The 2013-14 Season: Part 1: September-November 2013
September 9 RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST
A boldly dramatic adaptation of Mohsin Hamid’s bestselling novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a thoughtful political drama wrapped in a cracking thriller, boasting a star-studded cast lead by Kiefer Sutherland (Melancholia, television’s 24), Liev Schreiber (Goon, Taking Woodstock) and Kate Hudson (Nine, Le Divorce). Mixing romance and tragedy with the classic arc of ambition thwarted, director Mira Nair (The Namesake, Monsoon Wedding) chronicles the slow transformation of a young Pakistani man (Riz Ahmed,
Trishna, Four Lions), whose pursuit of corporate success on Wall Street leads him on a
strange path back to the world he left behind.
At an outdoor café in Lahore in 2011, a Pakistani man named Changez (Ahmed) tells Bobby (Schreiber), an American journalist, about his experiences in the United States. Flash back ten years and we find a younger Changez, fresh from Princeton, seeking fortune and glory on Wall Street. The American Dream seems well within his grasp, complete with a smart and gorgeous artist girlfriend, Erica (Hudson). But when the Twin Towers are attacked, a cultural divide slowly begins to crack open between Changez and Erica. (“How does that happen?” Erica asks of the terrorist attacks. “What makes you think I’d know?” he answers.) Changez’s dream soon begins to turn into a nightmare: profiled, wrongfully arrested, strip-searched and interrogated, he is transformed from a well-educated, upwardly mobile businessman into a scapegoat and perceived enemy. With time, he begins to hear the call of his homeland.
Ahmed gives a magnificently textured performance as the aptly named Changez, whose attitude evolves from an eager willingness to assimilate to a deep dejection with his adopted country. Ahmed and his castmates benefit from Nair’s assured direction and a superb script from Ami Boghani, William Wheeler and Hamid. Brought to the screen with both passion and insight—and brimming with profound, global implications—The Reluctant Fundamentalist thrills with the thought-provoking and timely issues it raises.
September 23 LOVE IS ALL YOU NEED
Cast: Pierce Brosnan, Trine Dyrholm, Paprika Steen
Year: 2012
Runtime: 110 minutes
Country: Denmark
Language: English, Danish with English subtitles
Rating: 14A
Pierce Brosnan stars in this cross-cultural romantic comedy from Academy Awardwinning Danish director Susanne Bier (In a Better World, After the Wedding), which screened as a Special Presentation at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival®.
Returning from her final, successful chemotherapy treatment, Ida (Trine Dyrholm,In a Better World, The Celebration) arrives home only to find her boorish husband Leif (Kim Bodnia, In a Better World, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen) in a compromising position with a ditzy co-worker (Christiane Schaumburg-Müller). Stricken, she takes off to Sorrento alone to attend the wedding of her daughter Astrid (Molly Blixt Egelind) to Patrick (Sebastian Jessen) in a beautiful Italian villa, where the lemon groves and cypress trees form the perfect backdrop for a young couple who appear to be blissfully in love. Unexpectedly, Leif arrives with his new bimbo paramour in tow, leading Ida to give her husband a piece of her mind — and a face full of champagne. This display does little to impress Patrick’s no-nonsense father Philip (Brosnan, The Ghost Writer, Married Life), a dashing but brooding widower who seems less than pleased with his life, his son, and his soon-to-be in-laws. When the young couple’s future happiness is suddenly jeopardized, Ida and Philip are brought together to try to set things right — and find that life might have a second chance in store for them as well.
Bier’s films have always been marked by their outstanding ensemble casts, andLove Is All You Need is no exception. Dyrholm invests Ida with a nervous energy (she’s constantly adjusting her post-chemo wig) as well as warmth and humour. Brosnan delivers a delightful straight-man performance as the staid Phillip, while Paprika Steen is simply uproarious as Philip’s lustful sister-in-law. Hilarious, touching and inspiring, Love Is All You Need is a rousing toast to those who have the courage to transform their lives.
