Official site for the award-winning Minicine film society. Dedicated to bringing you the best independent arthouse and foreign language, cult and classic cinema from around the world.
We’re just over a week away from our next Minicine at the Mills screening so we thought it was about time we announced the audience scores for last month’s event.
Back in April we screened Adrienne Shelley’s U.S. indie romantic comedy-drama, Waitress, as well as a diverse selection of short films.
First up was Free Pie, written and directed by Caleb Slain, a dark and surreal comedy about a bearer of bad news’ belief that free rhubarb pie can soften the blow. The film scored a respectable 3.05.
Yasmin Fedda’s documentary Breadmakers, which details a day in Edinburgh’s Garvald bakery and observes the working ans social relationships of its workers, scored 3.26. As did…
The music video promo for the Blur single Coffee & TV. Directed by Garth Jennings and produced by Nick Goldsmith (collectively known as Hammer & Tongs) follows a carton of milk as it goes in search of a family’s missing son – Blur guitarist Graham Coxon.
And finally our feature presentation – Waitress, about an unhappily married woman whose plans to leave her domineering husband are put in jeopardy when she falls pregnant. The film went down well with the majority of our sell out crowd and scored a solid 4.16.
Last week was the programme launch for next month’s Bradford International Film Festival (April 11-21). A programme which looks as eclectic and comprehensive as ever. What an opportune time then, to tell you more about this month’s Minicine at the Mills screening of Dance to the Spirits, directed by Ricardo Íscar, on Thursday 28th March. Former Minicine co-director Mike McKenny saw the film at BIFF two years ago:
Watching this film was such a spellbinding experience that it has been lingering in my mind since seeing it almost two years ago now. This is the beauty of such original filmmaking; it reminds you how powerful the medium of film can be. It is entirely appropriate that this particular film has had such a difficult to explain effect, akin to some form of witchcraft. Surely, as someone interested in Minicine you know the powerful, transformative effect cinema can have, embedding itself in your consciousness, staying with you years to come. Where this eerie – sublime even – effect is relevant to this film is that its very subject matter focuses on what is necessary when the easy to explain, ‘western’ medicine fails. This medicine acknowledges sides of life that conventional western science would have us believe doesn’t or cannot exist.
The result is a film that doesn’t exoticise this ‘other’ form of life. What is referred to as ‘western’ medicine in the film is not rejected, nor is it some ‘advanced’ form that ‘primitive’ people know about (how this scenario could be painted by certain narratives or less deft filmmaking). No, just like the magic of cinema comes from the smoke and mirrors of its mechanical apparatus – or its increasingly digital apparatus – these physical, pragmatic and scientific considerations have a limit when trying to understand its magical effects. The doctor at the centre of Dance to the Spirits is perfectly aware of western medicine, and frequently uses it as a first option for ‘day-world sickness’. But where it fails, where it is apparent that something more profound is going on, other tonics, medicines and practices are necessary. Such problems would be vaguely and unconvincingly explained away in ‘civilised’ society as various psychological problems, but I for one am still yet to be convinced that these issues are being cracked by contemporary practices of psychological therapy. Or even worse, are often simply evaded by prescribing an array of anti-depressants. The culture depicted in Dance to the Spirits convincingly believe that such things come from demons, spirits and other such mischievous paranormal entities. This film shows how they approach these illnesses.
Below is a summary of what I thought of the film just after seeing it, in a piece I wrote for Film&Festivals Magazine’s festivals blog at the time.
I was quite sceptical going into Dance to the Spirits due to it being Spanish produced and directed; I was worried that the film would seem condescending, invasive and exploitative, showing this community as exotic but simple in a really patronising manner. I couldn’t have been much further from the truth, as it really did feel honest and genuine; I never felt like anyone on screen was manipulated, exploited, unaware or unduly exoticised. I say unduly, as there were exotic, insightful and enlightening examples of the culture within the tribe, but only in a way to capture their identity from an inside perspective, rather than say ‘oh look at these funny people, aren’t they charming but simple’ as I had sceptically anticipated. A brief example is that a scene early in the film saw some of the villagers come back from fishing with the biggest frogs I have ever seen. I can’t recall their name, and maybe I haven’t seen enough David Attenborough documentaries, but I have never seen frogs this big; they were as big as toddlers. This very early example made explicit early on that I was seeing into a culture that was very different to one I had seen before.
