Films & Schedules - Friday, February 19, 2010

Fish Tank is the story of an alienated Essex teenager whose life becomes even more complicated when her mom brings home a new boyfriend.

Winner of the Cannes Jury Prize for her first film, Red Road (PIFF 31), Arnold has won it again for her second, Fish Tank. Mia (Kate Jarvis), a sullen and volatile 15-year-old, lives with her single mother and little sister in a dreary working-class housing project in Essex. Ostracized at school and angry at the world, Mia’s only solace is her private passion for hip-hop dancing, which she practices incessantly. When her mother (Kierston Wareing) brings home a mysterious, charming stranger named Connor (Michael Fassbender, Hunger), who just might be the calming father figure the family needs, an emotional, if not sexual, chemistry between he and Mia soon adds a new dimension to a charged family atmosphere. One of Britain’s strongest new cinematic voices, Arnold reaffirms her talent for gripping, emotionally-charged realism, and for finding beautiful poetry in the bleakest of lives.

Filmography: Red Road (06).

122 Minutes    

Interests: Narrative Feature.

Heiran and Mahi are in love. He is Afghan, she is Iranian. Her father forbids her to see him, and thus begins a tale of love and prejudice, a modern-day, Middle Eastern Romeo and Juliet.

During the post-Soviet period of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, almost three million Afghans fled across the border into Iran, triggering prejudice and strife among their hosts. Heiran is one such refugee. Mahi, a successful 17-year-old student from a poor family herself, falls in love with Heiran. Her father, however, flies into a violent rage when he learns of their relationship and forbids Mahi to see Heiran. And that is only the beginning of the couple’s problems. When they flee to Tehran together, their hard-won bliss is soon threatened again. Heiran is a timeless tale of star-crossed lovers thrown into turmoil by family differences and cultural circumstances—a modern-day, Middle Eastern Romeo and Juliet.

First Feature Film.

88 Minutes     Digital    

Interests: Narrative Feature, Global Classroom, Middle Eastern.

In this retelling of the tale of the wife-killing Bluebeard, Breillat reminds us all that the best fairytales are dark around the edges. The film intercuts between the stories of two pairs of sisters. The first is set in the 1950s and features a young girl who loves torturing her older sister with dramatic readings of the story of Bluebeard. In the second, set during the Renaissance, a young girl becomes engaged to Lord Bluebeard, despite the suspicious disappearances of his previous wives.

Following the death of their father, Anne and Marie-Catherine are cast from boarding school and sent back to their mother. With no money for dowry, younger sister Marie-Catherine agrees to wed the wealthy but notorious aristocrat Lord Bluebeard, whose previous wives have all suspiciously disappeared. Will Marie-Catherine be next? Both surprisingly straightforward and slyly subversive, Breillat’s telling of Charles Perrault’s lurid 18th-century fable teases out the class and gender conflicts present in the original, reminding us that the best fairy tales are tinged with perverse darkness. Using parallel storylines, Breillat intercuts the fairy tale itself with childhood scenes set in a safe, bourgeois home in the 1950s, where a young girl frightens her older sister, and herself, with repeated readings of the titillating Freudian tale.

Selected Filmography: 36 Fillette (87), Romance (99), Fat Girl (00), Sex Is Comedy (02), The Last Mistress (06).

Sponsored by TV5MONDE and with support from the Cultural Services of the French Embassy.

80 Minutes     Digital    

Interests: Narrative Feature, French Language, Literature.

A revelatory documentary exploring the vision of I.M. Pei, the distinguished 90-year-old Chinese-American architect as he works on his latest commission, the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar, one of the most complex building projects of his long career.

One of the most distinguished architects of our time, I.M. Pei has spent his storied career creating designs for some of the world’s most treasured structures, including Paris’s Pyramide du Louvre and The National Gallery in Washington D.C. Learning From Light chronicles Pei’s adventure through a recent and historically monumental challenge: his commission to design the Museum of Islamic Art for Doha, Qatar. Traveling the Islamic world from Spain to Cairo, the 90-year-old modernist architect embarked on a journey of discovery to research the culture, history, and landscape that would inform the project. Pei searched for inspiration in the ancient origins of desert architecture and translated his findings into one of the most complex building projects of his career.

Filmography: Alan and Namoi (92), The Haunted Desert (01), The Work and the Glory (06).

Sponsored by The Nines.

84 Minutes     Digital    

Interests: Documentary Views, Global Classroom.

Financial concerns tempt an ex-con to return to his smuggling ways in this taut psychological thriller.

Ex-con Kristófer, recently released from a jail term for smuggling alcohol while working on a freighter, now works as a lowly-paid security guard. Bored with his dreary existence and struggling to support his family, he is tempted when his friend Steingrímur offers to help him get back his old job on the ship—which would provide the opportunity to do one last smuggling job on a freighter between Reykjavik and Rotterdam. Contending not only with the suspicious local police, but also with a captain who mistrusts him and a psychopathic Dutch criminal, Kristófer sets out on his mission to solve his financial woes. Reykjavik-Rotterdam’s gritty naturalism is evocatively realized by the work of Jar City cinematographer Bergsteinn Björgúlfsson and hardened performances from a fine cast.

