Fall 2009 Global Cinema Series
Tuesday, Sept. 29
La Haine (France)
This film follows one day in the lives of three unemployed young
men who live on a housing estate in a deprived suburb of Paris.
They mull over the events of the day before, when there was a
violent confrontation between police and rioters, which arose after
a young Arab was brutally attacked by a policeman. One swears that
if the Arab dies, he will find a policeman and kill him. He reveals
that he managed to purloin a loaded gun during the riot. The three
young men spend the evening in Paris, killing time and generally
making a nuisance. When they return home the following day, they
are picked on by the police, with disastrous consequences.
.........................
Director: Mathieu Kassovitz
Facilitator: Jennifer Selby, Department of
Religious Studies
Awards: Best Director (Cannes Film Festival); Best
Editing, Best Film, Best Producer (César Awards); Best Young
Film (European Film Awards); Best Foreign Language Film (Film
Critics Circle of Australia Awards); Best Director, Best Film
(Lumiere Awards).
Tuesday, Oct. 13
The Herd (Canada, 1999)
The Herd traces the true-life tale of Andy Bahr's reindeer drive
across 2,400 km of hostile and unmapped terrain from Alaska in 1929
with a small team of Inuit and Sami herders and 3,000 reindeer. The
Canadian government purchased the herd to provide a livelihood for
the Mackenzie Delta Inuit. The reindeer drive, expected to take
about 18 months, lasted 6 years. Filmmaker Peter Lynch continues to
challenge the boundaries of fact and fiction, fusing drama and
documentary.
.........................
Director: Ken Wardrop
Facilitator: John Sandlos, Department of
History
Tuesday, Oct. 27
Suite Havana (Cuba, 2003)
A multi-award-winning film describes with tenderness and humour a
day in the life of 10 ordinary Havana citizens who express
themselves through images not words. In compelling vignettes we
follow amongst others, a man who seeks solace at night by escaping
to play the saxophone in a church, an elderly lady selling peanuts
and the mutual dependence of a widower and his downs syndrome son.
A documentary without interviews, presents the Cuba of today:
complex, intimate and controversial.
.........................
Director: Fernando Pérez
Facilitator: Myriam Osorio, Department of French
and Spanish
Awards: Havana Film Festival (2003): Best
Director, Best Music, Best Sound, Best Film Poster; FIPRESCI prize,
Grand Coral - First Prize; UPEC Cultural Circle Award and Goya
Awards (Spanish Academy Awards, 2004) Martin Luther King Memorial
Centre Award.
Tuesday, Nov. 10
PRIMER (USA)
PRIMER is set in the industrial suburbs of an unnamed contemporary
city where two young engineers work by day for a large corporation
while conducting extracurricular experiments on their own time in a
garage. While tweaking their current project, a device that reduces
the apparent mass of any object placed inside it by blocking
gravitational pull, they accidentally discover that it has some
highly unexpected capabilities--ones that could enable them to do
and to have seemingly anything they want. Taking advantage of this
unique opportunity is the first challenge they face. Dealing with
the consequences is the next.
.........................
Director: Shane Carruth. (Carruth, a former
engineer who spent three years teaching himself filmmaking,
conceived, wrote, directed, edited and scored PRIMER and also plays
one of the lead roles.)
Facilitator: Joshua Lepawsky, Department of
Geography
Awards: 2004 Sundance Film Festival: Grand Jury
Prize, Alfred P. Sloan Prize:2004 Nantucket Film Festival: Best
writer/director;2004 Gotham Awards Nomination: Best Feature;2005
London International Festival of Science Fiction: Best Feature;2005
Independent Spirit Award Nomination: Best Feature, Best Director,
Best Director, Best First Screenplay.
Tuesday, Nov. 24
Persepolis (France, 2007)
The coming-of-age story of a precocious and outspoken young Iranian
girl that begins during the Islamic Revolution. We meet
nine-year-old Marjane when the fundamentalists first take power,
following her as she cleverly outsmarts the "social guardians" and
discovers punk, while living with the terror of government
persecution and the Iran/Iraq war. Marjane's journey moves on to
school in Austria where she has to combat the religious
fundamentalism and extremism she fled her country to escape.
Marjane eventually gains acceptance in Europe, but finds herself
alone and horribly homesick, and returns to Iran to be with her
family, though it means putting on the veil and living in a
tyrannical society. At age twenty-four, she realizes that while she
is deeply Iranian, she cannot live in Iran. She then makes the
heartbreaking decision to leave her homeland for France.
.........................
Director: Marjane Satarpi with Vincent
Paronnaud
Facilitator: Jenina MacGillivray, Department of
Philosophy
Awards: 80th Academy Awards: Nominated, Best
Animated Feature, 65th Golden Globe Awards; Nominated: Best Foreign
Language Film, César Awards: Best First Work , Best Writing,
Nominated: Best Editing, Best Film, Best Music Written for a Film,
Best Sound , 2007 Cannes Film Festival: Jury Prize, Nominated:
Palme d'Or; 2007 London Film Festival: Southerland Trophy (Grand
prize of the festival); 2007 São Paulo International Film
Festival: Best Foreign Language Film; 2007 Vancouver International
Film Festival: Rogers People's Choice Award for Most Popular
International Film.
Tuesday, Dec. 8
La prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV/ The Rise to Power of
Louis XIV (France, 1966)
Filmmaking legend, Roberto Rossellini, brings his realist
cinematography and focus on the everyday to this portrait of the
early years of the reign of France’s Sun King; in the
process, Rossellini reinvents the costume drama. The 1966 French
television film revolves around French king Louis XIV's rise to
power after the death of his powerful advisor, Cardinal Mazarin. To
achieve this political autonomy, Louis deals with his mother and
the court nobles, all of whom assumed that Mazarin's death would
give them all more power. The construction of the palace at
Versailles, the extravagant meals of the royal court: all are
recounted with the same meticulous detail that Rossellini brought
to his contemporary portraits of postwar Italy.
.........................
Director: Roberto Rossellini
Facilitator: James Bradley, Department of
Philosophy
$8 per film or 6 for $45
Tickets are available at the door --- exact change greatly appreciated! --- or may be reserved in advance by calling the Division of Lifelong Learning at 737-7979. All films begin promptly at 7 p.m. in the Inco Innovation Centre, IIC2001.