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A Darren Aronofsky Film Festival
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05
ARONOFSKY
06
About Aronofsky
09
Interview
12
Awards
16
FILMS
24
Film Selection
28
Pi
38
Requiem For a Dream
36
The Fountain
48
The Wrestler
58
Black Swan
70
SCHEDULE
82
List of Events
44
Maps
86
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Table of contents
THE FESTIVAL
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We are so pleased to welcome everyone to the festival of a lifetime. A dark, twisted, fabulous adventure through the mind of one of the most creative directors of our generation. From obsessed mathematicians and grieving scientists to broken down wrestlers and crazed ballerinas, Darren takes us on a journey to the brink of sanity. So please join us as wish Darren Aronofsky a very, happy 40th birthday and visit the work that has made his career.
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The Festival
There is no question that Mr. Arronofsky deserves to have a festival in honor of his great work, the only question was when. At what point in a mans career do you stop to remember what has gotten him to his present place? Well we figured a 40th birthday would be a perfect time. And so Afflicted, the film festival honoring the great Darren Arronofsky and his directorial work was born.
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ABOUT ARONOFSKY
8 // Afflicted Film Festival ABOUT ARONOFSKY
About Aronofsky
In a era obsessed with special effects and often devoid of story Darren Aronofsky continually pushes the envelope on filmaking with raw characters and filming techniques. He has directed five full length feature films all of which have received numerous awards including an Academy Award nomination for best director and three Oscar nominations for cast performances: Ellen Burstyn for her role in Requiem for a Dream, Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei for The Wrestler and Natalie Portman who won for her performance in Black Swan. His other films include The Fountain and Pi.
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“I TRY TO MAKE FILMS THAT ARE EXCITING, AND FUN,
ABOUT ARONOFSKY
Aronofsky studied film at Harvard and won several film awards for his senior thesis film, “Supermarket Sweep”, which was also a National Student Academy Award finalist. His movies combine musical genres and sound effects to heighten tension and drama without fancy special effects. The stories tend to focus on characters who are obsessed to the point of self destruction.
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ABOUT ARONOFSKY
AND EMOTIONAL, AND MOVING, AND FILLED WITH ACTION... AND THAT’S ALL I CARE ABOUT.”
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ABOUT ARONOFSKY
Interview
by Damon Wise
When did you first embark on making Black Swan? How did it come together?
I’m responsible. I take full credit. My sister Patti was a dancer growing up, and she was very into ballet. For me, it wasn’t anything I understood, but then as I got I older I started thinking about worlds to set films in. And I thought ballet could be an interesting world. Was your sister a professional dancer?
Well, she got pretty far. She went to a professional ballet school all through high school. But once she got out of high school, she stopped. So Patti went all the way through high school – which is pretty far – and then she realized it wasn’t for her, and now she does other stuff. Where did the character of Nina come from?
I was also very interested in Dostoyevsky’s The Double, which is a story about a guy who wakes up and his doubles’s there – it starts to replace his life. And then I went to see a production of Swan Lake, which I thought was just a bunch of girls in tutus. I didn’t know what it was. Then I saw that there was a black swan and white swan, both played by the same dancer, and it was kind of a eureka moment: I was like, “Oh wow, so there’s a double...” Then it started to come together.
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DIRECTOR INTERVIEW
How long ago was that?
Ohh, I don’t know. I met with Natalie, like, eight or nine years ago. We met in Times Square and we had a coffee. I had this idea for a film set in the ballet world. But I kind told her a little bit more than I actually knew for sure about what it was... So it was slowly evolving, over the years. It kinda came together more recently. After The Wrestler, I got this writer, this guy called Mark Hayman, to do a bunch of work, and we started really working on it together. It was a very hard script to write. Mostly because understanding the ballet world was really complicated. As was getting into it. Did you ever feel guilty about pushing her in such a demanding role?
You don’t really need to push Natalie that much. She’s incredibly hard working and disciplined, and present, and willing to go for it. She rarely complains. And she’s tough. She’s a tiny little girl but she’s built of some strong material, and she went for it – over and over again. But she was very prepared, so I didn’t really need to push her that much, emotionally and physically.
“... NO MATTER HOW LOW IT G
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ETS, DIRECTOR INTERVIEW
SOMETHING GOOD WILL COME ALONG Do you see parallels between Black Swan and The Wrestler?
It’s a diptych. They’re total companion pieces. I look forward to the day when an art theatre plays them both as a double feature. I mean, there are just so many similarities. They’re both artists that use their bodies to express themselves, and they do a tremendous amount of damage to themselves to do that – except that one’s the highest art and the other’s the lowest art. If you can even call it an art. Most people wouldn’t. And so I like that comparison. I’m very clear about it – they both leap at the end. The stories are very, very different but there is a comparison. You use a lot of Tchaikovsky in the movie...
Well, it’s not purely Tchaikovsky, it’s Tchaikovsky via Clint Mansell, my composer. He took Tchaikovsky and he pulled it apart. Because if you just put Tchaikovsky music over the movie, it would be way, way too up and down and too fast. Classical music is not movie music. So Clint took certain themes and ideas and turned them into scary music. So it flows out of Tchaikovsky, into Clint being influenced by Tchaikovsky, and then back into Tchaikovsky. Even the dance club music is all samples and manipulations by the Chemical Brothers and all these bands using pieces of Tchaikovsky. So there’s Tchaikovsky’s throughout the entire film but it’s not purely his music.
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DIRECTOR INTERVIEW
Let’s talk about some of the motifs in the movie. There are an awful lot of mirrors...
Look, the mirror is in every room in the ballet world, because ballet dancers are constantly looking at themselves, studying themselves, and maybe even judging themselves. All the time. So it was very clear to me that the mirror was a major character in this film. And the film is also about doubles. Your reflection is your double, isn’t it? So it just became a really important part of the film. And very early on we started to think of all the different types of tricks we could do with mirrors. And how about the scenes in which Natalie grows feathers?
Well, the story of Swan lake is that, during the day, the Swan Queen is a swan and at night she’s like a half-swan, half-human creature. That’s like a werewolf, y’know? (Laughs) So I was excited to be making a were-swan movie. And the idea of taking Natalie Portman and turning her into some kind of creature was even more delicious fun. That became a major part of the film
Why did you cast Winona Ryder as Beth, the older ballerina?
I cast her because, in many ways, Natalie – not Natalie herself, but someone one like Natalie, her generation – has replaced Winona. I mean, Winona used to be as big as Natalie, if not bigger, and now Natalie is there. And now there’s Mila Kunis coming through... I was trying to use their reputations as actors a bit to play off what was happening in the dance world. Did you think about Roman Polanski’s early films while you were making this movie?
