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
BFI introduction: A migrant family and their dog cross the drought-stricken arid Sertão
region in a desperate bid to survive. Pereira dos Santos adapts
Graciliano Ramos’ acclaimed 1938 novel, one of Brazil’s key literary
works, employing stark landscapes and non-professional performances to
stunning effect. It is regarded as a foundational Cinema Novo work – a
devastating yet deeply humane portrait of poverty, endurance and
cyclical displacement.
This 35mm screening is part of the 'Projecting the Archive' strand at BFI Southbank. There will be an introduction by Jason Morell, actor and son of Joan Greenwood.
BFI introduction: When a young dancer has her career cut short by illness, she marries an
eminent sculptor whose cruelty drives her into the arms of another man.
This early role for Joan Greenwood sees her perfectly cast as the
fragile ballerina trapped in an abusive relationship. Sewell’s
atmospheric evocation of the fin de siècle decadence of bohemian Paris
is enhanced by the camerawork of silent horror veteran Günther Krampf.
Based on a French play, which the director adapted four times across his
career, this macabre tale exploring jealousy and spiritualism serves up
a shocking final twist.
