Member Film Notes for Spring 2017

7 February 2017 I, Daniel Blake

14 February 2017

21 February 2017 Your Name

28 February 2017 Nocturnal Animals

7 March 2017 Julieta

14 March 2017 La La Land

21 March 2017 Things to Come

28 March 2017 Paterson

4 April 2017 Under the Shadow

11 April 2017 Manchester by the Sea

25 April 2017 Hunt for the Wilderpeople

9 May 2017 Graduation

PLEASE NOTE: the reviews and features contained within may contain spoilers All notes are also available on our website www.filmsinstafford.com where you can read them online (with the password) or print them

Where we meet: The Gatehouse Theatre, Eastgate Street, Stafford Our programme starts at 7:30pm, with the main feature at 7:45pm.

We hope you enjoy reading these reviews, articles and interviews. We have drawn them from a variety of sources to provide entertainment, challenge and to provoke debate! Additional online references to all our films can be found on our website: www.filmsinstafford.com

I, Daniel Blake Tuesday 7th February 2017

Director: Ken Loach Before the film’s release, Ken Loach spoke about its origins UK 2016 / 100 mins / Cert 15 and themes, the research behind it and its ambitions. Starring: Dave Johns, Hayley Squires What lies at that root of the story?

The title character of I, Daniel Blake is a 59-year-old The universal story of people struggling to survive. But then the characters and the situation have to be grounded in Newcastle joiner, who has had a heart attack at lived experience. work, almost falling from a scaffold, and has been advised by his doctors not to return to work until he If we look hard enough, we can all see the conscious cruelty has made a full recovery. at the heart of the state’s provision for those in desperate need, and the use of bureaucracy – the intentional However, Dan’s benefits are stopped when he is deemed to inefficiency of bureaucracy – as a political weapon. ‘This is be “fit to work”. While his appeal is lost in a bureaucratic what happens if you don’t work. You will suffer.’ The anger black hole, his efforts to secure Job Seekers’ Allowance lead at that was the motive behind the film. him to despair, “a sick man looking for a non-existent job Where did you start your research? that he can’t take anyway.”

At the same time, he meets Katie, a single mother of two My home town is Nuneaton. And I’m a little involved with a charity there called Doorway [working with vulnerable who has been living in a homeless hostel in London and has young people] which is run by a friend, Carol Gallagher. So just been found a flat in Newcastle,• far from her family and Paul [Laverty] and I went there. Carol introduced us to a friends. “Sanctioned” for being a few minutes late for a whole range of people who were unable to find work for Jobcentre appointment, the penniless Katie has no choice but various reasons – not enough jobs being the obvious one. to find the nearest food bank.

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Some were working for agencies on insecure wages and had There are expectations of the number of people who will nowhere to live. One was a very nice young lad who took us be ‘sanctioned’. If the interviewers don’t sanction enough to his room in a shared house helped by Doorway. people, they themselves are put on ‘Personal Improvement Plans’. Orwellian, isn’t it? This all comes The room was Dickensian. There was a mattress on the from research drawn from people who have worked floor, a fridge, but pretty well nothing else. Paul asked him [there]. would it be rude to see what he’d got in the fridge. He said, “No” and opened the door – and there was nothing, there The sanctioning regime means people won’t be able to wasn’t milk...there wasn’t anything. He said that the week live on the money they’ve got. And therefore food banks before he’d been without food for four days. have come into existence. And the government seems quite content that there should be food banks. And you visited food banks? Much of the story deals with suffocating We went to a number of food banks together. What we bureaucracy. How did you try to make that show in the food bank in the film was based on an incident dramatic on screen? that was described to Paul. What I hope carries the story is that the concept is Food banks are awful. You see people in desperation. We familiar to most of us. It’s the frustration and the black were at a food bank in Glasgow and a man came to the door. comedy of trying to deal with a bureaucracy that is so He looked in and hovered and then he walked away. palpably stupid, so palpably set to drive you mad.

One of the women working there went after him, because he I think if you can tell that truthfully, in the relationship was obviously in need, but he couldn’t face the humiliation of between the people across a desk or over a phone line, coming in & asking for food. I think that goes on all the time. that should reveal the comedy of it, the cruelty of it – and, in the end, the tragedy of it. Out of all the material you gathered and the people you met, how did you settle on your story? Do you make films hoping to bring about change?

We felt we’d done a lot about young people – Sweet Well it’s the old phrase isn’t it: ‘Agitate, Educate, Sixteen was one. And we saw the plight of older people and Organise.’ You can’t educate much with a film, though thought that it often goes unremarked. you can ask questions, and you can’t organise at all. But you can agitate. There’s a generation of people who were skilled manual workers and are now reaching the end of their working lives. And I think [that’s] a great aim, because being complacent They have health problems and they won’t work again about things that are intolerable is just not acceptable. I because they’re not nimble enough to duck and dive between think anger can be very constructive if it can be used – agency jobs, a bit of this and a bit of that. anger that leaves the audience with something unresolved in their mind, something to do, something challenging. Then they are confronted by assessments for Employment and Support Allowance, where you can be deemed fit for It is the 50th anniversary of Cathy Come Home... work when you’re not. Politically the world that this film shows is even more The whole bureaucratic, impenetrable structure defeats cruel than the world that Cathy was in. The market people. We heard so many stories about that. economy has led us inexorably to this disaster. It generates a working class that is vulnerable and easy to And your argument is that the bureaucratic structure exploit. Those who struggle to survive face poverty. is impenetrable by design… Looking back, we should not be surprised at what has Yes. The Jobcentres now are not about helping people, happened. The only question is – what do we do about it? they’re about setting obstacles in people’s way. There’s a job coach, as they’re called, who is not allowed to tell people Extracts from interview with Ken Loach by Demetrios about the jobs available, whereas before they would help Matheou, unison.org.uk, October 2016 them to find work.

Stafford Film Theatre at the Gatehouse www.filmsinstafford.com Spring 2017 A United Kingdom Tuesday 14th February 2017

Director: that, for all its progressive importance, this is first and UK 2016 / 111 mins / Cert 12A foremost an impressively crowd-pleasing piece of intelligent Starring: , screen entertainment. Its true-life tale of unity in the face of cultural apartheid and political expediency remains as The true-life romance in the 1940s between an relevant as ever in these divided times, but it is Asante’s English office clerk and the future king of Botswana talent for making the personal political – and vice versa – which had personal and political repercussions that is the real story here. Her position as one of the UKs most accessibly agitating film-makers is confirmed.

