UW-Parkside Foreign Film Series

2010 - 2011 Season

Thursday 7:30 pm	Saturday 5:00 pm	Sunday 2:00 pm
Friday 7:30 pm	Saturday 8:00 pm	Sunday 5:00 pm

Films are shown in the Student Center Cinema.

LOOKING FOR ERIC – September 9-12
Eric Bishop has a hard life. It’s been years since his second wife left him and now his stepsons are teenagers, drinking and playing video games and refusing to go to school and trashing the house. Perhaps he brought it on himself by walking out on his first wife, Lily, whom he still loves. He still has a good relationship with his daughter and enjoys looking after her baby, but now she has requested that, in order to do so, he make contact with his first wife again. The only person Eric feels he can talk to – through the life size poster on his bedroom wall-is Eric Cantona, his football hero and conversation companion. Under the tutelage of his hero, Bishop has the chance to turn his life around. A life affirming film whose gritty exterior hides an undercoat of silky humor and an unexpected soft heart, Looking for Eric marries harsh reality with a sprinkling of fantasy in the down-to earth way at which Ken Loach excels. (UK/France, 2009) Dir: Ken Loach. English language. 116 min.
Review

DEPARTURES – September 23-26
Whimsy and sweet irony are laced throughout this film, a warmhearted blend that turned it into the surprise winner of 2009’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Daigo is a cello player of great dedication but middling talent. When the orchestra falls on hard times and Daigo finds himself out of a job, his dreams are the first thing to go. He sells his expensive instrument and moves with his wife Mika to his provincial hometown. In search of a job, he answers a help wanted ad entitled Departures, thinking he would enjoy working in the travel industry, but discovers that the job is actually for a “Nokanshi” or “encoffineer,” a funeral professional who prepares bodies for burial and entry into the next life. While his wife and others despise the job, Daigo takes a certain pride in his work and begins to perfect his art. The film follows Daigo’s profound and sometimes comical journey with death as he uncovers the wonder, joy, and meaning of life and living. 2009 USA Academy Awards: Best Foreign Language Film; 2009 Asian Film Awards: Best Actor. (Japan, 2008) Dir: Yojirô Takita. Japanese language. 130 min.
Review

THE WHITE RIBBON – October 7-10
Haneke is in possession of a serious idea. It’s that the parenting and education German children received in the early years of the 20th century made them morally susceptible to Nazism. Haneke brings this idea home through the story of strange happenings in a small German village. There is evil lurking in the seemingly idyllic village. The film pulls viewers in with the power of its imagery and the brooding sense of impending menace. Whether we’re watching the local baron and his wife, or the sensitive young schoolteacher or the preacher and his children, Haneke makes us remember that we are, at all times, watching a town. We are watching a culture, and that culture is desperately sick, and it’s generating sickness. The film ends on the eve of the onset of the First World War-but already the seeds have been sown for the wave of popular support that created the climate for the rise of Hitler and the eventual outbreak of the Second World War. 2009 European Film Awards: Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenwriter; 2009 Chicago Film Critics Association Awards: Best Foreign Language Film. (Germany, 2009) Dir: Michael Haneke. German, Italian, and Polish languages. 144 min.
Review

BROKEN EMBRACES –October 21 -24
A man lives in darkness. Fourteen years before, he was in a brutal car crash in which he not only lost his sight, he also lost his passion for the love of his life, Lena (Penélope Cruz.) The man uses two names: Harry Caine, a playful pseudonym with which he signs his literary works, and Mateo Blanco, his real name, with which he lives and signs the film he directs. After the accident, Mateo Blanco reduces himself to his pseudonym, Harry Caine. He holds the idea that Mateo Blanco died in the accident along with his beloved Lena. In the present day, Harry Caine survives thanks to the scripts he writes and to the help he gets from his faithful former production manager, Judit, and from Diego, her son. One day Diego asks him about the time when he answered to the name of Mateo Blanco, and so begins the tale of Mateo Blanco’s final movie, Girls and Suitcases, a comedy starring Lena. This is a story of “amour fou,” dominated by fatality, jealously, the abuse of power, and treachery. The film is ravishing to watch and sheer indulgence for Almodóvar, and just as indulgent for his fans, for it’s a movie crammed with passions and plot twists. 2009 São Paulo International Film Festival: Best Foreign Language Film. (Spain, 2009) Dir: Pedro Almodóvar. Spanish language. 127 min.
Review

