Notícias

The palm-sized absurdist Lebanese film "The Kite" (2003) was never released to U.S. theaters, and it's a piteous sign of the times -- even a decade ago, such a deft and humane film, bearing an armload of festival awards, would've hit screens in at least a few cities, and appeared on critics' top ten lists, and therein manage a footprint on American film culture consciousness. Perhaps the alt-distribution stream of DVD will suffice, in general; as it is, Randa Chahal Sabbag's film deserves eyeballs, trafficking in the satiric-fable tradition of "West Beirut" (1998) and "In the Battlefields" (2004) that might stand as a particularly Lebanese idiom. For a country as savaged and riven by warfare, occupation, religious vendettas and geographic tumult, the sense of embracing humor in all three films must be hard won -- the DNA of it shares genes with Jiří Menzel's Czech élan and Kusturica's Serbian hyperbole, but...