Sunday January 18th 2015, Movie Night:pERVERT cINEMA pRESENTS: La Grande Bouffe by Marco Ferreri, 1973. In French with English subtitles. Door opens at 8pm, film begins at 9pm.
A group of men hire some prostitutes and go to a villa in the countryside. There, they engage in group sex and resolve to eat themselves to death.
Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Doors open at 8pm, film begins at 9pm, free entrance. You want to play a movie, let us know: joe [at] squat [dot] net
Sunday January 11th 2015, Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema by Jeffrey Babcock: Szerelem (Love). Directed by Károly Makk, 84 minutes. In Hungarian with English subtitles. Door opens at 8pm, film begins at 9pm.
Filmmakers in Hungary have made some real cinematic gems, but rarely are they ever screened. Winner of the Jury prize at Cannes in 1971, and recently voted the 12th best film in the history of Hungarian cinema, Szerelem is a captivating, wrenching, haunting depiction of East block existence in the 50s. When a man is arrested and imprisoned by the government for no apparent reason, his wife lies to her husband’s dying mother, telling her he is abroad shooting a film in New York. This beauty of a film deals with themes of commitment, faith, and even the ethics of telling lies… how far can someone go with lying?
Szerelem is the merging of two short stories by the famous Hungarian writer Tibor Déry. The real magic though is in it’s sublime cinematic mood. It’s visual style is sober with a chill of fear in the air, but at the same time poetically edited with flashes of memories and other realities. Riveting, poignant and told in a flow of stunning visuals, this will be a rare screening of one of cinema’s small, neglected masterpieces. […Lees verder]
Sunday January 4th 2015, Movie Night: Incendies (Scorched) by Denis Villeneuve (130 minutes, 2010). In Arabic and French, with English subtitles. Door opens at 8pm, film begins at 9pm.
People who have lived through noteworthy experiences – fascinating or tragic – have always inspired writers and filmmakers. Soha Bechara is one such figure. A militant with the communist resistance to the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon, Bechara was imprisoned without trial when she was 21 for trying to assassinate Antoine Lahad, the leader of the Israel-backed South Lebanon Army. She spent 10 years in Khiam prison, six of them in solitary confinement.
Bechara’s story has captured the imagination of Lebanese filmmakers and since her release from Khiam in 1998, she has appeared in a number of documentary studies. Now, in the wake of these artful documentaries, the first of the fiction films has come: “Incendies”. Villeneuve’s film is based on the play of the same name by Lebanese-Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad. The plot of “Incendies” revolves around the character of political activist Nawal Marwan, who lived through a harrowing detention before leaving her fictional home country for a life of exile in Canada. Her story is loosely inspired by Bechara’s own experiences. […Lees verder]
Sunday December 28th 2014, pERVERt cINEMa presents: The Holy Mountain, by Alejandro Jodorowsky (1973, 114 minutes, with English subtitles). Door opens at 8pm, film begins at 9pm.
Embodying the sex, drugs, spiritual awakenings and societal unrest of the late 1960s/early 1970S, Jodorowsky’s Mexican-American film Holy Mountain (La Montaña Sagrada) is a suitably bizarre and exquisitely designed trip. The quasi narrative tells of a Christ-like vagrant and six of the world’s most powerful individuals (each representing a planet in the Solar system) for a spiritual pilgrimage through a perverse and unfriendly land. The mission is to find the Holy Mountain and immortality. The film’s symbolic figures and gestures – ranging from birds flying out of bullet holes to reptiles re-enacting the Mexican conquest – make this surreal film one that existed completely outside of traditional filmmaking of the time.
[…Lees verder]
Sunday December 21st 2014, Life in Loops – A Megacities RMX. Directed by Timo Novotny, 2006, 80 minutes, with English subtitles. Door opens at 8pm, film begins at 9pm.
“Radioglaz and the Global City
Glawogger captured the grinding routine of everyday labor and escapism of people on the outskirts of the metropolises New York, Mexico City, Moscow. and Mumbai in his awarded documentary essay Megacities. By finding a film language that not only reflects Zygmunts Bauman’s (1997: 328) assumption of globalization’s force to stratify the world population in globalized wealthy and localized poor, but that also offers an idiosyncratic insight beyond the description of urban peripheries as slums, the filmmaker came close to the poetics of his (aesthetic but not political) role model Dziga Vertov.
