Our Guide to the Greatest of the ND/NF's Latest

Caruso Mendelsohn Productions

3 Backyards

FSLC/MOMA

I Am Love

Details

New Directors/New Films
Presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art
March 24 through April 4
Walter Reade and Roy and Niuta Titus theaters

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More About

• Eric Mendelsohn
• Tanya Hamilton
• Mads Brugger
• Humbert Balsan
• Laura Poitras

The Oath | The second installment in a planned trilogy on American policy post–9/11—which follows her strong 2006 ND/NF nonfiction entry on Iraq, My Country, My Country—Laura Poitras's extensively researched, intelligently structured doc centers on Abu Jandal, a taxi driver in Yemen who was once Osama bin Laden's bodyguard. As the intensely magnetic Jandal describes his time in Al Qaeda, the spectral presence of his brother-in-law, Salim Hamdan, OBL's former driver, then still locked away in Gitmo after being the first detainee tried before a military tribunal, constantly looms over Poitras's quietly forceful indictment of the "War on Terror."

The Red Chapel | A (purposefully?) insufferable Danish journalist, Mads Brügger attempts a Borat-like stunt in Pyongyang when he convinces the North Korean government of the cultural value in hosting the fart-filled slapstick revue of Danish-Korean performing duo Simon and Jacob. Under 24-hour surveillance in a police state, Brügger's attempts to "expose the very core of evil that is North Korea" are impossible to achieve, of course; the real draw of this unclassifiable doc is his two charges' increasingly conflicted feelings—about Brügger, his deceptions, and their faux-"homecoming." Or, as Simon responds with Scandinavian calm when his director pushes them too far: "The fondue pot has boiled over."