HIGH LONESOME

Dir: Rachel Liebling, USA, 1991, 16mm, 95 mins, unclassified 18+

Following on our screening of Pennebaker’s Down from the Mountain, a chance to see Rachel Lieblings' 1991 documentary history of the Bluegrass music at the roots of the concert, the film and the popular culture of the Kentucky Hills. Includes the songs and stories of Ralph Stanley, Mac Wiseman, Jimmy Martin, Flatt & Scruggs and the great Bill Monroe.
From the collection of the NFSA.

BREATHLESS

(Ddongpari) Dir: Yang Ik-Joon, Sth Korea, 2008, 130 mins, 35mm, (unclassified 18+)

The Rotterdam and Pusan Film Festival award-winner marks a powerful break-through for Korean cinema, tackling head-on what is often shocking, compelling, but also disquieting in its filmmaking. A national culture of violence becomes the film’s tough central theme, as director and star Yang looks at the tough life of petty thug and enforcer Sang-hoon (the 'shit-fly' of the film's literal Korean title) and schoolgirl teen Yeon-hue. Frank in its grasp of the conditions that make him brutal and their environment brutalising, it's sympathetic but never sympathising, standing out as a fearless examination of the social context that spawned the film, and possibly a profound challenge to its own audience.

2009 AFI AWARD SHORT FILM NOMINEES

Total 123 mins, video except as noted (unclassified 18+)

A chance for the Canberra public to see the Australian Film Institute's 2009 AFI Awards Short Fiction and Animation nominees on the cinema screen. For more information see www.afi.org.au.

BURN
Dir: David Selvarajah Vadiveloo, 34 mins
In this groundbreaking drama from Community Prophets, 11 young adults from the inner-city streets of Sydney, improvise a confronting film about 16 year old Tee Samuelu, whose life spins out of control when he seeks acceptance from older gang members. A searing exploration of youth identity and the dangerous rise of group offending.

LIEBERMANS IN THE SKY
Dir: Richard Vilensky, 18 mins
Liebermans In The Sky is an offbeat comedic journey through fatherhood, waterbeds and Cabalisitc folklore. It is the story of Alan Lieberman, beleaguered waterbed salesman, on the worst day of his life. It is a story about failure and one man's journey towards realising that, like levitation, there are some things in life we cannot achieve.

MIRACLE FISH
Dir: Luke Doolan, 18 mins
8 year old Joe has a birthday he will never forget. After friends tease him, he sneaks off to the sick bay, wishing everyone in the world would go away. He wakes up to find his dream may have become a reality.

WATER
Dir: Corrie Jones, 18 mins
Toby yearns for a life like any other eight-year-old kid. But his mentally disabled father is a constant reminder that life for Toby, will never be normal.

In the Animation Category:

THE CAT PIANO
Dir: Eddie White, Ari Gibson, 9 mins, 35mm
A vibrant city of singing cats is preyed upon by a mysterious, dark figure, intent on performing his own twisted feline symphony.

CHICKEN OF GOD
Dir: Frank Woodley, Clem Stamation, 9 mins
On a drought-ravaged vineyard, Yirri is about to kill his last chicken. He's stopped by his wife, Teresa, who claims the chicken's comb resembles the face of Jesus. Bizarre miracles start to happen, but Yirri and Teresa look a gift chicken in the mouth, with disastrous results of biblical proportions.

THE NOT-SO-GREAT EUGENE GREEN
Dir: Michael Hill, 13 mins
Eugene is a strange elderly man with a simple dream - to entertain his world through the art of vocal sound effects. The trouble is that he only possesses a very small repertoire. Repeatedly rejected by the people around him, Eugene meets Madeleine, an equally strange woman, who shares his sense of humour. But when Madeline disappears from his life, Eugene realises just how alone he really is.

REACH
Dir: Luke Randall, 4 mins
A tiny robot is given the gift of life with only one limitation - the length of his power cable. When a curious bird appears at the workshop window, his lust to live outside of his reach may be his demise.

ROME, OPEN CITY

(Roma, città aperta) Dir: Roberto Rossellini, Italy, 1945, 100 mins, 35mm, (M)

Planned while the Germans were still in Rome, in production two months after liberation; this is where Rossellini and his collaborators (including Federico Fellini) initiated Neorealism. Re-creating actual moments of the occupation in the locations they took place, Rossellini also created an apparently artless style, where “getting the shot” outweighed composition and editing – the aesthetic breakthrough that still dominates our sense of cinema realism. Winning at Cannes in 1946, it was also a revelation of a new sort of acting naturalism, embodied in the haunting Anna Magnani. New restoration courtesy Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia-Cineteca Nazionale. Preceded by the classic Australian doco on post-war railway gauge reform, Journey of a Nation (dir: John Heyer, 1947, 9 mins, 35mm), script by Catherine Duncan.

