MAY JUNE 2012 presents
Alchemist of the Surreal
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY + OPEN HOUSE Alexei Gherman • Jem Cohen • Georges Méliès Jay Reatard • DiverCiné • Kibatsu Cinema • The Tree of Life Hard Core Logo • Highway 61 • Toy Story 1 1 3 1 H OW E S T R E E T
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C I N E M AT H E QU E . B C . CA
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ADMI NISTRATIVE O F F I C E 200 – 1131 Howe Street Vancouver, BC V6Z 2L7 tel 604.688.8202 • fax 604.688.8204 Email: info@cinematheque.bc.ca Web: www.cinematheque.bc.ca STAF F Executive and Artistic Director: Jim Sinclair Managing Director: Amber Orchard Communications Manager: steve chow Education Manager: Liz Schulze Operations & Marketing Coordinator: Kate Wilkins Media Production Coordinator: Mitch Stookey Development Intern: Jessica Li Facility Manager: Sue Cormier Assistant Theatre Managers: Sharon Cohen, Lora Haber, Ann-Mary Mullen, Dawna Brown, Nadiya Chettiar, Jessica Parsons, David Emery, Andrea Oberdieck Head Projectionist: Al Reid Relief Projectionists: Peter Boyle, Stuart Carl, Ron Lacheur, Cassidy Penner BOARD OF DIRECTO RS President: Mark Ostry Vice-President: Eleni Kassaris Secretary: Luca Citton Treasurer: Wynford Owen Members: Moshe Mastai, Mark Tomek, Kathy Wang V O LUNTEERS Theatre Volunteers: Mike Archibald, Michael Begg, Mark Beley, Eileen Brosnan, Jeremy Buhler, Nishant Chadha, Emily Chia, Andrew Clark, Jessica Clarke, Adam Cook, Rob Danielson, Ben Daswani, Steve Devereux, Ray Don, Ryan Ermacora, Chantelle Gates, Paul Griffiths, Joe Haigh, Dora Ho, Brad Iles, Krisandra Janowicz, Michiko Higgins-Kato, Beng Khoo, Michael Kling, Ray Lai, Shannon Lentz, Liam McClure, Brittany McDuff, Vit Mlcoch, Kelley Montgomery, Danuta Musial, Kailash Ragupathy, Duncan Ranslem, Chahram Riazi, Marc Ronnie, Hisayo Saito, Alexis Sogl, Derek Thomas, Amanda Thomson, Stephen Tweedale, Diane Wood, Natalie Zeoli Distribution: Martin Lohmann, Harry Wong, John William, Michael Edillor, Chantal Cooke, Hazel Ackner, Lynn Martin, Michael Demers, Scott Banakaiff Office: Jo Bergstrand, Betty-Lou Phillips, Zac Cocciolo, Moya Hilliam Education: Michael Edillor, Wesley Houston, Chloe McKnight, Nick McLean, Pat McSherry, Jennifer Somerstein, Michael van den Bos, Matthew Vatta, Donna Welstein And a special thanks to all our spares! PACIF I C C IN É MATH È Q U E PR O G RAM G U I D E Art Direction + Graphic Design: steve chow Program Notes: Jim Sinclair Advertising & Additional Ad Design: Sonya William Proofreading: Amber Orchard Published six times a year with a bi-monthly circulation of 15,000. Printed by Van Press Printers. ADVE RT ISIN G To advertise in this Program Guide or in our theatre before screenings, please call 604.688.8202. Pacific Cinémathèque is a not-for-profit arts society. We rely on financial support from public and private sources. Donations are gratefully accepted — a tax receipt will be issued for all donations of $30 or more. To make a donation or for more information, please call our administration office at 604.688.8202. Pacific Cinémathèque gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the following agencies:
EXPERIENCE ESSENTIAL CINEMA EMA
CONTENTS Pa c i f i c C i né m athèque Pr og r am Guid e, v3 5. 5
M A Y + JUNE 2 012
10 YEARS OF FRAMES OF MIND p.4 Spider • Young Freud in Gaza
DIM CINEMA p.5
Jem Cohen: New York • Movable Facture: Timee Frames
BACK TO THE HIGHWAY: A CELEBRATION OF HIGHWAY 61 p.6 The Four Winning Short Films • Highway 61
HARD CORE LOGO p.7 BETTER THAN SOMETHING: JAY REATARD TARD p.7 CINEMA SUNDAY p.8
Toy Story • A Town Called Panic
OPEN HOUSE p.9
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY p.9 THE TREE OF LIFE p.9 ALCHEMIST OF THE SURREAL: JAN ŠVANKMAJER, ANIMATOR OF PRAGUE p.10 NOW PLAYING CALENDAR p.12-13 DIVERCINÉ 2012 p.14 THE EXTRAORDINARY GEORGES MÉLIÈS IÈS p.16 A Trip to the Moon + The Extraordinary Voyage
ALEXEI THE GREAT: THE FILMS OF ALEXEI GHERMAN p.17 KIBATSU CINEMA p.20
10 YEARS OF
presented by PACIFIC CINÉMATHÈQUE and the INSTITUTE OF MENTAL HEALTH, UBC DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHIATRY
Pacific Cinémathèque is pleased to join with the Institute of
Series directed by DR. HARRY KARLINSKY,
Mental Health, UBC Department of Psychiatry in presenting
Director of Public Education, Department of Psychiatry,
“Frames of Mind,” a monthly event utilizing film and video
University of British Columbia.
to promote professional and community education on issues pertaining to mental health and illness. Screenings,
Programmed by CAROLINE COUTTS, film curator,
accompanied by presentations and panel discussions,
filmmaker, and programmer of “Frames of Mind”
are held on the third Wednesday of each month.
since its inception in September 2002.
FRAMESOFMIND.CA
Frames of Mind began its 10th year in September. We’re celebrating with a year-long retrospective of some of the most memorable films screened in the series since its inception in 2002. This program’s selections are Spider, first presented at Frames in August 2005, and Young Freud in Gaza, first presented in October 2009.
Spider Canada/Great Britain 2002. Director David Cronenberg Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Miranda Richardson, Gabriel Byrne, Lynn Redgrave, John Neville
David Cronenberg’s magnificent, bleak Spider stars Ralph Fiennes in a tour-de-force performance as Dennis Clegg, nicknamed “Spider” during childhood because of a fascination with arachnids. After thirty years in a facility for the mentally ill, he is released to an East End London halfway house, where he receives little care or attention from the landlady (Lynn Redgrave). Unsupervised and off his medication, he starts revisiting his childhood haunts, and reliving his lonely working-class boyhood as the only son of a hard-drinking plumber (Gabriel Byrne) and his subdued wife (Miranda Richardson). Disturbing memories of his father’s attempts to replace his mother in the household with a blousy, blonde seductress (also played by Richardson) confuse Spider and threaten his (perhaps delusion) grasp on the past, and he spirals into fresh madness. Adapted by Patrick McGrath from his own 1990 novel, Spider “is the film that Shine and A Beautiful Mind could not be, a story about schizophrenia that doesn’t neatly resolve its complex subject matter” (Darrin Keene, Film Threat). “More poetic than clinical in its approach to schizophrenia, suffused with existential dread, this evocation of psychological torment is both sensationally grim and exquisitely realized” (J. Hoberman, Village Voice). Colour, 35mm, 98 mins.
Post-screening discussion with Dr. William MacEwan, Clinical Professor and Director, Schizophrenia Program, Department of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia. Moderated by Dr. Harry Karlinsky, Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia. WEDNESDAY, MAY 16 – 7:30 PM
Young Freud in Gaza (Unge Freud i Gaza)
Sweden 2008. Directors: PeÅ Holmquist, Suzanne Khardalian
“Young Freud in Gaza profiles Ayed, a young psychotherapist working the Palestinian Authority’s Clinic for Mental Health. He provides therapy to variety of patients — male and female, adults and children — for depression, stress, anxiety attacks, and suicidal tendencies. Filmed from 2006 to 2008, against a backdrop of armed clashes between Hamas and Fatah factions, Israeli missile attacks, and the constant overhead presence of a surveillance dirigible, the documentary shows Ayed training young wives and mothers in deep-breathing exercises to calm anxiety, counselling maimed Hamas and Fatah militants in meditation techniques, and leading children in group therapy sessions in which they discuss their reaction to the death of siblings and draw pictures to cope with their emotions. The film also captures Ayed at home, relating to his parents and other family members and friends, in the process revealing that this young mental-health doctor is struggling with personal issues of his own, including serious doubts about his ability to help his patients. As Ayed acknowledges, ‘Gaza needs a million psychologists’” (adapted from Icarus Films). “Arresting ... a fair-minded, intimately probing documentary ... There’s no question that the very definition of psychotherapy means something different under occupation” (Ella Taylor, Village Voice). Colour, Digibeta video, in English and Arabic with English subtitles. 58 mins. 4
Post-screening discussion with Dr. Rene Weideman, a registered psychologist with interests in psychotherapy training and individual and group psychotherapy. Dr. Weideman is the Director of the Clinical Psychology Centre in the Department of Psychology at Simon Fraser University and the Associate Director (Faculty Affairs) of the Psychotherapy Training Program in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia. He also has a part-time private practice. Moderated by Dr. Harry Karlinsky, Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 20 – 7:30 PM
A MONTHLY EVENING OF MOVING-IMAGE ART AND CINEMATIC EXPERIMENTS DIM presents Canadian and international artists and their moving-image practices in dialogue with cinema. DIM is curated by Amy Lynn Kazymerchyk, a Vancouver filmmaker, writer, and curator. Amy is the Coordinator of Events + Exhibitions at VIVO Media Arts Centre and Curator of the Signal + Noise Media Arts Festival.
Just Hold Still | USA 1998. 16mm, 32 mins. Drink Deep | USA 1991. 16mm, 10 mins. Black Hole Radio | USA 1992. 16mm, 8 mins. Lost Book Found | USA 1996. 16mm, 37 mins. Spirit | USA 2006. 16mm, 8 mins. Long for the City | USA 2008. 16mm, 10 mins. Total running time: approx. 105 mins. MONDAY, MAY 28 – 7:30 PM
LUC SANTE, LOW LIFE AND EVIDENCE
CURATED BY ALLISON COLLINS “Narrative represents real or imaginary events in time. As with a landscape painting, a narrative film seems to offer an experience that stands in for — pretends to be — creates an illusion of — something taking place before us. In order for it to work, we must enter into the illusion, suppress our awareness of presence and treat illusion as a present reality.” - MALCOLM LA GRICE Can we define time-structures for cinema and particularly expanded cinema that go beyond narrative? Or if not beyond it: around, underneath, across? The works in “Movable Facture: Time Frames” are drawn from an earlier moment in film’s history, when a preoccupation with structure was attended to through a variety of formal experiments and strategies that skirt or avoid narrative immersion. The selection is drawn from classic structural films such as Hollis Frampton’s Nostalgia, and little-seen local gems found in Pacific Cinémathèque’s film collection. WWW.DIMCINEMA.CA
JAMES BROUGHTON
“Its beauty is quite ineffable. It’s the sort of visual experience that transforms everything seen by the viewer for several hours afterward ... What it actually does is capture the subconscious of the city itself, the dream state of the whole past existing in simultaneous disarray.”
