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CANCELLED BECAUSE OF INCLEMENT WEATHER!
An Evening of Shorts will be rescheduled. Sorry for any inconvenience caused by the late notice.
Seven short films from the first-ever Aesthetica Short Film Festival, York, England, held November 3-6, 2011. We are privileged to be able to present to you the best of the 150 shorts from 35 countries shown at the festival. NO ADMISSION CHARGE to this FREE showing. Bring your friends!
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The films are:
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The Romantic Killer, Phillip Berg, Denmark (2010). 14 min. 30 sec. A serial killer seduces a victim. |
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Hasan Everywhere, Andrew Kavanagh, Ireland. (2009) 7 min. (Best Animation) A brief but passionate friendship between an Israeli writer and a Palestinian artist. |
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Buriganga, Michell Coomber, Bangladesh/UK. (2010) 12 min. Capturing the rhythms of the Buriganga River in Bangladesh. |
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Amatorski: Soldier, Maria de Gier, Belgium. (2011) 4 min. 22 sec. (Best Music Video) |
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Light of Family Burnam, Marshall Axani, Canada. (2009) 19 min. 45 sec. A father must embrace the lighter side of death. |
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Bad Night for the Blues, Chris Shepherd, UK. (2010) 14 min. The hues of blue that make up the Tory heartland are more than just a party. |
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Tooty's Wedding, Frederic Casella, UK (2010) 18 min. 30 sec. (Best Comedy) A young couple's marriage hilariously hits the rocks during a weekend wedding in the country. |
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Aesthetica Magazine website
Download ASFF 2011 Complete Program (PDF) With the Adobe Reader plug-in for Firefox, it is possible to open and read the program in the browser without downloading it. Go to the Aesthetica Magazine website and click on the Festival Program image at upper right.
"Gothic romance attracts us with a deep tidal force. Part of its appeal is the sense of ungovernable eroticism squirming to escape from just beneath the surface. Its chaste heroines and dark brooding heroes prowl the gloomy shadows of crepuscular castles, and doomy secrets stir in the corners. Charlotte's Bronte's Jane Eyre is among the greatest of gothic novels, a page turner of such startling power, it leaves its pale latter-day imitators like Twilight flopping for air like stranded fish. To be sure, the dark hero of the story, Rochester, is not a vampire, but that's only a technicality. The tension in the genre is often generated by a virginal girl's attraction to a dangerous man. The more pitiful and helpless the heroine the better, but she must also be proud and virtuous, brave and idealistic. Her attraction to the ominous hero must be based on pity, not fear; he must deserve her idealism.
This atmospheric new Jane Eyre, the latest of many adaptations, understands those qualities, and also the very architecture and landscape that embody the gothic notion." Complete review by Roger Ebert
Awards: Mia Wasilkowska (Jane Eyre) was nominated for a British Independent Film Award (Best Actress).
(2011) Drama/Romance. UK/USA, 120 min. English/French (subtitled as necessary). Rated PG-13.
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A pioneer who makes films about pioneers, Herzog naturally felt simpatico with the first human beings known to have painted on a wall. When he read Judith Thurman's 2008 New Yorker story about a cave discovered in the South of France in 1994 by a three-man team led by Jean-Marie Chauvet, which held drawings nearly 32,000 years old, nearly twice as old as those in Lascaux, he resolved to make a film of them, though photography was forbidden as a safeguard to the fragile environment. He went to French Minister of Culture Frédéric Mitterand and volunteered to become a government employee for the salary of one euro (on which, Herzog promised, he would pay taxes).
Eventually, he and his three-man crew received permission to shoot for five four-hour days, with lightweight 3-D equipment, inside the Chauvet cave, under the sponsorship of The History Channel. The result, Land of Forgotten Dreams, is an enthralled and mostly enthralling guided tour of what Herzog describes as "one of the greatest art discoveries in the history of human culture."
What we learn is that, among the hunters and spear-makers and pelt-curers of 30,000 B.C., there were artists. Someone far more sophisticated than the palm-print brigade sketched glorious images of wild animals–lions, wolves, bison, bears–ť many extinct, and all drawn with a sophistication that reveals their contours and propulsive power. The bison, for example, is shown with eight legs, "suggesting movement," Herzog says, "sort of a proto-cinema." The artist or artists also used the curves in the cave walls to give the figures a seductive illusion of depth; "it is," the filmmaker grandly proclaims, "as if the modern human soul erupted here."
