Pitcher Miguel “Sugar” Santos is a 20-year-old Dominican pitcher for the Kansas City Knights’ farm team called up to the minor leagues. His big chance takes him from his island village to the Arizona desert to an Iowa of cornfields, ballfields and fans as dedicated to America’s pastime as they are their Sunday morning church service.
Souleyman “Solo” Savane is a Senegalese taxi driver plying his trade in Winston-Salem, N.C. He drives to help his new family, but he dreams of being a flight attendant. An unexpected calling comes when Solo decides he must save a passenger’s life.
Solo and Sugar are the humble, compelling subjects of two sublime films playing in Denver: “Goodbye Solo” and “Sugar.”
At first glance, “sublime” is an odd word to apply to the films. After all, writer-director Ramin Bahrani (“Solo”) and filmmaking couple Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (“Sugar”) make films that take seriously the details of everyday life.
And recently the filmmakers were dubbed by New York Times critic A.O. Scott as “neo-neorealists,” along with directors Kelly Reichardt (“Wendy and Lucy”), Lance Hammer (“Ballast”) and So Yong Kim (the upcoming “Treeless Mountain”).
The moniker confers a deserved cinematic-historical cachet on this convergence of willfully observant filmmakers.
Film neorealism was born in Italy after World War II when its practitioners — Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini among them — turned their cameras on the working class in postwar ruins.
But the moniker seems to mute what is so dynamically homegrown about their interests in storytelling, not only how they craft their modestly budgeted tales, but whose stories they ache to tell. Perhaps this convergence should be called the Cinema of the Underappreciated, and its makers, the Empaths.
In others’ shoes
“You get told a lot in school to tell what you know, write what you know,” says Boden, sitting next to co- director and mate Fleck in a Denver restaurant. “But what excites me about filmmaking, about being a storyteller, is being able to learn about other people, putting myself in somebody else’s shoes, whether that be someone from the Dominican Republic or someone from Cuba or inner-city Brooklyn.”
The story for “Sugar” took hold when the two traveled to the Roberto Clemente ballfield in the Bronx and met a number of Latino former ballplayers who, for one reason or the other, had left baseball.
“We owe so much to the guys who were so generous and open and told us their stories, says Boden. “But it was equally enlightening to talk to someone whose experience was so fresh still, so painful that they couldn’t really talk about it at all. That’s when I really felt how difficult a journey it was for these guys.”
In 2006, the couple’s film “Half Nelson” won critical raves at the Sundance Film Festival. It went on to gain Ryan Gosling a best-actor Oscar nomination for his turn as a junior high school teacher with a drug habit who forms a bond with one of his students (Shereeka Epps).
“Half Nelson” is much more familiar to my upbringing,” says Fleck, trying to provide an explanation for the characters they’re drawn to. “I grew up in Oakland and for a long time I was the only white kid in school. Then I moved to the suburbs when I was in junior high and it was mostly white.
“I had been used to hanging out with the Asian and black kids, so when I got there, that’s who I hung out with. Coming from that made me feel very comfortable with the themes of that movie.”
As for their christening as “neo-neos”?
Fleck admits he likes the company he and Boden find themselves in. “We think they’re all great, to be grouped with them is an incredible honor.” Like Boden and Fleck, Kelly Reichardt, So Yong Kim and Ramin Bahrani all live in or near New York City.
No big stars
“You have to remember I made three films in three years,” said “Goodbye Solo” director Bahrani. “And they’re not about anything exploitative and they don’t star anyone.
“I didn’t make a movie about a musician with five stars — just a Pakistani pushcart vender, a boy wandering around a junkyard, and Solo and an old guy.”
A gentle rain was beginning to fall while the Winston-Salem-born and -raised director talked outside the University of Colorado’s Macky Auditorium on a recent afternoon.
He was not boasting, though he would have cause to. Last month, Bahrani became the first filmmaker to share a stage with Roger Ebert during the critic’s famed “Cinema Interruptus” program at the Conference on World Affairs in Boulder.
The seminar featured a start-stop, frame-by-frame, scene-by-scene reading of Bahrani’s second film, “Chop Shop,” about Ale, a young boy trying to watch over his older sister and hustle a living in the massive-auto parts bazaar of Willet Point, Queens.
“How do you behave in the world? What is your relationship to fate, to the things we don’t understand?” he says of the times that inspire him. He says he finds his influences in the works of Albert Camus, Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski and John Steinbeck.
“I can’t say God because I don’t believe in a god that’s in the Bible or the Koran or the Torah.
“But I do believe in the mystery we can’t understand, and I think people should be humble to that.”
Film critic Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com. Also on blogs.denverpostcom/madmoviegoer