“Movie images are dim reflections of the beauty and ferocity in mankind.”
Following our DIM presentation of his feature-length Benjamin Smoke in March, “New York,” highlights Jem Cohen’s 20-year practice of picturing New York City. Cohen begins his portraits as a witness and collector by compiling film reels and audio recordings of his friends, neighbours, and the city they share. Cohen focuses his camera on the liminal spaces of the city and the people who live and work on the margins. Black Hole Radio features recordings from an anonymous telephone confession hotline. Long for the City is a reminiscence of New York through the eyes and words of Patti Smith. Lost Book Found follows a found notebook filled with listings of places, objects, and incidents. Inspired by the writings of Walter Benjamin, Cohen uses these listings to decode the city: “a city of unconsidered geographies and layered artifacts — the relics of low-level capitalism and the debris of countless forgotten narratives” (Video Data Bank). His slowpaced endurance process developed in tandem with his interest in how people live and move through life. In speaking of his process Cohen remarks, “I became invisible, and then I began to see things that had once been invisible to me.”
These experimental works are present as film, despite cinema’s potential to bring us toward something else. Eschewing story, they are more closely related through formal features that attempt to draw a viewer toward an unauthorized experience. While we might invest a psychological experience in a representation, we may also spend time with cinema’s problems. Flat fields of movement and sound can offer coherence, but it is not a coherence that belongs with the spectator. The Flicker | Tony Conrad/USA 1966. 16mm, 30 mins. Straight and Narrow | Beverly Conrad/USA 1970. 16mm, 10 mins. Cinetude 2 | Keith Rodan/Canada 1969. 16mm, 5 mins. Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper | David Rimmer/Canada 1970. 16mm, 8 mins, T.O.U.C.H.I.N.G. | Paul Sharits/USA 1969. 16mm, 12 mins. “Hapax Legomena I” (nostalgia) | Hollis Frampton USA 1971. 16mm, 39 mins. Total running time: approx. 104 mins. “Time Frames” accompanies the exhibition “Movable Facture,” featuring the work of Amy Granat and Drew Heitzler, Isabelle Pauwels, Benjamin Tiven, and Jennifer West, at VIVO Media Arts Centre, June 1-23, 2012. “Movable Facture” and “Time Frames” are supported by the BC Arts Council. MONDAY, JUNE 18 – 7:30 PM 5
BACK DOWN THE HIGHWAY: A CELEBRATION OF
HIGHWAY
In recognition of the 20th anniversary of the release of Bruce McDonald’s Highway 61, Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society and Pacific Cinémathèque are proud to present an evening honouring this classic indie Canadian film with a unique double bill. We’ll start the evening at 7:00 pm with a collection of short films created as part of “Back Down the Highway,” a Cineworks-sponsored short film competition inspired by McDonald’s seminal feature. Applicants were challenged to come up with a ten-minute script that employs a section of dialogue drawn from Highway 61, but to use those words to create an entirely new and original piece. Five films were then produced from these scripts, with each team given two weeks to complete the entire creative process from the first shot to the final edit. Presented next, at 8:30 pm, will be McDonald’s quirky rock ’n’ roll road movie, screening from a rare 35mm print. We’re very excited about this opportunity to showcase the work of upand-coming filmmakers while also celebrating the work of a Canadian cinematic legend, and look forward to sharing the experience with you. A reception (with cash bar) will follow the screenings. We hope you’ll join us for a drink and a chance to meet some of the evening’s filmmakers.
TICKETS FOR THE EVENING (one or both screenings)
$10.50 regular / $9 seniors & students Membership in the Pacific Cinémathèque or Cineworks will be accepted for this event.
BACK DOWN THE HIGHWAY: THE FOUR WINNING SHORT FILMS THURSDAY, MAY 31 – 7:00 PM
HIGHWAY 61
Canada 1992. Director: Bruce McDonald Cast: Valerie Buhagiar, Don McKellar, Earl Pastko, Peter Breck, Art Bergmann
After mainlining a jolt of rock ‘n’ roll energy into Canadian cinema with his 1989 debut feature Roadkill, maverick Bruce McDonald (whose Hard Core Logo also screens at Pacific Cinémathèque this week) upped the ante (and the road-movie antics) with Highway 61, which earned prizes for best director at San Sebastian and most popular Canadian film at VIFF. ”Set along the legendary road that leads from Thunder Bay in northern Ontario to New Orleans (passing through St. Louis, Memphis and many points in between), Highway 61 is a finely tuned, high-octane road movie. Don McKellar [who acted in and wrote Roadkill] stars as a barber and frustrated trumpet player who for years has been planning to flee his small town and journey to New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz. When some kid happens to die in his backyard, he gets mixed up with a hard-ass rock ‘n’ roll roadie (Valerie Buhagiar), and before he knows it, he’s speeding down the blacktop with a pine coffin strapped to the roof of his Galaxie 500 ... Working, once again, with both a hilarious script and subtle performance by McKellar, McDonald gives Highway 61 the same exuberant energy as Roadkill, but shapes it into a slicker, totally entertaining movie” (Toronto I.F.F.). Colour, 35mm. 102 mins. THURSDAY, MAY 31 – 8:30 PM
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“I’M NOT GOING TO BE ABLE TO MAKE RECORDS WHEN I’M DEAD. I’m not dead right now, so I want to make records. It’s that simple, really.” JAY REATARD, 1980-2010
NEW 35mm PRINT!
VANCOUVER PREMIERE!
USA 2011. Directors: Alex Hammond, Ian Markiewicz With: Jay Reatard, King Louie Bankston, Scott Bomar, With Chad Booth, Alix Brown Canada 1996. Director: Bruce McDonald Cast: Hugh Dillon, Callum Keith Rennie, Bernie Coulson, John Pyper-Ferguson, Julian Richings
Famously championed by Quentin Tarantino, and now both cult favourite and Canadian classic, Bruce McDonald’s fabulous faux documentary, adapted by screenwriter Noel S. Baker from the experimental novel by Vancouver writer Michael Turner, chronicles the tumultuous reunion tour of once-legendary Vancouver punk band Hard Core Logo. Fronted by charismatic, volatile Joe Dick (Hugh Dillon, then singer for The Headstones, now an actor on TV’s Flashpoint), the re-formed band sets off a decade after its initial demise for an ill-conceived whirlwind tour of Western Canada. With documentary crew in tow, the band lurches from dingy club to dingy club, playing raucous shows to largely apathetic audiences, and reviving the old animosities that broke them up in the first place. Callum Keith Rennie co-stars as reluctant guitarist Billy Tallent, ready to ditch the doomed enterprise for a real chance at pop stardom with a hot L.A. band. (Canadian punkers Billy Talent derived their name from the character.) Meanwhile, the schizophrenic bassist has lost his meds, and the loutish drummer is only making things worse. “One of the most formally inventive features ever made in Canada ... It mixes documentary-style sequences and quasi-surreal imagery with Super 8 footage, monologues and journal entries, and a lengthy homage to Apocalypse Now” (Toronto I.F.F.). Colour, 35mm. 94 mins. FRIDAY, JUNE 1 – 7:00 PM SATURDAY, JUNE 2 – 5:00 PM & 8:45 PM
The late garage-punk phenom Jay Reatard, a mainstay of the Memphis indie scene and a Matador Records recording artist, died in 2010, just short of this 30th birthday — and clearly on the verge of bigger things. This uncommonly intimate rock-doc reveals a fascinating, frustrating talent who was as prolific and productive as he was polarizing and self-destructive. “Like the longhair with the foghorn falsetto it’s titled after, this unfussy profile is shaggy, sophisticated, and more than a little sad. Compiled from dozens of hours of 2009 interview footage with Reatard (né Jimmy Lee Lindsey Jr.), Better Than Something captures its subject at a crossroads: pushing 30 and losing the adrenalized rage that gave his early work (and stage name) its nasty edge. Reatard is candid and cogent about his future as an artist — all the more tragic, then, that he OD’d in 2010 .... Even non-fans will appreciate what a tough act Reatard is to follow, and anybody with a shred of respect left for rock ‘n’ roll will feel loss and anger at his passing” (Mark Holcomb, Village Voice). “What elevates the film above the norm is a series of remarkably candid and eerily prescient interviews ... Clearly a smart and articulate guy, Reatard comes across as a confident, driven perfectionist who inevitably inspired both fierce loyalty and lasting enmity ... A must for fans, with generous helpings of Reatard’s music” (Eddie Cockrell, Variety). Colour, HDCAM. 89 mins. FRIDAY, JUNE 1 – 8:50 PM SATURDAY, JUNE 2 – 7:00 PM
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Presented by Pacific Cinémathèque’s Education Department, Cinema Sunday is an afternoon film program for children and their families. We invite you to join us every month to watch outstanding movies and take part in follow-up discussions, activities, and games intended to be fun and stimulate critical and creative thinking. Our goal is to introduce you to some awesome new films, treasured classics, and other favourites — movies that keep you thinking and talking long after you leave the theatre. We hope you’ll join us and make Cinema Sunday a regular addition to your family outings!
PACIFIC CINÉMATHÈQUE MEMBERSHIP IS NOT REQUIRED FOR THESE EVENTS.
Toy Story USA 1995. Director: John Lasseter Voices: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Don Rickles, Jim Varney, Wallace Shawn “To infinity… and beyond!” The enormous ambition of Toy Story is matched only by its success: Pixar’s first feature film, and the first feature ever created solely with computer-generated imagery (CGI), Toy Story proved so resoundingly popular that it inspired two sequels, two live stage adaptations, six theme park attractions, and an international devotion to Pixar’s emotionally honest, exuberantly animated work. The story takes place in a world where toys come to life when nobody’s looking, in the bedroom of a young boy named Andy. At the centre is Woody, a pull-string cowboy doll who had always been Andy’s favourite, and Buzz Lightyear, a brand new space action figure who threatens to take his place. Woody’s jealousy and fear of obsolescence are met with confusion, as Buzz is convinced he’s a man on an intergalactic mission, not a toy! Through Pizza Planet and the next-door-neighbour kid’s creepy bedroom, Woody, Buzz, and the whole toy gang (featuring such stars as Mr. Potato Head, Slinky Dog, and Hamm the Piggy Bank), discover what it means to be friends. “Children will enjoy a new take on the irresistible idea of toys coming to life. Adults will marvel at a witty script and utterly brilliant anthropomorphism” (Janet Maslin, New York Times). Colour, Blu-ray. 81 mins. SUNDAY, MAY 20 – 1:00 PM
ALL AGES WELCOME
A Town
Called Panic
(Panique au village) Belgium/France/Luxembourg 2009. Directors: Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar Voices: Stéphane Aubier, Jeanne Balibar, Bruce Ellison, Vincent Patar, Benoît Poelvoorde “‘Oh non! Mon Dieu!’ The first stop-motion animated feature selected for Cannes, A Town Called Panic — the feature version of a demented Belgian television animation sensation of the same name — brings to life a topsy-turvy world populated by cheap plastic figurines of cowboys, Indians, farmers, horses, cows, and pigs. When an attempt to surprise their pal Horse with a homemade brick barbecue for his birthday goes terribly awry, Cowboy and Indian must find a way to deal with the fifty million bricks they mistakenly ordered. Unfortunately, their effort to hide the bricks results in their house being destroyed. Trying to rebuild it, the oddball trio contends with an avalanche of bizarre obstacles, including a voyage to the centre of the Earth, a giant snowball-throwing mechanical penguin, and pointy-headed sea creatures from a parallel underwater world” (Colin Geddes, Toronto I.F.F.). “Despite a cast of 1,500 plastic toy figures, A Town Called Panic was probably made for less than it cost to produce 10 seconds of Avatar and is, in some ways, an even weirder, more ingrown, raucous fantasy” (J. Hoberman, Village Voice). Colour, 35mm, in French with English subtitles. 75 mins. SUNDAY, JUNE 17 – 1:00 PM A Town Called Panic is a visual treat that we believe all ages will delight in, but please be aware that it is presented in French with English subtitles.
