Winter Season: November 2012

“I’ve always said to myself, don’t grow up too fast.” Life is complicated when you’re eleven. You are on the cusp of maturity, not an adult but not really a child, trying to find your own explanations for many of life’s questions. Australian film-maker, Genevieve Bailey, takes her camera on a journey, interviewing subjects from different nationalities, religions and backgrounds who only have one thing in common; they are all eleven years old. Some of the questions are simple, some are more complex, but what is fascinating is that while the responses she gets vary greatly, many still contain the same underlying themes. In making this heart-warming documentary, Bailey may have sought to create a film about eleven year-olds, but much of what she captures reveals more about the parents, and their upbringing, than about the children themselves.

In 2010 performance artist Marina Abramovic conducted a 736-hour long session at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she sat at a table, looking at whomever sat opposite her. The effect on the participants was extraordinary, as the accounts in this film testify. Although this kind of performance pushes the boundaries of what many consider art, it is the perfect material for a documentary, since you can see the work as it happens. Now aged 65 and with a birthday in November, Abramovic is not only phenomenally strong and charismatic, she is also one of the most interesting women in the art world today. “Her role as an artist, she she believes… is to lead her spectators through an anxious passage to a place of release from whatever has confined them” – The New Yorker.

Starring the remarkable Tahar Rahim (Un Prophète) and the ageless Michael Lonsdale (Of Gods & Men) this film is set in Paris during the Second World War where Younes, an Algerian / Muslim immigrant trying to ignore the oppression and moral imperatives of the time simply to make a quick buck, finds himself helping a Jewish refugee who needs to escape detection by the Germans. He is helped by Si Kaddour Ben Ghabrit, an elder at the local mosque who has to steer a tricky path by seeming to be a friend to the Nazis while actually working against them. The occupation of France in the 1940s has produced some of the best French cinema of the last fifty years and this film is a worthy addition, full of tension, ambiguity and troubling moral paradoxes.

Jaded, fading Rock God Chayenne (Sean Penn, taking his cue from Robert Smith of The Cure) emerges from splendid-if-dull royalty-subsidised isolation in Dublin to embark upon a quest; a quest of reconciliation with his estranged and now dying father, and of revenge against a Nazi war-criminal, Aloise Muller, who persecuted his father during his time in Auschwitz. Arriving in New York too late to patch things up in life, Chayenne sets off across heartland America in pursuit of his nemesis. Following Chayenne as he searches for his father’s tormentor, Sorrentino’s English language debut emerges as more than just a dark comedy. This is the story of a man whom everyone knows, getting to know himself better, and anxious for redemption as much as for revenge. Terrific performances from Penn, Frances McDormand and Judd Hirsh.