Forest Row Film Society

After a long separation, Amelia (Giuletta Masina) and Pippo (Marcello Mastroianni) are brought together again to appear in an extremely low-brow TV variety show After some crazy goings on, we see them on the stage among a crowd of vulgar would-be celebrities getting ever more lonely and fragile as they are caught in a flood of crass freaks, unable to fight off being relegated to novelty status. One feels their pain and frustration of being trapped in an alien world. Beside a broad critique of television the real theme of the movie is the displacement of the artist once their chosen form is rendered obsolete.

Further Reading

1. New York Times
2. DVD Talk

Most of the characters in this 1971 adaptation of Chekhov's play are consumed with lethargy, boredom, and regret over their unsatisfactory lives. They include Vanya himself, an embittered estate manager, Serebryakov, a once-worshipped scholar that Vanya has discovered to be a charlatan, Astrov, the brooding and introspective doctor who is disappointed in love and life, and also the mysterious and beautiful Yelena, Serebryakov's young second wife. Konchalovsky allows the film to proceed at Chekhov's own pace: the camera, which has the presence of a household intimate, captures the pathos, pain and tragi-comedy of this volatile household.

Further Reading

1. New York Times

Caramel is the most internationally acclaimed Lebanese film to date. A simple but effective story of five Lebanese women tackling binding traditions, forbidden love, repressed sexuality, duty versus desire, and the struggle to accept the natural process of age. Labaki's film is unique for not showcasing a war-ravaged Beirut but rather a warm and inviting exotic locale where people deal with universal issues.

The title Caramel refers to an epilation method used in the Middle East that consists of heating sugar, water and lemon juice. In the film Labaki also symbolically implies the "idea of sweet and salt, sweet and sour" as everyday relations can sometimes be, but ultimately the sisterhood shared between the central female characters prevails.

Further Reading

1. Official film site
2. Film Journal International
3. Screen International
4. Sunday Tribune (Dublin)

Set in a fictional African Judea, Son of Man is a retelling of the story of Christ by the South African theatre group, Dimpho Di Kopane, who also produced U-Carmen eKhayelitsha. Filmed in a South African township, it is a musical allegory against the background of a brutal civil war.

Amid the conflict a child is born to a poor couple. As he grows up, he sets out to save the people from oppression through an ethic of non-violent protest. Amazing to look at and with a powerful soundtrack, Son of Man is a remarkable story of revolution and justice.

"A vivid, thrilling, visually awe-inspiring piece of cinema" Daily Telegraph

The film will be introduced by Flora Smith, who, together with director Mark Dornford-May, produced the original theatre version.

Further Reading

1. Screen International
2. The Guardian
3. Official film site

On the last day of World War Two in a small town somewhere in Poland, Polish exiles of war and the occupying Soviet forces confront the beginning of a new day and a new Poland. In this incendiary environment we find Home Army soldier Maciek Chelmicki, a youth psychologically deformed by war (played by the ‘European James Dean’, Zbigniew Cybulski), has been ordered to assassinate an incoming commissar. But a mistake stalls his progress and leads him to Krystyna, a beautiful barmaid who gives him a glimpse of what his life could be. Gorgeously photographed and brilliantly performed, Ashes and Diamonds masterfully interweaves the fate of a nation with that of one man, resulting in one of the most important Polish films of all time. Wajda’s film displays a deep understanding and human sympathy with both sides, or rather for the people on both sides who are inspired by honest motives.

Further Reading

1. Derek Malcolm, The Guardian
2. New York Times
3. Stuart Liebman, "The Art of Memory: Andrzej Wajda's Three War Films", Cineaste 2006

Widely regarded as Tarkovsky's finest film, Andrei Rublev charts the life of this icon painter in eight imaginary episodes through a violent period of fifteenth century Russia. Reduced to silence by the horrors he witnesses under the Tartar invasion, the Christ-like visionary monk finally regains the will to speak and paint, and the film ends in a stunning montage of Rublev's surviving icons.

Further Reading

1. Derek Malcolm, The Guardian
2. Senses of Cinema
3. Nostalghia.com [site about Tarkovsky]

In The Muppets Take Manhattan the muppets have created a successful show which they try and sell to a Broadway producer. After a string of failures, however, they split up and resort to various odd jobs until Kermit finally strikes lucky and gets their show 'Manhattan Melodies' on stage.

