Year: 2006

It’s always been something of a feat for Minnesota Film Arts, a small but stalwart nonprofit, to pull off this annual, all-you-can-eat buffet for cinephiles. It’s been in large part a labor of love on the part of the legendary Al Milgrom, who only recently underwent bypass surgery. Considering that, along with the financial trials Minnesota Film Arts is enduring, and this year’s festival–which, we are assured, will go on–seems only just short of a miracle. What’s more, it will open with a fanfare: the Midwest premiere of a documentary about Al Franken. God Spoke chronicles his evolution from Saturday Night Live humorist to persistent thorn in the side of certain political players to his potential transformation into a politician himself. In addition, the festival will screen nearly a hundred works from forty-plus countries, including a brand-new selection of gloomy Scandinavian pictures; short works by Minnesota filmmakers; glimpses of life in the Middle East by resident and visiting filmmakers; and the return of last year’s innovation, the Childish Film Festival. The lineup isn’t final until the lights come back up on the last day of the festival, so visit the festival’s website regularly for updates. www.mnfilmarts.org

Sebastian Junger’s career resembles, at times, an Indiana Jones movie. As a journalist he’s traveled to war zones in Sarajevo, Sierra Leone, and Afghanistan–in that last country, he tracked down Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of the Taliban resistance, shortly before he was killed. He’s also immersed himself in often-harrowing vocations like smoke jumping and commercial fishing, the latter of which became the topic of his first book, The Perfect Storm. Junger says he first recognized his thirst for danger during his recovery from a brutal chainsaw accident, which happened on the job with a tree-trimming company. While his massive leg wound was healing, he mused about the pleasure he and others take in risky work, and decided to train his writer’s eye on people he described as “fools and heroes.” Despite his rakish good looks (George Clooney wished to star in an adaptation of one of his stories), Junger is self-deprecating enough that he’d put himself in the fool category, we think. He’s also quite earnest. He approached The Rake’s Desert Island challenge with the kind of intense seriousness he gives to his higher-stakes endeavors, and opted for an everyman’s second-person voice in presenting the five items he’d want to bring with him to the isle. “I’m reaching for some sort of human needs common to all of us, and not just to me,” he explained. So here’s what he–and we–could use:

1. No matter where you go, you need a good knife. Not a folding knife, because over a lifetime it will break. Without a knife, you feel powerless, exposed, and vulnerable, and you have no tool to change your world with.

2. You need a mirror, because over a lifetime you will forget what you look like, and that will be a fundamental loss of identity that you cannot afford if you are alone. It is also good for signaling passing airplanes.

3. You cannot live without music, so you would bring a guitar–which you don’t know how to play, because I hear it takes a lifetime to learn guitar. That way you will be well-engaged with something until you die.

4. If you’re like me, you’re an atheist, but you’re from a Christian culture. You will therefore bring the Bible because you will finally have enough time to read it and maybe figure out what wisdom it may contain. Religion aside, it contains a multitude of stories and maybe those would keep you stimulated over the course of the coming decades.

5. Finally, you will bring a photograph of your family or your wife or your best friend or maybe all of them together–the people you love, the people without whom you would feel lonely even in a city of ten million.

Sebastian Junger presents “Myths and Legends, the Stories that Haunt Us,” a free-form storytelling event at which he will spin tales about all manner of disasters and monsters. Topics are slated to include the Titanic, the Loch Ness Monster, the Edmund Fitzgerald, the Bermuda Triangle, and the Boston Strangler. April 22 at the Fitzgerald Theater, 10 Exchange St. E., St. Paul; 651-290-1221; www.mpr.org

Portuguese Nobel Prize laureate Jose Saramago is a contemporary Kafka, spinning existential fantasies built around his obsessions with the nature of vision, insight, perception, and imagination. In his books he grounds these philosophical preoccupations through everyman characters and settings so vibrant, distinct, and outlandish they confound attempts to connect them to any specific time and place. In Seeing, Saramago’s latest novel, an epidemic of blindness breaks out, affecting everyone except an eye doctor’s wife, who helps a group of newly blind people survive in a world gone dark and confusing. Toss in a general election with perplexing results (held during an unending rainstorm), and Saramago has created one of the most memorable–and inscrutable–revolutionary scenarios in literary history.