As a female British film-maker of Ghanaian heritage, Eye in the Sky screenwriter Guy Hibbert’s screenplay (from the director Amma Asante broke several glass ceilings Susan Williams’s 2006 book Colour Bar) revisits an often when her third feature, A United Kingdom, opened the forgotten chapter of postwar history that might be filed London film festival in October. With an awards-worthy, under “stranger than fiction”. Rosamund Pike is Ruth powerhouse performance by producer/star David Oyelowo – Williams, a clerk from Blackheath, south London, working in whose brilliant portrayal of Martin Luther King in 2014’s Selma Lloyds of London in 1947, who is swept off her feet by was overlooked at the “so white” Oscars – A United Kingdom handsome law student Seretse Khama (Oyelowo). Ruth also chimed with the launch of the BFI’s Black Star season, a doesn’t know that Seretse is an African king in waiting, programme “celebrating the range, versatility and power of leader-to-be of the Bamangwato people of Bechuanaland black actors”. (later Botswana), the British protectorate to which he is due to return on completion of his studies. Yet watching the film for a second time with a packed audience who swooned at its romance, laughed at its wry When Seretse proposes, having duly explained his true humour and cheered its moments of triumph, it struck me identity, Ruth imagines a new life away from the misty drizzle

Stafford Film Theatre at the Gatehouse www.filmsinstafford.com Spring 2017 A United Kingdom continued...

of London, a life that, she assures her fiance, will be taken Oyelowo’s Seretse and Pike’s Ruth that delivers the real “moment by moment – together”. But when the news of this emotional punch. high-profile black-and-white union reaches neighbouring South As with 2014’s superb Belle, A United Kingdom depicts a Africa, whose National party is busy enshrining apartheid in world in flux, and once again Asante manages to dramatise law, the cash-strapped British authorities move first to forbid global upheavals through intimate personal observations – and then to undermine the marriage, scared of alienating their Pike’s anxious yet resilient smile (not to mention her supplier of cheap gold and uranium. Seretse’s regent uncle, hilarious regal wave); Oyelowo’s defiant boxer stance and Tshekedi Khama (Vusi Kunene), also refuses to countenance a commanding vocal manner. white queen and a rift develops that threatens to tear apart more than just love. Having cut her teeth as an actor, the director draws terrific performances from her cast, who dance nimbly Handsomely shot on locations in the UK and Botswana by around some rather on-the-nose dialogue. Lively support Sam McCurdy, A United Kingdom contrasts sweeping exteriors comes from a superbly supercilious Jack Davenport as Sir with fusty interiors, breathing rich visual life into the battle Alistair Canning (a composite of snotty British between an entrenched establishment and an emerging representatives), and a sturdily sympathetic Terry Pheto republic. Production designer Simon Bowles and composer as Seretse’s sister Naledi. Plaudits, too, to Nicholas Patrick Doyle clearly relish the broad canvas opportunities of Lyndhurst who wrings real pathos from his small but the narrative, while Asante cites Richard Attenborough and significant role as Ruth’s loving but outraged father. David Lean as her guiding lights. “I want to make pieces of entertainment and art that For all the film’s vibrant grandeur, though, our attention is mean something,” Asante recently told the BBC while kept tightly focused on the central couple’s romance, even musing upon her forthcoming film, Where Hands Touch, a when they are separated by geography, economics and longstanding passion project about a relationship between politics. Much is made of the world-turned-upside-down a bi-racial girl and a Hitler Youth boy in 1930s Berlin. “I absurdity of Labour prime minister Clement Attlee’s want to make movies that leave some kind of mark on obsequious loyalty to South Africa while the Conservative you.” With A United Kingdom she has done just that. Churchill appears to be an ally of Khama’s progressive cause (although pragmatism soon overrides opposition promises), Mark Kermode, Observer, 27th November 2016 but it’s the wholly believable and tangible bond between

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Stafford Film Theatre at the Gatehouse www.filmsinstafford.com Spring 2017 Your Name Tuesday 21st February 2017

Director: Makoto Shinkai Once he’s got us on our toes, Shinkai keeps us there. The Japan 2016 / 106 mins / Cert 12A / Subtitled outer-body premise is well-milked for gentle humour to start – Taki becomes fixated on his newfound breasts – but the playful pitch doesn’t swamp feeling. A time-travelling,, body-swapping, gender-twisting, Raised in an environment of tradition, Mitsuha pines for city disaster-based animated teen romance resembling life; Taki, meanwhile, wrestles with the tragicomic little else around inarticulacy of adolescent masculinity. Smartphones are cleverly used to co-ordinate the plot-lines, a co-ordination Is Makoto Shinkai ‘the new Miyazaki’? Comparisons to given a metaphorical parallel in the cords Mitsuha is tasked Studio Ghibli’s animation master accompanied Shinkai’s with meticulously braiding. previous films: lustrous visions such as Voices of a Distant Star The braiding becomes more intricate as the duo wonder why (2003) and The Garden of Words (2013), but Shinkai emerges as fate linked them and, in a twist on the will they/won’t they his own man with this deeply affecting, richly imagined and cliché, whether a meeting is in the stars. Time loops, lushly gorgeous fantasy. tumbling comets, lost towns and themes of eco-disaster mix in the ensuing action, a mash-up of melancholy raptures, A hit in Japan, Shinkai’s genre-bender begins with a twist on mind-warping metaphysics and cosmic cataclysms. meet-cute clichés between provincial teen-girl Mitsuha (Mone Kamishiraishi) and Tokyo teen-boy Taki (Ryûnosuke Kamiki) – It all sounds like too much to take onboard. But Shinkai after a teasing opening montage involving comets falling, the holds his material steady. Between style and substance, he pair awake to find themselves inhabiting each other’s bodies. knows just what’s needed to keep the plot focused, viewers

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Stafford Film Theatre at the Gatehouse www.filmsinstafford.com Spring 2017 Nocturnal Animals Tuesday 28th February 2017

Director: Tom Ford installations featuring morbidly obese female nudes dancing USA 2016 / 116 mins / Cert 15 (hello, David Lynch). Susan's success is superficial: She hates Starring: Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal her job, hates that she's a manager and not an artist, and hates that her husband Hutton (Armie Hammer) is cheating on her. Stories of revenge from both past and present Into Susan's life comes an advance copy of a book. It's from intertwine with fictional horrors in this stylish Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), the starter husband she dumped psychological thriller and forgot nearly two decades ago, with encouragement from her rich, hard-drinking harridan of a mother (Laura Tom Ford is drunk on movies. Like the fashion icon he is, Linney, so good you want to kill her). The novel is dedicated the director brings a keen eye for style, texture and design to to Susan. Sweet – only it isn't. The tome tells the story of the images he creates. But bruised humanity and the emotions Tony (Gyllenhaal again), his wife Laura (Isla Fisher) and their roiling underneath elegant surfaces – those are his true teen daughter India (Ellie Bamber) on a nightmare road trip. subjects as a filmmaker. A Single Man (2009) was a masterful Forced off a West Texas freeway by Ray (Aaron Taylor- debut with Colin Firth giving a career-best performance as a Johnson) and two other hoods, Tony must stand by gay professor feeling suicidal over the death of his lover. Ford helplessly while the boys have their way – and worse – with hits it out of the park again in Nocturnal Animals, a stunning film his wife and daughter. noir that resonates with ghostly, poetic terror. WTF! The sequence is as terrifying as any chainsaw massacre Amy Adams stars as Susan Morrow, a sleek, lacquered Los or a Jim Thompson crime novel, showing Ford's unexpected Angeles gallery owner without a hair out of place. The mess, flair for shuddering unease and grisly, galvanizing action. Tony however, is all inside. The film opens with one of her art teams up with a Texas cop Bobby Andes, played with animal

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vibrancy by Michael Shannon, to bring these thugs to justice. But is he man enough? That's the vengeful heart of the matter as Susan rightly interprets the book as retribution for the sins she committed against Edward.

