Screening on 07th Oct 2007: KES

KES
Film by Ken Loach
Country : England
Year : 1969
Duration : 110 Minutes
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium , Ganapathy CBE
07th October 2007 ; 5.45 pm
Call 94430 39630

Ranked seventh in the British Film Institute's recent selection of the 100 favourite British films of the 20th century, Kes remains Ken Loach's masterpiece. While the director has reached similar aesthetic heights in subsequent years (Days of Hope [1975] and Raining Stones [1993] immediately spring to mind), the film remains a template for Loach's abiding concerns: the struggle of the British working class to achieve life's basic needs, dramatised through the plight of an individual character; the significant impact of public institutions upon personal lives; sensitive performances with an ear for regional dialects; and an unobtrusive yet evocative visual style that illuminates character and place in a naturalistic fashion. Arriving as the '60s drew to a close, Kes heralds the end of “kitchen sink realism” and the true arrival of one of contemporary cinema's major artists.

Click here to watch the trailer of the film 'KES'

Kes details the life of Billy Casper (David Bradley), a lonely teen facing a bleak future in a Yorkshire mining town. An outcast at school, Billy's slight frame and unkempt appearance make him an easy target for teachers and bullies alike. Unfortunately, home provides no respite. Billy's father is absent, his inattentive mother (Lynne Perrie) offers little guidance or love (referring to Billy as “a hopeless case”), and his abusive older brother Jud (Freddie Fletcher) takes out his hostility through punches and insults. However, hope appears in the form of a kestrel, which Billy captures as a fledgling and trains to fly on command. Soon, the bird reveals not only Billy's untapped potential, but also his desire to escape his toxic environment. It's no accident, of course, that Billy is obsessed with the only bird owned by the lowest social orders during medieval times. As Loach notes, “It's a bird for the riff-raff of the world.”

Ken Loach

Born in 1936 at Nuneaton,Warwickshire, England (his father was a factory electrician), Loach attended King Edward VIGrammar School and following two years in the RAF read law at St Peter's College, Oxford. There he performed in the now well established comedy group, the Oxford Revue. He started out as an actor in repertory theatre, but in the early 1960s moved into television direction and was credited in this role on early episodes of Z-Cars in 1962.

In 1966 Loach made the socially influential docu-drama Cathy Come Home portraying neglected subjects such as homelessness and unemployment, and presenting a powerful and influential critique of the workings of the Social Services. In the late 1960s he started directing films, and in 1969 made Kes, the story of a troubled boy and his kestrel, based on the novel A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines. It remains perhaps his best known film in Britain. Till 1990 he faced many difficulties with his projects.

Loach experienced a miraculous, creative resurgence in the 1990s with the advent of Channel 4 funding and producers Sally Hibbin and Rebecca O'Brien. His recent films invest warmth and humour in their characters' plights while allowing political alternatives to develop naturally out of the narratives. Like Cathy Come Home or Kes, they also sympathetically address the issues facing working class families, including union politics (Riff Raff [1991], Bread and Roses [2000]), familial difficulties (Raining Stones, Ladybird Ladybird [1994]), drugs and alcoholism (My Name is Joe [1998], Sweet Sixteen [2002]) and contemporary political struggles (Hidden Agenda [1990], Carla's Song [1996]) and Wind That Shakes The Barely [2006].

Ken Loach is a director admired, and often loved, all over the world. For his remarkable output, Loach has won numerous international prizes and long overdue critical recognition . Despite political ebb and flow, fickle artistic trends and film financing difficulties, he remains steadfast in his commitment to progressive ideals and a personal cinema. Loach's films are art of the highest order. While exposing the failings and limitations of human experience, they also provide a path to change and progress. His body of work firmly celebrates the fact that life is worth living.

Courtesy : Senses Of Cinema , Wikipedia .

Dinamalar 16 07 2007 Click on this write up for larger image.

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16th Sept : Ballad of a Soldier

Ballad of a Soldier

A Film By Grigori Chukhrai
Nominated for Oscar. Another 4 wins & 2 nominations
Year :1959 Country : Russia
Run time : 89 minutes ; Russian with English Sub titles.
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium, Ganapathi , Coimbatore
16th Sept 2007 , 5.45 pm ; Call 94430 39630
Email : konangal@gmail.com

Russia's fight against the Nazi war machine cost that country 20 million lives. Ballad of a Soldier takes a simple premise — one young soldier, Alyosha 's journey home to visit his mother — and shapes it into a polished lens. Through that lens Ballad projects those 20 million, and at the focal point burns a humane, non-dogmatic meditation on the incalculably tragic cost of war.

We are told at the outset that Alyosha is killed at the front, never to return to his mother, to Shura, or to anyone else again. Ballad of a Soldier's conclusion strikes a single, clear tone with one of the most poignant of wartime questions — what if? What if Alyosha, decent and honorable and deserving of a full life, had not died in the war? What could he, and by extension some 20 million Alyoshas, have become? What could this everyday hero have contributed if he'd been allowed to fulfill his promise? Ballad doesn't answer the question. Instead it tells us that Alyosha dies a "simple Russian soldier" (a citizen of a country, not an ideology) because he never had the time or opportunity to be anything else.

