viewing: sessions 2010

19/03–21/03/2010 mermaid arts centre,

Women without

Men Sun 21 Feb / Light House / 4.00pm

Director: Shirin Neshat 2009 / Germany/Austria/France

/ 97 minutes

Principal Cast: Pegah Ferydoni, Orsi Toth, Arita Shahrzad, Shabnam Toloui

Trimpin: The Sound of Invention

Iranian-American artist Shirin Neshat is well-known for her work depicting Islamic culture in poetic, stylized form. This interpretation of Shahrunsh Parsipur’s controversial novel combines Neshat’s skill in creating mood and tone with the magical-realist elements of Parsipur’s writing. She portrays the lives of four women in 1953, the year when Iran’s elected Prime Minister was removed in a coup d’etat backed by Britain and the US, in order to re-instate the Shah and avoid nationalizing the country’s oil resources.

The women’s own search for freedom in an oppressive culture leads each of them to a beautiful ephemeral garden, a place of safety and refuge. Filmed in haunting muted hues, the women’s individual journeys are compelling, and the broader themes – the tensions between religion and secularism, between tradition and modernity – have never felt more relevant.

Sun 21 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 4.00pm

Director: Peter Esmonde 2008 / US / 79 minutes

Sun 21 Feb / Screen 1 / 4.00pm

Directors: Scandar Copti & Yaron Shani 2009/ Israel / 120 minutes

Principal Cast:

Ajami, a crime-infested Jaffa neighborhood, serves two first-time directors (one Israeli, one Arab) as an allegory for the kind of pressure cooker climate the entire state of Israel is subjected to today.

A fractured chronology introduces a series of inter-related stories: Omar (Kabaha) needs money to settle a vendetta between his family and another, more powerful clan. Teenager Malek (Frege) is working in a restaurant to pay for his mother’s bone marrow transplant. Binj (co-director Copti) wants to leave Ajami, but his brother has just knifed a Jewish neighbour and taken flight, leaving a package of drugs behind. And then there’s police inspector Dando (Naim), whose life was turned upside down when his younger brother, a soldier, disappeared without trace. All these characters, each carrying his own pent-up anxieties, frustration and rage, turn out to be pieces of one, single, larger puzzle.

Dan Fainaru, Screen International

In Trimpin: The Sound Of Invention, Peter Esmonde takes audiences inside the singular sonic realm of Trimpin, the instrument inventor, installation artist and engineering savant whose intricate automated sound works have inspired composers, musicians and technologists the world over. Perhaps best known for his mammoth spiral sculpture of automated, selftuning electric guitars housed in Seattle’s Experience Music Project, Trimpin reflects on this and other large-scale installations as he embarks on a new project with the famed Kronos Quartet: the lively collaboration between Kronos and the idiosyncratic maestro buoys this whimsical look at the life and work of a true artistic genius. An amazing investigation of an extraordinary creative genius whose self-made world resembles both Santa’s workshop and Frankenstein’s lab, Trimpin: The Sound of Invention will delight anyone interested in the mysteries, pitfalls, and sheer joys of creative experiment.

Seattle International Film Festival Programme

City of Life and Death

City of Life and Death shines a floodlight on the Rape of Nanking: the massacre depicted took place over several long weeks as part of the Japanese invasion of China in 1937. Guided by the eye of director Lu Chuan, who studied in Nanjing and spent almost four years researching the script, the film abandons the noisy fanfare of political propaganda and plunges into the disorienting chaos of war.

Wolfy

Between the Canals

World Premiere

Sun 21 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 8.40pm

Sun 21 Feb / Cineworld 17 / 5.45pm

Director: Lu Chuan

2009 / Hong Kong / 136 minutes

Principal Cast:

Shot in gorgeous, majestic black and white, City of Life and Death is an epic and truly harrowing cinematic experience. Lu’s camera records both the atrocity and the humanity of the soldiers, the strength and abnegation of the women, and finally the powerful drive to survive under the most extreme conditions. This is a beautifully crafted piece of eye-witness filmmaking, as though an observer happened to be there on the battlefield with a 35mm camera.

