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Spring 2011
@
The Robinson Film Center
(617 Texas Street in downtown Shreveport)  

*** Admission for the general public is $5.00; Centenary students admitted free with student ID.

*** Films start around 7:30  (check the Robinson Film Center web site for exact times)

  • For more information: call the RFC at 459-4122; or email Anna Medica, Student Director (amedica@centenary.edu) or Jefferson Hendricks, Faculty Advisor (jhendric@centenary.edu)
Many thanks to the Student Government Association of Centenary College of Louisiana, which supports the Centenary Film Society and other student media at the college.  
*  co-sponsored by the North Louisiana Jewish Federation
** Co-sponsored with the support of the Consulate General of France in New Orleans; FACE:  French American Cultural Exchange, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and the French Ministry of Culture (CNC), as well as the Florence Gould Foundation, the Grand Marnier Foundation, and highbrow entertainment.


      







Tuesday, January 18:    American Violet  
  --  co-sponsored by the Diversity Committee of Centenary College    
  • Nominated in 6 categories at the 2010 Black Reel Awards, including "Best Film" and "Best Acting Ensemble" 
  • (2009; USA.  Dir. Tim Disney.  Cast:  Nichole Beharie, Alfre Woodard, Xzbit, Charles C. Dutton, Will Patten, Tim Blake Nelson.   103 minutes.  Rated:  PG-13.
  • "A torn-from-the-headlines tale of institutional racism and injustice in the Lone Star State of not-so-long-ago, American Violet might not be subtle, but it's certainly powerful."  Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer
  • "...movingly told and packed with powerful subject matter."     Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle 
American Violet










Tuesday, January  25:    Nora's Will   (Cinco días sin Nora)
   --  co-sponsored by the North Louisiana Jewish Federation 
  • Winner of 10 international film festival awards, including “Audience Award” at the Miami International Film Festival
  • (2008; Mexico. Dir. Mariana Chenillo. Cast: Enrique Arreola, Ari Brickman, Juan Carlos Colombo, Verónica Langer. 88 minutes. In Spanish and Hebrew with English subtitles. No rating.)
  • “What starts as a comedy of one man's rebellion against what is expected of him turns into a moving story in which his understanding of his own life blossoms.”  Marshall Fine, Hollywood & Fine.com
  • “Beneath its decorous, Old World interiors and its veneer of slight, sentimental comedy, Nora's Will is about a man who has lost the only woman he ever loved, and now must reckon with the gift she has given him from beyond the grave.”   Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com
Nora's Will









Tuesday, February 1:    Everyone Else   (Alle Anderen)    
  • Winner of two awards at the 2009 Berlin International Film Festival, including "Best Actress" and "the Jury Grand Prix"
  • (2009; Germany.   Dir. Maren Ade.   Cast:  Birgit Minichmayr, Lars Eidinger, Hans-Jochen Wagner, Nicole Marischka.  119 minutes.  in German with English subtitles.  No rating.) 
  • "It's an impressive achievement: The film reveals things about each person's inner world, and how it looks to the other, without making us feel as if we're lost in a house of mirrors."  Walter Addiego, San Francisco Chronicle 
  • " If you haven't been in this relationship, then you surely know someone who has: Chris and Gitti are as recognizably human as a glance in the morning mirror, and just as strangely distorted."  Marc Savlov, Austin Chronicle

Everyone Else










Tuesday, February 8:    Mon Oncle    (My Uncle)  
  • Winner of 6 international film festival awards, including "Best Foreign Film" at the Academy Awards and the "Jury Special Prize" at the Cannes Film Festival 
  • (1958; France.  Dir. Jacques Tati.  Cast:  Jacques Tati, Jean-Pierre Zola, and Adrienne Servantie.   117 minutes.  In French with English subtitles.  Not rated, but suitable for all ages.) 
  • "Unforgettably funny, wonderfully observed, and always technically brilliant."  Derek Adams, Time Out Magazine
  • " Jacques Tati is the great philosophical tinkerer of comedy, taking meticulous care to arrange his films so that they unfold in a series of revelations and effortless delights."   Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Mon Oncle