October 7 KON TIKI
Director: Joachim Roenning, Espen Sandberg
Cast: Pål Sverre Hagen, Anders Baasmo Christiansen, Gustaf Skarsgård |
Year: 2012
Runtime: 118 minutes
Country: UK, Norway, Denmark, Germany
Language: Norwegian, English, French, Swedish (English subtitles)
Returning from her final, successful chemotherapy treatment, Ida (Trine Dyrholm,In a Better World, The Celebration) arrives home only to find her boorish husband Leif (Kim Bodnia, In a Better World, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen) in a compromising position with a ditzy co-worker (Christiane Schaumburg-Müller). Stricken, she takes off to Sorrento alone to attend the wedding of her daughter Astrid (Molly Blixt Egelind) to Patrick (Sebastian Jessen) in a beautiful Italian villa, where the lemon groves and cypress trees form the perfect backdrop for a young couple who appear to be blissfully in love. Unexpectedly, Leif arrives with his new bimbo paramour in tow, leading Ida to give her husband a piece of her mind — and a face full of champagne. This display does little to impress Patrick’s no-nonsense father Philip (Brosnan, The Ghost Writer, Married Life), a dashing but brooding widower who seems less than pleased with his life, his son, and his soon-to-be in-laws. When the young couple’s future happiness is suddenly jeopardized, Ida and Philip are brought together to try to set things right — and find that life might have a second chance in store for them as well.
Bier’s films have always been marked by their outstanding ensemble casts, andLove Is All You Need is no exception. Dyrholm invests Ida with a nervous energy (she’s constantly adjusting her post-chemo wig) as well as warmth and humour. Brosnan delivers a delightful straight-man performance as the staid Phillip, while Paprika Steen is simply uproarious as Philip’s lustful sister-in-law. Hilarious, touching and inspiring, Love Is All You Need is a rousing toast to those who have the courage to transform their lives.
October 7 KON TIKI
Director: Joachim Roenning, Espen Sandberg
Cast: Pål Sverre Hagen, Anders Baasmo Christiansen, Gustaf Skarsgård |
Year: 2012
Runtime: 118 minutes
Country: UK, Norway, Denmark, Germany
Language: Norwegian, English, French, Swedish (English subtitles)
Rating: PG
From the directors of the World War II resistance epic Max Manus — which became Norway's biggest hit at the domestic box office and played as a Gala at the Festival in 2009 — the stirring epic Kon-Tiki recounts one of the great real-life adventures of the twentieth century. In 1947, explorer and ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl began an 8,000-kilometre voyage across the Pacific on a balsa wood raft with a rather motley and inexperienced crew, in a dangerous attempt to prove his theory that Polynesia was populated by settlers from South America, rather than Asia as widely assumed by the scientific community. While such films as Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo and Jan Troell's The Flight of the Eagle have depicted similar expeditions as grand follies undertaken by half-crazed visionaries, Kon-Tiki renders Heyerdahl's quest in the heroic mold of a David Lean epic.
A risk-taker since childhood, Heyerdahl (Pål Sverre Hagen) is one of the last examples of the scientist as adventurer. Unable to find a publisher to print his thesis about the migration of early civilizations — much of it devised during his stay on Fatu Hiva, an island in the Marquesas — he hatches his plan to cross the Pacific on raft, just like the ancient Incas before him. Unshakeable in his determination, Heyerdahl simply refuses to give up — despite the fact that the scientific community openly mocks him, he can't find funding for the voyage, his first recruit for the raft's crew is a somewhat stocky refrigerator salesman, and he himself can't actually swim.
A bold and inspiring epic, Kon-Tiki features extraordinary photography by Geir Hartly Andreassen (who also shot Max Manus). The visuals are suffused with a palpable sense of awe at the beauty of the natural world; seldom has a film made the night sky look so full of possibility or the ocean surface seem so teeming with life. The episodes when the crew must deal with sudden thunderstorms, a shark attack, and an encounter with a playful whale that escalates into a near catastrophe, are breathtakingly executed. Kon-Tiki is one of those rare movies that restores our sense of wonder.
October 21: Hannah Arendt
Director: Margarethe von Trotta
Cast: Barbara Sukowa, Janet McTeer, Axel Milberg, Klaus Pohl
Year: 2012
Runtime: 113 minutes
Country: Germany
Language: German with English subtitles
A risk-taker since childhood, Heyerdahl (Pål Sverre Hagen) is one of the last examples of the scientist as adventurer. Unable to find a publisher to print his thesis about the migration of early civilizations — much of it devised during his stay on Fatu Hiva, an island in the Marquesas — he hatches his plan to cross the Pacific on raft, just like the ancient Incas before him. Unshakeable in his determination, Heyerdahl simply refuses to give up — despite the fact that the scientific community openly mocks him, he can't find funding for the voyage, his first recruit for the raft's crew is a somewhat stocky refrigerator salesman, and he himself can't actually swim.