Gangster Soon-Hong’s life is a cycle of violence and self-loathing. When he meets schoolgirl Han Yeonheui, he not only meets his match, but his possible salvation. Is his lifestyle one he can transcend? Get ready for the gangster genre at its least glamorized: Breathless is all the more subversive in its wilful opposition to glamour and escapism. Stripping away the faux existentialism that encumbers most gangster films, actor-writer-producer Yang Ik-june’s unsentimental debut contains a power all of its own. Its verité feel owes much to the film’s crew starring in key roles – the director casting with a Bressonian eye for looks rather than acting experience.

One wonders exactly where the gangster film can go next; Breathless dismantles every single tenet and facet that gangster chic is predicated upon – this is Korean cinema at its most foul-mouthed, violent and absolutely vital.

Edinburgh International Film Festival Programme

Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story

Breathless

Sun 21 Feb / Light House / 6.30pm

Director: Vasili Sigarev 2009 / Russia / 86 minutes

Principal Cast: Yana Troyanova, Polina Pluchek, Veronika Lysakova

Director: Mark O’Connor

2010 / Ireland / 79 minutes

Principal Cast: Pat Coonan, Dan Hyland, Stephen Jones, Damien Dempsey Screening with the short film, Scaffolder Falls. See page 21.

Director Mark O’Connor will be in attendance at this screening

Between The Canals follows three small time criminals from Dublin’s North Inner City as they each aspire to be somebody in a fast changing society: Liam (Hyland) a small time dealer who wants to quit his life of crime to become an electrician and provide for his girlfriend and son; Dots (Coonan), a crazy, irresponsible thug with ambitions to become a big time dealer and Scratchcard (Jones), a drug user with no ambitions but to stay on social welfare and watch the world go by.

Sun 21 Feb / Screen 1 / 6.30pm

Director: Yousry Nasrallah

2009 / Egypt / 139 minutes

Principal Cast: Mona Zakki, Mahmoud Hemida, Hassan El Raddad, Sawsan Badr

Sun 21 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 6.00pm

Director: Yang Ik-June

2009 / South Korea / 130 minutes

Principal Cast: Yang Ik-june,Kim Kkobbi, Lee Hwan

Veteran Egyptian filmmaker Yousry Nasrallah adapts the famed ‘story inside of a story’ method of his Arabian Nights title in order to relate several tales about the contemporary condition of women in Cairo in this skillfully drawn modern melodrama.

As much an insight to the nature of relationships between men and women as it is a sharply honed vision of Cairo society, the two main narratives — one focusing on a beautiful, fiercely independent talk show host struggling to have it all, the other about three sisters, their small store, and an involvement with a lower class laborer mutating from romance to tragedy — are threads from two ends of the social spectrum interwoven by mutual dilemmas.

Richly conceived and provocative without being didactic, this a showcase for a master storyteller, one whose talent and honesty make for memorable ‘night’ of cinema.

Geoff Gilmore, Sundance Festival Programme

Police pursue a pregnant woman across a snow-covered field and she goes into premature labour. A young girl, the result of the birth, announces in voiceover that she didn’t meet her mother until seven years later. Wolfy charts the ongoing course of their relationship. The little girl rarely sees her mother, and is left in the care of her grandmother and, subsequently, an invalid aunt. Her mother seems to depend on the sexual favours of men and occasionally brings her presents, most significantly a spinning top (‘volchok’, which is also the Russian for little wolf). A strikingly imagined combination of social observation and fairy tale, Wolfy is based on the experiences of leading actress Yana Troyanova, who plays the role of the mother. While the subject is, on the surface, grim, writer/director Vasili Sigarev deliberately sought ‘the sensation of childhood memories’, arguing that childhood memories can be beautiful regardless.

Peter Hames, BFI London Film Festival Programme

Liam is torn between life in the flats and his responsibility to be a good father to his son. He has to just get through this one day and maybe things will look brighter on the other side. But it’s Saint Patrick’s Day and in Dublin City this means trouble everywhere. A heartbreaking and occasionally hilarious story of loyalty, duty and masculinity, Between The Canals is a true find.