ALL AGES WELCOME
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With each passing year, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick’s visionary masterpiece of 1968, seems ever and eternally more like one of cinema’s greatest works. Has any other mainstream narrative feature — save for Terrence Malick’s recent The Tree of Life — tackled the great cosmological questions and the mysteries of existence with more quantum-leap ambition, audacity, and sheer virtuosity? Both films, as it happens, employ the extraordinary talents of the renowned special effects wizard Douglas Trumbull. Together, they make for one mind-blowing Big Bang of a double bill ...
OPEN HOUSE S A T U R D A Y, J U N E 16 Calling all film lovers! Pacific Cinematheque opens its doors for a glimpse beyond the screen with its 4th Annual Open House. You will have the opportunity to tour the projection booth, library, and archive, participate in an Education Department film activity, join our donor program, and bid on film posters. Then, with a complimentary bag of the city’s best popcorn in hand, settle into your seat and experience essential cinema with a free screening of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
OPEN HOUSE: 12:00pm - 2:00pm FREE SCREENING
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY: 2:00pm Tickets to the free 2:00pm screening will be available on a first-come, first-serve basis starting at 12:00pm on Saturday, June 16th. For more information, please call 604-688-8202.
2001
EXPERIENCE ESSENTIAL COSMIC CINEMA
A SPACE ODYSSEY
One of the landmark films of the 1960s, and now often cited as one of the greatest films ever made, Stanley Kubrick’s cosmic epic offers a spectacular speculative history of humanity and technology from the dawn of civilization to the turn of our new millennium. In one of the most brilliant, breathtaking examples of associative montage to be found in cinema, Kubrick bridges millions of years of human development with a single cut: a tumbling bone, only just used by an ape-like ancestor of humanity to crush the skull of an adversary, is suddenly transformed into a spaceship soaring hundreds of miles above the Earth. The year is 1999, and the discovery of a mysterious black slab on the Moon leads, eighteen months later, to a manned mission to Jupiter — and a beyond-theinfinite rendezvous with evolutionary destiny. The film’s use of classical music is inspired; its most human character, in Kubrick’s chilly view of a future dehumanized by technology, is, ironically, a (deeply flawed) computer. Dismissed by one critic as a “shaggy God story,” described by another as “the world’s most expensive underground movie,” 2001 is a big-budget, wide-screen, quasi-experimental opus whose extended psychedelic sequences owe much to the drug culture of the era. In turn, its state-of-the-art special effects inspired the cycle of expensive sci-fi films that began in the 1970s, although Kubrick is clearly more concerned with ideas than gadgets, and few of those later films have captured 2001’s “convincing sense of the void ... the abysmal feeling of deep space — its utter quietude, its dark infinitude, and ... absurdity” (Mark Crispin Miller). Colour, 35mm. 141 minutes. FRIDAY, JUNE 15 – 6:30 PM SATURDAY, JUNE 16 – 2:00 PM FREE SCREENING! SATURDAY, JUNE 16 - 9:10 PM SUNDAY, JUNE 17 – 6:30 PM
ALL AGES WELCOME Annual $3 membership requirement in effect for those 18+ (except for Open House free screening)
Great Britain 1968. Director: Stanley Kubrick Cast: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, Douglas Rain, Leonard Rossiter, Margaret Tyzack
T H E
TREE LIFE O F
USA 2011. Director: Terrence Malick Cast: Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn, Hunter McCracken, Laramie Eppler
Love it or not-love it — and for many, that “merciful dinosaur” scene was the dividing line — Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes) was the film that cinephiles were talking (and talking and talking) about last year. The non-prolific Malick, maker of but a handful of remarkable features (including Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line), is one of cinema’s great poets; whether you found Tree of Life fascinating but deeply flawed — or, like us, were completely and utterly transported by the sheer cosmic, Kubrickian audacity of injecting the creation of the universe and the 5-billion-year history of Earth and evolution into the tale of a middle-class family dealing with grief in 1950s Texas — a new film by Malick is nothing less than a Major Cinematic Event. Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, and Sean Penn star in the film’s familial drama, rendered in the lush, lyrical, impressionistic Malick style of ravishing visuals and poetic voice-overs. Special effects wizard Douglas Trumbull, whose work distinguished Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey — perhaps the only other major feature film with comparable celestial ambition, scale, and vision — came out of retirement to help Malick capture, in stunning, nonCGI fashion, the origins of absolutely everything. All hail Terrence Malick for daring to ponder (and visualize) the hardest, vastest, most daunting questions — and for creating a film of such awesome, affirmative, haunting beauty. Colour, 35mm. 139 mins. FRIDAY, JUNE 15 – 9:10 PM SATURDAY, JUNE 16 – 6:30 PM SUNDAY, JUNE 17 – 9:10 PM
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ALCHEMIST OF THE SURREAL
ANIMATOR OF PRAGUE “Unless we again begin to tell fairy tales and ghost stories before going to sleep and recounting our dreams upon waking, nothing more is to be expected of our Western civilization.” JAN ŠVANKMAJER
The renowned director Miloš Forman has famously described the startlingly original, uniquely disturbing vision of fellow Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer as “Disney + Buñuel.” Švankmajer’s dark, macabre, cruel, witty, perverse, visceral films — including a string of mind-boggling shorts dating back to the early 1960s, and a series of bizarre and brilliant features beginning with an acclaimed adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in 1988 — are celebrated for their imaginative mix of stopmotion animation and live action and their unsettling assemblages of puppets, dolls, toys, and other (often musty and mildewed) everyday household objects. Fetishism, erotic fantasy, and obsessive ritual frequently figure prominently. Delightfully subversive and painstakingly crafted, this body of work has established Švankmajer as one of animation’s greatest living maestros, and as Prague’s most prominent purveyor of nightmarish surrealism since Kafka.
“Jan Švankmajer is a grand master not just of innovative animation techniques but of life itself.” DEBORAH YOUNG, HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
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“No other filmmaker — and that includes David Lynch — is so consistently inventive in his ability to marry pure, startling nonsense with rigorous logic, black wit with piercing psychological insights.” GEOFF ANDREW, TIME OUT
Švankmajer’s films reveal the influence of Edgar Allen Poe, Lewis Carroll, the Marquis de Sade, Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali and the Surrealists, and traditional Czech puppet theatre (Švankmajer himself also cites Eisenstein and Fellini). Švankmajer has in turn been a major influence on the notable likes of Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, the Brothers Quay, and many others. This retrospective, organized in association with the New York-based curator Irena Kovarova, with additional support provided by the Czech Center New York, includes all six of Švankmajer’s feature-length films to date as well as a select program of his award-winning shorts, and offers the first major retrospective of Švankmajer’s work to be presented in Vancouver since 1995.
ALICE
THE CONSPIRATORS OF PLEASURE
Czechoslovakia/Switzerland/Great Britain 1988. Director: Jan Švankmajer Cast: Kristýna Kohoutová
Czech Republic/Switzerland/Great Britain 1996. Director: Jan Švankmajer. Cast: Petr Meissel, Gabriela Wilhelmová, Jirˇ í Lábus, Barbora Hrzánová, Pavel Nový
(Neˇco z Alenky)
(Spiklenci slasti)
The brilliant Czech animator Jan Švankmajer’s first feature — much anticipated after a string of amazing Švankmajer shorts stretching back to the early 1960s — was this highly perverse, highly personal adult adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, hailed by many as the definitive film version of Lewis Carroll’s classic. Young Kristýna Kohoutová, in the title role, is Alice’s only live actor; she shares the screen with a sinister supporting cast of superbly animated puppets. The ominous action unfolds within Švankmajer’s delirious, disturbing dream universe, a surrealist minefield of “the marvellous, the cruel, the erotic, the nightmarish, the amoral... Drawers forever refuse to open or they vomit myriad magical objects; tears flow that can literally drown you; doors only open to reveal new mysteries beyond. There are horrible, instantaneous size changes and compulsive recurrent chases. Even Carroll’s erotic attraction to little girls is not slighted, and the famed trial scenes become an uncomfortable analogy to Stalin’s show trials” (Amos Vogel, Film Comment). “ A wonderland, indeed, imbued with a grotesque, cruel, and menacing dream-logic at once distinctively Švankmajer’s and true to the spirit of Carroll... As always, Švankmajer’s methods are hugely enjoyable in their perversity” (Geoff Andrew, Time Out). Colour, 35mm, in Czech with English subtitles. 84 mins.
The mostly live-action Conspirators of Pleasure, Jan Švankmajer’s follow-up to Faust, is a wordless take on sexual fetishism and fantasy that draws on Freud, de Sade, Buñuel, and Max Ernst. Six characters prepare for a Sunday of elaborate and onanistic sexual shenanigans involving, among other things, bread balls, fresh carp, and a pornographic papier-mâché chicken’s head! The ribald, riotous result is a tactile, toe-sucking tour de force of Švankmajerian strangeness and dark humour that must be seen to be believed. “A bizarre fusion of surreal comedy, grotesquerie and psychosexual fantasy ... The film’s impressive cartoonish soundtrack combines tumultuous bursts of opera and symphonic music with everyday noises heightened to unnatural extremes” (David Rooney, Variety). “Seriously funny and cheekily subversive. In having its six characters be ordinary people with extraordinary fantasies, the film portrays the erotic impulse of everyday life as a wild, chaotic, antisocial force that lends people their sense of individuality ... Švankmajer is a surrealist visionary” (Stephen Holden, New York Times). Colour, 35mm, no dialogue. 86 mins.
