ENTERTAINMENT VISIONARY ART AT STARSEED GARDENS Visionary Art will be a major focus in Byron next week, at the second annual Somara Shamanic Medicine Forum at Starseed Gardens. With artists coming from all over Australia and around the world this in an amazing opportunity to directly
see into the extra levels of awareness that visionary states can bring. The Visionary Art Space will be exhibiting works from Luis Tamani (Peru), Daniel Mirante (UK), Lily Moses, Paulie Mann, Katia Honor, Bryan Itch and special guests.
idea that entheogens can lead to profound artistic expression, and that art itself can be an entheogen.
This year Somara is running a Visionary Art Intensive with Peruvian artist Luis Tamani, whose astounding work often depicts the interior of Amazonian plant Watch live painting demos, browse medicine experiences. Participants can join in 12 hours of tuition the original artworks and prints over three days with this worldfor sale in the marketplace and listen to a panel discussion on the renowned artist.
CULTURE CONTINUED FROM p35 Food and drink are available at The Lotus Teahouse. A full program featuring international and local speakers, panelists and a variety of experiential workshops. Visit somara.org to view the event program and follow facebook. com/somara.org for updates.
cinema Reviews BY JOHN CAMPBELL
HEART-BEAT OF THE MEDICINE BIRD - VISIONARY ARTWORK BY DANIEL MIRANTE, VISITING BYRON BAY FROM THE UK
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ARTIST’S IMPRESSION
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108-110 Jonson Street, Byron Bay 6680 8555 www.palacecinemas.com.au
36 January 27, 2016 The Byron Shire Echo
THE BÉLIER FAMILY THE HATEFUL EIGHT
Set in provincial France, Eric Lartigau’s endearing coming-of-age movie begins with a song of thrilling expectation and ends with one of heartbreaking resignation. Gigi (Karin Viard) is the teenaged daughter of deaf parents – her younger brother is similarly afflicted – and we encounter her riding her bicycle to the school bus stop while listening to the rambunctious pop of the Ting Tings’ That’s Not My Name. Going against the popular practice of colour-by-numbers filmmaking, Gigi’s family is not dysfunctional. Her mother Paula (Louane Emera) makes cheeses, her father Rodolphe (François Damiens) tends to the cows and all is warm and jolly in their stone farmhouse. Clouds gather, however, when the music teacher Fabien (Eric Elmosnino) discovers Gigi’s rare singing talent and urges her to apply for a position at an exclusive Paris academy.
Gigi’s domestic idyll is further confounded by the arrival of her first period (she seems a bit old to only now begin menstruating, but that’s neither here nor there). Coping with change is never easy, but the potential upheaval of the Béliers’ lives is even more stressful because Gigi is the conduit through which her unhearing parents connect with the outside world. A not altogether convincing sub-plot concerned with Rodolphe running for mayor is only a minor distraction from the torment that tears at Gigi’s heart. For Paula, the prospect of losing her daughter provokes near hysterical anger – in a remarkable and, you suspect, perspicacious outburst she admits to hating people who can hear – while Rodolpe is reduced to stony grief. A turning point arrives at Gigi’s performance at the school concert. It is generally little more than a gimmick when a director deletes the audio, but in this case it is perfectly attuned to the moment, for, in absolute silence, we are able to share the parents’ wonder as they witness the effect that Gigi has on those around them. Viard’s ingénue is paired with Damiens’s bearded papa bear in a timeless story of loss and discovery.
This is Quentin Tarantino’s eighth film. We know this because it’s the first thing we read in the introductory credits. Even by Hollywood’s immodest standards, such hubris is laughable. Further, as an act of selfreference – if not self-reverence – the auteur has included that number in the title, presumably having pre-determined that his work will be held in the same high regard as John Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven (1960). You can make up your own mind, but what the movie is most assuredly not is unpredictable, concluding in celebratory death and bloodshed. His acolytes, those who see Tarantino as a counterculture hero (even though he still flies in the pointy end of the plane), argue that he is being ironic, but I just wish he’d grow up. His story is set in the deep winter of Wyoming shortly after the Civil War. A stagecoach, an enduring icon of the Western genre, features prominently in the beautiful opening sequences as it makes its way through the snow to the staging post of Minnie’s Haberdashery. On board, the bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) has handcuffed his captive outlaw Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh). In transit, they pick up Marquis Warren (Samuel L Jackson), a veteran of the Union army, and shortly after Chris Mannix (Walter Goggins), the new sheriff of Red Rock. Overtaken by a blizzard, they hole at Minnie’s with a handful of suspicious strangers, including the wonderful Tim Roth as Mobray the hangman. Weighed down by dense verbiage to begin with, the dialogue gets even wordier as the players cleave off into alternating groups to do set pieces in which long-winded exchanges thicken the plot while bluntly addressing matters of philosophical import, primarily to do with race. As a mystery along the lines of ‘who will be last man standing’, it keeps you guessing, and if you enjoy seeing people’s brains blown out in the interest of hipster art, then it is, like, really cool. Otherwise, the movie is best appreciated as an insight into America’s moronic obsession with guns.
Byron Shire Echo archives: www.echo.net.au/byron-echo