FREE FRI 22 FEBRUARY THE OFFICAL GFF DAILY GUIDE
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WHAT’S INSIDE? 2 — TODAY’S PICKS We went panning for brochure
gold and found these films
2 — LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION A look at themed cinema venues in Glasgow. We recommend showing The King’s Speech in Celtic Park
3 — REVIEWS A Late Quartet Caesar Must Die Spring Breakers
4 — WHAT’S NEW ONLINE Giving free publicity to our rivals. Remember that, The List RAT FEVER
BEYOND THE FAVELA
The variety of BRAZILIAN CINEMA at Glasgow Film Festival shows that the country has moved on from City of God’s guns and gangs WORDS: ALAN BETT
NATIONAL STEREOTYPES are perhaps a necessary evil: by attaching simplistic labels to the people of this world, we fill gaps in our knowledge. Such lazy typecasting is often raised and nurtured through film and Brazil in particular has ensured itself a damaging infamy in this area. The huge success of the kinetic masterpiece City of God , for instance, led to a spate of exaggerated, highly stylised stories of deranged drug lords and sashaying samba girls. With this in mind, Glasgow Film Festival aims to look beyond the favelas with its expertly programmed New Brazilian Cinema strand. While earlier films such as Bus 174 and Carandiru fiercely questioned the country’s social order, the Brazilian film in the GFF programme often take on a wider political scope, searching for insight into where the rapidly changing nation might rest as the ideological plates of the world grind against one another. Some guy
4 — SNOW WAY! Featuring a headline joke so
4 — PIC OF THE DAY The first photo of CineSkinny
which finally allows Brazil’s creative leftfield slackers to be heard above the aggressive playground bullies of the well known favela features. It opens with a gorgeous floating monochrome of waterways and bridges, reminiscent in style and tone to Lou Ye’s Suzhou River , a pertinent comparison as both Brazil and China are facing seismic cultural and economic shifts. It is with meticulous timing, then, that GFF have concentrated its and our thoughts here, in advance of Rio’s upcoming Olympics and World Cup finals, when all cameras will centre upon the city. Maybe it’s cinema’s job to show a little of life’s wild side, to thrill us with danger and depravity. But in reality we mostly exist among shades of grey. The excellent films in this series show that there’s far more to Rio than gun-toting toddlers. [Alan Bett] XINGU: 22 FEB – CINEWORLD 17 @ 13.45 RAT FEVER: 22 FEB – GFT 2 @ 20.40
2013 to actually feature some- one in hot pants
4 — WHAT DO YOU THINK? Surprise film Spring Breakers
once said that for an understanding of the future, we must consult the past, and this is precisely what director Camilo Tavares sets out to do with his documentary The Day that Lasted 21 Years , the story of covert US interference in South America during the Cold War. We move forward from this post-colonial meddling to an even darker date, 1978, with Prime Time Soap , in which a military dictatorship hunts political dissidents while others simply wish to escape into the aspirational fantasies of the disco in Dancin’ Days, a hot new telenovela. Highly styled 70s kitsch make for a refreshing change to the poverty porn so often made for slumming cinephiles. It’s important not to gloss over the world’s awkward truths but at the same time one mustn’t revel smugly in its injustice. When Claudio Assis takes us back to the gutter with Rat Fever , he delivers street poetry that’s both verbal and visual. Here is a lyrical film of stanzas and melodic imagery
bad it didn’t even make it into Mirror, Mirror
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Produced by The Skinny magazine in association with the Glasgow Film Festival Editors Designer Digital Deputy Editor
Lewis Porteous Jamie Dunn Marianne Wilson Nathanael Smith Josh Slater-Williams
GFF BOX OFFICE Order tickets from the box office at www.glasgowfilm.org/festival or call 0141 332 6535 or visit Glasgow Film Theatre 12 Rose Street, Glasgow, G3 6RB boxoffice@glasgowfilm.org
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FRIDAY 22 FEBRUARY THE CINESKINNY 1