A bold and inspiring epic, Kon-Tiki features extraordinary photography by Geir Hartly Andreassen (who also shot Max Manus). The visuals are suffused with a palpable sense of awe at the beauty of the natural world; seldom has a film made the night sky look so full of possibility or the ocean surface seem so teeming with life. The episodes when the crew must deal with sudden thunderstorms, a shark attack, and an encounter with a playful whale that escalates into a near catastrophe, are breathtakingly executed. Kon-Tiki is one of those rare movies that restores our sense of wonder.
October 21: Hannah Arendt
Director: Margarethe von Trotta
Cast: Barbara Sukowa, Janet McTeer, Axel Milberg, Klaus Pohl
Year: 2012
Runtime: 113 minutes
Country: Germany
Language: German with English subtitles
German director Margarethe von Trotta has long been fascinated by history’s great women, from twelfth-century Christian mystic Hildegard von Bingen to Marxist firebrand Rosa Luxemburg. With her newest film, she tackles a crucial episode in the life of another great twentieth-century icon: the German-Jewish philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt, as magnificently incarnated by von Trotta’s frequent collaborator, the great Barbara Sukowa (Vision, Rosa Luxemburg).
A former prize pupil (and lover) of philosopher Martin Heidegger, Arendt was already famous in academic circles for her books The Origins of Totalitarianismand The Human Condition when she was assigned by The New Yorker in 1961 to travel to Jerusalem and cover the trial of Adolph Eichmann, one of the architects of the Nazis’genocidal “Final Solution” during World War II. Following the testimony from concentration camp survivors and the pathetic self-exonerations of Eichmann, von Trotta brilliantly dramatizes the process by which Arendt began to formulate what would be her most lasting, and controversial, contribution to contemporary political thought: the “banality of evil”—evil not as diabolical intent but as unthinking, almost offhanded ignorance of the consequences of one’s actions.
Featuring a towering performance by Sukowa, and Janet McTeer (The Woman in Black, Albert Nobbs) in a superb supporting role as her staunchest ally Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt is a stunning historical and human drama. Using footage from the actual Eichmann trial and weaving together an involving narrative that spans three countries, von Trotta turns the often invisible passion of thought into immersive, dramatic cinema.
Watch the Trailer.
November 4: Haute Cuisine
Director: Christian Vincent
Cast: Catherine Frot, Arthur Dupont, Jean d'Ormesson
Year: 2012
Runtime: 95 minutes
Country: France
Language: French
Wadjda is a 10-year-old girl living in a suburb of Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. After a fight with her friend Abdullah, a neighborhood boy she shouldn`t be playing with, Wadjda sees a beautiful green bicycle for sale. She wants the bicycle desperately so that she can beat Abdullah in a race. But Wadjda`s mother won`t allow it, fearing repercussions from a society that sees bicycles as dangerous to a girl`s virtue. So Wadjda decides to try and raise the money herself.
The Trailer
November 4: Haute Cuisine
Director: Christian Vincent
Cast: Catherine Frot, Arthur Dupont, Jean d'Ormesson
Year: 2012
Runtime: 95 minutes
Country: France
Language: French
Rating: PG
Hortense Laborie, a renowned chef from Perigord, is astonished when the President of the Republic appoints her his personal cook, responsible for creating all his meals at the Elysée Palace. Despite jealous resentment from the other kitchen staff, Hortense quickly establishes herself, thanks to her indomitable spirit. The authenticity of her cooking soon seduces the President, but the corridors of power are littered with traps.
The Trailer
November 11: Wadjda
Director: Haifaa Al-Mansour
Cast: Reem Abdullah, Waad Mohammed, Abdullrahman Al Gohani
Year: 2012
Runtime: 98 minutes
Country: Saudi Arabia
Language: Arabic with English subtitles
The Trailer
November 11: Wadjda
Director: Haifaa Al-Mansour
Cast: Reem Abdullah, Waad Mohammed, Abdullrahman Al Gohani
Year: 2012
Runtime: 98 minutes
Country: Saudi Arabia
Language: Arabic with English subtitles
Rating: PG
The first film made in Saudi Arabia
The Trailer
