Equality and Diversity Film Series 2008-9
Organised by the School of the Arts in conjunction with the
Equality & Diversity Unit
All Films to be held at the Cinema@AvenueSt. Georges Avenue (near the Racecourse), Northampton.
For more information contact:
Verity Milligan: 01604-893075;
Paul Crofts: 01604-893887;
Black History Month:
Thursday 23rd October at 6.30 pm: Baldwin's Niggerand Pressure (double bill) + guest speaker (Alan Howard) to introduce. Discussion at the end. Jointly sponsored with the Northamptonshire Black History Association
Equality & Diversity/One-World Week
Thursday 6th Novat 6.30 pm: Sammy and Rosie Get Laid
International Day for Disabled People
Wednesday 3rd Decemberat 6.30 pm - The Station Agent
International Human Rights Day
Wednesday 10th December at 6.30: "The Jammed"
Jointly sponsored with Northampton Amnesty International
Holocaust Memorial Day:
Thursday 29thJanuaryat 6.30 pm: The Counterfeiters
Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual and Trans History Month:
Thursday 5thFebruaryat 6.30 pm: “Celluloid Closet”and“Beautiful Thing”(double bill)
Thursday 19thFebruaryat 6.30 pm: “Summer of Love”
Jointly sponsored with the Northamptonshire Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Alliance (NLGBA)
For International Woman's Day
Thursday12thMarchat 6.30 pm: Vera Drake
May Day: Celebrating an inclusive “Britishness”
Friday: 1stMay (8.00 pm): Folk Evening with Chris Wood (Isham Studio)
INFORMATION and Reviews:
Baldwin's Nigger
Dir: Horace Ovè
1969. Black and White
“Baldwin's Nigger” is a striking portrait of the writer James Baldwin at his sharp-witted best addressing a group of radical West Indian students in 1960s London. Accompanied by comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory, Baldwin discusses black experience and identity in both Britain and America. Impassioned and entertaining, this is a fascinating snapshot of one of America's most powerful novelists and spokesman for a generation.”
British Film Institute
Pressure
Dir: Horace Ovè
1975. Colour
Hailed as Britain’s first Black feature film, this is a hard-hitting and honest document of the struggle and disenchantment faced by British-born Black youth. Set in 19702 London, it tells the story of Tony, son of West Indian immigrants, who finds himself torn between his parent’ church-going conformity and his brothers’ Black power militancy. In his un-heroic way Tony goes along with his family’s aspirations fro him: a quite life and a career in accounting. Despite being a bright school-leaver, his efforts to find a job prove futile. The acts of open discrimination he encounters bring home to him the harsh reality of survival in a country where he is treated as an outsider despite him having roots there. In a bid to find a sense of belonging, he joins his Black friends who, estranged from their submissive parents seek a sense of purpose in the streets and in chases with the police. An angry but sincere and balanced film, Pressure deals with identity struggles that children of immigrants have to face
Whilst made in the 1960s and 1970s these films are still relevant to discussions around “race”, “racism”, identity and justice that are taking place today in new contexts and involving other immigrant communities.
Sammy and Rosie Get Laid
Dir: Hanif Kureishi
1987
“Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) was Hanif Kureishi's second screenplay …. Images of London dominate both the script and the visual landscape of the film. While making the film, Kureishi wrote in his published diary, "My love and fascination for inner London endures. Here there is fluidity and possibilities unlimited." When Rafi (Shashi Kapoor) urges his son to move to Pakistan, Sammy (Ayub Khan Din) narrates over a montage of locations from the towpath toward Hammersmith, past the Albert Hall and RoyalCourtTheatre to the ICA. Here Kureishi emphasises the cosmopolitanism of Sammy's true "homeland".
However, the 'ideal', romantic, even utopian vision of 1980s London that Sammy imagines is in stark contrast to the dismal, hopeless reality of the burning wasteland of the streets outside. Kureishi's London is rent by contradictions between assimilation and separation, conservatism and liberalism, and tradition and progression.
Against a backdrop of homelessness, racial hatred and squalor, the voice of Margaret Thatcher praises prosperity; Sammy and Rosie live on a middle-class street on the edge of a war zone; and while interracial love and extra-marital sex may be a social breakthrough, it is inarticulate, unfulfilling, and ultimately a pursuit of freedom for freedom's sake. We see each of the three couples in a visually striking triple, horizontally-split scene, one pair on top of each other, inhabiting a separate setting, experiencing the same hollow satisfaction of sexually-driven adulterous affairs.
Kureishi called the film his "declaration of war on the British establishment". For all its attempts at an original portrayal of gender, class, race, politics in Thatcher-era London, its main flaw was that this "declaration" was too self-conscious, too transparent, and insufficiently contextualised. It was its all-too-obvious attempt at hipness that left it open to ridicule, while its obsession with sex was a complaint of more than just conservative critics”.