FRIDAY, JUNE 22 – 7:00 PM SATURDAY, JUNE 23 – 8:30 PM SUNDAY, JUNE 24 – 4:30 PM
LITTLE OTIK [aka Greedy Guts]
FAUST (Lekce Faust)
[aka Lesson Faust]
Czech Republic/Great Britain 1994. Director: Jan Švankmajer Cast: Petr Cˇepek, Jan Kraus, Vladimír Kudla, Jirˇí Suchý, Antonín Zacpal
Offering a fantastical retelling of the Faust legend, Jan Švankmajer’s second feature-length film is a tour-de-force of black magic and black humour in which a man’s wanderings through the streets of Prague lead to a cellar, a tattered copy of Goethe’s Faust, a confrontation with Mephistopheles — and a nightmarish cosmic journey that includes visits with the King of Portugal, David and Goliath, and Helen of Troy. The work unfolds, characteristically enough, as a dark, demimonde mix of marionettes, claymation, and live action, and reveals Švankmajer’s singular talents at their unsettling finest. “To enter into Švankmajer’s world is to abandon ‘objective’ logic in favour of the logic of dreams and nightmares ... Faust gives free reign to the unconscious and all its attendant pleasures and horrors” (Vancouver I.F.F.). “A visual delight ... Faust is an unusual and remarkably distinctive work, literally unlike anything else being produced in the world today ... Švankmajer is a true original” (Piers Handling, Toronto I.F.F.). Colour, 35mm, in English. 97 mins. FRIDAY, JUNE 22 – 8:45 PM SATURDAY, JUNE 23 – 6:30 PM
JAN ŠVANKMAJER: SELECT SHORTS Jan Švankmajer’s extraordinary short films range from the absurdist to the allegorical, and are filled with startling images that celebrate unrestrained imagination while satirizing the machinery of a repressive society. This selection was programmed by Irena Kovarova. The Flat (Byt) - An unfortunate young man finds himself in a room full of malevolent objects in Švankmajer’s surrealist nightmare, a winning mix of live action and trick photography displaying the director’s distinctive blend of sadism and black comedy. 1968. Blu-ray Disc. 13 mins. The Garden (Zahrada) - A “human fence” surrounds a farm in this live-action critique of oppression and tyranny in communist Czechoslovakia. 1968. Blu-ray Disc. 19 mins. Jabberwocky (Žvahlav aneb šaticˇ ky slameˇ ného Huberta) - Predating his feature Alice by 17 years, Švankmajer’s first hommage to Lewis Carroll teeters in unsettling fashion between childhood innocence and nightmarish violence. 1971. 35mm. 14 mins Dimensions of Dialogue (Možnosti dialogu) - Cited by Terry Gilliam as one of the ten best animated films of all time, Švankmajer’s superb short serves up three giddily grotesque illustrations of the impossibility of dialogue. 1982. 35mm. 12 mins. Another Kind of Love - A Švankmajer surprise and rarity: a music video for Hugh Cornwell, former front man of English punk rockers The Stranglers. 1988. Blu-ray Disc. 4 mins. Flora - Švankmajer’s shortest short — just 30 seconds long — is a visually-startling study of decay and death. 1989. Blu-ray Disc. 1 min. Meat Love (Zamilované maso) - Two beefsteaks have a fleshy flirtation before finding togetherness in the frying pan. 1989. Blu-ray Disc. 1 min. Food (Jídlo) - Three deliciously dark and fantastical vignettes about dining — and greed, poverty, capitalism, and bureaucracy. 1992. 35mm, 17 mins. Total running time: approx. 81 mins. SUNDAY, JUNE 24 – 6:30 PM
MONDAY, JUNE 25 – 7:00 PM
(Otesánek)
Czech Republic 2000. Director: Jan Švankmajer Cast: Veronika Zˇ ilková, Jan Hartl, Kristina Adamcová, Jaroslava Kretschmerová, Pavel Nový
“A wonderfully wicked comedy” (Geoff Andrew, Time Out) Švankmajer’s mostly live-action Little Otik is a bizarre parable of procreation, parenting, food phobia, and monstrous mass consumption, modelled on a famous Czech folktale (Otesánek). Ordinary couple Bozˇ ena and Karel long to have children, but haven’t been unable to conceive. When Karel digs up a tree stump that vaguely resembles a child, Bozˇ ena, mad with unfulfilled maternal urges, resolves that it is a real baby, and literally wills it to life — with giddily grotesque consequences, as Little Otik quickly proves to have an insatiable appetite for flesh (the family cat is only the first victim) and an alarming propensity to grow exponentially whenever he is fed. “Dazzling ... Dark, dreamlike, and very subversive” (Andrew). “Guaranteed to give impressionable viewers nightmares ... Švankmajer is still one of the world’s great animators, whose droll sense of humour leaves nothing untouched” (Deborah Young, Variety). Colour, 35mm, in Czech with English subtitles. 127 mins. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 27 – 6:30 PM
LUNACY (Sˇ ílení)
Czech Republic/Slovakia 2006. Director: Jan Švankmajer Cast: Pavel Lisˇka, Jan Trˇ íska, Anna Geislerová, Jaroslav Dusˇ ek, Martin Huba
“What could be more natural than cult director Jan Švankmajer pairing the poetic twins of decadence, Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade?” (Jay Weissberg, Variety). Gleefully deranged and wondrously inventive, Lunacy is mostly live-action, but, in splendid Švankmajer fashion, but also features plenty of, um, meaty animated interludes, involving slithering amputated tongues, autonomous eyeballs, and gruesomely glistening entrails. The plot concerns a young man plagued by recurring nightmares in which is he dragged off to the madhouse. Returning from his mother’s funeral, he is invited to the castle of an eccentric marquis, where he witnesses some blasphemous debauchery, and is forced into some frightening “purgative therapy” for his fears. It all unfolds in a glorious, demented Švankmajerian mélange of sex, violence, Grand Guignol terror, and gallows humour. Švankmajer himself makes an on-screen appearance in the prologue, drolly introducing Lunacy as “a horror film, with all the degeneracy peculiar to that genre,” and “an ideological debate” about “the madhouse we live in today.” “Delirious ... A bracing blast of old-school surrealism” (Dennis Lim, Village Voice). Colour, 35mm, in Czech with English subtitles. 118 mins. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 27 – 8:50 PM FRIDAY, JUNE 29 – 6:30 PM SATURDAY, JUNE 30 – 8:50 PM
SURVIVING LIFE (Theory and Practice) (Prˇezˇ ít svu˚j zˇivot [teorie a praxe])
Czech Republic/Slovakia 2010. Director: Jan Švankmajer Cast: Václav Helsˇus, Klára Issová, Zuzana Krónerová, Daniela Bakerová, Emília Doseková
“This film is going to be a comedy that nobody is going to laugh at,” announces Jan Švankmajer’s latest feature, in which the master animator embarks on an eye-popping new cut-out-and-collage direction (mixed with live action) and crafts one of his most entertaining and accessible films yet. Švankmajer’s psychoanalytical yarn concerns middle-aged, married Evzˇ en, who enters therapy in order to deal with an obsession: he’s fallen heavily for a beautiful young woman he keeps encountering in his dreams. In a twist, Evzˇ en isn’t seeking help to rid himself of these dreams; rather, he wants to ensure he keeps having them! “Expounding on (and cheekily refuting) Freudian and Jungian dream logic while dazzling the eye with animation that falls somewhere between South Park, Yellow Submarine, and Terry Gilliam’s work for the Pythons, this manages to be Švankmajer’s most poignant and fully-formed feature to date. It retains all of his hallmarks, from the grotesque close-up photography to his fixations with food and sex. Its masterstroke, though, is the zestfully ironic way it harnesses the skewed workings of the subconscious” (David Jenkins, Time Out). “An unmissable pleasure ... Švankmajer is at the height of his filmmaking powers as director, artistic director, and storyteller here” (Deborah Young, Hollywood Reporter). Colour, 35mm, in Czech with English subtitles. 109 mins. FRIDAY, JUNE 29 – 8:45 PM SATURDAY, JUNE 30 – 6:45 PM
11
SENIOR/ STUDENT
Tickets go on sale at the Box Office 30 minutes before the first show of the evening. Advance tickets are available for credit card purchase at www.cinematheque.bc.ca. Events, times, and prices
HOW TO BUY TICKETS
unless otherwise indicated
ADULT (18+)
Martha Lou Henley Charitable Foundation
also available through choir office 604.739.1255 & choristers
1.800.838.3006
Adults $28 • Seniors $22 • Students $15
St. Andrew’s-Wesley United Church,1022 Nelson St at Burrard, Vancouver
Saturday, May 5, 2012 • 7:30 pm
Gala Concert
Ryerson United Church, 2195 W 45th Ave at Yew Street, Vancouver Free tickets available from Brown Paper Tickets and at the door.
Friday, May 4, 2012 • 7:30 pm
Choral Threads
Festival of Women's Choirs
International
Tapestry
Morna Edmundson, Artistic Director
27
4
My Friend Ivan Lapshin
Twenty Days Without War
The Seventh Companion
6:30pm
ALEXEI GHERMAN
6:30pm
Khrustalyov, My Car! (p 18)
7:00pm Jem Cohen: New York (p 5)
6
30
KIBATSU CINEMA
Highway 61 (p 6)
8:30pm
The Four Winning Short Films (p 6)
7:00pm
BACK DOWN THE HIGHWAY: A CELEBRATION OF HIGHWAY 61
Monsieur Lazhar (p 16)
8:30pm
DIVERCINÉ 2012
7
ALEXEI GHERMAN
8:50pm
BETTER THAN SOMETHING: JAY REATARD (p 7)
7:00pm
HARD CORE LOGO
(p 7)
A Trip to the Moon + The Extraordinary Voyage (p 16)
8
1
Headwinds (p 15)
6:30pm
ALEXEI GHERMAN
8:45pm
HARD CORE LOGO
7:00pm
BETTER THAN SOMETHING: JAY REATARD (p 7)
5:00pm
HARD CORE LOGO
5
(p 7)
(p 7)
9
2
26
19
12
A Trip to the Moon + The Extraordinary Voyage (p 16)
GEORGES MÉLIÈS 8:20pm
Monsieur Lazhar (p 16)
6:30pm
8:15pm Omar Killed Me (p 14)
DIVERCINÉ 2012
The Kid With a Bike (p 15)
8:15pm
GEORGES MÉLIÈS 7:00pm
6:30pm Nuit #1 (p 15)
25
DIVERCINÉ 2012
6:30pm
18
11
4
SATURDAY
DIVERCINÉ 2012
Two Generators
9:00pm
Short films
7:30pm
C. 1983
FREE ADMISSION!
FRIDAY
31 JUNE
Khrustalyov, My Car! (p 18)
A Trip to the Moon + The Extraordinary Voyage (p 16)
7:00pm
17
24
ALEXEI GHERMAN
23
Viva Riva! (p 15)
8:10pm
Omar Killed Me (p 14)
6:30pm
DIVERCINÉ 2012
GEORGES MÉLIÈS 7:00pm + 8:30pm
Spider (p 4)
7:30pm
FRAMES OF MIND
16
10
8:15pm
8:15pm
ALEXEI GHERMAN
3
9
OF TIME AND THE CITY
6:30pm
NIGHTWATCHING
THE LONG DAY CLOSES
3
6:30pm
ALEXEI GHERMAN
29
8
2
THURSDAY
REMBRANDT’S J’ACCUSE
MAY
WEDNESDAY
DIM CINEMA
7:30pm
28
For film descriptions, please consult the previous Program Guide magazine or visit our website: www.cinematheque.bc.ca
MAY 2-4 SCREENINGS
TUESDAY
ALEXEI GHERMAN
6:30pm
Khrustalyov, My Car! (p 18)
7:00pm
ALEXEI GHERMAN
Nuit #1 (p 15)
8:30pm
6:30pm
Headwinds (p 15)
Viva Riva! (p 15)
6:30pm
DIVERCINÉ 2012
7
21
A Trip to the Moon + The Extraordinary Voyage (p 16)
GEORGES MÉLIÈS 3:00pm + 4:30pm
A Monster in Paris (p 16)
4:30pm
DIVERCINÉ 2012
Toy Story (p 8)
CINEMA SUNDAY 1:00pm
20
13
6
More info: www.cinematheque.bc.ca/venue 604.688.8202 • theatre@cinematheque.bc.ca
Pacific Cinémathèque’s theatre can be rented on Tuesday nights and during the day seven days a week.
