The Cinematheque MARCH+APRIL 2015 by The Cinematheque

EXPERIENCE ESSENTIAL CINEMA

FORCE MAJEURE

THE FILMS OF RUBEN Ö STLUND PAINTING WITH FILM HARD TO BE A GOD HOU HSIAO-HSIEN CONTINUED... WAVELENGTH + BLOW-UP THE IMAGE BEFORE US: A HISTORY OF FILM IN B.C.

MARCH + APRIL 2015

1131 Howe Street | Vancouver | theCinematheque.ca

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ction!? Instead, these esteemed directors seem to call out: Freeze! Recently, culture critic and film scholar Hava Aldouby has illuminated a unique zone of viewing pleasure by reminding us that the great Federico Fellini professed a desire to create “an entire film made of immobile pictures.” In this screening series, we can also use this quotation as a launching point to gaze at and analyze films by a diverse range of acclaimed directors who, like Fellini, create sequences of “pictures” that draw extensively on art history, and particularly painting, as a reservoir for their highly retinal and idiosyncratic visual imagery. David Lynch, for example, said he liked making “moving paintings.” Something like Goya in action. Like Aldouby’s own astute observations about Fellini, we can also employ an innovative pictorial approach that allows us to uncover a wealth of visual art evocations throughout the astonishing bodies of work produced by these seminal film artists over the years. Each director occupies a uniquely personal place in the history of cinema, but there is also one common element they all share, apart from the exquisite nature of their artifacts, and that is their intense absorption by the suspended and extended retinal experience. Dreaming with our eyes wide open if you like. Ultra-reverie.

o f S till ness We celebrate the moving image in this series, but in a rather counter-intuitive manner. These are all slow movies. Some are so slow that you are suddenly taken aback by the sound of your own beating heart. Some cross over into a purely optical realm more commonly reserved for paintings as receptacles and transmitters of unconscious meanings and associations. That is where these films begin to weave their occasionally immobile magic: in the dreamlike interstitial zone between poetic paintings, photographs, and motion pictures. Are they paintings, or are they photographs, or are they motion pictures? Yes, they are. So, climb aboard this slow moving cinematic train, where the pace may be leisurely but the heights achieved are lofty and the view is sublime. – Donald Brackett

Donald Brackett is an art/film/culture critic and the author of two books on the dynamics of creative collaboration: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos (Praeger, 2007) and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter (Praeger, 2008). A frequent guest lecturer, curator, and film programmer, he curated Strange Magic: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, a retrospective presented at The Cinematheque in 2013.

Opening Night Friday, April 10

Refreshments & Curator’s Introduction 6:00 pm – Doors 7:00 pm – Screening of Aguirre, The Wrath of God Introduced by Donald Brackett 9:00 pm – Persona

h t i W Fil m Aguirre, The Wrath of God

(Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes)

West Germany 1972. Dir: Werner Herzog. 95 min. DCP

Herzog’s greatest achievement – and his first film with Klaus Kinski – is a fever journey into the Heart of Darkness, stunningly shot (by Thomas Mauch) in the Peruvian jungle. In 1560, during Pizarro’s exploration of the Amazon, a small reconnaissance party sets off in search of El Dorado, the legendary Inca city of gold. Leading the doomed mission is mutinous, maniacal Aguirre (Kinski), who proclaims himself the “Wrath of God” and resolves to breed a new, purer race. Herzog’s hallucinatory epic - an allegory for Nazism, or Vietnam, or the arrogance of “civilized” society – is astonishing cinema. “The timeless opening sequence alone sets the emotional tone for what amounts to a visual poem, a river of exquisite images. Herzog is an unrivalled master at crafting a series of evocative paintings unfolding in a dream landscape” (DB).

Friday, April 10

Opening Night with Refreshments & Curator’s Introduction Doors 6:00 pm / Screening 7:00 pm

Curated by Donald Brackett

Persona

Sweden 1966. Dir: Ingmar Bergman. 84 min. 35mm

A key work of modernist cinema, Persona may be Bergman’s masterpiece. It is certainly his most formally innovative work: a disturbing, endlessly fascinating rumination on art, identity, personality, and cinematic reality. Liv Ullmann plays a prominent stage actress suddenly stricken mute. Bibi Andersson is the talkative nurse tasked with her care at a remote seaside cottage. The personalities of the two women begin to break down and merge; occasional Godardian devices break down conventional cinema’s fourth wall. “Persona is to film what Ulysses is to the novel” (John Simon). “Labelled both psychological drama and modernist horror, and depicted in the gorgeous minimalist language of cinematographer Sven Nykvist (in his sixth collaboration with Bergman), this is a film as much about filmmaking as life is about living” (DB).

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FRIDAY, APRIL 10 – 9:00 PM SATURDAY, APRIL 11 – 6:30 PM SUNDAY, APRIL 12 – 8:20 PM

SATURDAY, APRIL 11 – 8:15 PM SUNDAY, APRIL 12 – 6:30 PM

SATYRICON

New Restoration!

Hiroshima, Mon Amour Last Year at Marienbad France/Japan 1959. Dir: Alain Resnais. 91 min. DCP

The debut feature of French master Resnais, who died last year, is a landmark of modernist cinema. Scripted by Marguerite Duras, it relates the “impossible love” between a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) and a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) in Hiroshima. The affair evokes painful memories for the woman; the relationship between time and memory is a key theme of Resnais’s often Proustian cinema. Hiroshima’s audacious formal structure attempts to replicate the workings of consciousness! “As masterly and revolutionary as Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane 18 years earlier” (Roy Armes). “Space frozen in a dynamic equilibrium with time, conveying the elusive, enigmatic tenderness of Resnais at his best. Considered one of the primary inspirations for French New Wave cinema, it utilizes innovative flashbacks and a non-linear script” (DB). THURSDAY, APRIL 16 – 6:30 PM SATURDAY, APRIL 18 – 6:30 PM SUNDAY, APRIL 19 – 4:30 PM

Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna)

Japan 1964. Dir: Hiroshi Teshigahara. 147 min. 35mm

Teshigahara’s seductive, supremely visual film, adapted from Kōbō Abe’s novel, is one of the great erotic landmarks of Japanese cinema. It was also an international sensation: winner of a major prize at Cannes, nominated for the foreign-film Oscar, and Oscar-nominated again the following year in the best director category! Eiji Okada (the architect in Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour) plays an entomologist imprisoned at the bottom of a deep sand pit by an attractive young widow (Kyoko Kishida). Forced to spend endless days in the Sisyphean task of shovelling sand, he finds his hatred for his captor turning to overpowering lust. Masterful use of extreme close-up and a memorable score by Toru Takemitsu keep the erotic charge cranked to the max! “This masterpiece unfolds inside our senses, then takes us beyond them, until the viewer is unaware of seeing sounds and hearing pictures” (DB). THURSDAY, APRIL 16 – 8:15 PM SATURDAY, APRIL 18 – 8:15 PM

(L’année dernière à Marienbad)

France/Italy 1961. Dir: Alain Resnais. 94 min. 35mm

Resnais described his hugely influential film, written by nouveau roman novelist Alain RobbeGrillet, as “an attempt, still crude and primitive, to approach the complexity of thought and its mechanisms.” At a baroque resort that may or may not be Marienbad, a man tries to convince a sceptical woman that he met her, or someone like her, “last year at Marienbad.” Winner of Venice’s Golden Lion and featuring extraordinary wide-screen imagery by Sacha Vierny (later Peter Greenaway’s favourite DOP), Marienbad is “one of the authentically modernist works in cinema. . . Labyrinthine images of past, present, and future seem to merge in the same visual continuum of highly stylized tracking shots and frozen geometric compositions” (David Cook). “Possibly the most visually splendid film ever made. Images and words collide in the middle of our foreheads, where all the best films wait to be witnessed” (DB). FRIDAY, APRIL 17 – 6:30 PM SATURDAY, APRIL 18 – 4:30 PM SUNDAY, APRIL 19 – 6:30 PM

Satyricon

(Fellini Satyricon)

Italy/France 1969. Dir: Federico Fellini. 129 min. 35mm

Fellini’s legendary flamboyance hits its zenith in the spectacular Satyricon, “the most glorious bacchanal in the history of cinema” (Time). A sprawling adaptation of Petronius, the film follows two students through the phantasmagoric depravity and debauchery that is Fellini’s fantasy of Nero’s Rome. With its sumptuous costumes and decor, stunning set pieces, and parade of archetypal Fellini grotesques, Satyricon is a true feast for the senses. Fellini called it “a science fiction film projected into the past, not the future.” Some compared it to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which appeared around the same time, as a mind-blowing, consciousnessexpanding harbinger of a new non-linear cinema. “The striking parallels between the excess selfcentred sensations of Fellini’s ancient Rome in decline and the intensely immersive but illusory digital realm of today’s fragmented cultural landscapes are hard not to notice. Best to just open your eyes and let them dream” (DB). FRIDAY, APRIL 17 – 8:20 PM SUNDAY, APRIL 19 – 8:20 PM

WOMAN IN THE DUNES

The Elephant Man

Wings of Desire

Following the fever-dream brilliance of his DIY debut Eraserhead, David Lynch reined in the weird – but not the artistic promise – for his first Hollywood outing, a beautifully imagined, humanistic portrait of famously disfigured 19thcentury Londoner Joseph “John” Merrick, known as the “Elephant Man.” A prostheticized John Hurt, Oscar-nominated, plays Merrick, discovered in an East End freak show by the medically curious, then compassionate, Dr. Treves (Anthony Hopkins). Shot in stunning black and white, and credited with spurring the Oscars to create a new “Best Makeup” category (an award not added until the following year), Lynch’s surefooted second feature is a carefully-crafted study of human dignity in the face of intolerable cruelty. “One of the most beautiful and sadly tender films I’ve ever seen in my life. And one of Lynch’s finest and most elegant moving paintings” (DB).

West Germany/France 1987. Dir: Wim Wenders.

USA 1980. Dir: David Lynch. 124 min.

THURSDAY, APRIL 23 – 6:30 PM SATURDAY, APRIL 25 – 6:30 PM SUNDAY, APRIL 26 – 8:35 PM

Alexander Nevsky USSR 1938. Dir: Sergei Eisenstein. 110 min.

