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Click to download the Synopses are from For extensive film reviews and information go to For information on film classification go to Films are screened in the order shown, with a 15 minute interval between films. All film bookings are confirmed by the distributors, but are subject to change. For further information about the society or its programmes, email to |
PROGRAMME FOR 2009
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REVIEWS |
JOURNEY FROM THE FALL "The Americans have broken their promise. They have left us." (Long Nguyen, South Vietnamese resistance fighter) |
REVIEWS |
PERSEPOLIS Marjane Satrapi (voice of Chiara Mastroianni) is growing up in Iran under the old regime - the Shah and his Royal family. But when he is deposed by the new order, Marjane and her family - mother (Catherine Deneuve), father (Simon Abkarian) and grandmother (Danielle Darrieux) - face the new threat of fundamentalism and the Taliban. To make things worse, Iran and Iraq embark on a horrific 10 year war, and Marjane's view of life is filled with fear and death. She seeks refuge in the West but finds herself excluded and homesick. Returning home, she finds that while she is deeply Iranian, she cannot live in Iran and begins a search for a new life and a new identity. |
REVIEWS |
THE ORPHANGE Laura (Belén Rueda) has persuaded her husband, Carlos (Fernando Cayo), to buy the abandoned orphanage where she was raised. They hope the fresh air and rugged setting in the Atlantic Northwest of Spain will provide a wholesome environment for their chronically ill adopted seven year old son, Simón (Roger Príncep). Laura even intends to reopen the facility as a home for children with mental disabilities. But then Simon's games with his invisible friends turns into terrifying drama when Simon himself disappears. |
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THE VISITOR At age 62, widower Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) has lost his passion for teaching and writing, and fills the void by unsuccessfully trying to learn to play classical piano. When his Connecticut college sends him to a Manhattan conference, Walter is surprised to find a young couple has taken up residence in his little used apartment. Victims of a real estate scam, Tarek (Haaz Sleiman), a Syrian man, and Zainab (Danai Gurira), his Senegalese girlfriend, have nowhere else to go and Walter reluctantly allows the couple to stay. Touched by his kindness, Tarek, a talented musician, teaches the aging academic to play the African drum. But when Tarek is arrested as an undocumented citizen and held for deportation, Walter finds himself compelled to help his new friend with a passion he thought he had long ago lost. Then Tarek's mother Mouna (Hiam Abbass) arrives unexpectedly from interstate in search of her son. |
REVIEWS |
YOUNG@HEART The Young @ Heart Chorus is a group of Northampton (US) senior citizens who keep themselves energized by performing contemporary and classic rock and pop songs. Their average age is 81, and many of them must overcome health adversities to participate. Their music is unexpected, going against the stereotype of their age group, performing songs, for example, by James Brown and Sonic Youth. Although they have toured Europe and sang for royalty, this film focuses on chorus director Bob Cilman preparing them with new songs for a concert in their home town, which succeeds in spite of several real heart breaking events. |
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YOU, THE LIVING A series of short sketches, each filmed in one take, dealing with the human condition in all its joy and sorrow,
self confidence and anxiety, greatness and weakness. |
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BLACK ICE Saara (Outi Mäenpää), a Helsinki gynecologist, whose self-assured exterior conceals a strong streak of jealousy,
discovers that her husband Leo (Martti Suosalo) is having an affair with young Tuuli (Ria Kataja), one of his students, who also
works at a martial-arts studio. Intrigued, Saara tries to find out who this girl is, and unwittingly ends up joining Tuuli's class
of self-defence beginners. Little by little, Saara slips into Tuuli's life, gaining her trust and friendship. She even establishes
a troubling intimacy, partly by accident, partly by design. She creates an elaborate scenario, giving herself a false name to
