Documentaries / Fylmow Fethyel
New and recent accounts of personal endeavour, inspiration, innovation and survival.
Dancing Dreams (Tantzträume)
South West Premiere
Sat | 5 Nov | 12.20 | Screen 4 | Book Tickets
Dir. Rainer Hoffmann, Anne Linsel |Germany 2010 | E | 95min
In the midst of the new love of dance films heralded by the success of Black Swan, comes a ballet film that captures the hearts of the dancers themselves, and celebrates the work of renowned, visionary choreographer Pina Bausch. Two years ago, Bausch selected 40 teenagers to be part of her dance piece Kontakthof. Most joined up expecting to have fun – and soon discovered that participation required serious commitment and would make emotional as well as physical demands.
The documentary follows the teens through 10 months of rehearsals, under the expert, challenging guidance of Bausch, from their first attempts at expressing themselves in movement through to the long-awaited opening night. By the end of their extraordinary journey they have learned to express themselves through dance, and discovered themselves in the process; their youth, perhaps, allowing them to experience the aggression and tenderness, love and loss, with an intensity older performers may have lost.
Bausch, who revolutionised modern ballet, died in 2009 shortly after the film was completed, making it a timely and fitting testament to the genius of one of ballet's greats – as well as a timely message that the current UK government’s funding cuts for creative programmes in the schools is an unfortunate loss for the current generation of motivation-starved young people. In German with English subtitles.
“For me Dancing Dreams . . . gives a much clearer insight into Bausch’s working methods and captures the spirit of her life’s endeavour more tellingly than the sterile if beautiful images of [Wim Wenders’s] Pina.” – Vicky Wilson, Sight & Sound
Kinshasa Symphony
South West Premiere
Sun | 6 Nov | 17.10 | Screen 4| Book Tickets
Dir. Claus Wischmann, Martin Baer |Germany 2010 | E | 95min
A fasincating study of the power of the human spirit and the influence of music on everyday lives. Set in the chaotic and war-torn capital city of Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the film introduces the audience to the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste, which was created and has been maintained despite the fact that the musicians often have to make their own instruments, repeatedly have to practise in the dark because of constant power outages, and are made up of regular citizens, not classically trained artists, who are simply trying to maintain a sense of normalcy and survival in one of the poorest nations in the world. The focus is on the orchestra’s intense preparations for an upcoming open-air independence day concert for several thousand people, including difficult works such as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Orff’s Carmina Burana and pieces by Dvorak and Verdi.
In French and Lingala, with English subtitles.
“Beautifully photographed and sonically stellar . . . .” – Variety
Tabloid
South West Premiere
Sat | 5 Nov | 18.50 | Screen 4 | Book Tickets
Sun | 6 Nov | 09.50 | Screen 1| Book Tickets
Dir. Errol Morris |USA 2010 | 15 | 87min
Academy Award-winner Errol Morris’ Tabloid follows the much stranger-than-fiction adventures of Joyce McKinney, a former “beauty queen” whose single-minded devotion to the man of her dreams leads her across the globe and directly onto the front pages of the British tabloid newspapers. Joyce’s crusade for love and personal vindication, as illustrated by Morris (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, Standard Operating Procedure), takes her through a surreal world of gunpoint abduction, manacled Mormons, oddball accomplices, bondage modelling, magic underwear and dreams of celestial unions. This notorious affair is barking mad.
Equal parts love story, film noir, brainy B-movie and demented fairy tale, Tabloid is a delirious meditation on hysteria – both public and personal – from a filmmaker who continues to break down and blow open the documentary genre with his penetrating portraits of eccentric and profoundly complex characters. In Tabloid, Morris concocts another jaw-dropping portrayal, this time of a phenomenally driven woman whose romantic obsessions and delusions catapult her over the edge into scandal-sheet notoriety and an unimaginable life. Long before the days of Lindsay, Britney and the 24-hour news cycle, Joyce McKinney reigned as the ensnaring Femme Fatale accused of sexual defiance. In Tabloid, she is back, and Morris offers up his best guilty treasure. (With thanks to Dogwoof.)
“Errol Morris’s astonishing new documentary achieves a degree of serendipitous timeliness . . . the sheer heterogeneity of human experience is one of his enduring preoccupations, and he has found, once again, an impossible and perfect embodiment of just how curious our species can be.” – A.O. Scott, The New York Times (Critics’ Pick)
Tabloid will be released in the UK on 11 November.
