Feature-length Films
Departures
Showtime: Saturday, January 16, 2010, 2:00pm
Director: Yojiro Takita
Original Title: Okuribito
Country: Japan
Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki), a devoted cellist in an orchestra that has just been dissolved, is suddenly left without a job. Daigo decides to move back to his old hometown with his wife to look for work and start over. He answers a classified ad entitled "Departures" thinking it is an advertisement for a travel agency, only to discover that the job is actually for a "Nokanshi" or "encoffineer," a funeral professional who prepares deceased bodies for burial and entry into the next life.
While his wife and others despise the job, Daigo takes a certain pride in his work and begins to perfect the art of "Nokanshi," acting as a gentle gatekeeper between life and death, between the departed and the family of the departed.
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Fraulein
Showtime: Sunday, January 17, 2010, 3:00pm
Director: Andrea Staka
Original Title: Das Fräulein
Country: Germany
Ruža left Belgrade more than 25 years ago to seek a new life in Zurich. Now in her fifties, she has completely detached herself from the past. She owns a cafeteria and maintains an orderly, joyless existence. Mila, a waitress there, is a good-humored Croatian woman who also emigrated decades ago, but, unlike Ruža, she dreams of returning to a house on the Croatian coast. Both of them receive a jolt when Ana, a young, itinerant woman who has fled Sarajevo, breezes into the cafeteria looking for work. Ruža hires her but is annoyed by Ana's impulsive and spirited efforts to inject life into the cafeteria. Gradually the acrimony will dissipate, as Ana, who hides a tragic secret under her passionate spirit, begins to thaw Ruža's chill, and their relationship will change both women in ways they never anticipated.
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Kabei: Our Mother
Showtime: Sunday, January 17, 2010, 7:00pm
Director: Yoji Yamada
Country: Japan
Veteran Japanese filmmaker Yoji Yamada's 80th feature film concerns a mother living in 1940s-era Tokyo who is forced to care for her two daughters alone after her husband is jailed for expressing reformist views on the Japanese invasion of China. Professor Shigeru Nogami (Mitsugoro Bando) is an outspoken man with some particularly unpopular political views, and for his role in speaking out against the Japanese invasion of China he is promptly jailed. In the wake of his imprisonment, Professor Nogami's devoted wife, Kayo (aka Kabei, played by Sayuri Yoshinaga), is suddenly relegated to the status of single mother. As Kayo does the best to care for the couple's two young daughters, her stern policeman father (Umenosuke Nakamura) proves little help. Thankfully for Kayo and the two children, the people of the neighborhood are more concerned with the well-being of her family than her husband's political views. One of the professor's former students in particular, the clumsy but well-meaning Yamasaki (Tadanobu Asano), does his best to ensure that the Nogami family is properly cared for until the day his mentor can return. - Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
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Lemon Tree
Showtime: Monday, January 18, 2010, 2:00pm
Director: Eran Riklis
Original Title: Etz Limon
Country: Israel
Salma, a Palestinian widow - living there for decades - , has to stand up against her new neighbor, the Israeli Defense Minister, when he moves into his new house opposite her lemon grove, on the green line border between Israel and the West Bank. The Israeli security forces are quick to declare that Salma's trees pose a threat to the Ministers safety and issue orders to uproot them. Together with Ziad Daud, a young Palestinian lawyer, Salma goes all the way to the Israeli Supreme Court to try and save her trees. Her struggle raises the interest of Mira Navon, the Defense ministers wife, trapped in her new home and in an unhappy life. Despite their differences and the borders between them the two women develop an invisible bond, while forbidden ties grow stronger between Salma and Ziad. Salmas legal and personal journey lead her deep into the complex, dark and sometimes funny chaos of the ongoing struggle in the Middle East, in which all players find themselves alone in their struggle to survive. As usual the Palestinian cause is dismissed, the movie ends with the Israeli wife moving out (obviously divorcing her husband), a tall concrete wall built between between Salma's land and the Israeli Minister's home, implying that they found an arrangement... but a final camera shot let us see that the trees have been cut off.
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Munyurangabo
Showtime: Saturday, January 16, 2010, 10:00am
Director: Lee Isaac Chung
Country: Rwanda
After stealing a machete from a market in Kigali, Munyurangabo and his friend, Sangwa, leave the city on a journey tied to their pasts. Munyurangabo wants justice for his parents who were killed in the genocide, and Sangwa wants to visit the home he deserted years ago. Though they plan to visit Sangwa's home for just a few hours, the boys stay for several days. From two separate ethnic groups, their friendship is tested when Sangwa's wary parents disapprove of Munyurangabo, warning that "Hutus and Tutsis are supposed to be enemies."