What's happening here is that Ford has taken on the impossible task of filming an unfilmable novel, Austin Wright's 1993 Tony and Susan. There is some strain when the real world and Edward's revenge fiction bump heads. But the impossible has brought out the visionary best in the director, who holds course as the ground keeps shifting. As a screenwriter, he added the satirical jibes at the L.A art world that aren't in Wright’s novel. Otherwise, he sticks to the criss- crossing themes running through this parallel universe. Cheers to cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, composer Abel Korzeniowski and especially editor Joan Sobel who help Ford weave multiple stories into one darkly funny, visually dazzling piece.

The actors could not be better. Gyllenhaal, in two roles, dives Credits from Sight & Sound, November 2016 deep into the wells of perceived masculine weakness. And Adams takes Susan from dewy college girl to hardened ice queen without missing a stop or a nuance in between. She's spectacular. Nocturnal Animals can throw you with its shifts in tone, its merging of past and present, but don't overthink what Jake Gyllenhaal plays Susan’s ex Tony, and Edward, Ford has so cunningly crafted. Surrender to it. the father in the novel-within-the-film Peter Travers, Rolling Stone, 15th November 2016

Stafford Film Theatre at the Gatehouse www.filmsinstafford.com Spring 2017 Julieta Tuesday 7th March 2017

Director: Pedro Almodovar that tiresome cliché risks underselling how fresh and charged Spain 2016 / 97 mins / Cert 15 / Subtitled the performances are, and how they fade slowly into focus, Starring: Emma Suárez, Adriana Ugarte making this the filmmaker's most moving work since 2006's Volver. So let's say this: Julieta is an enthralling meditation on Middle-aged Julieta hears news of her long-lost the mechanics of memory and grief that will delight the sort of person who uses "Almodóvarian" as an adjective. daughter. Julieta reflects on her past, flashing back to the moments of pain that defined her life The script is loosely based on three different stories by the Canadian writer Alice Munro, each taken from Runaway, her 2004 collection. Emma Suárez plays Julieta, a middle-aged The Spanish director's newest picture is an enthralling woman planning a move from Madrid to Portugal with her meditation on grief. companion, Lorenzo (Darío Grandinetti). She appears Pedro Almodóvar, it seems, grew tired of being Pedro somehow broken, wracked by some unspoken grief. After an Almodóvar for a few years there. In 2011, the Spanish unexpected street encounter with a childhood friend of her filmmaker made a foray into psychological horror with the absent daughter, she spirals into uncertainty—about the thoroughly chilling captivity nightmare The Skin I Live In. I'm So move, about Lorenzo, about everything. Excited, his 2013 follow-up, lightened the mood considerably, In flashbacks, which subsume most of the narrative, Adriana though the airborne screwball comedy was as fleetingly Ugarte plays a younger Julieta, a radiant blonde who begins a satisfying as in-flight Wi-Fi. life with her mysterious, rugged lover Xoan after she With his 20th and latest picture, Julieta, Almodóvar returns to becomes pregnant with his child. They have a daughter; they the melodramatic hallmarks of his career with inspiration settle in a gorgeous seaside house; the baby grows into a renewed. It is tempting to say that it's a return to form, but preteen. Then, a tragedy that is so shattering and complete it

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deserves another. I don't want to reveal too much. Like Volver protagonists," Almodóvar said about this movie in an and Talk to Her (2002), the plot unfolds in nonlinear fashion, interview last year. Indeed, Suárez and Ugarte are each lurching forward and back through time to reveal the family excellent as the titular Julieta, one worn down by life's melodrama in full review, an emotional labyrinth that becomes cruelty, the other eager for its pleasures. They play the thornier but more engrossing as it progresses. same character but never the same person; what has transpired between them has occasioned some In deciding to adopt Munro's material for the screen, immeasurable gulf. Almodóvar was evidently seized by one scene in particular, which takes place on a late-night train ride. It is a fabulous Anybody who has experienced some great, shattering moment, Hitchcockian by nature. Julieta, at her youngest grief knows this to be true. Time heals. It also ravages, point, meets two men, one of whom dies and one of whom rearranges, pulls apart atoms. You're born anew. The becomes her lover. Sex, death—they are all accounted for. It working title for this film was apparently Silence—or is the late 1980s—when Almodóvar first surged to Silencio, in the original Spanish—which feels right, since prominence with his Women on the Verge of a Nervous grief so often is experienced in silent isolation. Much of Breakdown—and Jean-Claude Larrieu's cinematography this movie is about the pain of trying to keep the past captures the period with bright, colorful charm: the deep reds, sealed away or unspoken. (Almodóvar changed the title to the brilliant blues, the frizzled blondness of Julieta's post-punk avoid confusion with Martin Scorsese's new movie of the haircut. same name.)

"It’s a return to the cinema of women, of great female Zach Schonfeld, Newsweek, 23rd December 2016

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rapt and emotions engaged. liaisons. A satisfying conclusion seems like too much to expect from so rich a weave, but Shinkai’s careful Working with Ghibli-schooled animation director Masashi Ando weaving of poignancy, plot threads and metaphor (whose credits also include 2015’s senses-stoking Miss Hokusai), delivers one. Shinkai makes glowing work of his digi-mation vistas: the limpid images glisten as if radiated with emotion. But don’t think about For Mitsuha and Taki, the outcome is best pausing to admire the scenery. Races against time and musical experienced, not explained. For animation fanciers montages usher us breathlessly towards the climax, chivvied new to Shinkai, it could be the beginning of a beautiful along by vibrant songs from Japanese band Radwimps. relationship.

Adding more flavours, the end stretch recalls Wong Kar-wai’s Kevin Harley, Total Film, 14th November 2016 rainy-day romanticism in its mix of sliding doors and deferred

Stafford Film Theatre at the Gatehouse www.filmsinstafford.com Spring 2017 La La Land Tuesday 14th March 2017

Director: Damien Chazelle USA 2016 / 128 mins / Cert 12A and resentment of having to play anything else, even if it Starring: Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone makes him money. Then there’s Mia (Emma Stone), a struggling actress whose curse seems to be that she’s just as good as dozens of other redheads, who just happen to be “a Nominated for 14 Oscars, this LA-set musical little bit prettier,” according to her. Her auditions are a explores what is more important: a once-in-a- series of small humiliations that add up to one giant disappointing choice in career. Her real job is as a barista in a lifetime love or fame and the spotlight coffee shop on the Warner Bros. lot, which means she’s surrounded by the craft she’d love to be a small part of, and Despite what you may have been led to believe, writer that only adds to her torture. -director Damien Chazelle’s La La Land is not some type of homage to the Hollywood musicals of old. It The two first lay eyes on each other in a restaurant where only starts out that way, with a pair of big, colorfully splashy Sebastian is tinkling away playing Christmas carols as numbers to make you think that’s what you’re in for. The first background music for patrons. But what draws her into the number is an epic song-and-dance spectacular about how establishment is that brief moment when he goes off-book great it is living in sunny Los Angeles…with a cast of hundreds and plays a contemplative, self-written piece, a small act of dancing amid vehicles lined up in a bumper-to-bumper traffic rebellion that gets him fired by boss J.K. Simmons. Sebastian jam. But tucked away in that mess are at least two people storms out of the restaurant and blows by Mia, who is (likely more) with dreams. attempting to tell him how beautiful his music sounded. The more traditional meet-cute happens later at a pool party First, there’s Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a talented jazz piano where Sebastian is in an ’80s cover band, rocking A-Ha and A player whose only drawback is his commitment to classic jazz

