Wednesday, February 19 at 7pm University of Pennsylvania Humanities Forum Film Series WOMEN FILM THE WAR ON TERROR Control Room dir. Jehane Noujaim, USA, 2004, digital, Arabic and English, 84 min.
Egyptian-American filmmaker Jehane Noujaim (Startup.com) directs Control Room, a documentary investigating the ethics of media-managed wars. This film particularly focuses on the U.S.-led war in Iraq. Noujaim and her film crew travel to the headquarters of Al-Jazeera, the media leader in the Arab world, to find out what the news looks like in Iraq. She interviews several journalists and producers involved in war reporting for Al-Jazeera, including senior producer Sameer Khader, journalist Hassan Ibrahim, and producer Deema Khatib. Noujaim also interviews American correspondents David Shuster from NBC and Tom Mintier from CNN.
ihousephilly.org
Thursday, February 20 at 7pm Full Exposure Centro Historico dir. Pedro Costa, Manuoel de Oliveira, Victor Erice and Aki Kaurismaki , Portugal, 2012, digital, Portuguese w/ English subtitles, 80 min.
“Two of these four short films about the Portuguese city of Guimarães are by Portuguese directors, and they are standouts. Pedro Costa’s Sweet Exorcist features Ventura, the elderly Cape Verdean immigrant (and nonprofessional actor) who starred in his 2006 film Colossal Youth, and extends the earlier film’s triangular connection between the life of a beleaguered laborer, the mighty grind of historical forces, and the substrate of mythological fantasy. Ventura wanders through haunted underbrush and arrives at a hospital, where, in the elevator, he encounters the statue of a soldier—with whom he enters into a dialogue about the country’s 1974 military coup, the vestigial dreams of his homeland, and the enduring legend of revolution that survives like a secular vision of redemption. The centenarian Manoel de Oliveira’s documentarybased fiction The Conqueror takes an aptly long and Olympian view of history, following a tour guide (Ricardo Trêpa) as he leads his flock of tourists to the city’s medieval highlights and delivers potted introductions in broken English. Oliveira offers a simple and rarefied lesson in vision, finding blazingly clear angles to reveal ancient wonders in a renewed immediacy, to look ancient heroes in the face, and to take their point of view—visual and historical, whimsical yet hopeless—against the undiscerning modern crowd”. Richard Brody