Technically rich yet possessing a refining simplicity, Ballad of a Soldier is a quietly powerful work that could have diminished into soapy melodrama or government-stamped rhetoric. Instead, director/co-writer Grigori Chukhrai delivered a personal ode, one indeed as emotive and straight-shooting as a ballad, to his own postwar generation. He did so with then-distinctive attention to varying responses war brings out in individual people, with moments of unmistakable (and now sweetly chaste) sexual heat, and without resorting to the clichés, stilted symbols, or pompous phraseology that did so much harm to Soviet cinema.

Grigori Chukhrai

Grigori Naumovich Chukhrai (Russian: Григорий Наумович Чухрай; May 23, 1921--October 28, 2001) was a prominent film director and screenwriter in the former Soviet Union. He is the father of director Pavel Chukhrai.

He was born in Melitopol in the Zaporizhia Oblast of Ukraine. A decorated veteran of World War II, Chukhrai's wartime experiences profoundly affected him and the majority of his films were connected with events of the War. At war's end, he studied filmmaking at the Soviet State Film School and then developed his craft as a director's assistant at the Kiev Film Studio. By the mid 1950s, he began writing and directing his own films, gaining cinematic recognition outside the Soviet Union at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival with his film Sorok pervyj (The Forty-first).

In 1959, Chukhrai co-wrote and directed his greatest work, Ballad of a Soldier. A story of love and the tragedy of war made without the usual Soviet propaganda, the film received great acclaim at home earning the prestigious Lenin Prize. It was heralded internationally for both its story and cinematic technique and at Cannes in 1960 the film was awarded a special jury prize for "high humanism and outstanding quality." Ballad of a Soldier overcame the Cold War barrier and premiered in the United States in 1960 at the San Francisco International Film Festival in San Francisco, California. The film won the Festival's Golden Gate Award, for Best Picture and for Best Director for Grigori Chukhrai. Playing worldwide, the following year it earned the BAFTA Award for Best Film. Grigori Chukhrai and script co-writer Valentin Yezhov were nominated for an Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay.

Chukhrai's next film, released in 1961, was titled Chistoye nebo (Clear Skies) and told the story of a Soviet pilot who survived Nazi imprisonment during the war but was later accused of being a spy. In 1984, at age 63, Grigori Chukhrai directed his final film. He wrote a book of war memoirs and in 1994, for his lifetime contribution to film, Chukhrai was given a Nika Award, the Russian film industry's equivalent of an Oscar.

Grigori Chukhrai died of heart failure in Moscow in 2001 at the age of eighty.

Konangal Outreach Programme Screening on 9th Sept 2007 : Rabbit-Proof Fence

Leaping The Fence Of Australia's Past

Rabbit-Proof Fence
A Film By : Phillip Noyce
Year : 2002, Run Time : 93 minutes ; Country: Australia
Screening on 9^th Sept 2007 at 5.45pm
Venue : Aruna Thirumana Mandapam , 279, 280 N S R Road (Opp.Spencer Supermarket ) Coimbatore.
Call : 94430 39630 , 98416 58466, 4382331 .

Rabbit-Proof Fence is based on the book ‘Follow The Rabbit Proof Fence’ by Doris Pilkington Garimara. It concerns the author's mother, and two other young mixed-race Aboriginal girls, who ran away from the Moore River Native Settlement, north of Perth, in which they were placed in 1931, in order to return to their Aboriginal families.

Based on true events, "Rabbit-Proof Fence" is a moving story of racial prejudice, agoraphobic desert vistas, and amazing endurance as three girls walk 1,500 miles to find their mothers in 30s Australia.

These are the shocking facts behind the movie: during the early years of the 20th century, white Australians panicked about the supposed disaster of an "unwanted third race" of "half-caste" Aborigine children.

Special detention centres were set up across the continent to keep the mixed race children from "contaminating" the rest of Australian society, and orders were given to forcibly remove "half-caste" children from their families. It was a disastrous, racist policy that brought about the misery of the so-called "stolen generations".

In "Rabbit-Proof Fence", Australian director Phillip Noyce gives us a perceptive, uplifting drama that highlights - and overcomes - that racist policy. Having been forcible separated from their natural mothers, three girls - Molly (Sampi), Daisy (Sansbury), and Gracie (Monaghan) - escape from the Moore River Native Settlement, presided over by AO Neville (Branagh).

With an epic journey ahead of them, the girls set out to find their way back home by following the rabbit-proof fence that stretches across the Outback. Cutting back and forth between the children's journey and Neville's increasingly desperate attempts to capture them, Noyce's sensitive dramatization swaps angry politics for emotional sympathy, concentrating on the plight of the children instead of ranting against the authorities.

By highlighting the realities of this hidden genocide (unbelievably, the policy continued until the early 70s), "Rabbit-Proof Fence" stands as a powerful, worthy testimony to the suffering of the stolen generations.

