Dubai Dates: 1st-14th September at 8.30 pm Venue: The Picture House in Dubai Mall
Abu Dhabi Dates: 15th-28th September at 8.30 pm Venue: Vox Cinemas, Marina Mall
About Pomegranates and Myrrh:
A free spirited woman dancer, Kamar, finds herself the lonely wife of a prisoner, Zaid, and away from everything she loves until she returns to the dance, defying societys taboos. At the dance Kamar is confronted with Kais, a Palestinian returnee. Sparks fly between Kamar and Kais, creating more than a passionate, emotional dance for the both of them. Matters become even more complicated when Zaid's sentence is extended. Kamar's life is thrown into turmoil as she becomes increasingly attached to Kais, and caught in the midst of her desire to dance and breaking the family and society taboos of the prisoner's wife's role while life under occupation rages on.
The Picturehouse, Dubai's only arthouse cinema (located in Dubai Mall) is screening Vincere this week. The Picturehouse isn't very consistent when it comes to screening films, so if you want a break from the Hollywood blockbusters this week, here's your chance. Here's the screening schedule.
A cinematic tour-de-force, VINCERE is Italian master Marco Bellocchio’s (FISTS IN THE POCKET) portrait of Benito Mussolini (Filippo Timi), and the fiery woman who was his secret wife and the mother of his abandoned child (Giovanna Mezzogiorno). The film was a standout selection of the 2009 Cannes, Telluride, Toronto, New York, AFI film festivals, and received awards for Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Actor at the Chicago IFF.
In VINCERE, the closely guarded story of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s secret lover and son is revealed in fittingly operatic proportions. Thunderstruck by the young Mussolini’s charisma, Ida Dalser gives up everything to help champion his revolutionary ideas. When he disappears during World War I and later resurfaces with a new wife, the scorned Dalser and her son are locked away in separate asylums for more than a decade. But Ida will not disappear without a fight...
Uxbal (Javier Bardem) is a street criminal, a spiritual man, a loving father and a lost soul - surrounded by death and how he is trying to live life ... a harsh life because of his circumstances, surroundings, his choices in life.
Set in Barcelona, showing us a side of the city most of us are very unfamiliar with, Biutiful is full of subtle details that added so much depth to the story and the characters.
Here's a small extract from Iñárritu's production notes (worth reading in its entirety) that explains what inspired the film:
Biutiful for me is a reflection akin to our brief and humble permanence in this life. Our existence, short-lived as the flicker of a star, only reveals to us its ineffable brevity once we are close to death. Recently, I thought of my own death. Where do we go and what do we transform into when we die? Into the memory of others. This is the anguishing and dizzying race against time that Uxbal faces. What does a man do in his final days of life? Does he dedicate himself to living or to dying? Perhaps Kurosawa was right when he said our dreams of transcendence are just that: an illusion. Regardless, since the film’s inception, I was never interested in making a movie about death, but a reflection in and about life when our inevitable loss of it occurs.
A film for me always begins with something very vague -- a bit of a conversation, a glimpse of a scene through a car window, a shaft of light or some music notes. Biutiful started on a cold autumn morning in 2006 while my kids and I were preparing breakfast and I randomly played a CD of the Ravel Piano Concerto in G Major. Some months before, I had played the same Ravel piano concerto during a family car trip from Los Angeles to the Telluride Film Festival. The scenery of the Four Corners area was breathtaking but after the Ravel piece finished, both of my kids started to cry at the same time. The melancholic quality, the sense of sadness and beauty that this piece of music contains was overwhelming for them. My kids couldn’t take it or explain it. They just felt it. When they heard that Ravel piano again that morning, they both asked me to stop the CD. They remembered very clearly the emotional impact and how that music moved them. That same morning, a character knocked on my head’s door and said: “Hola, my name is Uxbal.” During the next three years, I would spend my life with him. I didn’t know what he wanted, who he was or where he was going. He was dismissive and full of contradictions. But to be honest, I knew how I wanted to present him and how I wanted to finish with him. Yes, I just had the beginning and the end.
