QUICK SELECT
ANIMATED
Dir: Craig Monahan, Aust., 1989, 85 mins, 16mm, (G)
AFI-Award-winning director Craig Monahan (The Interview) surveys the first 70 years of Australian animation, beginning in 1912 with pioneer animator Harry Julius and then, via the work of Eric Porter, the Owen brothers, Bruce Petty, Yoram Gross and Alex Stitt, to recent experiments and the first years of computer video animation. The film features interviews and informal discussions with leading animators, and there are also generous samples of their now rarely seen work. From the collection of the NFSA. All tickets $5.
INTO THE SHADOWS
Dir: Andrew Scarano, Aust., 2009, 90 mins, digibeta, (classification TBA)
The end of an era for Canberra screen culture – the closure of the Electric Shadows cinema in 2006 – is a discussion starter on the wider problem of making and getting Australian independent cinema out to audiences. Seen in the context of the closure of independent cinemas and Australian cinema’s underwhelming national box office share, directors, producers, exhibitors and critics (including George Miller, Nash Edgerton, Robert Connolly, Rolf de Heer and Andrew Pike) offer their views about our cinema’s crisis of relevance.
THE WIZARD OF OZ
Dir: Larry Semon, USA, 1925, 81 mins, 35mm, (unclassified 15+)
The first feature-lengthed adaptation of Baum’s classic story featured Dorothy Dwan and a younger Oliver Hardy. Kansas and Oz are more integrated than in the 1939 musical, although the story is even more removed from Baum’s tales: Dorothy really is long-lost Oz royalty, whilst the farm hands are just country bumpkins who want to get back to Kansas. The knock-about tone makes a fascinating comparison. Plus: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz(1910, 13 mins) Frank L. Baum’s own very early one-reel adaptation of his Oz stories. Pianist Jan Preston accompanies the screening live. Courtesy UCLA Archive and presented with the support of the Embassy of the United States.
DIRTY DANCING
Dir: Emile Ardolino, USA, 1987, 100 mins, 35mm, (M)
Say goodbye to Swayze under the stars with the now-cult ‘end of innocence’ film. Sometime in the 1960s, Baby (Jennifer Grey) struggles to break out of expected moulds and finds her chance for change through a handsome, holiday resort dancing instructor. The love story of Johnny and Baby became the fairy tale of the late ‘80s and ran for almost a year in most cinemas during its original release, making Patrick Swayze one of the biggest sex symbols in contemporary Hollywood.
LOUISE-MICHEL
Dir: Benoît Delépine, Gustave de Kervern, France, 2008, 94 mins, 35mm, (M)
Gruff Louise works in a toy factory, except that female co-workers and even her apron name-tag call her ‘Jean-Pierre’. When the girls’ lose their jobs to a factory in China, she’s the first to suggest they pool their pay-out and assassinate the boss. They hire Michel, who used to be a miserable fat girl, but who now has delusions of being an International Man of Mystery… Excusez-moi? There’s no real point in going and figuring this crazy hit comedy; directors Delépine and de Kervern – the team behind the deeply subversive French TV comedy Groland – are as much Johnny Rotten as Jacques Tati. Canberra Premiere.
TALENTIME
Dir: Yasmin Ahmad, Malaysia, 2009, 119 mins, 35mm (unclassified 15+)
As teachers and students rush to pull a high school talent contest together, nothing seems like it will be right on the night. Except maybe the teen romance that’s budding between the deaf-mute son of a strict Indian widow and the contest’s rising talent, the gentle daughter of a big-hearted and slightly zany Muslim family. Does a Malaysian cross between Romeo and Juliet and High School Musical sound a little cheesy? Well, in the delicate hands of the great director Yasmin Ahmad, the rom-com starts off as tender and funny, but builds into a deeply moving call for reconciliation between the diverse communities that make up a modern multi-cultural Asian society. The Malaysian box office hit of 2009 will have its Canberra premiere screening in honour of director Ahmad, who passed away soon after the film’s completion. A preview screening of our Regional Intersections season of new Southeast Asian cinema, screening in late February. Presented by the Australian National University Asia-Pacific Week. FREE admission, but bookings essential on 6248 2000.