Eisenstein’s first completed sound film is one of the cinema’s great epics, an operatic historical pageant of astonishing visual grandeur, set to a stirring original score by Prokofiev. In 13thcentury Russia, Prince Nevsky of Novgorod (Nikolai Cherkassov) leads his countrymen into battle against invading Teutons. Eisenstein’s spectacular film culminates in a monumental, much-celebrated Battle on the Ice, featuring a cast of thousands. Made at a time of increasing tension between the USSR and Germany – the fiercely-adorned, geometrically-arrayed Teutonic raiders were clearly intended as thinly-disguised Nazis – the film was quietly withdrawn after Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact in 1939. “I used to rent it in 16mm from the library and show it on my living room wall. Eisenstein literally ‘invented’ the concept of montage, the science of the sequence and rhythms of individual photographs juxtaposed in duration. He also made history happen before our eyes” (DB). THURSDAY, APRIL 23 – 8:50 PM SATURDAY, APRIL 25 – 8:50 PM SUNDAY, APRIL 26 – 6:30 PM

(Der Himmel über Berlin) 127 min. 35mm

Angels perched atop the buildings of Berlin listen in on the innermost thoughts of mere mortals in Wim Wenders’s lovely, lyrical Wings of Desire, a soaring high-point of the director’s cinema and a moving, melancholic elegy to a Berlin still divided. Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander) are brooding, compassionate angels who eavesdrop on the secret pains and fears of ordinary people. When Damiel falls for a beautiful trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin), he renounces his immortality to return to earth as a human, hoping for a love that transcends life in the heavens. The stunning cinematography – crisp black-and-white, lurid Technicolor — is by French great Henri Alekan, whose many credits include Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast. Wenders won Best Director honours at Cannes. “This mesmerizing tale is a perfectly laid-out advertisement for eternity. Eternity is of course the secret product of all cinema” (DB). MONDAY, APRIL 27 – 6:30 PM WEDNESDAY, APRIL 29 – 8:35 PM THURSDAY, APRIL 30 – 6:30 PM

The Draughtsman’s Contract

Great Britain 1982. Dir: Peter Greenaway. 108 min. 35mm

An erudite cinematic puzzle, an arch reflection on artifice and representation, a cockeyed tribute to Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, an hilarious 17thcentury take on Antonioni’s Blow-Up – Greenway’s film is dazzling stuff. Murder mystery, costume drama, and dark comedy mix in the idiosyncratic tale of Mr. Neville (Anthony Higgins), a draughtsman hired to make a series of drawings of a country estate. In return, he is to receive sexual favours from the lady of the manor (Janet Suzman). When Neville notices that all his drawings contain certain inexplicable details, he suspects that he has evidence of a crime. Michael Nyman’s memorable score established his reputation as a cinema composer. “There are two kinds of people in the world, it seems: those who love the film and those who loathe it. But even the loathers still marvel at the structural design of it” (DB). MONDAY, APRIL 27 – 9:00 PM WEDNESDAY, APRIL 29 – 6:30 PM THURSDAY, APRIL 30 – 9:00 PM

Painting With Film: The Cinema of Stillness continues in May/June!

Series continues in May/June with screenings of Nostalghia (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983), Nosferatu the Vampyre (Werner Herzog, 1979), The Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975) A Zed and Two Noughts (Peter Greenaway, 1985), Fitzcarraldo (Werner Herzog, 1982), Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977), Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965), Russian Ark (Alexander Sokurov, 2002), and Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948). Program subject to change. Details will be available in April in our May/June 2015 Program Guide or online at theCinematheque.ca

IN CASE OF NO EMERGENCY THE FILMS OF RUBEN ÖSTLUND A mid-career retrospective devoted to the director of Force Majeure! A sly, trenchant observer of human behaviour under duress, the Swedish director Ruben Östlund is quickly emerging as one of world cinema’s most distinctive voices, equal parts satirist and sociologist. Östlund, who began his career in the 1990s directing skiing films, has for the past decade been collecting prizes at major festivals, including Cannes, where his latest, the widely acclaimed Force Majeure, took the Grand Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard competition. Two of his four features have been chosen as the official Swedish Oscar

entry: 2008’s Involuntary and now Force Majeure this year. In Östlund’s bracing, darkly funny movies, modern life takes shape as a series of simultaneously devastating and absurd crises, no less real for being imagined, and the civilized veneer of Western bourgeois society barely conceals all manner of foibles and prejudices. His deconstructions of ego and privilege are elegant provocations, designed to defy easy identification and, in his words, “make the audience take a moral stand on its own.” – Film Society of Lincoln Center

“Östlund’s masterpiece-so-far . . . Play troubles the water of any smuglyheld view, liberal or conservative.” – Michael Atkinson, Village Voice

Play

Sweden/France/Denmark 2011. Dir: Ruben Östlund. 118 min. DCP

“‘I want to make the audience active and reflective,’ Östlund has stated. He does just that with this controversial record, inspired by actual court cases, of five black teenagers harassing white and Asian youths through scams and roleplaying. All violence is implied, but the graver implication (which inflamed critics on the home front) is that political correctness debilitates society, as ‘good people’ stand by and do nothing for fear of being thought racist. Östlund, who won a Swedish Oscar for Best Director and a ‘Coup de coeur’ prize at Cannes, imprisons his actors within a frame, not unlike our social mores freezing us in place. Unabashedly impolite, Play offers food for thought and fuel for fury” (FSLC). THURSDAY, MARCH 12 – 6:30 PM FRIDAY, MARCH 13 – 8:40 PM SATURDAY, MARCH 14 – 6:30 PM

Acknowledgements: This touring retrospective is produced by Comeback Company, in partnership with the Swedish Film Institute and Plattform Produktion, with additional support from the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation, the Embassy of Sweden in the U.S., and the Consulate General of Sweden in New York. Program introduction and film notes courtesy of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York.

“Brittle wit and inventive shooting . . . Östlund paints a coolly non-judgmental comic picture of the appalling things people do to each other, and to themselves.” – Jonathan Romney, Screen International

Involuntary (De ofrivilliga)

Sweden 2008. Dir: Ruben Östlund. 98 min. DCP

“Described by Östlund as ‘a tragic comedy or a comic tragedy,’ the director’s second feature examines group dynamics and the dark side of human nature in five tales of social discord. In one, a teacher sees a colleague carry discipline too far and mentions the act in the staff room, with startling consequences. In another, a party host, afraid of losing face, unwisely neglects an injury. Two parallel stories detail groupthink among young men and women respectively. Co-written with Östlund’s long-time producer Erik Hemmendorff, and inspired by personal experiences, Involuntary situates the viewer inside each social powder keg, where recognition and uneasy laughter coalesce” (FSLC). preceded by

Autobiographical Scene Number 6882 (Scen nr: 6882 ur mitt liv)

Sweden 2005. Dir: Ruben Östlund. 9 min. DCP

“A young man boasts to friends that he will jump from a high bridge into the river below, then begins to have second thoughts. This penetrating short presages Östlund’s Involuntary for its illustration of peer pressure and Force Majeure for its critique of the fragile male psyche” (FSLC).

THURSDAY, MARCH 12 – 8:45 PM FRIDAY, MARCH 13 – 6:30 PM SATURDAY, MARCH 14 – 8:45 PM

“Only one film released in 2014 signalled the stateside arrival of a fullyformed, world-class talent on the level of Kubrick, von Trier, or Godard — and that is Force Majeure, written and directed by Ruben Östlund, Europe’s fastest-rising filmmaking star.” – Cinefamily, Los Angeles “Of all the satirists working in cinema today, Östlund displays perhaps the slyest streak of dark humour.” – Peter Debruge, Variety

FORCE MAJEURE

“One of the quirkiest Swedish films of recent memory, The Guitar Mongoloid has all the makings of a cult classic.” – Gunnar Rehlin, Variety

The Guitar Mongoloid (Gitarrmongot)

Sweden 2004. Dir: Ruben Östlund. 89 min. DCP

“Östlund’s feature debut is set in Jöteborg, a fictional Swedish city resembling the director’s own hometown of Göteborg (Gothenburg). His focus is on outsiders and nonconformists, in particular the titular musician, a young man facing dire obstacles in life. The mostly non-professional cast brings a documentary quality to this loosely scripted communal portrait, wrought with compassion and touches of humour. Winner of the FIPRESCI (International Critics) Prize at the 2005 Moscow International Film Festival, The Guitar Mongoloid is shot in typical Östlund fashion, with an observant camera capturing life from fixed positions” (FSLC). preceded by

Incident by a Bank (Händelse vid bank)

Sweden 2009. Dir: Ruben Östlund. 12 min. DCP

“Based on a real-life account of a bank robbery witnessed (and filmed) by two bystanders across the street, Östlund’s study of surveillance earned the Golden Bear for Best Short Film at Berlin. His slow zooms and pans across vast public spaces – and his implicit question, ‘Who watches the watchers?’ – may remind some viewers of Michael Haneke’s Caché” (FSLC). THURSDAY, MARCH 19 – 6:30 PM FRIDAY, MARCH 20 – 8:45 PM SATURDAY, MARCH 21 – 6:30 PM

“With all respect to David Fincher’s Gone Girl, Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure is the best formalist black comedy about marriage since Eyes Wide Shut.” – Angelo Muredda, Cinema Scope “There are those trying to position Gone Girl as the date-and-debate movie of the season, but it isn’t half the unsettling thriller Force Majeure is.” – Natalie Atkinson, Globe and Mail

Force Majeure (Turist)

Sweden 2014. Dir: Ruben Östlund. 118 min. DCP

“On a ski vacation in the French Alps, a young Swedish couple and their two children have a close call with an avalanche that sends the father, Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke), scurrying for his life, leaving behind his panicked kids and equally terrorized wife, Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli). Though no one is harmed, the foundational beliefs and expectations holding together the edifices of marriage and family have been shattered. As Östlund plumbs the aftermath of Tomas’s split-second transgression, this scalpel-sharp, often squirmingly funny film examines the flimsy bonds of coupledom, the conflict between social role and survival instinct, and the impossibility of undoing that which has come before. Winner of the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes and this year’s official Swedish Oscar entry” (FSLC). THURSDAY, MARCH 19 – 8:30 PM FRIDAY, MARCH 20 – 6:30 PM SATURDAY, MARCH 21 – 8:30 PM