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Flock of Seagulls tunes. He walks her to her car, they share a end of the film that will empty your eyes of tears. Don’t get few life goals, and by the end they’re dancing a simple two- me wrong: they are quite strong performers in every step. And so the tentative romance begins. respect, but this film isn’t about that. In a strange way, it’s almost better than Gosling sings in something of a whisper While Chazelle (who previously gave us Whiplash) could have and that Stone’s dancing is less than flawless. The movie simply made La La Land a purist romance exercise, he’s a bit embraces and celebrates these imperfections with song and more daring than that when he introduces something strange dance in the grand tradition of Jacques Demy (The Young and almost unheard of to the formula—real life. With the help Girls of Rochefort, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg). of original songs from Justin Hurwitz, with lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, Chazelle has composed a musical about There’s a musical number in La La Land set five years in the compromise and patience in an artist’s life. These people have future from the rest of the film that takes the film from life goals, but at some point they realize if they are a little “great” to “into the stratosphere.” I don’t want to say too more patient than we usually see people in films about artists, much about it, but it’s the most old-school Hollywood that they eventually get where they think they want to land. musical moment of the entire film, taking on elements of But there are also sacrifices to be made in getting there, and fantasy and spectacle that isn’t in any other part of the film that’s where pain enters the story. (okay, dancing in the air among the stars in a planetarium is close). And in those few closing moments, we learn more La La Land also pays affectionate tribute to the inspiring impact about dreams—real and unfulfilled—than I have from any that rejection can have in an artist’s life. Sebastian is driven to film in quite some time. The sequence comments on the open his own club where only traditional jazz will be played, road not taken, and asks us to consider which path was the and the more his way of thinking is swatted aside by more right one for these two. It’s exquisite, unforgettable, and modern music, the more driven he becomes. So much so that utterly heartbreaking. But it also gives us hope for both of he takes a steady job in a pop-oriented jazz band led by old our heroes. This and all the rest make La La Land one of friend Keith (singer John Legend). The gig pays well, but keeps the finest films of the year. him away from Mia for weeks at a time. But more importantly, she’s surprised how easily he’s taken to the role of playing Steve Prokopy ("Capone"), aintitcool.com someone else’s modern music. He sees it as a long-term stepping stone and as a means of growing up somewhat. She Those record-equalling Oscar noms in full: sees it as selling out and wanting to be liked, which he finds an ironic criticism coming from an actress. Best Picture; Actor in a Leading Role; Actress in a Leading Role; Cinematography; Costume Design; Roughly the first half of La La Land is the romance, with the Directing; Film Editing; Music (Original Score); back half bringing the hurt, with a chance for redemption by the end. Gosling and Stone are such game players and possess Music (Original Song—twice); Production Design; a winning chemistry (having worked together twice before in Sound Editing; Sound Mixing; Writing (Original Crazy, Stupid, Love and Gangster Squad) that it’s easy to forgive Screenplay) that they aren’t the best singers and dancers, although Stone’s delivers a show-stopping number during an audition near the Phew!

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Stafford Film Theatre at the Gatehouse www.filmsinstafford.com Spring 2017 Things to Come Tuesday 21st March 2017

Director: Mia Hansen-Løve Nathalie prides herself on her ability to stimulate her France 2016 / 102 mins / Cert 12A / Subtitled students’ minds while encouraging them to think for themselves. Now she must ask serious questions about her Starring: Isabelle Huppert own existence, all while having her perspective constantly challenged by her two free-spirited children and a Things to Come offers quietly profound observations charismatic former pupil named Fabien (Roman Kolinka), all on life, love, and the irrevocable passage of time of whom drift in and out of Nathalie’s story.

Nathalie quotes Jean-Jacques Rousseau in class while doing Life may teach us to accept certain incontestable her best to avoid being dragged into a debate on a proposed truths, but it doesn’t always prepare us for them. We retirement reform act which, if passed, will directly impact know, for example, that our children will one day forge their her more than the adolescent protesters who confront her own paths, just as our parents will reach the end of theirs. outside the school gates. Yet although she eventually comes How we cope with suddenly finding ourselves at the midpoint to doubt herself, this is by no means a time of crisis for of our own journey is the focus of Mia Hansen-Løve’s Nathalie – she takes everything in her stride with dignity and transformative fifth feature, which marks a pronounced shift in a cool head, belying the complex and confusing nature of her the writer/director’s outlook on growing up and all the predicament. anxieties and pressures that come with it. Indeed, Things to Come is a film comprised of still moments of Things to Come is a sensitive, bittersweet portrait of a middle- self-reflection rather than sweeping dramatic gestures. Like aged woman named Nathalie, played by Isabelle Huppert, who each of Hansen-Løve’s previous films, from 2007’s Tout est is forced to re-evaluate her life after her husband of 25 years, pardonné through to 2014’s Eden, it offers an intimate Heinz (André Marcon), confesses to having an affair. As a long- serving philosophy teacher at a local Parisian high school, Continued on page 16...

Stafford Film Theatre at the Gatehouse www.filmsinstafford.com Spring 2017 Paterson Tuesday 28th March2017

