In a quiet post-Oscar week, Austria's The Counterfeiters (Sony Pictures Classics), winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, kept its position at the top of the charts, earning $10,050 per screen at 18 locations, according to estimates compiled by Leonard Klady at Movie City News. Klady noted that the film "doubled its playdates and box office but appears short of the commercial traction (or social vibrancy) of last year's triumphant The Lives of Others."

Chop Shop (Koch Lorber) performed very nicely at its single-theater engagement in New York City's Film Forum, grossing $8,900. Kim Voynar described it as one of her favorite films from last year's festival circuit; filmmaker Ramin Bahrani (Man Push Cart) follows a 12-year-old orphan struggling to survive on the mean streets of New York. Chop Shop continues its run at Film Forum through March 11.

Other new indie releases struggled to find audiences. Chicago 10 (Roadside Attractions), "appreciable as one of the most creative and entertaining documentary films in years," did the best, pulling in $3,030 per-screen at 14 locations. Playing on 75 screens, City of Men (Miramax), "neither as stylistically fresh nor as powerfully raw as City of God," scratched out $1,570 per engagement, while Bonneville (SenArts), "a road trip movie for spunky older chicks" starring Kathy Bates, Joan Allen and Jessica Lange, and Romulus, My Father (Magnolia Pictures), "an incredibly slow-paced film that relies on the strength of its actors to thrive" starring Eric Bana, trailed behind, earning $1,410 and $1,070 per screen, respectively, in limited engagements.

Good news for all you New Yorkers -- one of my favorite films of last year's fest circuit, Chop Shop, is now playing at New York City's Film Forum. The film played Cannes and Toronto last year, and just came off a screening at the Berlinale. Filmmaker Ramin Bahrani, who just won the Independent Spirit's Someone to Watch award, previously made the critically acclaimed Man Push Cart, and his follow-up is every bit as good as that film.

Chop Shop revolves around a young boy named Ale, who lives and works in a chop shop in NYC's tough Iron Triangle district. Added bonus: at the 8PM screenings tonight and tomorrow night, Bahrani will be on hand for a Q&A following the screening. The film will play at Film Forum through March 11.

Daily Green Cine has a nice round-up of reviews of the film; you can also read our review of the film from the Toronto International Film Festival, and our interview with Bahrani.

With his second feature film, Chop Shop, director Ramin Bahrani carries on his theme of exploring the "invisible people" of society that he started with his first film, Man Push Cart, which played Sundance (and other fests) in 2006. Where Man Push Cart showed a cross-section of the life of a former Pakistani pop star reduced to selling doughnuts and coffee to busy Manhattanites, in Chop Shop Bahrani shows us the life of a young Latino boy who lives and works in the Iron Triangle district of New York City. Bahrani took time out of pre-prod for his latest film, Solo, to chat with Cinematical by phone about Chop Shop, Man Push Cart, and his unique style of making films.

Cinematical: Both Man Push Cart and Chop Shop have the similar thematic element of focusing on people whose lives most people don't spend a lot of energy thinking about -- the guy who sells them coffee and bagels on their way to work, the street kid hustling in a chop shop. Why the focus on these "invisible" people?

Ramin Bahrani: I don't know how you feel about this, and I don't know what the reaction is going to be to Chop Shop when it's released in the States, when more people in the States see this film. I think both these films are about immigrant-type characters: in Chop Shop, Ale is young enough that he maybe could have been born here, or if he and Isamar immigrated they were very young, that was left deliberately ambiguous -- but I don't think that's the essential tissue of the film. I just feel like I'm tired of seeing the same independent films being made over and over again. This "mumblecore" stuff that's popular right now -- I'm not interested in these stories about these really attractive white kids, and their really attractive friends, and their problems. I'm interested in these groups of people, the people you don't see featured so much in films, and that's why I focus on them.

I see the connection between these characters in my films, and the kind of people who will see the film – mostly white, educated, the bourgeois, you know? Not that there's anything wrong with those people at all, it's just that they're the most likely demographic to see independent films at all. I'd like to see someone figure out how to market a film like Chop Shop to Hispanic school-age kids, but that's just not reality.

But as a filmmaker I don't see it as my job to connect those pieces of society. There is a connection between the screen and the viewer, and how the viewer reacts to it, but I'm not interested in why that chop shop exists, or why Ahmad's character exists, or why the taxi driver (in his next film, Solo) exists. I'm not a moral filmmaker, there's no moral message in the end of my films, there's no moral question. The characters are pretty pragmatic. In Chop Shop, Ale is involved in many things that people watching the film may find immoral or illegal, and they may be confused about why there's no judgment in the film, why there's no good or bad in the film. But it's who he is, he's surviving, and he's a kid – he doesn't make those judgments. That's just where he is, and I just think it's not my place to judge them.

From the moment I saw Ramin Bahrani's Man Push Cart at Sundance a couple years ago, I knew I'd found a filmmaker I was going to like. In Man Push Cart, Bahrani took a figure most folks who live in or visit New York City take for granted -- the guys who operate the shiny metal pushcarts you see dotting every other street corner, pimping doughnuts and coffee to busy Manhattanites -- and explored the fictional existence of pushcart man Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi), a former Pakistani pop star turned average deeply depressed guy trying to survive in the wake of his wife's death. Man Push Cart impressed me because of both the depth with which Bahrani explored his character and the gritty realism with which the film plopped the viewer into Ahmad's dismal, but not hopeless, existence.

Bahrani scored well with Man Push Cart -- the film premiered at Venice before going on to play a slew of fests, including Sundance, before getting a limited theatrical release and a DVD release the UK and Spain (soon to come in the US, according to Bahrani's official website). But in spite of being called " ... among the most striking American independent movies of the last year" (along with In Between Days and Cavite) by Dennis Lim, writing for the New York Times, Man Push Cart was rather overlooked by a lot of critics at Sundance and didn't find huge theatrical success. Roger Ebert liked the film enough to slot it in his Overlooked Film Festival the same year, but the film's total box office is just over $55,000, according to Box Office Mojo. I was disappointed it didn't do better off the fest circuit; it was one of the best independent films I saw that year, and I eagerly waited to see what Bahrani was going to do which his next film, and I'm pleased to be able to say that with Chop Shop, Bahrani has a solid follow-up.