The main contributing factor to its apparent honesty was the doctor, Mba Owona Pierre, with whom the film stays with most of the time. He is far removed from the often stereotyped notion of a spiritual ‘witch doctor’ or ‘sorcerer’ – terms that he openly jokes about having been referred to as. He wrote his journals in French, he had a great sense of humour and he wasn’t in any way ignorant of, or in denial of physical (western/scientific) medicine. He conceded that this medicine has its place; he often rigorously checked his patients pre-treatment, to see if they were affected by a ‘day-world sickness’ and could therefore be treated by the hospitals. If not, if they were suffering from an ‘Evu’ induced ‘night-world sickness’ then they must be cured with traditional forms of medicine. His weighted and measured approach makes the case for traditional medicine much better than a blanket damning of western scientific approaches. We all know that there are a wealth of issues that science can nowhere near adequately solve or explain.
A source that the film often unapologetically – and persuasively – singled out as a factor in the dominance of these internal demons, is city life, and the individualistic affluence and accompanying ‘dog eat dog’ nature that comes with it. The film, without explicitly saying, shows the reverse of this in the village setting, particularly in a charming scene where the villagers go fishing. Working together, singing as they work, they ingeniously build a temporary damn, empty the water out of a section, and then simply pick up the fish, crabs and whatever else is left.
To finalise the film’s balanced approach, it isn’t entirely nostalgic and in praise of this declining way of life, as the doctor explains that so many people in the village leave without paying. They will stay for their treatment and when they are better, they just leave; therefore it is partly the society’s own fault that this system is in decline.
- Mike McKenny
Tickets for Dance to the Spirits are currently available from our online box office.
So there’s still got our Minicine at the Mills screening of Ricardo Íscar’s medicine-man documentary Dance to the Spirits and our Screen Easy showing of the classic It Happened One Night to look forward to but before that we’d like to let you know about the new batch of films coming your way from the end of April.
First up we have Adrienne Shelley’s baking and baby comedy, Waitress (2007). First screened at the Sundance Film Festival this whimsical tale sees an unhappily married woman, Jenna, played by Keri Russell (TV’s Felicity) attempt win a pie baking contest and use the prize money to flee her oppressive husband’s grasp only to become pregnant and embark on an awkward relationship with the new town doctor played by everyone’s favourite nice guy, Nathan Fillion (Firefly, Two Guys and a Girl). Here’s the trailer:
Okay, now at Minicine we’ve screened dramas, thrillers, documentaries, mockumentaries and 1930′s classics. We’ve eaten cake, cookies and brownies. But you know what we’ve been missing at Minicine?
Ryan Gosling.
Calm yourselves! This May we’ll be screening The Believer (2001), written and directed by Henry Bean, a film in which Gosling portrays an Orthodox Jew who, conflicted by teachings, rejects his heritage and reinvents himself as a Neo-Nazi skinhead. When confronted with his past he is forced to again question his beliefs:
June will see us return to The Maven with our Screen Easy strand. Fritz Lang’s first sound film, M (1931), has long been regarded as a classic. Lang himself declared it his finest work. When Berlin police are unable to capture a serial child-murderer, local criminals decide to join in the search:
Persepolis (2007) rounds out our programme for the second quarter of 2013. Based on Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel of the same name the film follows the author as a young girl growing up during the Iranian Revolution and moving to Austria at the behest of her family. This will be the first time we’ve screened a feature animation and we are very proud to be bringing you one as critically acclaimed as this Academy Award nominated animation:
For a summary of all our upcoming screenings and available tickets, check out our Coming Soon page and we hope to see you at a screening soon.
