alr

Man Push Cart

Directed by Ramin Bahrani

Chop Shop

Directed by Ramin Bahrani
Director in Person
Screening on Film
$10 Special Event Tickets

00:00 / 00:00
      Man Push Cart introduction and post-screening discussion with Haden Guest and Ramin Bahrani.

      PROGRAM

      • Man Push Cart

        Directed by Ramin Bahrani.
        With Ahmad Razvi, Leticia Dolera, Charles Daniel Sandoval.
        US, 2005, 35mm, color, 87 min.
        Print source: Films Philos

      The compelling story of Bahrani’s breakthrough film centers on a haunting avatar of the old world, an immigrant pushcart vendor who rises at dawn to sell coffee and bagels at the foot of Manhattan’s corporate towers. Man Push Cart sets out to capture the paradoxes and poetry of 21st century New York City as a place of evocative contrasts, embodied in the Pakistani vendor’s mysterious past, gradually revealed to lay worlds away from his Sisyphean life in the streets. Like its lonely hero, Man Push Cart keeps its distance from those characters that represent an easier form of narrative resolution—the love interest, the family, the compassionate fellow immigrant. The film’s critical success saw Bahrani immediately labeled as an heir to the neo-realist tradition, a claim supported by the Man Push Cart’s patient style and its careful, documentary-inspired focus on the grinding rituals that define the vendor’s world.

      • Chop Shop

        Directed by Ramin Bahrani.
        With Alejandro Polanco, Isamar Gonzales, Ahmad Razvi.
        US, 2007, 35mm, color, 84 min.
        Print source: Koch Lorber Films

      During the filming of Man Push Cart, Bahrani discovered Willets Point, an industrial area in Queens sustained by block upon block jumble of auto body shops. Instantly struck by the neighborhood’s rich narrative and visual possibilities – “if Los Olvidados were to be made today and in America, it would be made here,” he claimed—Bahrani looked beneath the surface of apparent bleakness to discover a vivid improvised theater of life on the edge. Perhaps inspired by Buñuel’s masterpiece, Bahrani focuses his film on a precocious twelve-year old who scavenges and works odd jobs to support himself and his older sister. While the non-professional cast’s strong performances give the film an authentic, improvisatory quality, the meticulous planning, scripting and rehearsals behind Chop Shop are revealed in the film’s expressive use of the rough hewn auto body shops and the film’s carefully sustained tempo. Bahrani’s seemingly casual yet delicately precise camerawork allows the film to miraculously retain its naturalism while avoiding any traces of sentimentality.

      Part of film series

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      The Films of Ramin Bahrani, or Life at Street Level

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      Ben Rivers, Back to the Land

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      Harvard Undergraduate Cinematheque

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      Make Way for Tomorrow. Carson Lund’s Eephus

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      Jessica Sarah Rinland’s Collective Monologue

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      David Lynch, New Dimensions

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      Museum Hours: Mati Diop’s Dahomey

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      Albert Serra, or Cinematic Time Regained

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      Wang Bing’s Youth Trilogy