22nd May 2016 ; Chaitanya Tamhane's 'COURT'

COURT

A film by Chaitanya Tamhane

2014 / Maharashtra/ Marathi / 116 minutes

3 Supplements (5 minutes each) on  ‘COURT’ will be screened

 One  in the beginning and rest after the film

A study in class, bureaucracy, and censorial stupidity, young film maker Chaitanya Tamhane's debut feature, Court, plants viewers in the plastic chairs of an Indian court of law as 69-year-old protest singer Narayan Kamble (Vira Sathidar) is tried for a crime he didn't commit.  

A well- to-do activist lawyer (Vivek Gomber, who has also produced the film) represents Kamble in court while the public prosecutor (Geetanjali Kulkarni) fights tooth and nail to ensure he stays in jail. At one point she even cites archaic laws to claim that the elderly singer is a threat to the sovereignty of India. The defense lawyer knows very well that these laws are antiquated and irrelevant, but apart from being patient and carrying on the fight, there is precious little he can do. 

Beyond criticism of India’s judiciary, the director implicitly implicates the country’s education system, which creates professionals skilled in rote learning yet completely lacking in independent thinking. Where the trial scenes use the legal system’s ponderous rules to hang itself, sequences showing the lawyers outside working hours reveal, via exceptionally nuanced observations, the sorts of influences and lives led by the two sides.

“Court” ends up being a great courtroom drama: it treats the audience as both witness and jury and lays out a sprawling argument for them to ponder over. It’s hard to shake this one off long after the credits have rolled.

( Source:Internet)

Chaitanya Tamhane

Born in Mumbai in 1987, Chaitanya Tamhane is an English literature graduate from Mithibai College of Arts. He has written and directed a feature-length documentary titled FOUR STEP PLAN (2006), chronicling the trends of plagiarism in Indian cinema. His first full-length play as a writer-director, Grey Elephants in Denmark opened to critical acclaim in Mumbai and had several successful shows at prestigious venues. SIX STRANDS (2010), his first fictional short film was screened at various international film festivals including Rotterdam International Film Festival, Clermont Ferrand International Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Slamdance, and many others.

Chaitanya’s debut feature film, COURT (2014), premiered at the 71^st Venice Film Festival, where it won the Lion of the Future award for best debut and the Orizzonti award for Best film.  Since then, the film has gone on to win 16 international awards at various prestigious film festivals. He was recently featured in Forbes India‘s list of 30 young Indian achievers under the age of 30.

FILMOGRAPHY

COURT / Feature / 2014

SIX STRANDS / Short / 2010

FOUR STEP PLAN / Documentary / 2006

24th April 2016 ; Wim Wender's WINGS OF DESIRE

 

WINGS OF DESIRE

A film by Wim Wenders

1987/ Germany/ 129 min

24.04.16 /5.45pm / Perks mini Theater

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/

Wim Wender's celestial tribute to life, love, Berlin, filmmaking, angels and the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, among many things. .Seen through the (black-and-white) lens of veteran French cinematographer Henri Alekan and reflected in the gentle eyes of Wenders' star angel Bruno Ganz, "Wings" is a soaring vision that appeals to the senses and the spirit.

The angels in “Wings of Desire” are not merely guardian angels, placed on Earth to look after human beings. They are witnesses, and they have been watching for a long time--since the beginning. The film evokes a mood of reverie, elegy and meditation. It doesn’t rush headlong into plot, but has the patience of its angels. It suggests what it would be like to see everything but not participate in it.

We follow two angels: Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander). They listen to the thoughts of an old Holocaust victim, and of parents worried about their son, and of the passengers on trams and the people in the streets; it’s like turning the dial and hearing snatches of many radio programs. the angel Damiel decides that he must become human.He falls in love with the trapeze artist.