C o n t i n u e d f r o m Ja n ua ry- F e b r ua rY

THE IMAGE BEFORE US

A HISTORY OF FILM IN BRITISH COLUMBIA Curated by Harry Killas

t is time to celebrate the innovative, iconoclastic, often astonishing cinematic, television, and video heritage of British Columbia. Our rich legacy of dramatic feature films, shorts, documentaries, television dramas, experimental cinema, and animation will be showcased in this program, which highlights many of the significant works of the past 80 years by looking at their achievements in new ways. This series of screenings – a history of film in British Columbia – with emphasis on a history, not the history – is inspired by one of my favourite films: The Image Before Us, written and directed by poet, scholar, and filmmaker Colin Browne. In this documentary essay film, within the

genre of the compilation film, Browne investigates and gently critiques the images of Vancouver that have been presented to us in many historic motion pictures, primarily newsreels and travelogues, produced in and about B.C. “What is the image before us?” Browne asks. “And how did it get that way?” How do we “read” our own films? If one focuses on this story or that image, what about the stories and images that have been left out? What stories and images have been presented and persist in our imaginaries of here? What others are not presented and consequently need to be? Browne’s rich, condensed, pungent, and ultimately moving work asks these questions and sets up our

series: What do the films of British Columbia represent to us, and what are the cinematic narratives of here? This series contains a bias, a bias towards the social context of peoples in B.C. and towards the realistic image, reflected in my own interests and work as a filmmaker and educator. Themes and sub-themes weave and, I hope, reverberate through these screenings: Aboriginal stories, characters, and “contact”; the manufactured image; the American archetype; the pictorial and the anti-picturesque; the intensely local and the intensely global. Come to these screenings and be inspired, entertained, and amazed. – Harry Killas, Assistant Dean, Dynamic Media, Emily Carr University of Art + Design

The Grey Fox

Canada 1982. Dir: Phillip Borsos. 110 min. 35mm

The gifted Phillip Borsos made good on the promise of his award-winning shorts — and solidified B.C.’s reputation as a film centre in Canada — with his remarkable debut feature. Richard Farnsworth is gentleman bandit Bill Miner, an aging Old West stagecoach robber released into the 20th century after decades in prison. His introduction to modernity includes his first exposure to the movies: Edwin Porter’s 1903 classic The Great Train Robbery, which inspires old-fashioned Miner to attempt some new-fangled larceny. Jackie Burroughs co-stars. Shot by Frank Tidy and written by John Hunter, Borsos’s beautiful film offers a charming evocation of place and an elegiac, film-smart take on the Old West and Old Westerns. It won 7 Genies, including Best Film and Director, and was voted one of the ten best Canadian films of all-time in 1984 and 1993 national polls. Print courtesy TIFF’s Film Reference Library. Introduced by Kevan Funk Kevan Funk studied film and media at Emily Carr. He directed the shorts A Fine Young Man and Yellowhead, which both premiered at TIFF, as well as Saint Pierre, Destroyer, and This Bleeding Heart. Bison, his latest, was selected for Canada’s Top Ten Shorts 2014. MONDAY, MARCH 2 – 7:00 PM

On The Corner

Canada 2003. Dir: Nathaniel Geary. 95 min. 35mm

Nathaniel Geary’s assured feature is a tough, tender tale of life on the streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The director’s award-winning 1998 short keys to kingdoms dealt with the same notorious neighbourhood; Geary also worked for several years at the DTES’s Portland Hotel. Fresh off the reserve in Prince Rupert, teenager Randy (Simon Baker) arrives in Vancouver looking for runaway older sister Angel (Alex Rice). He finds her at the dingy Pennsylvania Hotel, addicted to heroin and working as a prostitute. Angel urges Randy to return home, but drugs – and Angel’s best friend Stacey (Katherine Isabelle) – prove too alluring. Named Best Western Canadian Feature at VIFF in 2003. preceded by

Canadian Pacific I Canada 1974. Dir: David Rimmer. 9 min.

Blockade

Canada 1993. Dir: Nettie Wild. 90 min.

After impressing with Rustling of Leaves: Inside the Philippine Revolution, her debut, Vancouver filmmaker Nettie Wild focused her fearlessly honest documentary eye on an at-the-barricades conflict closer to home. In the early 1990s, long-simmering disputes over native land claims and forestry practices boiled over into a tense confrontation in northern B.C. between the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en peoples, on the one hand, and nonnatives and loggers, on the other. Wild and crew (including regular cinematographer Kirk Tougas) spent 15 months chronicling the complexities of an ever-escalating conflict; Blockade offers a thoughtful, reflective account of a highlycharged subject. Characteristic of Wild’s work is the generosity (but also warts-and-all honesty) accorded all sides in the dispute. preceded by

Spartree

Canada 1977. Dir: Phillip Borsos. 15 min.

This early work from the director of The Grey Fox offers an exhilarating documentary look at a once-common form of West Coast forestry practice: the high-rigging, tree-topping, death-defying form of logging known as “high-lead.” Best Short, 1977 Canadian Film Awards. Guest in attendance: TBA

MONDAY, MARCH 9 – 7:00 PM

Trains, boats, the ocean, and the North Shore mountains. Eminent Vancouver experimenter David Rimmer’s window on Vancouver harbour, shot from a fixed camera position over several months, “helped establish him as one of the world’s foremost cinematic artists” (Peter Morris, The Canadian Film Encyclopedia).

Saint Pierre

Canada 2012. Dir: Kevan Funk. 14 min.

A Quebecois man in English Canada, saddled with a marginal job, takes inspiration from a famous MMA fighter. Vancouver filmmaker Funk’s poetic short, selected for the 50th NYFF, captures the zeitgeist of a dissatisfied, dissident global population. Guests in attendance: Nathaniel Geary, director of On the Corner, and Dr. Glen Lowry, Associate Professor, Faculty of Culture and Community, Emily Carr University of Art + Design MONDAY, MARCH 16 – 7:00 PM

TOP: HOW A PEOPLE LIVE BOTTOM: ME, MOM, AND MONA

Dirty

Air India 182

Bruce Sweeney’s darkly humorous, darkly erotic second feature has a highly evocative sense of place (Vancouver, rarely so well captured) and a highly provocative feel for the messier side of life (sex, sex, sex). Babz Chula plays Angie, a dopedealing, middle-aged mom involved in a spank-happy sexual relationship with David (Tom Scholte), a university student half her age. Their masochistic game-playing moves into dangerous emotional territory as David becomes increasingly demanding of Angie’s attention. Intersecting their obsessive orbit are several other desperately lonely and/or dysfunctional characters. A devotee of British master Mike Leigh’s directorial methods, Sweeney put his ensemble cast through a lengthy, improvisational-based rehearsal process before shooting; the results show in the film’s assured performances.

This highly affecting non-fiction film from director Sturla Gunnarsson (Monsoon, Force of Nature) tackles the worst incident of terrorism in Canadian history. In 1985, an Air India flight en route from Montreal to London was destroyed by a bomb over the Atlantic. All 329 people onboard were killed; most were Canadians. The bombing, the result of a Vancouverbased conspiracy, was the most lethal act of air terrorism until 9/11. Gunnarsson’s film uses first-person accounts, declassified CSIS documents, and dramatic reconstructions to trace the conspiracy and its tragic aftermath. “Gunnarsson is one of Canada’s most accomplished, most consistent, and most underrated filmmakers . . . This film may be the finest and most important of his career” (Brian D. Johnson, Maclean’s).

Canada 1998. Dir: Bruce Sweeney. 94 min. 35mm

Canada 2008. Director: Sturla Gunnarsson. 97 min. HDCAM

preceded by preceded by

Betty and Vera Go Lawn Bowling

Canada 1990. Dir: Bruce Sweeney. 17 min. 16mm

The first film by Vancouver writer-director Bruce Sweeney (Dirty, Last Wedding) was this short, modestly billed as “one of the best lawn bowling films of ’90.” Two older women set on a road trip to have some fun and throw some balls. Guest in attendance: Bruce Sweeney, director of Dirty and Betty and Vera Go Lawn Bowling MONDAY, MARCH 23 – 7:00 PM

You Fig

Canada 2014. Dirs: Jessica Gnyp, Víctor Ballesteros. 9 min.

“Over the fence in our neighbour’s backyard a fig tree produces fruit that ripens and rots. Meanwhile, life goes on around and within it.”

Tam

Canada 2012. Dir: Toan Nguyen. 6 min.

Toan Nguyen’s animated documentary, made at Emily Carr University, uses cut-out animation to recount his father’s difficult journey from imprisonment in Vietnam to freedom in Canada. Panel discussion after screening! Air India 182 cinematographers Tony Westman and Kirk Tougas will discuss collaboration, cinematography, and documentary and drama hybrids. Moderated by Dr. Glen Lowry, Associate Professor, Faculty of Culture and Community, Emily Carr University of Art + Design. MONDAY, APRIL 13 – 7:00 PM

How a People Live Canada 2013. Dir: Lisa Jackson. 60 min.

In 1964, the Gwa’sala and ‘Nakwaxda’xw First Nations, two distinct groups living along B.C.’s northwest coast, were forcibly relocated by the Canadian government from their traditional territories to a single reserve on Vancouver Island. Their old villages were destroyed. Anishinaabe director and SFU grad Lisa Jackson – a Genie winner for her 2009 short Savage – uses interviews, archival footage, 100-yearold photos, and a visit to their ancestral homelands to bring to life a people whose vibrant art, culture, and strong connection to the land has allowed them to overcome the hardships of disease, displacement, and residential schools.

T’Lina: The Rendering of Wealth Canada 1999. Dir: Barb Cranmer. 50 min.