However, it was not until 2006 that the Austrian video artist Timo Novotny reviewed the original footage of Megacities in order to rearrange it in the spirit of Dziga Vertov’s radioglaz (3), a film concept and montage policy that counts on the “complex interaction of sound with image’ (Vertov in Hicks 2007: 77). sometimes even favoring the sound as the overriding rhythmizing element over the image. Whereas Megacities tells twelve geographically interspersed but serf-contained stories of survival, Life in Loops breaks them open and uses the audiovisual fragments to paint only five portraits of clandestine ways of living and working in global cities against the backdrop of a filmic contemplation on urban topographies. That way, Life in Loops traces, like Megacities, the conditio humana in relation to glocal subalterntiy, though making use of Vertov’s radioglaz in a more radical way.
[…Lees verder]
Sunday December 14th 2014, Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema by Jeffrey Babcock: Deadlock. Directed by Roland Klick, 1970, 88 minutes, in English. Door opens at 8pm, film begins at 9pm.
Thin on storyline but blistering with atmosphere, this film is clearly European in its sensibilities… its just another one those wonderful, eclectic, bizarre artistic films that were churned out in the 70s. Since it was made the film has gained an enthusiastic cult following, despite the fact that its rarely ever been screened. Deadlock is somewhere
between a spaghetti western, a bleak gangster noir and Antonioni’s Zabriski Point.
The film opens with a scene which already defines its surreal style… in a burning desert landscape a man, sweating and heaving, carries a suitcase and a gun. He’s dusty and worn, and looks like a saint delivering a message. What he has with him of course is a very different story…. leading to a twisted cat and mouse game involving three people in a deserted mining town. Like the early work of Jodorowsky this offbeat German film is a strange, metaphysical gangster fable with a mythological tone. And its also featuring an original soundtrack by the
legendary experimental-progressive rock group CAN.
“DEADLOCK is fantastic. A bizarre, illuminating film.” – Alejandro Jodorowsky […Lees verder]
Sunday December 7th 2014, Iranian new wave cinema: A few kilos of date for a funeral ( چند کیلو خرما برای مراسم تدفین) by Saman Salur (2006, 85 minutes), in Persian with English subtitles. Door opens at 8pm, film begins at 9pm.
Synopsis: Sadry and Yadi work at a petrol station removed from the main traffic routes since the building of a ring road. It is winter and heavy snow lies on the ground. Sadry, a former performing strongman who accidentally lost an eye, is behaving strangely. He takes off from time to time and seems obsessed with the weather. Yadi is in love with a girl from a nearby town and sends her passionate letters via the local postman. Sadry and Yadi occasionally receive a visit from Orooj, the neighbourhood undertaker, their only contact with the exterior.
Director’s statement: The idea of this film, originally under a different title, came to me during my studies. At the time I often travelled from Tehran to my home town, Boroujerd, in the south-west of Iran. I often thought of the petrol station that was once situated along the highway and whose prosperity had disappeared with the building of a ring road. I also thought of likable outsiders such as Sadry and Yadi, left on the margins of society and forgotten by the rest of the world. The fate of such people has always fascinated me. I often dreamt as the film began to take shape and as my dreams were often colourless and grey, I decided to shoot in black and white. The close cooperation of my friend Touraj Aslani as director of photography was of utmost importance to me. The actors Mohsen Tanabandeh, Nader Fallah, Mahmoud Nazaralian and Hassan Rashid Ghamat are no strangers to cameras, the latter also doubling as film editor and short-film director. Mohsen Namjou who plays the role of the postman is a composer in real life. As snow was an essential element of the story, I must admit that Mother Nature also had her role to play.
“A Few Kilos of Dates for a Funeral” is a story of ordinary people with all their qualities and defects……but it is above all a story of love.
More info: http://www.dreamlabfilms.com/a-few-kilos-of-dates-for-a-funeral/ […Lees verder]
Sunday November 30th 2014, Movie night: Harold and Maude by Hal Ashby (1971, 91 minutes). a 1971 American romantic black comedy directed by Hal Ashby and released by Paramount Pictures. It incorporates elements of dark humor and existentialist drama, with a plot that revolves around the exploits of a young man named Harold (played by Bud Cort) intrigued with death. Harold drifts away from the life that his detached mother (Vivian Pickles) prescribes for him, and slowly develops quite a strong and close friendship and eventually a romantic relationship with a 79-year-old woman named Maude (Ruth Gordon) who teaches Harold about living life to its fullest and that life is the most precious gift of all. Door opens at 8pm, film begins at 9pm.