AN EDUCATION – November 4-7
An Education treats a woman’s entree into the world of adult love as a saga of mystery, adventure and possibly heartbreak, not as an event that needs to be scripted or legislated by her elders. The opening finds Jenny-a bright, diligent, attractive 16-year-old schoolgirl-feeling bored by her suburban existence. The plan is that she’ll go to Oxford, and her father orchestrates her life with that goal in mind. Enter thirty-something David who charms Jenny’s parents into letting him take her to a concert. Before long, he’s also taking her out to nightclubs with his upscale friends. Eventually, of course, there will be a crisis, and we learn that David isn’t exactly what he seems-or maybe the point is that he is exactly what he seems, and Jenny just can’t see it. Either way, Scherfig treats the affair as a real relationship, not as a schoolgirl fantasy. Jenny wants to be in love, and she wants it to be easy; but as inexperienced as she is, she knows deep down that love can never be easy. The fact that Jenny’s flowering, her coming of age journey, serves as a metaphor for the times, adds another layer of richness to a peak cinematic experience. 2009 Chicago Film Critics Association Awards, and 2009 British Independent Film Awards: Best Actress. (UK, 2009) Dir: Lone Scherfig. English language. 100 min.
Review

AFGHAN STAR – November 18-21
In the first minutes of this remarkable documentary, a blind Afghan boy sings a poetic love song, then smiles and tells the camera, “When I listen to music, I feel really happy.” That camera belongs to filmmaker Havana Marking, who was in Afghanistan to profile the country’s most popular TV show, an American Idol – like program called Afghan Star. The Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, banned music, and they and their supporters still influence the country, notably its southern region of Kandahar. So Afghanistan’s past and present collide on the TV program Afghan Star, especially with the presence of a female contestant from Kandahar and another female contestant who, in the throes of her song,has her head scarf come off and, worse still, moves her hips in dance as if she’s Madonna in Vegas. Both women risk their lives by appearing on Afghan Star. The actions of the contestants often inspire smiles and cheering. Other times, the result is deep, deep enmity. Marking makes their stories every bit as interesting as the complex politics of Afghanistan, and as a result builds the suspense to the show’s climactic finale. 2009 Sundance Film Festival, World Cinema—Documentary: Audience Award, Directing Award. (Afghanistan/UK, 2009) Dir: Havana Marking. Pashto and Dari languages. 87 min.
Review

BON COP, BAD COP – December 9-12
In this comedy, when the body of a hockey executive is found on the billboard of the border of Quebec and Ontario, the jurisdiction of the crime is shared between the two police forces and detectives David Bouchard from Montreal and Martin Ward from Toronto are assigned to work together. With totally different styles, attitudes and languages, the reckless David and the ethical Martin join forces to disclose the identity of the Tattoo Killer, a deranged serial-killer who is killing managers of hockey franchises. Despite their differences, the two cops quickly learn that they have to work together to achieve their end goal of finding the killer. Ward and Bouchard’s job becomes one not only of catching the killer but also anticipating who the next targeted victim will be. Built in the Lethal Weapon genre and with a decidedly Canadian angle, this film is hilarious, perfectly acted, and suspenseful. 2007 Genie Awards: Best Motion Picture. (Canada, 2006) Dir: Erik Canuel. English and French languages. 116 min.
Review

AJAMI – January 27-30
Ajami, filmed in a rundown quarter of the Tel Aviv-adjacent city of Jaffa, dovetails into a series of stories told in chapters: Omar, a young Muslim Israeli Arab caught up in his family’s war with Bedouin mobsters; Malek, a sweet-faced teenager from occupied Palestine, works illegally in Israel to raise money for his mother’s urgent surgery; Binji, an affluent Palestinian dreams of escaping to live with his Jewish girlfriend in Tel Aviv; and Dando, a pugnacious Israeli cop, obsessed with an ongoing search for his missing soldier brother. Religion as lifestyle, lifestyle as religion, the illicit drug trade, the peculiar vagaries of Israeli citizenship, the divisions even between Arab-speaking Christians and Muslims and between observant and cultural Muslims are just a few of the themes that permeate the many stories here. The movie’s sensibilities are humanistic, but a political dimension, however implicit, is inescapable in this fragile web of enmities and allegiances. 2009 Awards of the Israeli Film Academy: Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Music. (Israel, 2009) Dir: Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani. Arabic and Hebrew languages. 120 min.
Review

BRIGHT STAR – February 10-13
Bright Star depicts the affecting and deeply felt love affair between the Romantic poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, the headstrong and independently minded girl next door. Their mutual attraction, despite obvious differences, deepened over the short time they had together. When Fanny first meets Keats in 1818, she’s unimpressed but flirts with him anyway. Fanny emerges as a highly modern young woman with a mischievous sense of fun, a sense that develops into full-fledged passion as her relationship with the poet deepens and progresses to its ultimately tragic conclusion. Campion’s innate sense of story-telling technique meshes the strands together, all adding up to a study in passion and tragedy that vigorously holds fast to period sensibilities and so keeps an audience firmly in its embrace. With her restless camera movements and off-center close-ups, she films history in the present tense, and her wild vitality makes this movie romantic in every possible sense of the word. 2009 British Independent Film Awards: Best Cinematography. (Australia/UK, 2009) Dir: Jane Campion. English language. 119 min.
Review