“Every spring the people of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation travel to Knight Inlet on the B.C. coast for the harvest of eulachon, a small fish from which they extract t’lina, an oil central to their traditional culture and economy. Filmmaker Barb Cranmer’s family has participated in this ritual for generations. T’lina was traded among the First Nations of the Pacific Northwest for centuries, valued as a food staple and an important ceremonial substance. In recent years, eulachon stocks have been depleted by industrial logging and shrimping practices . . . Cranmer raises the alarm on the uncertain future facing this vital cultural practice and offers a lively history of a dynamic coastal First Nation” (National Film Board of Canada). Guest in attendance: Barb Cranmer, director of T’Lina: The Rendering of Wealth MONDAY, MARCH 30 – 7:00 PM

Double Happiness Canada 1994. Dir: Mina Shum. 90 min. 35mm

Vancouver filmmaker Mina Shum’s seriocomic, semiautobiographical debut feature was one of the most talkedabout Canadian films of the 1990s. Future Grey’s Anatomy star Sandra Oh, here still an up-and-comer, has the lead in Shum’s spirited tale of a young Chinese-Canadian woman torn between her own wants and needs and the expectations of her more traditional parents. Oh plays Jade, an aspiring actress still living at home. To keep the peace, she agrees to let her parents set her up with a nice Chinese boy, but soon finds herself falling for Mark (Callum Keith Rennie, also in an early role), a non-Asian grad student. Oh won a Genie for her infectious performance. preceded by

Me, Mom and Mona Canada 1993. Dir: Mina Shum. 20 min. 16mm

Mina Shum’s fast-paced, funny, and evocative personal documentary profiles the three women in her Chinese-Canadian family and their idiosyncratic efforts to balance modern feminist ideas with the old-fashioned notions of Mina’s dad. Guest in attendance: Mina Shum, director of Double Happiness and Me, Mom and Mona MONDAY, APRIL 20 – 7:00 PM

SUN

BC Film History

The Puppetmaster – 6:30 pm

TUES

The Grey Fox – 7:00 pm

Hou Hsiao-hsien

Daughter of

WED

YWCA

The Mask You Live In – 6:30 pm

MARCH

BC Film History

Blockade + Spartree – 7:00 pm

the Nile – 6:30 pm

HOW TO BUY TICKETS Day-of tickets go on sale at the Box Office 30 minutes before the first show of the evening. Advance tickets are available for credit card purchase at theCinematheque.ca ($1 service charge applies). Events, times, and prices are subject to change without notice.

Hou Hsiao-hsien

TICKETS

MON

Cinema Sunday

Clash of the Titans – 1:00 pm

BC Film History

On The Corner + Canadian Pacific I + Saint Pierre – 7:00 pm

Flight of the Red

The Green, Green Grass

Goodbye South,

Daughter of the Nile – 8:50 pm

Balloon – 6:30 pm

of Home – 8:15 pm

Goodbye – 9:00 pm

Hou Hsiao-hsien

A Summer at Grandpa’s – 6:30 pm

Millennium Mambo – 8:45 pm

Ruben Östlund

Play – 6:30 pm

Ruben Östlund

Involuntary +

Ruben Östlund

Play – 6:30 pm

Involuntary + Autobiographical

Autobiographical Scene

Involuntary + Autobiographical

Scene Number 6882 – 8:45 pm

Number 6882 – 6:30 pm

Scene Number 6882 – 8:45 pm

Frames of Mind

Neurons to Nirvana:

First Runs + Restorations

Hard to be a God – 3:00 pm

First Runs + Restorations

Hard to be a God – 3:00 pm

First Runs + Restorations

Grey Gardens – 4:30 pm

CHAN CENTRE CONNECTS 16

Ruben Östlund

The Guitar Mongoloid

Ruben Östlund Force Majeure – 6:30 pm

Ruben Östlund

The Guitar Mongoloid + Incident

+ Incident by a

The Guitar Mongoloid +

by a Bank – 6:30 pm

Bank – 6:30 pm

Incident by a Bank – 8:45 pm

Force Majeure – 8:30 pm

BC Film History

Dirty + Betty and Vera Go Lawn Bowling – 7:00 pm

Hard to be a God – 6:30 pm

HOU HSIAO-HSIEN 14-15

YWCA 17

Millennium Mambo – 6:30 pm

Ratcatcher – 7:00 pm

FIRST RUNS + RESTORATIONS 12–13

CINEMA SUNDAY 17

Hou Hsiao-hsien

Three Times – 6:30 pm

Understanding Psychedelic

BC Film History

How a People Live + T’Lina: The

Rendering of Wealth – 7:00 pm

The Cinematheque’s 42nd Annual General

The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq – 4:30 pm

Houellebecq – 6:30 pm

Grey Gardens – 6:30 pm

Chorus – 8:20 pm

Eric Baudelaire: Now Here

First Runs + Restorations

Hard to be a God – 7:00 pm

DIM Cinema

Films for One to Eight

Chan Centre Connects

Tropicália – 7:00 pm

Projectors – 7:30 pm

Meeting – 6:00pm

First Runs + Restorations

The Kidnapping of Michel

DIM Cinema

First Runs + Restorations

Hard to be a God – 7:00 pm

First Runs + Restorations

Hard to be a God – 7:00 pm

Then Elsewhere – 6:30 pm

IN THIS ISSUE

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 16

Hou Hsiao-hsien

Cheerful Wind – 6:30 pm

Medicines – 7:30 pm

Hard to be a God – 6:30 pm

BC FILM HISTORY 8–9

SAT

Play – 8:40 pm

RUBEN Ö STLUND 6–7

FRI

Hou Hsiao-hsien

Three Times – 8:20 pm

Character – 4:30 pm

PAINTING WITH FILM 2–5

Hou Hsiao-hsien

Flight of the Red Balloon – 8:30 pm

From Our Collection

THE CINEMATHEQUE IS RECOGNIZED AS AN EXEMPT NON-PROFIT FILM SOCIETY UNDER THE B.C. MOTION PICTURE ACT, AND AS SUCH IS ABLE TO SCREEN FILMS THAT HAVE NOT BEEN REVIEWED BY THE B.C. FILM CLASSIFICATION OFFICE. UNDER THE ACT, ALL PERSONS ATTENDING CINEMATHEQUE SCREENINGS MUST BE MEMBERS OF THE PACIFIC CINÉMATHÈQUE PACIFIQUE SOCIETY AND BE 18 YEARS OF AGE OR OLDER.

THURS

APRIL First Runs + Restorations

Chorus – 6:30 pm

First Runs + Restorations

Chorus – 4:30 pm

Houellebecq – 4:30 pm

The Kidnapping of Michel

Grey Gardens – 6:30 pm

Houellebecq – 6:30 pm

The Kidnapping of Michel

Grey Gardens – 8:20 pm

First Runs + Restorations

Grey Gardens – 6:30 pm

Grey Gardens – 8:20 pm

Painting With Film

Opening Night with Curator’s Introduction

The Kidnapping of Michel

Houellebecq – 8:20 pm

Painting With Film

Persona – 6:30 pm

The Kidnapping of Michel

Doors – 6:00pm

Aguirre, The Wrath

Houellebecq – 8:20 pm

Aguirre, The Wrath

of God – 8:15 pm

of God – 7:00pm Persona – 9:00pm

Painting With Film

Aguirre, The Wrath

BC Film History

Air India 182 + You Fig + Tam – 7:00 pm

of God – 6:30 pm

FRAMES OF MIND 18

Frames of Mind

She’s Lost Control – 7:30 pm

Painting With Film

Hiroshima, Mon Amour

17 – 6:30 pm

Woman in the Dunes – 8:15 pm

Persona – 8:20 pm

DIM CINEMA 18

Painting With Film

Last Year at

Painting With Film

Last Year at Marienbad – 4:30 pm

Marienbad – 6:30 pm

Hiroshima, Mon Amour – 6:30 pm

Satyricon – 8:20 pm

Woman in the Dunes – 8:15 pm

FROM OUR COLLECTION 19

Cinema Sunday

BC Film History

Pee-wee’s Big Adventure – 1:00 pm

Double Happiness + Me, Mom

Painting With Film

and Mona – 7:00 pm

Capture Photography Festival

Painting With Film

Wavelength

The Elephant Man – 6:30 pm

+ Blow-Up – 7:00 pm

Alexander Nevsky – 8:50 pm

Capture Photography Festival

Wavelength

+ Blow-Up – 7:00 pm

Hiroshima, Mon Amour – 4:30 pm

ALL AGES EVENT

FREE EVENT

Painting With Film

Alexander Nevsky – 8:50 pm

Satyricon – 8:20 pm

Sale – 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

The Elephant Man – 6:30 pm

Last Year at Marienbad – 6:30 pm

SPECIAL GUEST IN ATTENDANCE

The Cinematheque’s Poster

Painting With Film

Alexander Nevsky – 6:30 pm

Wings of Desire – 6:30 pm

The Draughtsman’s

Wings of Desire – 6:30 pm

The Elephant Man – 8:35 pm

The Draughtsman’s

Contract – 6:30 pm

The Draughtsman’s Contract – 9:00 pm

Contract – 9:00 pm

Wings of Desire – 8:35 pm

BACKGROUND IMAGES: TOP: WAVELENGTH BOTTOM: HARD TO BE A GOD

Both Films - Vancouver Theatre Premieres

put your spirituality into practice Join us Sundays, 10 a.m. at The Cinematheque

1131 Howe Street, Vancouver • cslyaletown.org

March 24th “Lauf Junge lauf” Polish | Yiddish | Hebrew | German | English Subtitles

Monthly Tuesday Screenings at 7pm

April 28th "Casse-tête chinois" French | Spanish | Chinese | Yiddish | English Subtitles