Of course, Repulsion was a big influence. Do you always know what your films are ‘about’ while you’re making them?
Look, I remember working on the first film I ever did, Pi. I thought I understood it. And then, after doing press for a few months on it, I was like, “Wow, I never really understood the movie until I talked to you guys.” (Laughs) But I think that’s true. Well, it probably changes in meaning, but as I speak, and talk about it and ask questions – and I see what you’re all interested in – it kind of acquires a new meaning. On Black Swan, every day I was on set working with Natalie on a take it would be one thing. But it’s constantly evolving, about what it is and what it represents.
– SOMETHING ALWAYS COMES OUT OF THAT DARK PERIOD.”
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I think it’s always a surprise. There’s something about the material that’s interesting and attractive, and you just work on it... It’s gotta have something that connects with you, because it takes years to make these things, so it’s gotta be something you can come back to. I was very excited about the werewolf element of it – the transformation, the metamorphosis – and I liked the idea of shooting dance, and the movement of dance. I also liked the nightclub scene between Lily and Nina. So there were always things that were always exciting about it.
DIRECTOR INTERVIEW
Are you ever surprised by what comes out of that?
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NOMINATED // ROBERT BEST AMERICAN FILM Black Swan (2010) Robert Festival
NOMINATED // CINEMA BRAZIL GRAND PRIZE BEST FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILM
NOMINATED // CÉSAR BEST FOREIGN FILM Black Swan (2010) César Awards, France
NOMINATED // BODIL BEST AMERICAN FILM Black Swan (2010) Bodil Awards
2011 NOMINATED // OSCAR BEST ACHIEVEMENT IN DIRECTING Black Swan (2010) Academy Awards
NOMINATED // GOLDEN GLOBE BEST DIRECTOR - MOTION PICTURE Black Swan (2010) Golden Globes, USA
DIRECTOR // AWARDS & NOMINATIONS
Black Swan (2010) Cinema Brazil Grand Prize
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Awards and Nominations
2012
DIRECTOR // AWARDS & NOMINATIONS
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NOMINATED // DAVID LEAN AWARD BEST DIRECTOR
WON // BLUE RIBBON AWARD BEST FOREIGN FILM
Black Swan (2010) BAFTA Awards
Black Swan (2010) Blue Ribbon Awards
NOMINATED // SATURN AWARD BEST DIRECTOR
NOMINATED // CRITICS CHOICE AWARD BEST DIRECTOR
Black Swan (2010) Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films
Black Swan (2010) Broadcast Film Critics Association Awards
WON // INDEPENDENT SPIRIT AWARD BEST DIRECTOR
NOMINATED // DGA AWARD OUTSTANDING DIRECTORIAL ACHIEVEMENT IN MOTION PICTURES
Black Swan (2010) Independent Spirit Awards
NOMINATED // BEST FOREIGN FEATURE FILM
Black Swan (2010) Directors Guild of America
Black Swan (2010) Amanda Awards, Norway
NOMINATED // TFCA AWARD BEST DIRECTOR
NOMINATED // SILVER RIBBON BEST NON-EUROPEAN DIRECTOR
Black Swan (2010) Toronto Film Critics Association Awards
Black Swan (2010) Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists
NOMINATED // VFCC AWARD BEST DIRECTOR
NOMINATED // OFCS AWARD BEST DIRECTOR Black Swan (2010) Online Film Critics Society Awards
Black Swan (2010) Vancouver Film Critics Circle
NOMINATED // ALFS AWARD DIRECTOR OF THE YEAR
NOMINATED // DAVID BEST FOREIGN FILM
Black Swan (2010) London Critics Circle Film Awards
Black Swan (2010) David di Donatello Awards
NOMINATED // COFCA AWARD BEST DIRECTOR Black Swan (2010) Central Ohio Film Critics Association
The Wrestler (2008)
NOMINATED // SIERRA AWARD BEST DIRECTOR Black Swan (2010) Las Vegas Film Critics Society
WON // SDFCS AWARD BEST DIRECTOR Black Swan (2010) San Diego Film Critics Society
WON // SFFCC AWARD BEST DIRECTOR Black Swan (2010) San Francisco Film Critics Circle
NOMINATED // SATELLITE AWARD BEST DIRECTOR Black Swan (2010) Satellite Awards
WON // CINEMATOGRAPHER-DIRECTOR DUO AWARD Shared with: Matthew Libatique Camerimage
NOMINATED // CFCA AWARD BEST DIRECTOR Black Swan (2010) Chicago Film Critics Association Awards
Black Swan (2010) Boston Society of Film Critics Awards
NOMINATED // FCCA AWARD BEST FOREIGN FILM- ENGLISH LANGUAGE The Wrestler (2008) Circle of Australia Awards
NOMINATED // WAFCA AWARD BEST DIRECTOR Black Swan (2010) Washington DC Area Film Critics Association Awards
NOMINATED // GOLDEN LION Black Swan (2010) Venice Film Festival
3RD PLACE // DFWFCA AWARD BEST DIRECTOR Black Swan (2010) Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association Awards
WON // TRIBUTE AWARD Gotham Awards
WON // AUSTIN FILM CRITICS AWARD BEST DIRECTOR Black Swan (2010) Austin Film Critics Association
WON // AWARD OF THE ARGENTINEAN ACADEMY BEST FOREIGN FILM Black Swan (2010) Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences of Argentina
DIRECTOR // AWARDS & NOMINATIONS
NOMINATED // BODIL BEST AMERICAN FILM
2ND PLACE // BSFC AWARD BEST DIRECTOR
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2010
2009 WON // AFI AWARD MOVIE OF THE YEAR The Wrestler (2008)
NOMINATED // DAVID BEST FOREIGN FILM The Wrestler (2008)
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DIRECTOR // AWARDS & NOMINATIONS
David di Donatello Awards
WON // INDEPENDENT SPIRIT AWARD BEST FEATURE The Wrestler (2008)
NOMINATED // ALFS AWARD DIRECTOR OF THE YEAR The Wrestler (2008)
NOMINATED // OFCS AWARD BEST DIRECTOR The Wrestler (2008) Online Film Critics Society Award
NOMINATED // SILVER RIBBON BEST NON-EUROPEAN DIRECTOR The Wrestler (2008)
2008 WON // KCFCC AWARD BEST DIRECTOR The Wrestler (2008) Kansas City Film Critics Circle Awards
WON // AUDIENCE AWARD The Wrestler (2008) Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival
NOMINATED // BEST FILM The Wrestler (2008)
WON // GOLDEN LION The Wrestler (2008)
2006