Shalini Chanda;
The Station Agent
Dir: Thomas McCarthy
2004
It's a rare and wondrous thing to be surprised at the cinema these days. Where are the truly original characters? Where are the story lines that lay legitimate claim to that ubiquitous and inflated adjective "quirky"? Where is the astonishment?
Right now, it's in "The Station Agent," a wise, funny, affecting little movie that delighted audiences at the Sundance Film Festival in January and is just now making its way to theaters. It was written and directed by an actor named Tom McCarthy, who made it as a vehicle for a bunch of his friends, whom most viewers probably will not have heard of. It's the kind of film that exists outside of genre or one-line descriptions. Its twists and turns are so subtle and unexpected that easy synopsis would be unfair. The best advice to filmgoers who appreciate smart, mature, humanist movies is, simply, Go. That, and Tell Your Friends.
Peter Dinklage stars as Finbar McBride, a train buff who is happily working in lonely quietude at a model-train store as the movie opens. When the death of a friend results in Fin inheriting a tiny train depot in rural New Jersey, the quiet, vaguely misanthropic young man sets off for a new life, presumably of quiet misanthropy in rural New Jersey.
Instead, Fin discovers that he has neighbors, whose lives have a persistent way of intersecting with his. Joe (Bobby Cannavale), a hot dog vendor who parks his truck in front of Fin's depot every morning, is determined that he and Fin will be best friends; Olivia (Patricia Clarkson), a clumsy, preoccupied painter, almost runs the newcomer over -- twice -- and arrives on his doorstep apologetically bearing a bottle of bourbon. As this oddball threesome coalesces into something akin to a friendship, it's never clear whether Fin will entirely break through his carapace of hurt and mistrust, or whether he will retreat into his hermetic world of train schedule, pocket watch and comfortable, lonely silence.
It should be noted that Fin comes by his isolation honestly: He happens to be a dwarf, measuring 41/2 feet tall, and early in the movie the audience is shown the indignities that he suffers every day. Children make cruel jokes about Snow White as he walks by; a salesgirl doesn't see him over the cash register; the manager of a convenience store takes his picture while he's buying toilet paper. Fin, a handsome man with searching eyes and a sensuous, bow-shaped mouth, has learned over a lifetime that people will see him as exotic, even though, he explains, he's actually "just a simple, boring person."
McCarthy achieves a wonderful balance whereby Fin's height is simultaneously taken for granted and yet always at the problematic center of things. He's helped enormously by a strong, unsentimental performance by Dinklage, whose soft baritone and dark-eyed glower are both forbidding and seductive. Clarkson and Cannavale deliver equally accomplished performances as Fin's ragtag clique: Clarkson, with her porcelain delicacy and tinkling, musical voice, is at once heartbreaking and sharply funny, and Cannavale, who serves as the comic relief, also manages to serve as the movie's big, open-hearted moral catalyst. (Raven Goodwin, the Prince George's County native who was so lovely and amazing in "Lovely & Amazing," and Michelle Williams, from "Dawson's Creek," round out a terrific ensemble cast.)
With Clarkson and Dinklage, McCarthy has cast two of the contemporary screen's great faces, and he films them accordingly. His cinematographer used grainy 16mm film to photograph "The Station Agent," which results in a gauzy, unfocused look that fits the movie's gentle tone (in certain still, nighttime moments, Clarkson looks as if she's been painted by Gerhard Richter).
As a testament to vagrant, evanescent human connection, "The Station Agent" conveys a melancholy sort of joy that is rarely seen in conventional movies these days. Indeed, its emotions are probably too complicated for the nuance-free conventions of the major motion picture. In the cinema, as in all things, we can thank heaven for small miracles.
Ann Hornaday, Washington Post:
The Jammed
Dir: Dee McLachlan
2007
Inspired by court transcripts and actual events, The Jammed is a social thriller about trafficking and the sex slave trade in Melbourne. When a Chinese mother arrives in Melbourne to find her missing daughter, she enlists the help of Ashley Hudson. Ashley reluctantly agrees to help search, and is soon drawn into the dark underworld of this cultured city as she tries to rescue three girls from a trafficking syndicate. As the story unravels the sinister workings of illegal prostitution and governmental deportation is filled with twists and surprises.
The Counterfeiters
Dir: Stefan Ruzowitzky
2007
If you think you are suffering from holocaust fatigue and cannot face another concentration camp reconstruction, take a moment to reconsider. At the centre of The Counterfeiters is a moral dilemma not a million miles from that facing Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness) in The Bridge On The River Kwai.
Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics) is a diminutive, cynical, thin-lipped master forger, living the high life in pre-war Berlin, paying off the Nazis and bribing the police. Although blatantly Jewish, he is confident enough to believe that the storm-troopers’ persecution of his race won’t effect him because of his money and contacts in high places.