SUN

BC Film History

The Puppetmaster – 6:30 pm

TUES

The Grey Fox – 7:00 pm

Hou Hsiao-hsien

Daughter of

WED

YWCA

The Mask You Live In – 6:30 pm

MARCH

BC Film History

Blockade + Spartree – 7:00 pm

the Nile – 6:30 pm

Hou Hsiao-hsien

TICKETS

MON

Cinema Sunday

Clash of the Titans – 1:00 pm

BC Film History

On The Corner + Canadian Pacific I + Saint Pierre – 7:00 pm

Flight of the Red

The Green, Green Grass

Goodbye South,

Daughter of the Nile – 8:50 pm

Balloon – 6:30 pm

of Home – 8:15 pm

Goodbye – 9:00 pm

Hou Hsiao-hsien

A Summer at Grandpa’s – 6:30 pm

Millennium Mambo – 8:45 pm

Ruben Östlund

Play – 6:30 pm

Ruben Östlund

Involuntary +

Ruben Östlund

Play – 6:30 pm

Involuntary + Autobiographical

Autobiographical Scene

Involuntary + Autobiographical

Scene Number 6882 – 8:45 pm

Number 6882 – 6:30 pm

Scene Number 6882 – 8:45 pm

Frames of Mind

Neurons to Nirvana:

First Runs + Restorations

Hard to be a God – 3:00 pm

First Runs + Restorations

Hard to be a God – 3:00 pm

First Runs + Restorations

Grey Gardens – 4:30 pm

CHAN CENTRE CONNECTS 16

Ruben Östlund

The Guitar Mongoloid

Ruben Östlund Force Majeure – 6:30 pm

Ruben Östlund

The Guitar Mongoloid + Incident

+ Incident by a

The Guitar Mongoloid +

by a Bank – 6:30 pm

Bank – 6:30 pm

Incident by a Bank – 8:45 pm

Force Majeure – 8:30 pm

BC Film History

Dirty + Betty and Vera Go Lawn Bowling – 7:00 pm

Hard to be a God – 6:30 pm

HOU HSIAO-HSIEN 14-15

YWCA 17

Millennium Mambo – 6:30 pm

Ratcatcher – 7:00 pm

FIRST RUNS + RESTORATIONS 12–13

CINEMA SUNDAY 17

Hou Hsiao-hsien

Three Times – 6:30 pm

Understanding Psychedelic

BC Film History

How a People Live + T’Lina: The

Rendering of Wealth – 7:00 pm

The Cinematheque’s 42nd Annual General

The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq – 4:30 pm

Houellebecq – 6:30 pm

Grey Gardens – 6:30 pm

Chorus – 8:20 pm

Eric Baudelaire: Now Here

First Runs + Restorations

Hard to be a God – 7:00 pm

DIM Cinema

Films for One to Eight

Chan Centre Connects

Tropicália – 7:00 pm

Projectors – 7:30 pm

Meeting – 6:00pm

First Runs + Restorations

The Kidnapping of Michel

DIM Cinema

First Runs + Restorations

Hard to be a God – 7:00 pm

First Runs + Restorations

Hard to be a God – 7:00 pm

Then Elsewhere – 6:30 pm

IN THIS ISSUE

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 16

Hou Hsiao-hsien

Cheerful Wind – 6:30 pm

Medicines – 7:30 pm

Hard to be a God – 6:30 pm

BC FILM HISTORY 8–9

SAT

Play – 8:40 pm

RUBEN Ö STLUND 6–7

FRI

Hou Hsiao-hsien

Three Times – 8:20 pm

Character – 4:30 pm

PAINTING WITH FILM 2–5

Hou Hsiao-hsien

Flight of the Red Balloon – 8:30 pm

From Our Collection

THURS

APRIL First Runs + Restorations

Chorus – 6:30 pm

First Runs + Restorations

Chorus – 4:30 pm

Houellebecq – 4:30 pm

The Kidnapping of Michel

Grey Gardens – 6:30 pm

Houellebecq – 6:30 pm

The Kidnapping of Michel

Grey Gardens – 8:20 pm

First Runs + Restorations

Grey Gardens – 6:30 pm

Grey Gardens – 8:20 pm

Painting With Film

Opening Night with Curator’s Introduction

The Kidnapping of Michel

Houellebecq – 8:20 pm

Painting With Film

Persona – 6:30 pm

The Kidnapping of Michel

Doors – 6:00pm

Aguirre, The Wrath

Houellebecq – 8:20 pm

Aguirre, The Wrath

of God – 8:15 pm

of God – 7:00pm Persona – 9:00pm

Painting With Film

Aguirre, The Wrath

BC Film History

Air India 182 + You Fig + Tam – 7:00 pm

of God – 6:30 pm

FRAMES OF MIND 18

Frames of Mind

She’s Lost Control – 7:30 pm

Painting With Film

Hiroshima, Mon Amour

17 – 6:30 pm

Woman in the Dunes – 8:15 pm

Persona – 8:20 pm

DIM CINEMA 18

Painting With Film

Last Year at

Painting With Film

Last Year at Marienbad – 4:30 pm

Marienbad – 6:30 pm

Hiroshima, Mon Amour – 6:30 pm

Satyricon – 8:20 pm

Woman in the Dunes – 8:15 pm

FROM OUR COLLECTION 19

Cinema Sunday

BC Film History

Pee-wee’s Big Adventure – 1:00 pm

Double Happiness + Me, Mom

Painting With Film

and Mona – 7:00 pm

Capture Photography Festival

Painting With Film

Wavelength

The Elephant Man – 6:30 pm

+ Blow-Up – 7:00 pm

Alexander Nevsky – 8:50 pm

Capture Photography Festival

Wavelength

+ Blow-Up – 7:00 pm

Hiroshima, Mon Amour – 4:30 pm

ALL AGES EVENT

FREE EVENT

Painting With Film

Alexander Nevsky – 8:50 pm

Satyricon – 8:20 pm

Sale – 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

The Elephant Man – 6:30 pm

Last Year at Marienbad – 6:30 pm

SPECIAL GUEST IN ATTENDANCE

The Cinematheque’s Poster

Painting With Film

Alexander Nevsky – 6:30 pm

Wings of Desire – 6:30 pm

The Draughtsman’s

Wings of Desire – 6:30 pm

The Elephant Man – 8:35 pm

The Draughtsman’s

Contract – 6:30 pm

The Draughtsman’s Contract – 9:00 pm

Contract – 9:00 pm

Wings of Desire – 8:35 pm

BACKGROUND IMAGES: TOP: WAVELENGTH BOTTOM: HARD TO BE A GOD

Both Films - Vancouver Theatre Premieres

put your spirituality into practice Join us Sundays, 10 a.m. at The Cinematheque

1131 Howe Street, Vancouver • cslyaletown.org

March 24th “Lauf Junge lauf” Polish | Yiddish | Hebrew | German | English Subtitles

Monthly Tuesday Screenings at 7pm

April 28th "Casse-tête chinois" French | Spanish | Chinese | Yiddish | English Subtitles

A medieval science-fiction epic from the director of Trial on the Road and My Friend Ivan Lapshin Adapted from a novel by the authors of Tarkovsky’s Stalker Vancouver Premiere!

Hard to be a God (Trudno byt’ bogom)

Russia 2013. Dir: Alexei Gherman. 170 min. DCP

A work of staggeringly visceral cinema, the epic, phantasmagoric final film of late Russian cinema god Alexei Gherman (director of My Friend Ivan Lapshin, and subject of a Cinematheque retrospective in 2012) imagines a world in which the Renaissance never happened. Adapted from a cult science-fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky – who penned the source novel and screenplay for Tarkovsky’s Stalker – the film is set on an alien planet mired in the savagery and squalor of a never-ending Middle Ages. A team of undercover scientists from Earth, including protagonist Don Rumata (Leonid Yarmolnik), is there to observe but not interfere. Gherman’s pet project was decades in gestation; he wrote a first screenplay in 1968, finally shot the film between 2000 and 2006, and was years into post-production when he died in 2013. The film’s immersive, in-the-muck canvas – Gherman stuffs his black-and-white frame with breathtaking levels of detail – owes precious little to space opera and much to the art of Bruegel and Bosch – and Dante! SUNDAY, MARCH 22 – 3:00 PM & 6:30 PM THURSDAY, MARCH 26 – 7:00 PM FRIDAY, MARCH 27 – 7:00 PM SATURDAY, MARCH 28 – 7:00 PM SUNDAY, MARCH 29 – 3:00 PM & 6:30 PM

EXC

IV S U L

“A gorgeous, unexpectedly hopeful tragedy . . . Its visual wonder lifts the film into sublime, even transcendent aesthetic heights.” – Ryan Lattanzio, Indiewire 2015 Berlin Film Festival – Panorama 2015 Sundance Film Festival – World Cinema

The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq (L’enlèvement de Michel Houellebecq) France 2014. Dir: Guillaume Nicloux. 93 min. DCP

A star is born! French novelist and controversialist Michel Houellebecq – whose latest book, Submission, a near-future satire of France under Sharia law, appeared at the same time as the Charlie Hebdo attacks – plays himself in this wry comedy. The film riffs on a real incident: in 2011, in the midst of a book tour, Houellebecq disappeared for a time. The rumours ran rampant. Here, three muscle-bound amateurs nab the chainsmoking novelist, and spirit him away to a hideout in the

country, hoping that someone – François Hollande perhaps? – will pay a ransom. A curious, hilarious relationship between captive and captors develops in this energetic, realist-style farce. Houellebecq’s self-effacing performance is a total treat. The film won Best Screenplay honours at Tribeca. FRIDAY, APRIL 3 – 6:30 PM SATURDAY, APRIL 4 – 4:30 PM & 8:20 PM SUNDAY, APRIL 5 – 6:30 PM MONDAY, APRIL 6 – 4:30 PM THURSDAY, APRIL 9 – 8:20 PM

“An instant cult classic . . . Half mad and completely compelling.” – Nathan Lee, New York Times “Comic and bright, as well as sobering . . . One of the most haunting documentaries in a long time.” – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times “One of the ten greatest documentaries of all time.” – 2014 Sight and Sound Documentary Poll

“An astonishing film . . . As hypnotic and as beautifully choreographed as anything in Tarkovsky or Béla Tarr.” – Gabriel Winslow-Yost, New York Review of Books “The most important Russian film of the 21st century so far and the last testament of the greatest Russian filmmaker after Tarkovsky.” – Anton Dolin, Film Comment “A must for those who like their cinema visionary, hellish, and utterly thrilling.” – Kate Taylor, British Film Institute

T IRS

Vancouver Premiere!