Director: Jim Jarmusch Poetry by Ron Padgett and William Carlos Williams USA 2016 / 118 mins / Cert 15 is a big part of Paterson. Where does poetry fit in, in Starring: Adam Driver, Golshifteh Farahani general, as far as what you try to achieve as a filmmaker? I don’t analyze what I do. The poem by William Carlos Paterson is a bus driver and poet who lives in Paterson, Williams, This Is Just to Say, is actually a note left on a table New Jersey, whose existence follows a quiet, humdrum about some plums. I would hope my films are in that kind of pattern. The film follows him over eight typical days vein, rather than something that tries to teach you or tell you something universal from the mountaintop. A lyrical filmmaker and an art-house icon, Jim Jarmusch has In 1989, you said you’d rather make a movie about a written and directed Paterson, an unordinary movie about the guy walking his dog than one about the Emperor of ordinary life of a poem-writing New Jersey bus driver and his China. And now you’ve made a film about a guy artistically souled wife. The Globe and Mail spoke with the walking his dog. philosophic American director about dog walking, the film’s I’d like to make a movie about the Emperor of China walking star Adam Driver and the significance of insignificance. his dog. [Laughs.] Adam Driver plays a bus driver who writes Someone once said of your work that “nothing and poetry and walks his dog every night. His life, as you present everything can happen in a film by Jim Jarmusch, that it, is repetitious and mundane. And yet he seems serene and master of Zen mesmerism.” A fair statement? content. It’s very mundane. The film follows him seven days I like that description, because it’s almost a Buddhist on one week, with each day as a variation on the previous statement, that embracing opposites or contradictions is day. It’s a very simplistic metaphor that was attractive to me. possible. So, nothing is everything, and everything is nothing. I love variations in music, and in art. If you look at Mark That means that all things are possible. So, I like that. That the Rothko paintings, they’re all variations. impossible is possible. Stafford Film Theatre at the Gatehouse www.filmsinstafford.com Spring 2017 Paterson continued... Things to Come continued from page 14 Or Andy Warhol. Right. There’s something very honest with it. It defies the idea examination of a character entering a period of of originality or significance, in a beautiful way. It frees you from readjustment following a personal loss or separation. those things. This film is trying to free itself from significance. It’s about how easy it is to lose control over the things My take on the film is that it is an homage to the we hold dear, and how other people’s actions can lead simplicity of a bygone era. I’m thinking of the 1950s, us to question our own beliefs. where the working class could work simple jobs, It’s also a film concerned with furthering our punching a clock, living a repetitious but stress-free life understanding of fulfilment – be it vocational or and being able to provide for their family. We’ve lost domestic – and how in life we tend to settle at the that, haven’t we? point at which our preconceived notions of happiness I don’t think of Paterson as a nostalgia film at all. They have a appear to have been met. For Nathalie, the realisation modest house. He has a municipal job, but it’s hard for them. that life rarely plays out as expected arrives late, but They’re working on it, but they’re not living large. So, it’s not a not so late that wholesale changes severely throwback to the domestic world of I Love Lucy or anything for compromise her wellbeing. And, as the title suggests, me. It’s not about looking back. there’s a great deal of optimism here, too. Nathalie As far as the casting, did you write the male lead for expresses feeling liberated both by her husband’s Adam Driver? betrayal and the death of her infirm yet overbearing I didn’t. Usually I write for actors, but I didn’t know who was mother. She doesn’t dwell on past regrets but instead going to play these two main characters. But then I was very revels in the uncertainty of the present. attracted to Adam – how he looks, and his quietness as an In one particularly cathartic scene Nathalie and Heinz actor. I hadn’t seen him much. He did a lovely little thing travel to his family’s picturesque seaside retreat in in Inside Llewyn Davis, and he was in Frances Ha. Brittany. While she sets about clearing out her You don’t watch him in the HBO series Girls? wardrobe, he appears overwhelmed by the realisation I think I saw part of one episode. I’m not a big TV guy. I heard that this will be her last visit. The fact that Nathalie’s Adam in some interviews, and I loved the idea that he had been conscience is clear allows her to say goodbye while a Marine and also had studied at Juilliard. And here I have a reflecting fondly on the memories they have built character who’s a bus driver and a poet. I loved how he talked together – whether on their honeymoon or during about acting, and that he refuses to see any film he’s in, because countless family holidays. Conversely Heinz’s lingering he doesn’t want to jeopardize his ability to be a reactive actor. I guilt over his infidelity means that he is reluctant to let love that kind of acting. go. There’s an innate sense of tragedy here, but it’s also a strangely beautiful scene, not to mention highly I’m guessing you were pleased with his work amusing in its frank observation of human relationships. in Paterson. He was really fantastic. There’s a scene in a bar when he takes a In the end, what Things to Come signals most coherently guy down, and afterward a woman says something like, is a young filmmaker’s ascent to true greatness, “Thanks, Paterson, that was really heroic.” And the first take although Hansen-Løve’s standing as one of France’s that we did, he just said something like, “What, I don’t know.” most naturally gifted filmmakers is confirmed long before the closing stages of this remarkable film, when It just came out of him, as if he was traumatized. It was so real. I Nathalie’s midnight search for a black cat show us that was, like, “That’s it.” only when surrounded by darkness can we begin to see So, just one take for the scene? the light. He asked if we could do a couple more takes. I said sure, but Adam Woodward, Little White Lies, undated that’s the take that was going to be in the movie. He’s something special, that guy.

Interview with Jim Jarmusch by Brad Wheeler, Toronto Globe and Mail, 2nd February 2017

Stafford Film Theatre at the Gatehouse www.filmsinstafford.com Spring 2017 Under the Shadow Tuesday 4th April 2017

Director: Babak Anvari during the revolution in Iran. The movie opens on her pleading with an imperious male official to allow her to Iran 2016 / 84 mins / Cert 15 / Subtitled resume her studies. Dressed demurely, her body obscured Starring: Narges Rashidi, Avin Manshadi and with a head scarf covering her hair, she sits opposite him as he inspects her case and barely gives her a look. In the Shideh and her family live amid the chaos of the Iran large picture window behind them that looks out onto the city, a missile hits in the not-too-far distance. -Iraq war. Accused of subversion, she falls into a The interviewer’s apparent indifference both to Shideh and state of malaise and starts to believe that an evil to the attack — sucking on a candy rather like an overgrown spirit is trying to possess her daughter child, he gives the explosion a cursory glance — is unnerving. It suggests a certain hardness, whether institutional or The creaking and shrieking inside a haunted-house movie personal, national or political. He flatly rejects Shideh’s often turn on evil spirits, restless ghosts or sometimes just request, telling her to find something else to do with her life. human madness. It takes time before the creepy noises are If his dismissal registers as more disturbing than just a rubber fully revealed in the quietly nerve-pricking horror flick “Under -stamp rejection, it’s because he embodies the threat of the the Shadow,” though there’s already plenty to worry about theocratic regime itself. He also turns out to be the first in a before the first real boo erupts. Bad juju is one thing, but in series of men (soldiers, police officers, neighbors) who Tehran in 1988 — the final year of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war impede Shideh’s progress, test her patience and threaten her — danger comes from every direction: the prying nosy sanity. neighbors, the patrolling morality police, the hurtling enemy Shideh’s problems go from bad to strange to increasingly missiles. freaky after her husband, Iraj (Bobby Naderi), a doctor, A standout at the 2016 New Directors/New Films festival, leaves for the front. At first, Shideh seems like she might “Under the Shadow” centers on Shideh (Narges Rashidi), become another of art’s doomed women, locked in the bird whose medical training was derailed by her political activism cage of fate, gender or consciousness. She certainly seems at

Stafford Film Theatre at the Gatehouse www.filmsinstafford.com Spring 2017 Under the Shadow continued...

