Beyond the Multiplex

Fast forward: "The Blood of My Brother" goes inside Iraq's Shiite uprising; growing up too fast in "The Motel"
Andrew Berends' Iraq documentary "The Blood of My Brother" has already been embraced by film festivals around the world, and the qualities that may endear it to cinéastes are exactly the same as those that will limit its audience appeal. Berends got extraordinary access to an Iraqi family living in Kadhimiya, a working-class Shiite district of Baghdad, and through them to the anti-American insurgency, or at least that aspect of it that was led, circa 2004, by Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr (these days almost a moderate among wacky Iraqi leaders).

There's no question that "The Blood of My Brother" required tremendous courage to film, and it captures a ground-level view of the sweat, dust, danger and chaos that typify daily life in American-occupied Iraq. Much of the picture is exciting and terrifying, and even when Berends goes for semi-relevant metaphorical imagery (many of you will not wish to see a goat sacrificed in loving close-up, I predict) there's tremendous integrity to his technique. There's no voice-over narration, and a minimum of informational text, mainly to identify place and time. The film is almost entirely told through its pictures and the on-screen conversations we witness. (There are also a few interpolated interviews with American soldiers, which frankly seem extraneous.)

I suppose the great strength of "The Blood of My Brother" is that it never tries to make political points in any direction. The family's eldest son, Ra'ad, has been killed in an altercation with United States troops outside the Kadhimiya mosque. Was he carrying a weapon? Was he involved with the armed insurgency? Or was he a mosque guard, whom the Americans should have recognized as such? There are no clear answers, and even his grief-stricken younger brother Ibrahim, who vows revenge against "Americans and Jews," doesn't really know. Berends principally captures Ibrahim and his sisters, mother and friends as confused, angry, recognizably human individuals, grappling with tremendous loss by reaching out -- as we all do -- to faith, family and community.

Yes, some elements in that combination nudge Ibrahim and his friends toward picking up RPG launchers or Kalashnikovs and joining the low-end guerrilla army that shoots at American tanks on the back streets of Baghdad. Berends shoots some hair-raising footage as he scrambles through dusty alleys and tin-roofed houses with al-Sadr's men, but even these headline-making exploits are not the heart of the picture. For better or worse, "The Blood of My Brother" is not a behind-the-headlines investigative work but an intimate, enigmatic exploration of Tolstoy's maxim that every unhappy family is unique (while every happy family is the same).

Ibrahim seems to be an irresponsible and depressed loser, who drifts through life without Ra'ad and is unable to keep the family's photography business afloat. His sister is vaguely unhappy about her lot in life but unable to articulate any alternatives. (As a devout Muslim, she wears the hijab constantly and rarely leaves the house.) Their mother constantly tells both of them that Ra'ad was her beloved and that life without him isn't worth living, which helps family morale no end. Powerful as this film often is, it's also a bummer and something of an existential or psychological dead end: Do the Iraqis hate us because their lives have become boring, depressing and full of hassle? (Opens June 20 at Cinema Village in New York; July 7 in Chicago, Dallas and Portland, Ore.; July 28 in Los Angeles; and Aug. 11 in Boston, with more cities to be announced.)

Let's finish with a genuine upper: Michael Kang's first dramatic feature, "The Motel," follows a chubby Chinese-American 13-year-old named Ernest (played by the wonderful Jeffrey Chyau), who stoically observes life at the suburban hot-sheet motel ferociously run by his immigrant mother (Jade Wu). Ernest wants to be a writer; Mom of course thinks this is a waste of time. Into their world comes a mysterious guest named Sam (Sang Kung), a charismatic Korean-American dude who smokes, drinks, cusses, drives a sports car and brings an alluring parade of white (and black, and Latina) women back to the motel at all hours.

All the ingredients of this coming-of-age fable are individually familiar, but you rarely see them come together so well. Ernest's would-be romance with Christine (Samantha Futerman), the only other Asian kid in town, is perfectly pitched, and Kang has a remarkable ear for the going-nowhere dialogue of teens who are killing time and the oddball adults who kill time with them. Sure, this is sometimes a bittersweet family study, but it also has a funny, dirty ruthlessness that may remind you of Todd Solondz's epoch-making "Welcome to the Dollhouse."

If Sam sometimes seems more like Ernest's fantasy projection of what a studly Asian-American male might be like, he's nonetheless a wonderful character, a font of dubious racial attitudes and useful masculine advice on cars, clothes and girls -- "Never think porn is bad. Porn is good" -- and a tour guide on ill-advised late-night road trips. There were half a dozen occasions, maybe more, when I roared out loud with laughter. This just may be a filmmaker with great things in him; this one's pretty damn good. OK, I can't resist. Here's my favorite line, pronounced by a 12-year-old blond girl in a profoundly pissed-off tone of voice: "Your dick is hard. That means you love me." (Now playing at Film Forum in New York, with more cities to follow.)

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