Chorus

S N U R

Canada 2015. Dir: François Delisle. 97 min. DCP

The fiercely independent cinema of Montreal auteur François Delisle is now on the international radar: his fifth and sixth features – 2013’s Le météore and now Chorus – were selections of both Sundance and Berlin. Chorus is an extraordinarily moving, visually potent drama about loss and love. A couple, long estranged after the disappearance of their young son ten years before, are forced to come together again when the boy’s remains are found. Fanny Mallette and Sébastien Ricard, both superb, have the leads; veteran Quebec notables Pierre Curzi and Geneviève Bujold co-star. “A mesmerizing black-and-white feature . . . Spartan dialogue, poetic inner monologues, single images held to contemplate, and minimalist yet rich characters – all contribute to a quiet cinematic power that builds to a crescendo of exceptional beauty and emotional catharsis” (Kim Yutani, Sundance F.F.). FRIDAY, APRIL 3 – 4:30 PM SUNDAY, APRIL 5 – 8:20 PM MONDAY, APRIL 6 – 8:20 PM WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8 – 6:30 PM

“Houellebecq is an extraordinary presence in this bizarre and very funny docu-fantasy, a sort of Euro-realist Curb Your Enthusiasm.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian “A French intellectual’s equivalent of Michael Winterbottom’s Trip movies . . . A briskly enjoyable reality comedy.” – Scott Foundas, Variety “One of the ten best films of 2014 . . . My favourite writer is now a movie star.” – John Waters, Artforum

New Restoration!

Grey Gardens

USA 1976. Dirs: Albert and David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer. 95 min. DCP

Now a cult favourite, this legendary (and legendarily bizarre) Direct Cinema documentary by Albert and David Maysles (Gimme Shelter) inspired both a Tonywinning Broadway musical and an Emmy-winning HBO movie. Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edie were relatives – the aunt and first cousin, respectively – of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Like real-life versions of Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond, the eccentric pair, known as Big Edie and Little Edie, lived as recluses in a derelict Long Island mansion known as “Grey Gardens.” Their home was in such appalling condition that local authorities once threatened to evict them;

the incident made national headlines – American royalty, living in squalor! The film, criticized by some for being voyeuristic, offers an intimate, engrossing, and disturbing portrait of the unforgettable pair and their complex mother-daughter relationship. FRIDAY, APRIL 3 – 8:20 PM SATURDAY, APRIL 4 – 6:30 PM SUNDAY, APRIL 5 – 4:30 PM MONDAY, APRIL 6 – 6:30 PM WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8 – 8:20 PM THURSDAY, APRIL 9 – 6:30 PM

35mm PRINTS

Also Like Life T H E F I L M S O F H O U H S I AO - H S I E N

The Cinematheque’s comprehensive Hou Hsiao-hsien retrospective, running February 6-March 11, 2015, showcases the films of one of world cinema’s reigning masters. A leading figure of Taiwan’s New Wave of the 1980s, and widely recognized as one of the most important filmmakers alive since the 1990s, Hou (b. 1947) has created a rich, rewarding, contemplative body of work celebrated for its great beauty, deep humanism, insightful historicism, and Ozu-like formalism.

Acknowledgements: “Also Like Life: The Films of Hou Hsiaohsien” is an international retrospective organized by Richard I. Suchenski (Director, Center for Moving Image Arts at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY) in collaboration with the Taipei Cultural Center, the Taiwan Film Institute, and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of China (Taiwan). The book Hou Hsiao-hsien (Vienna: Österreichisches Filmmuseum and New York: Columbia University Press, 2014) has been released in conjunction with this retrospective.

C O N T I N U E D F R O M F E B R U A RY Final screenings in the series March 1-11, 2015. Full series introduction and program notes can be found in our January/February 2015 Program Guide magazine and online at theCinematheque.ca.

The Puppetmaster

Cheerful Wind

Taiwan 1993. Dir: Hou Hsiao hsien. 142 min. 35mm

Taiwan 1981. Dir: Hou Hsiao-hsien. 90 min. 35mm

(Xi meng rensheng)

Hou’s gorgeous follow-up to A City of Sadness uses the memoirs of puppet master Li Tien-lu to trace an intimate history of Taiwan under the half-century of Japanese occupation that ended in 1945. Li was declared a Living National Treasure by the Taiwanese government in 1989; he also appeared as an actor (in “Grandfather” roles) in three previous Hou films. The Puppetmaster juxtaposes episodes from Li’s oftenharrowing life with scenes from his puppet plays and with Li’s earthy, often wildly-funny direct addresses to the camera. Hou’s innovative feat of storytelling and filmed history won a Jury Prize at Cannes. “Truly something new in movies, collapsing fact and fiction into one moving and penetrating inquiry into the past ... The work of a genuine master” (Film Society of Lincoln Center). In Mandarin, Taiwanese, and Japanese with English subtitles. SUNDAY, MARCH 1 – 6:30 PM

(Feng er ti ta cai)

The pop-star leads from Hou’s first feature, Cute Girl, are reunited in the director’s follow-up, a brisk work of bubble-gum romance that begins to experiment with the rules of the genre. This time, Taiwanese singing sensation Feng Fei-fei plays Hsing-hui, a trendy photographer visiting a seaside village in Penghu with her successful boss/fiancé. When she happens upon a flute-playing medic blinded in an ambulance crash (Kenny Bee), sparks fly, songs are sung, and she’s left with the tough decision of who to say “I do” to. Despite the eye-rolling premise, Hou infuses the film with enough formal ingenuity (long takes, telephoto lenses, on-location shooting) that a case can be made for its auteurial significance. In Mandarin with English subtitles. WEDNESDAY, MARCH 4 – 6:30 PM

The Green, Green Grass of Home

(Zai na hepan qing cao qing) Taiwan 1982. Dir: Hou Hsiao-hsien. 91 min. 16mm

Hou’s final film in the Taiwanese romantic-comedy mode, The Green, Green Grass Home is the most nuanced, fulfilling, and recognizably HHH-esque of these early commercial works. Again, the director brings along Hong Kong songster Kenny Bee as his lead, but swaps Feng Fei-fei for new ingénue Chiang Ling, who plays an elementaryschool teacher in a will-they-won’tthey relationship with Bee. Though Hou concedes to some of the genre’s predictabilities, more often he’s pursuing his own interests: the joyful spontaneity of improvised acting, the natural beauty of the Taiwanese countryside, and the growing socio-economic concerns of an industrialized nation. “Compares favourably with Ozu’s lyrical comedies of the 1930s” (David Bordwell). In Mandarin with English subtitles. WEDNESDAY, MARCH 4 – 8:15 PM

“Not only Taiwan’s greatest film artist but, heir to Bresson and Ozu, arguably the greatest narrative filmmaker of the past several decades.” – J. Hoberman, Village Voice “The 21st century belongs to Asia, and Hou is its historian, its prophet, and its poet laureate.” – Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Three Times

Millennium Mambo

Taiwan/France 2005. Dir: Hou Hsiao-hsien. 130 min. 35mm

Taiwan/France 2001. Dir: Hou Hsiao-hsien. 119 min. 35mm

(Zui hao de shi guang)

An undisputed masterpiece and Best-ofthe-Decade staple, Three Times is Hou’s breathtaking, tripartite tale of love (and love lost) from three periods in Taiwanese history: 1966, 1911, and 2005. Starring Shu Qi and Chang Chen as decadehopping courters, its splendour comes from the way Hou contemplates time within each chapter. “A Time for Love” elliptically jumps from month to month at a 1960s pool hall, where a soldier on leave tries to (re)connect with an attractive bargirl. “A Time for Freedom” adopts the period-proper intertitles of the silent era to portray a 1910s brothel during the Chinese revolution. And “A Time for Youth” returns to the modernday Taipei of Millennium Mambo to consider a nihilistic singer who sells herself as an object without past or future. “This is why cinema exists” (A. O. Scott, New York Times). In Mandarin and Taiwanese with English subtitles. THURSDAY, MARCH 5 – 6:30 PM SUNDAY, MARCH 8 – 8:20 PM

Goodbye South, Goodbye

(Nanguo zaijian, nanguo) Taiwan/Japan 1996. Dir: Hou Hsiao-Hsien. 112 min. 35mm

Small-time hoods attempt to scam their way across southern Taiwan in Hou’s first film in a decade with an entirely contemporary setting. The motley characters include tattooed thirtysomething thug Kao (Hou regular Jack Kao); his volatile teenage protégé Flathead (pop star Lim Giong, who also contributed the soundtrack); and Flathead’s suicidal, flaky, debt-ridden date Pretzel (Good Men, Good Women’s Annie Shizuka Inoh). Inhabiting a Mean Streets-milieu of neon, karaoke bars, and gambling dens, these slack-jawed, Nintendo-playing lost souls suggest a modern Taiwan adrift between traditional values and money-crazed Western soullessness. Hou described his stylish, visually-beautiful, uncharacteristicallymobile movie as an attempt “to create a new rhythm, different from my previous films.” In Mandarin and Taiwanese with English subtitles. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 27 – 6:30 PM THURSDAY, MARCH 5 – 9:00 PM

(Qian xi man po)

Hou Hsiao-hsien entered the aughts with this atmospheric tone-poem set and shot in Taipei. Lensed by revered cameraman Mark Lee Ping-bin, who shot Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, the film is noticeably more intimate than Hou’s past efforts, favouring shallow-focus cinematography and close-quartered settings to evoke the claustrophobic character of Taiwan’s capital city. It also brings a visual candour to the story’s central thread: the stifling inability of a listless young woman (an entrancing Shu Qi) to escape her abusive boyfriend. Told as a techno-scored, neon-lit memory from the year 2011, Millennium Mambo taps into the modern-day malaise of a generation longing for the future so that the present may be past. In Mandarin and Japanese with English subtitles. preceded by

Flight of the Red Balloon

(Le voyage du ballon rouge) France/Taiwan 2007. Dir: Hou Hsiao-hsien. 115 min. 35mm

“A movie of genius” (J. Hoberman, Village Voice), Hou’s first film made outside Asia pays fond tribute to Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 children’s short The Red Balloon, and features Juliette Binoche in a standout performance. Binoche is Parisian puppeteer Suzanne, harried mother of young son Simon. Absorbed in her latest project, Suzanne hires Taiwanese film student Song to nanny Simon. Song is a devotee of Lamorisse’s classic film; when she takes Simon to visit the Paris sites of its making, they are often followed, mysteriously, by a red balloon! “A charmer: a love letter to the French capital [and] a tough, telling study of the pressures facing (and caused by) professional single parents” (Geoff Andrew, Time Out). In French and Mandarin with English subtitles.

