"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, SEPTEMBER 25, 2009
Magic of Cinema presents I Am From Titov Veles and Those Three, 6:00:00 PM, Little Theater (J-16)
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The Macedonia film, I Am From Titov Veles, is set in the quaint Balkan town of Veles and tells the story of three sisters who long to escape the suffocating environment of their dying community and its polluting steel mill. Burdened by memories of their late father, each chooses a different path: Sapho struggles to secure a visa to Greece, Slavica desperately searches for a rich husband and Afrodita hopes for love and children.
The second film, Those Three, by Iranian director Naghi Nemati tells the story of three conscripts who desert their camp and escape into the frozen wilderness of Northern Iran just one day short of completing their military training. During the dangerous and treacherous journey that takes them across snowbound mountains, the three must rely on their friendship and the promise of independence to see them through. |
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FRIDAY, OCTOBER 02, 2009
My Time Will Come (Ecuador) and Mutum (Brazil), 6:00:00 PM, Little Theater (J-16)
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My Time Will Come opens with a predawn murder, which sets in motion a series of interlocking tragedies that eventually find their way to the city morgue's brooding coroner, Dr. Arturo Fernandez. Physically and emotionally isolated from the world around him, he develops an oddly intimate relationship with the personal lives of his cases, gradually forcing him to confront his own connection to the living. Directed by Victor Arreguli, Ecuador’s capital city, Quito, becomes a living entity in the film where life and death are put into a strange tension between isolation and the joys of life and human connection.
Mutum, the second film, is a Brazilian coming of age story. The central character, Thiago, is a sensitive and imaginative boy of 10 living on a small, hardscrabble farm in a remote region of Brazil. His life is filled not only with curiosity and youthful discovery, but also the reality of his parent's unhappy marriage and his father's abuse — all of which are one day changed by a chance encounter and unexpected gift. The director, Sandra Kogut, focuses on minute details of rural life to tell a bittersweet tale of one boy's growing up through events both great and small. |
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FRIDAY, OCTOBER 09, 2009
The Photograph (Indonesia) and Possible Lives (Argentina), 6:00:00 PM, Little Theater (J-16)
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The Photograph from Indonesia portrays the story of a young woman, Sita, who works as a singer and prostitute in a local karaoke bar in order to support her sick mother. Her daughter, meanwhile, lives apart from her in the country. As the story unfolds, we find Sita coming under the influence of an elderly and withdrawn photographer from whom she rents a room. The bond between the two slowly grows, based at first on need—Sita’s to avoid her pimp, and the photographer, who is desperate to find an apprentice he can train to carry on his work before he dies. The unlikely bond that develops is the basis of writer director Nan Achnas's visually brilliant and poignant human drama about the profound effect one life and the fragile world of images can have on another. The film was awarded the Special Jury Prize, Karlovy Vary FF, in 2008.
Achnas was among a group of 300 filmmakers in 2007 that successfully protested the Jakarta government’s state control over the film industry. The result was a strong boost to national production from critically acclaimed film directors. The Photograph is her fourth feature film. Her documentary films have been screened at festivals worldwide, and her narrative work includes the FIPRESCI award–winning Whispering Sands and The Flag. She currently teaches Cinema Studies and Directing at the Jakarta Institute of the Arts.
Possible Lives from Argentina traces the life of a woman as she desperately searches for her husband, who has mysteriously disappeared during a business trip to Patagonia. During her search, she makes a startling discovery: a man with an uncanny resemblance to her spouse, but with another name and a wife. Convinced the stranger may be her husband, she ignores entreaties to quit her search just as police discover a body that may be the man she seeks. Suffused with vibrant color and sexuality, director Sandra Gugliotta's film is a haunting and suspenseful study of grief and letting go. This is Gugliotta’s second feature film.
Gugliotta began her filmmaking career as a producer of independent films and documentaries for television. Her short film, Noches Áticas, was included in the feature Historias Breves I, and her first feature film, A Lucky Day, won the Caligari Film Award at the Berlin International Film Festival.