NOMINATED // GOLDEN LION The Fountain (2006)
WON // EMERGING VISIONARY AWARD Chicago International Film Festival
WON // VISIONARY AWARD Requiem for a Dream (2000) Stockholm Film Festival
NOMINATED// GRAND PRIX The Fountain (2006) Ghent International Film Festival
WON // FEATURE FILM PRIZE IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY The Fountain (2006) Hamptons International Film Festival
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DIRECTOR // AWARDS & NOMINATIONS
2001 WON // FRANKLIN J. SCHAFFNER AWARD American Film Institute, USA
NOMINATED // CFCA AWARD BEST DIRECTOR Requiem for a Dream (2000) Chicago Film Critics Association
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DIRECTOR // AWARDS & NOMINATIONS
Awards
NOMINATED // BRAM STOKER AWARD SCREENPLAY Requiem for a Dream (2000) Bram Stoker Awards
NOMINATED // INDEPENDENT SPIRIT AWARD BEST DIRECTOR Requiem for a Dream (2000)
WON // YOUNG HOLLYWOOD AWARD HOTTEST YOUNG FILMMAKER Young Hollywood Awards
NOMINATED // CHLOTRUDIS AWARD BEST DIRECTOR & BEST SCREENPLAY ADAPTED
2000
Requiem for a Dream (2000) Shared with: Hubert Selby Jr. Chlotrudis Awards
WON // GOLDEN SPIKE
WON // OFCS AWARD BEST DIRECTOR Requiem for a Dream (2000)
NOMINATED // PFCS AWARD BEST DIRECTOR & BEST SCREENPLAY ADAPTATION Requiem for a Dream (2000) Phoenix Film Critics Society Awards
2ND PLACE // SEFCA AWARD BEST DIRECTOR Requiem for a Dream (2000) Southeastern Film Critics Association Awards
Requiem for a Dream (2000) Valladolid International Film Festival
NOMINATED // BRONZE HORSE Requiem for a Dream (2000) Stockholm Film Festival
NOMINATED // CHLOTRUDIS AWARD BEST DIRECTOR Pi (1998)
WON // FFCC AWARD NEWCOMER OF THE YEAR Pi (1998) Florida Film Critics Circle Awards
WON // INDEPENDENT SPIRIT AWARD BEST FIRST SCREENPLAY Pi (1998)
WON // SPECIAL MENTION Pi (1998) For the screenplay. M谩laga International Week of Fantastic Cinema
NOMINATED // INDEPENDENT SPIRIT AWARD BEST FIRST FEATURE Pi (1998)
1998 NOMINATED// GRAND SPECIAL PRIZE Pi (1998) Deauville Film Festival
NOMINATED // GOLDEN ALEXANDER Pi (1998)
3RD PLACE// BEST INTERNATIONAL FILM Pi (1998) Fantasia Film Festival
NOMINATED // GRAND PRIX ASTURIAS BEST FEATURE Pi (1998) Gij贸n International Film Festival
WON // DIRECTING AWARD DRAMATIC NOMINATED // GRAND JURY PRIZE DRAMATIC Pi (1998) Sundance Film Festival
WON // FIPRESCI PRIZE SPECIAL MENTION INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION Pi (1998) Thessaloniki Film Festival
DIRECTOR // AWARDS & NOMINATIONS
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1999
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The films in order of release are: Pi Requiem for a Dream The Fountain The Wrestler Black Swan
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Film Selection
Although he has directed several films in recent years, it was eventually decided that only the first five films of his career would be featured. These films built the foundation of his filmography and represent a range of subjects demonstrating his versatility as a director. Of course they all share the common thread of afflicted characters who walk a thin line between greatness and sanity.
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FILMS // PI
PI
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FILMS // PI
“IT’S SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST, MAX, AND WE’VE GOT THE FUCKING GUN. .”
1998
Pi RUNTIME : 1 hour 42 minutes BUDGET
$60,000 AWARDS
9 wins 7 nominations
In Manhattan, behind six locks, lives Max Cohen, a mathematician and computer whiz. Since staring at the sun at age six, he’s had terrible headaches; plus, he can’t abide human contact except with an aging professor, and he’s obsessed with finding numeric patterns. His current obsession is the stock market; his theories bring him to the attention of Wall Street traders. He also keeps running into Lenny, a fast-talking Chasidic who fronts for a cabal that wants to rediscover long-lost mathematical mysteries in the Torah. Neither group is benign, and they pursue Max as his hallucinations and headaches worsen. Does nature offer any solutions? Can Max find them? Max is a genius mathematician who has built a supercomputer at home that provides something that can be understood as a key for understanding all existence.
CAST: Sean Gullette Mark Margolis Ben Shenkman Pamela Hart Stephen Pearlman Samia Shoaib Ajay Naidu Kristyn Mae-Anne Lao Espher Lao Nieves Joanne Gordon Lauren Fox
FILMS // PI
Sean Gullette Mark Margolis
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STARRING:
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REQUIEM FOR A DREAM
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FILMS //
REQUIEM FOR A DREAM
RogerEbert.com, July 24, 1998
Review
by Roger Ebert
The film “Pi” is a study in madness and its partner, genius. A tortured, driven man believes (1) that mathematics is the language of the universe, (2) nature can be expressed in numbers, and (3) there are patterns everywhere in nature. If he can find the patterns, if he can find the key to the chaos, then he can predict anything--the stock market, for example. If the man is right, the mystery of existence is unlocked. If he is wrong, the inside of his brain begins to resemble a jammed stock ticker. The movie, written and directed by Darren Aronofsky, is a study in mental obsession. His hero, named Maximillian Cohen, lives barricaded behind a triple-locked door, in a room filled with high-powered, customized computer equipment. He wants nothing to do with anybody. He writes programs, tests them, looks for the pattern, gets a 216-digit bug, stomps on his chips in a rage, and then begins to wonder about that bug. Exactly 216 digits. There is a theory among some Jewish scholars, he learns, that the name of God has 216 letters.
