21st Annual
University of Richmond International film Series
Fall, 2009

This series is free and open to the public.  All films are shown in Jepson Hall 118 unless otherwise noted.  Friday showings are at 3:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. and Sunday showings are at 7:30 p.m. The films are shown in the original language with English subtitles.  For more information, please contact Paul Portefield.

Tokyo Sonata

September 11 & 13

Japan, 2008

Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

119 minutes (Rated PG-13)

Language: Japanese

Tokyo Sonata, directed by acclaimed Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa, could hardly be more relevant as it ticks through the familiar ills brought about by a country outsourcing and downsizing itself into crisis.  Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa) is unexpectedly dismissed from his management job, and unable to admit his demise to his wife (Kyoko Koizumi) and sons, takes to haunting soup-kitchen lines and employment centers.  His sense of pride and shame gradually poisons his contemporary family, with the older son taking off for U.S. military service and the younger defying him by taking piano lessons only worsening the situation.  Kurosawa’s trademark chills are evident as he ratchets up the unsettling atmosphere and the grim hopelessness of a family slowly unraveling.  Outstanding performances, serene, elegant direction; Tokyo Sonata was an official entry at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.

The Pope’s Toilet

September 18 & 20

Uruguay, 2007

Directed by César Chalone and Enrique Fernández

85 minutes (No MPAA rating)

Language:  Spanish

Set in 1988, The Pope’s Toilet is a moving tale of adversity and enterprise examining the frenzied activities that ensue as news hits a small Uruguayan town that the Pope is paying a visit. Expecting many thousands of tourists to pour in from nearby Brazil, Beto (César Troncoso) and his neighbors see an opportunity to make a profit out of the visit.  While most villagers plan food or souvenirs stalls, Beto and his family build a toilet that can be used by the hordes they’re expecting, but will all go according to plan?  Co-written and directed by César Chalone and Enrique Fernández, and shot in an attractive documentary style, The Pope’s Toilet is a celebration of hope, humor and resilience as it dares to tackle the disconnect between the Church and the poor.  The Pope’s Toilet is being presented in honor/ collaboration with the University of Richmond’s first Latin American/ Hispanic Heritage Month.

African Film Program (September 25 & 26)

Each film in this special program will be preceded by comments and followed by a discussion led by Dr. Kenneth Harrow, Professor of English at Michigan State University, who specializes in African Literature and Cinema, Caribbean Literature, Third World Cinema, and Postcolonial and Feminist Theory.  There will be a luncheon buffet following the screening of Carmen Jones.

Prosper Merimée's novella, Carmen, adapted in Bizet's celebrated opera, has already received 52 film interpretations.  This series celebrates these three original adaptations of the classic work.

Karmen Gei   

September 25 & October 3, 3 and 7:30 p.m.                       

Senegal, 2002

Directed by Joseph Gaye Ramaka

82 minutes (No MPAA rating)

Language: French and Wolof

Karmen Gei, an extraordinary work that revolutionized notions of Third Cinema in Africa, and generated enormous controversy in Senegal. It is an adaptation of Bizet’s Carmen, with a daring approach to the orthodoxies concerning power, gender, and sexual orientation in Senegal today. The adaptation is bold; the music is Senegalese, the performances stunning. Joseph Gaï Ramaka writes: "Carmen is a myth but what does Carmen represent today? Where do Carmen's love and freedom stand at the onset of the 21st Century? Therein lies my film's intent, a black Carmen, plunged in the magical and chaotic urbanity of an African city." Like every Carmen, Karmen Gei is about the infinite desire for freedom and the laws, conventions and human limitations that constrain the desire. Here Karmen transgresses every convention, escaping prison through her lesbian relationship with the warden and then wrecking the marriage and career of a police corporal by making him her lover and co-conspirator in a smuggling ring.

Carmen Jones

September 26, 9:30 a.m.                           

USA, 1954

Directed by Otto Preminger

105 minutes (No MPAA rating)

Language:  English

Love, passion, betrayal and tragedy. Carmen Jones is a classic 1954 all-Black adaptation of Bizet's legendary opera, Carmen. It tells the story of a young, free spirited woman called Carmen Jones whose great beauty is the object of many men's desires. However, Carmen sets her sights on young army officer Joe, who is engaged to his sweetheart, Cindy Lou, and is about to go into his pilot training for the War. Joe quickly succumbs to Carmen's charms, forsaking his Cindy Lou, thus beginning the tragic love story. Although Oscar Hammerstein II translated the libretto for Georges Bizet's opera Carmen from French into English for his Broadway production, the music was largely left intact, but Hammerstein transferred the action to WWII America. The cast includes Dorothy Dandridge (nominated for an academy award for her role), Pearl Bailey and Harry Belafonte.

U-Carmen eKhayelitsha

September 26, 1:00 p.m.                   

South Africa, 2005

Directed by mark Dornford-May

120 minutes  (No MPAA rating)

Language: Xhosa (South African)                    

Based on a 2001 production by the South African performing arts company Dimpho Di Kopane and winner of the top award at the 2005 Berlin Film Festival, U-Carmen pushes against every expectation you would normally bring to a movie version of Bizet’s opera. It relocates the tale’s doomed romantic triangle to Khayelitsha, an industrial community near Cape Town; sets the action in and around a cigarette factory; and translates its libretto into Xhosa, a click language. The South African singer Pauline Malefane plays Carmen, who’s been changed from a Gypsy into a cigarette roller and a member of her workplace choir. Carmen’s chief suitor, Don José, is now Jongikhaya (Andile Tshoni), a Bible-reading cop who lets the beguiling but rough-edged Carmen lures him into a smuggling operation. Escamillo, the toreador with whom Carmen becomes infatuated, has been changed to Nomakhaya (Lungelwa Blou), an expatriate tenor who’s the son of a slain anti-apartheid activist. With powerful music, one reviewer writes “the blood flows, and the overall conception is so original that it dazzles.”

