A masterpiece from a master Director still has a lot to say about community spirit and is a film with much more to say to it than feel good sentimentality.
No apologies for showing a film that you will have seen before but it is a film that demands to be shown at this time of year (big screen better than the box) The power of Community in your Community Cinema.
Lucem
How about an alternative Christmas film, rated as one of the best of the lot, no reindeers or cuddly Santa’s among this lot, the flames won’t be off the Christmas pudding!
As usual there is a Brit actor playing the baddie, mind you he wasn’t a saint in Harry Potter.
More traditional fare next week
A film for our times, the most awarded film out of the prestigious 2019 Sundance film festival.
This film has been selected in memory of Len Saunders 7/12/1951 – 30/07/2017
The last female beehunter in Europe must save the bees and return the natural balance in Honeyland, when a family of nomadic beekeepers invade her land and threaten her livelihood. This film which is filmed in Macedonia is an exploration of an observational Indigenous visual narrative that deeply impacts our behaviour towards natural resources and the human condition.
A 1974 5 ***** Classic thriller with the star “giving his best ever performance” set in 1930’s Los Angeles our anti hero private eye stumbles into political and corporate corruption (could be set in the present time period ?) A brilliant film noir, acting, direction and script, can’t wait to see it on our big screen.
Lucem.
The critically acclaimed story of two men revisiting old haunts while there is still time to remember, a poignant and touching tale of one partners mental decline due to dementia, two tremendous actors giving superb performances.
Lucem
Syrian refugee Omar (Amir El-Masry, superb) carries his oud, a stringed musical instrument, everywhere he goes. But since Omar, like a ragtag group of other young male asylum seekers, is currently lodged on a small Scottish island, there are not too many places to wander, once you’ve visited the bus stop, the island’s single payphone and the despondent children’s playground. But like so much in this gorgeous tragicomic drama from writer and director Ben Sharrock, the oud takes on an added symbolism. It’s a link to home, obviously – the only time we see Omar’s Keatonesque countenance crack into a smile is in footage of him playing the instrument, a sliver of a distant past. But the oud in its case evokes the hard angles of a coffin, symbolising, perhaps, the demise of Omar’s musical ambitions, or the possible death of a loved one left behind in his war-torn homeland.
For a film that is so infused with sadness, however, Limbo is remarkably funny – a gentle, empathic kind of humour that is derived from the men’s bleak existences, without mocking them. Sharrock uses the location evocatively – the wind is harnessed to bring a plaintive desolation to the sound design; the bleak beauty provides a striking backdrop. The irony is inescapable: men whose options are currently so curtailed are confronted daily by horizons that are limitless.
Summer 1939. Influential families in Nazi Germany have sent their daughters to a finishing school in an English seaside town to learn the language and be ambassadors for a future looking National Socialist. A teacher there sees what is coming and is trying to raise the alarm. But the authorities believe he is the problem.
Britain 1939. Hitler’s grip is tightening. No-one can be trusted.
Lucem
