Iranian movie night: My Tehran for Sale (Granaz Moussavi, 2009)

By: börek - February 25th, 2022  Filed under: Filmavond

Sunday 27 February 2022, Iranian movie night: My Tehran for Sale (Persian :تهران من، حراج) Granaz Moussavi, 2009, 101 minutes, in Farsi with English subtitles. Doors open at 19:30, Film starts at 20:00.

Marzieh is a young female actress living in Tehran. The authorities ban her theater work and, like so many young people in Iran, she is forced to lead a secret life in order to express herself artistically. At an underground rave, she meets Iranian born Saman, now an Australian citizen, who offers her a way out of her country and the possibility of living without fear.
My Tehran for Sale is the debut feature film written and directed by avant-garde poet turned filmmaker Granaz Moussavi (she immigrated to Australia with her family in 1997), starring Marzieh Vafamehr, Amir Chegini and Asha Mehrabi. The film explores the contemporary Tehran and its underground art scene, focusing on the life of a young actress who has been banned from her theater work. Struggling to pursue her passion in art as well as her secret lifestyle in a socially oppressed environment, Marzieh gets involved in some subsequent and unexpected events leading her to a decision-making dilemma regarding her survival and identity.
The film addresses issues such as double life of young people, oppression of women, HIV, secret abortions, underground art, massive emigration, crisis of identity, people smuggling, and asylum seeker detention centres. The borders between documentary and fiction are seemingly dissolved in many scenes using a poetic language with a non-linear narrative and an open ending.
In July 2011, Iranian authorities arrested Marzieh Vafamehr, reportedly for acting in the film without proper Islamic hijab and with a shaved head. She was sentenced to one year in prison and 90 lashes, however due to international pressure and various campaigns, an appeals court later reduced her sentence to only three months’ imprisonment. She was released in October 2011.

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: Life According to Agfa (Assi Dayan, 1993)

By: börek - February 3rd, 2022  Filed under: Filmavond

Sunday 20 February 2022, Movie night: Life According to Agfa (Hebrew: החיים על פי אגפא) by Assi Dayan, 1993, 100 minutes. In Hebrew with English subtitles. Doors open at 19:30, Film starts at 20:00.

Life According to Agfa is a Israeli psychological-social drama film written and directed by Assi Dayan and produced by Rafi Bukai and Yoram Kislev. The film revolves around one night in a small Tel Aviv pub whose employees and patrons represent a microcosm of Israeli society – men and women, Jews and Arabs, Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, kibbutzniks and city-dwellers.

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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Black and White Movie Night: The General Line (Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov, 1929)

By: börek - February 3rd, 2022  Filed under: Filmavond

Sunday 13 February 2022, Black and White Movie Night: The General Line, also known as Old and New, by Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov, 1929, 121 minutes. Doors open at 19:30, Film starts at 20:00.

100.000.000 peasants – illiterate, poor, hungry. There comes a day when one woman decides that she can live old life no longer. Using ways of new Soviet state and industrial progress she changes life and labor of her village. A young peasant woman (Marfa played by Marfa Lapkina) is striving for collectivization of farming in her village. In so doing she is confronted with resistance of the older farmers.
The General Line was begun in 1927 as a celebration of the collectivization of agriculture, as championed by old-line Bolshevik Leon Trotsky. Hoping to reach a wide audience, the director forsook his usual practice of emphasizing groups by concentrating on a single rural heroine. Eisenstein briefly abandoned this project to film October: Ten Days That Shook the World, in honour of the 10th anniversary of the Revolution. By the time he was able to return to this film, the Party’s attitudes had changed and Trotsky had fallen from grace. As a result, the film was hastily re-edited and sent out in 1929 under a new title, The Old and the New. In later years, archivists restored The General Line to an approximation of Eisenstein’s original concept. Much of the director’s montage-like imagery—such as using simple props to trace the progress from the agrarian customs of the 19th-century to the more mechanized procedures of the 20th—was common to both versions of the film.

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: Gundermann (Andreas Dresen)

By: börek - February 3rd, 2022  Filed under: Filmavond

Sunday 6 February 2022, Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Gundermann (Andreas Dresen), 118 minutes. In German with English subtitles. Doors open at 19:30, Film starts at 20:00.

This is a biopic about the DDR singer-songwriter Gerhard Gundermann (1955-1998). It is directed by Andreas Dresen, one of the very few East German filmmakers that was allowed to make movies after the fall of the Berlin wall. I love his films because he always sees things from a different angle than West German filmmakers. There is a kind of humanitarianism in Dresen’s films that is missing from West German because they try to be too sensational, too ‘cool’, too controversial or overly sentimental. For Dresen cinema is never a commercial trick or a gimmick.

Our main character Gerhard Gundermann had a job as a crane operator in an excavation site. It’s 1970s and during the day he digs for coal, but at night he was forming rock bands to play music. His songs were thoughtful, touching, rebellious, and hopeful. But after the Berlin wall fell, it turned out he had a contradictory past, and had a secret life working undercover. So what emerges in this flick is a complex portrait of a highly unusual character. Although we like to see the world in black-and-white terms, things are not always so easy… usually reality is in shades.