"Wings," like most Heaven-and-Earth movies, ties up its resolution with romantic ribbons but, in Wenders' eyes, such a conclusion is the crowning union of life's dual opposites, the sensual and the spiritual, German's East and West -- as well as its Nazi past and occupied and uncertain present . . . It's also one of the best endings you can hope for in a movie. And "Wings" is one of the best movies you can see.  (Source: Internet)

 

Wim Wenders

Born in Dusseldorf in Germany just after the end of World War II, German film director Wim Wenders grew up with an insatiable appetite for movies. After studying medicine and philosophy in his native country, Wenders took up art study in and then returned to his homeland to attend Munich's Academy of Film and Television. Wenders began his career writing film criticism before directing a few short subjects of his own; in 1970 he and several other young filmmakers formed a production-distribution firm, Filmverlag Der Autoren. Summer in the City (1970) was Wenders' first feature film, but it was his 1973 adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter that first brought him attention outside Germany.

Wenders began his "road movie" cycle, inspired by such American pictures as Easy Rider (1970) and Two Lane Blacktop (1971). Three films in this genre followed in quick succession: Alice in the Cities (1974), The Wrong Move (1975) and Kings of the Road (1976).

 Wenders' American-financed films Hammett (1980) and Paris, Texas (1983) were remarkable in their evocation of time and place.Wenders' return to German filmmaking was rewarded in 1987 with the release of Wings of Desire.

10th April 2016; Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem

Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem

A film by Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz

2014 / Israel/ 115 minutes

5.45 pm / 10^th April / Perks Mini Theater

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/

“Gett, The Trial of Viviane Amsalem” is the story of a woman wronged by men and God, if finally, in a sense, redeemed by cinema. Gett is the Hebrew word for a legal divorce document in Jewish law. This is the ordeal of a woman’s attempt to divorce her husband under the strict religious laws of Israel. There’s no such thing as civil divorce in Israel, where, even today, the termination of a marriage cannot be granted — or even enforced, regardless of grounds — without the husband’s consent.

Shot entirely in the limited space of a courtroom and using uniquely subjective visual aesthetic, “Gett, The Trial of Viviane Amsalem” is Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz’s third feature film as a directing team. Ronit Elkabetz also stars in the film as Viviane, a character they developed based on their mother’s life.

Viviane — brought to powerful life by Ronit Elkabetz with currents of humility and hauteur — is at once a fleshed-out character, a political metaphor, a shout to heaven and earth. Despite a part requiring long periods of silence, her character’s emotions are as visible — and as changeable — as clouds passing in the sky.

The film depicts the last two years of struggle during which the adamant three-rabbi court tries every means to convince her to remake the couple. The action takes place almost entirely in two rooms, a Jerusalem Bet Din (Rabbinical Court) and its waiting room.  Despite the seemingly uncinematic nature of this inert, even claustrophobic scenario, the film mesmerizes, utterly. It’s at once a feminist film, obviously, and a larger story about diminishing the ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) authority and influence in Israeli life.

Ronit Elkabetz & Shlomi Elkabetz

Israeli film makers  sister-brother duo Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz have made three films together.

Ronit Elkabetz actress / film maker was the oldest of four children, with three younger siblings who were all brothers. Her younger brother Shlomi, became a director whom she worked with on their trilogy on the life of Viviane Amsalem.Her acting career started in 1991. n May 2010, Ronit Elkabetz received the France Culture award at the Cannes Film Festival, a prize awarded to filmmakers for quality work and social involvement. The judges described her as a "woman teeming with passion and erotica, who can even play the queen of Egypt

Shlomi Elkabetz was born in 1972 in Be'er Sheva,Israel. After completing his military service, he decided he wanted to work in film. He traveled in the Far East and went on to New York, where he remained for seven years. He wrote prose and plays, and also acted; at a certain stage he and Ronit began to write the screenplay for "To Take a Wife," incorporating into it autobiographical elements. In 2000 he returned to Israel. The film, which came out five years later, won various prizes, including the Audience Award at the Venice Film Festival.

27th March 2016; Kurosawa's HIDDEN FORTRESS

HIDDEN FORTRESS

A film bu Akira Kurosawa

1958/ Jpan/ 39 minutes

27th March /5.45pm / Perks Mini Theater

The Hidden Fortress is a comedy-action epic. It  playfully treats themes that Kurosawa could turn into the grimmest of anatomizations of human nature. Toshiro Mifune is at the fore, but the real focus of the story is on a pair of escaped thieves who, despite their initial bickerings, soon become friends of an almost co-dependent nature. They are captured, but manage to escape in a prisoner riot and go hide in the mountains. While there, they come across two unexpected surprise - gold.