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FRIDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2009
Sleepwalking Land (Mozambique) and What A Wonderful World (Morocco), 6:00:00 PM, Little Theater (J-16)
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Sleepwalking Land is Mozambique director Teresa Prata’s feature debut. In it, she explores both the impact of storytelling and the shape of things in her native Mozambique through the eyes of an elderly man and a youth whose lives intersect when the two seek refuge from one of the many wandering gangs that are a result of the country’s endless civil war. Striking up a friendship, the two men discover the diary of a dead refugee, which the young man reads aloud as a way of passing the time.
Although the journal is filled with many horror stories related to the civil war, it also has some surprising details that give the younger man an unexpected sense of hope. He gains hope as well from the many other travelers they meet along their journey, each with his or her own story to share. Some are stark, some are uplifting and some are just plain bizarre, but all of them speak to the strength of a long suffering people and the redemptive power of story.
Prata split her childhood between Mozambique, Brazil and Portugal and directed several acclaimed shorts before starting work on Sleepwalking Land. Variety has called it a “parable for a society struggling to cope with its evisceration.” Before directing this film, Prata made several experimental videos and installations.
What A Wonderful World from Moroccan director Faouzi Bensaïdi has been called a new vision of an old culture, “unveiling an uncommon Casablanca caught in a world wide web of associations and consequences.” The story centers around three people —Souad, a prostitute; her best friend Kenza, a tough traffic cop; and Kamel, Souad's favorite customer, who just happens to be a contract killer who receives his hit orders via the Internet. When Kenza falls in love with Kamel, the two begin a bizarre courtship doomed by their disparate lines of work, and a persistent cyber–snooping hacker who stumbles upon the site where Kamel receives his murderous contracts.
What a Wonderful World is Bensaïd’s second feature film. Two of his short films, The Wall and The Rain Line, won prizes at the Cannes and Venice International Film Festivals.
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FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 06, 2009
Song From The Southern Seas (Kazakhstan) and Getting Home (China), 6:00:00 PM, Little Theater (J-16)
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Critics have been very positive in their reviews of Song From the Southern Seas, which they say can be read as an allegory for post Soviet relations between Russian and the republics, as a meditation on race in modern life, or as a straight ahead family drama from the Great Steppe. Regardless of how you view it, they say it works wonderfully on all these levels.
The story involves the birth of two babies, and the reactions that center around their appearance. When a baby is born to a Russian couple living in Kazakhstan, the father thinks the child looks more like his neighbor and friend, a Kazakh with distinctly Asian features. At about the same time, the neighbor and his wife also have a child, who has an uncharacteristic head of hair of a distinctly reddish color. Immediately, this neighbor, too, becomes suspicious, and the spiral of speculation mounts, resulting in a humorous, briskly paced film of plots and subplots. Enhancing the film are a collection of Central Asian folk melodies that are part of the sound track.
The director, Marat Sarulu, studied at the Moscow Cinema Academy. He is co–writer of the internationally successful feature film, Beshkempir and currently works as a writer and director. Song from the Southern Seas is his third feature film.
The second film,Getting Home, tells the story of a middle aged Chinese construction worker who struggles to return a fellow worker's deceased body to his family for proper burial. Directed by Zhang Yang, the film takes the audience on an unusual travel odyssey that brings viewers face to face with all sorts of manners and social classes.
British critic Simon Field says of the film: "Crossing much of southern China and ending near the Three Gorges Dam, this is a quirky road movie with a cleverly restrained central performance with a series of engaging cameos by well known Chinese actors, . . the film celebrates ordinary Chinese living far from the ‘economic miracle,’ and Getting Home is perhaps his greatest achievement in this vein, offering a gentle, heart warming and often ironic vision of provincial China.”
Getting Home is Yang’s fifth feature film. He was born in Beijing, China, and graduated from the Central Theatre Academy in 1992. He then directed a theatrical production of Kiss of the Spider Woman and went on to direct more than 20 underground music videos. His first feature film,Spicy Love Soup, swept the domestic Chinese awards and his second feature, Shower, won the FIPRESCI prize at the Toronto International Film Festival.
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