This 35mm screening is part of the Queer 60s season at the Barbican. Details here.
Barbican Cinema introduction: A
boy disappears in a rural Brazilian community and all fingers point
to a stranger in town in Carlos Hugo Christensen’s extraordinary
magical realist drama. To the horror of the locals of a small rural
Brazilian community, handsome engineer Jose (Ênio
Gonçalves), an accused child
murderer, is back in town and on trial following the disappearance of
teenager Zeca (Luiz Fernando
Ianelli). As homophobic lies and
accusations fly, we gradually learn more about the man and the boy,
and the latter’s extraordinary connection to the strong winds that
blow through the town. A plot synopsis of The
Boy and the Wind cannot do justice to
what follows, with incredible set pieces and an appropriately
dramatic conclusion. The film remains an outstanding, magical realist
depiction of queerness that still fascinates today.
Rio Cinema introduction: To celebrate RIO FOREVER, Rio Film Feminists returns to 1979/80 to
shine a light on the Rio’s first feminist film season, organised in
association with Hackney and Islington Socialist Feminist Group,
Hackney Black Women’s Group and Women in Entertainment. We have
picked to re-screen American writer/director Claudia Weill’s
landmark feminist indie Girlfriends (1978), which was presented in a
late-night double-bill with Rapunzel: Let Down Your Hair (1978) by
The London Women’s Film Group.
New Yorker review: One of Girlfriends' many gentle astonishments was brought to mind by a viewing of Alex Ross Perry’s recently released feature “The Color Wheel”—namely,
that, for all the discussion of the directorial art of comic timing,
the art of knowing just how near or far to place the camera to an actor,
the art of comic distance, is equally important in calibrating the
humor of performance. Weill is psychically close to her protagonist, the
young photographer Susan Weinblatt (played by Melanie Mayron with an
audacious vulnerability), but doesn’t stay so visually close as to
short-circuit her humor—both the self-deprecating kind and the kind,
achieved with a hint of critical detachment, that Weill sees in her.
Even scenes of anguished, ambivalent commitment evoke Susan’s whimsical,
dialectical jousting, her blend of studied reticence and irrepressible
spontaneity. The movie catches a moment of new expectations for women,
when professional assertiveness and romantic fulfillment were more
openly in conflict, but it also catches the last days of an old New
York, a time when office buildings were not guarded fortresses but open
hives, and when—peculiarly similarly—the boundaries between professional
activity and personal involvement were less scrupulously guarded,
perhaps even undefined. One of the wonders of Weill’s movie is in its
intimate crystallization of the inchoate; it propels Susan Weinblatt and
a city of young women into the future, and it’s terribly sad that
Weill’s—and, for that matter, Mayron’s—own careers didn’t leap ahead in
the same way. Richard Brody
BFI introduction: Left with relatives while his parents ‘disappear’ during the
dictatorship, a football-obsessed boy finds community in a São Paulo
neighbourhood. Cao Hamburger filters political trauma through childhood
perception, blending humour and melancholy. It’s a tender coming-of-age
story shaped by absence, memory and solidarity, with the 1970 World Cup
as a national soundtrack.
This is a 35mm screening and part of the Flemish Film Classics strand. Details here.
Time Out review: Coming hot on the heels of Rosetta, another Belgian film which
takes a long hard look at the woes of a working class teenage girl.
Rosie (Aranka Coppens) also lives alone with her mum - or her 'sister', as
Irene (Sara de Roo) prefers to pretend in front of her boyfriends. At 13,
Rosie is a loner with a taste for the steamier sort of romantic fiction,
making her easy prey for a handsome delinquent like Jimi (Joost Wijnant),
who rocks her world with his petty thieving and joyriding. Out of a
warped and wounded kindness, Rosie picks up a crying baby and carries it
off, playing happy families with Jimi at the oil works in the old part
of town. Call me 'Mummy', she instructs the poor infant, louder and
louder. You want to give her a good shake, and then you want to hug her.
Somewhere in translation, Patrice Toye's movie has lost its original
subtitle, 'The Devil in My Head,' which gave a hint that this is not
just social realism, but something closer in spirit to the tortured
psychodramas of pulp crime novelist Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me; The Grifters).
Toye seems unsure just how much of a melodrama he wants to make - an
alert viewer will tease out the twists well before the end - but the
discrepancy between the flat, mundane treatment and the heightened
American narrative hovering in the background works quite effectively.
Pain in this film is too all-encompassing to be expressed in short,
sharp shocks; instead Rosie endures a dulled, mute suffering. If Ken
Loach had made Badlands it might have looked something like this: depressing, claustrophobic, not romantic, but innocent. Tom Charity
This screening will be introduces by Ketty Rodríguez, Founder & Artistic Director of the London Latino Film Festival.
Time Out review: This arresting early work by one of Cuba's foremost film-makers is a
black comedy about institutionalised bureaucracy at its most pedantic.
After a model factory worker is killed in an accident at work, he's
buried with his union card as a mark of eternal solidarity; trouble is,
when his wife applies for a pension, she's told she must present the
card before she can get any money - and there's a law forbidding
exhumation within the first two years of burial. It's a surprising piece
to have been made in the Cuba of the mid-'60s, but the laughs come as
much from a Buñuelian sense of absurdity as they do from any outright
criticism of Castro's regime. Trevor Johnston
Try
not to miss this ultra-rare screening of a key early Brian De Palma
film which the late, great critic Robin Wood described as “one of the
key American films of the 1970s”.
After ten years and a number of ambitious works (commercially successful and critically controversial) such as Carrie, Dressed to Kill and Blow Out, Sisters arguably remains Brian De Palma's most completely satisfying film. Like Dressed to Kill, it is an elaborate variation on Psycho; unlike
it, its attachment to the feminine viewpoint is much less compromised.
Like all De Palma's films, it invites a psychoanalytic reading (‘the
wound' as symbolic castration). Few Hollywood films (and perhaps no
other horror film) have explored so rigorously the oppression of women
under patriarchy and its appalling consequences for both sexes. Robin Wood
Chicago Reader review: After a hiatus of nearly a decade, the brilliant Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel (The Holy Girl, The Headless Woman)
returns with an entrancing 17th-century period drama. The title
character, a magistrate in rural Argentina, longs to return to his
native Spain so he can be reunited with his wife and children; waiting
on his deliverance, he idles away his time with native women and petty
political squabbles until he’s sent into the jungle on a suicide mission
to capture a violent bandit. As always with Martel, the story is opaque
but the atmosphere is rich and immersive, with meticulously designed
frames that balance one’s attention between the principal characters and
marginalized individuals (in this case women, slaves, and Native
Americans). The soundtrack is also characteristically vibrant, as Martel
conjures up a vivid world beyond the frame. Ben Sachs