There are many laugh out loud moments in Hidden Fortress, thanks to the dimwitted pair's antics and the use of Mifune's blustering bravado to intimidate and annoy them.In addition, the film also bears some of Kurosawa's finest action sequences since Yojimbo, which include Mifune chasing down two escaping enemies on horseback with a two-handed grip katana smackdown at the end of the ride, and a protracted but excellent spear Deul between Rokurota and a general of the opposing army.

The Hidden Fortress was cited by George Lucas as the basis of Star Wars—chiefly in the way the story unfolds through the eyes of two comic characters. Kurosawa has differentiated The Hidden Fortress from nearly every similar feudal era Japanese epic ever committed to the screen. THE HIDDEN FORTRESS should leave you with a smile on your face and almost wishing it would keep going.

Akira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa was the youngest of seven children, born in Tokyo on 23 March 1910. A talented painter, he enrolled in an art school that emphasized Western styles. Around this time he also joined an artists' group with a great enthusiasm for nineteenth-century Russian literature, with Dostoevsky a particular favourite. Another influence was Heigo, one of his brothers, who loved film and worked as a benshi, a film narrator/commentator for foreign silent films. His suicide deeply affected the director's sensibilities.

In 1930 he responded to a newspaper advertisement for assistant directors at a film studio and began assisting Kajiro Yamamoto, who liked the fact he knew 'a lot about things other than movies'. Within five years he was writing scripts and directing whole sequences for Yamamoto films. In 1943 he made his debut as a director with Judo Saga (Sanshiro Sugata), with a magnificent martial-arts sequence.

His early films were produced during the Second World War, so had to comply to themes prescribed by official state propaganda policy. It was Drunken Angel which was Kurosawa's first personally expressive work, made in 1948 and featuring Toshiro Mifune who became Kurosawa's favourite leading man.

For those who discover Kurosawa, they will find a master technician and stylist, with a deep humanism and compassion for his characters and an awe of the enormity of nature. He awakened the West to Japanese cinema with Rashomon, which won the top prize in the Venice Film Festival of 1951, and also a special Oscar for best foreign film. A golden period followed, with the West enthralled by his work. Seven Samurai, Yojimbo etc.

A true auteur, he supervised the editing of nearly all his films and wrote or collaborated on the scripts of most. His memoirs were published in 1982, titled Something like an Autobiography. In 1989 he won an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement. Kurosawa died in 1998.

6th March 2016 - TIMBUKTU

TIMBUKTU

A film by Abderrahmane Sissako

2015 / Mauritania / 97 minutes

5.45 pm at Perks Mini Theater

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/

Abderrahmane Sissako's passionate and visually beautiful film Timbuktu is a cry from the heart – with all the more moral authority for being expressed with such grace and such care. It is a portrait of the country of his childhood, the west African state of Mali, and in particular the city of Timbuktu, whose rich and humane traditions are being trampled by fanatical jihadis, often from outside the country.

The story revolves around the death of a cow, affectionately named "GPS" – an appropriate symbol for a country that has lost its way. A great deal of the film is focused on a family of cattle herders living in the dunes outside of Timbuktu, the paterfamilias of which, Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed), comes under jihadist judgment in the aftermath of a conflict with a local fisherman over the killing of a cow.

The new puritans appal the local imam, who has long upheld the existing traditions of a benevolent and tolerant Islam; they march into the mosque carrying arms.  Timbuktu is no longer tombouctou la mysterieuse, the magical place of legend, but a harsh, grim, unforgiving place of bigotry and fear.

Abderrahmane Sissako confirms his status as one of the true humanists of recent cinema with this stunningly shot and deeply empathetic drama. In the hands of a master, indignation and tragedy can be rendered with clarity yet subtlety, setting hysteria aside for deeper, more richly shaded tones. Sissako is just such a master, and while previous films have showcased his skill at bringing magnetic dignity to his characters, “Timbuktu” confirms his status as one of the true humanists of recent cinema.