The Electric Picture House

preceded by

Hou’s contribution to To Each His Own Cinema, an anthology film commissioned for the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival.

Shu Qi stars in Hou’s segment from 10+10, an anthology film in which 10 established and 10 emerging Taiwanese filmmakers were asked to reflect on the “uniqueness of Taiwan.”

France 2007. Dir: Hou Hsiao-hsien. 3 min.

FRIDAY, MARCH 6 – 6:30 PM SATURDAY, MARCH 7 – 8:45 PM

Daughter of the Nile

(Ni luo he nu er)

Taiwan 1987.Dir: Hou Hsiao-hsien. 93 min. 35mm

A neglected item in the Hou filmography is this neon-lit, pop-culture-soaked contemporary drama, titled after a Japanese manga character, and made just before the director’s celebrated trio of epic historical films. With Hou’s customary warmth, humour, and gentle observation, the film follows teenaged Hsiao-yang as she juggles night-school classes, a parttime job at KFC, and caregiver duties in her motherless family. She also mediates between her policeman father and pettygangster brother, while nursing a crush on her brother’s pal, a gigolo. Taiwanese pop star Yang Lin made her film debut in the lead. “Hou’s attention to the anomic rhythms of Taipei youth culture reminds one of Godard’s early 1960s portraits of Paris” (James Quandt, Artforum). In Mandarin with English subtitles. FRIDAY, MARCH 6 – 8:50 PM SUNDAY, MARCH 8 – 6:30 PM

La Belle Epoque

Taiwan 2011. Dir: Hou Hsiao-hsien. 5 min.

SATURDAY, MARCH 7 – 6:30 PM WEDNESDAY, MARCH 11 – 8:30 PM

A Summer at Grandpa’s

(Dong dong de jia qi) Taiwan 1984. Dir: Hou Hsiao-hsien. 100 min. 35mm

A clear influence on Hayao Miyazaki’s similarly-themed My Neighbour Totoro — albeit without the fantasy elements — Hou’s gentle fifth feature is an affecting, unsentimental tale of childhood lost, told from the perspective of the film’s young protagonists. When their mother falls ill, siblings Ting-ting and Tungtung are carted off to the countryside to live with their grandfather, a smalltown doctor. There, they try to adjust to the slowed-down tempo of rural living while grappling to understand the enigmatic, often violent, actions of their elders. The film won the Jury Prize at Locarno — Hou’s first major festival honour — and is considered the first in an informal coming-of-age trilogy that includes A Time to Live and a Time to Die and Dust in the Wind. In Mandarin and Taiwanese with English subtitles. WEDNESDAY, MARCH 11 – 6:30 PM

Capture Photography Festival and The Cinematheque present

WAVELENGTH + BLOW-UP The second annual Capture Photography Festival, in conjunction with The Cinematheque, presents a special program of Michael Snow’s Wavelength and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up. These two celebrated films, both dating from the mid 1960s, complicate and confound the routine relationship between stillness and action: the latter contains the former, and from that point, everything can shift. As photographs depict a singular moment, the use of one in a narrative film forces both its characters and the audience to imagine beyond. Whether or not this “beyond” is fulfilled throughout the course of the plot is up for analysis, as the image burns itself into memory, resurfacing with new significance at some later date. Transformed with our own sensibilities and memories, the photograph becoming a placeholder for a greater unknown outside itself. – Casey Wei

Wavelength

Canada 1967. Dir: Michael Snow. 45 min. 16mm

Canadian master Michael Snow’s 1967 milestone is one of avant-garde cinema’s most celebrated and influential works. The film consists of a single, continuous, 45-minute zoom shot across a room (the artist’s New York loft), set to a steadily increasing sine wave of sound. There are several episodes of human “drama” and various structuralist elements (superimpositions, splicey jumps, variations in light, colour, and film stock) disrupting things along the way. “Wavelength is without precedent in the purity of its confrontation with the essence of cinema: the relationships between illusion and fact, space and time, subject and object. It is the first postWarhol, post-Minimal movie” (Gene Youngblood).

Blow-Up

Great Britain 1966. Dir: Michelangelo Antonioni. 100 min. 35mm

Michelangelo Antonioni’s first English-language film was this landmark mid-1960s meditation on the search for meaning, the subjective nature of reality, and the illusory nature of appearances. Set in Swinging London, the film stars David Hemmings as a fashion photographer who thinks that he may have inadvertently photographed a murder. With its Carnaby Street-cool portrait of pop art, pot parties, chic fashion models, mod youths, hip clubs, and rambunctious sexual freedom, Blow-Up is the perfect ’60s time capsule. It also remains a quintessential Antonioni piece – “a work totally fascinated with questions of illusion and appearance and shifting surfaces, and the way objects adjust their character according to the nature of the observing eye” (Penelope Houston). Vanessa Redgrave co-stars, while The Yardbirds rock in a (literally) smashing concert cameo!

Curated by Casey Wei Casey Wei is a Vancouver-based artist working in film/video and text. She graduated with an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Simon Fraser University in 2012. Her first feature-length video work, Vater und Sohn/Father and Son/父与子, was screened in The Cinematheque’s DIM program in 2014.

Some sexually suggestive scenes and nudity Persons under 14 must be accompanied by an adult

There will be a 10-minute intermission between Wavelength and Blow-Up.

The Capture Photography Festival is a annual

celebration of photography and lens-based art. Capture presents close to 100 free exhibitions, events, and public art projects throughout the

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 22 – 7:00 PM FRIDAY, APRIL 24 – 7:00 PM

Special pricing in effect for this program: $14 Regular / $12 Students & Seniors Cinematheque membership not required for this event.

month of April with the participation of over 50 cultural institutions across Metro Vancouver.

April 2015 capturephotofest.com

BLOW-UP

The Chan Centre Connects Series and The Cinematheque present

Tropicália

Brazil 2012. Dir: Marcelo Machado. 87 min. DCP

What exactly is Tropicália? It is this complex question that a Portuguese TV host poses to exiled Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso to open this documentary exploration of a fascinating artistic era in Brazil. Having grown up listening to the ground-breaking sounds of Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Os Mutantes, and Tom Zé, director Marcelo Machado takes his audience on a tour through the sounds, images, and history of one of Brazil’s most iconic cultural movements. Tropicália is an affectionate panorama of the fertile, controversial, and violent years of the late 1960s, featuring incredible archival material, images, interviews, and, of course, music. “Tropicália wasn’t a style or a movement as much as an atmosphere, a rush of youthful, cosmopolitan, liberationist optimism that broke over Brazil like a sun shower and soaked into everything: art, music, fashion, film, theater, literature” (New York Times). “An intoxicating blend of biography, performance, and cultural history” (Telluride F.F.). THURSDAY, APRIL 2 – 7:00 PM

This screening of Tropicália is presented in conjunction with the Chan Centre’s presentation of Brazilian singer, guitarist, and composer Gilberto Gil on Sunday, April 12 at 7:00 pm at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts at UBC. The Chan Centre Connects Series presents outreach activities related to visiting artists performing in the annual concert series at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts at UBC. For more information on these events, please visit chancentre.com/connects www.chancentre.com

The Cinematheque’s Education Department presents

An Afternoon Film Program for Children and Their Families $6 Children & Youths (under 18) $9 Adults (Cinematheque membership not required)

CLASH OF THE TITANS

If there’s one thing the movies do best, it’s whisking audiences away on incredible journeys and fantastic voyages. Travel with us to points unknown in our 2015 Cinema Sunday series, “The Spirit of Adventure.” Teeter on the edge of your seat over perilous pursuits of ancient artifacts, expeditions of eternal enlightenment, quests for fortune and glory, and missions to vanquish the vile villain. We are thrilled to present amazing adventures of the ages… for all ages! Films will be introduced by Vancouver film history teacher, critic, and dashing man of adventure Michael van ben Bos. In-theatre giveaways courtesy of Cinema Sunday community sponsors Videomatica Sales, Kidsbooks, and Golden Age Collectables.

Clash of the Titans USA 1981. Dir: Desmond Davis. 118 min. Blu-ray Disc

All ages welcome Want some insight into Harryhausen’s stop-motion magicry? Join Reel Youth after the film for an in-theatre demonstration that’ll teach you the visual-effects principles for how those monsters move. For more on Reel Youth, visit www.reelyouth.ca.

FILM FESTIVAL

“Release the Kraken!” Legendary stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen created his final, and perhaps best, “Dynamation” effects for this fantastical 1981 creaturefeature, an affectionate throwback and pseudo-sequel to his other Greek mythology movie, Jason and the Argonauts (1963). This time it’s the adventures of Perseus, son of Zeus (Laurence Olivier!), keeping Harryhausen’s imagination (and hands) busy. Through a signature combination of live-action players and meticulously crafted stop-motion miniatures, an ancient world of deities, mortals, and monsters is brilliantly rendered onscreen – no CGI needed! “Its visual wonderments are astonishing … Clash of the Titans is [Harryhausen’s] masterwork” (Roger Ebert).

