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July 2008
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Forei gn Films
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New to View
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Vol. 2, No. 7 |
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The Foreign Films New to View newsletter is a monthly publication designed to keep you up to date on some of HCPL's latest foreign films on DVD. The selections in this newsletter are just a sample of the rich variety of films available to you through your library. Use the sign-up box above to have this newsletter sent directly to your e-mail every month, with new, recommended movies for you to view. See Foreign Films Archive.
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HCPL has a new service: MyLibraryDV, offering viewers digital downloadable videos on demand. Click on the link above or visit "Library Services, Branches, & Jobs" on the HCPL homepage and then click on " MyLibraryDV" in the center of the page. Using MyLibraryDV involves downloading an application on the viewer's home computer in order to view the digital videos. Once it is downloaded, the viewer will then have access to a selection of classic, independent, and foreign movies, as well as a variety of instructional, travel, health and fitness, and other useful and entertaining videos, all viewable on home computers. MyLibraryDV provides kids' programs as well.
The video entertainment selection includes Academy Award winners and other classic films. For example, for some campy fun, take a look at William Castle's horror film House on Haunted Hill, starring Vincent Price, or enjoy Frank Capra's last "social statement" film Meet John Doe. Or for something more serious, try the Italian Neo-Realist classic, Roberto Rossellini's Open City. The foreign film collection goes beyond Open City, to include movies on video from China, Finland, Spain, and other lands. Check it out...or more accurately, click on it, and watch videos on demand from your library, right in your home, through MyLibraryDV.
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And now for our usual newsletter of selections of foreign DVDs:
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Adam's Apples, directed by Anders Thomas Jensen
(in Danish, with English subtitle)
A dark Danish comedy, Adam's Apples explores the conflict between an unusually sunny minister and a skinhead neo-Nazi sent to the minister's farm to work off his community service hours. When the skinhead decides to subvert the minister's work and spirit, the film becomes decidedly more allegorical, with elements of magical realism. Jensen may be familiar to viewers through his work on the screenplay for Wilbur (Wants to Kill Himself).
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Antonia, directed by Tata Amaral
(in Portuguese, with English subtitles)
Antonia is the name of a Brazilian hip hop group, composed of four women who just might make it in the music world. Unfortunately, they face poverty, racism, and worst of all, sexism on their challenging road to success.
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Chak de! India, directed by Shimit Amin
(in Hindi, with English subtitles)
Kabir Khan, a former captain of a hockey team, must forge a champion field hockey team out of a group of young women with their own agendas. He may not be the right person for the job...or they may not be the right players for the team, but Khan thinks he can help them be competitors in the World Cup.
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The Clay Bird, directed by Tareque Masud
(in Bengali, with English subtitles)
A family in East Pakistan in the 1960's faces inner turbulence even as the nation goes through its own politcal turmoil of rebirth into the country of st1:country-region w:st="on">Bangladesh. A fundamentalist Muslim father sends away Anu, his young, sweet-natured son, to a madrasah for a strict Muslim education. Anu fears for his younger sister, Asma, who is ill. To add to his unsettled life and mind, he suffers at the hands of the other more aggessive boys in the madrasah.
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Death of a Cyclist, directed by Juan Antonio Bardem
(in Spanish, with English subtitles)
A wealthy woman and a professor having an affair accidentally hit a cyclist on their way to a tryst. Should they tell the police and get aid for the dying cyclist? If they do, they will expose their affair. When they choose to flee the scene of the accident, the consequences are farther reaching than just the death of the cyclist.
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The Fire Within, directed by Louis Malle
(in French, with English subtitles)
Alain is an alcoholic writer, who returns to Paris from a clinic where he has been drying out. As he visits old friends, he sees the utter superficiality of their lives, and by extension, his own life. This understanding compels him to contemplate suicide.
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Rana's Wedding, directed by Hany Abu-Assad
(in Arabic, with English subtitles)
Like the young woman in The Syrian Bride (FFNtoV, June 2007), Rana struggles to complete her plans for her marriage, against the backdrop of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Rana's father has given her an ultimatum: accompany him to Egypt, or by 4 o'clock that afternoon marry any of the men on the short list he provides her. Rana accepts neither option but instead struggles through the day seeking her lover, preparing for the wedding she wants, gathering the necessary people, and bringing all together at the registrar's office. Can she do it? Faced with her time constraints and the obstacles thrown before her from the occupation, Rana's struggle seems epic in a land in upheaval.
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Summer Palace, directed by Lou Ye
(in Mandarin, with English subtitles)
The personal and the political merge as two university students engage in their heated romance amidst the turmoil of China's political unrest of 1989. |
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Vitus, directed by Fredi M. Murer
(in Swiss and German, with English subtitles)
Vitus is just a little kid, but his parents see within him a genius when it comes to the piano. Their efforts to channel him into a career as a child piano prodigy come with a price, however, a price Vitus is less than willing to pay. What he really wants is to reach for the sky but not so much in metaphoric terms as in real ones.
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The Willow Tree, directed by Majid Majidi
(in Farsi, with English subtitles)
A kind of match to Majidi's The Color of Paradise, this film also concerns a blind protagonist, but unlike the young boy of that film, the university professor of The Willow Tree does regain his sight. And that might be where the story truly begins. In his blindness, Youssef lives a kind of idyllic life, teaching poetry, only vaguely aware of the evils of the world. After he regains his sight, however, he begins to see the darkness of people's souls, even his own.
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