When finally he is arrested, you feel that it is his arrogant disregard of Hitler’s anti-Semitic policy, as if thumbing his nose at the Fuehrer, rather than sneaking about in the shadows, like filthy scum victim stereotypes should, that does him in. As well as being good at his craft, Sally is a survivor and Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky’s film, based on the memoir of Adolf Burger, celebrates this quality, while, at the same time, questioning how far means justify ends.
At first, in the Malthausen camp, Sally uses his artistic talent to gain special privileges by drawing flattering portraits of his captors. Later he is transferred to Sachsenhausen at the request of the commandant, the ex-Berlin chief of police who had originally arrested him. Himmler has a devilish plan to flood the market with counterfeit pound notes and dollar bills, thus destroying the enemy’s currencies.
Sally is chosen to lead a team of printers and artists to achieve this end. They are kept separate from the other prisoners, fed and housed decently and provided with the tools of the forger’s trade. Within the group, however, there is argument and dissent, especially from the Communist Burger (August Diehl), who attempts to sabotage the project because of its collaborative nature. Sally knows that their lives depend upon getting the job done and getting it done properly. They are valuable to Himmler only if they succeed and Sally is fully aware of this, while persistently playing for time.
The film is extraordinary on many levels. Markovics captures the contradictions, intelligence and complexity of Sally so accurately that he becomes, not a hero, but a man who wages his soul for the scent of Chanel on the skin of a beautiful woman in Monte Carlo. Despite being treated as human beings by the commandant, the men who work with Sally in the camp are constantly in danger. The tension and sense of death is like a physical barrier to sanity’s guiding hand. The arguments for and against completing the task, with all that that implies for Germany’s war effort, raises the stakes to a scarcely bearable level.
The rich texture of suffering and guilt carries until the end, and then beyond. To have been here, Sally seems to say, is to know that to have done your best for the honour of your profession and the safety of your comrades is tainted with the blood of millions.
Celluloid Closet
Dir: Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman
1996
The movies are over 100 years old, and gay movie characters have been with us since the very beginning -- even during the Production Code years, when “sex perversion” was explicitly forbidden. From comic sissies to lesbian vampires, from pathetic queens to sadistic predators, Hollywood has both reflected and defined how we think about homosexualityand about what it means to be a man or woman. With clips from over 100 Hollywood movies, and interviews with many of the filmmakers and stars who created them (including Tom Hanks, Shirley Maclaine, Susan Sarandon, Whoopi Goldberg and Gore Vidal), The Celluloid Closet is an epic story -- by turns surprising, hilarious and disturbing. The Celluloid Closet makes us see Hollywood images in a whole new light, exploding sexual myths and examining our attitudes about sexuality and sex roles as they evolved through the 20th century.
Beautiful Thing
Dir:Hettie Macdonald
1996
A tender love story set during a hot summer on a South-East London housing estate. Jamie, a relatively unpopular lad who bunks off school to avoid football, lives next door to Ste, a more popular athletic lad but who is frequently beaten up by his father and older brother. Such an episode of violence brings Jamie and Ste together: Sandra (Jamie's mum) offers refugee to Ste, who has to 'top-and-tail' with Jamie. Hence, the story tells of their growing attraction for one another, from initial lingering glances to their irrefutable love, which so magnificently illustrated at the end of the film. In deals with the tribulations of coming to terms with their sexuality and of others finding out, in light of Sandra's unwavering loyalty and defence of Jamie and the fear of repercussion should Ste's family find out. The plot is set against sub-texts of Sandra's desire to manage her own pub, and thus escape the estate, and of her new relationship with her hippy boyfriend Tony; and of Leah, the brassy girl next door who has been expelled from school and spends her time listening to Mama Cass records and tripping on a variety of drugs. Written by Mark Edwards.
Summer of Love
Dir:Pawel Pawlikowski
2004
A tale of obsession and deception, and the struggle for love and faith in a world where both seem impossible. The film charts the emotional and physical hothouse effects that bloom one summer for two young women: Mona, behind a spiky exterior, hides an untapped intelligence and a yearning for something beyond the emptiness of her daily life; Tamsin is well-educated, spoiled and cynical. Complete opposites, each is wary of the other's differences when they first meet, but this coolness soon melts into mutual fascination, amusement and attraction. Adding volatility is Mona's older brother Phil, who has renounced his criminal past for religious fervor - which he tries to impose upon his sister. Mona, however, is experiencing her own rapture. "We must never be parted," Tamsin intones to Mona but can Mona completely trust her? Written by Focus Features
Vera Drake
Dir: Mike Leigh
2005
Vera Drake is a selfless woman who is completely devoted to, and loved by, her working class family. She spends her days doting on them and caring for her sick neighbour and elderly mother. However, she also secretly visits women and helps them induce miscarriages for unwanted pregnancies. While the practice itself was illegal in 1950s England, Vera sees herself as simply helping women in need, and always does so with a smile and kind words of encouragement. When the authorities finally find her out, Vera's world and family life rapidly unravel. Sujit R. Varma
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