6 September 2006 HOTEL RWANDA
TERRY GEORGE has moved from the Irish political scene (In
The Name Of The Father, Some Mother’s Son) to chronicle the events in Africa
in 1994 when the Tutsi people were subjected to a genocidal massacre while the
West prevaricated. His moving and convincing film touches and shames us as he
concentrates on the true story of how one Hutu man found the courage he didn’t
know he had to try to help his Tutsi neighbours.
Don Cheadle, in his first leading
part, is perfect as the suave hotel manager who uses his professional skills,
honed in the service of a white clientele who have abandoned his people, to
outwit and bamboozle the murderous mob who threaten the 1200 he has packed into
his rooms.
Back to top
27 September 2006 THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED
Reversing the
normal trend, a French remake of an American thriller - James Toback’s 1978
Fingers. JACQUES AUDIARD has turned it into a sophisticated psychological
study of a young man torn between his father’s brutal, but profitable,
underworld and his dead mother’s intellectual, artistic world, which he fondly
remembers. ROMAIN DURIS plays the ruthless anti-hero who is drawn, against his
normal inclinations, into the aesthetic world of classical music, which he finds
even more demanding than his established life-style.
Back to top
18 October 2006 SEPARATE LIES
The debut as
writer and director of JULIAN FELLOWES in which he takes a shrewd look at the
comfortable self-deceptions and hypocrisies of the English middle-middle-classes
in the manner in which French directors such as Chabrol have been dissecting the
French bourgeoisie for years. A pompous, but decent, London solicitor has a
young wife who spends most of her time in their country residence trying to live
up to his exacting standards. Then she meets a fascinating local divorcé, but a
fatal hit-and-run accident destroys the calm. Poised playing by TOM WILKINSON,
EMILY WATSON, RUPERT EVERETT and LINDA BASSETT.
Back to top
15 November 2006 MOOLADE
The veteran Senegalese director OUSMANE SEMBENE has been
making outstanding films for many years and at last we have managed to include
one in our programme. The story is set in an apparently peaceful village in
Burkina Faso, where a young woman waits for the son of the village headman to
return from Paris to marry her. Her mother has refused to allow her daughter to
take part in the traditional purification ceremonies and when a group of young
girls go to the mother to ask for her help, she gives them her protection (mooladé)
and the village is torn apart by the resulting conflict.
Beautifully shot by DOMINIQUE GENTIL,
the film is a striking, lively image of the real African world, unusual in our
cinema because it is not that world as viewed by outsiders.
Back to top
5 December 2006 THE CONSTANT GARDENER
When FERNANDO
MEIRELLES, director of the heart-stopping City Of God, took over the
making of this adaptation of the novel by JOHN LE CARRE, it might have been
expected that he would bring to it the vibrancy, humanity and tension of his
earlier work, and he has not disappointed. This exposure of Western commercial
duplicity and callousness in Africa, through the story of the dogged love of a
quiet English junior diplomat, RALPH FIENNES, for his young activist wife,
RACHEL WEISZ in an Oscar winning performance, is both a gripping thriller and a
touching romance. The machinations of major pharmaceutical companies and the
compliance of governments provide the menacing backdrop as he tries to find out
what happened to her and a local doctor friend.
Back to top
17th January 2007 VERA DRAKE
MIKE LEIGH has made an outstanding study of postwar working-class life in
London. Vera is a busy, cheerful housewife who cleans posh houses for a living
and helps her less fortunate neighbours as she passes by, while looking after
her close-knit family of hardworking husband and grown-up son and daughter. She
also helps women who have got into trouble and can see no way out, by removing
their problems. When one girl nearly dies, Vera’s world falls apart. IMELDA
STAUNTON has deservedly won numerous awards for performance as Vera, but the
supporting cast are all excellent in this masterful exposé of the social
hypocrisy of British society before the Abortion Act.
Back to top
7th February 2007 SARABAND
A new film by INGMAR BERGMAN, only his second in twenty years, is an event not
to be missed, especially as he claims it will be his final work. In 1973 he made
a film called Scenes From A Marriage starring ERLAND JOSEPHSON and LIV ULLMANN.
It was a film which charted the tortuous and often painful break-up of a
comfortable middle-class marriage. Three decades later the two protagonists,
divorced and with new lives, meet up again. The initial fond reunion soon begins
to develop cracks as the former wife, a family lawyer, begins to act as
confidante to her ex-husband’s son and granddaughter. An intense, complex film,
it returns to many of Bergman’s earlier films and concerns and shows he has lost
none of his ability to dissect spiritual suffering and moral tensions.
Back to top
14th March 2007
THE INTERPRETER
SYDNEY POLLACK has gone back to an old-fashioned thriller
format, but given it a new setting by opening the story in a fictitious modern
African state and continuing with much of the rest of the film being shot in the
UN building in New York, the first time this has been allowed. NICOLE KIDMAN and
SEAN PENN star, respectively, as a UN interpreter and the secret service agent
charged with both investigating and protecting her when she discovers a plot to
assassinate that state’s President in the General Assembly. How will this
relationship develop and will they translate the clues in time? The answer to
one question is predictable, the other isn’t.
Back to top
4th
April 2007 INHERITANCE
This is another Scandinavian look at the stresses of
middle-class marriage, but this time by the Danish director PER FLY. At first
the young couple seem to be completely happy in their life in Sweden, but when
his father commits suicide, the husband returns to his home in Denmark, the
failing family business and his indomitable mother. Does he save his father’s
company and if so, does he wreck his marriage?
Back to top
Last Year's Programme
