Screenings at the Blue Sky
Cafe at 7.30pm, food is served from 6.00pm.
Provisional list - We would welcome any film suggestions (positive or negative) to info@occasionalcinema.org.
Director: Christian Carion
Country: France
Year: 2005 Duration: 01:56 Cert:12
This very touching story about a true occurrence during the first Christmas of the Great War is very moving. Although the truce was not a generalized event, it did happen in quite a few areas all along the front line. It was the only moment of sanity in an otherwise gruesome experience in futility. Twenty years later, these same countries would be at it again. Karl Marx said that wars are awful events pitting ordinary people (proletariats) one against another for the benefit of the wealthy, the powerful, the aristocrats. This aspect is depicted very well in this movie. Alfred Anderson, the last survivor of the Christmas Truce of 1914 died November 21th, 2005 at a nursing home in his native Scotland. He was 109 years old. Lest we forget.
Ultimately, Joyeux Noel achieves the near-impossible, by keeping the treacle to a minimum while leaving one in no doubt about the finer aspects of humanity. Utterly magical. Oscar-nominated.
Director: Armando Iannucci
Country: UK
Year: 2009 Duration: 01:46
Guardian quote: “..horribly brilliant comedy about this government's culture of spin and muddle, using characters first aired in the TV show The Thick Of It. It is a satirical, cynical nightmare on the subject of the run-up, or blunder-up, to the war in Iraq, complete with the nastiest of PR attack dogs and the dodgiest of dossiers. It conjures up a compelling backstairs political world of anxiety and incompetence, bullying and humiliation”.
Director: Paul Taylor
Country: UK/South Africa
Year: 2006 Duration: 01:23
We Are Together tells the moving and inspiring story of 12 year old Slindile and her remarkable friends at the Agape orphanage in South Africa. Filmed over three years, with unforgettable kids, soaring music and a plot full of surprises; a stirring and uplifting theatrical documentary.
Director: Gideon Koppel
Country: UK
Year: 2008 Duration: 01:34
Set in a small farming community in Trefeurig, Ceredigion, where Koppel's parents, both refugees, found a home. This is a landscape and population that is changing rapidly as small scale agriculture is disappearing and the generation who inhabited a pre-mechanised world is dying out. This is a poetic and profound journey into a world of endings and beginnings; a world of the mobile library, stuffed owls, sheep and fire.
Guardian quote: “The film has richness and an unshowy compassion…pays tribute to the grit of a people who may yet revive their economy..”
Director: Luis Piedrahita/ Rodrigo Sopena
Country: Spain
Year: 2007 Duration: 01:28
Four mathematicians who do not know each other are invited by a mysterious host on the pretext of resolving a great enigma. The room in which they find themselves turns out to be a shrinking room that will crush them if they do not discover in time what connects them all and why someone might wish to murder them.
Guardian quote: “an ingenious, relentlessly exciting film, a moral fable at once visceral and cerebral.”
Director: Philippe Claudel
Country: France
Year: 2008 Duration: 01:55
Guardian quote: “Kirsten Scott Thomas's performance, easily the best of her career, is at the centre of a deeply involving, beautifully acted and expertly constructed human drama by and for grown-ups. She plays Juliette, a fortysomething woman who after a long and painful separation has been taken in by her younger sister, Léa. When we first see Juliette, being picked up at the airport, she wears no makeup and smokes perpetually; she has a dowdy grey cardigan of the sort worn in girls' boarding schools, and has clearly been institutionalised in some awful way.
Director: Baltasar Kormakur
Country: Iceland
Year: 2006 Duration: 01:34
Guardian quote: “cracking police-procedural thriller from Iceland, inspired by a real-life controversy when that country put the genetic records of its entire 300,000 population on a single database, as an ideal test sample for research into inherited diseases. Inspector Erlendur, a tough, grizzled cop is investigating the brutal murder of a revolting old child-porn enthusiast, who lived alone in a mangy flat. Erlendur finds there the mysterious photograph of a little girl's grave, taken in 1974, and stubbornly pursues this coldest of cold cases in this coldest of cold countries. Meanwhile, an agonised businessman, whose daughter has just died at the same age, appears to be digging into the computer gene-records.”
Director: John Sayles
Country: USA
Year: 2007 Duration: 02:03
1950 rural Alabama. Cotton harvest. It's a make-or-break weekend for the Honeydripper Lounge and its owner, piano player Tyrone "Pine Top" Purvis. Deep in debt to the liquor man, the chicken man, and the landlord, Tyrone is desperate to lure the young cotton pickers and local army base recruits into his juke joint, away from Touissants, the rival joint across the way.
Honeydripper is a warm-hearted celebration of communal life, but it is far from being an exercise in nostalgia. Sonny, who's built his own electric guitar and amplifier, is the harbinger of a new music and he saves the day for Tyrone in an exuberant finale that reinvigorates the community. Great music and cinematography.
**************
Occasional Cinema is a film society run by volunteers. Films are shown at the Caban, Brynrefail on the second Wednesday of the month and at the Blue Sky Cafe, Bangor on the fourth Wednesday and unless stated otherwise start sometime after 7.30pm.
You must become a member to attend a screening. Membership is available on the door on film nights for a cost of £5 per lifetime: the first film is free, after this film entrance is £3.00. Member's guests may watch a film for £4.
Food is usually available from 6.00pm and a sophisticated
clientele enjoy the wholesome food, reasonable price (about £8.50 for two courses) and
excellent atmosphere. Reservations for a meal are recommended and often
essential (several recent films have been fully booked) - Caban 01286 685500,
Blue Sky 01248 355444. You can't book for the film only, which is on a first
come first served basis.
Details of films are available on the website
www.occasionalcinema.org and we send out regular electronic mailings -
please provide an up-to-date email address to
info@occasionacinema.org.
www.occasionalcinema.org Matrix10 web hosting.