risk, given that she does little more than moon about as she herself.” tends, with increasing testiness, to her daughter, Dorsa (Avin “The war was largely invisible to us, because Tehran Manshadi), a wilful girl with a wiggy doll. Shideh’s only wasn’t the frontline,” Anvari says. “We were children, pleasure, it seems, comes from her forbidden Jane Fonda and we didn’t really know what was happening. But I aerobics videotape, which she works out to after drawing the remember sirens wailing and running with my neighbours curtains. Yes, but some things can’t be kept out as assorted into the basement of the apartment block. I remember raps and shrieks — as well as talk of supernatural entities the arguments and rumours that would circulate down known as jinni — shortly prove. there, hearing these distant blasts of Iraqi missiles.” The writer-director Babak Anvari, who was born in Tehran, His heroine is Shideh, played by Narges Rashidi, a doctor starts by giving “Under the Shadow” a lived-in, thorny intimacy who has been banned for political activism. Rashidi was also born in Tehran, leaving for Turkey, and then that’s as familiar as a family holiday dinner. Much of the movie Germany, at the age of seven. Like Anvari, she also has takes place in Shideh’s apartment, a modest, austere, flatly traumatic early memories of the city of her birth. lighted space that doesn’t come with the usual haunted-house dark corners. When she exercises to Jane Fonda, Shideh can “I remember falling asleep in the middle of the night in my block out the outside and its horrors, even as one explosion mum’s lap, and waking up to the sound of bombs falling. We’d be taken down to the cellar to hide, and my mum after another cracks open up this world. After an unexploded would always play loud music and start dancing. She missile pierces the building, suspended above like a harbinger would make us stand up and dance with her, so she had of death, those fissures become maws. War may be terrible, her tricks to keep us from being afraid. but for a woman like Shideh there’s no horror like home. “When I think of the adults in my life at that time, I Manolha Dargis, New York Times, 6th October 2016 remember how exhausted they all looked, even as they tried to give us a happy childhood.” Now an actor in Los Angeles, Rashidi found herself re- Terror in Tehran: Under the Shadow and the examining the impact of her own past in order to portray Shideh. “I knew what was going on,” she says of the war. politics of horror “I was old enough to pick things up. But I never looked Babak Anvari’s debut Under the Shadow evokes his fear-ridden into those memories after leaving Tehran. I wanted to try childhood in Iran – and is being hailed as a horror classic. Here he and forget such things – war and revolution – so I could talks about his mother’s inspirational courage – and the nightmares get on with my life. But it was there. I never lost it, I just never dug into it. I had to do that with this movie. I had that still haunt him to go back to that time, and it was difficult.” Ever since he can remember, Babak Anvari’s nightmares have always been the same. “I wake up shouting at someone in the For all its scare tactics and creeping atmospherics, Under corner of the room,” he says. “I can feel someone there, and the Shadow is deeply humanist, and seems in awe of the I’m so convinced of it. It takes me 30 seconds to realise we’re women who were forced to live, and raise children, alone. My girlfriend is usually very patient, but I think it drives under the threat of carpet bombs and the intolerance of her crazy.” the post-revolution regime. “My brother and I have grown up being scared of everything “There’s a misconception about Iranian women,” says and anything,” says Anvari. “We’ve both grown up with night Anvari. “People think of them as oppressed, ready to be terrors, being afraid of being left alone, of being in the dark for victimised. But Iranian women always fight back. There too long.” are so many restrictions in Iranian society, but they never sit back and just accept them. Shideh was inspired by my Now 33, Anvari grew up in Iran; his was a childhood defined by mother, and the other women I knew when I was the war with Iraq and the emergent authoritarianism of the growing up. Her strength is a tribute to them.” cultural revolution. When Anvari and his brother were toddlers, their father, a doctor, would leave for mandatory It is rare to find a horror story rooted in the fears our stints on the frontline, leaving his sons in the sole care of their mothers pass on to us, that captures how trauma can, young mother, Farzaneh. from one generation to the next, visit us in the middle of the night. And how, with strength and resilience, we can “My mother came to visit me in London, and I asked her why spirit it all away. she had raised such scared boys,” says Anvari. “She confessed she felt almost constantly afraid and stressed during those months when Dad was away, and she’s convinced she Extracts from article by Tom Seymour, Guardian, 29th subconsciously passed all her fears on to us. She blames September 2016

Stafford Film Theatre at the Gatehouse www.filmsinstafford.com Spring 2017 Manchester by the Sea Tuesday 11th April 2017

Director: Kenneth Lonergan By The Sea is so absorbing is down to Lonergan’s painstaking USA 2016 / 137 mins / Cert 15 directorial style and to a superb Method-style performance Starring: Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams from the lead actor.

As Lee, Affleck doesn’t get many great soliloquies in which to Scratching out a living as a handyman, Lee is express his feelings. Much of his time on screen is spent suddenly called back to his home town on the shovelling snow, fixing blocked drains or sitting in offices, Massachusetts coast by the death of his brother listening to doctors, bosses or policemen, all invariably telling him the worst. There is nothing remotely charming about Writer-director Kenneth Lonergan specialises in studies of him. His idea of recreation is propping up a bar, drinking as grief, guilt, and bewilderment. You don’t watch his movies in much beer as he can and then slugging anyone who has the the hope of the kind of New Year cinematic pick-me-up temerity to look at him. that La La Land provides. Manchester By The Sea is in a similar Affleck plays Lee with a pained, bewildered look in his eyes. register to You Can Count On Me (2000) and his troubled 2011 There is a very telling moment early on in which a customer feature, Margaret. In his movies, he provides very closely berates him and he swears at her (“I don’t give a f*ck what focused anatomies of characters who’ve suffered extreme you do, Mrs. Olsen.”) For all his seeming aggression, his emotional trauma. Here, janitor and handyman Lee Chandler manner is fatalistic. He goes about his tasks in an efficient but (Casey Affleck) is the one who is suffering. robotic way, shunning all human contact, but we can sense The film could easily have seemed grim and foreboding in the his pain. extreme – a story of a father and husband who inadvertently Lonergan lays on the gloom. The film is set in the dead of caused a tragedy in his own family and is full both of self- winter. It is freezing, too cold even for the undertakers to loathing and of hostility towards the world. That Manchester dig into the ground to bury a body, so the corpses are left in

Stafford Film Theatre at the Gatehouse www.filmsinstafford.com Spring 2017 Manchester by the Sea continued...

the freezer. The classical music on the soundtrack adds to the the movie, after the accident which has ruined their lives, elegiac feel. The director makes as few concessions to the she is shown recoiling at his slightest touch. It’s a audience as the janitor does to his customers. If Lee receives a testament to Michelle Williams’ ability that she’s able to call, he’ll be shown listening. If he is in a car, Lonergan will film bring such complexity to her role as Randi even though him driving, staring blankly ahead. she’s only on screen for a few minutes.