SUNDAY, MARCH 15 – 1:00 PM

Pee-wee’s Big Adventure USA 1985. Dir: Tim Burton. 91 min. Blu-ray Disc

Paul Reubens’s lovable alter ego made the jump from stage show to screen with this gleefully bizarre, cross-America comedy that announced the arrival of both a major comic talent in the Buster Keaton-esque Reubens, and the quirky-goth vision of feature-debut director Tim Burton. A retelling of Bicycle Thieves by way of… well, Pee-wee Herman, the film follows Pee-wee and his doting friend Dottie as they try to track down his cherished stolen bicycle, snatched and then sold by a neighbourhood nemesis. Brimming with unforgettable did-I-just-see-that moments (Large Marge anyone?), Pee-wee’s Big Adventure is outrageous family fun for adult-kids and kid-kids alike. “A one-comic masterpiece” (Empire). All ages welcome Before the screening, acclaimed clowns James & Jamesy will treat moviegoers to an excerpt from their award-winning theatrical comedy High Tea (playing at the Jericho Arts Centre, May 18-24). After the movie, they’ll share the story of how they created their clown characters and lead participants in a funny-face-making exercise. For more on James & Jamesy, visit www.jamesandjamesy.com. SUNDAY, APRIL 19 – 1:00 PM

FREE EVENT

Presented by the YWCA Metro Vancouver with The Cinematheque’s Education Department Vancouver Premiere!

The Mask You Live In

USA 2015. Dir: Jennifer Siebel Newsom. 97 min. Blu-ray Disc

Join YWCA Metro Vancouver and The Cinematheque’s Education Department for a special screening in conjunction with this week’s upcoming International Women’s Day celebration. The Mask You Live In is a new documentary about boys and young men struggling to stay true to themselves while negotiating narrow definitions of masculinity. Director Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s follow-up to her much-acclaimed Miss Representation, The Mask You Live In explores ongoing issues of equality between men and women. One such issue is how boys are taught to “be a man” – to be tough, hide their emotions, and ignore their feelings. How does this impact their development and society as a whole? The screening will be followed by a interactive panel discussion, hosted by Janet Austin, CEO of YWCA Metro Vancouver, featuring a group of experts and advocates who will discuss the film, share their experiences, and consider actions to address issues of gender inequality. TUESDAY, MARCH 3 – 6:30 PM

Free Event. Visit www.theCinematheque.ca to reserve your spot in advance online. Only a limited number of tickets will be available at the door.

NEURONS TO NIRVANA

A Monthly Mental Health Film Series

Presented by The Cinematheque and the Institute of Mental Health, UBC Department of Psychiatry

he Cinematheque is pleased to join with the Institute of Mental Health, UBC Department of Psychiatry in presenting “Frames of Mind,” a monthly event utilizing film and video to promote professional and community education on issues pertaining to mental health and illness. Screenings, accompanied by presentations and audience discussions, are held on the third Wednesday of each month. Series directed by Dr. Harry Karlinsky, Director of Public Education, Department of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia.

Programmed by Caroline Coutts, film curator, filmmaker, and programmer of “Frames of Mind” since its inception in September 2002.

Neurons to Nirvana: Understanding Psychedelic Medicines Canada/USA 2013. Dirs: Oliver Hockenhull, Mikki Willis. 69 min. DCP

A thought-provoking and visually-stunning documentary that explores the potential of five powerful psychedelic substances (LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, ayahuasca, and cannabis) as psychotherapeutic medicines. Despite the potential promise shown by such drugs in research conducted in the 1950s, the increasingly restrictive anti-drug policies of successive governments effectively shut down further enquiry. As one of the many world-renowned researchers, writers, psychologists, and scientists interviewed in the film says: “The government does not allow this research to take place, and then says there’s no research to support it. It’s beyond hypocrisy.” The film is a cogent call to put irrational, fear-based beliefs aside in order to allow clinical, evidence-based research into psychedelics in areas such as addictions, PTSD, anxiety, depression, and end-of-life care. Post-screening discussion with Oliver Hockenhull and Mark Haden. Filmmaker, teacher, and essayist Oliver Hockenhull’s awardwinning oeuvre has merged the documentary, essay, and experimental genres in such films as Aldous Huxley: The Gravity of Light, Building Heaven, Remembering Earth, and Evo. Following 28 years in the addictions field, Mark Haden now works as an Adjunct Professor at the UBC School of Population and Public Health in the area of drug policy reform. He is also the Chair of MAPS Canada, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

Vancouver Premiere!

She’s Lost Control

USA 2014. Dir: Anja Marquardt. 90 min. Blu-ray Disc

Anja Marquardt’s audacious debut feature premiered at Berlin, where it won the CICAE Art Cinema Award, and went on to highprofile screenings at New Directors/New Films and SXSW. Its controversial, somewhat salacious-sounding subject matter – a New York sex surrogate finds the lines blurring between her professional and personal life when she gets too close to one of her clients – is tackled by the director with intelligence and maturity. As the story unfolds, it seems the surrogate, dispatching lessons in personal connection, has intimacy issues of her own. “An astutely cold and compelling psychological drama with sex at its core . . . Subtly unsettling . . . A taut film that reflects the emotional tension within its central character” (Mark Adams, Screen International). Post-screening discussing with Dr. Shauna Correia, Dr. Miriam Driscoll, and Marie Carlson. Dr. Correia (MDCM, FRCPC) and Dr. Driscoll (MD, FRCPC) are psychiatrists in the UBC Department of Psychiatry and work full time at B.C. Centre for Sexual Medicine treating patients with sexual difficulties. Marie Carlson RN, BSN, CRN(C), works in the Sexual Health Rehab Service at G. F. Strong Rehabilitation Centre, providing education, medical intervention, and support for clients with disability and chronic illness. Moderated by Dr. Harry Karlinsky, Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia.

Moderated by Dr. Harry Karlinsky, Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia. Co-sponsored by The UBC Neuroscience Graduate Student Association (with special thanks to Naila Kuhlmann).

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 15 – 7:30 PM

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18 – 7:30 PM FILMS FOR ONE TO EIGHT PROJECTORS

Moving-image art in dialogue with cinema

Programmed by Michèle Smith, co-editor of the art journal Drawing Room Confessions.

www.dimcinema.ca

VANCOUVER PREMIERES

Eric Baudelaire: Now Here Then Elsewhere

While in Japan researching extreme left-wing groups gone underground, artist Eric Baudelaire, a former political scientist, struck a deal with Masao Adachi, the renegade director/screenwriter who abandoned filmmaking to join the Japanese Red Army in Lebanon and fight in the Palestinian cause. In return for his story, Adachi asked Baudelaire to shoot scenes for him in Beirut based on his cinematic theory of landscape, fukeiron. In return for this footage, Baudelaire asked Adachi to write a script, a semi-autobiographical fiction, to be made after the completion of The Anabasis, Baudelaire’s dark and suspenseful documentary about the JRA. “Anabasis” is the name given, since Xenophon, to a journey into the unknown and the return home in a changed state. The new screenplay, about a group of former Palestinian militants haunted by their pasts, would be the protocol for constructing a film, The Ugly One, on memory, revolution, and cinema, seemingly written and rehearsed before our eyes.

The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years Without Images (L’anabase de May et Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi et 27 années sans images) | Eric Baudelaire/Japan-Lebanon-France 2011. 66 min. DCP.

The Ugly One | Eric Baudelaire/Lebanon-France 2013. 101 min. DCP. There will be a 10-minute intermission between the two films.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 25 – 6:30 PM *NOTE EARLY START TIME!

Films for One to Eight Projectors Live Show by Roger Beebe! Experimental filmmaker Roger Beebe’s 2015 touring program of multiple-projector performances and single-channel HD video includes the premiere of his latest multi-projector mayhem, Sound Film. These works take on a range of topics, from the forbidden pleasures of men crying and the secret logic of the book of Genesis to Las Vegas suicides and companies jockeying to be at the start of the phone book. “Beebe’s films are both erudite and punk, lo-fi yet high-brow shorts that wrestle with a disfigured, contemporary American landscape” (Wyatt Williams, Creative Loafing). WEDNESDAY, APRIL 1 – 7:30 PM

Related Event!

Iris Film Collective hosts a talk by filmmaker Roger Beebe at 7:30 pm on Thursday, April 2 at Falaise Park Fieldhouse (3434 Falaise Avenue) in Vancouver. www.irisfilmcollective.com

FROM OUR

Collection 35mm prints from The Cinematheque archive

Character (Karakter)

Netherlands/Belgium 1997. Dir: Mike van Diem. 120 min. 35mm

Dutch director Mike van Diem’s powerful 1997 drama won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Based on a classic 1939 novel by Dutch master Ferdinand Bordewijk, the film is set in 1920s Rotterdam, where a ferocious, hate-filled battle of wills plays out between powerful, much-feared bailiff Dreverhaven (Jan Decleir), pitiless in his treatment of the elderly and poor, and ambitious, self-made lawyer Katadreuffe (Fedja van Huêt), who happens to be Dreverhaven’s illegitimate son. The impressive production design and costumes handsomely evoke the period. The rich, award-winning cinematography is by Rogier Stoffers – who later shot Bob Dylan’s Masked and Anonymous and Richard Linklater’s The School of Rock! SUNDAY, MARCH 15 – 4:30 PM

Ratcatcher

Great Britain/France 1999. Dir: Lynne Ramsay. 94 min. 35mm

The acclaimed first feature of Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay (Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk About Kevin) is an arresting, startling original tale of childhood set in a poor Glasgow neighbourhood in the 1970s. “Ramsay’s astonishingly assured debut centres on a 12-year-old (William Eadie, excellent) who, haunted by the (secret) role he played in a pal’s accidental death by drowning, gradually retreats into a private world of solitude, strange friendships, and consoling dreams of a new home for his family. . . Ramsay’s bold visual sense, droll wit, and tender but unsentimental take on the various characters and their relationships makes for a distinctly poetic brand of gritty realism, and one of the most impressive first features by a British director in some years” (Geoff Andrew, Time Out). SUNDAY, MARCH 15 – 7:00 PM RATCATCHER

P O STER SA L E Join us as we open The Cinematheque poster vaults for your pillaging pleasure! Hundreds of posters to choose from.

Saturday, April 25

* 10 am - 12 pm

1131 Howe Street Vancouver

42nd Annual General Meeting MARCH 31 - 6 PM

The Cinematheque Theatre 1131 Howe Street All members are invited to attend Please bring your valid Cinematheque membership card

APR 30 - MAY 10 2015

Wu Man and the Shanghai Quartet

SAT MAY 9 2015 /8pm

Lila Downs SUN APR 26 2015 / 7pm