A literary follow-your-heart poster girl, Elizabeth Berg worked as a nurse for a decade, pulling bedpan duty while inventing imaginary worlds in her mind. Such mundane jobs are a boon to writers, of course; if nothing else, they liven up a resume. Berg surely witnessed a thousand dramas and characters in her job, some of which no doubt provided fuel (not to mention fodder) for her many bestselling novels, whose subject matter tends toward the painful and domestic. We Are All Welcome Here is her latest, based on the true story of a paraplegic polio victim raising her daughter amid the social upheavals–both race- and Elvis-related–that besieged Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1964. 2020 Lake of the Isles Pkwy. W., Minneapolis; 612-374-4023; www.birchbarkbooks.com

Anchee Min has been remarkably lucky at least three times in her life. As a reward for her loyalty to China’s Maoist regime, she was selected by Madame Mao to star in a government-produced film. Her good fortune wasn’t long lasting, though; Mao’s death and the end of his regime sent Min back into the ranks of the lowly. Her friendship with actress Joan Chen allowed her to move to the United States, and when she chronicled her sometimes shocking experiences in China (she describes herself as the “product of Maoist brainwashing”) in Red Azalea, she earned critical hosannas and cracked the bestseller lists. In her native country, Min is frequently criticized for sharing too much. Here, though, she is admired for her portraits of a remarkable time and place. 10500 Hillside La. W., Minnetonka; 651-209-6799; www.hclib.org

T.C. Boyle’s fiction used to be a reliable source for laughs, usually at the expense of his characters. His often gleefully malicious stories about yuppies, hippies, quacks, and people who share their lives with animals had the outlandish trajectory of those classic cartoons that reveled in comic brutality–amputations, anvil accidents, cruel twists of fate–visited on the deserving and undeserving alike. Of course, Boyle’s amusing abuse was generally tempered with sharp social criticism and a keen understanding of human foibles; in recent books he has been weaving subtle, dark treatises on environmental destruction, global warming, and species extinction into his tales. More and more often lately, however, Boyle’s short stories have been domestic dramas almost entirely devoid of humor, a trend that is as alarming as it is discouraging. He’s always been a charismatic and entertaining performer, though, and hopefully his sense of humor is still intact and will be on display for this reading. 2128 4th St. S., Minneapolis; 612-626-1892

A gem of a show that highlights Morrison’s vast and varied talents. Aside from one nude, the other works are all variations on abstraction and nature. One drawing is a gorgeous thicket of brown-ink hatch marks; several others depict the north shore of Lake Superior, where Morrison was raised and where he spent the last seventeen years of his life, in pen and ink and with a surrealist-tinged wit. While the works are all modest in scale, this is a fine example of how exhibitions devoted to works on paper offer a window into an artist’s sense of both experimentation and play. Morrison in particular took in all manner of styles and influences through his lengthy career, transcending but never forgetting his Native American roots. 2123 21st St. W., Minneapolis; 612-377-4669; www.bockleygallery.com

It’s a reunion of sorts, albeit a highly non-traditional one, as several former artists-in-residences return to the Walker with new and decidedly free-form projects. Answer “What is freedom?” at a digital-media station rigged up by Spencer Nakasako; your recorded reponse will join those of fellow visitors and people around the country. Or get in on the action around a two-story stage set built by Rirkrit Tiravanija (who early on hosted one of his now-legendary dinner-parties-as-performance-art in the Walker’s Gallery 7); or at the installation by Ralph Lemon, the choreographer who, like Nakasako, has had a lengthy relationship with the Walker. Also on view are works created by previous artists-in-residence, and a series of performances, actions, events, hijinks, and other surprises by local artists like Mankwe Kdosi, Gulgun Kayim, Abinadi Meza, Marcus Young, and Andrew Knighton. 612-375-7600; www.walkerart.org

For years, Lynda Barry’s Ernie Pook’s Comeek made the back pages of alternative weeklies across the country worth reading. The adventures of Marlys, a geeky girl who aspired to be a revolutionary funk dancer in the seventies; her angsty, zitty older sister; and their loony, hookah-sucking Filipino relatives unfolded with humor, pain, beauty, and a self-consciousness that could be understood by anyone who was ever a dumb little kid, which is all of us. More recently, Barry has written novels and worked on her outsider-ish art from a top-secret and remote location somewhere in Wisconsin. 1 College St. N., Northfield; 507-646-4023; www.carleton.edu

This ambitious traveling show focuses on the environmental destruction of native lands by energy interests–from dam building and coal mining to oil drilling and logging. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and Michael Horse are some of the well-known names among the more than forty artists in the show, but there are a few compelling pieces by newer names, as well. For instance, Neal Ambrose-Smith’s Coyote Sees Two Worlds combines native forms and imagery with colors and composition that recall Constructivist-style propaganda posters, while America Meredith’s Pop-influenced Produced Water: Salt the Earth has the Morton Salt girl and a cowboy-hatted businessman walking arm in arm through an oilfield (toxic brine is one of the byproducts of oil drilling). While there’s plenty here to induce shame, despair, and anger, there’s also a sense of hope in the idea that Native Americans can and should take a place in developing renewable energy, like solar and wind power. 1113 Franklin Ave. E., Minneapolis; 612-870-7555; www.honorearth.org/impactednations