KEEP ON ROCKIN

Dir: DA Pennebaker, USA, 1969, 96 mins, 35mm, (unclassified 15+)

During the autumn of love, wedged between the high of Woodstock and comedown of the Altamont Speedway, Aquarian music fans headed north for the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival festival. Ever-intrepid documentarian DA Pennebaker followed, and Keep on Rockin’ is the result. Rock legends of the day Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix take to the mike to open proceedings, before a procession of ‘revived’ superstars - Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Bo Diddley - remind the crowd that the ‘50s knew how to rock too.

THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES

Dir: William Wyler, USA, 1946, 172 mins, 35mm, (PG)

Three demobbed servicemen – family man Fredric March, soda-jerk turned war-hero Dana Andrews and real life amputee sailor (and eventual Oscar-winner) Harold Russell – come home to small town USA. The unexpected Hollywood (and Australian) box office super-hit of peacetime’s first months brought a new realism to American cinema. The direction was unusually personal. William Wyler himself had only just arrived from work as a frontline filmmaker on classics such as The Memphis Belle and his work buried deep and uniquely into the suppressed grief and post-war unease of audiences. Courtesy of the Academy Film Archive and with the support of the Embassy of the United States.

TULPAN

Dir: Sergei Dvortsevoy, Russia/Germany/Kazakhstan, 2008, 100 mins, 35mm, (PG)

The winner of a slew of festival awards, including Un Certain Regard at Cannes, Tulpan’s humble, but visually expansive tale of a herder’s painful attempts to find a wife has struck a special chord with art house audiences, and opened them up to a new national cinema.

OUR CENTURY and HIGHWAY

104 mins, unclassified 18+

Short masterpieces from two Central Asian cinema greats. Our Century (Mer dare, Armenia, 1983, 47 mins) – the longest film completed by Armenian visionary Artavazd Peleshian, in a career of less than three hours of released film – is a haunting cine-poem, created from archival footage, and speaking to the tragic history of 20th century Armenia. Tulpan director Sergei Dvortsevoy’s Highway (France/Russia/Kazakhstan, 1999, 57 mins) accompanies a family travelling circus; their magic able to briefly transform the barren Kazakh steppes into an enchanted world, but never able to keep poverty at bay.

SWEET MARSHALL

Dir: Eva Acharya, Martin Alvarez Garcia, 91 mins, 35mm, (M)

Marshall has it all. But his high paying job places him on the criminal’s most-wanted list. It all comes crashing down when Marshall is imprisoned for a robbery he did not commit. But jail becomes his play ground, as he weaves his master plan. When he gets his freedom, Marshall becomes a hunted man. Kidnapped, drugged and tortured, he is caught in a sticky web of lies and seduction. Or is he?

PAISÀ

Dir: Roberto Rossellini, Italy, 1946, 134 mins, 35mm, (PG)

Rossellini’s Rome, Open City follow-up is a collection of six moral tales from the last days of the war and from its ruins; produced to suggest, but also to understand, the solidarity between Italian partisans and their American liberators. The film verges on documentary, in its use of newsreel and other reportage technique (animated maps, authoritative voice-over commentary). But these vignettes of tragedy, confusion, brutality and unlikely relationships have a poignant grasp of the moral experience of war that no documentary could. Courtesy of the BFI.

COMPANY

Dir: DA Pennebaker, USA, Total 112 mins, 16mm, (unclassified 15+)

Rare screenings of equally rare insights into the backstage life of Broadway productions. The sensation of the 1970 New York Film Festival, D A Pennebaker’s Company: Original Cast Album (USA, 1969, 60’) captures the in turns joyous and gruelling 18 1/2 hour recording session for the soundtrack to Stephen Sondheim’s musical Company.

THE FALL OF OTRAR

(Gibel Otrara) Dir: Ardak Amirkulov Kazakhstan, 1990, 176 mins, 35mm, (unclassified 18+)

Four years in the making, Amirkulov's epic account of Genghis Khan’s destruction of the East Asian civilization of Otrar is hallucinatory, visually resplendent even in its sepia palette, and ferociously energetic. Packed with eye-catching (and gouging) detail and B-movie fervour, it traverses an endless variety of epic landscapes and ornate palaces. Spurring the new wave of Kazakh cinema, and also western hits like Mongol, The Fall Of Otrar is also one of cinema’s more astute historical parables, well aware of its parallels to the story of Stalin’s Soviet Union.