HOST YOUR EVENT HERE!
SUNDAY
MONDAY
NOW PLAYING
MAY+JUN
1131 HOWE STREET
www.cinematheque.b c.ca
U P D AT E S & A D V A N C E T I C K E T S
17
The Conspirators of Pleasure (p 11)
25
18
OPEN 06.16 HOUSE
6:30pm
Select Shorts (p 11)
JAN ŠVANKMAJER
7:00pm
24
Alice (p 11)
4:30pm
JAN ŠVANKMAJER
9:10pm
Movable Facture: Time Frames (p 5)
(p 9)
THE TREE OF LIFE
7:30pm
DIM CINEMA
6:30pm
(p 9)
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
A Town Called Panic (p 8)
CINEMA SUNDAY 1:00pm
The Fall of Otrar (p 19)
6:30pm
6:30pm
The Fall of Otrar (p 19)
ALEXEI GHERMAN
Trial on the Road (p 19)
4:30pm
8:45pm Faust [aka Lesson Faust]
9:00pm Hikari + Mariko Rose the Spook (p 22)
(p 9)
16
30
23
Lunacy (p 11)
8:50pm
Surviving Life (Theory and Practice) (p 11)
6:45pm
JAN ŠVANKMAJER
Alice (p 11)
8:30pm
(p 11)
Faust [aka Lesson Faust]
6:30pm
JAN ŠVANKMAJER
9:10pm
(p 9)
Vancouver’s only community media centre features 10,000 square feet of tech space on 3-levels in the Woodward’s Atrium. We are also a great place to eat, open every day, next door to the National Film Board and SFU Woodward’s. We can produce your next launch party, screening, workshop, meeting or catered reception for 25-500 people. visit us online at creativetechnology.org 111 W Hastings, Vancouver, BC, V6B 1H4 Twitter @W2Woodwards @W2MediaCafe 604.689.9896 facebook.com/pages/W2-Media-Cafe
A SPACE ODYSSEY
2001
(p 9)
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
6:30pm
THE TREE OF LIFE
2:00pm
FREE SCREENING 2PM
29
22
Surviving Life (Theory and Practice) (p 11)
8:40pm
8:50pm
Abraxas (p 22)
8:45pm
Tokyo Oasis (p 22)
Lunacy (p 11)
Lunacy (p 11)
6:30pm
JAN ŠVANKMAJER
7:00pm
KIBATSU CINEMA
Alice (p 11)
(p 11)
JAN ŠVANKMAJER
(p 9)
Summer Time Machine Blues (p 21)
7:00pm
9:10pm
THE TREE OF LIFE
7:00pm
28
21
6:30pm
12:00pm
OPEN HOUSE
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (p 9) FREE SCREENING! (p 9)
Little Otik [aka Greedy Guts] (p 11)
6:30pm
JAN ŠVANKMAJER
27
Young Freud in Gaza (p 4)
7:30pm
Happily Ever After (p 21)
The Fall of Otrar (p 19)
FRAMES OF MIND
8:35pm
KIBATSU CINEMA
Yuriko’s Aroma (p 21)
7:00pm
KIBATSU CINEMA
Trial on the Road (p 19)
15
My Friend Ivan Lapshin (p 19)
Battle League Horumo (p 21)
14
8:30pm
8:30pm
8:50pm
6:30pm
20
13
(p 19)
Trial on the Road (p 19)
Girl Sparks (p 20)
My Friend Ivan Lapshin
6:30pm
7:00pm
ALEXEI GHERMAN
12 P M
22
(p 18)
(p 18)
(p 18)
ALEXEI GHERMAN
Twenty Days Without War
The Seventh Companion
Twenty Days Without War
11
8:30pm
8:30pm
8:15pm
10
(p 19)
(p 18)
(p 18)
DiverCiné 2012
World from Cinema
la Francophonie
LES ÉCRANS DE LA FRANCOPHONIE DU MONDE
Presented in Vancouver by the Pacific Cinémathèque and the Consulate General of France, DiverCiné is a cooperation between the Embassy of France in Canada and Canadian Heritage/ Patrimoine canadien. It is designed to celebrate and promote la Francophonie, the international community of countries and governments that use French as a common language; express the identities, imaginings, and cultures of the French-speaking world in all their diversity; and showcase the range and abundance of film production in the francophone nations of the world. DiverCiné programming gives prominence to films selected for major international festivals, and provides Canadian audiences with an opportunity to see exceptional films that, in many cases, they would otherwise not be able to see. Our 2012 program is made up of acclaimed features from Africa, Europe, and Canada, and includes a special all-ages matinee screening of a new animated film from France. Acknowledgements: Pacific Cinémathèque is very grateful to the Consulat Général de France à Vancouver, the Embassy of France in Canada (Ottawa), and Canadian Heritage/Patrimoine canadien (Ottawa) for making this exhibition possible.
Omar Killed Me (Omar m’a tuer)
France/Morocco 2011. Director: Roschdy Zem Cast: Sami Bouajila, Denis Podalydès, Maurice Bénichou, Salomé Stévenin, Nozha Khouadra
The second feature by French filmmaker Roschdy Zem, an actor, writer, and director of Moroccan descent, this France-Morocco co-production was Morocco’s official submission to this year’s Oscars and also selected for New Directors/New Films in New York. “Zem tells this story of racism, politics, and injustice with the clarity of a documentary and the pacing of a thriller ... In the summer of 1991, a wealthy widow was beaten and stabbed to death at a beautiful villa in the south of France. Omar Raddad (Sami Bouajila), the woman’s Moroccan gardener, became the prime suspect because of one bizarre clue: the words “Omar m’a tuer” — a grammatically incorrect phrase that roughly translates as “Omar has kill me” — written in the victim’s blood. Despite gaps in the investigation and no forensic evidence, Raddad was convicted and sent to prison for 18 years. Only PierreEmmanuel Vaugrenard, a journalist, believed in his innocence and went to work to prove it” (Film Society of Lincoln Center). “Gripping ... One of Gaul’s most versatile actors, Sami Bouajila, adds another deeply felt turn to his résumé in this classically assembled crimeand-courtroom drama” (Boyd Von Hoeij, Variety). Colour, 35mm, in French and Moroccan Arabic with English subtitles. 85 mins. THURSDAY, MAY 17 – 6:30 PM FRIDAY, MAY 18 – 8:15 PM
14
Viva Riva!
Democratic Republic of Congo/France/Belgium 2010. Director: Djo Tunda Wa Munga Cast: Patsha Bay Mukana, Manie Malone, Hoji Fortuna, Alex Herabo, Marlene Longange
“The first major motion picture to come out of Congo in decades happens to be one of the best neo-noirs from anywhere in recent memory” (Time Out New York). Viva Riva!, a high-octane noir joyride set on the mean streets of Kinshasa, has surprised viewers everywhere; Roger Ebert describes it as an “exciting, well-made crime thriller, dripping with atmosphere.” “Riva is an operator, a man with charm and ambition in equal measure. Kinshasa is an inviting place. With petrol in short supply in the DRC’s capital, he and his sidekick pursue a plot to get hold of a secret cache — barrels of fuel they can sell for a huge profit ... Riva’s main nemesis is Azor, a crime boss in the classic style. He’s not a man to mess with, but his girlfriend, Nora, may just be the most seductive woman in all of the DRC. Riva catches sight of her dancing at a nightclub and it’s not long before Nora matches the fuel cache as a coveted object of his lust ... Viva Riva! is unprecedented: a story set in contemporary DRC full of intrigue, music, and a surprisingly frank approach to sex ... It offers a portrait of urban Africa too rarely seen onscreen” (Cameron Bailey, Toronto I.F.F.). Colour, Digibeta video, in French and Lingala with English subtitles. 98 mins. THURSDAY, MAY 17 – 8:10 PM MONDAY, MAY 21 – 6:30 PM
Nuit #1
Canada 2011. Director: Anne Émond Cast: Catherine Le Lean, Dimitri Storoge
Anne Émond’s provocative drama of a sexual encounter and its aftermath won the Claude Jutra Award (best first feature) at this year’s Genies and was named best Canadian feature at VIFF. “Émond’s dazzling debut is a bold and intimate study of a one-night stand. Clara and Nikolai meet at a sweat-soaked rave and end their night at his apartment. The first part of the film is an erotic and candid portrait of their lovemaking. When Nikolai catches Clara trying to sneak out without saying goodbye, this typical hookup takes an unexpected turn. The two strangers, now sober and clothed, begin to talk ... The power struggles of a couple play out, almost dancelike, in this one night. Most remarkable are the astonishing insights they make about their lives as they both venture willingly into the darkest parts of themselves. Set almost entirely in Nikolai’s unadorned apartment, Nuit #1 focuses closely on the two captivating lead actors. Émond has deftly combined spare but elegant form with maximum impact. In a world of technology-mediated contact and fleeting encounters, Nuit #1 is a cathartic chamber piece about two modern young people who dare to go much further” (Agata Smoluch Del Sorbo, Toronto I.F.F.). Colour, 35mm, in French with English subtitles. 91 mins. FRIDAY, MAY 18 – 6:30 PM MONDAY, MAY 21 – 8:30 PM
The Kid With a Bike
(Le gamin au vélo)
Belgium/France 2011. Directors: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne Cast: Cécile de France, Thomas Doret, Jérémie Renier, Fabrizio Rongione, Egon Di Mateo
The raw, realist dramas of Belgian masters Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne — two-time winners of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, for 1999’s Rosetta and 2005’s L’enfant — evoke the uncompromising films of Robert Bresson, and have placed the brothers at the forefront of contemporary world cinema. Combining minimalist style and maximal emotional power in the best Dardennes fashion, The Kid With a Bike, their latest, follows the developing relationship between Cyril (Thomas Doret), a wilful, intense 11-year-old boy abandoned by his single father (Dardennes regular Jérémie Renier), and Samantha (Cécile de France), a young hairdresser who begins foster-parenting him on weekends. “The Dardenne brothers may be the most consistently highachieving filmmakers of our time — the kings, if you will, of poetic neorealism. Like all their films, The Kid With a Bike is near perfect” (Nick James, Sight and Sound). “A quietly rapturous film about love and redemption ... One thing that makes the Dardennes’ work so vibrant, at once new and seemingly timeless, is that they ask the most urgent questions we can ask of ourselves — including, what is it to be human — and in nondoctrinaire, nonproscriptive terms” (Manohla Dargis, New York Times). Colour, Blu-ray Disc, in French with English subtitles. 87 mins. SATURDAY, MAY 19 – 6:30 PM
Headwinds (Des vents contraires)
France/Belgium 2011. Director: Jalil Lespert Cast: Audrey Tatou, Benoît Magimel, Isabelle Carré, Antoine Dulery, Ramzy Bedia
A stellar French cast, including Benoît Magimel (Best Actor at Cannes in 2001 for his role in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher) and Audrey Tatou (Amélie), are showcased in actor-turned-director Jalil Lespert’s sensitive adaptation of Oliver Adam’s best-selling French novel, Des vents contraires. “One of France’s finest young actors, Lespert can now, on the strength of his second film as director, be seen as one of its most promising filmmakers as well ... Headwinds begins as the marriage between Paul (Magimel) and Sarah (Tautou) appears to be unravelling. One morning, Sarah goes for a run and never returns; the police investigate, but come to no conclusion. Paul, a struggling writer, quits Paris and moves back to the seaside town in Brittany where he was raised, beginning a long process of healing after long years of self-doubt and emotional turmoil. Magimel simply has never been better: beneath his gruff exterior, one can feel a mountain of vulnerability, as well as the nagging sense that perhaps he did have something to do with Sarah’s disappearance. He is joined by an all-star cast, including Isabelle Carré, Bouli Lanners, and Aurore Clément” (Film Society of Lincoln Center). Colour, Blu-ray Disc, in French with English subtitles. 91 mins. SATURDAY, MAY 19 – 8:15 PM SUNDAY, MAY 20 – 6:30 PM
15
A NEW ANIMATED FEATURE FROM FRANCE!
