2011/2012 Season Films

All shows start at 7:45PM unless otherwise stated

Archipelago

9 September 2011

A dysfunctional middle-class family takes a break on the Isles of Scilly.  Tensions increase as  they await the arrival of the mysterious father and the weather becomes more grey.

Archipelago is a subtle, enigmatic film about people, who, in spite of being related, do not know one another very well at all.

The Secret in their Eyes

23 September 2011

A retired legal counsellor writes a novel hoping to find closure for one of his past unresolved homicide cases and for his unreciprocated love for his superior - both of which still haunt him decades later.

Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 2010, it is a combined love story, murder mystery and political allegory, within a drama about memory.

Le Quattro Volte ( Four Times)

7 October 2011

An old shepherd lives his last days in a quiet medieval village perched high on the hills of Calabria, at the southernmost tip of Italy. He herds goats under skies that most villagers have deserted long ago. He is sick, and believes he finds his medicine in the dust he collects on the church floor, which he drinks in his water every day.

A beautiful celebration of life, stunningly photographed with quiet majesty.

Revanche

28 October 2011

An Austrian noir thriller, Revanche takes the heist-gone-wrong set-up to intriguing new territory – the countryside – making a gripping film which won four Awards at the Chicago International Film Festival.

Austrian director Götz Spielmann's film is a meditation on revenge which is intelligent and well-made, if, at times, a little implausible. Drama, archive footage, and music create a highly cinematic oratorio of enormous emotional force.

Of Gods and Men

11 November 2011

La Princesse de Montpensier (The Princess of Montpensier)

2 December 2011

La Nana (The Maid)

6 January 2012

This perceptive psychological chamber drama centres on Raquel, a quiet, ungainly 41-year-old maid from a remote village, who's spent most of her life keeping house for an upper-class Chilean couple and bringing up their four children.

However, Raquel is also aware of the distance between herself and her employers. Though she's fiercely devoted to Mundo Valdes, his wife, Pilar, and their son, Lucas, she finds herself increasingly at odds with their rebellious daughter, Camila.

Sebastián Silva's film is an unexpected combination: a gripping psychological thriller, and also a poignant human drama. It really is edge-of-the-seat stuff, with a startling denouement, and an outstanding central performance from Catalina Saavedra.

Police, Adjective

17 February 2012

A policeman finds himself growing uncomfortable with his latest assignment in this study in the nature of power and authority from Romanian director, Corneliu Porumboiu.

Cristi is a seasoned police detective who has just married and wants to keep his superiors happy. He has been ordered to keep a close watch on a teenager suspected of dealing drugs for a local cartel. In a riveting concluding sequence, as eloquently wordy as the earlier scenes are enigmatically silent, the film suggests that the spirit of the police state is far from dead.

The Boy Friend

16 March 2012

Polly Browne, the assistant stage manager of a small-time theatrical company, is forced to understudy for the leading lady at a matinée performance at which an illustrious Hollywood director, Cecil B. DeThrill, is in the audience, scouting for actors to be in his latest "all-talking, all-dancing, all-singing" extravaganza.

The Boy Friend is based on Sandy Wilson’s stage musical of the same name, a small scale entertainment which became a surprise success in the West End in 1954 and, in the following year,   introduced Julie Andrews to American audiences on Broadway.

Fantasy sequences provide the director, Ken Russell, with freedom to exercise his capacity for over-the-top visuals in this charming 1920's era film.

DOUBLE BILL

13 April 2012

A man from Mexico (Jorge Machado) travels to Italy and falls in love with a beautiful local woman (Roberta Palombini). Their feelings for one another are strong, but they prove to be short lived, and when they decide to break up after the birth of their son Natan, he returns to Mexico while she stays in Italy and takes primary custody of the child.

The young boy and his father learn about living in harmony with nature in this languid drama, which won the 2010 Grand Jury Prize at the Miami Film Festival.

Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl

The unstoppable Manoel de Oliveira - 101-years-old but producing films at a pace few filmmakers of any age could rival - returns to Anthology with this spare, deceptively simple, disarmingly pleasurable, and finely-wrought gem, an adaptation of a story by the great early-modernist Portuguese author Eça de Queiróz.

Opening on a train, where a visibly distraught man, Macário, begins to unburden himself to the woman in the seat next to him, the film tells the story of Macário's infatuation with a young woman holding a Chinese fan in the window opposite his office.

A woman devoted to her son struggles to keep him from spending his life in prison in this drama from director Bong Joon-ho.

Do-jun  is a man in his mid-twenties who isn't especially bright and is easily led. He lives with his elderly mother, who loves him fiercely even though she has no illusions about his abilities or his bad habits. Do-jun spends much of his spare time with Jin-tae, a borderline criminal who takes advantage of Do-jun's credulous nature.