RT118 Giveaways
Platform Papers, No 37: Not at a Cinema Near You
Tina Kaufman believes that in this provocative Platform Paper, “Lauren Carroll Harris has made a timely and important contribution to the ongoing and increasingly necessary debate about old and new film distribution. As she says, there is a ‘pressing need to re-think distribution as the vital way in which we conceive and reach out to our audience—and an urgent problem requiring a solution for Australian filmmakers’” (see article). Harris’ essay also includes a concise account of the troubled history of film distribution in Australia.
5 copies courtesy of Currency House
The Act of Killing, DVD
Of this chilling documentary Dan Edwards writes: “A line of dancing girls sashays from the mouth of a giant fish, the scene shot in such lurid tropical colours it appears poised on the edge of a nightmare. Welcome to the make-believe world of Indonesia’s death squads, built on the corpses of a million of their compatriots. Joshua Oppenheimer’s extraordinary new film The Act of Killing—‘a documentary of the imagination’—renders this imaginary world on screen, as the killers who ushered in Indonesia’s ‘New Order’ in 1965 enact their perspective on one of the largest massacres in history.” Read Dan Edwards’ interview with the filmmaker in RT117.
5 copies courtesy of Madman Entertainment
Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer
We’ve been waiting impatiently to see this British-Russian documentary by Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin to learn more about the case of Nadia (Nadezhda Tolokonnikova), Katia (Ekaterina Samutsevich) and Masha (Maria Alyokhina), members of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot who were sentenced to two years in a labour camp after performing a satirical rock song in Moscow’s main cathedral. One of them was freed. Although Pussy Riot were not interviewed for the film, family members were and the court proceedings are followed in illuminating if depressing detail. Russia’s ‘state capitalism’ has little room for criticism, let alone art as protest.
5 copies courtesy of Madman Entertainment
Frances Ha, DVD
If you’re a fan of GIRLS you’ll especially appreciate this film about someone a little bit older—a woman with an evaporating dance career and a faltering social life. It’s a frank and funny account of the superficially engaging but often garrulous Frances Ha (Greta Gerwig, who appeared in Greenberg and To Rome with Love) and her attempts to pursue the creative life in New York while trying to stay afloat economically and emotionally. Shot in luminous black and white and directed by Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale), this is an enjoyable comic fable, almost in the manner of Eric Rhomer—Frances even flies to Paris on a badly misjudged whim.
5 copies courtesy of Transmission Films
RealTime issue #118 Dec-Jan 2013 pg. 48