ALL-AGES MATINEE
ALL AGES WELCOME
A Monster in Paris
Annual $3 membership requirement in effect for those 18+
VANCOUVER PREMIERES
(Un monstre à Paris)
France 2011. Director: Bibo Bergeron Voices: Vanessa Paradis, Matthieu Chedid, Gad Elmaleh, Sébastien Desjours, Ludivine Sagnier, François Cluzet
A lovelorn film projectionist, a wisecracking delivery man/inventor, a famous cabaret singer, and a gargantuan flea named Francoeur join forces against a corrupt police chief in French animator Bibo Bergeron’s enchanting A Monster in Paris, a major hit in France. Full of catchy tunes, Bergeron’s beautifully rendered film is set during the 1910 Paris flood. A monster may — or may not — be at large in the waterlogged city. The truth isn’t important to the dastardly chief of police, who’s exploiting peoples’ fears for his own political gain. “The huge success of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo augurs pretty well for this amiable family animation, which has some similar themes and settings... The film has something of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and indeed King Kong, but has an eccentric style of its own” (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian). “Enjoyable and heartfelt ... There’s much to praise in this bubbly fairytale, [which] borrows some of its tics from silent cinema, but it also reaches out to films such as Frankenstein, Phantom of the Opera, The Fly, and King Kong for inspiration. A Monster in Paris charms with painterly backdrops and sartorially elegant characters” (Derek Adams, Time Out). Colour, 35mm, in French. 90 mins. SUNDAY, MAY 20 – 4:30 PM ORIGINAL FRENCH-LANGUAGE VERSION. NO ENGLISH SUBTITLES!
Pacific Cinémathèque membership is not required for this screening.
Cinema’s great mythos has the art form developing in two great parallel (but in fact often intertwining) streams, with Louis Lumière as the “father” of film reality or documentary, and compatriot Georges Méliès as the “father” of film fiction, fantasy, and illusion. Martin Scorsese’s marvellous recent movie Hugo has revived interest in the magician and movie pioneer Méliès, and in his iconic 1902 milestone A Trip to the Moon, Méliès’s most famous film fantasy. Hugo excerpted footage from a recently rediscovered and carefully restored rare, original hand-painted colour version of A Trip to the Moon. That restoration premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year. Pacific Cinémathèque is pleased to bring it to Vancouver, along with The Extraordinary Voyage, Serge Bromberg (Inferno) and Eric Lange’s new documentary about the Méliès masterpiece and its remarkable resurrection and restoration, after 109 years, in colour.
“The gorgeous restoration of Méliès’s masterpiece A Trip to the Moon that was shown at the Cannes and Telluride film festival was surely a cinematic highlight of the year, maybe the century.” A. O. SCOTT, NEW YORK TIMES
(Le voyage dans la lune) France 1902. Director: Georges Méliès. Cast: Georges Méliès, Henri Delannoy, Bleuette Bernon, François Lallement
“A landmark event: the hand-painted colour version of Méliès’s legendary A Trip to the Moon, unseen for 109 years until its glorious new restoration by Lobster Films, Groupama Gan Foundation for Cinema, and Technicolor Foundation for Cinema Heritage. In the first outer-space adventure in the history of cinema, six members of the Astronomers’ Club set off on an expedition to the Moon, encounter the Selenites and flee their King, and return home to a triumphant parade. A Trip to the Moon will be screened with a new soundtrack by the French band Air” (Museum of Modern Art, New York). Hand-tinted colour, Blu-ray Disc, silent with musical score. 16 mins.
Monsieur Lazhar
Canada 2011. Director: Philippe Falardeau Cast: Fellag, Sophie Nélisse, Émilien Neron, Danielle Proulx, Brigitte Poupart
The year’s most triumphant Canadian film has been the fourth feature by writerdirector Philippe Falardeau, who, on the strength of his previous work — The LeftHand Side of the Fridge (2000), Congorama (2006), and It’s Not Me, I Swear! (2008) — had already earned a reputation as one of Canadian’s finest filmmakers. Monsieur Lazhar has won a host of national and international honours, among them an Oscar nomination and six Genies, including best film, director, actor (Fellag), supporting actress (young Sophie Nélisse), adapted screenplay, and editing. A luminous, heartbreaking work of cumulative, deceptively simple power, Monsieur Lazhar explores grief and mourning and the way adults speak — or don’t speak — to children about issues they themselves would rather not confront. When an elementary school teacher commits suicide, her class is shaken to the core. But no one really wants to talk to the students about it save her replacement, Bachir Lazhar, an Algerian immigrant seeking political asylum. Falardeau’s reworking and expansion of Evelyne de la Cheneliere’s one-man play is an impressive feat of adaptation. Impressive too is the sensitive, moving lead performance of Fellag, an Algerian performer best known as a comedian. “A nuanced and incomparably beautiful work, Monsieur Lazhar is easily one of this year’s most emotionally affecting films” (Toronto I.F.F.). Colour, 35mm, in French with English subtitles. 94 mins. FRIDAY, MAY 25 – 8:30 PM SATURDAY, MAY 26 – 6:30 PM
COARSE LANGUAGE; THEME OF SUICIDE
ALL AGES WELCOME. Annual $3 membership requirement in effect for those 18+ 16
(Le voyage extraordinaire) France 2011. Directors: Serge Bromberg, Eric Lange. With: Michel Gondry, Tim Burton, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Michel Hazanavicius, Costa-Gavras
“Cinema’s most unforgettable image is perhaps that of the Man in the Moon being poked in the eye by a rocket ship. The magical Georges Méliès, one of the celebrated heroes of Martin Scorsese’s new movie Hugo, was the creator of that image, and his Trip to the Moon thrilled audiences in 1902. Now, thanks to one of the most technically sophisticated and expensive restorations in film history, A Trip to the Moon can thrill audiences once again in colour. This fascinating documentary charts the film’s voyage across the century and into the next millennium, from the fantastical Méliès’s production in 1902 to the astonishing rediscovery of a nitrate print in colour in 1993 to the premiere of the new restoration on the opening night of the Cannes Film Festival in 2011. Interviews with some of contemporary cinema’s most imaginative filmmakers attest to Méliès’ enduring significance” (Museum of Modern Art, New York). Colour, Blu-ray Disc, in English and French with English subtitles. 60 mins. MONDAY, MAY 21 – 3:00 PM & 4:30 PM WEDNESDAY, MAY 23 – 7:00 PM & 8:30 PM FRIDAY, MAY 25 – 7:00 PM SATURDAY, MAY 26 – 8:20 PM
ALEXEI
GREAT:
THE
THE FILMS OF
ALEXEI
GHERMAN A bold, uncompromising filmmaker of uncommon gifts, Alexei Gherman is one of Russian cinema’s reigning masters. Gherman — whose name is often transliterated as German, but also as Guerman and Gherman, to emphasize its hard “g” pronunciation — first came to wide international attention in the 1980s, as one of the major cinematic discoveries of glasnost. In the 1970s, he had been one of most distinctive and decidedly nonconformist directors working at Leningrad’s famed Lenfilm Studios, where, away from Moscow’s prying eyes, Soviet filmmakers had traditionally enjoyed more freedom than their colleagues elsewhere. But if Gherman stands as something of a symbol for the independent “Lenfilm spirit,” he is also a significant example of the heavy price often paid by iconoclastic artists in the preglasnost Soviet Union: Gherman’s career was repeatedly interrupted by official disapproval, censorship, and the shelving of his all-too-few films.
“Gherman is indisputably one of the greatest filmmakers alive in the world today.” FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER
This touring exhibition, which originated at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York in March, offers the first complete North American retrospective of Gherman’s directorial work. Made up of the five feature films Gherman has completed to date, it includes new 35mm prints of the rarely-seen The Seventh Companion (1967) and the long-banned masterpiece Trial on the Road (1971), and also includes Kazakh director Ardak Amirkulov’s magnificent epic The Fall of Otrar (1990), a film produced and co-written by Gherman (and released in North America under Martin Scorsese’s imprimatur). Acknowledgements: This retrospective of the films of Alexei Gherman was organized by Seagull Films and the Film Society of Lincoln Center (New York) with the assistance of Lenfilm Studios (St. Petersburg) and generous support provided by George Gund III.
“In this age of Netflix, streaming video and burnon-demand DVDs, it can be all too tempting — comforting, even — to think that there is no more cinematic terra incognita left to be discovered, that all of the treasures of world moviemaking are simply lying in wait for us to dial up in our living rooms. And yet there is the case of Alexei Gherman, who is indisputably one of the greatest filmmakers alive in the world today, but whose work has, until now, been nearly impossible to see, little distributed outside of his native Russia (with the exception of the French co-production Khrustalyov, My Car!) and wholly unavailable on any home video format in the English-speaking world. To be fair, Gherman’s films — five features to date, all shot in stunning black-and-white and staged in complex, obsessively detailed tracking shots that rank with the best of Scorsese and De Palma — have long been championed by a small but enthusiastic cult of admirers and programmers [and made occasional appearances at exhibitions of Soviet and Russian cinema presented at Pacific Cinémathèque and other film institutes]. But today, even the savvy art-film goer is unlikely to have heard of Gherman, let alone seen any of his work — a dilemma for which this retrospective represents one small corrective. Gherman was born in 1938 in Leningrad into something like Soviet cultural royalty, the son of author, playwright, reporter and screenwriter Yuri Gherman, a man who dined with Stalin and Gorky and whose writing would directly or indirectly inform many of his son’s films. The younger Gherman also studied both theatre and film, the latter under the great Grigori Kozintsev (known for his masterful film versions of Hamlet and King Lear) and began as an apprentice in the then-prosperous Soviet studio system. But almost from the start, Gherman proved to be a troublesome cog in that well-oiled machine, clashing with co-director Grigori Aronov over authorship of The Seventh Companion and running so afoul of the authorities on his next picture, the masterpiece Trial on the Road, that the film was suppressed for the next 15 years. Though Gherman — together with his wife and regular screenwriting partner Svetlana Karmalita — has continued to work in the decades since, his projects have been subject to variously long production delays, owing to everything from the collapse of funding to (in the case of Khrustalyov) the collapse of the Soviet Union. (Well, that and Gherman’s refusal to cast an American movie star as Stalin.) Yet Gherman has, rather like one of his own wizened, war-weary protagonists, soldiered forth, creating one of the most profoundly human and richly cinematic bodies of work in modern movies. He is currently said to be nearing completion of his decades-in-the-making sixth feature, an adaptation of the brothers Arkady and Boris Sturgatsky’s sci-fi novel Hard to Be a God. [Both Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Sukorov’s Days of the Eclipse were based on works by the Strugatskys.]`` FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER
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VANCOUVER PREMIERE!
