Jaffa, the Orange’s Clockwork (Eyal Sivan, 2009)

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

Sunday 27 March 2022, Movie night: Jaffa, the Orange’s Clockwork (Eyal Sivan, 2009), 86 minutes, English subtitles. Doors open at 20:00, Film starts at 20:30.

In deconstructing the world famous ‘Jaffa oranges’ brand and probing its iconographic history director, Eyal Sivan delves into orientalist fantasies of the Holy Land and the Zionist promise of a “desert” that colonists would be bringing to “bloom”. Sivan uses photographic and filmic archives, poems and paintings, to narrate the history that goes back to a once economically thriving Arab Jaffa, whose prolific and profit-generating orange groves attracted local and neighboring labor in droves for picking, packaging and export. After the Nakba and the expulsion of the Palestinian population, the Israeli state rebranded ‘Jaffa’ as a symbol of an Arab-free Israel. Sivan interviews historians, political analysts and workers, retracing how an orange harvest, once the site of a cooperation, transformed gradually into a symbol of the escalating conflict and war.

Eyal Sivan, is a documentary filmmaker and theoretician based in Paris. Born in 1964 in Haifa Israel and grow up in Jerusalem. After exercising as a professional photographer in Tel-Aviv, he leaves Israel in 1985 and settled in Paris. Since he is sharing is time between Europe and Israel. Known for his controversial films, Sivan directed more than 10 worldwide awarded political documentaries and produced many others. His cinematographic body of work was shown and awarded various prizes in prestigious festivals. Beside worldwide theatrical releases and TV broadcasts, Sivan’s films are regularly exhibit in major art shows around the world. He publishes and lectures on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, documentary filmmaking and ethics, political crimes and representation, political use of memory, genocide and representation, etc.
Presently Sivan in an Honorary Fellow at Univerty of Exeter UK, he is teaching at the Master in Film at the Netherlands Film Academy in Amsterdam and he is member of the editorial board of the Paris based publishing house La Fabrique Editions.
http://eyalsivan.info/

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: Die endlose Nacht (Will Tremper, 1963)

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

Sunday 20 March 2022, Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Die endlose Nacht (Will Tremper, 1963), 83 minutes. In German with English subtitles. Doors open at 20:00, film starts at 20:30.

There is thick fog over Berlin-Tempelhof Airport, and an announcement is made that all flights to West Germany are canceled. Since the airport is in East Germany, many people are not allowed outside and so they are left stranded, hoping in the morning things will clear up.

This film follows six of the people who are caught up in the building, walking aimlessly through the near empty airport. The film is made up of their encounters, and their attempts to make something interesting happen. In some ways, it has a bit of the mood of the pandemic and all the lockdowns… suddenly thrown into a void, a bit lost, with plenty of time to kill, and not knowing how long it will take.

The people who are drifting around are from both sides of the Iron Curtain, and therefore meeting each other for the first time, both suspicious of the other side. To further this East-West connection, the theme song is a tune by the Andrzej Trzaskowskí Quintet, a wicked Polish jazz band featuring the vocals of Wanda Warska.

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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The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996)

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

Sunday 13 March 2022, Movie night: The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996), 90 minutes. Doors open at 20:00, Film starts at 20:30.

Romantic comedy-drama staring Dunye as Cheryl, a young black lesbian working a day job in a video store while trying to make a film about a black actress from the 1930s known for playing the stereotypical “mammy” roles relegated to black actresses during the period. The Watermelon Woman was the first feature film directed by a black lesbian and is considered a landmark in New Queer Cinema. In 2021, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.

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 & White Movie Night: Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmush, 1984)

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

Sunday 6 March 2022, Black & White Movie Night: Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch, 1984), 89 minutes. Doors open at 20:00, Film starts at 20:30.

Masterpiece of modern independent cinema, this film is a black-and-white absurdist deadpan comedy starring jazz musician John Lurie, former Sonic Youth drummer-turned-actor Richard Edson, and Hungarian-born actress and violinist Eszter Balint. It features a minimalist plot in which the main character, Willie, is visited by Eva, his cousin from Hungary. Eva stays with him for ten days before going to Cleveland. Willie and his friend Eddie go to Cleveland to visit her, and the three then take a trip to Florida. The film is shot entirely in single long takes with no standard coverage.

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: 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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