The film is very matter of fact, and morbidly comic, about the Somehow, over a couple of minutes, standing on a street whole business of dying. When Lee is called back home, to behind a park, she manages us to show us her character’s Manchester-By-The-Sea, because his brother is dangerously ill, humour, fieriness, her sense of yearning and heartbreak, the doctors and nurses take him through a routine that is her vengeful feelings and her pity for Lee. clearly very long rehearsed. You’re allowed a moment with “Look, Lee, you made a horrible mistake like a million the body. If there are tears, someone will get the Kleenex. other people did last night. We’re not going to crucify There are forms to fill in, funeral arrangements to be made. you,” a friendly cop tells the suicidal Lee after the accident Affleck’s face, throughout this entire rigmarole, is a landscape which devastates his family. It’s a throwaway line but sums of suffering and plaintive, barely suppressed rage. up perfectly one of the main themes of the movie – Flashbacks are thrown into the film very briefly. Suddenly, as namely that “sh*t happens” and that when it does, the we see Lee as the devoted dad with his beloved wife Randi worst punishment is always likely to be self-inflicted. (Michelle Williams) and kids, colour and energy will flood into the frame. Lee will be shown goofing around. Geoffrey Macnab, Independent, 11th January 2017 Lonergan’s screenplay is deceptively intricate. Lee wants to be on his own but the moment he is back in his home town, it becomes apparent that he is caught up in a complicated web Credits from Sight & Sound, February 2017 of different relationships: with his brother’s flaky, alcoholic wife (an enjoyably neurotic cameo from Gretchen Mol); with old friends and, most importantly, with his brother’s teenage son, Patrick (Lucas Hedges). The biggest conflict for Lee comes when he learns his brother has appointed him as Patrick’s guardian. Taking on such a role will force him to come out of his self-protective shell.

Patrick is the opposite of Lee, a fiery, impulsive teenager who plays in a band and is one of the stars of the high school hockey team. While he is busy looking for new experiences and embracing life, Lee is the Scrooge-like figure, saying no and trying to keep the outside world at bay. For a few moments, as the focus shifts onto Patrick’s life, the film begins to resemble one of those John Hughes Brat Pack movies.

There are very funny interludes in which Patrick and his girlfriend are shown pretending to do their homework in an upstairs room when they are really trying to have sex. Patrick deals with his grief in an entirely different way to his uncle. He looks outward. He is as gregarious as Lee is solitary.

It’s typical of Lonergan’s approach that the most intense moment in the movie – the chance encounter between Lee and his now-remarried ex-wife – is so inconclusive. Earlier in

Stafford Film Theatre at the Gatehouse www.filmsinstafford.com Spring 2017 Hunt for the Wilderpeople Tuesday 25th April 2017

Director: Taika Waititi guide. New Zealand 2016 / 101 mins / Cert PG A few days into their companionship, Bella drops dead. Not Starring: Sam Neill, Julian Dennison long after she is buried, Hector states that he isn’t going to take care of Ricky in Bella’s place, but wait for child services to come within a few days and put Ricky into government Defiant city kid Ricky goes on the run in the New care. This causes Ricky to run away into the forest—for real, Zealand bush with his cantankerous foster carer this time—with a dog he named Tupac in tow. Hector eventually catches up with Ricky, but doesn’t get him back Uncle Hec in this delightful comedy home in time for the government's visit. When the child service agent thinks that Ricky has been kidnapped by Hector, Hunt for the Wilderpeople is the type of film that Hunt for the Wilderpeople becomes a wacky homeward journey makes comedy look easy, a well-oiled machine that for the two, albeit being pursued by the military, police, and bounds back and forth from big laughs to heartbreak even a gaggle of hunters, while becoming the focus of a and back again. One of Sundance 2016's most guaranteed nationwide media sensation. Waititi nicely expands the story hits, it's an adventure of storytelling itself. to such engaging ridiculousness with a fast pace and a lively, youthful imagination. In the film directed by the infuriatingly talented New Zealander, Taika Waititi, Julian Dennison plays pre-teen Always with a charm or surprise up its sleeve, Waititi’s film Ricky Baker, a chubby thug-culture-loving hoodlum brought wins its viewers over from the start, even if it does borrow to the New Zealand boonies to be set straight by loving from the overall charisma that made Pixar’s Up such a matriarch Aunty Bella (an immediately endearing Rima Te dramatically thorough journey. The film certainly has the Wiata) and her curmudgeonly husband Hector (Sam Neill). hyper, imaginative young kid in Ricky (whose facial reactions Though Ricky initially refuses to be happy under their watch, can get some huge laughs), and the grumpy old man dealing (trying to run away the first night, but passing out from with his own place in the world, now that his loved one is exhaustion minutes into the journey), he does come around gone. As the latter, Neill is a great straight man to a kid who to like her. She respects his angst with a dry wit, and inspires talks in slang; in moments the film earns later, Neill also within him a sense of adventure, especially that which can be presents a depth to which he needed Aunty Bella for his own found beyond self-isolation, although requiring the proper life redirection. Like in his own 2010 film Boy (of which Hunt

Stafford Film Theatre at the Gatehouse www.filmsinstafford.com Spring 2017 Hunt for the Wilderpeople continued...

plays like it's in the same universe of good spirits on emotional water bottle she sticks in his bed every night. adventures), Waititii proves here to be very skilled at mining the However, no sooner has he accepted her as his new "auntie" — and received a dog from her that he dubs empathy that binds the inner comedy and drama of seemingly "Tupac" — than she dies, leaving him alone with regular people. scruffy, surly Hec, desperate to avoid re-entering the The business of comedy within Hunt for the Wilderpeople is foster system. immediate, breathless. Waititi knows funny like a reflex, not Ricky fakes his own death and flees into the bush, and something that many other filmmakers, who have made far more he and Hec, considered fugitives, soon become national news items (complete with Hec slandered as a films than him, could ever claim. The film expresses this magnificent "pervert"). Much hunting, chasing, bickering, and touch through a prevalent precision to its assembly: just as the bonding ensues, and while Waititi's tale (based on movie separates itself into chapters, one has to imagine that Waititi Barry Crumps's novel Wild Pork and Watercress) is has a complete, piece-by-piece vision of the story, regarding each destined for an upbeat ending, the path it charts to goofy cut, each smash zoom into a close-up, every fast montage that conclusion is uniquely strange, told with crossfades, off-kilter compositions, random fantasy that further enlivens its animated dialogue (such as when Ricky’s sequences, deadpan edits, and a cheeky Eighties-style offenses are listed/presented). Even when the movie bungles one of synth score. The picturesque material becomes its late additions (a “bush man” in the third act), it isn’t the downright dreamlike. filmmaking failing with its exact beats or general skill, but its sense Neil proves compellingly gruff as a reluctant father of humor just briefly overstepping its cartoonish impulses. figure, though it's the trash-talking, family-craving ten- year-old Dennison who steals the show, exuding a Though Waititi hails from New Zealand, Sundance likes to claim wacko, wounded attitude rooted in Ricky's backwoods him as their own, and rightly so. Each of the former comedian’s Rambo-Scarface–Mad Max reveries. Hunt for the films (Eagle vs. Shark, Boy, What We Do in the Shadows) have played Wilderpeople elevates its sentimental formula through the fest, many of them worked on at the institution's workshops. weird, wonderful personality, plus amusing one-liners To no small feat, Waititi may have been schooled during an indie from not only its leads but a paranoid psycho (Rhys Darby) and an odd pastor (Waititi, delivering the filmmaking era that thrived on regurgitating Wes Anderson-brand funniest funeral sermon in recent memory). stylization, but he has been able to build out with similar aesthetic tools to a style that is truly and warmly his own. Nick Schager, Village Voice, 20th April 2016 After Sundance, Waititi is essentially off to direct Thor: Ragnarok. It’s not certain as which parts of his resume won him the gig, but I imagine his continuously precise and heartfelt vision of big entertainment didn’t hurt. Here’s hoping that Marvel lets him run wild. Nick Allen, rogerebert.com, 24th January 2016

