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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It Must Be Heaven (Elia Suleiman, 2019)

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

Sunday 31 october 2021, It Must Be Heaven (Elia Suleiman, 2019) 97 minutes, with English subtitles. Free admission. Doors open at 20:00, film starts at 20:30

The film, which stars Suleiman, follows him as he goes from Paris to New York in a semi-autobiographical tale of a Palestinian man seeking a new homeland, only to find similarities with his homeland wherever he goes.
The jury (from the Cannes film festival) said in a statement: “In a subtle, stylistically strong and humorous way, this film tells a story that goes beyond politics, religions, authorities and cultural differences. Even though those differences are observed with a sharp eye for the absurd that slides through hypocrisy and are delivered with great cinematic and often surprising choreographies.”

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: Tout va bien (Jean-Luc Godard, 1972)

By: börek - October 24th, 2021  Filed under: Filmavond

Sunday 24 october 2021, Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Tout va bien (Everything’s All Right), directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 1972, 96 minutes. In French with English subtitles. Doors open at 20:00, Film starts at 20:30.

Directly after the ground-breaking historical events that occurred in May ’68 in France, director Jean-Luc Godard went into a crisis. He was famous internationally, but the revolution shook him so deeply that he realized that such fame was a fraud and actually undemocratic! So Godard went into collective filmmaking, and this film was the major result of this period. These collaborations are known as the Dziga-Vertov films.
Because he had two major stars signed for the project – Jane Fonda and Yves Montand – he was able to make a big-budget experimental film that follows the journey of a filmmaker and a reporter caught up in a worker’s take-over of a sausage factory. So there is an intimate love story, but this film also steps back and looks at the bigger picture. By approaching the situation in this way, Godard, together with Jean-Pierre Gorin, are able to analyze the movie industry, society in general, how news is reported by the mass media, along with structurally undemocratic hierarchies inherent in factories and most places of work.
Certainly a bewildering movie, there is nothing else quite like it. Mid-way through the film you see the look on actor Yves Montand’s face, something like “What the fuck is going on? How did I get mixed up in this!” It is a crazy film, with a lot of humor, but also despair. There is a thoughtful and melancholy mood that hangs over this innovative flick, as Godard stubbornly continues the battle when most others have already given up, ditched the ship, and gone for the cash in post-May ’68 France. This is the kind of film you need to watch if you want to explore, understand the world around you… and also to grasp the untapped possibilities of cinema.

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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Letter from a Time of Exile (Borhane Alaouié, 1988) – The Chair (Cynthia Choucair, 2002)

By: börek - October 7th, 2021  Filed under: Filmavond

Sunday 10 October 2021, Lebanese movie night: Letter from a Time of Exile (Borhane Alaouié, 1988, 52 minutes) – The Chair (لغة فرنسية) (Cynthia Choucair, 2002, 21 minutes). Both films in arabic with english subtitles. Free admission. Doors open at 20:00, Film starts at 20:30

In Letter from a Time of Exile, Borhane Alaouié presents the stories of four exiles from Beirut. Their only connection is the voice of the narrator and their situation of living in exile in Europe. Told with a subtle humor, the film sketches four highly individual portraits of people, whose lives have taken unexpected turns due to the madness of the Civil War.
Borhane Alaouié, Lebanese film director from South Lebanon, died in September 2021 in Brussels. He was 80 years old. He shot his first feature film Kafr Kassem in 1974, his work was immediately recognized internationally as one of the best Arab films of the year.
Director Hady Zaccack remembers: “Borhane Alaouié was a spiritual father for me and for Lebanese cinema, this new cinema which was born in 1975. The filmmaker was the most loved of a group of filmmakers like Maroun Baghdadi, Jocelyne Saab, Jean Chamoun, Randa Chahhal… who have transformed the country’s cinematographic landscape. Its disappearance coincides with the disappearance of a modern, secular vision of a new Lebanon, far from confessionalism. His cinema, which deals in particular with social problems, exile and return, was a pan-Arab cinema with Beirut as the center of his stories, but also Egypt (It is not enough that God is with the poor, 1978). Borhane Alaouié was my teacher, the one who paved my way by telling me one day: “You have to choose between being a critic or a filmmaker.” So he pushed me to make films and see them as a critic. I owe him a lot since the day he supervised my thesis film. It was a film school in itself. His departure marks the end of an era that is withering forever… tragically.”

The Chair (لغة فرنسية) by Lebanese filmmaker Cynthia Choucair (2002, 21 minutes).

While playing Basketball, 12-year-old Nader and 8-year-old Samer rip the chair of their dead brother. Fearing their mother’s anger, they throw it in the bin. Wallowing in a sense of guilt, the two brothers go out to retrieve it, but unfortunately the chair is no longer there.
Cynthia Choucair graduated from the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (University of Balamand) in 1998 and holds a Master’s degree in cinema from IESAV, Saint Joseph University, Beirut. In 2007 she founded her production house “Road 2 Films”.
In 2012, her documentary “Powerless” addresses the issue of Lebanon’s electricity crisis through the testimonies of Jamal and others whose lives have been greatly affected by the persistent electricity shortage in their country.
Her documentary “Counting Tiles” was premiered in 2018 with a group of clowns who set off for the island of Lesbos to deliver laughter to refugees. These clowns are member of Clown Me In, a Beirut-based group that performs for young Syrian refugees: the children of a new generation of war.

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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