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She, a Chinese
Tues 23 Feb
Morphia
Don’t go unrewarded Tues 23 Feb / Light House / 8.15pm
Director: Aleksey Balabanov 2008 / Russia / 102 minutes Principal Cast: Leonid Bichevin, Ingeborga Dapkunaite, Andrey Panin, Svetlana Pismichenko
Tues 23 Feb / Screen 1 / 8.00pm
Director: Xiaolu Guo 2009 / UK/Germany/France / 98 minutes Principal Cast: Lu Huang, Wei Yi Bo, Geoffrey Hutchings Director Xiaolu Guo will be in attendance at this screening
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She is Mei, an enigmatic young Chinese woman longing for a different life. To find herself, she needs to escape, and her journey takes her first to a city in her own country, where she finds love, and loses it. Still searching, she travels to England, drifting and rootless. All the time, she is learning more about herself, experimenting. Sometimes the experiments are misguided. But none of them are wasted. There is no end point to her journey, but we sense that what she leaves behind is as important as what she is moving towards. Filmmaker and novelist Xiaolu Guo has herself followed a trajectory from China to the UK. Here she brings an impressive and attractive energy and freshness to her cross-cultural story, both in the style and structure of the piece and in her choice of PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish to supply the score. Sandra Hebron, London Film Festival Programme
Sick-bags at the ready for Aleksey Balabanov’s (Cargo 200, Of Freaks and Men) deliciously funny and graphically gory take on Mikhail Bulgakov’s Notes Of A Young Doctor, as he juxtaposes the worsening morphine addiction of a bookish young medic (Leonid Bichevin) in his backwoods hospital with the 1917 Bolshevik revolution which rages in the neighbouring cities. Divided into short episodes, all with laughout-loud titles (The First Injection, The First Amputation, etc.) which comically hint at the ensuing carnage, the film offers a vision of humanity bent on self-destruction and where the social pillars of religion, politics, media and medicine are all irredeemably corrupt. The exhaustive production design deserves a special mention. Time Out ‘Handsomely shot and set to an evocative score, Balabanov transforms Mikhail’s self-inflicted hell into a searing spectacle that viewers simply can’t tear their eyes from.’ Vancouver International Film Festival Programme
Colony
Tues 23 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 8.30pm
Directors: Carter Gunn and Ross McDonnell 2009 / Ireland / 87 minutes Directors Carter Gunn and Ross McDonnell will be in attendance at this screening. Beautifully photographed by Ross McDonnell and skilfully edited by Carter Gunn, Colony follows several American beekeepers during 2008 and 2009 as the country’s economy spiralled downward. A recent and unexplainable phenomenon, colony collapse disorder saw a drop in almost a quarter of the number of bees in the United States. This mystery is akin to something out of science fiction and has dark implications for the future. Because our agriculture depends on pollination, when bees are in trouble, so is society. At the heart of this film is the Seppi family, newcomers to the beekeeping world. As the Seppis face the collapse of their colony and the economy, tensions course through the family. McDonnell and Gunn perfectly capture the intimacy of these scenes, and are as adept at filming the microcosmic scale of the beehives, making us fear for the bee’s survival as for our own. Thom Powers, Toronto International Film Festival Programme