It wasn’t until one year later, while I was walking in the El Raval section of Barcelona, that everything made sense. Barcelona is the queen of Europe. She is indeed beautiful, but like every queen, she also has a much more interesting side than the obvious and sometimes boring, bourgeois beauty that every tourist and postcard photographer has admired. Since I was 17 years old and traveled around the world working in a cargo ship as a floor cleaner, I have been attracted to, curious about and fascinated by the neighborhoods that are hidden and that nobody sees. That’s what I respond to. And I am talking about the diverse, complex, marginal and multiethnic new world that has been recently created in Barcelona and most of the big cities of Europe. It would have been impossible to imagine this when I first came to Barcelona at 17. But now, immediately, I knew that Uxbal belonged to this place, I knew he belonged to this eclectic and vibrant community that is reshaping the world.
Biutiful is a love story between a father and his children. This is the journey of Uxbal, a conflicted man who struggles to reconcile fatherhood, love, spirituality, crime, guilt and mortality amidst the dangerous underworld of modern Barcelona. His livelihood is earned out of bounds, his sacrifices for his children know no bounds. Like life itself, this is a circular tale that ends where it begins. As fate encircles him and thresholds are crossed, a dim, redemptive road brightens, illuminating the inheritances bestowed from father to child, and the paternal guiding hand that navigates life’s corridors, whether bright, bad – or biutiful.
I leave you with this wonderful quote by Iñárritu, also from the Production Notes (I told you its worth reading in full):
At the end of the day, when a film is not a document, it is a dream. And as a dreamer, you are always alone, as a painter is alone with a white canvas. And to be alone is to ask questions (as Goddard once said ) . . . and to make films is to answer them.
In the last week of the British Council's UK Film Season we have two films focusing on women, Made in Dagenham (UK) and Once (United Arab Emirates).
Details: Dates: Till 15th March Venue: The Picturehouse at Reel Cinemas in Dubai Mall Timings: 2:05pm, 4.35pm, 7:05pm, 9:35pm, 00:05am Phone: +971 4 449 1988
Made in Dagenham A dramatization of the 1968 strike at the Ford Dagenham car plant where female workers walked out in protest against discrimination. From the director of Calendar Girls, Nigel Cole - the film stars the award winning Sally Hawkins as Rita OGrady who is the catalyst for the 1968 Ford Dagenham strike by 187 sewing machinists which led to the advent of the Equal Pay Act.
Working in extremely impoverished conditions and for long arduous hours, the women at the Ford Dagenham plant finally lay down their tools when they are reclassified as unskilled. With humour, common sense and courage they take on their corporate paymasters, an increasingly belligerent local community, and finally the government itself. The leader of the womens struggle is fast-talking, no nonsense Rita whose fiery temper and occasionally hilarious unpredictability proves to be a match for any of her male opponents, and is echoed by Barbara Castle's struggle in the male-dominated House of Commons.
Once This short film directed by Nayla Al Khajatakes place on the day when Hamda is to meet her boyfriend Saeed, for the first time. Scared of getting caught and full of excitement at seeing him, we watch Hamda's transformation from girl to beautiful young woman, taking risks and telling lies, in order to find what she imagines must be true love.
I owe you an apology. I missed out on updating you on the films screened during the 5th and 6th week of the British Council's UK Film Season (you missed Topsy Turvy and White Lightenin').
But here I am back with an update for the 7th week, but you have two days left. This week's screening includes Looking for Eric and Noura's Apple.
Details: Dates: 3rd-8th March Venue: The Picturehouse at Reel Cinemas in Dubai Mall Timings: 12:05pm, 2:05pm, 4.35pm, 7:05pm, 9:35pm, 00:05am Phone: +971 4 449 1988
Looking for Eric
Eric the postman is slipping through his own fingers. His chaotic family, his wild stepsons, and the cement mixer in the front garden don't help, but it is Eric's own secret that drives him to the brink. Can he face Lily, the woman he once loved? Despite outrageous efforts and misplaced goodwill from his football fan mates, Eric continues to sink. In desperate times it takes a spliff and a special friend to challenge Eric to journey into the most perilous territory of all - the past. As a certain frenchman says, "He who is afraid to throw the dice, will never throw a six."