The film stars all of the favourite muppet crew who are accompanied by a large cast of celebrity cameos including Joan Rivers, Liza Minnelli and the then-mayor of New York, Ed Koch. This is a fun caper that builds on the structure of the television series and will appeal to muppet fans and others of all ages.

During a long summer two boys form an unlikely friendship. Will, brought up in a strict religious household, is forbidden TV and music. Lee, a school troublemaker, enthuses his friend with a pirate copy of Rambo. Lee is making a home movie, and persuades Will to act in it: they plot stunt after stunt, all the while avoiding teachers and family to finish the masterpiece in time to enter it for a national amateur film competition.

With Eric Sykes in a cameo role, this is a nostalgic and heartwarming comedy, directed by Garth Jennings (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) about two boys with great ambitions.

Further Reading

1. Official film site
2. New York Times
3. Chicago Sun-Times

This is Bresson's very personal vision of the Arthurian legend, stripped of all romance. Camelot is a bleak expanse of gloomy muddy forest where the knights of the Round Table clank around in their unwieldy armour. The characters, far from chivalrous, are proud, cruel and lonely. The defining joust sequence is a turmoil of pounding hooves, thrusting lances, mud and blood. And yet the film is strangely beautiful and utterly mesmerising.

Further Reading

1. Bright Lights Film Journal
2. notcoming.com
3. Senses of Cinema
4. London Review of Books

Our Seeds addresses the problems of globalised food based on hybrids that require pesticides and synthetic fertilisers. The film shows how individuals and small groups have solved these problems and is a celebration of the seed keepers that stand at the source of humanity's diverse food heritage.

The film is a documentary on traditional diets and how they are grown and eaten in eleven countries: Spain, France, Italy, India, Sri Lanka, China, Vietnam, Taiwan, Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands. The film explores the relationship between traditional biodiversity and traditional culture in the wide-ranging locations and shows that there are the same problems and solutions in each of them. It is a David and Goliath story where resilience and persuasive logic triumph over seemingly invincible corporate agribusiness.

This film shown in collaboration with Transition Forest Row, and is ahead of Seedy Saturday - a seed swap at the Community Market on Saturday 7th February.

Further Reading

1. Official film site

Breaking down on a lonesome road on the way to see an old professor, Brad Majors and Janet Weiss seek help from the source of a light. Entering the castle, the two experience a night they’ll never forget…

Starring Tim Curry as the Transylanian transvestite, and Susan Sarandon as Janet, this cult classic is completely unlike any other 'musical' you will have ever seen.

Further Reading

1. Eye for Film
2. Wikipedia

This film will be screened in Kidbrooke mansion, Michael Hall School, Priory Road, Forest Row, as part of the French weekend. The weekend has been supported by a Lefevre Trust grant administered by the British Council. All seats £4. 9.15pm start.

A delightful pastiche murder mystery, 8 Women combines comedy, music and some of the greatest names in French cinema. Eight women are trapped in a big house after a man has been murdered. With each suspecting the others, accusations and confessions pour out. Added to this, there are song and dance routines and lashings of style, all filmed like a luscious 50s Technicolor melodrama. But all is not as it seems, and unexpected intentions and motives gradually emerge.

Starring Catherine Deneuve, Fanny Ardant, Emmanuelle Beart, Danielle Darrieux and Isabelle Huppert, 8 Women is beguiling French fun at its best.

"Light-hearted and droll -- even if you think you don't like 'French' films, you'll adore this one." -- Empire

Further Reading

1. Trailer
2. Chicago-Sun-Times
3. Sight and Sound

Filmed in the immediate aftermath of the Israeli bombing of Lebanon in 2006, Under the Bombs is a road movie in a war zone.

Zeina, a shi'ite, returns to Beirut to find her son who has been living with her sister. She persuades Toni, a christian taxi driver, to take her to the south to search for her family. Their relationship, initially frosty, gradually develops into a strong rapport as their quest progresses.

With moments of humour, and the beautiful landscapes contrasting with the troubles of living in Lebanon, Under the Bombs was filmed using documentary techniques and won a prize at last year's Venice Film Festival.

Further Reading

1. Official film site
2. Screen International
3. The Guardian

Fourteen year old Grace MacLean (Scarlett Johansson) has had a tragic accident while riding her horse, Pilgrim. Her mother Annie (Kristin Scott Thomas), tries to help her by finding a horse whisperer; someone who can cure horses. She finds Tom Booker (Robert Redford), and he sets about fixing the after effects of the incident. Based on the best-selling novel by Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer is a charming and easy-going drama that will be just right for a quiet February afternoon.

