Darius Marder's award-winning début nonfiction feature has a one week run planned at the IFC Center starting November 20, but if you're fast on your feet, you can grab a ticket for tomorrow's sneak peek at 8:00 p.m. courtesy of Stranger Than Fiction. Marder will be in the house for a Q&A and post-screening fest at MacDougall Street's own 99 Below, home to many a drunken doc lover.
Loot won the grand jury prize for best documentary feature at last year's Los Angeles Film Festival, a fine validation for a new artist on the scene--one this writer hopes will make many more films. Marder's past incarnation as a chef served him well in making his first film, for Loot serves up a really complex and memorable (narrative) dish, resonant with ingredients and flavors that one recognizes, certainly--the eccentric characters, the quixotic quests, haunted pasts, and the serendipitous meeting of souls from different generations that resonate so strongly with one another that viewers intuit that an emotional crescendo of some import is likely. But what Marder is really adept at capturing (along with his cinematographer, Anson Call) are the nuanced ways in which his subjects deal with shaky memory, denial of epic proportion and unbearable emotional pain, each helpless in the face of their guilt and remorse for what transpired in a time when they were young and brash WWII soldiers trying to do anything they could not to get killed. And in finding themselves all in one piece at the end of a long and brutal time of it, they rewarded themselves with war booty.
Darrel stole 20 pounds of jewels, hid them in the attic of an Austrian farmhouse
and returned home to Utah. Andy looted Samurai swords and jewels, burying them in the Philippines before returning to Arizona. Sixty years later, infirm and facing the end of their lives, Lance Larson comes into the picture. Larson is a Utah-based, Mormon used-car salesman, inventor,
entrepreneur and second-generation treasure hunter; in two separate storylines, he offers to help them recover their long-ago buried treasures, despite the apparent apathy and ambivalence both men feel about going back to uncover, or re-cover, that part of their lives. In the interim, the ferociously violent, inhuman memories of war rise to the surface and we slowly realize the toll that all of that inherent, irrevocable and life-altering damage has had on these men and what finding this elusive treasure will bring to the surface--a recapitulation of their lives, a true reckoning with their mortality and, above all, the confrontation of the wounded love they have for their lost sons, both victims of mortal drug addictions.
It is a compelling, poignant and universally relevant moral fable that will surprise you and move you deeply.
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