This February we screened Jennifer Venditti’s debut feature film Billy the Kid at the prestigious Palace Picturehouse in Armley Mills Industrial Museum.
Billy scored a respectable 3.89 and, in what could be a first for a Minicine event, we had a short film scoring as high as the feature. Well done to enJoy Film and their latest animation, Window, for that.
This month we begin our 2013 screenings with a presentation of Park Chan-wook’s JSA: Joint Security Area. Minicine member Kieron Casey has kindly written some words on Park’s work and how his films, including JSA, weave into the fabric of Korean cinema and national history:
South Korean cinema introduced itself to many cinephiles across the world with the bloody, violent, visceral and twisted Old Boy; a film which instantly exalted it’s auteur, Park Chan-wook, to the status of one of the most celebrated active directors in the entire movie industry. Taking Cannes film festival by storm, the powerfully kinetic 2003 feature won an array of fans ranging from Steven Spielberg through to Quentin Tarantino due to its impossibly inventive, highly stylised action sequences which blended slick hyper-violence with an impossibly dark, Shakespearean narrative. The success of the film, in terms of both critical and cinematic achievement, granted it instantly iconic status and provided a launch-pad for movie fans to explore Korean cinema looking to discover similarly dark, masochistically driven pieces (of which Breathless, I Saw The Devil, Save The Green Planet, Bittersweet Life and Memories of Murder are prime examples).
Yet, although for many people South Korean cinema and insanely gruesome violence will always be inextricably linked, the majority of the country’s filmic history has its roots placed firmly within the much softer melodrama genre – an area in which much of its highest quality output is found and, indeed, where Park Chan-wook himself made his career breakthrough with the profound and moving JSA: Joint Security Area. The film, which became the highest attended movie in Korean history upon its release and still remains the feature Park is best known for in his homeland, is an elegiac and intricate tragedy; a sentimental piece of movie-making which shares much more common ground with highly successful Korean features such as The Classic, Christmas In August, Failan, Friend, Wedding Dress and Oasis which, perhaps in part due to their lack of bombast, have failed to cross-over into Western markets with the success of their more violent contemporaries.
JSA deals with a theme that is familiar to many fans of Korean cinema, or indeed world politics, and that is the physical, and ideological, divide which separates the highly consumerist South with their communist neighbours North of the border. In Park’s award winning film, a serious shooting has taken place in the DMZ (demilitarised zone) at a remote border crossing which both Northern and Southern soldiers patrol. With neither country’s soldiers willing to speak truthfully about what happened, the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission are flown in to try and make sense of the occurrences and to stop a tense situation escalating even further. When the truth begins to eventually pour out, in a Rashomon-esque fashion, a tragedy greater than the shooting soon comes into view as friendships and brotherhoods are torn apart, real human bonds destroyed by futile and overbearing politics.
Starring the brilliant Song Kang-ho (The Host) and Lee Byung-hun (The Good, The Bad, The Weird), Park’s film is a suspenseful piece of cinema, and mature to the degree that when South Korea’s President Roo Moo-hyun met North’s then dictator Kim Jong-il, it seemed more like a peaceful gesture than an antagonistic one when the former presented a copy of the movie on DVD to the latter. In many ways its muted, sincere heart seems the very antithesis of the sensationalist, hyper-stylised and aesthetically challenging gruesome nature of which much of the Korean cinema which finds a popular audience in the West is based. Those expecting JSA to be a carbon copy of Park’s Vengeance films will be disappointed as the film, superficially, has very little in common with the graphic violence Korean cinema often has bursting from its pours. Studying Old Boy and JSA back-to-back it is possible to see the two apparently polemic strands which Korean cinema often fits: the melodramatic and the violent.
Yet, despite the seemingly large gulf between the two strands of film-making, the two apparently polemic styles both have much in common aside from their unprecedented uniqueness and sheer world class quality of invention. Park Chan-wook and his filmography provide a perfect example of how the gaps between the two strands are not so far apart after all and his oeuvre can also be used as a perfect illustration of how Korean cinema ended up where it is today – a medium used to artistically convey extreme expressions of extreme emotion pushed to the limits.
