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June 17, 2000 American film producer Peter Loehr, '95 Chinese School and head of IMAR Films, the first independent film company in China, will discuss his work with members of the Chinese School and the public. Loehr's new film, Shower, a drama set in a traditional Beijing bathhouse, will be released in the U.S. in July. The film's director, Zhang Yang, will also be present at the lecture. |
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June 17, 2000 West Beyrouth [West Beirut] |
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Lebanon, 1998, 105 minutes. Color. Arabic with English
subtitles.
Written and directed by Ziad Doueiri
Approximately 150,000 people died in Lebanon’s civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 1989, but surprisingly few films have been made about the conflict. West Beirut captures the sociopolitical climate during the early part of the war with remarkable accuracy and subtlety, and proves once again that humor, even in the most unbearable situations, can be an indispensable tool for survival.
This fresh, intimate, funny and poignant drama brings 1975 Lebanon to life as a free-spirited teenager tries to get his Super-8 home movie developed in war-torn Beirut. A fusion of comedy, innocence, sudden danger and romance, the autobiographical West Beirut marks an auspicious feature debut for writer-director Ziad Doueiri, who began his career in the U.S. as cameraman for Quentin Tarantino. The critics agree: West Beirut is the "must see" foreign film of the year!
New Directors/New Films Festival, 1999
Directors’ Fortnight, Cannes Film Festival, International Critics’ Prize, Toronto International Film Festival.
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June 24, 2000 Jing ke ci qin wang [The Emperor and the Assassin] 7:00 pm only |
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China, 1999 160 minutes Color Mandarin with English
subtitles.
Directed by Kaige Chen
From the director of Yellow Earth, an epic film based on the true story of China’s first emperor. Ying Zheng, power-hungry heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Qin, whose goal is to conquer the other six kingdoms existing in China, gains the help of his concubine Zhao (Gong Li), who travels to the kingdom of Han as a spy, in order to make the king believe that she has fallen out of favor with Ying. Once in Han, and together with the king, Zhao is supposed to find an assassin, who will be sent to kill Ying, but Ying will be prepared for the assassin's onslaught, and in defending himself, will be considered by the people to be unstoppable.
While walking through the marketplace in the kingdom of Han, Zhao discovers Jing Ke. Struck by his subtle demeanor and able swordmanship, Zhao approaches Jing Ke about becoming the assassin and begins a campaign to convince him to kill Ying, using all her powers of persuasion. It is through her dealings with this modest man, that she finds herself falling deeply in love...
"****! A REAL STUNNER! The film is so good it can survive comparisons to Kurosawa, Eisenstein and David Lean." – Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune
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July 1, 2000 Rajio no jikan [Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald] |
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Japan, 1997, 103 minutes. Color. Japanese with English
subtitles.
Directed by Koki Mitani
In the late-night studio of the nation’s number one radio station, the countdown has started for "Woman of Destiny", a big, new, romantic drama from the station’s prize-winning scriptwriter. Suddenly the lead actress decides that, unless the script is changed, she will refuse to go on the air. No longer content to play Ritsouko, a fisherman’s wife in a small village, she first demands to be renamed Mary Jane, then demands a career change: she wants to be a major trial lawyer in New York City. Other players demand equally outrageous and interesting changes to their own roles. By the time the show begins a few minutes later, the sweet, touching love story has become a big city action drama full of machine gun warfare, rocket-launching and trampled love affairs.
"A total joyous delight! Japanese cinema’s first screwball comedy" – Weekly Variety
"The birth of a new, unprecedented Japanese cinema" – The Sankei Shimbun Newspaper
"Dissects the inner workings of Japanese social relations with a finer scalpel than any film in recent memory" – Japan Times
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July 8, 2000 Conte d'automne [Autumn Tale] |
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France, 1998, 110 minutes. Color. French with English
subtitles.
Directed by Eric Rohmer
A romantic, celebratory fable of matchmaking and misunderstandings, this is the final film of Eric Rohmer’s seasonal quartet "Tales of the Four Seasons". Isabelle, a sophisticated bookseller, and Magali, a country winemaker, are lifelong best friends. In the throes of planning her daughter’s wedding, Isabelle, who is happily married, becomes concerned that her shy, rough-around-the edges widowed friend is lonely now that her children have left home. Indeed, Magali admits she needs a man but doesn’t know – at forty-five, living in a remote part of the Côte du Rhone countryside – where to find one. Isabelle suggests a personal ad, and when Magali reacts with horror, decides to place one and then handpick her friend a mate by posing as Magali herself.
Léo, Magali’s son, is dating the beautiful and bright Rosine, whose ambivalent feelings for Léo are far outweighed by her admiration for Magali. Rosine cooks up her own scheme for setting Magali up with her own ex-lover and philosophy teacher Etienne, an older man who is not quite over Rosine.
