THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP

Celebrating Director Michael Powell’s Centenary

Friday, October 7 at 7:00
Sunday, October 9 at 4:00

“Very possibly the finest film ever made in Britain.” – David Kehr, Chicago Reader

Thought by many to be Powell’s masterpiece, THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP provides a sardonic course in British military history. Its dubious hero, Clive Candy (played by Roger Livesey) is based on a jingoist cartoon character, Colonel Blimp. In a brilliant color trip through one man's fantasy of history, Candy describes in flashback how the years have mellowed him from the hothead he likes to think he was at the time of the Boer Wars to the lukewarm, harmless bumbler he in fact is in 1942. Deborah Kerr plays the love interest of three separate periods in Clive's life, and Anton Walbrook is excellent as the Prussian officer who becomes a refugee from Nazi Germany.

(1943, 163 min.)



OR (MY TREASURE)

Friday, October 14 at 7:00
Sunday, October 16 at 4:00

Winner of the Camera d'Or at Cannes in 2004 for best first feature, Keren Yedaya's riveting psychological study focuses on an aging Tel Aviv prostitute and her eighteen-year-old daughter, Or, who fights to keep her mother off the streets, even to the point of locking her indoors. Immensely winning if perhaps overly confident, Or is convinced that she has all the right answers and that she can redirect this helpless woman into a new occupation. The girl is not without her own sexual desires, which complicates her role as puritanical overseer. Grounded in a rich specificity of detail about daily life in working-class Tel Aviv, this remarkably self-assured debut offers us glimpses of a substratum of Israeli society rarely seen onscreen.

(2004, 100 min, in Hebrew with English subtitles)



TURTLES CAN FLY

Friday, October 21 at 7:00
Sunday, October 23 at 4:00

'The first impressive thing about Bahman Ghobadi's movie is that it got made at all. Not many directors, perhaps, would choose to film in the Kurdish encampments of northern Iraq, where life has been a mix of the ramshackle, the uncertain, and the downright lethal. The story is set in the days before the arrival of American forces in 2003—a cause of much rumor and hope. Satellite (Soran Ebrahim) is a boy of thirteen, but he has grown old before his time, and everybody in the village, adults as well as children, relies on his initiative. This is a world of losses: adults who have lost authority, and children who have lost parents and limbs. We watch Satellite as, true to his name, he brings television (and therefore news of war) to a clamoring community. All this should be grim beyond bearing, yet the film treads carefully, and even lightly, through its tribulations. Never has childhood seemed more weirdly resilient, or less cute.”— Anthony Lane, THE NEW YORKER

( 2004, 95 mins, in Kurdish with English subtitles)



Fifth Avenue Bus Rides

Friday, October 28 at 7:00
Sunday, October 30 at 4:00

SPEED FOR THESPIANS

“ Speed for Thespians is a ride to remember as Kalman Apple puts his stellar cast through their paces on an in-service New York City bus in this glorious adaptation of Chekhov’s The Bear.” - Peter Moore, Mill Valley Film Festival.

(2000, 30 min.)


EASY LIVING

In Preston Sturges’s most famed pre-directorial screwball comedy, working girl Jean Arthur is bonked on the head with a mink coat while riding on an open-air Fifth Ave. double-decker bus, mistaken for the mistress of Wall St. lion Edward Arnold, given the Manhattan penthouse suite to end all luxurious Manhattan penthouse suites, and finds love in the Automat with Ray Milland.

(1937, 91 min.)