As a country, Korea has suffered centuries of mistreatment (by invaders such as the Manchurians and Japanese amongst countless others) and injustices, which has led to their belief that every Korean is born with the culturally specific emotion “Han” in their hearts: an incurable pain caused through their country’s many wrongs never put right. Post-civil war, and the splitting of the country in two, this feeling has grown stronger and can, partially, be attributable to the two extreme emotions that are most often expressed in Korean cinema – rage and sorrow. Whilst Park’s Vengeance trilogy deals almost exclusively with the first of these emotions, JSA is steeped in an unrelenting sorrow which is almost too hard for us to understand and is as viscerally disturbing as the hyper-violence of the aforementioned series. Whilst Oh Dae-su in Old Boy has to deal with the injustice of being kidnapped and mentally tortured, the soldiers in JSA feel a similar pain in their heart by being inhumanely separated from their brothers and fellow men. Both films are about the futility and injustices that stem from society and, whilst superficially different, both are uniquely Korean in nature and represent, in their own ways, a highly stylised take on what it is to be Korean in character.
Park’s practical filmic education begun, not unsurprisingly, on the set of a melodrama, rather than an action feature (he worked as an assistant director for the feature Watercolour Painting in a Rainy Day, a feature helmed by a man who went on to become the most influential director in Eastern cinema’s romantic melodrama genre, Kwak Jae-yong, the mind behind My Sassy Girl). Yet, like most of his contemporaries of the Korean cinema boom, throughout his work there is a real focus on hybridization of splicing traditional Korean film influences (not least the tropes created by the original master of Korean cinema, The Housemaid director Kim Ki-young) with the cinema of the West, a process which begun in the early 1990s and helped shaped the country’s film industry and creative landscape.
As the incredibly capitalist driven side of Korea saw the astronomical profits of Hollywood movies (the government noting that one film like Jurassic Park made more money than the combined total of thousands of car sales), film censorship, which was heavily stringent up until the 1980s, was relaxed and commercial investment was made into cinema as part of a successful drive to make the industry the best in the world. Able to express themselves freely and with commercial, non-governmental backing available for films for the first time from 1992 onwards, Korean film-makers began splicing together their style. The two key components here were their own country’s cinematic history (largely melodramatic as it was considered a “safe” genre by censors) and the influence left by the excesses of Western cinema. These provided the groundwork for the two strands which make up the majority of Koreas filmic output and which continue to feed into one another. So, whilst films such as JSA and Old Boy may seem miles apart in terms on content, they both grew from the same uniquely Korean roots and, in turn, have left behind a host of seeds as a legacy. And whilst JSA may seem, to those only familiar with the darker side of Korean cinema, an anomaly it is in fact another perfect example of the thing that binds the country’s film industry together – a beautifully woven expression of extreme emotion.
We’ll be screening JSA: Joint Security Area at The Palace Picturehouse in Armley Mills Industrial Museum on Thursday 24th January at 7PM. For tickets and more details of the screening please visit our online box office here.
2012 has been a fantastic year for Minicine. We’ve seen record numbers of sellouts at our Minicine at the Mills screenings in Armley Mills Palace Picturehouse, we moved into Dock Street Market for a while with our Films From The Bakery series, we recently announced our Screen Easy strand of 20s and 30s movies at The Maven, and our overall programme of films was deemed good enough to win the British Federation of Film Societies Best Programming award back in September.
But the year is not over yet; we’ve still got our final screening of the year this Thursday at Armley Mills Industrial Museum. We will be showing Vittorio De Sica’s highly influential Italian neorealist masterpiece, BICYCLE THIEVES (or THE BICYLE THIEF if you’re American), which tells the story of Antonio and Bruno, father and son, searching for their lost bike without which Antonio will lose his job and his family will slip into poverty.
Back in November we asked people to vote for the film they would most like to see round out the year and BICYCLE THIEVES was the clear winner with 59% of the vote.
