LFF Education: School Group Bookings
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LFF Education: School Group Bookings For the first year in 2015, the LFF offers School Group Bookings for selected screenings in the LFF public programme. This is a limited offer! Tickets are available for schools to book on a first come first served basis until Fri 25 September. · The films are weekday matinees at BFI Southbank and Vue West End, Wed 7 – Sun 18 October. These films are not specifically chosen with education audiences in mind. For films chosen for education audiences, please see LFF Education programme at www.bfi.org.uk/Lff/education. · Tickets are £5.00 per student (accompanying teachers free) for a minimum 10 students per group. What to do: 1. Choose your film. This document includes synopses for the 19 films on offer to school groups; please contact the LFF Education team if you have any questions regarding content and suitability for the age group you will be bringing (tel/email below) 2. Get promotional code from LFF Education (tel/email below) 3. Book and pay for seats at BFI Southbank Box Office Manager’s Line on 020 7815 1411 (10:00-20:30 daily). Tickets will be posted to you. LFF Education 020 7815 1344 (10:00-17:00 Mon-Fri) [email protected] Films available for school bookings (in alphabetical order): BEING EVEL Monday 12 Oct, 15:15, Vue West End (Screen 5) With his Elvis-inspired jumpsuits and reckless stunts, Robert Craig ‘Evel’ Knievel cast an indelible shadow over 1970s pop culture. He cheated death so many times and in so many ways he seemed almost immortal. Presented by Johnny Knoxville, this often mindboggling documentary reveals the real Knievel – the frequently shocking truth about a petty criminal- turned-household name who became America’s flamboyant motorcycle hero, throwing himself into the show-off business without a minute’s thought. The stakes were astronomically high – his insanely ill-judged 1974 rocket-powered leap over Snake River Canyon in Idaho is especially nail-biting to watch –but the charismatic Knievel makes it all seem so effortless. For a time, Evel appeared to lead a charmed life. Then things stop going his way. For older audiences this is both a nostalgia trip and the ultimate cautionary tale, but for the Jackass generation it’s a warts-and- all portrayal of the genius grandaddy of devil-may-care. Damon Wise Dir Daniel Junge (USA 2015 102min) CHRONIC Wednesday 14 Oct, 15:15, Curzon Soho Vue West End (Screen 5) In 2012, Michel Franco’s searing portrait of a bullied schoolgirl, After Lucia stunned and disturbed LFF audiences in equal measure. He returns with his latest uncompromising study of grief and isolation, which focuses on David, a full time care-giver for the terminally ill. Seemingly altruistic and entirely devoted to his work, it becomes clear that David’s dedication to his patients comes at the expense of his own personal life and with each new client his attachment to them veers increasingly toward the unhealthy. Chronic is an intimate and often uncomfortable piece of filmmaking, filmed in long, measured takes, meticulously framed and almost clinical in execution. Tim Roth’s portrayal of a man displaying subtly sociopathic tendencies is nothing short of revelatory. He brings a sense of empathy and humanity to a complex, often challenging character, providing an unconventional heart to a gratifyingly unconventional film. Michael Blyth Dir Michel Franco (Mexico-France 2015 92min) COWBOYS Friday 16 Oct, 15:15, Vue West End (Screen 5) Best known as co-writer of Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet and Rust and Bone, Thomas Bidegain makes a striking directing debut with this timely twist on a classic Hollywood theme. A French family obsessed with country and western is thrown into crisis when teenage daughter Kelly suddenly disappears. Stetson-toting father Alain (François Damiens) heads off in pursuit, later accompanied by his son ‘Kid’. As time passes and we move into the uncertainties of the 21st- century, this twisty, provocative drama-thriller offers a modern variant on John Ford’s The Searchers, with Alain in the John Wayne role as a man forced to confront his own prejudices – not about Native Americans, but about Islam and its transformation of the contemporary world. With terrific performances from Damiens, up-and-comer Finnegan Oldfield, and John C Reilly Cowboys combines real-world commentary and classic French cinephilia to potent effect. Jonathan Romney Dir Thomas Bidegain (France-Belgium 2015 114min) THE END OF THE TOUR (BSL SCREENING) Friday 16 Oct, 12:00, Vue West End (Screen 7) To David Foster Wallace, the brilliant American writer who cut his own life short in 2008 at the tragically young age of 46, talent was a ‘dark gift’– something that haunted him as much as Hal, the central character of his breakout novel Infinite Jest. It is also the subject of this low-key twohander by James Ponsoldt (director of the LFF2013 hit The Spectacular Now), which documents the five days that Rolling Stone writer