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FILMS // PI
The movie is shot in rough, high-contrast black and white. Max, played by Sean Gullette, is balding, restless, paranoid and brilliant. He has debilitating headaches and nosebleeds. Symptoms of high blood pressure--or of the mental torment he’s putting himself through. He’s suspicious of everyone. The friendly Indian woman next door puts food by his door. He avoids her. He trusts only his old teacher, Sol (Mark Margolis). They play Go, a game deeper than chess, and Sol tells him to stop with the key to the universe business, already. He warns that he’s spinning away from science and toward numerology. Not everybody thinks so. His phone rings with the entreaties of Marcy (Pamela Hart), who works for a high-powered Wall Street analysis firm. They want to hire him as a consultant. They think he’s onto something. He has predicted some prices correctly. At the deli, he runs into a Hasidic Jew named Lenny (Ben Shenkman), who seems casual and friendly but has a hidden mission: His group believes the Torah may be a code sent from God and may contain God’s name. Of course if one finds the mathematical key to everything, that would include God, stock prices, the weather, history, the future, baseball scores and the response to all moves in Go. That assumes there is a key. When you’re looking for something that doesn’t exist, it makes you crazier the closer you get to it. The seductive thing about Aronofsky’s film is that it is halfway plausible in terms of modern physics and math. What was numerology a century ago now has now been simplified into a very, very vast problem. Chaos theory looks for patterns where common sense says there are none. A computer might be able to give you the answer to anything, if (1) it is powerful enough, and (2) it has all the data. Of course, you might need a computer the size of the universe and containing everything in it, but we’re talking theory here.
“I AM THRILLED WHEN A MAN RISKS HIS MIND “Pi” is a thriller. I am not very thrilled these days by whether the bad guys will get shot or the chase scene will end one way instead of another. You have to make a movie like that pretty skillfully before I care. But I am thrilled when a man risks his mind in the pursuit of a dangerous obsession. Max is out on a limb. There are hungry people circling him. He may be on to something. They want it, too. For both the stock market people and the Hasidic cabal, Max’s formula represents all they believe in and everything they care about. And then there is a level at which Max may simply be insane, or physically ill. There are people who work out complicated theories involving long, impenetrable columns of numbers. Newspapers get envelopes filled with their proofs every day. And other people who sit in their rooms, wrapping themselves in the webs of chess or numbers theory, addicted to their fixes. And game players, gamblers, horseplayers--people bewitched by the mirage of a system.
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IN THE PURSUIT OF A DANGEROUS OBSESSION.”
FILMS // PI
The beautiful thing about mathematics is that you can’t prove it except by its own terms. There’s no way to put some math in a test tube and see if it turns purple or heats up. It sits there smugly in its own perfect cocoon, letting people like Max find anything he wants in it--or to think that he has.
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REQUIEM FOR A DREAM
FILMS //
REQUIEM FOR A DREAM Pi cost only $60,000 to make, most of which was raised in the form of individual $100 contributions from the director’s friends and family. When it was later bought by Artisan Entertainment, each contributor got back a $150 return on their investment.
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FILM FACT
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REQUIEM FOR A DREAM
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FILMS //
REQUIEM FOR A DREAM
REQUIUM FOR A DREAM
2000
Requiem for a Dream Requiem for a Dream exposes four paralleled individuals and their menacing addiction to heroin, cocaine, and diet pills (speed). Taking place in Brooklyn amidst the waning Coney Island, the drugs are very easily obtained and keep each main character in its cycle of dependence.
Ellen Burstyn Jared Leto RUNTIME : 1 hour 42 minutes BUDGET
$4,500,0000 AWARDS
27 wins 38 nominations
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FILMS //
REQUIEM FOR A DREAM
The protagonist Harry Goldfarb is your typical heroin junky with an ambitious plan of “Getting off hard knocks,” with help from his cocaine crazed girlfriend Marion and his long time friend Tyrone. Meanwhile his widowed mother is obsessed with the glamor of television and eventually finds her way to a dietitian who pushes her into the cycle of drug induced enslavement.
STARRING:
CAST: Ellen Burstyn Jared Leto Jennifer Connelly Marlon Wayans Christopher McDonald Louise Lasser Marcia Jean Kurtz Janet Sarno Suzanne Shepherd Joanne Gordon Charlotte Aronofsky Mark Margolis Michael Kaycheck Jack O’Connell Chas Mastin
REMEMBER?”
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FILMS //
REQUIEM FOR A DREAM
“YOU PROMISED ME THAT EVERYTHING WAS GONNA BE OK
REQUIEM FOR A DREAM FILMS //
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FILM FACT During Ellen Burstyn’s impassioned monologue about how it feels to be old, cinematographer Matthew Libatique accidentally let the camera drift off-target. When director Darren Aronofsky called “cut” and confronted him about it, he realized the reason Libatique had let the camera drift was because he had been crying during the take and fogged up the camera’s eyepiece. This was the take used in the final print.
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FILMS //
REQUIEM FOR A DREAM
New York Times Saturday, May 10, 2014
Review
By Elvis Mitchell
“A TAN WITH ACUIT
In ‘’Requiem for a Dream,’’ the director Darren Aronofsky’s adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.’s lower-depths novel, Jared Leto has lost so much weight he looks like another person altogether. As the junkie Harry, a wasted pretty boy, he seems kept aloft by his eyelashes, the only substantial thing on his frame. Superficially, it might be easy to confuse the protagonists of ‘’’Requiem’’ with the models in a Calvin Klein Jeans ad of a few years ago. But make no mistake: there is plenty of meat on its bones.
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FILMS //
REQUIEM FOR A DREAM
The film maker’s effrontery is effectively a personal statement, a brand of dynamism that isn’t just technique for its own explosive ends but rather is integral to the storytelling. The book is unremittingly grim, and the flashes of visual wit supplied by Mr. Aronofsky, who wrote the screenplay with Mr. Selby, are off-putting because he is infatuated with the rot. By the end, he has made the movie bleaker than the original material. People may find it infuriating precisely because it’s so intimidating, and it may leave you shaken. Be warned: it’s a downer, and a knockout. ‘’Requiem’’ interweaves the stories of four drug addicts -- Harry; his mother, Sara (Ellen Burstyn); his girlfriend, Marion (Jennifer Connelly); and his buddy, Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) -- in their pursuit of a reality-blurring high. Still, the picture holds close to the theme of the novel: the real drug we’re all hooked on is the American Dream, with its promises of big cash paydays and fame and eventually happiness, which can all no doubt be found around that same corner where prosperity is said to lurk. Mr. Aronofsky starts with Mr. Selby’s thesis, which in the wrong hands could be corny and grating, and vaults right past it. He is pixilated on his own fairy dust, and the trail of grace notes that verge on the hyperbolic are his shout out to sanity; he’s clearing his head and his lungs. When the picture starts, Harry is dropping in on his mother for his regular appointment to steal and pawn her television set. Soon, though, he is coming by to bring her a gift: a brand new one. And in a tragic role reversal, Harry has become the adult. He recognizes his mother’s involuntary teeth grinding as an amphetamine addict’s behavior; she is hooked on the pills so she can get her weight down to go on her favorite television segment, a raise-the-roof weight-loss infomercial with a predatory host (Christopher McDonald). The tawdriness is another detail that Mr. Aronofsky gets right. The story involves the characters’ dream-chasing. Harry wants to be rich, his mother wants him to be married and happy, and Marion wants to be a part of his life. He talks her into dating her former therapist (Sean Gullette, the star of Mr. Aronofsky’s ‘’Pi’’) so she can get some money to keep Harry’s drug business going. Her revulsion is so visceral you can almost feel her nerve endings recoiling. Ms. Connelly, too, whittled herself down to a new weight class, and it’s her performance that gives the movie weight, since her fall is the most precipitous. By the end, when she curls into a happy fetal ball with a furtive smile on her face, she has come to love her debasement (including an exhibitionist sex scene that is the reason ‘’Requiem,’’ which opens today at the U.A. Union Square 14, is being released without a rating). Her dank realization is more disturbing than anything in the novel, and Ms. Connelly has never before done anything to prepare us for how good she is here.