Further Reading

1. Eye for Film
2. Chicago Sun-Times

Following Bob Dylan's life, six actors are employed to show the various aspects of Dylan's personality and career. With Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, Ben Whishaw and much-acclaimed Cate Blanchett each capturing parts of Dylan's persona, I'm Not There is such a restless and brilliant portrait of this elusive performer that "there’s no doubting Haynes has succeeded in capturing a real sense of the strange figure who can claim to have changed America." (Empire)

"[Cate Blanchett's] Dylan is intelligent, confident, artificial in the best sense: a strong contender for the big awards, and a good reason to see the film." -- The Guardian

Further Reading

1. Official film site
2. The Guardian
3. Chicago Sun-Times
4. Film Comment

As Michelangelo da Caravaggio lies dying at Porto Ecole in 1610, his mind drifts back to a life of extraordinary passion, his relationship with his model Ranuccio Thomasoni and with Ranuccio's mistress, Lena. In the film, Jarman proposes a murderous intensity as the mainspring for both Caravaggio's love life and for his painting.

Derek Jarman struggled for seven years to bring his portrait of the seventeenth century artist Caravaggio to the screen. The result was worth the wait, and was greeted with critical acclaim. The film centres on an imagined love triangle and conjures up some of the artist's most famous paintings through elaborate and beautiful photography.

Followed by the AGM.

Further Reading

1. Time Out
2. BFI ScreenOnline
3. Senses of Cinema on Jarman

Multinational coffee companies now rule our shopping malls and supermarkets and dominate the industry worth over $80 billion, making coffee the most valuable trading commodity in the world after oil. But while we continue to pay for our lattes and cappuccinos, the price paid to coffee farmers remains so low that many have been forced to abandon their coffee fields.

Nowhere is this paradox more evident than in Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee. Tadesse Meskela is one man on a mission to save his 74,000 struggling coffee farmers from bankruptcy. As his farmers strive to harvest some of the highest quality coffee beans on the international market, Tadesse travels the world in an attempt to find buyers willing to pay a fair price.

Against the backdrop of Tadesse's journey to London and Seattle, the enormous power of the multinational players that dominate the world's coffee trade becomes apparent. New York commodity traders, the international coffee exchanges, and the double dealings of trade ministers at the World Trade Organisation reveal the many challenges Tadesse faces in his quest for a long term solution for his farmers.

This film shown in collaboration with Transition Forest Row, and is screened as part of Fair Trade Fortnight.

Further Reading

1. Official film site
2. The Guardian
3. Washington Post

Sean Penn's inspiring film about a college drop-out on a quest in the great American outback is thought of as the best one he has ever made. The film is based on Jon Krakauer's book about Emory University student Christopher McCandless discovering the expanses and freedoms of Alaska.

"With the whole of America as his backdrop, Penn pulls off his most ambitious movie yet. The result is a beautiful and thought-provoking road movie" -- Empire

Further Reading

1. Official film site
2. Chicago Sun-Times
3. Empire

At 21 Samira Makhmalbaf was the youngest director to win the Jury Prize at Cannes for Blackboards. Her supremely thought-provoking, intelligent and sophisticated films have secured her prominence in the wave of the new Iranian cinema.

A group of teachers in Kurdistan brave the Iran–Iraq border with blackboards strapped to their backs. Their mobile teaching methods take them deep into the mountainous terrain, searching for would-be pupils whom they seek to educate. Reeboir infiltrates a group of child smugglers while Saïd joins a group of nomads, struggling to find their way home across the border to Iraq. Their mission provides a pessimistic insight into the lives of the dispossessed.

The image of a straggling group, clumsily shouldering blackboards through the sienna-coloured mountains, is at first startling, then surreal. The teachers soon learn that the harshest lesson of the day is one of survival.

Further Reading

1. Official site [includes extensive reviews]
2. Interview with the director

An animated coming of age story, comic, elegant and simple, based on Satrapi's graphic novel. A little girl, growing up in pre-revolutionary Iran in the 1970s, is the indulged and adored daughter of well-to-do secular leftists who campaign against the shah.

Marjane as a little girl is a funny, smart, cheerful and vulnerable character with a love of western trash culture. She is close to her mother, closer still to her witty, wise and worldly grandmother. As she grows into her teens, Marjane is sent abroad for a chaotic education in Europe. Her experiences help to reshape her expectations of life, and Marjane finds a gravitational pull to return to a homeland that rejects free-thinking women and sexual liberalism.

