“Summer Pasture” transforms the stuff of daily existence into an engaging portrait of centuries‑old lifestyle meshing with the 21st century world. Lynn True, Nelson Walker, and Tsering Perlo’s documentary follows Locho and Yama, a young Tibetan nomadic yak herding couple, over the course of summer 2007. On grasslands located 15,000 feet above sea level, the couple depends on their yaks for food, clothing material, and even fuel. This subsistence lifestyle, followed by 40% of the Kham community, faces the pressures of personal illiteracy and economic demand for the rare caterpillar fungus.
“Summer Pasture” avoids the romanticizing the primitive trap. When Yama molds yak dung with her bare hands, there is no sense of disgust. The camera also shows the Kham unselfconsciously drinking modern beverage bottles and using camcorders. The incredible blue skies and wide grasslands the couple works under may amaze, but the couple frequently reminds the viewer of the difficulties of providing for their children.
Locho, Yama, and their unnamed child prove engaging subjects. Despite their lives’ difficulties and shortcomings, they remain happy with one another.
The film’s ultimate success is that it admits no easy answers to the couple’s life dilemmas. Each possible answer offers both benefits and losses. What Locho and Yama ultimately choose will resonate with parents wanting better lives for their children.
Eyad Zahra’s “The Taqwacores” relies on two familiar fictional setups. One is the ordinary college student sharing space with weirdos. The other is modern pious youth reconciling religion and personal beliefs. Yet because the setting is the Islamic punk rock scene, the film offers a story that hasn’t been told before.
In Buffalo, New York, Pakistani engineering student Yusef (Bobby Naderi) moves off‑campus into a house shared with a group of Muslim punks. These include the Mohawked Jehangir (Dominic Rains), the burqa‑wearing Riot Grrl Rabeya (Noureen Dewulf), and the straight‑edge traditionalist Umar (Nav Mann). Over the course of an eventful year, Yusef gets influenced by his roommates’ involvement in the Taqwacore scene, and his beliefs about himself and his Muslim faith change.
The title mashes together the Islamic concept of piety (“Taqwa”) and the hardcore punk scene (“Core”). The film’s story follows these implied social outcasts’ attempts to reconcile these two conflicting ideas.
It’s hard to believe that when Michael Muhammad Knight’s source novel came out in 2004, there was no Islamic punk rock scene. So the wonderfully named Guantanamo Bay Packers and Osama’s Tunnel Diggers were Knight’s creations. Ironically, the popularity of Knight’s book inspired a real‑life Muslim punk scene populated by such bands as The Kominas.
“The Taqwacores” lives up to its punk spirit by cheerfully goosing fundamentalist bigotries of various stripes. Jehangir does drive‑by insulting with Islamophobic clichés. Rabeya excises from her Koran a particularly sexist passage. That punk spirit also gets matched visually with its raw energetic images of a dilapidated city and a punk graffiti encouraging simultaneous disrespect and sodomizing of Jesus Christ. Still, one wishes Zahra’s low‑budget production values didn’t include sometimes faint dialogue.
Zahra’s film assaults viewer preconceptions on being young and Muslim in post‑9/11 America. Seeing Jehangir render the pre‑dawn call to prayer on his electric guitar may be a genius moment. Yet the film’s message of “one need not be fundamentalist to be pious” does drag down its originality quotient.
Jy‑Ah Min’s debut experimental feature “M/F Remix” also aspires to be a piece of cinematic provocation. Yet its effectiveness is debatable.
The film’s appropriately familiar subtitle is “Whatever happened to the grandchildren of Marx and Coca Cola?” Cinephiles will recognize the subtitle and the titular M/F references to the Jean‑Luc Godard classic French New Wave film “Masculin Feminin.” Min’s film is set in 2004 America a.k.a. year one of the Iraq occupation and the Bush vs. Kerry presidential race. San Diego roommates Philip (Philip Westerland) and Mimi (Mimi Goh) passively note those events. Both twentysomethings drift through a world where mutual romantic interest and even life direction seem like abstract considerations.
Feature films need not be structured around straight narrative. But it’s not unreasonable to ask those treading the more offbeat cinematic paths to do more than fitfully intrigue the viewer’s attention.
For example, mundane onscreen images of Philip’s dead‑end factory job get criticized with onscreen titles calling it the “When Boredom Reigns Supreme Shift.” Yet Min’s attempts at cinematic subversion seem to supplant visual banality with intellectual banality.
Two political sequences, one filling up the screen with images of Iraq War dead and the somewhat puckish “How to be an Activist in 10 Seconds,” do provide a smidgen of cinematic life. However, the familiarity of these jabs undercut their power.
Calling the two roommates politically disengaged appears contradictory given their frequent onscreen references to revolution. Yet Philip and Mimi’s “agitation” feels more beholden to Coca Cola than to Karl Marx. The Free Winona poster in the duo’s living room could be replaced by a “Free Paris Hilton” poster to similar effect.
Min may not have intended to rely on remaking the Godard original. Yet the excerpts from Godard’s film show that whatever naivete its characters displayed, at least there was passion behind their attitudes. Philip and Mimi may want more from their lives. Yet the vagueness of their quest doesn’t provide a counter‑provocation against the viewer’s complacency.
(“Summer Pasture” screens on March 11, 2011 at 6:30 PM at Viz Cinema (1746 Post, SF), March 12, 2011 at 4 PM at the Pacific Film Archive (hereafter PFA) (2575 Bancroft Way, Berkeley), and March 14, 2011 at 4:30 PM at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas (1881 Post, SF). “The Taqwacores” screens on March 12, 2011 at 5:30 PM at the Landmark Clay Theatre (2261 Fillmore, SF) and March 18, 2011 at 8:45 PM at PFA. “M/F Remix” screens on March 12, 2011 at 4 PM at Viz, March 15, 2011 at 9 PM at the Kabuki, and March 16, 2011 at 7PM at PFA. For tickets and further information, go to www.caamedia.org )
