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SALIS Film Series 2011: "Discovering Relation(ship)s"

Wednesdays, 3-5 pm, room C124, Henry Grattan Building
All films are shown in the original language with English subtitles
This year's SALIS Film Series features nine films (Chinese, French and German) which revolve around the topic of relationships - those towards one's family, towards romantic partners and especially oneself. Each film reflects on the questions "Who am I?" and "Where do I come from?" from different perspectives. The notion of the return home, often to a home that has become a strange place, recurs in almost all films. The protagonists look back on their lives to investigate their social and personal place in the world, or they break away from family origins they see as restrictive.

Week 3, 12 October: If You Are The One II (非诚勿扰) (China, 2010)

"A sequel to one of China's biggest box office hits, the wry romantic comedy 'If You Are the One 2' continues the odd-couple courtship saga of wealthy, middle-aged retiree Qin Fen and serious-minded young air hostess Xiaoxiao. After an amusing prelude in which Qin presides over a lavish divorce ceremony for an amicably splitting married couple, he and Xiaoxiao decide to address their own relationship barriers — her youth and beauty, his cynical, childish sense of humor — by entering into a trial marriage while on a trip to the country's tropical southeast."
By Robert Abele, the Los Angeles Times

Week 4, 19 October: Anna's Summer (Annas Sommer) (Germany, 2001)
[In cooperation with Goethe-Institut Irland]

Anna Kastelano (Angela Molina) is packing up the home that had belonged to her family on a Greek island and is considering putting it up for sale. However, in these familiar surroundings, she is revisited by memories of her own past and that of her Sephardic-Jewish family. Anna has not yet got over the death of her husband Max (Herbert Knaup). She spends the summer on the island, which has become her second home, trying to come to terms with her solitude. For the first time, she opens the old family chest. Memories and ghosts rise up, with whom she cooks, dances and picks figs. She finds old telegrams relating to the fate of her grandmother Anna. She also discovers the diary of another Anna, her father's first love. But the present also makes itself felt. Anna meets Nikola and the feelings she experiences intermingle with her mourning and the moving discoveries about her family. Anna is searching for a path through the labyrinth of her history and ultimately decides to assume her place in it. Life goes on.
Source: http://www.german-films.de/film-archive/

Week 5, 26 October: The Road Home (我的父亲母亲) (China, 2000)

"Easily holding its own alongside other, more analytical films dealing with that period of Chinese history which preceded the Cultural Revolution, 'The Road Home' is a refreshing change in tone being always lyrical, romantic, and suggestive. Yet it is still a deeply eloquent film about an especially difficult period in China's recent past. Concerning itself with the relationship between the old and the new, and of city and country, 'The Road Home' specifically involves a young man living in the city who returns to his beautiful, peaceful but poor birthplace to attend the funeral of his father, the much revered local teacher. The inconsolable mother insists that he receive an old-style funeral, rarely seen since the Revolution, for which dozens of men will be required to accompany the coffin on the way to the place of burial. As the son organises the event, he recounts the burgeoning relationship of his young parents for whose romance the dusty, winding country road proved crucial. Hence its importance to the funeral. Zhang Yimou, who also directed 'Red Sorghum' and 'Ju Dou', makes it clear in every frame that he really feels for this story, and he often employs a lingering camera and silence to make his points about love, family, culture, and change. Unique, unshowy moments include the young wife waiting patiently by the road for the first sight of her husband and, at the end, mother and son sobbing quietly. It is the peace of the film, in fact, which contrasts creatively with the director's passion."
By Michael Thomson, BBC

Week 6, 2 November: It's a Jungle Out There (Nach fünf im Urwald) (Germany, 1995)
[In cooperation with Goethe-Institut Irland]

Why shouldn't one venture into the jungle after five o'clock? Because then the elephants practice parachuting. Why do crocodiles have flattened snouts? Because they went to the jungle after five o'clock. The main character is 17-year-old Anna who runs away to Munich after a row with her father, a Thelonius Monk fan and aspiring mayor. At a casting, she tries her luck as a singer and becomes involved in the world of the arty, arrogant PR-lot. Her worried parents also go off to Munich in search of their prodigal daughter. However, the trip to the big city is as much of a surprising adventure and a "jungle experience" for her "crinkly" elders as it is for teenager Anna. Her sister Clara, who has stayed at home, is the only one who keeps on top of things in her little treehouse and can't do more than shake her head in resignation at the escapades of her family.
Source: http://www.german-films.de/film-archive/

Week 8, 16 November: Farewell My Concubine (霸王别姬) (China, 1993)

"Chen Kaige's 'Farewell My Concubine', the Chinese epic that has proved so troublesome to the Communist authorities at home, is one of those very rare film spectacles that deliver just about everything the ads are likely to promise: action, history, exotic colour, multitudes in confrontation, broad overviews of social and political landscapes, all intimately rooted in a love story of vicious intensity, the kind that plays best when it goes badly, which is most of the time. […] "The time covered is 1925 through 1977. The setting is Beijing, earlier called Peking and, when not the national capital, Peiping. The film's title is taken from a favourite work in Chinese opera repertory, a tragic tale out of an ancient past that has become myth. It's about a concubine who's so loyal and true that rather than abandon her king as he faces military defeat, she chooses to dance for him one last time and then to cut her throat with his sword. The opera is important to the film for several reasons. It is the work that makes stars of the two actors who are its principal characters, Dieyi and Xiaolou. It comes to dominate the professional lives of both men, and even to shape the emotional and sexual development of Dieyi, who is loved by the public for the women's roles he plays in the all-male opera company. The opera is also a reminder that in life, as in the story of the concubine and the king, each of us must take responsibility for his own fate.
By Vincent Canby, The New York Times