Wonderful Town

October 9 & 11

Thailand, 2007

Directed by Aditya Assarat

92 minutes (No MPAA rating)

Language: Thai

Wonderful Town, the directorial debut from Aditya Assarat, is a naturalistic story of a subdued romance set in a Thai ghost town still recovering from the region’s 2004 tsunami.  Na (Supphasit Kansen) runs a small hotel, which is struggling to survive, and Ton (Anchalee Saisoontorn) an architect from Bangkok, is sent to help regenerate the city and sow the seeds of a new tourist industry.  Assarat’s film, much like Ton and Na’s courtship, unfolds at a gentle, underplayed pace, but turns unstable when Na’s brother and townspeople disapprove of their relationship.  Beautifully made, superbly acted, and emotionally powerful, the film demonstrates the psychological effects after Mother Nature’s devastation are still very much alive.

Laila’s Birthday

Tunisia/ Palestine, 2008

Directed by Rashid Masharawi

72 minutes (No MPAA rating)

Language:  Arabic

Palestinian director Rashid Masharawi’s spans the day in the life of an overqualified cab driver in Rammallah who attempts to remain steadfast amid madness and chaos in his besieged city.  Abu Laila (Mohamed Bakri) is a former judge who drives a taxi in order to support his wife and beloved nine-year-old daughter Laila, who gives the film its name.  All Abu wants, on this particular day, is to inquire about getting his old job back, and return home with a birthday cake for his little girl.  A series of unfortunate events get in the way of our protagonist’s journey, but his optimism and sense of The Law underlies this dark urban comedy.  Masharawi shoots a side of Ramallah that is unknown to most outsiders with gorgeous, seductive stone architecture and greenery - images that are a far cry from the scenes of destruction we are accustomed to.  

Ten Canoes

October 23 & 25

Australia, 2006

Directed by Rolf de Heer

92 minutes (No MPAA rating)

Language:  Ganalbingu, Aboriginal dialect

Rolf de Heer directs the first feature made in the Aboriginal language of Ganalbingu with an exclusively Aboriginal cast.  Ten Canoes is a richly layered folk-myth drama that illuminates the fascinating and eminently fair traditions that have allowed Aboriginal people to operate for centuries in a manner essentially unchanged.  Set a thousand years ago in the tribal times of north Australia, young tribesman Dayindi desires one of the wives of his much older brother Minygululu.  To stop his advances, Minygululu tells a story from the mythical past:  a story of wrong love, kidnapping, sorcery, bungling mayhem and revenge gone wrong.  de Heer’s masterpieces include a powerful study of the sexual longing of a woman with cerebral palsy (Dance Me To My Song), a police western dealing with Australia’s racial tensions (The Tracker), and he continues to deliver with Ten Canoes, a film that is richly entertaining, extremely complex, and fun to watch.

The Trap (Klopka)

October 30 & November 1

Serbia, 2007

Directed by Srdan Golubovića

106 minutes (No MPAA rating)

Language:  Serbo-Croatian

The Trap (Klopka), directed by Srdan Golubovic, is an intelligent modern film noir reflecting the true face of a society transitioning from post-Milosevic’s Serbia where there is no more war, only a moral and existential desert.   Mladen (Nebojsa Glogovac) is stuck in a low-paying job that barely supports him, his wife Marija (Natasa Ninkovic) and their son, who suddenly requires an expensive, life-saving operation.  With few options, Mladen is presented with a frightening solution:  he must kill a stranger to save the life of his sick child.  A drama about real people caught up in the twisted maze of their own lives; this is the kind of film we don’t see enough on American screens. 

Amarcord

Italy, 1974

Directed by Federico Fellini

123 minutes (Rated R)

Language: Italian

Amarcord is a trip down memory lane that could only be navigated by the likes of Federico Fellini.  His last motion picture seen as a masterpiece is not so much a story a wistful montage of vignettes in which the idiosyncratic filmmaker revisits the coastal Italian town of his birth, Rimini.  The movie’s title says it all: in the Italian dialect of Romagna, the region that includes Rimini, Amarcord means “We remember.”  Recipient of the 1974 Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film, Amarcord takes place in the Mussolini-led Italy in the mid-1930s.  Employing an episodic structure built around the seasons’ cycle, Fellini creates an impressionistic work that is almost painterly in its beauty and ability to evoke bittersweet emotion.  The film is especially noteworthy for the Giuseppe Rotunno’s gorgeous cinematography and Nino Rota’s haunting musical score.  Janus Films restored print of Amarcord played to sellout crowds at the New Film Forum in December 2008.

Vanaja

India, 2007

Directed by Rajnesh Domalpalli

111 minutes (No MPAA rating)

Language:  Telugu

With the haunting adolescent drama Vanaja, Indian writer-director Rajnesh Domalpalli rewrites the tale of a young girl’s journey into womanhood, by filtering it through an indigenous Indian cultural lens and the caste system.  Vanaja is set in rural South India and focuses on the 14-year old Vanaja who is the daughter of a low-caste fisherman.  With the encouragement of a local sooth-sayer, Vanaja goes to work in the house of the local landlady, who teaches the young girl the art of Kuchipudi dance.  The story takes a darker turn when the landlady’s son arrives home from America and Vanaja is faced with what so many women from the lower caste face.  Shot over a period of years to fulfill his Master’s Thesis requirements at Columbia University, Domalpalli creates an extraordinary film presented from the insider’s perspective, complete with shocking cultural mores that will have a stranglehold on the viewer.