Noura's Apple Childhood friends Noura and Hamdan have grown up. As time passed, their paths too diverged from what was once a period defined by innocence.
The fourth week of the British Council's UK Film Season brings us a music and dance themed selection of films with Streetdance (UK) and Heat the Beat 2 (United Arab Emirates).
Details: Dates: 10th-15th February Venue: The Picturehouse at Reel Cinemas in Dubai Mall Timings: 2:05pm, 4.35pm, 7:05pm, 9:35pm, 00:05am Phone: +971 4 449 1988
Streetdance In order to win the Street Dance Championships, a dance crew is forced to work with ballet dancers from the Royal Dance School in exchange for rehearsal space. With no common ground and with passions riding high, they realise they need to find a way to join forces to win. The film features the cream of UK dance talent, including show-stopping performances from Britains Got Talent dance sensations Flawless, Diversity and George Sampson, as well as from Matthew Bourne protégé Richard Winsor and breakthrough Brit actress Nicholas Burley (Donkey Punch, Love & Hate). www.streetdancethemovie.co.uk
HEAT THE BEAT 2 Two brothers founded the first hip hop crew in the UAE. The film charts their journey towards becoming rappers and examines their motivations.
I went last week and saw Never Let Me Go and glad to say there were no technical problems that I reported two weeks ago. Happy they listened to the complaint and fixed the problem. Also just want to say that Never Let Me Go is a beautiful yet very depressing film and glad I got to see it on the big screen.
Details: Dates: 3rd-8th February Venue: The Picturehouse at Reel Cinemas in Dubai Mall Timings: 2:05pm, 4.35pm, 7:05pm, 9:35pm, 00:05am Phone: +971 4 449 1988
Brassed Off In existence for a 100 years, Grimley Colliery Brass band is as old as the mine. But the miners are now deciding whether to fight to keep the pit open, and the future for town and band looks bleak. Although the arrival of flugelhorn player Gloria injects some life into the players, and bandleader Danny continues to exhort them to continue in the national competition, frictions and pressures are all too evident. And who's side is Gloria actually on?
Sheikh Al Jabal (Mountain Sheikh) This 11 minutes film directed by Naser El Yaqoobi depicts the life of an old Emirati man and his indominitable spirit of determination.
I talked about my experience of the first week here and I'm glad to say that the British Council got in touch with me saying the problem has been fixed. I will go to The Picturehouse over the next couple of days and hope I won't leave disappointed by the service.
Again, please do spread the word about this mini film festival, it's on till 15th March 2011 with new films every week.
Details: Dates: 27th January - 1st February Venue: The Picturehouse at Reel Cinemas in Dubai Mall Timings: 2:05pm, 4.35pm, 7:05pm, 9:35pm, 00:05am (but I suggest you call before you go to double check) Phone: +971 4 449 1988
Never Let Me Go As children, Ruth, Kathy and Tommy, spend their childhood at a seemingly idyllic English boarding school. As they grow up, they find that they have to come to terms with the haunting reality that awaits them.
Amal's Cloud Amal waits in the middle of the yard shifting between patience and hope; waiting for the jinx to melt and disappear.
Basically, the top part of the two films were cropped off the cinema screen because of projection issues and bad alignment. I had to take a few photographs as evidence to share with you here and the cinema.
I complained during the screening to get it fixed. Nothing changed. After the screening, I spoke to the manager and he blamed the distributor (based on the information from the British Council website, I believe the distributor is Front Row Entertainment).
Scene from SoloScene from Solo
I don't know the technicalities of the projection room, but surely this isn't acceptable. It's not like Reel Cinemas just opened yesterday. They have over 20 screens and if this is the standard, I'm appalled. It's disrespectful to the filmmakers and audience.
Dear British Council, Front Row Entertainment, Reel Cinemas - I don't know who is at fault here, but please sort this out to avoid the same problem over the next seven weeks. We struggle to get non-Hollywood movies to screen at our cinemas, and if this is the effort that goes into this mini film festival, we're better off projecting films on a white sheet in our backyards.
More scenes from Nowhere Boy. See what I mean about the cropped parts at the top of the screen?
Tuesday, August 30, 2011 at 12:08AM 