Tuesday, February 15:   Vincere  
  • Winner of 15 international film festival awards and nominated for the "Golden Palm" award at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival
  • (2009; Italy.  Dir. Marco Bellocchio.  Cast: Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Filippo Timi and Fausto Russo Alesi.  128 minutes.  In Italian with English subtitles.  No rating.)
  • "Vincere, which comes as close to grand opera as can be achieved without anyone actually bursting into song, feels like a big movie -- handsomely mounted, full of dark shadows counterpointed with stray shafts of light, with dramatic close-ups of faces driven by passion and madness and heavy silences brutally interrupted by clashing tympani."     Ella Taylor, National Public Radio
  • "If you care about movies, I'm telling you to carve out time for Vincere, a strange and powerful blend of historical fact and dreamlike imagination that captures both the charisma and the murderous madness of the young Benito Mussolini."    Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com  
Vincere









Tuesday, February 22:    Ajami      
   --  co-sponsored by the North Louisiana Jewish Federation
  • Winner of 13 international film festival awards, including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Screenplay from the Israeli Film Academy
  • (2009; Israel/Germany. Dirs. Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani. Cast: Fouad Habash, Nisrine Rihan and Elias Saba. 120 minutes. In Hebrew and Arabic with English subtitles. No rating.)
  • “Emotionally mesmerizing; Ajami is like an Israeli Amores Perros crossed with City of God and looks at the Middle East powder keg from both sides, weaving a time-fractured story of drug dealing, romance, and economic peril.”   Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly
  • “One of the pleasures of Ajami, a tough and in many ways unsparing movie, is its deep immersion in the beats and melodies of everyday life in Jaffa and beyond. The large cast consists mainly of nonprofessional actors for whom the locations are home, and their earnest, diffident performances combine with a ground-level, on-the-move shooting style to give the film an extraordinary immediacy.”   A. O. Scott, New York Times
Ajami








Thursday, March 3:     Last Train Home  
  • Winner, "Best Documentary Feature" at the 2009 Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival  
  • (2009; China/Canada/United Kingdom.  Dir. Lixin Fan.   Cast: Changhua Zhan, Yang Zhang and Suqin Chen.   89 minutes.   In Mandarin with English subtitles. No rating.)
  • "It's one of those extraordinary films, like Hoop Dreams, that tells a story the makers could not possibly have anticipated in advance. It works like stunning, grieving fiction."     Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
  • "Frequently moving and quietly enlightening, Last Train Home is about love and exploitation, sacrifice and endurance."     Jeanne Catsoulis, National Public Radio

Last Train Home









Tuesday, March 15:     Soul Kitchen  
  • Winner of the "Special Jury Prize" and the "Young Cinema Award" at the 2009 Venice Film Festival
  • (2009; Germany.  Dir. Fatih Akin.  Cast: Moritz Bleibtreu, Birol Ünel, Wotan Wilke Möhring, Jan Fedder.  99 minutes.  In German with English subtitles. No rating.)
  • "Akin perfectly captures the antic pace, eccentric personalities, and fickle fortunes of the restaurant game, and his vision of the Soul Kitchen as an all-night bacchanal is irresistible."  J. R. Jones, The Chicago Reader
  • "You could call Soul Kitchen a romance with sensational music, or a hymn to friendship with romantic resonances. Whatever you want to call it, the thing is bursting with life."  Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal 

Soul Kitchen



Friday, March 18 - Thursday, March 24:   The Tournées Film Festival:  French Film in Louisiana     [films to be announced in early February, while will include Un Secret below]    Co-sponsored with the support of FACE:  French American Cultural Exchange, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and the French Ministry of Culture (CNC), as well as the Florence Gould Foundation, the Grand Marnier Foundation, and highbrow entertainment.  





