20th Oct 2013; GIRL RISING

 

 Girl Rising

Directed  by Richard E. Robbins

2013 / Run time 104 minutes

20^th Oct 2013; 5.45 pm

Perks Mini Theater

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/

In connection with  International Day of the Girl Child observed world over on 11^th of this month , Konangal screens Girl Rising.  Girl Rising tells the stories of nine girls from nine different countries (Sierra Leone, Haiti, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Peru, Egypt, Nepal, India, and Cambodia). All of their stories reflect their struggles and triumphs to overcome societal or cultural barriers to go to school.

The film was directed by Richard E. Robbins and features narration by Anne Hathaway, Cate Blanchett, Selena Gomez, Liam Neeson, Priyanka Chopra, Chloë Grace Moretz, Freida Pinto, Salma Hayek, Meryl Streep, Alicia Keys, and Kerry Washington. 

 
SOKHA in CAMBODIA - Sokha was a Cambodian child of the dump; orphaned and forced to pick through garbage to survive. But, through a series of miracles, Sokha finds her way to school and, like a phoenix, rises to become a star student on the brink of a brilliant and once unimaginable future.

 

WADLEY in HAITI - “I will come back every day until I can stay.” Wadley is just 7 when the world comes crashing down around her. Haiti’s catastrophic earthquake destroys her home and school, but it cannot break her irrepressible spirit nor extinguish her thirst to learn, even as she’s turned away from the schoolhouse day after day.

SUMA in NEPAL - “Change is like a song you can’t hold back.” Though her brothers go to school, Suma is forced into bonded labor at age 6. The Nepali girl endures years of grueling work by expressing her sorrow in beautiful music and lyrics. Suma glimpses a different future by learning to read, the first step on the road to freedom.

YASMIN in EGYPT - “He was strong but I was stronger.” A young Egyptian girl falls prey to a violent attack but, rather than become a victim, she becomes a superhero. Yasmin’s is the story of the triumph of imagination over a reality too painful to bear.

AZMERA in ETHIOPIA - “What if a girl’s life could be more?” When 13-year old Azmera is told she must marry, she does something shocking; she says no. Meet an Ethiopian family where a brother champions his younger sister’s cause to be educated and to be free.

 

RUKSANA in INDIA - “That’s when I learned to never give up.” Ruksana’s family are “pavement dwellers” – living on the streets of Kolkata, India, where her father has sacrificed everything to send his daughters to school. Ruksana’s life is filled with danger but she escapes into her artwork and draws strength from her father’s resolve.

 

SENNA in PERU - “Poetry is how I turn ugliness into art.” Senna’s family struggles to survive in a bleak Peruvian mining town. Her father has dreams for her, and insists she go to school. There, she discovers the transformative power of poetry. Her passion and talent seem to ensure she’ll have a better future, and be the success her father dreamed she’d be.

https://www.facebook.com/konangal.filmsociety

 

CHIDAMBARAM

A film by G.Aravindan

1985/ Malayalam, Tamil/ Col/103 minutes

6th October 2013; 5.45pm

Perks Mini Theater

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/

Chidambaram is a temple town of Tamil Nadu. "Chit" means mind and "Ambaram" means space, thus the name Chidambaram.

The legend is that Lord Shiva came here to perform his dance. This region was already under the custody of Kali and naturally a quarrel ensued. It was mutually agreed that the winner in a dance competition should possess the region. The game commenced; with the Thandava of Shiva and Lasya of Kali. Shiva resorted to a stratagem. He lifted one leg high up in the air, which Kali could not do, because of modesty. Shiva won and became the Lord of Chidambaram. 

 Chidambaram is based on a short story by noted Malayalam writer C V Shriraman. The film is a deeply symbolic exploration of the man-woman attraction leading to betrayal and eventually to the purgatory of guilt.

The story develops mainly around three characters, Muniyandi (Sreenivasan), his wife Shivakami (Smita Patil) and the office superintendent of a farm, Shankaran (Gopi). Muniyandi, a labourer in the farm, believes and respects Shankaran. Muniyandi brings Shivakami to the farm after marrying her. She soon befriends Shankaran. 

