Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Divided Heaven (Konrad Wolf, 1964), GDR series

By: börek - August 31st, 2022  Filed under: Filmavond

Sunday 11 September 2022, Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Divided Heaven / Der geteilte Himmel (GDR series), 1964 adaptation of Christa Wolf’s novel by Konrad Wolf, 109 minutes, in German with English subtitles. Doors open at 20:00, film starts at 20:30.

This film is part of the GDR / Why Women Had Better Sex under Socialism series

Based on the famous novel by Christa Wolf about two lovers who are torn apart as the Berlin Wall is about to be constructed, dividing the country in two. Rita has a lover, but over the course of their relationship it becomes clear they have different political points of view. The movie is great in laying out excellent arguments for both sides… the socialist East Bloc and the consumer-orientated West.

The film embraces the structure of the novel, which begins with a woman waking up in a hospital, and through flashbacks, recounts the recent events that got her there. This wild structure matches well with the film’s French New Wave feel. It is often quite experimental – using angular photography and scenes overlapping between the present moment and the past. The cinematography is crystalline, with an endless array of exquisitely composed black-and-white images. The soundtrack is also bold, with an experimental electronic music score giving the story a modern, ‘in transition’ sort of mood.

It makes sense that since each character is a different gender, they make different decisions. In the West men are in control and have more advantages… and Rita stays in the East where there was much more gender equality. But the real argument is much more than that, it is more about if a person should fight for a cause, or just live as easy as possible.

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to screen a movie, let us know: joe [at] lists [dot] squat [dot] net

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Iranian movie night: The Salesman (Asghar Farhadi, 2016)

By: börek - August 31st, 2022  Filed under: Filmavond

Sunday 4 September 2022, Iranian movie night: The Salesman (Asghar Farhadi, 2016), 125 minutes. In Farsi with English subtitles. Doors open at 20:00, Film starts at 20:30.

Emad and Rana have had to move into a new apartment because their old building is structurally unsafe – a metaphor for their lives, perhaps. The new flat was once rented by a woman working as a prostitute, and one day when she is alone there, Rana casually buzzes in a caller she assumes is her husband.
Asghar Farhadi’s sombre movie is the story of a shocking and mysterious event which shatters the wellbeing of a middle-class couple. It is about male pride, male violence, male privilege. The film tells the story of a sexual assault that exposes the emotions seething beneath the surface of Iranian bourgeois life.

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to screen a movie, let us know: joe [at] lists [dot] squat [dot] net

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Cinema Italia: Ovosodo (Paolo Virzì, 1997)

By: börek - August 17th, 2022  Filed under: Filmavond

Sunday 28 August 2022, Cinema: Ovosodo / Hardboiled egg (Paolo Virzì, 1997), 96 minutes. In Italian with English subtitles. Doors open at 20:30, Film starts at 21:00.

Ovosodo is a coming-of-age film set in Livorno, an industrial city in Tuscany. We follow the life of Piero from childhood to adulthood, in his struggle to get out of the limitations his family life history poses. The protagonist is a working-class member, and slowly but steadily, through his endless search for love, he becomes aware of what this means. The film is also a sharp critique of left-winged Italians who come from other social classes. Moreover, it depicts Italy just before the computer’s revolution with the World Wide Web deeply transforms society, with its omnipresent mobile phones. That was a society where people met face-to-face, without the mediation of technology. A society where contacts were more real and full of solidarity, as in the 1950s, but soon to disappear.

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to screen a movie, let us know: joe [at] lists [dot] squat [dot] net

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Cinema Italia: Pane e tulipani (Silvio Soldini, 2000)

By: börek - August 17th, 2022  Filed under: Filmavond

Sunday 21 August 2022, Cinema: Bread and Tulips / Pane e tulipani (Silvio Soldini, 2000), 114 minutes. In Italian with English subtitles. Doors open at 20:30, Film starts at 21:00.

Bread and Tulips is first and foremost an act of love towards Venice. The protagonist is a woman, interpreted by Licia Maglietta, who wants to escape a meaningless housewife life. She meets a mysterious man, interpreted by Bruno Ganz, who is exceptionally acting in Italian. Aside from the comedy and the beauty of Venice, also shot in angles that you do not expect, this film presents a multi-layered message of social critique of an Italy of fin de siècle (meaning 1990s), stuck between a glorified past and the desire to live life here and now, without compromises.

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to screen a movie, let us know: joe [at] lists [dot] squat [dot] net

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Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: I cannibali (Liliana Cavani, 1970)

By: börek - August 17th, 2022  Filed under: Filmavond

Sunday 14 August 2022, Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: The Year of the Cannibals (Liliana Cavani, 1970), 87 minutes, in Italian with English subtitles. Doors open at 20:30, film starts at 21:00.

This is a wild offbeat plunge into European cinema of the 70s… a time when everything was up for grabs and bold experiments were being forged by visionary directors… in this case Liliana Cavani (The Night Porter). As I have mentioned before, female directors were emerging here in Europe in this period, a phenomena that would pretty much be dashed in the 80s. This bizarre document was made during the social protest years of 1967-69 and stars Britt Ekland along with the uncompromising Pierre Clémenti. It’s loosely based on the Greek tragedy Antigone by Sophocles, but this version has been updated into a surreal-symbolic Italian sci-fi of the 70s.

We enter a situation where the city streets are littered with the copses of hundreds of boys and girls, who were probably demonstrators beaten by the police. The bodies are left there as a warning against rebellion by the government, and no one is allowed to touch them. The story centers on a woman who wants to bury her dead brother, and together with her friend Tiresias, they conspire to break the law and bury the dead. The thunderous music score is by Ennio Morricone.