mislead Tuuli and a false lover to dupe her husband. Saara, Tuuli, Leo, and even Leo's sister and her husband are all sucked into
the maelstrom of jealousy and revenge. |
REVIEWS |
NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD Starting in 1971 when the era of savage censorship ended with the introduction of the R certificate, enabling
audiences to see films that confronted the socially conservative mores, several Australian filmmakers pursued genre filmmaking,
often with very small budgets and maverick methods. Many of the films were (and still are) derided, but just as many were commercially
successful, here and overseas. Many of the filmmakers have their say, as do some of their critics and the films are explored in
the context of Australian cinema history. |
REVIEWS |
IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOON Between 1968 and 1972 nine American spacecraft were hurled at the moon and 12 men walked on it. The surviving crew members from every Apollo mission which flew to the moon come together to tell their stories of danger, pride and passion, illustrated with clips of remastered archival footage from NASA, much of it never seen by the public. |
REVIEWS |
THE COUNTERFEITERS In 1944, when the German Reich sees that the end is near, the Nazis decide to produce counterfeit banknotes in the currencies of their enemies to flood and weaken their economies. Notorious counterfeiter Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), arrested before the war and now one of the millions of Jews in captivity, is roped in to help. At the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, two barracks are separated from the rest of the camp and transformed into a fully equipped counterfeiter's workshop, housing a select few prisoners. Operation Bernhard is born and 132 million British pounds printed, under conditions that are tragic and spectacular - and despite opposition from fellow Jewish inmate, Adolf Burger (August Diehl). |
REVIEWS |
JAR CITY Breaking box office records in its native Iceland, and winner of the Crystal Globe for Best film at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival—the premier Eastern European festival—Jar City is a taut thriller that turns on the famously homogeneous gene pool of the tiny Nordic nation.
When an elderly man is found murdered in his basement flat, Inspector Erlendur and his team don't have much to go on, except a photograph of a young girl's grave. They discover that many years ago the man was accused—though not convicted—of horrible crimes. Did his past come back to haunt him? As Erlendur reopens this very cold case, he follows a trail of unusual forensic evidence to the national genetic database, where he encounters the hacker Orn, distraught at the death of his own young daughter. Together, they uncover secrets that are much larger than the murder of one old man—with clues knitted into the bloodline of an entire country. |
REVIEWS |
VALLEY OF FLOWERS Along the highest mountain passes of the Himalayas, tough, intrepid Jalan (Milind Soman) and his gang earn their living by stealing from unsuspecting travelers. Abiding by their own, unique codes of honor and dividing the spoils equally, all is routine until the arrival of the mystifying, beautiful Ushna (Mylene Jampanoi). Appearing mysteriously after the raid of a pilgrim caravan, Ushna adheres to Jalan, claiming to have seen him in her dreams, and refusing to leave his side. Sensing the unease of the rest of the men, Ushna offers to help them in their endeavors, under condition that they not ask why or how she is able to guide them to success. In the time that follows, Ushna leads the gang to tremendous exploits, gaining the respect of the men, and the admiration of Jalan, who begins to fall passionately in love with this mysterious woman. As their success increases, seemingly unstoppable, so the love between Jalan and Ushna mounts in intensity, until they seem to have entered a world of their own. No longer heeding of the world around them, Jalan and Ushna venture too far in their exploits, progressing from the theft of material objects to tampering with elements that should never be tampered with; stealing energy, luck and even the powers of levitation, the two cross over into the bounds of the supernatural. Word of the duo and their strange exploits reaches the shrewd, robust Yeti (Naseeruddin Shah), who takes after them with his three experienced bounty hunters. In the confusion of pursuit, Jalan and Ushna face a temporary separation, the shock of which drives each to desperation. Having lost luck, wealth and friends, the fated two are nevertheless fortuitously reunited. Their passion running higher than ever, they vow never to be separated again, even if this entails deceiving fate and cheating mortality. But life always reserves surprises. |