But one day Muniyandi catches Shankaran red-handed with his wife Shivakami. Broken hearted, Muniyandi commits suicide. The extreme feeling of guilt forces Shankaran to leaves the place. He tries alcohol, spirituality and all other possible methods to escape from this mental torment, but fails. Finally he reaches the temple town of Chidambaram. There he finds Shivakami as a shoe keeper in the temple.

Chidambaram won the National Film award for best film and the State Film awards for the best film and director in 1985.

Direction & Screenplay: G Aravindan
Cast: Gopi, Smita Patil, Sreenivasan, Mohan Das, Murali
Cinematography: Shaji N Karun
Music: P Devarajan
(Source: http://www.cinemaofmalayalam.net/index.html )

G.Aravindan

Govindan Aravindan (born 21 January 1935 in Kottayam — died 15 March 1991 in Trivandrum), popularly known as G. Aravindan, was a national award winning film director, screenwriter, musician and cartoonist from Kerala, India. Known for his unorthodox film-making, Aravindan consistently experimented with cinematic forms and narrative styles drawing upon history, myth, folk tales, traditional stories, current events and anecdotes. Aravindan’s films are marked by an entirely original approach to cinema, and alongwith John Abraham and Adoor Gopalakrishnan, he placed Malayalam cinema in a position of pre-eminence in India.

 Aravindan started his professional life as a cartoonist in the journal, Mathrubhumi. He established himself as a noted cartoonist in the early 1960s. Next, Aravindan turned his attention to theatre and music and played a major role in establishing the theatre groups Navarangam and Sopanam.

Aravindan died on 16th January, 1991 before the release of his last film, Vasthuhara . Lamenting his death, Shyam Bengal said: “It is unfortunate everything had to end so suddenly. He had so many films in him – we would have seen films of the sort he had never made before; the kind he was slowly reaching towards. It is unfortunate he couldn’t complete his mission.”

An extremely important director of the New Indian cinema of the 1970s and 80s, his films have a haunting quality to them and what makes them unique and poetic is their constant yearning to break limits, to go beyond, their symbiotic links with music, mysticism and painting. All of Aravindan’s films, in one way or other, draw from and work with other art forms, classical and folk music, drawing and painting, dance, classical and folk art forms and so on. It is this constant transgression of boundaries – of medium, form, aesthetics and sensibility – that marks Aravindan’s works and makes them stand out from that of other filmmakers. (Source – www.mubi.com )

15th Sept 2013; John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath

 

The Grapes of Wrath

A film by John Ford

1940/USA/B&W/123 mins

15^th September ;5.45pm

Perks Mini Theater

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in

The Grapes of Wrath  was based on John Steinbeck's novel, arguably the most effective social document of the 1930s, and it was directed by a filmmaker who had done more than any other to document the Westward movement of American settlement, John Ford. 

When Steinbeck published his novel in 1939, it was acclaimed as a masterpiece, won the Pulitzer Prize, was snatched up by Darryl F. Zanuck of 20th Century-Fox and assigned to his top director, John Ford. It expressed the nation's rage about the Depression in poetic, Biblical terms, and its dialogue does a delicate little dance around words like "agitators" and "Reds"--who are, we are intended to understand, what the fat cats call anyone who stands up for the little man.

It is dialogue spoken by Henry Fonda, whose Tom Joad is one of the great American movie characters, so pure and simple and simply therein the role that he puts it over. Fonda was an actor with the rare ability to exist on the screen without seeming to reach or try, and he makes it clear even in his silences how he has been pondering Preacher's conversion from religion to union politics.

The photography is by the great innovator Gregg Toland, In "Grapes" he worked with astonishingly low levels of light; consider the many night scenes and the shots in the deserted Joad homestead. The power of Ford (1884-1973) was rooted in strong stories, classical technique and direct expression. There is a rigorous purity in his visual style that serves the subject well. "The Grapes of Wrath" contains not a single shot that seems careless or routine.

 The story, which seems to be about the resiliency and courage of "the people," is built on a foundation of fear: Fear of losing jobs, land, self-respect. To those who had felt that fear, who had gone hungry or been homeless, it would never become dated. And its sense of injustice is still relevant. The banks and land agents of the 1930s have been replaced by financial pyramids so huge and so chummy with the government that Enron, for example, had to tractor itself off its own land.