Filmography: SLC-25 (90), Remote Control (92), Pearls and Swine (97).

This year’s Icelandic submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

88 Minutes    

Interests: Oscar Submissions, Narrative Feature.

Welcome tells the story of a young Kurd, Bilal, who aims to swim to England from Calais, and the swimming instructor who agrees to train him for the treacherous crossing.

Managing to be political without being heavy-handed, Welcome focuses on illegal immigrants trying to reach England from Calais, and the risk taken by the French people who help them. Bilal, a 17-year-old Kurdish refugee, left his native Iraq shortly after his girlfriend emigrated to England, and wants to join her. His trek across Europe comes to an abrupt end on the northern coast of France. How to get across the cold English Channel? He decides to head for the local swimming pool to begin training for the swim of his life. There he meets lifeguard Simon, to whom he eventually confides his grand plan. Simon takes Bilal under his wing and secretly teaches him how to do the crawl, despite ongoing threats from the police, who imprison those who aid a growing community nurturing an inextinguishable hope of making a new life in the West.

Selected Filmography: Lost In Transit (93), Don’t Make Trouble (01), The Light (04).

Sponsored by TV5MONDE and with support from the Cultural Services of the French Embassy.

116 Minutes    

Interests: Narrative Feature, French Language.

In this quirky road movie about two bickering brothers traveling to Los Angeles, various encounters with local flora, fauna, and inevitable oddballs contribute to the tender, hilarious panorama of these men and their lives.

The setting of this quirky, comic road movie is the greater county of Los Angeles, from the city to the surrounding desert. Along for the ride are two estranged siblings: overbearing older brother Michael (Adam Scott), a failed novelist, and Tobey (Joel Bissonnette), an actor, whom Michael has reluctantly agreed to ferry to various destinations and errands. But it’s Michael’s birthday and this isn’t exactly how he’d planned to celebrate. As events unfold, it becomes clear that the agenda of the trip isn’t what it seemed and issues of trust resurface just when the brothers are forging a new bond. Various mysterious encounters with off-the-radar oddballs prove, in the film’s final moments, to be tightly woven threads in the real, underlying story.

Filmography: Looking For Leonard (02), Who Loves the Sun (06).

Sponsored by Ace Hotel.

85 Minutes    

Interests: Narrative Feature.

The early life and rise of Benito Mussolini is shown here through the eyes of his first wife, Ida, all but erased from history. Juxtaposing Ida's tragic decline into insanity with Mussolini's phantasmagoric rise to power, Bellocchio fashions a unique glimpse of a little-known aspect of history.

Bellocchio delves into the hidden early life and rise to power of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, as seen through the eyes of his quietly erased first wife. Beginning as a theater actor, journalist, and socialist on the rise, Mussolini meets Australian aristocrat and socialist Ida Dalser in 1914—and she falls hard for him. Their torrid affair compels her to sell everything to help him fund “Il Popolo d’Italia,” the newspaper that would soon become the propaganda tool of the newly formed Fascist party. After Ida gives birth to their son, Mussolini rejects them both. He eventually has them arrested, marries another woman, and dispassionately watches as Ida slips into insanity. Juxtaposing Ida’s tragic story with the phantasmic public one of the grand Il Duce, Bellocchio fashions a unique glimpse into an extraordinary period in Italian history.

Selected Filmography: Fists in the Pocket (65), Leap Into the Void (80), The Butterfly’s Dream (94), The Nanny (98), The Wedding Director (07).

Cultural Partner: Italian Cultural Institute, San Francisco.

128 Minutes    

Interests: Narrative Feature, History.

Mother is the story of an over protective mothers’ undying love and devotion for her mentally handicapped son.

“Convinced that her son has been wrongly accused of murder, a widow throws herself body and soul into proving his innocence. After his madcap allegorical monster movie The Host, Bong Joon-ho returns with an even more startling genre film. Mother begins as a cartoonish, almost slapstick comedy about a village idiot and his insanely doting, long-widowed parent. Midway through, the movie takes a serious turn as the 27-year-old child is railroaded into prison for the murder of a local school girl; then, in its last third, Mother unexpectedly spirals into a chilling psychological drama, as its unstoppable, devoted maternal protector appoints herself the case’s chief investigator and mutates into a cosmic force of nature, giving perhaps the performance of the year.”—New York Film Festival.

Filmography: Barking Dogs Never Bite (01), Memories of Murder (03), The Host (06).

This year’s South Korean submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

Sponsored by Oregon Korea Foundation.

129 Minutes    

Interests: Oscar Submissions, Narrative Feature, Asian.