Ironically the cityscape strewn with lifeless bodies anticipated a bomb which exploded in a Milan bank a few months later. First blamed on leftists, it was later discovered it had been planted by neo-fascists. The bomb blast killed 18 and wounded 80. Director Liliana Cavani would later call her film a “tragic prophecy.”

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to screen a movie, let us know: joe [at] lists [dot] squat [dot] net

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Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Sexy Beast (Jonathan Glazer, 2000)

By: börek - July 2nd, 2022  Filed under: Filmavond

Sunday 10 July 2022, Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Sexy Beast (Jonathan Glazer, 2000), 89 minutes, in English with English subtitles. Doors open at 20:30, film starts at 21:00.

The director of this film Jonathan Glazer says that he based it upon an old Greek myth about a man who thought he was happy and the Gods sent him the unhappiest man on earth. That seems to be a good way to look at this wild story about a British gangster (Ray Winstone) who wants nothing more than retire and enjoy his wealth. He lounges at his villa on Costa del Sol, with not a care in the world, until his Mediterranean paradise is interrupted by Logan (Ben Kingsley), who wants him to be involved in a London heist and won’t take no for am answer. That’s the volatile set-up for this raw drama that explodes into surreal proportions.

Especially Ben Kingsley’s infamous character, as a goateed, shaved-headed pit bull of a gangster is a classic, and its a direct contrast to his earlier academy award winning incarnation of Gandhi. In fact in this film he plays a kind of anti-Gandhi….a pushy gangster type which you will never forget. Director Glazer is best known for his inventive video work for bands like Massive Attack and Radiohead, and here he takes cinema head-on in this “high-voltage crime thriller that crackles with chilling style and wit.”

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to screen a movie, let us know: joe [at] lists [dot] squat [dot] net

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Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002)

By: börek - June 5th, 2022  Filed under: Filmavond

Sunday 12 June 2022, Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002), 97 minutes, in English with English subtitles. Doors open at 20:00, film starts at 20:30.

Scottish director Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk about Kevin) proved to be the boldest of all female European filmmakers when she blasted into the scene with her compelling early short movies and her haunting debut feature Ratcatcher. Morvern Callar was her second feature film, and we find her covering radically different territory yet again, with a story about a woman in Scotland whose boyfriend has committed suicide on Christmas Day. She then breaks away and takes off on a trip with her female friend to Spain. Actually, there is a lot more to this story than what I am telling, involving many levels of deception, intrigue, questions about art and forgery, and hidden secrets, but it’s better to let the story unfold itself. And although there is a story, I would say it isn’t a movie for a story-driven audience, one that is looking for thrills and spills… but rather for an audience that can pick up on ambience, the sensuality of the human face, and quiet subdued moments rather than overblown ones.

This is an absorbing portrait of the main heroine portrayed by Samantha Morton, and if you allow yourself to be open, it will suck you into its vast world. The cinematography hits you over and over again with its atypical framing and focusing, which is immersive and revealing. These images are fused with a wide-ranging soundtrack including music by Aphex Twin, Broadcast, German Kraut-rockers Can, Stereolab, Ween, the Velvet Underground, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood, etc. The film is based on the debut novel by Scottish author Alan Warner, who dedicated his book to musican Holger Czukay, so of course some of his music also emerges in several scenes. The free-form approach and unrushed speed of this flick, devoid of the normal identification gimmicks, means you won’t connect to our main character like you would in ‘normal’ movies…. she stays independent and mysterious. A poetic stream of both rough and lush textures, with an astounding performance by actress Samantha Morton that is absolutely mesmerizing.

This will be a high-definition screening.

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to screen a movie, let us know: joe [at] lists [dot] squat [dot] net

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Movie Night: Arna’s Children (Juliano Mer-Khamis & Danniel Danniel, 2004) + Benefit for the Freedom Theater in Jenin

By: börek - June 1st, 2022  Filed under: Benefiet, Filmavond

Sunday 5 June 2022, Movie Night: Arna’s Children (Juliano Mer-Khamis & Danniel Danniel, 2004) + Benefit for the Freedom Theater in Jenin. Film Language: Arabic & Hebrew (English subtitles). 84 minutes. Doors open at 8pm, film starts at 8:30pm.

The film tells the story of a theatre group that was established by Arna Mer. She comes from a Zionist family and in the 1950s married a Palestinian Arab. On the West Bank, she opened an alternative education system for children whose regular life was disrupted by the Israeli occupation. The theatre group that she started engaged children from Jenin, helping them to express their everyday frustrations, anger, bitterness and fear. Arna’s son Juliano, co-director of this film, was also one of the directors of Jenin’s theatre. With his super 8 camera, he filmed the children during rehearsal periods from 1989 to 1996. Now, he goes back to see what happened to them. Yussef committed a suicide attack in Hadera in 2001, Ashraf was killed in the battle of Jenin, Alla leads a resistance group. Juliano, who today is one of the leading actors in the region, looks back in time in Jenin, trying to understand the choices made by the children he loved and worked with. Eight years ago, the theatre was closed and life became static and paralysed. Shifting back and forth in time, the film reveals the tragedy and horror of lives trapped by the circumstances of war.

The film will be presented by the son of the co-director of the film.

The Freedom Theater in Jenin still exists to this day in Jenin refugee camp. All money donated during the screening will go to the Arna’s theater in Jenin. https://thefreedomtheatre.org/

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to play a movie, let us know: joe [at] squat [dot] net

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