As well as the feature presentation we’ll be screening some of our most popular short films from the past twelve months and, as always, there will be tea, coffee and homemade cake provide. We’ll even have FREE hot chocolate for you!
And then we move into 2013 which we hope we be even more successful than this year has been. We’ve been busy sourcing a variety of films to you and we’re very pleased with the programme so far. Here are details of the first quarter as they stand:
We begin the year with a Palace Picturehouse screening of Park Chan-wook’s JSA: JOINT SECURITY AREA (2000). In the last decade Park has emerged as one of the very best Korean filmmakers around, garnering critical acclaim for his dark works of art such as OLDBOY, SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE and THIRST.
JSA, one of Park’s first films, plays out like a political who-dun-it on the North Korean-South Korean Border. When a murder occurs at a remote border post UN dilplomats are flown in to determine what transpired but those involved on both sides aren’t talking and as it turns out that’s not the only thing they have in common.
February sees us double up on screenings as we return to The Maven for our second Screen Easy event. This time we’ll be showing Howard Hawks’ BRINGING UP BABY (1938).
Starring silverscreen icons Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, this screwball caper tells the tale of a paleontologist trying to secure a $1 million donation for his museum only to have his plans disrupted by a eccentric young woman and her pet leopard, Baby. The film was initially considered a flop upon release but has grown in reputation since then and was the most requested film when we originally announced plans for the Screen Easy strand.
Then we have BILLY THE KID (2007), a documentary directed by Jennifer Venditti.
Billy isn’t like most other kids, in his own words, “I’m not black, I’m not white, not foreign, just different in the mind. Different brains, that’s all”. Venditti’s debut film offers an itimate portrait into the world, and mind, of a thoughtful and tender young man dealing with memories of a painful childhood, the feelings of a first love and more. For fans of our previous offerings of small town USA movies, including LiTTLEROCK and LAY DOWN TRACKS this is a must.
And finally March, where we’ll be screening a film that we unfortunately had to cancel last September…
DANSA ALS ESPERITS (DANCE TO THE SPIRITS) finally gets it’s screening at Armley Mills’ Palace Picturhouse. This documentary looks at the use of traditional African medicine among the people of a Cameroonian village. Without being condescending, invasive or exploitative, the film showcases insightful and enlightening examples of the culture within this Cameroonian tribe.
Details of dates and venues can be found on our Coming Soon page and tickets will be made available closer to screenings at our box office.
We are sorry to announce that, do to an unforeseen delay in receiving the screening DVD from an overseas distributor, we are unable to screen Carl Theodore Dreyer’s THE BRIDE OF GLOMDAL this Sunday at The Maven as planned.
Despite our best efforts to secure an alternative copy of the film we have ultimately been unable to do so. Apologies to those who were looking forward to seeing it this weekend but these things can happen and unfortunately this time they have.
But as the the old saying goes, ‘Goonies never say die’ and rather than cancel the event altogether we’ve managed to secure another film to screen instead. So, this Sunday we will now be screening Lewis Milestone’s OF MICE AND MEN (1939).
Based on the John Steinbeck novella of the same name, OF MICE AND MEN tells the story of George and Lennie, played by Burgess Meredith (ROCKY, CLASH OF THE TITANS) and Lon Chaney Jr. (THE WOLF MAN, THE DEFIANT ONES) respectively, two migrant workers trying to scrape a living on a ranch in depression era California.
After an accident leaves the wife of the ranch owner’s son dead, George must help Lennie evade the lynch mob that comes looking for him.
The film opened to great critical acclaim and was nominated for four Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Sound Recording, Best Musical Score and Best Original Score.
Tickets already purchased will also remain valid for the Sunday screening despite the change of title, however anyone who wishes to refund their BRIDE OF GLOMDAL ticket can do so by contacting us at minicine@live.co.uk. If you haven’t bought tickets yet then you can head over to our online box office or pay on the door.
Once again, we apologies for any inconvenience and hope that you’ll still join us Sunday 2nd December at The Maven for an evening of cinema, cocktails and free popcorn courtesy of Yelp.
