Fest Market

So you've seen all the Oscar winners and also-rans, and you've caught up with whatever might vaguely be interesting among current releases. Don't panic, you needn't resort to Wing Commander yet--there's a surprisingly rich assortment of festival films from which to choose in the Valley this week.

The most notable is Three Seasons, the first U.S. indie shot entirely in Vietnam. The film receives its first post-Sundance screening at 7 p.m. Sunday, March 28, at Scottsdale Center for the Arts, 7380 East Second Street (994-2787) as the opening of the Scottsdale Independent Film Fest (it's also scheduled to open here commercially in May). Directed by Tony Bui, it's an intertwining of several narrative strands, one of which involves Harvey Keitel as an American vet in search of a long-lost daughter.

The Indie Fest continues with three more features. All four are to be shown in 35mm, and the directors of all four are scheduled to be present. Individual tickets are $8, $6 for students; the four-film series is $28. On Sunday, April 4, the film is Love, directed by Eric Dignam and starring Robin Wright Penn. On Monday, April 12, the fest features Slam--a winner of the 1998 Camera D'Or and the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes--directed by Marc Levin and starring the extraordinary "slam poet" Saul Williams, also seen in the documentary SlamNation, as a young man from the ghetto who learns to vent his rage through poetry while serving a prison term for dealing pot.

This fest then goes on hold until Monday, May 3, when the last film in the series, Who the Hell Is Juliette?, a low-budget verite work from director Carlos Marcovitch that chronicles the adventures of a teenage orphan girl (Yuliet Ortega) in modern-day Havana, Cuba, is screened.

Also on the festival beat for this week: a screening of Pixote, Hector Babenco's terrifying study of juvenile delinquency in Brazil, at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, March 25, in Room 110 of the M Building at Paradise Valley Community College, 18401 North 32nd Street; and a screening of Akira Kurosawa's heartbreakingly beautiful drama Ikiru (1952) at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 30, in Room 101 of the Nursing Building on the Arizona State University campus, Cady Mall and University in Tempe. Both are free.

--M. V. Moorhead