This screening is supported by : HOLLYWOOD DVD SHOPEE , NSR Road, Coimbatore ; Ph 4382331 , : 98416 58466

Phillip Noyce

(born April 29, 1950)

Noyce was born in Griffith, New South Wales, and began making short film at the age of 18, starting with Better to Reign in Hell, using his friends as the cast. He joined the Australian Film & Television School in 1973, and released his first professional film in 1977.

After his debut feature, the medium-length Backroads (1977), Noyce achieved commercial and critical success with Newsfront (1978), which won Australian Film Institute (AFI) awards for Best Film, Director, and Screenplay.

Noyce worked on two miniseries for Australian television with fellow Australian filmmaker George Miller: The Dismissal (1983) and The Cowra Breakout (1984).

Miller also produced the film that brought Noyce his greatest acclaim in the United States — the thriller Dead Calm (1989) which turned Nicole Kidman into a star. His greatest commercial success to date has been the Tom Clancy spy thriller Clear and Present Danger (1994) starring Harrison Ford.

Noyce achieved great acclaim in Australia for the "stolen generation" picture, Rabbit Proof Fence, which won the Australian Film Institute Award for Best Film in 2002.

Naaivaal Film Movement honours pioneers of Tamil cinema

Unsung Heroes

M. Senthamizhan’s documentary tells you who the real pioneers of Tamil cinema are..

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The invite had a long list of questions. Sample this: ‘Did you know that a man from your city travelled throughout the country 100 years ago to screen films? Do you know the interesting trivia surrounding Variety Hall Road? How did films initia lly pull in the crowds?’

Who could resist these? So, we promptly parked ourselves at Hotel Tamil Nadu for a documentary film screening organised by Naaivaal Film Movement. The film Pesaamozhi (Silent Language), directed by Chennai-based M. Senthamizhan was to provide answers to all those questions. And, it did.

The documentary traces the journey of Tamil silent movies, the masters behind them and seeks to crack riddles hitherto unexplained. It is sprinkled with interesting nuggets, interspersed with observations and opinions of experts.

In 1905, Swamikannu Vincent, a draughtsman in the Railways from Coimbatore, bought a projector from a Frenchman in Tiruchi, to become South India’s first exhibitor.

And, this was to cause a dramatic change in the entertainment arena of the nation. He set up a touring cinema that went around small towns and villages in the country. In fact, he went as far as Rangoon, Peshawar, Lahore and Mumbai with his touring cinema.

Crowd-puller

It was a hit among the public. There were no tickets. Instead, it was barter system: the audience emptied a bag of grains for viewing a show. As the films were silent, a storyteller explained them to an astonished audience. He was their god. They ensured all his requirements were met.

Unfortunately, storytellers were to wane into nothingness when the era of silent movies ended with the birth of the talking movies.

Says film historian Theodore Baskaran: “Cinema brought about a social revolution, because unlike drama, the audience were not discriminated against. Anyone with an anna or two could watch them. However, this easy access to the public brought about nonchalance among the intellects. Victoria Public Hall was close to Sudesi Mithran’s (newspaper) office. But, not one film review was written by Bharathiar in 20 years.” This is why, there is nothing l eft of Coimbatore’s son Vincent, except a road named after the theatre he built: Variety Hall Road.

Similar fate encountered greats from other parts of the State such as Marudhamuthu Moopanar, and Nataraja Mudaliar who produced South India’s first silent movie Keechaka Vadham (1918).

Kittusamy, who runs the Welcome Saloon opposite Delite Theatre recalls how as a seven-year-old he saw his neighbour Vincent choosing a car from an assembly lined up at his house.

Nuggets

Another neighbour narrates how during Vincent’s funeral, the city experienced aalankatti mazhai. Director Senthamizhan’s fine touches throughout the film command mention: Be it a naked village boy gaping at a row of bullock carts or offbeat snapshots from the film shoot itself!

Senthamizhan calls for concerted efforts for garnering all possible details about these heroes who remain unsung in the annals of the Indian film industry.

If you have details on these heroes, or want to purchase the DVD (Rs. 250), contact the director at 98412-74384.

Sound bytes

Theodore Baskaran (Film historian)

“During the time of the touring cinemas, there were breaks between scenes, for the projector to cool a bit. To keep the audience engaged during such breaks, wrestling, comedy and concerts were introduced. These, perhaps, were the harbinger to the incongruent song, fight and comedy tracks in films today.”

Paavendhan (Researcher, Tamilology)

“Most of the records on films in the country give details on actors and directors. However, many fail to understand that theatre history, exhibitors, studios, and even the audience are very integral to the film industry. And, this is why we find very little details on these, even on the internet.”

Paamaran (Columnist)

“The recent celebration of Tamil film’s platinum jubilee took into account the first ‘talking’ movie Kalidasan (1931). This is a painful pointer to the fact that even the film industry and the Government have forgotten the doyens of the Tamil cinema, who had screened/produced silent movies since 1913.”

M. Senthamizhan (Director)

“Silent movies were ignored by the intellects in the State, who believed that a medium (silent films) that drew innumerable crowd could be of little consequence. This may be one of the chief reasons why none of the 130-odd Tamil silent movies or their documents remains today.”

Courtesy : The Hindu , Metroplus dated 30 07 2007.