Wisconsin Film Festival Spotlight: “The Rocket”

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Tickets for the 2014 Wisconsin Film Festival went on sale March 8, and each day between now and the start of the festival on April 3, I’ll be zooming in on one of the more than 140 films playing at the festival. If you have suggestions about films you’d like to know more about as you’re planning your festival experience, let me know in comments.

Today, my friend Sean Weitner (@sweaternnine) weighs in on the crowd-pleasing foreign film “The Rocket” (3:30 p.m. Saturday, Union South Marquee, and 2 p.m. Wednesday, Sundance Cinemas):

It’s little wonder that “The Rocket” has won the audience award at multiple festivals, because it’s struck fresh from the “festival award winner” template. Plucky young Ahlo (Sitthiphon Disamoe) is ousted from his indigenous village by Progress, deposited with his family in a truly impoverished shantytown, befriended by outcasts including a dancing machine dubbed James Brown (Thep Phongam), and forced to compete in a local rocket-building festival in order to win the cash prize that will stop his family’s downward mobility slide.

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