  

Abderrahmane Sissako

Abderrahmane Sissako was born in Kiffa, Mauritania, in 1961 and raised in Mali, his father’s homeland. When he returned to Mauritania in 1980, the emotional and financial difficulties of adjustment made him turn to literature and film. A study grant allowed him to attend the Institute of the University of Moscow. Le Jeu (1989), first presented as a graduation assignment, won the prize for best short at the Giornate del Cinema Africano of Perugia in 1991. In 1993, October was shown at Locarno and won prizes the world over. His film Waiting for Happiness was screened at Cannes 2002 and was winner of the FIPRESCI award for best film in the Un certain regard section.

Sissako is, along with Ousmane Sembène, Souleymane Cissé, Idrissa Ouedraogo and Djibril Diop Mambety, one of the few filmmakers from Sub-Saharan Africa to reach a measure of international influence. His 2014 film Timbuktu was selected to compete for the Palme d’Or in the main competition section at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, garnered a 2015 Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, and swept the 2015 Cesar Awards in France winning seven awards, including Best Director and Best Film.

21st Feb 2016; Robert Bresson's AU HASARD BALTHAZAR

Au Hasard Balthazar

A film by Robert Bresson

1966/ France/ 95 minutes

21^st Feb 2016/ 5.45 p.m / Peks mini theater

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/

Great French master Robert Bresson is one of the saints of the cinema, and "Au Hasard Balthazar" (1966) is his most heartbreaking prayer. The film's title character/protagonist is a donkey -- not a humanoid, Disney donkey but a realistic animal who, in the film's opening sequence, is adopted by three young children in rural southern France and "baptized" in their own makeshift religious ceremony.

Balthazar is a farm animal - a donkey - born into a life of servitude: a beast of burden destined to work the land, carry bales of hay and provide occasional transportation. His harsh, often exploited existence is paralleled through the life of Marie, a reticent young woman whose father has been asked to maintain a friend's farm. The owner's son, Jacques, returns to the farm to profess his support for Marie's father, whose reputation has been ruined by  debt and rumors surrounding the ownership  of the farm. Jacques is devoted to Marie, but Marie is drawn to Gerard, a cruel young man. Meanwhile Balthazar's ownership passes hands to a baker and to Gerard and so on.

French new wave  film maker Godard’s famous claim that Au hasard Balthazar is “the world in an hour and a half” suggests how dense, how immense Bresson’s brief, elliptical tale about the life and death of a donkey is. The film’s steady accumulation of incident, characters, mystery, and social detail, its implicative use of sound, offscreen space, and editing, have the miraculous effect of turning the director’s vaunted austerity into endless plenitude, which is perhaps the central paradox of Bresson’s cinema. So concentrated and oblique is Balthazar, it achieves the density, to extend Godard’s metaphor just a little, of an imploded nova.

Au Hasard Balthazar is a haunting, subtly disturbing, and thematically uncompromising portrait of man's innate cruelty and destructive impulses. Through the transfiguration of a mistreated animal as an allegorical symbol of virtue, purity, and redemption, Robert Bresson creates a visually spare and indelible film of startling intensity: the symbolic image of Marie, Gerard, and Balthazar in the snow; the framed shot of a humiliated Marie against the back closet of the farmhouse; the final, sublime shot of Balthazar with the grazing sheep. Alone in the countryside, wandering and without direction, Balthazar finds a place of peace...his sanctuary. (Source: Internet) 

Robert Bresson 

Robert Bresson’s 13 features over 40 years constitute arguably the most original and brilliant body of work over a long career from a film director in the history of cinema. He is the most idiosyncratic and uncompromising of all major filmmakers, in the sense that he always tried to create precisely what he wanted without surrendering to considerations of commerce, audience popularity, or people’s preconceptions of what cinema should be. And although it might be argued that his venture into colour from Une Femme douce (1969) onwards was probably against his better judgement, he shows mastery in its use.

Born in central France and educated in Paris, Bresson’s early ambition was to be a painter. He ventured into filmmaking with the short Les Affaires publiques (1934). a satire with nods to Clair and Vigo, which was rediscovered in the 1980s after being thought lost. After a year or so as a prisoner-of-war he was approached by a Paris priest with a proposal for a film about the Bethany order of nuns, which became Les Anges du péché (1943). His next feature was also made during the Occupation, and filmmaking had by then definitely supplanted painting. The confusion over his date of birth, symbolic perhaps of his reclusive nature, caused reviewers of his final filmL’Argent (1983) to marvel over how a man "in his late 70s" or alternatively "in his 80s" could show such youthful exuberance in his filmmaking.