REVIEWS |
MY WINNIPEG A love poem to Canadian auteur Guy Maddin's soon-to-be-former home, MY WINNIPEG feels like a fever dream that brings together past, present, and future. Repeated words and phrases form a hypnotic cadence as Maddin's cinematic stand-in (Darcy Fehr) chugs through the snowy darkness. "Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Winnipeg," is the chant, rising and falling like the locomotive drone of the night train carrying its somnambulistic fares through Manitoba's premiere city. |
REVIEWS |
HUNGER Inside Belfast's Maze prison in the early 80s, IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) faces the brutality of the system and clashes with the Catholic priest (Liam Cunningham) as he determines to keep fasting in an effort to trigger change in the classification of IRA prisoners not as criminals but as Prisoners of War. |
REVIEWS |
NIGHT NIGHT is a stunning and cinematic big screen event documentary which celebrates Australia at night. It is a new film from director Lawrence Johnston who made the internationally award winning documentary ETERNITY. Showing society in all its forms, people and places, urban and rural, NIGHT explores the universal nature of night and how we experience it. |
REVIEWS |
CARAMEL In Beirut five women who work or frequent a beauty salon, a colourful and sensual microcosm of the city where several generations come into contact, talk and confide in each other. Beautiful Layale (Nadine Labaki) is oblivious to the gaze of a local admirer and instead fixates on a married man. Nisrine (Yasmine Al Masri) will soon be married but is afraid her fiancé will discover he isn't her first lover. Rima (Joanna Moukarzel) has designs on one of her stunning customers. Jamale (Gisele Aouad) is an aspiring actress and is refusing to grow old, while aging seamstress Rose (Siham Haddad) is overwhelmed when she attracts the attentions of a gentleman customer. |
REVIEWS |
MOLIERE It is mid-seventeenth century Paris and Molière (Romain Duris) is a long way from realising his legacy as the true master of comic satire, the author of The Misanthrope and Tartuffe, and a dramatist to rank alongside Shakespeare and Sophocles. He is an impetuous 22 year-old, his theatre troupe is a failure, he is bankrupt and in prison because he can't pay his debts. When his jailers let him go, he disappears. He reappears several months later, when his troupe begins touring the provinces - a tour that lasts for thirteen years and culminates in Molière's triumphant return to Paris in 1658. In those missing few months, he meets an unfaithful husband (Fabrice Luchini) and his beautiful wife (Laura Morante), the object of his desire (Ludivine Sagnier) and a conniving courtier (Eduardo Baer) who leads them all into trouble. |
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I'VE LOVED YOU SO LONG Kristin Scott Thomas gets one of her best roles in ages in this sombre account of a woman coming to terms with her past and present isolation. |
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SUMMER HOURS Summer Hours is the kind of film that could only have been made in France, not just because the houses are so enviable and the clothes so elegant, but because it's an uncompromising, grown-up drama in which educated, middle-class people consider a complex moral issue with barely a cross word, let alone a gun battle or a ravenous zombie. It flags towards the end, but for much of the time Olivier Assayas's film is mature, humane and unshowy. |
REVIEWS |
WENDY AND LUCY Kelly Reichardt's latest ode to the Pacific northwest, Wendy and Lucy, much like the filmmaker's previous work, Old Joy, is a veritable paean to the disenfranchised of America. To all those who are eaten up by the system and who never, for whatever reason (and none is ever given here) become what society expects them to be. To those on the fringe of America. Outcasts and throw-aways. Not bad people. Not lesser people. Simply people who do not know where they belong, where they fit in. This film, like Old Joy is a sad love song of sorts, sung to those for whom the idea of the American dream simply does not exist.