Thursday, March 24:    Un Secret    (A Secret)   
   --  co-sponsored by the North Louisiana Jewish Federation
  • Winner of the “Grand Prix des Amériques” award at the 2008 Montréal World Film Festival
  • (2007; France.  Dir. Claude Miller.  Cast: Patrick Bruel, Cécile De France, Ludivine Sagnier, Mathieu Amalric, Julie Depardieu.  107 minutes.  In French, German, Yiddish, and Hebrew with English subtitles. No rating.)
  • “Beautifully and poignantly captures the complexities of being a Jew in France from the 1930's to the present, where layers of a family's history are revealed by jumping back and forth in time.”   Nora Lee Mandel, Film-Forward.com
  • “It is a deeply moving and heartfelt story that makes an indelible impression on the viewers' hearts and minds.”    Keith Cohen, Entertainment Spectrum
Un Secret









Tuesday, March 29:      Disco and Atomic War
          (Disko ja  tuumasõda)
  • Winner, "Best Documentary" at the 2009 Warsaw International Film Festival
  • (2009; Estonia. Dir. Jaak Kilmi.  80 minutes.  In English and Estonian, Finnish, and Russian with English subtitles.  No rating.)
  • "Now it can be told. The erotic film Emmanuelle helped end the Cold War. That's one tasty tidbit from Disco and Atomic War, a subversively funny documentary."     V. A. Musetto, New York Post
  • "A playful compendium of archival footage, dramatic reconstructions with a surreal comic edge and solemn talking heads."     Stephen Holden, New York Times

Disco and Atomic War






 

Tuesday, April  5:       The Good, the Bad, the Weird (Joheunnom nabbeunnom isanghannom)
  • Winner of 4 international film festival awards, including "Best Director" at the 2008 Sitges-Catalonian Film Festival
  • (2009; South Korea.  Dir. Ji-woon Kim.  Cast: Kang-ho Song, Byung-hun amedica@centenary.eduLee and Woo-sung Jung.  139 minutes.  In Korean, Mandarin, and Japanese with English subtitles.  No rating.)
  • "A giddy mashup of Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns and George Lucas and Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones romps, this guns-a-blazing wide-screen Korean hit offers a nuttily staged, beautifully filmed homage to old-school Hollywood."     Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer
  • "Wild, crazy and packed with memorable moments, this South Korean homage to the western may not be thought-provoking or particularly deep, but it's also one of the most genuinely fun and inventive movies to hit the screen in quite some time."   Saxon Bullock, Film4
The Good, the Bad, the Weird











Tuesday, April  12:      Mademoiselle  Chambon
  • Winner, Best Adapted Screenplay, 2010 César Awards, France
  • (2009; France.   Dir.Stéphane Brizé.   Cast:  Vincent Lindon, Sandrine Kiberlain, Aure Atika, Jean-Marc Thibault, Arthur Le Houérou.  101 minutes.  In French with English subtitles.  No rating.) 
  • "People fall in love in every country, but nowhere is the experience put on film with the flawless style, empathy and emotion the French provide. Mademoiselle Chambon is the latest in that line of deeply moving romances, an exquisite chamber piece made with the kind of sensitivity and nuance that's become almost a lost art."     Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times
  • "This small, nearly perfect film is a reminder that personal upheavals are as consequential in people's lives as shattering world events."    Stephen Holden, New York Times


Mademoiselle Chambon









Thursday, April 28:     A Film Unfinished
       (Shtikat    Haarchion)
          -- co-sponsored by the North Louisiana Jewish Federation   
  • Winner, World Cinema Documentary Editing Award, 2010 Sundance Film Festival
  • (2010; Israel/Germany.  Dir. Yael Hersonski.  88 minutes. In German, Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish with English subtitles. No rating.)  
  • “Hersonski quietly and insistently unravels reality from ''reality''; her commitment to archival authenticity is its own tribute to those no longer able to testify. And in this, she has a powerful aid: a few precious, elderly survivors of that infamous Warsaw ghetto who speak with her as they watch the same footage we do. Irrefutable truth-tellers, they recognize their neighbors. In doing so, they bring those streets alive again, for real.”      Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly
  • “A Film Unfinished takes abject imagery and turns it into an essential statement on why we bear witness. The film pulls back the curtain on a deadly PR machine and forces us to consider its deceptions.”      Chris Vognar, The Dallas Morning News 
A Film Unfished