EVERLASTING MOMENTS – February 24-27
Troell views Swedish history through a struggling mother whose life is changed by the introduction of a camera. Set in the early decades of 20th-century Sweden, the story focuses on a housewife, Maria Larson, who, married to a ruinous, abusive drunk who has provided her seven children to care for, discovers that she is a talented photographer, a gift revealed only when she wins a camera in the local lottery. Her husband, Sigfrid, works on the docks, but is a heavy drinker who regularly breaks his temperance society pledge and is unfaithful. When Maria attempts to sell the camera she won, the curious shopkeeper and photographer, Sebastian, instead teaches her how to use it. Everlasting Moments shows Maria’s steady growth into a woman of substance as she learns a skill, fine-tunes her gaze, and unpretentiously records life in the neighborhood around her. This is artful filmmaking of the old school. Troell uses a leisurely, direct narrative style to re-create an era in which a woman, developing her first photo print, can declare, without irony, that the resulting image is “a miracle.” 2008 Valladolid International Film Festival: Best Actress; Best Director of Photography. (Sweden, 2008) Dir: Jan Troell. Swedish and Finnish languages. 131 min.
Review

WILD GRASS –March 10-13
Based on French writer Christian Gailly’s 1996 novel L’incident-which recounts how a stolen wallet results in an unlikely and unrequited love affair-the story starts with the event itself and then quickly takes its characters through hilarious scenarios and digressions while always maintaining a dark undertone. The two opening scenes, which trail protagonists Marguerite and Georges, show Georges scooping up Marguerite’s wallet in a suburban parking garage. Resnais portrays the characters doing one thing while imagining the amusing opposite – a technique he repeats throughout the movie. Intrigued by the two pictures of Marguerite he discovers in the wallet, he begins making a series of increasingly aggressive-and unwanted-phone calls to his would-be lover. When Georges’ come-ons begin to feel dangerous, Marguerite contacts a pair of cops, who show up at Georges’ for a hysterically offbeat interrogation scene. But nothing, not even Suzanne’s half-concerned questions, can stop this bizarre yet passionate romance from happening, and Resnais carries things toward an inevitable conclusion that’s pulled off with supreme skill. (France, 2009) Alain Resnais. French language. 104 min.
Review

LA GRANDE SÉDUCTION – March 24-27
This charming film is set in the tiny Quebecois island town of St. Marie-La-Mauderne. It’s the tale of a depressed local community which is desperate for the jobs a proposed new factory could bring. There is one catch, however. The factory can only go ahead if there is a resident doctor on the island. Having managed to entice a city-slick hotshot to do a temporary month’s stint on the isolated and, frankly, rundown island, the townsfolk, led by the desperate and resourceful mayor throw everything into an effort to make him fall in love with the place. To help figure out their strategy, they tap his phones and manipulate his life. In the process, the previously dispirited locals become the kind of go-getting, enthusiastic and friendly community they’re pretending to be. La Grande Séduction is an entertaining film with moments of broad comedy, strong performances, beautiful scenery and a sweetness of touch that makes it well worth a watch. 2004 Alpe d’Huez International Comedy Film Festival: Grand Prix; 2004 Sundance Film Festival, World Cinema—Dramatic: Audience Award. (Canada, 2003) Dir: Jean-François Pouliot. French language. 108 min.
Review

VINCERE April 7-10
There is a secret in the life of Mussolini: a wife and a son, Benito Albino, who was born, acknowledged and then denied. The secret bears a name: Ida Dalser. When Ida meets Mussolini, he is an ardent Socialist who intends to guide the masses towards a socially emancipated future. In order to finance a newspaper he has founded and the nucleus of the forthcoming Fascist Party, Ida sells everything she has. When WWI erupts, Benito Mussolini enrolls in the Army and disappears. When Ida finds him again in a military hospital, he is tended to by Rachele whom he has just married. Ida lashes out at her rival furiously, demanding her rights as Mussolini's true wife and the mother of his first-born son. (Italy, 2009) Marco Bellocchio
Review

THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES April 28-May 1
Benjamin is a retired court worker who decides to write a book about the case of a woman who was raped and murdered three decades previously, in the mid-1970s. The story opens 25 years later, when Benjamin is a white-haired retiree who has decided to write a novel about the horrific case he can’t get out of his mind. Benjamin visits his former boss Irene, now a chief judge. “Eyes talk,” one character says, and indeed, eyes function beautifully in the film as both vehicles of passion and instruments of observation. Benjamin tracks down the killer but this is just the beginning of a judicial nightmare, because the jailed assassin is soon recruited by Argentina’s secret police to carry out their dirty work. The film’s political commentary on the years of the dictatorship remains subtle. A deeply rewarding throwback to the unself-conscious days when cinema still strove to be magical, The Secret in Their Eyes is mesmerizing. 2010 USA Academy Awards: Best Foreign Language Film; 2009 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences of Argentina: Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Screenplay. (Spain/Argentina, 2009) Dir: Juan Jose Campanella. Spanish language. 127 min.
Review