It is one of these wayward "untouchables", a young woman named Wendy, who we follow along her path of disillusionment - a path that never really goes anywhere - with the most grotesque and quite perverse curiosity, like watching a strange exotic animal in a zoo, never daring to think, there but for the grace of God go I. We watch as she meticulously - and quite methodically - keeps track of every cent she spends in a pocket notebook only to see it all be for naught once her car, the very thing she has been living in for God knows how long, breaks down and she becomes trapped once again by society. We also watch as Wendy is nabbed for shoplifting by a strangely overzealous stock boy and in the process of being arrested and booked, loses the one thing that means more to her than her car, her faithful companion, her dog Lucy. We then watch as this lost little girl searches for her Lucy in what seems like such an overpowering, suffocating world full of profiteering auto mechanics and bureaucratic red tape - as well as one of the most harrowing dog pound scenes I have ever seen (this critic had a hard time making it through as all those sadly hopeful eyes peered out at us from behind their chainlinked cages). The very society from which Wendy is supposedly making her escape is the very society that has again ensnared her within its web. And though we may feel like voyeurs at first, like ravenous vultures impatiently awaiting their inevitable carcass, in time, Reichardt's film ensnares us within its web as well, and we to are trapped. (Kevyn Knox)
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REVIEWS |
LEMON TREE Salma (Hiam Abbass), a Palestinian widow, has to stand up against her new neighbour, the Israeli Defense Minister (Doron Tavory), when he moves into his new house opposite her lemon grove, on the green line border between Israel and the West Bank. The Israeli security forces declare that Salma's trees pose a risk to the Minister's safety (a potential hiding place) and issue orders to uproot them. Together with Ziad Daud (Ali Suliman), her young Palestinian lawyer, Salma goes all the way to the Israeli Supreme Court to try and save her trees. Her struggle raises the interest of Mira Navon (Rona Lipaz-Michael), the Defense minister's wife, who is somewhat trapped in her new home and in a lonely life. Despite their differences and the borders between them the two women develop an invisible bond, while ties grow stronger between Salma and Ziad. Salma's legal and personal journey lead her deep into the complex, dark and sometimes funny chaos of the ongoing struggle in the Middle East. |
REVIEWS |
THE BLACK BALLOON Thomas Mollison (Rhys Wakefield) is turning 16, and as his family moves in to a new suburban home in Sydney, his autistic older brother Charlie (Luke Ford) once again embarrasses him as ignorant neighbours stare or make rude remarks. When his pregnant Mother (Toni Collette) is confined to bed, he and his army dad, Simon, (Erik Thomson) are put in charge of the difficult Charlie. His growing interest in school pal, Jackie (Gemma Ward), is also threatened by Charlie's antics, especially when it triggers one particular violent confrontation at Thomas's birthday party. |
REVIEWS |
AWAY FROM HER Grant (Gordon Pinsent) and Fiona (Julie Christie) are comfortable with each other, after 50 years of marriage and a good life. But Fiona's ever-increasing memory loss becomes an issue that neither can ignore, and eventually she enters Meadowlake, a retirement home that specializes in Alzheimers disease. In order for new patients to adjust, no visitors are allowed during the first month, and when Grant visits his wife, she can't remember him, but has turned her affection to Aubrey (Michael Murphy), another resident. Hurt and bewildered, Grant confides in Kristy (Kristen Thomson), a young resident nurse as he begins a friendship with Aubrey's wife Marian (Olympia Dukakis). |
REVIEWS |
WELCOME TO THE STICKS Post office manager Philippe Abrams (Kad Merad) and his wife, Julie (Zoe Felix) love the South of France but when he's found out trying to cheat his way to a posting to the Riviera, he is sent to the dreaded Nord Pas de Calais region for two years. This is France's northernmost region, noted for bad weather, nasty factories and weird food, and socially repressed locals who speak with a terrible dialect. Leaving behind his wife and son Raphael (Lorenzo Ausilia-Foret), Philippe soon finds to his surprise that he's adapting well and enjoying his new environment, with local chum Antoine (Dany Boon). He's reluctant to tell the pessimistic Julie, feeding her horror stories she'd expect. But then Julie decides to be the tangibly supportive wife and move north to be with him .... |