Week 9, 23 November: Requiem (Germany, 2006)
[In cooperation with Goethe-Institut Irland]

A small town in the 1970s in Southern Germany. Michaela, 21, has grown up in a deeply religious family, with a kind but weak father and a cold-hearted, distant mother. Despite her years-long battle with epilepsy, Michaela burns to leave home and study at the university. There, her first taste of freedom, her budding love for Stefan and her friendship with Hanna crack open the shell of faith and family within which she had always felt secure and protected. The result is a breakdown. Not a normal epileptic attack, but a frightening onrush of grotesque faces and voices. Afraid of being sent back home to her family, Michaela seeks help from a priest who reinforces her conviction that she is possessed. Though Stefan and Hanna entreat her to seek psychiatric help, they are unable to break through the dense religious and moral ties binding Michaela to her family, and leave her to her fate.
Source: http://www.german-films.de/film-archive/

Week 10, 30 November: Shower (洗澡) (China, 1999)

"In an updated version of the parable of the prodigal son, the black sheep who returns to the bosom of his family after a long absence is less likely nowadays to be a sated sybarite than a rich, snobbish yuppie revisiting the humble background he fled in shame. Reconnecting with his roots, his shuttered heart opens, and he discovers that indeed there's no place like home. Zhang Yang's sweet but serious comedy, 'Shower', offers an uplifting, witty variation on this scenario. Set in contemporary Beijing, the movie tells the story of Da Ming (Pu Cun Xin), a sharply dressed young businessman who returns from the southern Chinese region of Shenzhen to visit his aged father, Master Liu (Zhu Xu). For decades Master Liu, whose health is fragile, has run a bathhouse in a dilapidated district of Beijing. His right-hand man is his mentally handicapped younger son, Er Ming (Jiang Wu), who takes a childlike delight in all the ritualized sloshing. As Da Ming's visit lengthens, he begins to absorb his father's wisdom by a kind of osmosis. He also begins to take responsibility for the younger brother, whose existence he had kept secret from his wife. The father-son strife is powerfully conveyed in calm, sorrowful performances that establish the movie's bittersweet mood."
By Stephen Holden, The New York Times

Week 11, 7 December: Lourdes (France, 2009)

"Sylvie Testud gives a tremendous performance as Christine, a young Frenchwoman who has multiple sclerosis and has come to Lourdes as part of a religious tour group organised by the Order of Malta. Her arms and legs are immobile and her hands are clenched fists. At Lourdes, she takes an alert and intelligent interest in the proceedings, though without seeming fervent or desperate, and relates easily to her fellow pilgrims, including a woman with a disabled child, and an older woman Madame Hartl (Gilette Barbier), who takes it upon herself to be Christine's companion and roommate. Elina Löwensohn plays the senior nurse and tour group leader, something of a martinet who disapproves of any impious or egotistical behaviour. There is also Kuno, played by Bruno Todeschini, a handsome male volunteer who in the most refined, discreet and gentlemanly way, admires Christine's quiet beauty and courage. Like everyone else, Christine absorbs the ruling ethos at Lourdes that spiritual healing is the important thing - a credo that allows everyone to leave without thinking that they have had a wasted or disappointing journey. Also, everyone is quite aware of the routine phenomenon of the "phantom" miracle. Some, in the heat of the moment, do indeed rise from their wheelchairs, only to sink back, hours or days later, when the euphoria has worn off. Everywhere, there is a patiently rational and metaphorical approach to the miraculous. And yet... As events unfold, it seems possible that some sort of strange quantum of health and sickness is in force. If physical strength should suddenly desert one of the party, it might migrate to someone else - but if divine grace should be visited on someone via these mysterious means, then this might cause ripples of dissatisfaction and resentment among the rest of the group, and the status quo ante could yet be reasserted. A cool, elegant and almost imperceptibly black-comic detachment is created with Hausner's group compositions, in which the viewer must always stay attentive for something vital happening in the middle distance."
Excerpt from: www.guardian.co.uk, article by Peter Bradshaw

Week 12, 14 December: The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite) (Germany, 2007)
[In cooperation with Goethe-Institut Irland]

Nejat seems disapproving about his widower father Ali's choice of prostitute Yeter for a live-in girlfriend. But he grows fond of her when he discovers she sends money home to Turkey for her daughter's university studies. Yeter's sudden death distances father and son. Nejat travels to Istanbul to search for Yeter's daughter Ayten. Political activist Ayten has fled the Turkish police and is already in Germany. She is befriended by a young woman, Lotte, who invites rebellious Ayten to stay in her home, a gesture not particularly pleasing to her conservative mother Susanne. When Ayten is arrested and her asylum plea is denied, she is deported and imprisoned in Turkey. Lotte travels to Turkey, where she gets caught up in the seemingly hopeless situation of freeing Ayten.