Khrustalyov, My Car!
(Khrustalyov, mashinu!) Russia/France 1998. Director: Alexei Gherman Cast: Yuriy Tsurilo, Nina Ruslanova, Jüri Järvet, Mikhail Dementyev, Aleksandr Bashirov A triumph! Alexei Gherman’s dizzying, dazzling drama, adapted from a story by poet and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky, “resembles nothing else in cinema—although if Fellini, Tarkovsky, and Tati had pooled resources to update a Gogol story, they might have matched it” (Jonathan Romney, The Guardian). “Arguably Gherman’s most visually stunning, wildly provocative work, this fever-dream meditation on the crazed final days of Stalin’s regime was a cause célèbre of the 1998 Cannes and New York film festivals. The film takes off from the infamous ‘Doctor’s Plot,’ in which a group of predominately Jewish Moscow doctors were fingered as members of a conspiracy to assassinate Soviet leaders. Yuriy Tsurilo plays a Red Army general and famous brain surgeon who is sent to the Gulag after an anti-Semitic purge, then freed in a final effort to save Stalin from his date with destiny. Gherman creates a consistently amazing visual and aural rendition of the charged atmosphere of those sad times, in which no point of view is ever fixed, nor any shadow devoid of possible danger, nor any stray remark free from potentially lethal consequences” (Film Society of Lincoln Center). “Brilliantly directed ... Gherman’s alarming phantasmagoria is one of the great films of the ’90s” (J. Hoberman, Village Voice). B&W, 35mm, in Russian with English subtitles. 150 mins. THURSDAY, MAY 24 –7:00 PM SUNDAY, MAY 27 – 7:00 PM WEDNESDAY, MAY 30 – 7:00 PM
Twenty Days Without War (Dvadstat dnei bez voiny) USSR 1976. Director: Alexei Gherman Cast: Yuri Nikulin, Ludmila Gurchenko, Angelina Stepanova, Nikolai Grinko, Ekaterina Vasileva
Alexei Gherman’s first two solo features, 1971’s Trial on the Road and 1976’s Twenty Days Without War, both remarkable, unorthodox, and decidedly anti-heroic war films, met with official disapproval and censorship. The former was still banned (and would remain so for another decade) when Gherman embarked on the latter. A subtle, intimate, and affecting drama, Twenty Days Without War was denounced as “the shame of Lenfim” (it was made for Lenfilm Studios) and, for a time, itself suppressed — because “the people it depicts could only have lost the war.” In 1943, after the Battle of Stalingrad, Lopatin, a war correspondent and novelist, travels home to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, for twenty days leave. There, he assists in the making of a film based on his writings, and discovers that the illusions people harbour about war are far removed from the reality he has tried to write about. In a bold stroke of casting, Yuri Nikulin, a famous comic actor and circus clown, plays the lead. Based on a story by Konstantin Siminov, a prominent journalist and war poet who had opposed the banning of Trial on the Road, the film is shot with striking assurance by Valery Fedosov, Gherman’s regular cinematographer. B&W, 35mm, in Russian with English subtitles. 101 mins. SUNDAY, JUNE 3 – 8:15 PM MONDAY, JUNE 4 – 6:30 PM WEDNESDAY, JUNE 6 – 8:30 PM
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“Among the most important retrospectives in years, ‘The Films of Alexei Gherman’ is also a bracing, deeply satisfying cinematic experience.” TONY PIPOLO, ARTFORUM
NEW 35mm PRINT!
The Seventh Companion
(Sedmoy sputnik) USSR 1967. Directors: Alexei Gherman, Grigori Aronov Cast: Andrei Popov, Aleksandr Anisimov, Georgi Shtil, Pyotr Chernov, Vladimir Osenev “After a stint working as an assistant director at the Lenfilm studio, Alexei Gherman was assigned to his first feature, co-directed by Grigori Aronov. Based on the novella by Boris Lavrenyov, the film unfolds during the ‘Red Terror’ campaign that swept across Russia during the Civil War that followed the 1917 Revolution. Having been arrested with other former members of the Tsarist bourgeoisie, Maj. Gen. Adamov (Andrei Popov) is cleared of his alleged crimes and released back into society. But in the post-revolutionary world, Adamov’s apartment has been turned into a crowded commune and, with nowhere else to turn (“The fact that you are alive is a misunderstanding,” he is told), the soldier begins a campaign to return to the battlefield. Gherman clashed with Aronov during the shooting and would later distance himself from the film. The Seventh Companion nevertheless remains rich with his stunning use of black-and-white and profoundly humane view of ordinary men and women caught up in the absurdities of wartime. A dress rehearsal of sorts for the subsequent Trial on the Road and Twenty Days Without War, The Seventh Companion stands as an essential part of the Gherman filmography” (Film Society of Lincoln Center). B&W, 35mm, in Russian with English subtitles. 89 mins. SUNDAY, JUNE 3 – 6:30 PM MONDAY, JUNE 4 – 8:30 PM
My Friend Ivan Lapshin (Moi drug Ivan Lapshin) USSR 1984. Director: Alexei Gherman Cast: Andrei Boltnev, Nina Ruslanova, Andrei Mironov, Alexei Zharkov, Zinaida Adamovich My Friend Ivan Lapshin, Alexei Gherman’s arresting third solo feature, is one of the most heralded Russian films of the last 30 years, and one of the most celebrated movies of glasnost. A poll of Soviet critics in 1989 named it the best Soviet film of all time! An audacious, ironic, formally daring re-creation of the Stalinist era, told in flashback, and unfolding from the point-of-view of a nineyear-old boy, the film is set in the 1930s in a remote provincial town, where Ivan Lapshin, the local lawman, fearlessly maintains law and order while proving comically unlucky in love. Based on popular stories by Gherman’s father Yuri (a noted writer who was also the source for Gherman’s long-banned Trial on the Road), the film is beautifully crafted, richly detailed, and — with the worst of the Stalinist terrors just around the corner — underlain with a disquieting sense of foreboding. “Masterly ... Wonderfully vivid performances and amazingly original camerawork (mostly in elegantly faded monochrome) bring a vanished world to life” (Tony Rayns, Time Out). “With only his third major film, Gherman looks like the most radical force in Soviet cinema since Tarkovsky” (Ian Christie, Toronto I.F.F.). Colour and B&W, 35mm, in Russian with English subtitles. 101 mins. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 6 – 6:30 PM FRIDAY, JUNE 8 – 8:30 PM SATURDAY, JUNE 9 – 6:30 PM
NEW 35mm PRINT!
Trial on the Road “A LIVING LEGEND ... To many Russian critics, cinephiles, and viewers Gherman is their national cinema’s foremost figure after Tarkovsky. Others insist that, in fact, he is more important and more original.” ANTON DOLIN, FILM COMMENT
The Fall of Otrar (Gibel Otrara)
USSR [Kazakhstan] 1990. Director: Ardak Amirkulov Cast: Bolot Bejshenaliyev, Dokhdurbek Kydyraliyev, Tungyshbai Dzhamankulov, Sabira Atayeva, Kasym Zhakibayev
(Proverka na dorogakh) USSR 1971. Director: Alexei Gherman Cast: Rolan Bykov, Anatoly Solonitsyn, Vladimir Zamansky, Oleg Borisov Admirers have called Alexei Gherman’s uncommonly assured first solo feature “the most interesting debut film in Soviet cinema since Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood, which it sometimes resembles” (Tony Rayns, Time Out) and “as great an anti-war film as Kubrick’s Paths of Glory” (Film Society of Lincoln Center). It was banned for 15 years for its daringly anti-heroic take on Russia’s Great Patriotic War, and only saw the light of day with the coming of glasnost. Trial on the Road is set in fascist-occupied Byelorussia, where a beleaguered Red Army platoon captures a German soldier who claims to be a Russian forced to collaborate with the Nazis. The revelation causes tension between two officers: a major, who wants the man summarily shot, and a lieutenant, more sympathetic, who wants to offer the prisoner a chance to redeem himself. The moral complexity and ambiguity, and the atmospheric, deliberately retro monochrome cinematography — filming war in colour is impossible, Gherman says — are Gherman hallmarks. Trial is a masterly effort from “one of the most ambitious and original directors working in Russia” (Julian Graffy). “The stark-raving-mad images, from an army emerging from winter mist to a machine-gun duel from opposing ditches, grip like eyelid clamps” (Michael Atkinson, Village Voice. B&W, 35mm, in Russian with English subtitles. 98 mins.
FRIDAY, JUNE 8 – 6:30 PM Released in North America as a Martin Scorsese SATURDAY, JUNE 9 – 8:30 PM presentation, Kazakh director Ardak Amirkulov’s SUNDAY, JUNE 10 – 4:30 PM 1990 spectacular - produced by Alexei Gherman and co-written by Gherman and wife Svetlana Karmalita - has been called “one of the great unrecognized masterpieces of the Nineties” (Olaf Möller, Film Comment). “Four arduous years in the making, Amirkulov’s historical epic about the intrigue and turmoil preceding Genghis Khan’s systematic destruction of the lost East Asian civilization of Otrar is unlike anything you’ve ever seen. The movie that spurred the extraordinary wave of great Kazakh films in the 90s, Amirkulov’s film is at once hallucinatory, visually resplendent, and ferociously energetic, packed with eye-catching (and gouging) detail and B-movie fervour, and traversing an endless variety of parched, epic landscapes, and ornate palaces. But The Fall of Otrar is also one of the most astute historical films ever made, and its high quotient of torture and gore (Italian horror genius Mario Bava would have been envious) is always grounded in the bedrock realities of realpolitik: when the Kharkhan of Otrar is finally brought before the Ruler of the World, he could be facing Stalin — or any number of modern CEOs. Shot in sepia tones but occasionally bursting into colour, Otrar is truly a one-of-a-kind movie experience” (Film Society of Lincoln Center). Colour, 35mm, in Kazakh, Mandarin, and Mongolian with English subtitles. 165 mins. SUNDAY, JUNE 10 – 6:30 PM MONDAY, JUNE 11 – 6:30 PM WEDNESDAY, JUNE 13 - 6:30 PM
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kibatsu cinema
eccentricity, popular culture and contemporary Japanese film CURATED BY MIKO HOFFMAN
thursdays • june 7, 14, 21, 28 The Powell Street Festival Society and Pacific Cinémathèque are pleased to present the fourth edition of “Kibatsu Cinema,” a celebration of the odd and the eccentric in Japanese pop culture and contemporary Japanese film. Kibatsu is a Japanese word denoting a person or thing that is, by ordinary standards, unusual or unconventional. As with our previous “Kibatsu Cinema” programs (2007, 2009, 2011), the quirky, smart, and stylish films on display here reveal the influences of a variety of Japan’s prominent pop-cultural streams, including manga and anime, pop and punk music, and the famed flamboyance of the country’s street fashions and youth cultures. This year we add to the mix a time machine, some battling animated oni (demons), and a lot of quirky introspection.