This film shifts back and forth in time – into the seventies, to the fall of the Berlin wall in the late 80s, and the reunification of the 90s… showing how Gundermann dealt with his double life in his later years.

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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Black and White Night: One, two, three (Billy Wilder, 1961)

By: börek - November 25th, 2021  Filed under: Filmavond

Sunday 28 november 2021, Black and White Night: One, two, three (Billy Wilder, 1961). Free admission. Doors open at 20:00, film starts at 20:30

C.R. “Mac” MacNamara is a high-ranking executive in the Coca Cola Company , assigned to West Berlin after a business fiasco a few years earlier in the Middle East (about which he is still bitter). While based in West Germany for now, Mac is angling to become head of Western European Coca-Cola Operations, based in London. After working on an arrangement to introduce Coke into the Soviet Union, Mac receives a call from his boss, W.P. Hazeltine, at Coca Cola Headquarters in Atlanta. Scarlett Hazeltine, the boss’s hot-blooded but slightly dim 17-year-old socialite daughter, is coming to West Berlin. Mac is assigned the unenviable task of taking care of this young whirlwind.
An expected two-week stay develops into two months, and Mac discovers just why Scarlett is so enamored of West Berlin: she surprises him by announcing that she’s married to Otto Piffl, a young East German Communist with ardent anti-capitalistic views. When the Southern belle is confronted about her foolishness in the matter of helping him blow up anti-American “Yankee Go Home” balloons (how the couple met) she simply replies with, “Why, that ain’t anti American, it’s anti-Yankee… And where I come from, everybody’s against the Yankees …”

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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Circumstance (Maryam Keshavarz, 2011)

By: börek - November 17th, 2021  Filed under: Filmavond

Sunday 21 november 2021, Circumstance (Maryam Keshavarz, 2011) 108 minutes, in Farsi with English subtitles. Free admission. Doors open at 20:00, film starts at 20:30

Circumstance is an amazingly accomplished and complex first feature from Iranian-American writer-director Maryam Keshavarz. Set in Iran, the film was shot in Lebanon. It explores homosexuality in modern Iran, among other subjects. Atafeh is the teenage daughter of a wealthy Iranian family in Tehran. She and her best friend, the orphaned Shireen attend illicit parties and experiment with sex, drinking, and drugs.
MaraKesh Films is the production company spearheaded by writer-director-producer Maryam Keshavarz. MaraKesh Films is dedicated to making sure women and minorities are behind and in front of the camera.

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: Romuald et Juliette (Coline Serreau, 1988)

By: börek - November 8th, 2021  Filed under: Filmavond

Sunday 14 november 2021, Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Romuald et Juliette (Coline Serreau, 1988), 107 minutes. In French with English subtitles. Doors open at 20:00, Film starts at 20:30.

Coline Serreau (La belle verte) is an oddball and marginalized filmmaker, even within French cinema. Despite having quite a series of films, she has never gotten the recognition she deserves. Brilliantly determined, she refuses to tackle hard social problems with bitterness, but instead creates a brazen breeze of surreal humor that instantly reveals how absurd our modern world is. She embraced all the topics that were too hot to handle back in the 1980s… racism, gender inequality, monogamy, queerness.

In this flick we have Daniel Auteuil as a corporate businessman who gets wrapped up in a scandal when he attempts to cut costs in his factories. But then there is a twist… a woman who he always took for granted – the black woman who cleans his office every night – is suddenly able to help him. I won’t say more about the plot, since these broad narrative strokes aren’t what this movie is about anyway. It is about the details, the incredible humor, the beautiful twists and turns, and the sense of humanity that shines in this flick. Director Coline Serreau has a skill for a kind of magic that far surpasses any Hollywood product despite all the money they spend.

This is a sharp, simple, tender film that “does the right thing”. Cinema can be a negative cultural force that encourages fear, hatred, or in the modern sense, passive consumerism. But it once (in the 60s, 70s and 80s) was often used as a positive cultural force, that simply re-evaluated our society and shifted it towards something more humane. If there is any meaning to the word progress, it only makes sense if we end up living a more profound existence. And that is what this flick is about… how we get caught up in a crazy prefabricated world, and end up losing our sense of meaning.

A movie shining with social critique, humor and brilliance.

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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Black Sea Files (Ursula Biemann, 2005), The Host (Miranda Pennell, 2015)

By: börek - November 1st, 2021  Filed under: Filmavond

Sunday 7 november 2021, “Black Sea Files” (2005) by Ursula Biemann (42 minutes).”The Host” (2015) by Miranda Pennell (60 minutes). Free admission. Doors open at 20:00, film starts at 20:30

Both these movies are experimental documentaries about oil. In overgeneralized terms they both pose and attempt to answer the question: “If the modern world stands on a base of fossil fuel use, shouldn’t we assume that fossil fuels have their influence on every aspect of human life?” It’s a paranoid question but in some ways productive. “Black Sea Files” is about the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and how peoples (including the filmmaker’s) lives are organized around and under it. “The Host” is about the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s (later to be renamed British Petroleum) presence in Iran. The director, Miranda Pennell, lived on site in Iran as a child as both her parents worked for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Building her case on old photographs and archive entries, Pennell explores the violence commited on employees, Iranian citizens, and her own parents.

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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