That's typical Herzog, a man out of his time, if not his mind. He is lured into myths of the ancient Teutonic stripe, to tales of human achievement in extreme cold, no less than Leni Riefenstahl, the great and compromised German actress-director of the 1930s. When she wasn't fashioning the landmark Nazi documentary Triumph of the Will, she was starring in mountain films (The White Hell of Pitz Palu, The Blue Light) and focusing her legend-making camera on the flying skiers in Olympia. Herzog's politics are not Riefenstahl's; he's an old-fashioned European leftie. But his documentary work has taken him into the high Alps, for the 1974 The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, a portrait of World Champion Sky-flyer Walter Steiner, and, in 2007, to Antarctica for Encounters at the End of the World, which finally won Herzog an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature. And here he is, paying a call on fellow artists from the last glacial age. Time Magazine
On The Colbert Report, Herzog talked to Stephen Colbert about Cave of Forgotten Dreams. (June 6, 2011)
(2010) Documentary. Canada/USA/France/Germany/UK. 90 min. English/German/French (subtitles as required). Rated G.
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Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amelie is a delicious pastry of a movie, a lighthearted fantasy in which a winsome heroine overcomes a sad childhood and grows up to bring cheer to the needful and joy to herself. You see it, and later when you think about it, you smile. Audrey Tautou, a fresh-faced waif who looks like she knows a secret and can't keep it, plays the title role, as a little girl who grows up starving for affection. Amelie grows up lonely and alone, a waitress in a corner bistro, until one day the death of Princess Diana changes everything. Yes, the shock of the news causes Amelie to drop a bottle cap, which jars loose a stone in the wall of her flat, which leads her to discover a rusty old box in which a long-ago boy hoarded his treasures. And in tracking down the man who was that boy, and returning his box, Amelie finds her life's work: She will make people happy. But not in any old way. So, she will amuse herself (and us) by devising the most extraordinary stratagems for bringing about their happiness.
After discovering the box and bringing happiness to its owner, Amelie improvises other acts of kindness: painting word-pictures of a busy street for a blind man, for example, and pretending to find long-lost love letters to her concierge from her dead husband (Mathieu Kassovitz) who works indifferently in a porn shop and cares only for his hobby, which is to collect the photos people don't want from those automated photo booths and turn them into collages of failed facial expressions.
Amelie likes Nino so much that one day when she sees him in her cafe, she dissolves. Literally. Into a puddle of water. She wants Nino, but some pixie quirk prevents her from going about anything in a straightforward manner and success holds no bliss for her unless it comes about through serendipity. There must be times when Nino wonders if he is being blessed or stalked.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet has specialized in films of astonishing visual invention but, alas, impenetrable narratives (Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children). He worked for Hollywood as the director of Alien: Resurrection, placing it, I wrote, "in what looks like a large, empty hanger filled with prefabricated steel warehouse parts." With Amelie, he has shaken loose from his obsession with rust and clutter, and made a film so filled with light and air, it's like he took the cure. It is so hard to make a nimble, charming comedy. So hard to get the tone right and find actors who embody charm instead of impersonating it. It takes so much confidence to dance on the tightrope of whimsy. Amelie takes those chances, and gets away with them. Complete review by Roger Ebert
Awards: 52 wins and 51 additional nominations, including 4 César awards (Best Film Director, Music, Production Design), four European Film Awards, and nominations for five Academy Awards and the Golden Globe.
(2001) Comedy/Fantasy/Romance. France/Germany. 122 min. French (subtitled). Rated R.
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"They say that if you meet your double, you should kill him.” The mantra in Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez’s eighty-minute film Double Take, 2009, suggests that the real must assert itself against its image to prevent its own defeat in an ongoing battle between fiction and reality. The quotation is from the narrative that anchors the film—written by British novelist Tom McCarthy and based on Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “August 25, 1983”—in which Alfred Hitchcock meets an older version of himself. Alongside the intermittent narration of this tale in voice-over by a Hitchcock “sound-alike,” the film features interviews with Ron Burrage, one of the plethora of portly bowler-hatted Hitchcock look-alikes in Grimonprez’s Looking for Alfred, 2005, as well as carefully edited sequences of archival footage from the late 1950s and early ’60s. These include television news reports of the Cuban missile crisis, US and Soviet satellite launches, atomic bomb tests, and Nixon and Khrushchev’s 1959 “kitchen debate,” in addition to excerpts from Hitchcock’s wry introductions to his own television programs. At various points we see Folgers coffee commercials in which distraught housewives learn to mend their ways after serving their husbands unsatisfactory coffee. Throughout, echoes of and excerpts from "The Birds" propose Hitchcock’s 1963 film as an allegory for television (which, the director once quipped, “has brought murder back into the home—where it belongs”) and for missiles descending from the sky, suggesting a psychohistorical analogy between the fear of nuclear attack and the suspense that Hitchcock made his trademark.