DOWN HIS SU
GLE OF IMAGES COMIC PANEL T Y THAT HE IS Mr. Aronofsky draws astonishing performances from his actors. Probably the biggest surprise is Mr. Wayans, whose overstimulated comic work can border on hilarity and make you cringe at the same time. His hyperactivity conveys a desperate need for attention, which is frightening from someone who has so much presence. You can’t take your eyes off him even though you can sometimes barely stand to look at him.
‘’Requiem’’ is like a Chuck Jones video starring Cool Herk, in which the scratch rhythms on the soundtrack are mirrored by editing so nimble and fast it’s like old-school turntable scratching. Refrigerators sprout ravenous jaws, and the view through a filthy window onto a rainy, dark street suddenly becomes sun-kissed and luminous. The people in ‘’Requiem for a Dream’’ can’t see anything in front of them, and can’t really trust their senses until it’s far too late. Mr. Aronofsky’s style could probably best be described as cyberpulp, a tangle of images with comic panel acuity that he is downloading from his subconscious. To paraphrase a line from a Celine Dion song that might be from the time when this movie was set, the director pushed his accelerator all the way to the Equator.
FILMS //
Instead of falling back on the cliche of junkies’ vegetative states, Mr. Aronofsky races through their buzzes because he wants to show how quickly the time passes when they’re high. And it explains why their lives are so empty when they’re not consuming, which drug movies haven’t made so clear before. By rushing the addicts’ temporary nirvana, ‘’Requiem’’ puts a premium on the valuable drug time.
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N-LOADING FROM UBCONSCIOUS.”
REQUIEM FOR A DREAM
After the young director’s phenomenal debut with the barely budgeted ‘’Pi,’’ which was like watching a middleweight boxer win a fight purely on reflexes, he comes back with a picture that shows maturation. He has skills, and what works both for him and against him is that he is in as much of a jittery delirium as his characters. It’s obvious to say that moviemaking is his high, but it’s also undeniable. He doesn’t put a gloss on his characters’ problems. Their drug gobbling is highlighted, accompanied by slurps, gulps and other loud noises that infantilize their appetites. For them, it’s all sensation-seeking, and to a lesser extent it’s the case with the movie as well.
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REQUIEM FOR A DREAM
FILM FACT
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FILMS //
REQUIEM FOR A DREAM
Most movies contain 600 to 700 cuts. Requiem for a Dream contains over 2,000.
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FILMS // THE FOUNTAIN
THE FOUNTAIN
2006
The Fountain
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FILMS // THE FOUNTAIN
Three stories - one each from the past, present, and future - about men in pursuit of eternity with their love. A conquistador in Mayan country searches for the tree of life to free his captive queen; a medical researcher, working with various trees, looks for a cure that will save his dying wife; a space traveler, traveling with an aged tree encapsulated within a bubble, moves toward a dying star that’s wrapped in a nebula; he seeks eternity with his love. The stories intersect and parallel; the quests fail and succeed.
STARRING:
Hugh Jackman Rachel Weisz RUNTIME : 1 hour 37 minutes BUDGET
$35,000,000 AWARDS
6 wins 17 nominations
CAST: Ellen Burstyn Mark Margolis Stephen McHattie Fernando Hernandez Cliff Curtis Sean Patrick Thomas Donna Murphy Ethan Suplee Richard McMillan Lorne Brass Abraham Aronofsky Renee Asofsky Anish Majumdar Janique Kearns Boyd Banks Alexander Bisping Kevin Kelsall Patrick Vandalel
“FOR EVERY SHADOW,
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IS THREATENED BY MORNING LIGHT.”
FILMS // THE FOUNTAIN
NO MATTER HOW DEEP,
FILMS // THE FOUNTAIN
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FILM FACT Instead of using CGI, Darren Aronofsky chose to do the special effects for the film by using micro-photography of chemical reactions on tiny petri dishes. He has said that CGI would take away from the timelessness of the film and that he wants the film to stand the test of time.
FACT
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In early 2002, writer/director Darren Aronofsky cast Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in the central leads of Tom and Izzi with a budget of $75 million. During pre-production, Pitt and Aronofsky were having major creative differences, so Pitt left to film Troy (2004) instead and the film was shut down, and the sets and props built in Australia were auctioned off. In early 2004, with a smaller budget of $35 million, Aronofsky cast Hugh Jackman as Tom and Rachel Weisz replaced Blanchett as Izzi. Warner Bros., who had invested 20 million dollars in the canceled version, agreed to finance the new, cheaper version.
RogerEbert.com, November 21, 2006
Review
By Jim Emerson
If Darren Aronofsky’s “The Fountain” is an ambitious folly, that’s hardly inappropriate because the movie itself is about one of humankind’s most grandiose follies, the quest for eternal life. Aronofsky, director of the relentless “Pi” and “Requiem for a Dream,” dares to hurl himself, and his movie, way “out there” -- in three narrative directions at once. But unlike some other films that have divided critics this year, “The Fountain” springs from a passion to take risks, rather than from hedged bets (M. Night Shyamalan’s tepid, jokey, incoherent “Lady in the Water”) or stillborn multi-story conceits (the calculating “Babel”), where the various narrative threads are only tenuously connected to a core theme. OK, if this sounds more like a defense of “The Fountain” than a straightforward review, so be it. The movie has already been damned as silly and praised as audacious at film festivals from Venice to Toronto -- and both those assessments are valid, in part because of the movie’s biggest aesthetic gamble: its earnestness.
