I will admit to not being a huge fan of American independent cinema in general, largely for its tendency to recycle self-regarding postures and technique instead of ringing out with intelligent, individual voices. And so I approached the AFI Fest‘s Young Americans strand with caution, but am pleased to say that Mike Ott’s Littlerock does its part to restore the good name of the 20-something indie genre.

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As guest artistic director of this year’s AFI Fest, David Lynch gets to screen some old classics that mean a lot to him. One of them is Bergman’s  Hour of the Wolf, whose psychological horror techniques echo throughout Lynch’s oeuvre from Eraserhead on. I will admit to having an unresolved relationship with Bergman (don’t we all!) but whichever way you slice it, this is a film both of brilliantly mounted psychological tension and of naked, neurotic exposure that could have been made by nobody but Bergman, and would barely even have been contemplated by anyone else. Partly because he displays that same sense of self-importance as always, but this time it’s fundamental to the subject matter, and in any case it’s hard to say that it isn’t actually justified.

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It was a little alarming to hear the AFI Fest‘s associate director of programming describe Takeshi Kitano’s latest, Outrage (Autoreiji), as a return to form, since it comes off the back of his masterpiece, Achilles and the Tortoise. What he means is that it’s a return to the straight Yakuza genre with which Kitano started his career, and into which he has injected some interesting elements at various subsequent points. Not so much here, which from anyone else would be fine,but from him is a disappointment. Nonetheless, it is a perfectly efficient gangster film, told at the usual slow-steady pace, laced with black humour, and boasting some particularly unpleasant moments of violence.

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The AFI Fest offered an intriguing proposition on Sunday afternoon: back-to-back screenings of South Korea’s most famous classic film, Ki-young Kim’s The Housemaid (1960), together with Sang-soo Im’s 2010 remake/re-imagining. It wasn’t an entirely successful event – problems with the digital print of the older version meant the new one was screened first, which was obviously undesirable, and the older came on a DVD in the end, with ropey sound syncing. But they are both interesting films, and the original at least is worth seeing under any circumstances, if only for its strangeness (free on mubi.com, for example). And they are different enough that in fact one does not really need to discuss them together. But I am going to anyway.

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Bertrand Tavernier has a long and distinguished career behind him, of well-crafted, intelligent films across a wide range of genres (L’horlogier de Saint-Paul, ‘Round Midnight). But he’s never been exactly a hit name, and his recent films haven’t even made it to these shores, so it was a treat to attend the AFI Fest‘s presentation of his latest, La princesse de Montpensier. An ex-critic and fan of the Hollywood studio era, part of Tavernier’s skill is that he works a little like those directors, aiming for efficient quality in any subject matter, and that perhaps engenders a certain anonymity, no doubt a contributing factor to his not being better-known. But for all that Tavernier recalls an American model, his latest piece is French through and through, a 16th-Century drama (dealing with the period just prior to that of La reine Margot) adapted from the first short story by France’s first novelist (and a woman to boot – Madame de Lafayette) and dealing with that almost-epitome of Frenchness, blind, mad passion.

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What one really wants form a film festival is to be surprised, and the AFI fest did a pretty good job on Friday night, with a midnight screening of Switzerland’s first science-fiction film, Cargo.

As with Johnson’s walking dog, the surprise is that it is done at all. An immensely ambitious undertaking, set almost entirely in deep space, on a long-haul cargo ship, the film took nine years to make; but the time and care spent to make it show right there on the screen in the incredibly impressive digital environment and highly-detailed production design. Occasionally an effect doesn’t come off (usually the deep space green screen when human figures are involved) but for the most part the intricacy of the giant space stations and vessels, their movement and the hard light of deep space are rendered in an astonishingly accomplished and well-imagined manner that bears valid comparison with similar features in 2001. Would that the substance of the film was so sophisticated.

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The AFI Fest does a good job of getting film-makers to town to attend their screenings, which is how we were gifted with an extra titbit of info from Quentin Dupieux about his film Rubber. He directed it in the nude, wearing one black glove.

Of course he didn’t. His movie is absurd. He was accompanied on stage with a tire, the star of the film: it opens in fine surrealist fashion, as a car slowly knocks down chairs on a desert road and a sheriff gets out of its trunk in order to deliver a straight-to-camera disquisition on, and homage to, the concept of “no reason”. Suitable set-up to the film’s cheerful rejection of reason: a group of spectators with binoculars have gathered in the desert to watch a “film” – somewhere in the distance, a tire awakens from a junk-heap sleep, achieves self-locomotion and discovers first a will, then a telekinetic ability, to kill. Heads explode.

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Every three years or so, one can get genuinely excited about the Palme d’Or winner, and with Apitchatpong Weerasethakul’s previous work  looming large in best-of-the-decade lists, and now three major Cannes prizes on his mantlepiece, it was particularly welcome news that his Uncle Boonmee should be coming to the AFI Festival (Saturday 6 Nov. at 8.45 in the Mann Chinese 6).

Over the course of six features in the last ten years, Weerasethakul has been searching for a new kind of cinema, a new way of engaging with an audience, something like a dream-state. Uncle Boonmee is more immediately accessible than much else of his work (though it certainly contains its share of mysteries) and in some ways that is what makes this his most successful experiment yet.

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One of the things I like about the AFI Fest is that I know I’ll get a fix of Argentine cinema which, for my money, bears the rare distinction of producing the best films in the world right now, in both mainstream and independent spheres. The international resurgence about ten years ago (with Nine Queens et al) resulted in a healthy state-funded production system, which in turn spawned a reactive and fertile counter-cinema (centred round Mario Llinás). Both are thriving. This year’s offering, Carancho, is one of the former, and it plays at the Mann’s Chinese 6 theater on Monday 8 at 9.30. For free!

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