A critic once wrote that Mizoguchi’s Sansho Dayu (1954) "is one of those films for whose sake the cinema exists". For many of us, the same can be said of the work of Robert Bresson.

7th Feb 2016; Terrence Malick's BADLANDS

BADLANDS

A film by Terrence Malick

1973/ USA / 93 minutes

5.45 pm/ 7th Feb 2016

Perks Mini Theater

The world was like a faraway planet, to which I could never return ... I thought what a fine place it was, full of things that people can look into and enjoy.

– Holly (Sissy Spacek) in Badlands

 

When making a film, Terrence Malick speaks to his collaborators in poetic images. To Martin Sheen in Badlands (1973), he said: ‘Think of the gun in your hand as a magic wand.’

Among the great American crime movies, 1973's "Badlands" stands alone. It’s main characters Kit and Holly are inspired by real life  Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate who went on a wild ride in 1958 that ended with eleven people shot dead. Reclusive writer-director Terrence Malick  gives no psychological explanation and there are no symbols to note or lessons to learn from the movie. What comes through more than anything is the enormous loneliness of the lives these two characters lived, together and apart. He interweaves dull stretches of South Dakota and Montana with fierce young love, giving the film a chilling and spellbinding realism.

Nature is always deeply embedded in Malick’s films. It occupies the stage and then humans edge tentatively onto it, uncertain of their roles. Kit is ten years older than Holly, but they’re both caught up in the same adolescent love fantasy at first. 

Kit and Holly are fleeing toward nowhere, although Kit talks vaguely of “heading north”. Holly follows along not so much because she must, but because she had a crush on Kit and hated her father who angered her by forbidding her to see him and even shot her dog to punish her. Refracted through Holly’s naive, emotionally flat narration and Malick’s poetic visual style, this tale is transformed into something strange and oddly beautiful.  

Kit and Holly are fleeing toward nowhere, although Kit talks vaguely of “heading north”. Holly follows along not so much because she must, but because she had a crush on Kit and hated her father who angered her by forbidding her to see him and even shot her dog to punish her. Refracted through Holly’s naive, emotionally flat narration and Malick’s poetic visual style, this tale is transformed into something strange and oddly beautiful.

Scenes from "Badlands" just never leave you. There's a constant tension between the beauty of the landscapes -- and of Holly and Kit -- and the banality or craziness of their behavior.  Terrence Malick's debut film "Badlands" captivates us  with its unique blend of deadpan lyricism, eerie violence and wistful romanticism. (Source:Internet)

Terrence Malick

Malick grew up in Bartlesville, Oklahoma and Texas, working on oil fields as a young man. He moved to Austin, Texas and graduated from St. Stephen's Episcopal School. Malick studied philosophy under Stanley Cavell at Harvard University, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1965. He went on to Magdalen College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. After a disagreement with his advisor, Gilbert Ryle, over his thesis on the concept of the world in Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, Malick left Oxford without a doctorate degree.

In 1969, Northwestern University Press published Malick's translation of Heidegger's Vom Wesen des Grundes as The Essence of Reasons. Moving back to the United States, Malick taught philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology while freelancing as a journalist. He wrote articles for Newsweek, The New Yorker, and Life.

Malick got his start in film after earning an MFA from the AFI Conservatory in 1969, directing Lanton Mills. At the AFI he established contacts with people such as Jack Nicholson and agent Mike Medavoy, who acquired freelance script-doctoring work for him. After working as a screenwriter and script doctor, Malick directed Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978). Following the release of Days of Heaven, Malick moved to France and disappeared from public view for 20 years. He returned to film in 1998 with The Thin Red Line. The movie was nominated for seven Academy Awards, but did not win any of them.

His fourth feature was The New World, whose script he finished in the late 1970s. The film features a romantic interpretation of the story of John Smith and Pocahontas, filmed in his customary transcendental style. And nextcame his great  master piece Tree of Life in 2011. Malick is famously reclusive. His contracts stipulate that no one may photograph, and he routinely declines requests for interviews. Malick married Alexandra "Ecky" Wallace in 1998. They reside in Austin, Texas.

(Source:Internet)