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FILMS // THE FOUNTAIN
Well, death is a serious matter. And “The Fountain” isn’t so much about the quest for eternal life as it is about the will to stave off death. It’s one thing to fantasize about living forever; it’s quite another to fight the cessation of earthly existence in the next moment, or next week, or next year. “The Fountain” is a science-fiction historical adventure-fantasy about a man’s (or Man’s) struggle to face the incontrovertible fact of death. It begins with Tomas (Hugh Jackman, a boy a long way from Oz) as a 16th century Spanish conquistador exploring the land of the Mayans in search of the biblical Tree of Life at the behest of Queen Isabella (Rachel Weisz). The movie slips into the 21st century, where Tommy (Jackman) is a surgeon and research scientist desperate to discover a cure for the tumor in the brain of his wife, Izzi (Weisz), who is writing a fairy-tale book called The Fountain that includes the 16th century story. Surging forward another few millennia into the 26th century, the film finds Tom (Jackman) as a kind of zen astronaut hurtling through space in a big bubble with a dying tree and the ghost of 21st century Iz (Weisz) on their way into a mysterious nebula. The three stories flow into and out of one another.
“THE F MUCH FOR E
FOUNTAIN” ISN’T SO H ABOUT THE QUEST ETERNAL LIFE AS IT Does that sound a little silly? Sure, and it’s even sillier in synopsis. The image of the tree -- the oldest living things on Earth, with their roots gripping the ancient soil and their branches reaching for the heavens -- is at the core of the movie, and the source of some of Aronofsky’s most spine-tingling effects, from the tiny hairs on its trunk to its milky, essence-of-life sap. Sap of a different kind inevitably seeps into the story, particularly the contemporary episodes, but Jackman and Weisz commit to their roles as deeply as Aronofsky does to his concept. Their gravity helps keep this Tilt-a-Whirl of a movie from completely flying apart.
IS ABOUT THE WILL TO STAVE OFF DEATH.”
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They’re all bold attempts -- some more successful than others -- by passionate young filmmakers in their late 20s to mid-30s to sum up their own sensibilities and experience, to cram just about everything they know and feel, about life and about movies, on the screen at once. That doesn’t make for smooth, comfortable viewing, but I’d much rather watch somebody shoot for the moon when the stakes are sky-high than sit back while they play it safe.
FILMS // THE FOUNTAIN
Yes, “The Fountain” overreaches on every level, and that’s exactly what I like about it. Big subject, big canvas, big ambitions. A young director’s ungainly and overwrought folly? By all means, in the sense that Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia” or Gus Van Sant’s “My Own Private Idaho” or Martin Scorsese’s “New York, New York” or Bernardo Bertolucci’s “1900” are follies.
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FILMS // THE FOUNTAIN
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FILMS // THE WRESTLER
THE WRESTLER
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2008
The Wrestler RUNTIME : 1 hour 50 minutes BUDGET
$6,000,000 AWARDS
41 wins 37 nominations
This is a drama about an aging professional wrestler, decades past his prime, who now barely gets by working small wrestling shows in VFW halls and as a part-time grocery store employee. As he faces health problems that may end his wrestling career for good he attempts to come to terms with his life outside the ring. Working full time at the grocery store and trying to reconcile with the daughter he abandoned in childhood and forming a closer bond with a stripper he has romantic feelings for. He struggles with his new life and an offer of a high-profile rematch with his 1980s arch-nemesis, The Ayatollah, which may be his ticket back to stardom.
CAST: Evan Rachel Wood Mark Margolis Todd Barry Wass Stevens Judah Friedlander Ernest Miller Dylan Keith Summers Tommy Farra Mike Miller Marcia Jean Kurtz John D’Leo Ajay Naidu Gregg Bello Scott Siegel Maurizio Ferrigno Donnetta Lavinia Grays Andrea Langi Armin Amiri
FILMS // THE WRESTLER
Mickey Rourke Marisa Tome
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STARRING:
FILMS // THE WRESTLER
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FILM FACT Marisa Tomei’s first day of shooting was the scene where she gives Mickey Rourke a lap dance.
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FILMS // THE WRESTLER
The Guardian, Thursday, January 15 2009
Review
By Peter Bradshaw
“HE IS AS ST LAMB
If it was a comedy, this would star Will Ferrell in a beefcake fat-suit with other wiseacre comics playing his various wrestler comrade-opponents, looking on blankly while Will attempts his delusional comeback in the ring. But it’s deadly serious, and Mickey Rourke - famously once a contender in the marginally more credible world of boxing - is sublimely cast. Something about this gutsy, heartfelt drama from screenwriter Robert D Siegel and director Darren Aronofsky alchemies Rourke’s conceit into a terrifically engaging, likable and even vulnerable performance. Happily for them both, Aronofsky appears to have caught the 52-year-old Rourke at just the right time with just the right role. This film won the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice film festival, and it’s an exhilarating victory for the director after his dreadfully limp and overblown fantasy The Fountain. And for all his grotesque appearance in the film, Rourke plays something he has not been much known for in his acting career: a human being.
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FILMS // THE WRESTLER
He is Randy “Ram” Robinson, the washed-up star of the 80s professional wrestling scene, still roaring and crashing around the circuit to a diminishing crowd of nerdy male fans and dead-eyed blonde women keen to “party” after the show. He is mutton dressed as steroid-injected lamb, pecs and abs and biceps clenched with timor mortis, his hair an unshorn Samson shower of dyed blondness, fervently modeled on the heroes of the 1980s stadium rock scene. The Ram makes no secret of his detestation of 90s music in general and Kurt Cobain in particular. Rourke’s face has a ruined leonine quality, his lips perpetually pursed in something closer to shark pout than a trout pout. Les Kellett he ain’t. Randy is, poignantly, in love with a pole-dancer called Cassidy, played by Marisa Tomei. She is herself getting too old for a business whose similarities to Randy’s are made reasonably clear. But while Cassidy gets dollar bills stuck in her stocking-tops, Randy invites hopped-up guys in the crowd to smash metal fold-up chairs over his head before the action commences. As if to anticipate or pre-empt metaphorical readings of the wrestling game, Aronofsky has Cassidy occasionally behave like a 21st-century Mary Magdalene, tending to poor Randy’s post-match wounds in the lap-dancing club, and quoting to him stretches of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Who knows? Perhaps Aronofsky was also playfully hinting at Roland Barthes’s ruminations in his 1957 essay The World of Wrestling: “I have heard it said of a wrestler stretched on the ground: ‘He is dead, little Jesus there, on the cross ...’” There is, however, nothing little about Mickey Rourke. After a horrendous heart attack, Randy is ordered by his doctors to quit wrestling or die. He decides to use this enforced leisure to re-establish contact with his estranged daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood). But this is a painful, difficult business, and then
AND BICE WITH
MUTTON DRESSED TEROID-INJECTED B, PECS AND ABS Randy is offered a mouthwatering purse for a big rematch with his old enemy from the 80s glory days: the “Ayatollah”. Now that hating Iran is big again in America, this looks like box-office gold. Surely one more bout won’t hurt? Has Randy got the balls to go into the ring with the Grim Reaper himself? Deftly, sympathetically, Aronofsky immerses us in Randy’s strange world. Making ends meet with a supermarket job, he is part of what looks a weird cult that meets at the weekend. He and about a dozen other wrestlers are shown squeezing into the dressing room before a show, and hilariously, surreally, there is hardly enough room on screen for all these absurdly huge bodies. It is a wall of pumped-up and damaged flesh. They are, however, not at all cynical or mean to each other; on the contrary, they are mutually supportive and friendly. Even the “fix” for each bout is regarded with the same reverence as the established choreography of a bullfight.