As Grimonprez’s film develops, the parallels press in upon us ever more closely. The two Hitchcocks meet; television duplicates cinema; the opening salvos of the cold war expose the Soviet Union and the West as mirrors of each other. The proliferating layers of doubling are themselves interconnected; as the film implies, the overriding purpose of the space race and of television was propaganda, both individually and, to greatest effect, when acting together. Indeed, a rapid-fire sequence after the final credits portrays both politicians and Hollywood as still invested in perpetuating a culture of fear. We should remember, as Grimonprez has noted, that “The Birds is the first Hitchcock film not to feature ‘The End.’” Double Take plays out our recent history against a fiction even while it presents that history itself as an ongoing story of claustrophobic suspense. --Alexander Scrimgeour (Art Forum)
(2009) Documentary/Comedy. Belgium/Germany/Netherlands. 80 min. English. Not rated.
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About Inside Job, critics have said:
Wall Street owns Washington. You might think you know this, but "Inside Job" makes you feel the enormity of it. --Tom Long (Detroit News)
You don't have to know the difference between a credit default swap and a collateralized debt obligation to feel enraged anew by Charles Ferguson's thorough dissection of the country's economic collapse of 2008.--Christy Lemire (Associated Press)
Here's the biggest story of our time, lucidly told.--David Sexton (This is London)
Awards: Numerous awards, include Academy Award (Best Documentary), one of the top 5 documentaries of the year (National Board of Review), Best Documentary (NY Film Critics Circle), and Best Documentary Screenplay (Writers Guild Awards).
(2010) USA. Documentary/Crime. 120 min. English. Rated PG-13.
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This film adaptation of Marxist writer `Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi’s 1953 novel, set in the 1930s, is an epic chronicle of life in a rural Egyptian village. The main plot concerns the unsuccessful attempts of the villagers to retain their access to water. Told that they can only irrigate their land a few days a month, several of the villagers are arrested for overwatering. Although the outside threat originally seems to unite the villagers, divisions resurface, and one of them is bought off by the local bey, representative of the ruling class in general. Portrayed as a narcissistic, European-featured aesthete alienated from the land beneath his feet, the aristocrat has no compulsion against destroying the life of the poor peasants, or fellahs. Eventually, his decision to build a road through the fields to his house leads to confiscation of several villagers’ land, including that of the film's central presence, Abu Swaylim (played by Chahine regular, Mahmoud el-Milligi). Troops are brought in to enforce the unjust law, but Abu Swaylim develops a relationship with their leader, Captain Abdullah, a sympathetic character whose class position aligns him with the villagers rather than his superiors. Nevertheless, other authorities arrive, and the film concludes as Abu Swayulim is dragged, dying, from his land, his fingers clinging to the precious, life-giving earth.
Imagery of water pervades Al-Ard, reflecting the faces of numerous characters. When the authorities shave Abu Swaylim’s moustache while he is imprisoned, the forceable removal of this Middle Eastern marker of masculinity symbolizes the loss of dignity and honor of someone who worked the land. Al-Ard is one of relatively few Egyptian films to address rural poverty in detail. It was made under the auspices of the public sector, during the administration of Gamal Abdel Nasser, and while it was set in an unspecified time in the past, under the constitutional monarchy, Nasserist land reforms had not changed conditions substantially. Further socialist-oriented reforms was viewed by many in Egypt at the time as both possible and necessary. By extension, Al-Ard has also been interpreted as a plea for Arab control of the Middle East, and thus a metaphor for the loss of territory to Israel in the 1967 War. The film’s title was also the name of a pan-Arabist Palestinian organization advocating Palestinian liberation prior to the formation of the PLO. Al-Ard screened at the Cannes Film Festival and substantially advanced director Chahine’s international reputation.
(1969) Drama. Egypt. 130 min. Arabic (subtitled). Not rated.
Awards: Nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes (1970).