From the Village Voice

One of the nicest surprises at this year's Tribeca Film Festival — at

least, if you're not familiar with New Zealand director Taika from Credits Waititi (soon to direct Marvel's Thor: Ragnarok) — has been Hunt for the Wilderpeople, an alternately conventional and peculiar feature that plays out like a Kiwi variation on a Wes Anderson fable. Reminiscent of Rushmore and Moonrise Kingdom, Waititi's

Sight & Sound & Sight follow-up to last year's vampire-reality-show comedy What We Do in the Shadows is a deranged coming-of-age adventure about a young delinquent prone to expressing himself via haiku. Ricky (Julian Dennison), an overweight foster kid with thug-life

aspirations, is compelled by child protective services' Paula (Rachel 2016 July , House) to live with cheery farmer Bella (Rima Te Wiata) and her gruff husband, Hec (Sam Neill) — Hec first appears carrying a hog on his back as Paula's cop escort remarks, "He's giving that pig a piggyback!" Ricky quickly warms to Bella, thanks partly to the hot-

Stafford Film Theatre at the Gatehouse www.filmsinstafford.com Spring 2017 Graduation Tuesday 9th May 2017

Director: Cristian Mungiu Romeo, who would do anything to deliver his daughter to a Romania 2016 / 127 mins / Cert TBC / Subtitled better life abroad, free of the perils of corruption and poverty that plague modern Romania. Finding that the Starring: Adrian Titieni, Maria Dragus bureaucracy has no empathy for his daughter's situation, Romeo makes a Faustian bargain. A doctor attempts to help his daughter pass a life- NFS: This film has many layers—from guilt to corruption to parenting to disillusionment in life and changing school exam in an intelligent commentary in love. How did all of the elements come together in on injustices in Romanian society the writing process? Cristian Mungiu: I knew I wanted to do something not so Cristian Mungiu explains how he "respects reality" in much about corruption, but about the way in which his narrative films—but that fiction is more fair than corruption influences you on a very personal level. I knew I documentary. wanted to do something about education. I saw a lot of articles about both those things because I read a lot of press. Cristian Mungiu's Palme d'Or-winning drama 4 Months, 3 I started asking myself if there is not a connection between Weeks, and 2 Days is one of the most harrowing films in these two things in society. [In Romania,] we have a habit of recent memory. About a woman seeking an illegal abortion in educating children the same way we were educated. This, if Communist Romania, the film cemented a cinematic truth: it doesn't encourage, then at least won't stop corruption. when you depict unflinching reality onscreen, audiences can't I thought a lot about parenting because I have children look away. myself. I feel a great responsibility as a parent, especially because I live in a society that is not perfectly balanced. It's Mungiu's latest film, Graduation, is less gut-wrenching but just not the same kind of education for children if you prepare as morally complex. When a Romanian high schooler is them to be survivors in the unbalanced society, or if you sexually assaulted right before her most important final exam, think that they will go someplace else [to escape it]. her mediocre test scores jeopardize a scholarship to Cambridge. But no one is as distraught as the girl's father, Then I really wanted to make a portrait of my age.... I see

Stafford Film Theatre at the Gatehouse www.filmsinstafford.com Spring 2017 Graduation continued...

that people are very depressed, and I was wondering why. Is it things. I think the film speaks also about the individual because their expectations were very high? I thought of a solution versus collective solution in society today. portrait of this guy reaching this age, looking back, glancing NFS: Like your main character, most people make forwards, and asking, "Okay, as a result of all the decisions decisions that will impact their immediate future that I have made, what am I going to do next?" without considering the more abstract implications. I found a way of putting these ideas together through some Mungiu: But this is what people do. Everybody wants the short stories that I read in the press. I started designing the best for their children. You want your children to be happy screenplay; I wrote five different developments of in this life, not some other time. Especially if you decided to relationships that he's having with his mother, his wife, his make a sacrifice about your life, you don't want your children daughter, his mistress, and his friend, and then I started to make the same kind of sacrifice. It may be selfish, but it's putting them together and blending everything. It's a the way things are, and it's very difficult to judge. complicated screenplay. People understand that, even if it's somebody else's story onscreen, the film speaks a lot about NFS: I'm not a parent myself, but I can imagine how them. it must be to have a child who really makes you look at yourself in a way that nobody else ever did or NFS: Yes, and so much of this film is about characters could. neglecting to look at themselves in the mirror. Mungiu: Making a child is the only thing that changes your life Mungiu: It is. I think that if I look back to my films, I challenge completely and for good. When it comes to your child, you people to look at things that they don't want to recognize or put everything aside. But the story is about a parent for acknowledge about themselves. This is also the case here. It's whom it was really important to try and educate this child a lot about this need of, first of all, accepting the truth about outside of compromise. Because he understood the yourself before hoping that you might change anything. Before [consequences] of compromise in his life. Unfortunately, you you do this, you know it could be painful, but this is it. You don't get this perspective when you're 18. You need the are who you are. It's just that it's very difficult to accept. distance. When you understand, it's too late already; there's We say so many lies in our life. We pretend to be somebody nothing you can do. You understand that you lost your else and to have this better image of ourselves, and sometimes freedom the moment when you compromised for the first people that lie a lot start believing what they say about time. The only thing you can do is to try to protect your themselves. It's very strange. child from this path in life. Is this naïve? Is this possible? I don't know. NFS: It's very scary. In the end, I hope that I'm not being judgmental with any the Mungiu: It's very scary, but this is what I see. This is happening characters in the film. Because it's really difficult to say. What in reality. I like to do in cinema is to preserve the complexity and We had this funny incident when I was casting the actors. It ambiguity that I see in life. Things don't come with an was difficult for me to find [the main character]. I found some interpretation. They just happen. All decisions that we make small actor in a small theater with a very good face, sent him a are the result of a lot of impulses which can be very murky few pages. The guy got back to me saying, "I don't want this and unclear. It's not like in mainstream cinema, when the part. I would never be so manipulative as this guy." childhood trauma explains everything. That's very funny to me. "Funny," I thought, "coming from an actor." People cover shit under a pile of words. We can always find an excuse and a NFS: In life, the context isn't always delivered to you. motivation. It's true for these people in the film—they all claim You have to create it—fill in the blanks. to act [corrupt] in the name of helping. Mungiu: Yes, and people don't know precisely why they When you notice that your society is not fair, you feel acted like that, or why they decided [something]. disappointed. It's not fair when you feel that it's not based on merit. This is why so many people send their children away instead of fighting back. Fighting back is easy to encourage, but Extracts from interview with Cristian Mungiu by Emily is very difficult to do, because it takes a long time, it's a lot of Buder, nofilmschool.com, 17th October 2016 energy, and people just feel they are too small to change

THANK YOU FOR READING, SEE YOU IN THE AUTUMN!

Stafford Film Theatre at the Gatehouse www.filmsinstafford.com Spring 2017