SARAH
Dir: Yoram Gross, Aust., 1983, 80 mins, 35mm, (G)
Children’s animator Yoram Gross here varied his usual formula of cell animation and starring live-action narrator (in this case Mia Farrow) to do something more personal: an impressionistic account of a tiny Yiddish girl torn by war and persecution from family, village and culture. For many sequences, Gross went back to the style of his animated shorts of the 1960s, and their semi-abstract optical reworks of live footage. The result is a rare Australian children’s film, allowing in some of the darker shadows of Australia’s immigrant experience. Plus selected early animation by Yoram Gross. From the collection of the NFSA. All tickets $5.
UNDERGROUND
Dir: Emir Kusturica, France/ Germany/ Yugoslavia, 1995, 170 mins, 35mm, (M)
Wartime Yugoslav partisans Marco and Blacky begin as idealistic anti-Fascists. But whilst Marco’s troops hide in their bunker through the 1940s (… and ‘50s and ‘60s) and await the order to counter-attack the Nazi invaders, above them Blacky’s doing too well out of socialism to remember to let his comrade know the war is over. Then sometime in the early 1990s, Marco finally surfaces into modern Yugoslavia. Just as he thought, the war against the invaders is still in full swing. In his Cannes Golden Palm award winner, Emir Kusturica’s invented an outrageous allegory of Titoism, as it went from idealism to a shattered collection of cynically manipulated nationalisms.
LIONEL
Dir: Eddie Martin, Aust., 2008, 82 mins, video, (M)
In 1968 a young Aboriginal boxer named Lionel Rose punched his way into history when he became the undisputed world bantamweight champion. Two hundred and fifty thousand people hit the streets of Melbourne to welcome him back from his fight and he went on to become a symbolic figure in the racial politics of the times. Combining a remarkable selection of archival and present day footage and interviews, Lionel explores a mythic sporting figure and his struggle with the dimensions of that myth in his every day life.
THE WILD ANGELS
Dir: Roger Corman, USA, 1966, 86 mins, 16mm, (M)
Easy Rider seems Art House compared to the little-remembered late 1960s cycle of made for drive-in outlaw biker movies, often starring many of Rider ’s cast and makers, and always melting Brando’s Wild One with the then endless bad news about American gun, gang and race violence. B-movie impresario Roger Corman’s entry into the cycle seems like a version of Easy Rider that’s lost its cool. Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern, Michael Pollard and Nancy Sinatra are members of a Hell’s Angel’s chapter on a mission to recover a stolen bike that means more than life itself.
THE LOST BOYS
Dir: Joel Schumacher, USA, 1987, 97 mins, 35mm, (M)
Two brothers, new to a small coastal town, find friendship in two very different peer groups. Whilst the older boy begins to party all night with his biker gang mates, the younger suspects there’s more to his brother’s sleeping-in than adolescent rebellion. Soon he’s fallen in with a pair of nerdy, comic-addicted brothers, who claim the town needs some serious vampireslaying. The original Teen vampire party animals were director Joel Schumacher’s post-glam, no-wave brat pack, including Jason Patric, Coreys Haim and Feldman, plus Kiefer Sutherland.
CITIZEN HAVEL
(Obcan Havel) Dirs: Miroslav Janek, Pavel Kouteck, 145 mins, 35mm (unclassified 18+)
The political life of the Czech Republic’s first president – former dissident playwright Vaclav Havel – is laid bare in this probably unprecedentedly open documentary, begun in 1993 and ended with his retirement two terms and a decade later. There’s been nothing like it before as a portrait of a political leadership. We see Havel in the rough and tumble of Czech politics; his good days, personal life and tragedies (especially his battle with cancer, the death of his first wife and controversial remarriage); and also the celebrity world leader hanging out with Bill Clinton and The Rolling Stones. Canberra Premiere.