Tambien la Lluvia sets up an intriguing dialogue about Spanish imperialism through incidents taking place some 500 years apart, while examining the personal belief systems of the members of a film crew headed by director Sebastian (Gael Garcia Bernal) and his producer Costa (Luis Tosar) who arrive in Bolivia to make a revisionist film about the conquest of Latin America. Set in February and March of 2000 when real-life protests against the privatization of water rocked the nation, the film reflexively blurs the line between fiction and reality in what Variety calls "a powerful, richly layered indictment of the plight of Latin America's dispossessed." Carlos Aduviri is dynamic as a local who is cast as a 15th century native in the film, but when the make-up and loin cloth come off, he sails into action protesting his community's deprivation of water at the hands of the government. Meanwhile, Gael Garcia Bernal's Idealist film director is as relentless as Werner Herzog infamously was in making Fitzcarraldo, pushing ahead against all odds, ignoring the prevailing danger about to disrupt at any moment. Despite the devastation emerging around him, Sebastian seems unable to engage with any emotion other than a dogmatic desire to get his film done. And of course, the film also recalls themes in Herzog's Aguirre, Wrath of God.
Awards:16 wins and 13 nominations, including six Cinema Writers Circle Awards (Spain), three Goya Awards, and a nomination for Best Film (European Film Awards).
(2010) Drama. Spain/Mexico/France. 103 min. Spanish/Quechua/English (subtitled). Not rated.
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The importance of seeing, seeing the world deeply, is at the heart of this quietly devastating, humanistic work from the South Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong. For Mija (Yun Jung-hee), a 66-year-old raising her only grandson, Wook (Lee David), in a cramped, cluttered apartment in an unnamed city, the pursuit of poetry becomes a pastime and then a passion and finally a means of transcendence. At first, though, it’s a pleasant distraction from an otherwise mundane existence, if also a way to exercise a mind that, as a doctor tells Mija early on, has begun to slip slowly away from her. Out of fear or confusion, she keeps the diagnosis to herself and almost from herself, telling neither Wook nor his mother, who lives in another city. Instead she dons the poet’s cap.
She seems so unremarkable, this woman with her white hats, tidily arranged scarves and vanity. But like this subtle, transfixing film, she draws you in. Crucial in this respect is Ms. Yun’s performance, a tour de force of emotional complexity that builds through restraint and, like Mr. Lee’s unadorned visual style, earns rather than demands your attention. The shabby rooms and ordinary streets in Poetry are shown without fanfare, more like statements of facts than pieces of an evolving narrative. Yet it’s the prosaic quality of this world, its ordinariness, that makes the story’s shocks reverberate so forcefully, beginning with the revelation that Wook and five friends, all boys, have been implicated in the death of a classmate, a girl first seen floating face down in a river in the opening scene; the corpse belongs to a teenage girl who accused some classmates of having serially raped her. For them, this death wasn’t cataclysmic, just play that got out of hand.
This cruelty doesn’t exist in isolation, as becomes obvious when the father of one of the other accused rapists contacts Mija and sweeps her off to an afternoon meeting at a restaurant. Together, he and four other fathers have decided — with the school’s blessing — to give the dead girl’s mother a large sum of cash, a bribe for her silence.
Out of pain, Mija finds a way to see, really see the world, with its flowers, rustling trees, laughing people and cruelties, and in doing so turns reality into art, tragedy into the sublime. It’s an extraordinary transformation, one that emerges through seemingly unconnected narrative fragments, tenderly observed moments and a formal rigor that might go unnoticed. Yet everything pieces together in this heartbreaking film, less a circle than a continuum.
At one point, Mija asks her poetry teacher with almost comic innocence, “When does a ‘poetic inspiration’ come?” He says that she must wander around, seek it out, but that it’s there, right where she stands. In truth, she doesn’t have to ask why because the film — itself an example of how art allows us to rise out of ourselves to feel for another through imaginative sympathy — answers that question beautifully.
Awards: Numerous awards, including Best Director, Best Screenplay (Asian Film Awards), Best Actress, Best Director (Asia Pacific Film Awards), and Best Screenplay and Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at Cannes, where it was also nominated for the Palme d'Or.
(2010) Drama. South Korea. 139 min. Korean (subtitled). Not rated.
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Co-directors Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger said:
“The war in Afghanistan has become highly politicized, but soldiers rarely take part in that discussion. Our intention was to capture the experience of combat, boredom and fear through the eyes of the soldiers themselves. Their lives were our lives: we did not sit down with their families, we did not interview Afghans, we did not explore geopolitical debates. Soldiers are living and fighting and dying at remote outposts in Afghanistan in conditions that few Americans back home can imagine. Their experiences are important to understand, regardless of one's political beliefs. Beliefs are a way to avoid looking at reality. This is reality.”
Tim Hetherington was killed April 20, 2011, while covering the conflict in Libya.
Awards: 7 wins and 7 nominations, including Grand Jury Prize at Sundance (Documentary), and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Documentary.
(2010) Documentary/War. US, 93 min. English. Rated R
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