'World' Cinema

Twenty years ago, when filmmakers Richard Linklater and Lee Daniel put their disheveled heads together and formed the Austin Film Society, they decided to host their inaugural screening at the Dobie Theatre, the perfect gathering place, they felt, for an eccentric new film collective. Starting this Friday, the society is once again at the Dobie with the appropriately titled AFS@Dobie, a three-month series that will feature a new independent film every week, showing twice nightly for seven nights in one of the Dobie's curiously decorated, geometrically suspect theatres.

"The goal of the series," says guest curator Alison Macor, "is to bring more new films to Austin. More independent films, more foreign films, more documentaries." Macor, who for years was a movie critic at the Chronicle and across the pond at the Statesman, and who is currently putting the finishing touches on her book about the history of the Austin film scene, believes that despite its reputation as a cineaste-filled city, Austin is too often passed over by independent movie distributors looking to sell smaller, artier, more foreign fare.

"For years, I would go to festivals or hear about films that I wanted to see in Austin and that wouldn't make it here. It was frustrating," she says. "So now, hopefully with the AFS@Dobie series, films that maybe normally wouldn't come to Austin will get here."

Hoping the same is the director of programming for the Austin Film Society and one of the original minds behind AFS@Dobie, Chale Nafus, who has been around the Austin film community for more than 25 years. He's the man responsible for many of the film series screening throughout the year at the various Alamo Drafthouse theatres, including the Essential Cinema Series and the Texas Documentary Tour. Many of these Alamo series require that the movies involved adhere to a particular theme: Political Thrillers in Cinema, say, or Recent Korean Cinema. That isn't the case, though, with AFS@Dobie, a situation Nafus finds liberating. "With this AFS@Dobie series, I can bring a single movie in on its own, without worrying about whether it fits a theme," he says. To screen as part of AFS@Dobie, he says, movies need only be independent, well-made, and have little chance of showing in Austin otherwise.

Starting off this three-month experiment (which could go longer if demand is high enough) is The World, Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke's new film about the workers and performers at Beijing's enormous, surreal World Park. Zhangke's first "over-ground film," The World is the only one of the director's movies not to be banned by the Chinese government. This film is followed hard upon by a new movie every week, each one starting on Friday, each one showing twice a night, and each one quite different from the one before it. Darwin's Nightmare, Herbert Sauper's sobering documentary about the Nile perch fishing industry and the effect it has on a small village on Lake Victoria, starts Jan. 20; and academy award-winning director Steven Soderbergh's Bubble, a low-budget love-triangle drama set in a doll factory and starring nonprofessional actors, begins its run a week later.