Films intersect, dissect cultures

An Israeli man and a Palestinian woman fall in love in Berlin against the backdrop of the 2006 World Cup. A white trailer park mom from upstate New York teams with a Mohawk nation woman to smuggle illegal Chinese and Pakistani immigrants into the U.S. A half-Italian, half-English art star living in the states tries to adopt a pair of orphaned Sudanese twins. A college professor arrives at his seldom-used New York apartment to discover a young foreign couple-- he's Syrian, she's Senegalese-- living there illegally. A young Laotian man tells the story of his family's seemingly inevitable but ultimately disastrous immigration to America.

On the surface, these films have next to nothing in common aside from having premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival. Two are documentaries, the other three features set in diverse locations featuring characters with next to nothing in common. Yet each represents an earnest effort by the filmmakers to plumb the subject of borders and nationality and how they intersect, often violently, with life as it's actually lived in the 21st century.

The festival has been more open to the world this year and, in what seems a marked difference from about a decade ago, films focusing on issues of national identity no longer frame them in terms of identity politics or assimilation. Hyphens don't do justice to the complexity of our transnational world, in other words, where so many identities incorporate several nationalities at once.

'The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins'

Documentary-maker Pietra Brettkelly follows international art star Vanessa Beecroft for 16 months as she tries to adopt a pair of twin Sudanese orphans she's included in her artwork some months before. The result is a brutally honest, remarkably self-critical reflection on foreign adoption that touches unexpectedly on issues of alienation and loneliness. Through candid interviews with Beecroft and her American husband, her Italian mother, her English father, as well as others, a portrait emerges of a self-obsessed artist whose obsession with having a big family ("lots of people around who love me") stems from a lonely childhood spent with her mother in a remote Italian village.