The Wrestler runs on what are admittedly pretty traditional lines for a sports film, yet runs on them with exhilarating speed and attack. I was waiting for a cop-out ending, but it never arrived. Rather magnificently, Aronofsky finally gives schmaltz the forearm smash and puts the smackdown on sentimentality with a heavy-duty chokeslam - as it were. After an uncertain period, this director has rediscovered his grip.
PS CLENCHED H TIMOR MORTIS...”
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Despite the horror and the physical punishment that Randy absorbs so uncomplainingly, the biggest and scariest challenge comes when the supermarket manager at his day job makes him man the deli counter and deal with the grouchy customers wearing a wussy hairnet. Coming out to face his public is worse than any wrestling match, and yet Randy’s invincible showbiz chutzpah wins through. Metaphor isn’t far away as Randy is soon charming and backtalking all the old ladies and blue-collar guys who want his smoked ham and baloney.
FILMS // THE WRESTLER
But wrestling is horrible. Randy smuggles a razor blade into the ring, and though it isn’t what you might think, the resulting episode speaks volumes about the self-harm, self-doubt, self-hate and tatty addiction that underpins the whole business. The bout that finally brings on Randy’s cardiac arrest is a truly revolting X-treme match, featuring blunt implements, barbed wire and staple guns fired into pudgy chests - the staples have to be removed after the show by an on-site medic. Randy and his fellow grapplers are basically demi-snuff porn actors.
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Randy “The Ram” Robinson shares characteristics of the two biggest wrestling icons of the 1980s: Hulk Hogan and Randy ‘Macho Man’ Savage (Randy Savage). The look of The Ram, with the long blonde hair and tremendous physique as well as the steroid use, is obviously Hoganesque, while the “Ram Jam” (a flying double forearm smash off the top rope) is inspired by Savage’s “Flying Elbow” even down to the pose before executing it. The Ram’s feud with “The Ayatollah” also mimics the feud that Hogan had with Khosrow Vaziri (aka “The Iron Sheik”) that made him a venerable superstar and the face of 1980s and early 1990s wrestling.
FILMS // THE WRESTLER
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FILM FACT
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“...I AIN’T AS PRETTY AS I USED TO BE
BUT GOD DAMN IT
FILMS // THE WRESTLER
AND I’M THE RAM.”
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I’M STILL STANDING HERE
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FILMS // BLACK SWAN
BLACK SWAN
2010
Black Swan Nina is a ballerina in a prominent New York City ballet company whose life is completely consumed with dance. She lives with her obsessive former ballerina mother Erica who exerts suffocating control over her. When artistic director Thomas Leroy decides to replace prima ballerina Beth MacIntyre for the opening production of their new season, Swan Lake, Nina is his first choice. But a new dancer, Lily, impresses Leroy as well.
STARRING:
Natalie Portman Vincent Cassel RUNTIME : 1 hour 49 minutes BUDGET
$13,000,000 AWARDS
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FILMS // BLACK SWAN
Nina fits the White Swan role perfectly but Lily is the personification of the Black Swan. As the two young dancers expand their rivalry into a twisted friendship, Nina begins to get more in touch with her dark side - a recklessness that threatens to destroy her.
58 wins 125 nominations
CAST: Vincent Cassel Barbara Hershey Winona Ryder Benjamin Millepied Ksenia Solo Kristina Anapau Janet Montgomery Sebastian Stan Toby Hemingway Margolis, Tina Sloan Abraham Aronofsky Charlotte Aronofsky Marcia Jean Kurtz Sergio Torrado, Mark Shaun O’Hagan Chris Gartin, Deborah Offner
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FILMS // BLACK SWAN
“...VISUALLY, WE ARE REALLY PUSHING WHAT IT MEANS TO LOOK IN A MIRROR.”
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FILMS // BLACK SWAN
FILMS // BLACK SWAN
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FILM FACT Darren would subtly try to pit her and Mila Kunis against each other during filming in an attempt to increase the on-screen tension between their characters. This included keeping the two actresses separated during filming and sending each of them intimidating text messages about each others performance that day.
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FILMS // BLACK SWAN
The Guardian, Thursday 20 January 2011
Review
by Peter Bradshaw
Fantastically deranged at all times, Darren Aronofsky’s ballet psycho-melodrama is a glittering, crackling, outrageously pickable scab of a film. At its center is young ballerina Nina Sayers, played by Natalie Portman. She is beautiful, vulnerable, sexually naive and susceptible to mental illness. To play the role of a lifetime, Nina must delve deep into her own dark side. As her hallucinations and anxiety attacks escalate in tandem with her progress in rehearsal, artistic breakthrough fuses with nervous breakdown. This is a movie about fear of penetration, fear of your body, fear of being supplanted in the affections of a powerful man, love of perfection, love of dance, and perhaps most importantly of all, passionate and overwhelming hatred of your mother.