Persepolis won the Jury Prize at the 2007 Cannes festival.

Further Reading

1. Chicago Sun-Times
2. The Guardian
3. Official film site [includes trailer]

A widowed, heavy-drinking gypsy (Gabriel Byrne) takes his two young sons to live in an inner city high-rise flat. The boys run wild and avoid school while their father lies on his bed in a drunken stupor. Grandfather turns up and gives a beautiful white horse to the younger boy, and so starts the boys' search for the Land of Eternal Youth where they believe their mother has gone.

From the director of Four Weddings and a Funeral and of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and with a screenplay by Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot and The Field), this simple, charming and unpretentious film only demands a belief in innocence, and clearly defines the boundaries between the worlds of adults and of children.

Further Reading

1. Chicago Sun-Times

If Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was a warning, The 11th Hour is the red alert. Cataloguing the environmental damage wrought on the earth, Leonardo DiCaprio introduces and narrates this hard-hitting documentary that includes contributions from a wide range of luminaries, including Stephen Hawking and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Though the message of destruction is challenging, The 11th Hour also suggests options and strategies for re-tooling the world, and mitigating the problems ahead. This is a timely screening, with science now again taken seriously in the American agenda.

This film shown in collaboration with Transition Forest Row.

Further Reading

1. Official film site

Jacob Peterson is a man who has dedicated his life to helping the street children of India but sadly the orphanage he runs is faced with bankruptcy. He visits Jorgan, a Danish businessman and receives an unusual proposal, the award of four million dollars, but given with two conditions. First, Jacob must return and live in Denmark and, secondly, he must attend the wedding of Jorgan's daughter, Anna. The wedding, and all that is revealed after the ceremony, is a critical point between past and present, forcing Jacob into making one of the most difficult decisions of his life. A most amazing film that will leave you stunned, especially in the way it works out the fates of its troubled yet believable characters.

Further Reading

1. Official site [includes trailer]
2. New York Times
3. The Guardian

The Real Dirt on Farmer John challenges our pre-conceived ideas about farming and ideals. The story of Farmer John and how he revolutionized his family farm has won accolades and awards at film festivals around the world.

Director Taggart Siegel made the film over 25 years of an evolving friendship with Farmer John, allowing him to capture his alternately humorous, heartbreaking and spirited life with raw drama and intimacy. With the death of his father during the late 1960s, a teenaged John took over the traditional family farm, slowly turning it into an experiment of art and agriculture, making it a haven for hippies, radicals and artists. The Real Dirt on Farmer John charts the end of this idealistic era as the farm debt crisis of the 80s brought about the tragic collapse of the farm.

Local rumours gradually turn John into a scapegoat, condemning him as a Satan-worshipping drug-dealer. Threatened with murder, his home burned to the ground, John forsakes his farm and wanders through Mexico before finally returning to his home. He gradually transforms his land into a revolutionary farming community, a cultural mecca, where people work and flourish providing fresh vegetables and herbs to thousands of people every week. The Peterson family farm has become one of the largest Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms in the United States, and a beacon of today’s booming organic farming movement.

"Unbelievably special…a real and gripping story with insight and humor." -- Al Gore

"3.5 out of 4 stars. A loving, moving, inspiring, quirky documentary." -- Roger Ebert Chicago Sun-Times

This film shown in collaboration with Transition Forest Row.

Further Reading

1. Official site
2. Chicago Sun-Times

A huge hit at Cannes Film Festival, The Singer is a rewarding and touching romantic drama featuring one of the great performances of Gerard Depardieu's career. He plays the singer Alain Moreau, who appears at weddings and other local events. Singing cheerful and sentimental covers versions, he still take it seriously. One evening Marion, an estate agent (Cecile de France) turns up at an event. However, she is not charmed by him at all, and the film charts the gradual unfolding of their relationship.

"there's nothing remotely corny about The Singer: rather, Giannoli's film is an exceptionally astute anatomy of corniness, of the way it keeps people afloat through mundane, disappointing lives." The Independent

"an admirably tough, ambivalent and honest look at the fraught relationship between real feelings and the culturally acceptable (or otherwise) public expression of similar emotions as manipulative entertainment. Excellent." Time Out

Further Reading

1. Sight and Sound
2. Jonathan Romney The Independent
3. The Guardian
4. Time Out