Director Andrew Horn's documentary about late New Wave weirdo Klaus Nomi doesn't reveal much about the German émigré beyond his reticent Martian theatrics (Kabuki-style face paint, regal sci-fi capes, vinyl tuxedos and white Mickey Mouse gloves) and alarming countertenor. As a nostalgic snapshot of a musical outsider, The Nomi Song offers great archival concert footage, chronicling Nomi's salad days in the late '70s East Village performance art scene, his collaboration with David Bowie and Joey Arias on a 1979 Saturday Night Live performance of "The Man Who Sold the World," his unlikely popularity in France and his death from AIDS in 1983. Most fascinating is the story of how producers and promoters tried to hoist Nomi from downtown cult status into mainstream pop music. Needless to say, the wasted patrons of a New Jersey rock club didn't quite know what to do with Nomi, whose persona was some combination of C-3PO, Nosfaratu and Maria Callas.
    Recommended for fans of outrageous performance artists like Leigh Bowery, German singers similarly obsessed with life on other planets like Nina Hagen, or the post-punk vaudeville scene of '70s New York City, The Nomi Song, is an often touching portrait of a singing space cadet. — Matt Hickman

Ivo Trajkov's grim historic film The Great Water is set in a Macedonian gulag for orphans of "saboteurs" — the wealthy, religious, and freethinking citizens deemed a threat to Tito's Communist state. Based on the novel by Zivko Cingo, it treats a totalitarian regime's assault on the minds of its youth from 1945 to 1948, and shows how love and decency can be warped by brutality.
    Begun with a scene of a contemporary crisis — an elected Macedonian leader suffers a heart attack — the film toggles between shots of the aged Lem Nikodinoski (Meto Jovanovski) fighting for his life, and flashbacks to his twelve-year-old self being chased through the countryside by Tito's soldiers.
    Seized and brought to a Soviet-style "orphanage," the young Lem (Saso Kekenovski) finds himself trapped in a merciless system devoted to the indoctrination of its wards. "It was a dungeon," the older Lem says of the prison, formed by a crumbling castle isolated from the mainland by a vast sea. And "I," he recalls, "was a frightened little mouse."
    The orphanage is run by a creepy headmaster called "Daddy"; he secretly practices a banned Christianity but denies his charges sleep if they believe in "that retired God" (an ironic phrase turned by the Russian-Jewish writer Isaac Babel before his murder by Stalin's goons). Daddy's second-in-command is a pathological young woman, Olivera, who is capable of freezing to death a group of girls she suspects of stealing her Party-awarded gym shorts. Olivera worships Stalin, and soul-kisses a ceramic bust of him that she erects in her room.
    Lem's one friend is thirteen-year-old Isak Keyten (Maja Stankovska), an exquisite boy with surreal self-possession. Fond of rites that involve burning hair and drinking blood, Isak resurrects a cat electrocuted by a sadistic guard and nearly retains his Christlike integrity.
    But Trajkov falls off his narrative axis when he tries to force an affair between Isak and Olivera, just to push Lem's love for his friend to a point of tragic jealousy. In the ensuing melee, one boy is plucked from the prison by human hands, while the other is magically liberated.
    Its absurdities aside, The Great Water is a grossly disturbing film, one fixed on the fallout from betrayed faith and an old man's guilt at his boyhood rescue from a horrific and systemic depravity. — Susan Comninos