Talking With Spirits
South West Premiere
Sat | 5 Nov | 14.05 | Screen 2 | Book Tickets
Dir. Michael Wiese | UK 2011 | E | 90min + Q&A
In 1970 the young filmmaker Michael Wiese arrived in Bali and was taken to a remote village by a Balinese painting salesman. He became the first Westerner to live with the Balinese in this village participating in temple ceremonies, playing gamelan, painting, and seeing shadow plays. The longer he stayed, the more he realised that he was not really ‘seeing’ the world where the Balinese lived. In that world, the Balinese spend half their life participating in elaborate rituals and ceremonies evoking the spirits of the ancestors and honouring countless spirits deities – both gods and demons – who influence our world.
Michael wanted to learn more about these dimensions awash with spirits and powerful entities so common in Bali but unheard of in the Western world, but after 40 years and many visits, little progress was made. Then, a breakthrough occurred. Bali yielded its secrets as trance dancers, mediums, shadow masters, priests and healers revealed the spiritual practices and portals to these sacred dimensions. The result – a filmic treasure with many never-before-seen moments that makes us question everything we know about the nature of reality, consciousness and the source of creativity and inspiration.
*We welcome producer, director, author and publisher Michael Wiese, who will offer a Q&A following the screening.
Up In Smoke
Sat | 5 Nov | 11.55 | Screen 2 | Book Tickets
Dir. Adam Wakeling | UK 2011 | U | 70min + Q&A
Slash-and-burn farming generates more carbon annually than all air travel put together. It sits at the crossroads of two of the greatest threats to global stability: accelerating climate change and diminishing food security. Up In Smoke follows Lostwithiel scientist Mike Hands, who has laboured for 25 years to find a solution to replacing slash-and-burn agriculture in equatorial rainforests. Slash-and-burn farming is practised by anywhere between 250 and 500 million farmers worldwide. In the tropics, slash-and-burning leaves the soil infertile, leading farmers to cut down ever more trees in order to grow food.
Up In Smoke tells the story of Hands’s struggle to find out why the soil was losing its fertility. He became convinced the problem was a lack of phosphorous, a key nutrient, and discovered that the Inga tree, planted in rows interspersed with food crops, would act as a natural soil fertiliser while providing shade and blocking out weeds. Working with two Honduran farmers, Hands began the slow process of trialling the technique – overcoming a lack of funding, support and the farmer's initial skepticism. Filmed over four years in Honduras and the UK, this fascinating documentary presents a historic opportunity to address one of the most urgent issues of the present day. It parallels the farmers’ struggles with Hands’s attempts to get heavyweight political backing, as he tries to get the Inga tree and alley-cropping technique onto the agenda at the 2009 Copenhagen Summit.
*We warmly welcome Lostwithiel ecological scientist Mike Hands and the Inga Foundation’s Bozena Piniecka, who will offer a Q&A following the screening.
Up In Smoke will also be screened in the Newquay secondary schools 3 and 4 November, followed by Q&As with Mike and Bozena. We are grateful to the Eden Project for sponsoring these screenings.
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We Were Here
South West Premiere
Sat | 5 Nov | 21.05 | Screen 2 | Book Tickets
Sun | 6 Nov | 12.20 | Screen 4 | Book Tickets
Dir. David Weissman | USA 2010 | E | 90min
An astonishingly personal and emotional account of the historic period in US history when the AIDS epidemic was first discovered. The film focuses on five different citizens who lived in San Francisco prior to the revelation of the disease and who watched untold numbers of friends and lovers die, who were infected themselves or who were on the frontlines trying to understand and battle a mysterious disease that was destroying an entire community. AIDS infected roughly half of the city’s gay male population, killing more than 19,000 by the end of 2009.
The film combines exceptional and heartbreaking stories with prodigious archival footage and historical research, to candidly and completely tell the story of the San Francisco gay community’s role in combating the epidemic and also the overarching political and social issues of American society in the 1980s. As a political activist who arrived in San Francisco in 1976, director David Weissman infuses every aspect of his film with profound and respectful honesty and true understanding of what really went on in the days of what is sadly called the “gay plague” of the early 1980s.
“An extraordinarily moving, beautifully edited documentary . . . there is not a hint of mawkishness, self-pity or self-congratulation. The humility, wisdom and cumulative sorrow expressed lend the film a glow of spirituality and infuse it with grace.” – Stephen Holden, The New York Times (Critics’ Pick)
“We Were Here keeps faith with the memory of San Francisco’s dead, and the dignity of the survivors, in its somber, unflinching poignancy.” – Slant magazine
“A simple, powerful act of bearing witness, We Were Here is a sober reminder of the not-too-distant past, when gays were focused not on honeymoon plans but on keeping people alive.” – Melissa Anderson, Village Voice
We Were Here will be released in the UK on 25 November.