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FILMS // BLACK SWAN
Portman has decisively moved out of the ugly duckling phase of her career with this tremendous performance as Nina, a hardworking corps member of a New York City ballet company who has low-level dieting and self-harm issues more or less under control. She lives with her difficult mother – an impressive and satisfyingly nasty performance from Barbara Hershey – who abandoned her own stagnant ballet career on being impregnated by some heartless, mercurial mogul or other, and channeled her rage and disappointment into coaching the resulting daughter, whom she has attempted to infantilise by filling her pink bedroom with gonks and installing a deplorable musical box that tinkles the theme from Swan Lake. We join the story as the company is about to dispense with its bitter has-been star (and wrecked gamine) Beth Macintyre: the casting of Winona Ryder is sadistically judged. The company’s exacting director Thomas Leroy, played by Vincent Cassel, is looking for someone new to play the lead in Swan Lake. His hooded eye settles on tremulous Nina. But he warns her that the biggest challenge will be playing the character’s evil twin, the “Black Swan”. She has to find the darker, more sensual side of herself. Thomas invites Nina back to his apartment for intimate drinks. To develop the role, he instructs her to go home and touch herself. Touching Thomas also appears to be on the agenda. This is not based on anything by Noel Streatfeild. In addition, Thomas encourages Nina to admire the company’s new ballerina: funky free spirit and Olympic-standard minx Lily (Mila Kunis), who helps unlock Nina’s life-force with seductive overtures of friendship, and more. But does Lily simply want to steal Nina’s role? As Nina’s anxiety intensifies, she is worried about a weird feathery skinrash and becomes convinced that her reflection in the mirror continues to stare at her after she has turned away. As a study of female breakdown, Black Swan is the best thing since Polanski’s Repulsion. But, in fact, with its creepy Manhattan interiors, its looming, closeup camera movements, and its encircling conspiracy of evil, it looks more like Rosemary’s Baby, particularly in cinematographer Matthew Libatique’s brilliant continuous shot in which Nina makes out with a random guy in a club, then wakes up to what she’s doing and, freaked out, blunders through murky winding corridors and out into the night air – there seems no difference between inside and outside. Everywhere is claustrophobic.
BLACK BEST T POLAN
“AS A STUDY OF FEMALE BREAKDOWN, Of course, any ballet movie has to be compared with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, and the figure of Thomas is obviously inspired by Anton Walbrook’s legendary martinet – although Thomas is rather less high minded – and Nina’s POV pirouette-whirl in rehearsal is also taken from Powell and Pressburger. But again, their influence might be more from the convent drama Black Narcissus, and the final confrontation of Kathleen Byron and Deborah Kerr. There are also hints of John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London.
K SWAN IS THE THING SINCE NSKI’S REPULSION.”
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Black Swan is over the top, and some of its effects are overdone, but it is richly, sensually enjoyable and there is such fascination in seeing Portman surrender to the madness and watch her face transmute into a horror-mask like a nightmare version of Maria Callas. It is exciting, quite mad and often really scary.
FILMS // BLACK SWAN
This happens to be the second film recently that has used the Swan Lake theme – Xavier Beauvois’s Of Gods and Men featured it counter intuitively, at the crisis of an ascetic and spiritual tale of French monks. Its use in Black Swan is self-explanatory – it is more obviously grandiloquent and excessive and appropriate to the fireworks going off in Nina’s head. (In both cases, the Swan Lake theme is technically diegetic, in that the music is physically present in the story, being played respectively on the monks’ old tape machine and in the orchestra pit.) But my goodness, Aronofsky likes to play that Swan Lake theme loud. He’s probably right to do so. Tchaikovsky’s rich, gloriously direct music needs to be punched over, and punched over it is. Motörhead could not have played the Swan Lake theme any louder than this. I left the cinema with blood trickling from my ears.
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FILMS // BLACK SWAN
Mila Kunis was brought into the project after co-star Natalie Portman suggested her to director Darren Aronofsky. Kunis had a video chat with Aronofsky via Skype and got the role without officially auditioning.
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FILM FACT
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SCHEDULE
Events LOCATION 1 IFC Center 323 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10014
LOCATION 2 Cranford Theatre 25 North Avenue Cranford, NJ 07016
LOCATION 1 reRun Gastropub Theater
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SCHEDULE
147 Front Street Brooklyn, NY 11201
Join us for opening night! Meet and mingle while enjoying top shelf drinks and hors d’oeuvres. 21 and over only.
PI // 8PM IFC Center Max is a genius mathematician who’s built a supercomputer at home that provides something that serves as a key for understanding all existence. Representatives both from a Hasidic, cabalistic sect and a high-powered Wall Street firm hear of the secret and attempt to seduce him into giving up the information by any means necessary. Starring: Sean Gullette, Mark Margolis Runtime: 1 hour 25 minutes
Friday, 2/8/2019 REQUIEM FOR A DREAM // 12 PM Cranford Theatre This gritty emotionally charged film set amidst the abandoned beaches and faded glory of Coney Island, Brooklyn is based upon the novel by celebrated author Hubert Selby Jr. The story intricately links the lives of a lonely widowed mother, her son, his beautiful girlfriend and his best friend, each pursuing their vision of happiness. Even as everything begins to fall apart, they refuse to let go, plummeting with their dreams into a nightmarish gut-wrenching free-fall. Starring: Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto Runtime: 1 hour 42 minutes
THE FOUNTAIN // 5PM Cranford Theatre Spanning three parallel stories over a millennium, ‘The Fountain’ is a story of love, death, spirituality, and the fragility of our existence in this world. Starring: Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz Runtime: 1 hour 37 minutes
Darren will be in the hot seat answering all your questions. Learn insider information about his process and behind the scenes stories from the set.
ON LOCATION: SITE TOUR // 11AM Meet at the IFC Center Join us for a guided tour of filming locations from all of the movies in the festival. Special guest crew members will be with us to help you relive the shoot and provide insider information.
Saturday, 2/9/2019 THE WRESTLER // 4PM reRun Gastropub Theater A powerful portrait of a battered dreamer, ex-professional wrestler Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke), who despite himself and the odds stacked against him, lives to be a hero once again in the only place he considers home—inside the ring. Starring: Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei Runtime: 1 hour 50 minutes
BLACK SWAN // 7PM ReRun Gastropub Theater In this psychological thriller set in the world of New York City Ballet, BLACK SWAN takes a gripping journey through the psyche of a ballerina whose role as the duplicitous swan queen turns out to be a part for which she becomes frighteningly perfect. Starring: Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel Runtime: 1 hour 49 minutes
FRACTURE PARTY // 10PM IFC Center The movies may be over but the party is just getting started. Help us wish Darren a happy 40th birthday the best way we know how, by celebrating his art. Join us for drinks, discussion and dancing.
SCHEDULE
AFFLICTED COCKTAILS // 5PM IFC Center
DIRECTOR Q & A // 7PM Cranford Theatre
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Photos courtesy of Protozoa Pictures. Š 2019 Protozoa Pictures, All Rights Reserved.