The Last-Minute ND/NF 2010 Preview, Part 2: Hunting & Zn. to Norteado

Families take the center stage in the second part of our New Directors New Films preview. In the Netherlands, a couple comes undone thanks to a new arrival. In Italy, a concubine dares to wander outside a brood’s closed ranks. In Canada, mother and son make like a WWE production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? And you don’t even want to know what they’re doing to each other in Greece. It’s a line-up so gripping that film fans won’t even be able to turn from the screen to tell that elderly couple behind them to shut up. Hit the linked titles for more goodies.

Read the first part of our New Directors/New Films preview.

Hunting & Zn. (Hunting & Sons)

Tako and Sandra oughta be poster children for the Netherlands good life. Successful in both work and in life, the childhood sweethearts are the envy of all their friends. Sandra’s pregnancy should be cause for further celebration. In Sander Burger’s domestic horror, however, the blessed event is the very thing that causes their bourgeois bliss to spectacularly deflate. Don’t stand too close to the canal!

Io sono l’amore (I Am Love)

Luca Guadagnino takes a few frames from Visconti in this fragrant family saga, garnished with plenty of love, Italian style. Tilda Swinton is the beautiful Russian odalisque who marries into a fashion dynasty. Her second-class spousal existence is upended when she falls for a humpy young chef. Problem is Swinton’s surging libido might bring down the rest of the clan with her.

Talking Pictures: Night Catches Us’ Tanya Hamilton

Usually when a filmmaker tackles the Black Panthers, we get something sensationalistic. Writer-director Tanya Hamilton wanted to take a different approach. Her thoughtful debut feature Night Catches Us looks at the legacy of the Black Power movement on a Philadelphia neighborhood from the perspective of the ’70s. The Hurt Locker‘s Anthony Mackie is an ex-Panther who hooks up with a fellow activist vet (Kerry Washington), during the long, hot summer of 1976. Another reason to be excited: There’s music by the Roots, too. Hamilton spoke to the Los Angeles Times at Sundance and explained why it took her a decade to bring Night to the screen.