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Rain
Showtime: Monday, January 18, 2010, 7:00pm
Director: Maria Govan
Country: Bahamas
Rain is a spirited fourteen-year old who, after the death of her grandmother (Irma P. Hall), forgoes the sheltered, simple life of her home on Ragged Island to seek out her estranged mother in the big city of Nassau. Her dreams of a loving reconciliation are quickly shattered when she meets Glory (Nicki Micheaux), a scarred, proud, guarded woman bearing no resemblance to the mother she had hoped for. Glory's self destructive lifestyle, diminished by drug abuse and prostitution, is rudely awakened by the imminent role of Motherhood.
Confronted by unforseeable trials, Rain's passion for running and deeply rooted spirit brings two allies into her life: an insightful and inspiring track coach and a charming, rebellious teenage neighbor. And in time, Rain's spirit and talent take her to unimaginable heights.
Shot in a style that combines gritty realism, a bold and unforgettable color palette, soulful Bahamian music, and the use of local actors alongside seasoned pros, Rain takes us on a journey into the heart of a child, into the pulse of a country and the spirit of its people.
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Ramchand Pakistani
Showtime: Monday, January 18, 2010, 10:00am
Director: Mehreen Jabbar
Country: Pakistan
Ramchand Pakistani is derived from a true story concerning the accidental crossing of the Pakistan-Indian border during a period (June 2002) of extreme, war-like tension between the two countries by two members of a Pakistani Hindu family belonging to the 'untouchable' (Dalit) caste, and the extraordinary consequences of this unintended action upon the lives of a woman, a man, and their son.
The singular theme of the film is how a child from Pakistan aged eight years learns to cope with the trauma of forced separation from his mother while being held prisoner, along with his father in the jail of a country i.e. India, which is hostile to his own, while on the other side of the border, the wife-mother, devastated by their sudden disappearance builds a new chapter of her life, by her solitary struggle for sheer survival.
The film portrays the lives of a family that is at the bottom of a discriminatory religious ladder and an insensitive social system, which is nevertheless tolerant, inclusive and pluralist. The irony is compounded by the fact that such a family becomes hostage to the acrimonious political relationship between two neighbor-states poised on the brink of war.
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The Empty Nest
Showtime: Saturday, January 16, 2010, 7:00pm
Director: Daniel Burman
Original Title: El Nido Vacío
Country: Argentina
This film explores the emptiness experienced when children grow up and leave the family home, suddenly revealing the cracks in a marriage. Leonardo, a successful if somewhat tedious author, behaves like a man on the verge of a middle-age crisis, indulgent towards his neurosis and phobic towards the changes taking place around him. Unlike his wife, Martha, who launches herself into any activity that will take her mind off things, Leonardo prefers introversion. Only when he accepts his situation, including a son-in-law with his own literary ambitions, a daughter who settles in Israel and a wife with an unexpected enthusiasm for social life, can Leonardo find true happiness.
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The Necessities of Life
Showtime: Friday, January 15, 2010, 7:30pm
Directed by: Benoit Pilon
Country: Canada
In 1952, an Inuit hunter named Tivii (Natar Ungalaaq, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner), stricken with tuberculosis, leaves his northern home and family to recuperate in a sanitarium near Quebec City. Uprooted, far from his land and his loved ones, unable to speak French and faced with a completely alien world, Tivii becomes despondent. He refuses to eat and expresses a wish to die. He finds his fading will to live suddenly reinvigorated after his nurse, Carole (Éveline Gélinas), arranges for another young Inuit to be transferred to the same hospital. The boy, an orphan named Kaki (Paul-André Brasseur), is also sick, but he has experience with both worlds and over time he manages to help Tivii grow more comfortable with his surroundings. In exchange for Kaki's kindness, Tivii educates his newfound friend about the ways of the land and the Inuit people. By sharing his culture with Kaki and opening it up to others, Tivii rediscovers his pride and energy. Ultimately he also rediscovers hope through a plan to adopt Kaki, bring him home and make him part of his family. ~ Vancity Theatre website
Additional Information
- IMDB
- Canadians choose 'Life' for Oscars (Variety News)
- Interview with Benoit Pilon (Beyond Robson Blog)
- Film Summary (Vancity Theatre)
The Window
Showtime: Sunday, January 17, 2010, 1:00pm
Director: Carlos Sorín
Original Title: La ventana
Country: Argentina
It is a significant day for 80 year old Antonio. After an absence of many years, his estranged son is coming to visit. All must be perfect. There will be a toast with a very special champagne; an embrace; warm words that may finally bridge the gap between them… But before, Antonio must wait. Bedridden, he looks out his window at the Patagonian landscape and sees light and life, the past and the present, while sensing the future. He decides to secretly leave the house, unseen by his faithful caretakers, to take what might be a last walk in his fields, breathing the air, treading the earth, inhaling the scent of the land that had been his life. What could otherwise seem like insignificant memories or moments in one's life, take a special, beautiful meaning and weight in this poetic, humanistic film. ~ filmmovement.com