REVIEWS |
DEEP WATER In 1968 Donald Crowhurst, a 36-year-old father, marine electronics inventor and Sunday sailor enters the most daring nautical race ever - the first Sunday Times Golden Globe Solo, non-stop, round the world race, with a £5,000 cash prize for the winner. Crowhurst is driven by financial needs - and his desire to prove to the world that with the help of his revolutionary invention, an on board computer, one could sail the seas effortlessly. The competitors include the amateur Chay Blyth; Frenchman Bernard Moitessier; and Robin Knox-Johnston. Crowhurst soon starts to radio through a series of increasing record-breaking daily distances. The nine men who originally started the race are reduced to just two including Crowhurst. As the world waits for this extraordinary man to cross the finish line to a heroes welcome, the jaw-dropping truth is revealed. |
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HAPPY-GO-LUCKY Poppy (Sally Hawkins) is an irrepressibly cheerful primary school teacher who won't let anyone or anything get her down. Even when her bicycle, which she so happily rides through the busy streets of London, is stolen, her first thought is only: "I didn't even get a chance to say goodbye." Living with her flatmate Zoe (Alexis Zegerman), Poppy has a gift for making the most of life. Determined to learn to drive, she finds herself matched with Scott (Eddie Marsan), an uptight driving instructor who is everything she is not. |
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LET THE RIGHT ONE IN Oskar is a 12-year-old-boy who is being bullied at school. He befriends a mysterious child, Eli, who moves in next door with an older man, Håkan. Eli is revealed to be a 200-year-old vampire, but the two children develop a close relationship and Eli helps Oskar fight back against his tormentors. |
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O'HORTEN Rhapsodic. Anti-climactic. Deadpan. Superbly lit, shot, and cut. Writer-director-producer Bent Hamer's unique blend of vision and attention to detail makes sure that everything fits in this gem of an art-house movie. It's uneventful and unprecedented at the same time. In the process of telling the story of Odd Horten's retirement, Bent Hamer paints an affectionate portrait of his quiet hero. We never know what's really going on in Odd Horten's mind, but we learn a great deal about him just from watching him go about his daily routine during his final days as an award-winning locomotive driver on the Oslo-Bergen express. |
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BUDDHA'S LOST CHILDREN Former professional Thai boxer Khru Bah became a monk 15 years ago, during which time he has been caring for needy and homeless boys at his Golden Horse Monastery in Northern Thailand. Under his guidance and with the help of a nun as his colleague, the young boys learn not only Thai boxing, but an entire life philosophy as they are exposed to the fundamental basics of survival and inner peace. |
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ROMAN DE GARE Best-selling author Judith Ralitzer (Fanny Ardant) is researching unlikely places to find characters for her next novel. As luck would have it, a serial killer with a penchant for magic tricks has just escaped from a high-security prison, providing the perfect source material for an intricately plotted, moody mystery. At the same time, her ghost writer Pierre (Dominique Pignon) gives a lift to a stranger, Huguette (Audrey Dana) who has been left stranded at a gas station after a huge row with her boyfriend. She and her life become Pierre's inspiration for the next Judith Ralitzer novel - but he's no longer satisfied to stay in the shadows, which sets up a clash of wills with the determined author. |
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AFTER THE WEDDING Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen) runs a faltering Bombay orphanage and when a wealthy Danish benefactor, Jorgen (Rolf Lassgard) who could save the place insists on meeting him, Jacob reluctantly leaves Bombay for, he hopes, a brief trip. After a perfunctory meeting, Jorgen invites Jacob to the weekend wedding of his daughter Anna (Stine Fischer Christensen) to Christian (Christian Tafdrup). At the reception, Anna's impromptu speech inadvertently reveals a family secret that implicates her mother Helene (Sidse Babbett Knudsen) and shocks Jacob. It's the beginning of a chain of changes to all their lives. |