Around the World in a Decade

Kami awali sinematek 2010 dengan bagian pertama dari Around the World in a Decade, showcase film-film menarik dari penjuru dunia dalam dekade terakhir ini. (Ya, satu lagi daftar “Yang Terbaik dalam Satu Dekade”.) Mungkin bukan film-film terbaik, tapi kami rasa patut untuk ditonton yang mungkin tidak Anda temukan di bioskop terdekat. Hanya empat dari ratusan film yang dibuat dalam satu dekade tentu saja tidak cukup; silahkan menulis versi Anda sendiri daftar film dengan mengisi formulir komentar di bawah ini. Masukan Anda akan sangat berguna untuk bagian kedua serial ini di bulan Juni.

Pemutaran berlangsung tiap Sabtu, 17.00, di C2O, Jl. Dr. Cipto 20 Surabaya 60264 (jalan kecil seberang Konjen Amerika — lihat peta), gratis dan terbuka untuk umum. Sinematek C2O merupakan program pemutaran film dengan tujuan berbagi dan bertukar referensi dari film-film yang diputar, tanpa bermaksud membatasi. Sumbangan dan sokongan dari penonton sangat kami hargai untuk memastikan kelangsungan program ini dan C2O.

Dikarenakan musim hujan, pemutaran akan dilakukan di dalam ruangan dalam TV kecil. Mohon maaf dan terima kasih atas pengertiannya.

For 2010 we jump-start our cinematheque this January with the first part of Around the World in a Decade, a showcase of notable films from around the world made in the past ten years. (We can hear you screaming,OH NO, not another one of those “best of the decade” list?) Not the best, but films we think are worth watching but might have missed your radar. Four out of gazillion films produced in a decade is a rather paltry number, so feel free to write your own version of notable films in that comment form below. We’d love to hear your ideas for our 2nd part of the series in June.

Screenings are held every Saturday, 17.00 at C2O library, Jl. Dr. Cipto 20 Surabaya 60264 (across US General Consulate — view map), free and open for public. This screening programme is run independently with the purpose of introducing and sharing references and informations, not necessarily limited films per se. Donations are most gratefully and lovingly welcome. We rely on your donations and support to ensure that we can continue this program for free and open for public.

Please note that due to the rainy season, we’ll be screening the films indoor in our small TV. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your understanding.

9 January 2010

The World (Shijie) | Jia Zhang-ke
2004 | China / Japan / France | 140m | 2.35 : 1 |  Colour | In Chinese & Japanese with English subs

An exhilarating and expansive, funny and anguished vision of the new China (and of, well, the world). Moving away from the northern provincial settings of his previous films, and extending his reach in every way, Jia Zhang-ke interweaves the stories of several young people who work at the World Park on the outskirts of Beijing, a 114-acre stretch of detailed scale replicas of famous international landmarks (e.g. the Taj Mahal, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Eiffel Tower, London Bridge, and the pyramids). This enclosed, artificial setting—a kitsch version of the global village, edited to just its tourist “high points,” consumable in one monorail trip—provides the metaphor of forgery, fakery, and facsimile that connects many of the film’s teeming subplots. At the centre of Jia’s sprawling masterpiece is his muse Zhao Tao, who plays a dancer in the park’s lavish “ethnic” extravaganzas, spectacles that sample the world’s cultures for the delectation of tourists. Jia’s complex narrative revolves around Zhao’s relationship with a security guard who is smitten with a married fashion designer. The latter’s company does cheap knockoffs, another instance of the film’s theme of imitation and fraudulence. Interspersed with musical numbers, Flash-animated cell phone text messages, and unnerving tours of the World Park, the film reaches past audacity to a full-bodied and moving realism. “A glorious achievement” (Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly).

