Thursday, June 8---Ali Selim is a softspoken man from Minnesota with an expressive face and an obvious passion for filmmaking. His first film, SWEET LAND, which is the only American film included in the First Works competition at the Troia International Film Festival, has the scope, integrity and humanity of a John Ford epic. The film captures the limitless landscapes of the Minnesota plains in the period just after World War I, when immigrants from Scandinavia began to exert their cultural h...

CHAOS is just a theory in physics, but it's a full blown practice at the Minneapolis film festival. Whether or not a can of film will arrive at its designated venue at all, or, if it does arrive, whether it will be wound on backward or inside out -- therefore unshowable -- is often a toss-up. One such instance, Werner Herzog's latest, "The Wild Blue Yonder" -- an astronaut fantasy in a post-Armageddon world -- arrived at the Oak Street theater projection booth cut into unmarked segments, so th...