David Lipsky spent with Wallace in 1996, following a national tour to promote Infinite Jest. Based on the many hours of taped conversations that Lipsky recorded, Ponsoldt’s film creates an intimate portrait of the man and his art, anchored by an intuitive performance from Jason Segel as Wallace. Pursued by the dogged Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg), Wallace is portrayed as neither tragic nor profound, but more as a gifted satirist with a sharp eye for modern life’s absurdities. Damon Wise Dir James Ponsoldt (USA 2014 106min) GOLD COAST Thursday 15 Oct, 12:00, Vue West End (Screen 7) In 1836, young botanist Wulff Joseph Wulff is dispatched to the Danish colonies in Guinea (present-day southeast Ghana) to establish and oversee a coffee plantation. He is fuelled by naïve optimism and what he believes is a progressive mentality, but his troubling experience of colonial life radically challenges his very European complacency. Based on fact, but far from a traditional historical drama, both in style and content, writer/director Daniel Dencik’s story evolves through a series of richly textured dreamlike vignettes. Dencik employs a creative collision of fact and imagination to build a mesmerising picture of Wulff’s moral compass, thoughts and inner life. And Jakob Oftebro (Kon-Tiki) delivers an extraordinary and extreme performance as Wulff, by turns visceral, conflicted and heartbreaking. The addition of Angelo Badalamenti’s ethereal contemporary score further helps to bring a distinctive freshness to this powerful and ambitious feature debut. Sarah Lutton Dir Daniel Dencik (Denmark 2015 114min) JAMES WHITE Thursday 8 Oct, 14:45, Vue West End (Screen 7) Following hard on the heels of previous LFF selections Martha Marcy May Marlene and Simon Killer, Josh Mond – the last member of New York’s three-strong Borderline Films collective to direct his own film – delivers his coup de grace, an elegant and unforgettably powerful meditation on a tumultuous mother-son relationship. The soulful and engaging Christopher Abbott, who appeared in the first two series of Girls, plays the title character. We find him coping badly with the recent death of his estranged father. His hedonistic attempts to escape his pain give the film its lightest and most surreal moments, but the story is more concerned with what happens next: diagnosed with both cancer and – because of the drugs – early-onset dementia, his mother Gail (a terrific Cynthia Nixon) becomes the centre of James’s unravelling existence. This is a quiet yet devastatingly emotional two-hander about love, life and the inevitability of death. Damon Wise Dir Josh Mond (USA 2015 85min) JANIS: LITTLE GIRL BLUE Thursday 15 Oct, 15:15, Vue West End (Screen 5) Like Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin was a skinny white girl with a big soulful voice and a deeply felt connection to music rooted in African American culture. Both also famously struggled with addiction and died tragically at 27, just as they were hitting their peaks. Oscar-nominated director Amy Berg (West of Memphis) draws extensively on stunning archive footage, contemporary interviews and a wide range of the singer’s own personal correspondences. What emerges is a portrait of a hugely witty and talented free spirit who rebelled against her own youth in a town populated by bigotry, where she was targeted for her boyish looks and for being pro-integration. Janis tore down barriers for women just by doing what she wanted, whether openly dating black and white women and men, or leading a rock band with a voice that could take a little piece of anyone’s heart. Before Amy, before Kathleen, before Chrissie and Patti… there was Janis. Tricia Tuttle Dir Amy Berg (USA 2015 106min) LAND OF MINE Friday 9 Oct, 15:15, Vue West End (Screen 5) When Denmark was liberated at the end of the Second World War, over one and a half million unexploded landmines remained buried on its beaches. The Danish and UK governments took the questionable decision to task German prisoners of war with their removal. In Land of Mine writer/director Martin Zandvliet (Applause, LFF2009) explores moral responsibility in the aftermath of war through the story of a group of very young mine-clearing POWs under the supervision of a violently embittered Danish sergeant (Roland Møller, in a breakout performance). Brutal, believable and punctuated with gallows humour, this at times harrowing film focuses on the personal impact of policies of retribution and sensitively probes how reconciliation may (or may not) occur. Camilla Hjelm’s breathtaking cinematography ratchets up the tension by juxtaposing the apparent calmness of long stretching beaches with the knowledge of what lies beneath. Sarah Lutton Dir Martin Zandvliet (Denmark-Germany 2015 101min) MOUNTAINS MAY DEPART Thursday 8 Oct, 15:15 , Vue West End (Screen 5) Jia Zhangke delivers a picture every bit as ambitious, astute and humane as his previous films, covering three time periods in the life of a group of friends who become family.