Both women conspire to direct their candidates for Magali to the wedding of Isabelle’s daughter Émilia, but neither is sure the stubborn Magali will cooperate once she gets there. To complicate matters both Isabelle and Rosine have second thoughts about giving up their proposed suitors
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July 15, 2000 Todo sobre mi madre [All About My Mother] |
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Spain, 1999, 101 minutes. Color. Spanish with English
subtitles.
Written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar
The night a car ran over her son Esteban, Manuela read the last lines written by her son in a notebook that he always kept by his side. "This morning I looked through my mother’s bedroom until I found a stack of photographs. All of them were cut in half. My father, I suppose. I have the impression that my life is missing that same half. I want to meet him, I don’t care who he is, or how he treated my mother. No one can take that right away from me."
In memory of her son, Manuela leaves Madrid and goes to Barcelona in search of his father. She wants to tell him that their son's last written words were directed to him. But first she has to tell him that, when she abandoned him eighteen years ago, she was pregnant, they had a son, and he has just died.
Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, 2000
Winner, Best Director, Cannes Film Festival, 1999
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July 22, 2000 Lola rennt [Run Lola Run] |
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Germany, 1998, 77 minutes. Color. German with English
subtitles.
Directed by Tom Tykwer
Winner of the Audience Award at Sundance and the highest-grossing film in German history, this rapid-fire outlaw-couple romance combines MTV razzle-dazzle, film-noir fatalism and post-Tarantino plot twisting. Lola, the rebellious daughter of a philandering banker, gets a frantic phone call from her hotheaded boyfriend, who has lost the money entrusted to him in a drug deal. They have exactly twenty minutes to come up with 100,000 marks. Can they do it? The film provides three different answers to that question, in the form of three alternative destinies that transpire when split-second differences in timing trigger major variations in the chain of cause and effect.
Tykwer’s aggressive style uses every trick in the book, including fast-motion, slow-motion, still photos, split-screen, and animation, set to a pulsating wall-of-sound score.
"Hot, fast, and post-human…For sheer cleverness and gamesmanship, its altered sense of emotion and meaning in the face of breathless forward momentum, Mr. Tykwer’s film makes a startling harbinger of things to come." – Janet Maslin, New York Times
"A madly spinning top of a movie…a landmark." – Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly
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July 29, 2000 Brat [Brother] |
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Russia, 1997, 96 minutes, Color. Russian with English
subtitles
Directed by Alexei Balabanov
Brother is a violent and darkly funny film set in the fast-paced society of modern Russia. Danila is a young man just released from the army who can’t find a job in his provincial home town. He travels to St. Petersburg to visit his older brother Viktor whom he idealizes. Viktor offers him a partnership in the family business, assassins for the Chechen mob. Danila is a cool and highly effective killer but he is also an innocent, and he finds the completely amoral world around him confusing and disturbing. For Danila, killing is a job but mugging an old man is a crime which he will not abide. He is also torn romantically between a pretty young drug addict and a married trolley driver with an abusive husband.
"…There’s more freshness and electricity in any five minutes of Brother than in all the Lethal Weapon films put together" – Jay Carr, Boston Globe
"…Brother is the best Russian movie I have seen in years" – J. Hoberman, Village Voice
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August 5, 2000 Tre Fratelli [Three Brothers] |
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Italy/France, 1980 113 minutes, Color. Italian with
English subtitles.
Directed by Francesco Rosi
The director will be present at the screening.
This year the Italian School is honored to host noted director Francesco Rosi. Among the great directors such as Bertolucci, Pasolini, Ferreri, Wertmüller, Cavani, the Tavianis, Olmi, Petri, and Bellocchio, who emerged after Neorealism in Italian Cinema, Francesco Rosi stands out as the father of Cinema Civile [Civil Cinema], a type of socially engaged filmmaking which seeks to uncover the facts behind complex and mysterious events. In his memorable film, Tre Fratelli, three men - a Rome magistrate, a reform school teacher, and a trade union activist, are called home to their southern Italian village by their father for their mother’s funeral. Rosi says of the film: " I have tried to speak about all of us, our life, death, loneliness, the old and eternal values that we all carry within ourselves and the forces which threaten them; and of our need for trust and our hope as well."
Starring Phillipe Noiret, Michele Placido and Vittorio Mezzogiorno.
"Three Brothers is a masterpiece, a work beyond time, and it will probably move an audience fifty or a hundred years from now as deeply as it moves one today." –Boston Phoenix
"Perfect. Full of startling clarity and beauty, of extraordinary sweetness, of the discovery of unexpected reserves of emotion."--New York Times