Thursday 19th August. 8:30pm. R39
DIR: Erik Gandini / Sweden / Denmark / UK / Finland / 2009 / 85min
Until recently, Italy was the epitome of cool. Now it’s a nation of celebrity-obsessed wannabes, addicted to cheap TV game shows and talent contests in which naked women are the main attraction. Gandini’s film places the blame squarely on the expensively dressed shoulders of one man: Silvio Berlusconi, media magnate and current Italian prime minister. Berlusconi began his career as the host of a strip TV quiz show and now owns or …
Friday 27th August. 7:15pm. R39
DIR: Peter Liechti / Switzerland
2009 / 88min
This prize-winning masterpiece is not to be missed by anyone interested in the documentary form. Inspired by Masahiko Shimada’s novel Until I am a Mummy, itself based on the diary of a man who has decided to starve himself to death in a forest, Liechti crosses seamlessly between reality, fiction and dream, expanding the limits of what is possible in cinema, providing a parallel filmic layer to the last meditations of someone retreating from life. Startlingly beautiful nature scenes alternate …
Sunday 29th August. 6pm. R39
DIR: Nicolas Entel / Columbia / Argentina
2009 / 75min
Some happily live in their father’s shadow, but when Dad is cocaine-baron Pablo Escobar, that shadow is dark, foreboding and seemingly endless. A fugitive for the last years of his father’s life, and exiled in Argentina since his death, Escobar’s son changed his name in an attempt to lead a ‘normal life’. But guiltless normality is hard to achieve with such an inheritance. Sebastián Marroquín opens the family’s film and photo archives and recounts his father’s life, as …
Thursday 26th August. 9pm. R39
DIR: Zhao Liang / France / China
2009 / 124min
When it was shown out of competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Petition left its audience harrowed and humbled. For more than a decade Zhao Liang documented the experiences of the thousands of his fellow citizens who journey to Beijing to make a last-ditch appeal against the injustices and corruption of local officials. Some stay for years, living rough on the streets and in the alleyways around the Complaints Office of the Supreme People’s Court, hoping against …
Tuesday 24th August. 8:30pm With Q&A. R39
DIR: Stefanie Brockhaus & Andy Wolff
Germany / 2009 / 88min
Deft and unobtrusive camerawork follow Bongani and Lucky, brothers on the edge of adulthood, living on the “edge of the edge” in Khayelitsha shantyland, to Pollsmoor, where they await trial for murder and their Makhulu to bail them out with her pension. In the beautiful mountains of the Eastern Cape, newly circumcised, they are initiated into the ways of men – time now to put aside rape, robbery and drugs, their grizzled Tat’omkhulu tells them, …
