Nights of Cabiria, 1957, directed by Federico Fellini, screenplay by Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli, with additional dialogue by Pier Paolo Pasolini. If I made a list titled "Good Settings For Physical Comedy," I think "An Aging, Low-End Prostitute's Descent Into Penury" would be toward the bottom. Which means I would never have made Nights of Cabiria, a film that owes as much to City Lights as it does to The Bicycle Thief. Mixtures of pathos and comedy fit somewhere on a continuum from Waiting for Godot to The 40-Year-Old Virgin. As you would expect from its subject matter, Nights of Cabiria is more Beckett than Apatow, but Fellini isn't afraid to have his star walk into a glass door when the mood needs lightening.
First-time director Gela Babluani has made quite a splash in the festival circuit with his thriller, "13 (Tzameti)." The film, starring his brother, George Babluani, took the world cinema - dramatic prize at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival as well as prizes last year in Venice and his native Georgia at the Tbilisi International Film Festival. "13 (Tzameti)" is the story of Sebastian, a young man who finds and decides to follow instructions intended for someone else, not knowing where they will lead. When he reaches his destination, he finds himself in a secret degenerate world of mental chaos, in which men gamble on the lives of other men. Babluani discusses with indieWIRE his initial (and unsuccessful) foray into music, discovering the "How" and "What" of filmmaking, and mastering a sense of bravado in order to finish his project. Palm Pictures will open the film beginning in New York on Friday, July 28.