Derek O’Connor, JDIFF

New York, I Love You

Sun 21 Feb / Cineworld 17 / 8.45pm

Directors: Jiang Wen, Mira Nair, Shunji Iwai, Yvan Attal, Brett Ratner, Allen Hughes, Shekhar Kapur, Natalie Portman, Fatih Akin, Joshua Marston, Randy Balsmeyer 2008 / France / 103 minutes

Principal Cast: Ethan Hawke, Julie Christie, Natalie Portman, James Caan, Shia La Bouf, Orlando Bloom, John Hurt

In the city that never sleeps, love is always on the mind. Those passions come to life in this portmanteau picture, featuring an allstar cast. Together, they create a kaleidoscope of the spontaneous, surprising, electrifying human connections that pump the city’s heartbeat. Sexy, funny, haunting and revealing encounters unfold beneath the Manhattan skyline. From Tribeca to Central Park to Brooklyn, the story weaves a tale of love as diverse as the very fabric of New York itself.

‘Taking the wrinkle-free, easy-travel concept first executed in the 2007 Gallic compilation Paris, je t’aime, tourists may notice that the film’s New Yorkers are all straight, and mostly white. But they’ll want to sightsee, especially when Bradley Cooper hooks up with Drea de Matteo, Chris Cooper and Robin Wright Penn flirt madly, and, in Brett Ratner’s nicely raunchy sketch, Anton Yelchin gets lucky with a wheelchair-bound Olivia Thirlby.’

Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

Chloe

Catherine (Moore), a successful doctor, suspects that her husband of many years, handsome music teacher David (Neeson), is cheating on her. In the hope of putting her fears to rest, she hires an irresistible young woman, Chloe (Seyfried), to test his fidelity. For Catherine, her relationship with Chloe is that of a simple business transaction, but Chloe’s motives are less clear-cut. Her explicit tales of encounters with David lead Catherine on a journey of sexual and sensual rediscovery, but by opening the door to temptation, she puts her family in great danger.

Based on Anne Fontaine’s Nathalie, and written by Erin Cressida Wilson (Secretary), this frank, erotic intrigue is still very much an Atom Egoyan film. Recalling something of the tone of Exotica, this intriguing and intelligent film is one of Egoyan’s most compelling.

I’ve Loved You So Long

Sun 21 Feb / Screen 1 / 9.00pm

Director: Atom Egoyan

2009 / USA / 99 minutes

Principal Cast: Julianne

Moore, Liam Neeson, Amanda Seyfried

Sandra Hebron, London Film Festival Programme

Micheal Dwyer was a firm believer in independent cinema, and nowhere is this more evident than in his championing of the works of Hal Hartley, a man who has consistently defied expectations for the past two decades to remain a wilfully independent filmmaker.

His brilliant 1989 debut, a deft mixture of old-fashioned love story and wry absurdist comedy, follows the romantic escapades of a taciturn adonis Josh (Burke) who returns to his hometown after serving time for murder, attracting the attentions of a precocious teenager (the late, great Adrienne Shelly) obsessed with the impending apocalypse.

A series of half-truths and misunderstandings give Hartley the opportunity to explore his favoured themes of love and trust. Smart, profound and curiously touching, Hal Hartley’s unique vision is a fitting tribute to this festival’s founder and his always discerning eye for emerging filmmaking talent.

Rory Bonass, JDIFF

The Unbelievable Truth

Mon 22 Feb / Screen 1 / 4.00pm

Director: Philippe Claudel 2007 / France /115 minutes

Principal Cast: Kristin Scott Thomas, Elsa Zylberstein, Serge Hazanavicius, Laurent Grévill

As Juliette, Kristin Scott Thomas is first seen in closeup without makeup, her hair lustreless, her expression blank but tense. Juliette has completed a prison sentence of fifteen years for committing the unimaginable crime of murdering her six-year-old son. Her kid sister, Léa (Zylberstein), a literature professor at a university in Nancy, nervously lets her into her own family, where Juliette remains in an uneasy state of semi-silence. Written and directed by the novelist Philippe Claudel, the movie asks whether anyone who has done something so extreme can be welcomed back into the human community. And does she want to be welcomed back?

Mon 22 Feb / Screen 1 / 2.00pm

Director: Hal Hartley

1989 / US / 90 minutes

Principal Cast: Adrienne

Shelly, Robert Burke, Christopher Cooke, Edie Falco

Claudel dramatizes Juliette’s slow reawakening with an infinite number of small, sharply etched details. The secrets that are finally revealed have the curious effect of making one want to see the movie again immediately, in order to study Scott Thomas’s immaculate performance.

David Denby, The New Yorker