To get into the spirit of Bastille Day, here is a lively selection of new short films in all genres. Presented with generous support from the Consulate General of France in Houston and the Texas-French Alliance for the Arts. Special thanks to Cultural Attaché Dominique Chastres for organizing this program.
MFAH Films Fall 2009
Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro)
Sunday, November 8, 1:00 p.m.
Directed by Marcel Camus
(Brazil/France/Italy, 1959, 107 min., subtitled)
This frenetic Latin melodrama, set during Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro, is credited with bringing the bossa nova beat to North America. The plot was inspired by the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, a couple so in love that Orpheus convinced Hades, god of the underworld, to return Eurydice to the land of the living after her death. The only condition Hades placed on the deal was that Orpheus could not look at Eurydice on the way up from the underworld. Here, the myth is retold as Orfeo (Breno Mello), a streetcar conductor grappling with death in the streets of Rio, falls for Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn), a provincial girl newly arrived in the city. Black Orpheus won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the award for best foreign film at both the Oscars and Golden Globes.
35 Shots of Rum (35 rhums)
Friday, November 20, 7:30 p.m.
Saturday, November 21, 7:00 p.m.
Sunday, November 22, 5:00 p.m.
Directed by Claire Denis
(France/Germany, 2008, 100 min., subtitled)
“Claire Denis has created a sensual and contemplative body of films over the years, but nothing in her work prepares us for this deeply emotional yet light-of-touch story set among a small circle of Parisians and their friends. In fact, Denis evokes nothing so much as Eric Rohmer in his “seasons” quartet as she follows the various characters in a roundelay of relationships that touches on almost every kind of love there is: father-daughter, old lovers, old colleagues, absent mother, lost sister, unrequited, one-night, budding, brooding . . . Lionel (Alex Descas), a train engineer, shares an apartment with his daughter Jo (Mati Diop), a university student. In the same building live taxi driver Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué) and a young man who comes and goes, Noe (the intense and always mysterious Grégoire Colin, like Descas a Denis regular). Together, they are a kind of family. We figure out their roles and relationships only gradually as Denis leaves crumbs along her narrative path for us to follow—it’s one of the great pleasures of this extraordinarily pleasurable film made up of small moments, of looks and silences, of magical touches of physicality and pensiveness. Agnés Godard’s cinematography richly limns an interior architecture in which objects take on an Ozu-like delicacy and immediacy, and uses train tracks (and cars and motorbikes and vans) to propel the story into the out of doors and eventually, the future, as father and daughter face the inevitable: her independence.” – San Francisco International Film Festival
“Marvelously profound, illuminating the love between a father and daughter but also highlighting the difficulty of relinquishing what most people spend a lifetime putting into place.” – Variety
French: http://www.wildbunch-distribution.com/site/35rhums/
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French Short program I
“12:17Am”
This program is composed of six shorts including:
First Journey (by Grégoire Sivan); Pencils (by Didier Barcelo); Make Yourself at Home (by Gautier About); In their Skin (by Arnaud Malherbe); 12:17 a.m. (by Xavier de Choudens); and 200,000 Phantoms (by Jean-Gabriel Périot)
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French Short Program II
“Toi que j’eusse aimée”
Six more shorts complete the program including:
Skhizein (by Jérémy Clapin); Manon on the Asphalt (by Elizabeth Marre and Olivier Pont); In the Train (by Emilie Sengelin); Edward in Wonderland (by Vincent Burgevin and Franck Lebon); You Whom I Would Have Loved (by Emmanuel Broussouloux); and St. Feast Day (by Anne-Laure Daffis and Léo Marchand).