16 January 2010

The Wind Will Carry Us (Shijie) | Abbas Kiarostami
2004 | China / Japan / France | 140m | 2.35 : 1 |  Colour | in Persian with English subs

“The greatest film by Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami” (J. Hoberman, Village Voice), The Wind Will Carry Us is a work of transporting beauty, with its serried landscape and molten light, its carefully managed mysteries and sneaky epiphanies. A young intellectual engineer (Behzad Dourani, the only professional actor in the film) travels from Tehran to a remote Kurdish village in the hills with some assistants. His mission is unstated, but it seems to centre on a dying old woman, and becomes increasingly desperate and opportunistic. The film belies its formal and narrative intricacy with Kiarostami’s characteristic humility and wry humour—a lecture on the burden of women delivered by a café owner is stern, funny stuff, and the motorbike driven by a philosophical doctor offers the best transport for the road to redemption since Bresson’s Journal d’un curé de campagne. The film’s seeming inversion of the cosmology of earth and heaven—ascent associated with duplicity and death, descent with authenticity and life—bravely extends the existentialist themes of Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry. “4 stars—Abbas Kiarostami’s reputation as one of the decade’s most essential directors is reinforced with his latest film” (Liam Lacey, Globe and Mail).

23 January 2010

The Son (Le Fils) | Jean-Luc & Pierre Dardenne
2004 | China / Japan / France | 140m | 2.35 : 1 |  Colour | In French with English subs

“A masterpiece. . . . Miraculous” (A. O. Scott, New York Times). Thickly bespectacled Olivier Gourmet plays a master woodworker who trains disadvantaged boys in his trade. The hand-held camera that clings to Gourmet’s being (mostly the back of his head) throughout the first part of the film registers his agitation after he recognizes a sullen teenager who has been assigned as an apprentice; unbeknownst to the boy, the two share a terrible past. When the carpenter’s ex-wife arrives to tell him about her pregnancy and impending marriage, that past erupts into the present with violent emotional force. Whether read as a Christian allegory about good and evil, or a Chabrol-like study in guilt, revenge, and grace, Le Fils accumulates immense suspense—both literal and spiritual—as the carpenter and his student, one knowingly, the other not, act out their long suppressed conflict. By the time the boy realizes who his wary teacher is, he appears to be in mortal danger. Alarmingly physical, thrilling in its brusque, neo-Bressonian style, Le Fils wades deep in misery and mystery, then proffers in its final, abrupt gesture an authentic understanding of forgiveness in an unforgiving world. Gourmet won the best actor award at Cannes. “One of the Ten Best Films of 2003” (Village Voice 2003 Critics’ Poll).

30 January 2010

Syndromes and a Century (Sang Sattawat) | Apichatpong Weerasethakul
2006 | Thailand | 105m |  Colour | In Thai with English subs

Sheer enchantment. A film about memory, love both requited and not, and the beauty of the world (Apichatpong shoots trees, sun, water like a latter-day Renoir), Syndromes and a Century is an homage to the director’s parents who met as doctors in a rural hospital. Full of formal play (the pre-credit sequence alone packs in more invention than many other entire films) and teasing enigmas, the film is divided into two parts. In the first, the young, ardent Toa arrives in a rural hospital to court a young woman physician, Dr. Toey. The second, set in a modern hospital complex, replays the story of courtship, but slyly transforms many of its features and details. Because the symmetries of theme, setting, and character between Syndromes’ two halves are more pronounced than in the director’s sometimes bewildering Tropical Malady, it’s tempting to assign them dichotomous values—rural/urban, female/male, past/present, memory/fantasy—but Apichatpong’s modus operandi seems averse to such strict dualities. Among the surplus of vividly rendered characters whose tales intersect, disrupt, or abut the main love story are a dipso doctor who keeps her bottle stashed in a prosthetic leg, an authority on rare orchids, a Buddhist monk who is a DJ-manqué, and his would-be lover, a dentist who in his spare time croons Thai country tunes in a green sequined jacket. “A quiet masterpiece, delicate and full of wonder.” (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader)

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2 Replies to “Around the World in a Decade”

  1. I 1st saw this in year 7 at school I was in a club clelad film club with some other people My music teacher showed it to us cuz we were filming about Star Wars Thats the first time ive really ever heard about Star Wars And ive loved it ever since now im a Star Wars geek who wants to get a Vader suit or Stormtrooper armour and a Force FX Lightsaber

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