(Source:Internet)

John Ford

1894 - 1973

  

John Ford is, arguably, The Great American Director. When Orson Welles, who repeatedly screened Ford's Stagecoach (1939) as a crash course in filmmaking before helming his first film, Citizen Kane (1941), was asked who his three favorite directors were, he answered, "John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford." Along with D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille, the first-generation pioneers who created the narrative film in America, if not the world, Ford -- who came of age when movie production began shifting from its New York-New Jersey base to California in the second decade of the 20th Century -- ranks with William Wyler, Frank Capra and Howard Hawks as not only being among the greatest of American directors, but as an artist who helped define what America was on the silver screen. Ford's cinematic art is as much a part of Americana as a Frederic Remington painting of the Old West, a subject both lovingly portrayed in their respective media.

John Ford was born John Martin Feeney on February 1, 1894. John Ford has no peers in the annals of cinema. This is not to place him above criticism, merely above comparison. His faults were unique, as was his art, which he pursued with a single-minded and single-hearted stubbornness for sixty years and 112 films. Ford grew up with the American cinema. That he should have begun his career as an extra in the Ku Klux Klan sequences of The Birth of a Nation and ended it supervising the documentary Vietnam! Vietnam! conveys the remarkable breadth of his contribution to film, and the narrowness of its concerns.

Ford's subject was his life and his times. Immigrant, Catholic, Republican, he spoke for the generations that created the modern United States between the Civil and Great Wars. Like Walt Whitman, Ford chronicled the society of that half century, expansionist by design, mystical and religious by conviction, hierarchical by agreement; an association of equals within a structure of command, with practical, patriotic, and devout qualities. Ford portrayed the society Whitman celebrated as "something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of night and day." As befitted his status as America's premier director, in 1973, John Ford was the recipient of the first Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Film Institute. President Richard Nixon attended the event, presenting Ford with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the U.S.   (Source:Internet)

1st September 2013; Kiyoshi Kurosawa's TOKYO SONATA

Tokyo Sonata

A film by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

2008/Japan/Col/120 Min

1st September; 5.45pm

Perks Mini Theater

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/

https://www.facebook.com/konangal.filmsociety

"Tokyo Sonata,"  opens on a note of routine, of a family so locked into their lives that they scarcely know one another. Ryuhei is a salaryman in a management job. His wife, Megumi, is a source of predictable domesticity, centering on cleaning, sewing and the preparation of meals. His older son, Takashi, and younger son, Kenji, are filled with unhappiness but seemingly well-disciplined. Ryuhei loses his job, joins hopeless queues at an employment office.

What we seem to have are the outlines of a traditional family drama, in which tensions are bottled up, revelations will occur and a crisis will result in either tragedy or resolution. But that's not what we're given by director Kiyoshi Kurosawa. It simply shows how lives torn apart by financial emergencies can be revealed as being damaged all along. Unemployment is the catalyst -- an unspoken reality that makes everyone in the family angrier than they already are. All of the performances have perfect pitch.

A sonata is a classical form in which two musical ideas are intercut. In the beginning, they are introduced. In the following sections, they are developed in passages revealing the secrets or potentials of both. The conclusion does not resolve them; instead, we return to look at them, knowing what we know now.

The "themes" in this movie are the father and his family. At the end, they feel the same tensions as at the beginning, but the facade has been destroyed, and they will have to proceed unprotected.   (Excerpts from Roger Ebert’s review)

Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Kiyoshi Kurosawa  was born in Kobe on July 19, 1955, (He is not related to director Akira Kurosawa). After studying at Rikkyo University in Tokyo under the guide of prominent film critic Shigehiko Hasumi,where he began making 8mm films, Kurosawa began directing commercially in the 1980s, working on pink films and low-budget V-Cinema (direct-to-video) productions such as formula yakuza films.

In the early 1990s, Kurosawa won a scholarship to the Sundance Institute and was able to study filmmaking in the United States, although he had been directing for nearly ten years professionally.

Kurosawa first achieved international acclaim with his 1997 crime thriller film Cure. This was followed by two thrillers back-to-back, Serpent's Path and Eyes of the Spider. His other films  Charisma, Pulse,  Bright Future , Doppelganger, Loft and Retribution followed.. With his 2008 film, Tokyo Sonata, Kurosawa was considered to step out of his usual horror genre and into family drama.

He has written a novelization of his own film Pulse, as well as a history of horror cinema with Makoto Shinozaki.