Canterbury Film Society News

Canterbury Film Society News

Broken Wings

Screening: Monday 27 July, 6:30pm, Rialto Cinemas Moorhouse, Cinema 2
Nir Bergman | Israel | 2002 | DV | M offensive language, sexual references, drug use

A moving, perceptive picture of family dynamics thrown into chaos by the loss of an adored father. Nir Bergman’s tellingly detailed script illuminates the volatile density of family relationships with a clarity that is as rare as it is gratifying.
An Israeli film that could take place in any first world city, Broken Wings is a moving, acutely perceptive picture of family dynamics thrown into chaos by the loss, nine months earlier, of an adored father and husband. Dominated by the rocky relationship of mother and teenage daughter, the family is redefining itself through trial and error. Dafna, the mother, struggling to make ends meet, works as a midwife, leaving 17-year-old Maya to act as surrogate mother to 11-year-old Ido and 6-year-old Bahr.

Brother Yair has dropped out of school at 16 and found a job commensurate with his world-view, handing out leaflets, dressed as a giant mouse. Maya is a promising songwriter, but the boys in the band consider her family duties a cop-out. Her fury at this injustice provokes a crisis of heart-stopping suspense: the anxiety for emotional rescue becomes almost palpable. The actors thrive with writer/director Nir Bergman’s tellingly detailed script and illuminate the volatile density of family relationships with a clarity that is as rare as it is gratifying. — Bill Gosden.

(87 minutes, In Hebrew with English subtitles, DVD)
PLUS we'll start with the short film SING BOY SING, directed by John du Four, one of our members!!

************************************************************
FESTIVAL NEWS:

New Zealand International Film Festival 30 July - 16 August at the Regent

A reminder to CFS members that the New Zealand International Film Festival starts next Thursday 30 July. Tickets are on sale now to the biggest film event in Christchurch this year from the Regent on Worcester. Pre-sales have been high so make sure you book your tickets early to avoid disappointment. Remember that CFS members get discounted tickets so make sure you have your CFS membership card with you when you purchase your tickets.

Festival Highlights:

Camino - The major Spanish film of the year, it's been a huge, controversial hit and winner of Goya Awards for Best Film, Director, Screenplay and Actress. Writer/director Javier Fesser has based his film on the case of Alexia Gonzalez-Barros, a devoutly Catholic Spanish girl whose ‘exemplary’ hospital death in 1985 at the age of 14 has become the focus of a cult of sainthood.

The First Day of the Rest of Your Life - This popular French hit is a buoyant, rewardingly perceptive dramatic comedy about family dynamics and the urge to escape them.

Everlasting Moments - In the decade from 1907 that the based-on-fact story covers, few households possess a camera, but Maria, the struggling wife and mother at the film's centre, wins one in a lottery. Gently encouraged by the camera store owner, she finds flashes of profound respite from the dramas of her tough life by creating portraits of her children, her neighbourhood, the way the light streams through a window. The director, Swedish veteran Jan Troell, is a photographer himself and every frame of this beautiful film is alive to the camera's power to bear witness to time, place and experience.

Balibo - When Indonesian forces invaded East Timor, newly independent of Portugal, in 1975, the world turned a blind eye. Well, not quite. Two Australian television channels had reporters on the ground. Five of them – zealous young journos in their 20s, one of them, Gary Cunningham, a New Zealander – ignored every warning and kept their cameras rolling as the Indonesians made their advance on the Fretilin base at Balibo. It was not until 2007 that a NSW coroner’s enquiry confirmed that the Balibo Five, as they have become known, were not killed in crossfire, but trapped and coldly executed by the invaders.

Van Diemen's Land - The magnificent forest and riverscapes of Tasmania murmur their indifference as one of the most grimly resonant of white Australian settlement stories unfolds in this intensely impressive first film. Eight thieves, of Irish, English and Scottish birth, all city boys, escape a convict camp with scant knowledge of bush survival. One, Alexander Pearce, survives. When he claims that he stayed alive by eating the others, the authorities conclude that he's covering up for his escaped mates. Director Jonathan auf der Heide, cowriter and lead actor Oscar Redding and an ensemble of colleagues from Melbourne's fertile independent theatre scene have imagined events with scrupulous intelligence, psychological acuity and an almost anthropological attention to detail. Eschewing genre thrills, they invest the savagery of the ‘fatal shore’ with specific lived experience so raw and sad you sense an urge for national exorcism 190 years later.

Samson & Delilah - Warwick Thornton's potent, tacitly contentious feature about a pair of outcast Aboriginal kids who flee from their tiny central Australian community won the Camera d'Or for Best First Film at the Festival de Cannes in May. It's a major accolade, but the chances are that it pales as a reward for Thornton and his collaborators beside their film's success in the multiplexes of Australia. Samson & Delilah has entered the national conversation across the Tasman the way Once Were Warriors once did here.

Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies - New York filmmaker and gallery owner Arne Glimcher followed his 2007 exhibition ‘Picasso, Braque and Early Film in Cubism’ with this smart, concise documentary which encapsulates the show's thesis – that Cubism was a response to the new technology of cinema at the turn of the 20th century. Cinema is placed squarely at the centre of an emerging aesthetic of movement in the visual arts.

ends

© Scoop Media