Under the directorship of Ludi Kraus, the venue has grown from one screen to a microplex of four screens with the recent addition of two more screens in the nearby Lifestyles on Kloof Centre in Gardens.
A recent innovation was THE AFRICAN SCREEN, supported by The National Film & Video Foundation and the Royal Netherlands Embassy to provide a space for the screening of local product and film from the African continent as a whole.
Now something new. THE ALTERNATIVE SCREEN
In collaboration with programmers TREVOR STEELE TAYLOR (Cape Town Film Festival and Grahamstown Festival) and ANDREA PIENAAR, THE ALTERNATIVE SCREEN opened on Friday 27th May with the screening of the most expensive Dutch film ever, Jeroen Krabbe's theological, metaphysical, epic masterpiece THE DISCOVERY OF HEAVEN and the directorial debut of Arthur Miller's daughter Rebecca's beautifully realised portrait of three women's lives PERSONAL VELOCITY starring Kyra Sedgwick, Parker Posey and Fairuza Balk.
Every week another film will begin at THE ALTERNATIVE SCREEN. On Friday June 3rd CHRISTINA RICCI strips herself naked, body and soul for PROZAC NATION, adapted from the gut-wrenching biography by Elizabeth Wurzal, directed by Swede Erik Skoldberg and produced by Ricci herself.
The future holds much more in store: retrospectives of South Africa's horror-movie maestro RICHARD STANLEY, Britain's magician/filmmaker PETER WHITEHEAD and Andy Warhol acolyte PAUL MORRISSEY. Also coming are some rare delights from Spanish anarchists LUIS BUNUEL and JESUS FRANCO.
Keep tuned!
Also await news of the next innovation from the Labia (in collaboration with Taylor and Pienaar) THE SECRET CINEMA!
Opening: FRIDAY 10th JUNE
PROZAC NATION
USA/Germany 2001/99 mins/
Christina Ricci, Anne Heche, Jessica Lange, Jason Biggs, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers directed by Erik Skjoldbjaerg Based on Elizabeth Wurtzel?s zeitgeist 90s novel of prescription-drug dependence, the film is a clearly personal project for co-producer and actress Christina Ricci. Wurtzel?s real-life meteoric rise from brilliant Harvard student to acclaimed rock music journalist for the magazine Rolling Stone runs parallel to her clinical depression, psychiatric interludes and super dependence to the `happy? drug prozac. Christina Ricci gives a riveting and fearless performance as Wurtzel which is quite extraordinary from an actress barely herself out of her teens. Jessica Lange is terrifying as her histrionic, manipulative mother and Anne Heche is coldly efficient as the psychiatrist who introduces her to the infamous prozac. In a chilling voice over, Wurtzel/Ricci speaks of a vision of America as a nation medicated out of reality. Norwegian director Skjoldbjaerg (Insomnia) controls the structure with precision.
LEVITY
USA 2003/100 mins
Billy Bob Thornton, Morgan Freeman, Holly Hunter, Kirsten
Dunst
directed by Ed Solomon
The film that opened the 2003 Sundance Film Festival.
Thornton plays a man who is free from prison after serving
19 years for killing a teenager during an attempted
robbery. With long white hair and a ghostly demeanour he
is, by his own choosing, neither of this world nor the
next. Searching for redemption he follows an 11th century
book on the road to making amends. The first step is acknowledgement. The second is remorse. The third is making right with one?s neighbour. The fourth is to make right with God but the fifth is the hardest for it involves being in the same situation in which you sinned in the first place. A profoundly religious film it harks back to a similar tale of religious challange ( in which Thornton also starred) - Robert Duvall?s `The Apostle?. Poetic and mystical, the film is in musical terms like a song by Johnny Cash or Leonard Cohen heard while looking at a painting by Piero della Francesca.
Posted on Tuesday 31 May 2005
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