MEDIA Film News August 2024
News about European films supported by the EU funding or showing in independent cinemas and cinema clubs that are part of the Europa Cinemas network. Includes news from EU initiatives such as Eurimages Cinema Fund, European Film Promotion, the European Film Awards, European Cinema Night, and the LUX Audience Award.
The Irish members of Europa Cinemas include:
- IFI, Dublin and IFI@Home
- Triskel Arts Centre, Cork
- Lighthouse Cinema, Dublin
- Palás, Galway
- Access Cinema Network of regional cinema clubs
- Volta VOD online
- MyCinema.ie is an EU-supported platform, operated by access>CINEMA Ireland, on which you can you can rent a curated selection of the best world cinema.
Two of Us | MyCinema Online
Directed by Filippo Menedhetti, this French film is a story about Nina (Barbara Sukowa) and Madeleine (Martine Chevalier) who have been secretly in love for decades. Everybody, including Madeleine’s family, thinks they are simply neighbours, sharing the top floor of their building. They come and go between their two apartments, enjoying the affection and pleasures of daily life together. When an unexpected, life-altering event turns their world upside down Madeleine's daughter (Léa Drucker) unwittingly begins to unravel their truth. Golden Globes nominated and Shortlisted for Academy Awards 2021 – Best Foreign Language Film. Supported by MEDIA's Films on the Move funding.
The Green Border | IFI@Home
Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland directs The Green Border, a critique of a humanitarian calamity that continues to unfold. Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the 2023 Venice Film Festival. In the forests that make up the 'green border' between Belarus and Poland, refugees from the Middle East and Africa are lured by government propaganda promising easy passage to the European Union. Unable to cross into Europe and unable to turn back, they find themselves trapped.
'Through the focal characters of Bashir (Jalal Altawil, a non-professional whose own migration journey informed the film), his wife Amina (Dalia Naous) and their three children, alongside characters from Afghanistan and West Africa, their ordeal is expressed with nightmarish clarity: immediately following their crossing, the Polish border guard forces them back into Belarus, assaulting, battering and manhandling them, to an extent that crosses into its own realm of human rights abuse. And then the process is recommenced by the Belarusian military.' (Excerpt from Cineuropa review by David Katz). Supported by MEDIA's Films on the Move funding strand.
IFI | The Turin Horse, 21st August
Directed by BÉLA TARR & ÁGNES HRANITZKY. The Turin Horse (2011) opens with an episode from Nietzsche’s life in which he encounters a hansom cab driver whipping his horse. Nietzsche intervenes, crying and hugging the horse. After the incident he suffers from ongoing mental illness and must be cared for by his family. The remainder of the film is a narrative of six different lives shot in black and white with long sequence shots.
'Perfect framing of the black-and-white photography, long takes, dramatic music covering even the most banal scenes and very little dialogue – all these characteristics of Tarr’s work are present in The Turin Horse. If the Hungarian auteur always shows us the world at its bleakest and most desperate, here he seems to have gone to the absolute extreme. There is not a glimpse of hope in The Turin Horse, and as Tarr said at the press conference, "Kundera wrote of the unbearable lightness of being. This film is about unbearable heaviness of life."' Cineuropa film review of The Turin Horse by Vladan Petković.
About Dry Grasses | Lighthouse Dublin
Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Longing to escape a quiet Turkish village, art teacher Samet wrestles with ideas of unfulfilled potential. Accused of inappropriate behaviour towards a young student at his school, he becomes friends with Nuray, a charismatic fellow teacher. But when her affection moves to Samet’s more affable colleague, he becomes jealous and begins to compete for her attention.
'Nuri Bilge Ceylan is an expert in the art of keeping us at a distance while drip-feeding us tiny nuggets of information that allow us to make sense of the environment and the characters in a realistic and utterly genuine tone, before abruptly plunging right to the source, into those grey areas where people’s real motivations and the most ordinary of acts take on the proportions of controversial debates on good and evil, education, the individual and the community, youth, truth and falsehood, love, activism, and so on.' Cineuropa review by Fabien Lemercier.
Queer Cinema Club: All About My Mother | Pálás Galway, 22nd August
Directed by Pedro Almodóvar and starring Penélope Cruz, Cecilia Roth, Marisa Parades, Candela Peña, Eloy Azorín, Antonia San Juan. When her only son dies on his 17th birthday, Manuela decides to travel to Barcelona to find the boy's father, a transvestite named Lola.