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The
Spacial Film Club
The second season of the Spacial Film Club will commence
on Monday, 5th May and will continue fortnightly throughout
the year. The programme for spring/summer season includes
three new releases and a series of three films by German
directors. Full membership is €30.00 (all six
screenings). For further details contact Alex at 042
9392919.
Monday,
5th May 2008
Eastern Promises (18)
Director:
David Cronenberg
USA 2007 100 minutes
Starring:
Viggo Mortensen, Naowmi Watts
Language: English
Cronenberg merges his intriguing worldview
with writer Knight (Dirty Pretty Things) to
create a haunting, unsettling thriller. It
features strikingly good performances, as well
as a realistic vision of London’s darker,
wetter corners.
Anna (Watts) is a London midwife
with Russian heritage who treats a pregnant
14-year-old, losing the patient but saving
the baby. While searching for the family, Anna
meets a Russian mobster, Semyon (Mueller-Stahl),
his live-wire son Kirill (Cassel) and their
faithful driver Nikolai (Mortensen). Semyon
is shifty and suspicious, while is strangely
helpful, but Anna knows that she’s already
in trouble--a fact confirmed by her Russian
uncle Stepan (Skolimowski). As a cop (Sumpter)
closes in and the baby’s life becomes
a threat to the mafia, Anna will need to trust
in order to survive.
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Monday,
19th May 2008
Director: Christian Petzold
Germany 2007 89 minutes
Starring: Nina Hoss, Devid Striesow
Language: German
German writer-director Christian Petzold
returns to top form in Yella, another precision-helmed,
tightly wound, metaphysical thriller that confirms
him as one of Germany’s finest middle-generation
directors. Petzold’s best pics have always
had an unsettling emotional undercurrent beneath
their clean, clinical direction. Yella, with
its painterly interludes in which the rural summertime
scenery takes on a threatening edge, is strongly
in this line. Main character remains something
of an enigma, but Hoss, dressed throughout in
a eye-catching red blouse that cuts like an open
wound through the black-and-grey business world
in which she operates, brings a laser-like focus
to the role that holds the attention.
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Monday,
26th May 2008
Director: Deepa Mehta
Canada/India
2005 117 mins
Starring: Seema Biswas,
Lisa Ray,
John Abraham, Sarala.
Language:
Hindi
Set in the 1930s in the Indian holy city of Varanasi,
Deepa Mehta’s long-awaited new film examines
the plight of a group of widows forced into poverty
at a temple, in particular, the beautiful, headstrong
Kkalyani, unwilling to accept the harsh restrictions
imposed by Indian society on widows, and her relationship
with a man from a lower caste, a follower of Mahatma
Gandhi.
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Monday,
9th June 2008
Director:
Jan Schuette
Germany 2000 93mins
Language:
German
On one of the last days of an exceptionally
hot summer in 1956, Bertholt Brecht prepares
to leave his tranquil lakeside house in Brandenburg
for Berlin and the upcoming theatre season.
Most of the many women in his life are there:
his wife, old lovers and latest flames, including
a beautiful young actress and a woman whose
affections and body he shares with her political
activist husband. The serenity of the country
stands in stark contrast to the deep, volatile
emotions of the characters: love and hatred,
jealousy and egomania, betrayal and dashed
hopes.
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Monday
23rd June 2008
(15A)
Director:
Stefan Ruzowitzky
Germany 2007 98 minutes
Starring:
Karl Markovics, August Diehl
Language:
German
The Counterfeiters is the true story
of the largest counterfeiting operation in
history, set up by the Nazis in 1936. Salomon
Sally Sorowitsch is the king of counterfeiters.
He lives a mischievous life of cards, booze,
and women in Berlin during the Nazi era.
Suddenly his luck runs dry when arrested
by Superintendent Friedrich Herzog. Faced
with a moral dilemma, Salomon must decide
whether his actions, which could prolong
the war and risk the lives of fellow prisoners,
are ultimately the right ones. Gripping,
intelligent, moving and superbly crafted,
The Counterfeiters is simply excellent.-
Galway Film Fleadh Programme, 2007
Winner
- Best Foreign Language Film / 80th Annual
Academy Awards®
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Monday,
7th July 2008
Director:
Oliver Hirschbiegle
Germany 2000 20mins
Language:
German
Based on the 1971 Stanford Uuniversity
simulation study of the psychology of imprisonment
(otherwise know as the Stanford rison Eexperiment),
this film is an intense psychodrama about
a group of ordinary men who volunteer to
take place in a paid two-week study on
the mental effects of prison life. The
men are separated into two groups--eight
guards and twelve prisoners--and locked
into a working prison, fully loaded with
cameras to capture their every move. One
of the prisoners, an undercover reporter
named Tarek, uses every opportunity to
provoke the guards and collect quotes for
his story, but he consistently pushes the
envelope too far. As egos are bruised and
machismo is belittled, the guards resort
to sadistic torture techniques while the
prisoners formulate an escape scheme that
is laden with vengeance. The experiment
inevitably goes awry leading to a powerful
climatic battle between good and evil.
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The Spacial Film Club
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