"The Magic of Cinema" is a film series sponsored by Peninsula College with funding from the Peninsula College Foundation and the Associated Student Council. The series seeks to present the range of possibilities of film as an art form through screenings of classics from Art Cinema and Hollywood's Golden Age, as well as contemporary foreign and independent features, and documentaries. The series will continue throughout the school year.
All shows are in the Little Theater. Tickets are $5 at the door or $1.00 with a current Peninsula College Student ID card.
If you have questions about the film series or would like to be added to the series email list to receive updates about the schedule, please email Bruce Hattendorf.
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FRIDAY, JANUARY 22, 2010
Trouble the Water (USA. Winner, Documentary Grand Jury Prize, Sundance), 7:00:00 PM, Little Theater (J-16)
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Directed and produced by Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine producers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, Trouble the Water takes you inside Hurricane Katrina in a way never before seen on screen. The filmmakers document a couple’s return to New Orleans, the devastation of their neighborhood and the appalling repeated failures of government. Weaving an insider’s view of Katrina with a mix of verité and in-your-face filmmaking, Trouble the Water is a redemptive tale of self-described street hustlers who become heroes. |
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FRIDAY, JANUARY 29, 2010
Tulpan (Kazakhstan. Winner, Prix Un Certain Regard, 2008 Cannes Film Festival), 7:00:00 PM, Little Theater (J-16)
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| Winner of the Prix Un Certain Regard at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, acclaimed Kazakh documentarian Sergey Dvortsevoy’s first narrative feature is a gorgeous mélange of tender comedy, ethnographic drama and wildlife extravaganza. Following his Russian naval service, young dreamer Asa returns to his sister’s nomadic brood on the desolate Hunger Steppe to begin a hardscrabble career as a shepherd. But before he can tend a flock of his own, Asa must win the hand of the only eligible bachelorette for miles—his alluringly mysterious neighbor Tulpan. |
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FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 05, 2010
Up the Yangtze (Canada and China. Winner, Best Documentary, Independent Spirit Awards), 7:00:00 PM, Little Theater (J-16)
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The work of a young Chinese film-maker who calls Montreal, Canada, home will be shown at Peninsula College on Friday, February 5, when the Magic of Cinema brings you Up the Yangtze. The film will begin at 7:00 pm in the college’s Little Theater.
Directed by Yung Chang, the film provides a riveting look at the great river before it is completely flooded by the Three Gorges Dam project, the biggest hydroelectric dam ever to be built anywhere.
Up The Yangtze is a co production between Canada’s National Film Board and Montreal based EyeSteelFilm, and it has met with huge success where ever it has been shown. A reviewer at the Sundance Film Festival noted: “Chang shows the tenuous balance between China’s rich cultural past and its modernized future.”
The film came about as a result of a trip on the Yangtze Chang took with his parents and his grandfather on one of the so called farewell cruises of the river. Chang immediately saw the opportunity to take the story of the biggest engineering endeavor since the Great Wall and give it a human face by telling it through the eyes of a peasant family. It took him four years to secure the financing and to research and develop the story.
"This is a movie about displacement,” Chang says. When it is completed, the dam will have uprooted more than a million residents and destroyed countless cultural and archaeological sites, ending a way of life that existed for centuries.
"I had to convince them that I was not coming in with a western point of view but that I wanted to get behind and find the human story," Chang adds.
The film follows two young people whose lives are disrupted by the building of the dam. One is Yu Shui, the 16 year old daughter of a peasant family, who wants nothing more than to finish her education. Instead, she is forced to go to work on one of the luxury cruise liners designed to give tourists their last glimpse of the mighty Yangtze before it is forever changed. The other young person is Shui’s good-looking coworker, who sees his employment not as a closing down of a way of life, but merely as an opportunity to make money while he can.
Life onboard the ship mirrors the hierarchy of the wider world. Western passengers take in the views and enjoy the spacious upper decks, while Yu Shui toils in the galley, trying to gain a permanent position so she will be able to survive once the great river is damned.
Admission to the film is $5 or $1 with a current PC student I.D.
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FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2010
Three Monkeys (Turkey. Winner, Best Director, Cannes), 7:00:00 PM, Little Theater (J-16)
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A film that won half a dozen major awards at international film festivals and the Best Director prize at Cannes in 2008 will be shown Friday evening, February 12, at Peninsula College’s Magic of Cinema Film Series. The screening will begin at 7:00 pm in the Little Theater.
The film,Three Monkeys, is by Turkey’s leading filmmaker, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Considered a master of ambience and nuance in films, Ceylan does not disappoint in this film. Critics have called it “a twisty, noirish tale,” and it opens with an ambitious politician fleeing a hit and run accident.
Afraid of hurting his election chances, the politician pays off his chauffeur, Eyüp, to take the rap. The film centers on the effects of the devil’s bargain on Eyüp’s shiftless son Ismail and his own restless wife, Hacer.
When Eyüp goes to jail, his wife begins an affair with the politician. Eventually Ismail learns of his mother’s transgression and kills her lover.
Commenting on Three Monkeys in an online interview, Ceylan said: “This film aims to present that kind of emotional and psychological situation together with a plot loaded with the violence of complicated events evolving between four main characters. We have tried to dramatize the abstract thoughts, beliefs and conceptual conflicts that deeply engage our minds by personifying them in these characters.”
The film is remarkable not only for its acting, but for Ceylan’s evoking emotional and haunting cityscapes. Wintry vistas contrast with sweltering seaside summerscapes rife with thundering trains and lowering clouds that portend a day of reckoning repeatedly—but perhaps not endlessly—deferred.
Admission is $5 or $1 with a current PC student I.D.
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FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2010
Afghan Star (Afghanistan. World Cinema Audience Award and Best Directing Award, Sundance), 7:00:00 PM, Little Theater (J-16)
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After thirty years of war and five devastating years of Taliban rule, pop culture is beginning to return to the country. Since 2005, millions have been tuning in to Tolo TV’s wildly popular American Idol-style series Afghan Star. Like its Western predecessors, people compete for a cash prize and record deal. Winner of the Directing and Audience Awards in Sundance’s 2009 World Documentary competition, Havana Marking’s timely and moving film follows the dramatic stories of four young finalists—two men and two women—as they hazard everything to become the nation’s favorite performer.
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FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2010
Fados (Spain and Portugal. Nominated for Best Documentary and Winner, Best Song, Goya Awards), 7:00:00 PM, Little Theater (J-16)
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| Fados completes the musical trilogy of award-winning Carlos Saura (Flamenco, 1995; Tango, 1998). Using Lisbon as a backdrop, he explores Portugal’s most emblematic musical genre (fado) and its haunting spirit of saudade (melancholy). Tracing its African and Brazilian origins up to the new wave of modern faudistas, he ingeniously deploys mirrors, back projections, lighting effects, and lush colors to frame each song, ranging from a campfire ringed by sinuous dancers to a balletic catfight between two jealous women to a thrilling desgarrada (musical duel) in a fado café. |
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