“Kibatsu Cinema: eccentricity, popular culture and contemporary Japanese film” is a lead-up event to Vancouver’s 36th annual Powell Street Festival, a celebration of Japanese Canadian arts, culture and heritage. Festival weekend is August 4-5, with other events beginning in May.
www.powellstreetfestival.com
VANCOUVER PREMIERE!
girl sparks (Gâru supâkusu)
Japan 2007. Director: Yuya Ishii Cast: Ayuko Ikawa, Toshiaki Inomata, Mukau Nakamura, Tombo Katsura, Rumi Ninomiya, Yumiko Fukuoka
From dynamic, up-and-coming young director Yuya Ishii, maker of the funky comedies Sawako Decides (2010); Rebel, Jiro’s Love (2006), and Bare-assed Japan (2005), Girl Sparks is a film both light-hearted and personal, both realistic and fantastic. “When schoolgirl Saeko’s cross-dressing, disciplinarian dad looks like he’s losing his factory to bankruptcy, she decides to bury her negative feelings for him, roll up her sleeves and help him out in this surprising, absurdist comedy. Mixing teenage angst with surreal fantasy, Ishii transforms ostensibly banal material into winsome entertainment” (Seattle International Film Festival). Colour, DVCAM, in Japanese with English subtitles. 94 mins. THURSDAY, JUNE 7 – 7:00 PM
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VANCOUVER PREMIERE!
battle league horumo (Kamogawa horumô)
Japan 2009. Director: Katsuhide Motoki Cast: Takayuki Yamada, Chiaki Kuriyama, Gaku Hamada, Sei Ashina, Takuya Ishida COMMUNITY PARTNER
The best-selling fantasy novel by Manabu Makime, a phenomenon among the young and picky readers of Japan, has been adapted into an outrageous action comedy film. Battle League Horumo introduces esoteric and ancient Taoist magic in a modern setting with a cast of uniquely hilarious characters. Be prepared to enter a world in which the bizarre legend of “Horumo” plays out against the breathtaking backdrop of Kyoto! The film is directed by Katsuhide Motoki (Kitaro and the Millennium Curse, 10 Promises to My Dog) and stars Takayuki Yamada (Train Man, Crows Episode 0), Chiaki Kuriyama (Battle Royale, Kill Bill Vol. 1), and Sei Ashina (Silk, Kamui). Colour, 35mm, in Japanese with English subtitles. 35mm, 113 mins. THURSDAY, JUNE 7 – 8:50 PM
ユリ子のアロマ VANCOUVER PREMIERE!
yuriko’s aroma (Yuriko no aroma) Japan 2010. Director: Kota Yoshida Cast: Noriko Eguchi, Saori Hara, Noriko Kijima, Jun Miho, Shôta Someya
“Massage therapist Yuriko (Noriko Eguchi) is a master of scent. She whips up aromatherapy lotions to slather onto her clients at her friend’s massage spa, but Yuriko isn’t prepared when she catches a whiff of the salon owner’s sweaty 17-year-old soccer-playing nephew Takeshi (Shôta Someya) and is immediately overcome with desire… or love… or possibly both. Takeshi doesn’t know quite what to make of Yuriko’s obsession with his B.O., but soon he’s reciprocating her affections by letting Yuriko catch a whiff whenever she pleases. The appearance of the beautiful Iris (Saori Hara) just complicates an already complicated situation in Kota Yoshida’s sophomore feature film Yuriko’s Aroma. Equal parts naughty and funny, this black comedy asks the question about where we draw the line between normal desires and ones that will jeopardize everything” (shinsedaifest.com). Colour, DVCAM, in Japanese with English subtitles. 77 mins. THURSDAY, JUNE 14 – 7:00 PM
VANCOUVER PREMIERE!
happily ever after (Jigyaku no uta)
Japan 2007. Director: Yukihiko Tsutsumi Cast: Miki Nakatani, Hiroshi Abe, Maki Carousel, Dante Carver, Yoshikazu Ebisu
CANADIAN PREMIERE!
summer time machine blues (Samâ taimu mashin burûsu)
Japan 2005. Director: Katsuyuki Motohiro Cast: Eita, Juri Ueno, Yoshiaki Yoza, Daijiro Kawaoka, Yôko Maki, Munenori Nagano
We celebrate the second official day of summer 2012 with a fun-filled evening of wackiness, starting off with Summer Time Machine Blues. The irrepressible energy of youth collides head on with the theory of relativity in a uniquely exhilarating and uplifting comedy about time travel directed and produced by mega-hit maker Katsuyuki Motohiro. Shuttling repeatedly between two days in the lives of a group of college students, Summer Time Machine Blues is a rollercoaster ride of a story filled with plenty of crazy loops and mind-bending curves. Director Motohiro (also known for the phenomenally successful Bayside Shakedown series of feature films) solidified his reputation as one of the hottest and most popular directors in Japanese cinema with this film. Colour, Digibeta video, in Japanese with English subtitles. 107 mins.
Based on a smash-hit comic strip series by Yoshiie Gouda, Happily Ever After is a visually striking dark comedy that follows the exploits of Yukie Morita, a devoted wife, and Isao Hayama, her boorish, unemployed ex-gangster husband. While Yukie works hard at a noodle shop and struggles to make ends meet, Isao hangs around all day gambling and getting into trouble. Everyone advises Yukie to leave Isao, but her love for him is unconditional because he was the one who initially saved her from her misery. “A happy balance between black comedy, slapstick, and drama that turns the traditional idea of a romantic comedy on its ear” (Nipponcinema.com). Colour, 35mm, in Japanese with English subtitles. 115 mins. THURSDAY, JUNE 14 – 8:35 PM
サマー タイム マシン ブルース
THURSDAY, JUNE 21 – 7:00 PM
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未知なるヒカリ TWO BY DEVI KOBAYASHI VANCOUVER PREMIERES!
hikari
Japan 2011. Director: Devi Kobayashi
+ おばけのマリコローズ
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mariko rose the spook (Obake no mariko roˉ zu)
Japan 2009. Director: Devi Kobayashi Cast: Mutsumi Ogiso, Nao Muranaga, Kajin Takeshita, Kiichi Sonobe, Devi Kobayashi
The work of Devi Kobayashi, a leading figure in the Japanese independent film scene, makes its Vancouver debut tonight with these two comic films. “Kobayashi writes, directs, composes for, and acts in all of his work. In Mariko Rose the Spook, the ghost of a Meiji-era drag queen haunts a lovelorn woman, and insists that she shouldn’t give up, even though her potential sweetheart appears to be straight. A song about the encouraging possibility of bisexuality follows, and a plan to test that theory is hatched. This hour-long tale of mischief and lust is simultaneously cute, absurd, and relatable. Hikari is a short film about a young woman who doesn’t feel like she belongs on earth, and is convinced that she is an alien. She gets her hopes up when a UFO appears from the sky — that is, until the flying object sprouts arms, legs, and a head, and starts talking nonsense. There’s definitely a unique imagination at work here, and the result is both moving and hilarious” (Toronto Film Scene). Colour, DVD, in Japanese with English subtitles. Hikari: 24 mins. Mariko Rose: 66 mins. Total: 90 mins.
東京オアシス
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NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE!
tokyo oasis (Tôkyô oashis)
Japan 2011. Directors: Kana Matsumoto, Kayo Nakamura Cast: Satomi Kobayashi, Ryo Kase, Haru Kuroki, Tomoyo Harada, Mikako Ichikawa
The production teams and casts responsible for Kamome Diner, Megane, Pool, and Mother Water reunite for another film filled with beauty, charm, and quiet quirkiness. Satomi Kobayashi, who also starred in the above mentioned films, has the lead in this series of snapshots into the lives of several Tokyo characters. The film explores the connection between a place and the people who inhabit it though a woman’s soul-searching journey to self discovery. It is made by a collection of actors, directors, and writers with Tokyo in their hearts. A true Japanese story, Tokyo Oasis has neither a beginning nor an end, but the viewer enjoys the ride nonetheless. Colour, HDCAM, in Japanese with English subtitles. 83 mins. THURSDAY, JUNE 28 – 7:00 PM
THURSDAY, JUNE 21 – 9:00 PM
VANCOUVER PREMIERE!
abraxas
(Aburakurasu no matsuri) Japan 2010. Director: Naoki Kato Cast: Suneohair, Rie Tomosaka, Manami Honjô, Kaoru Kobayashi, Ryouta Murai
Since premiering at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, Abraxas has received rave reviews for its story and for the performance, both musical and dramatic, of Japanese indie rock superstar Suneohair. Continuing the theme of self-discovery in this evening’s Kibatsu line-up, Abraxas tells the tale of a punk musician turned Zen monk struggling with his personal demons while those around him both support him and are healed by him in mysterious ways. “Abraxas sports more than enough novelty just by allowing its hero the contradictions inherent in being a Buddhist monk by day and a punk rocker by night. Naoki Kato’s gently appealing serio-comedy treats mental illness and key Buddhist concepts, mostly involving mortality, with the same wry respect ... Despite a few improbabilities, the film’s low-key progress is ingratiating, and its unshowy presentation nonetheless manages to capture the natural beauty of the region that is the current locus of Japan’s post-earthquake/tsunami nuclear crisis. Adapting Buddhist monk Sokyu Genyu’s novel in his first professional feature, director/co-scenarist Kato demonstrates a sure touch with pacing, atmosphere, and astutely cast actors” (Variety). Colour, 35mm, in Japanese with English subtitles. 113 mins.
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Acknowledgments: Many thanks to Chris MaGee (J-Film Pow-Wow blogger and co-curator Shinsedai Cinema Festival Toronto) for curatorial support. Special Thanks: Yuuki Hirano; Jim Sinclair and Pacific Cinémathèque staff; Keiko Kusakabe (Makotoya Co. Ltd.); Shinji Sakoda (Pony Canyon); Tomoko Kage (Bitters End); Shio Toyoda (New People Entertainment); Miki Ohi (Pia Film Festival); Devi Kobayashi; Takako Hirayama (Nikkatsu Corporation); Japan Foundation; Canada Council for the Arts; Department of Canadian Heritage; British Columbia Arts Council; the Province of British Columbia through Direct Access to Charitable Gaming; City of Vancouver through the Office of Cultural Affairs.
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