From the Cinematheque members email:

As we have had many requests from members who missed THE LOVER and MAI’S AMERICA, we put two screenings of these films on Thursday 18th September.

Meanwhile, please dont miss the other four outstanding recent movies bellow which have been winning awards at film festivals and impressing critics worldwide.

For reservations, phone 936 2648 after 13:30 daily.

Wednesday, September 17
19:00    THE EDGE OF HEAVEN
21:00    IN BRUGES

Thursday, September 18
19:00    MAI’S AMERICA
21:00    THE LOVER

Friday, September 19
19:00    IN BRUGES
21:00    EDGE OF HEAVEN

Saturday, September 20
14:00    IN BRUGES
16:00    TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE

FILM NOTES

TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE
2007 Directed by Frank Gibney 109 minutes
English only. No Vietnamese translation.

2008 Academy Award, Best feature-length documentary
Best Documentary: Chicago International Film Festival
Best Documentary Screenplay: Writers Guild of America Award

“We have to work the dark side.”
- United States Vice President Dick Cheney

As U.S. soldiers occupied war-torn Afghanistan in 2002, a young Afghan taxi driver called Dilawar was arrested, along with his passengers, at a checkpoint for an alleged involvement in a Taliban rocket attack. Confined to a solitary cell at Bagram air base, Dilawar was chained and exposed to continuous beatings and torture from the U.S. soldiers. Five days after his arrest, Dilawar was dead.

TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE is a searing insight into the modern-day role of torture and political corruption in the “War On Terror.”

Review by Philip French, The Guardian (London):

“One of the most important films of the past five years, Alex Gibney’s Oscar-winning documentary TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE , is a quietly devastating, scrupulously argued account of the way torture and other practices outlawed by the Geneva conventions and repugnant to civilised society have become part of official American policy since 9/11.

It uses the abduction in 2002 and subsequent torture and murder at the notorious Bagram air base of an innocent Afghan taxi driver to trace the ever-widening stain of evil that spread to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and the chain of responsibility that reaches down from the commander in chief in the White House through the Pentagon to the lowest prison guard and interrogator. Though his death was recorded as natural, the taxi driver’s legs, according to a military pathologist, were ‘pulpified’.

Some people emerge with honour from this film: senior officials challenging the evolving policy, investigative journalists, politicians refusing to accept bureaucratic obfuscation. Some did terrible things but invite our sympathy - simple junior soldiers, untrained for the tasks assigned them, led to believe they were doing their duty.

But there are key figures who are beyond contempt: they include the President’s major legal advisers John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales and, above all, Vice-President Dick Cheney.”

Review by A.O. Scott, New York Times:

“A year from now, the presidency of George W. Bush will end, but the consequences of Mr. Bush’s policies and the arguments about them are likely to be with us for a long time. As next Jan. 20 draws near, there is an evident temptation, among many journalists as well as politicians seeking to replace Mr. Bush, to close the book and move ahead, an impulse that makes the existence of documentaries like Alex Gibney’s TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE all the more vital. If recent American history is ever going to be discussed with the necessary clarity and ethical rigor, this film will be essential.

The film includes remarkably frank interviews with American servicemen, some of whom faced courts-martial in connection with Dilawar’s death; with a fellow prisoner at Bagram; and with Carlotta Gall and Tim Golden, who reported on Dilawar’s story for The New York Times. TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE, however, does not simply recount a single, awful anecdote from the early days of the war on terror; rather, it traces the spread of a central, controversial tactic in that war. The burden of Mr. Gibney’s argument, laid out soberly and in daunting detail, is that what happened to Dilawar was not anomalous, but rather represented an early instance of what would soon be a widespread policy.

From Bagram in 2002, TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE charts a path to Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, all the while insisting that the brutal treatment of prisoners in those places was hardly the work of a few “bad apples,” as Pentagon officials said. Instead, the sexual humiliation, waterboarding and other well-documented practices were methods sanctioned at the very top of the chain of command. How those methods were intended to work - to break down psychological defenses, to induce not only physical discomfort but also a kind of madness - is laid out in interviews with behavioral scientists, and also with professional interrogators and their victims.

Though Mr. Gibney’s own views are evident throughout, he does allow those who defend the use of torture on legal and strategic grounds to have their say. By now, surely, the empty semantic debate about the appropriateness of the word torture has been settled, but it is still important to recall that in the months after the 9/11 attacks, the willingness to consider the necessity of extreme and previously taboo tactics was widespread. It was Vice President Dick Cheney who noted in a television interview that the fight against Islamic extremism would necessitate a trip to “the dark side,” as administration lawyers prepared (and later publicly defended) briefs and memos limiting habeas corpus and the applicability of the Geneva Conventions.

TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE includes an interview with the former Justice Department official John Yoo and clips of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales responding to their critics. And its essential fair-mindedness (which is not the same as neutrality) strengthens the film’s accounting of the consequences, both strategic and moral.”

PARANOID PARK
2007 Directed by Gus Van Sant 84 minutes
English only. No Vietnamese translation

60th Anniversary Prize: 2007 Cannes Film Festival
Nominee for Golden Palm Award: 2007 Cannes Film Festival
Bodil Award (Danish “Oscars”) Best American Film 2007

When Alex, a 16-year-old skateboarder plucks up the courage to go to Paranoid Park - Portland’s most challenging and infamous urban skateboard destination - he didn’t expect his night to end with the death of a railway security guard.

Deciding to say nothing about the incident, Alex does all he can to lead a normal life, but is troubled by a crushing burden of guilt which impacts on his relationship with one of the school’s most sought-after girls and his relationship with his parents. Soon, he finds he needs to tell somebody in secret, but with the police closing in, his choice of confidant could mean the difference between being caught and staying free.

Stylishly shot by acclaimed cinematographer Chris Doyle (who shot THE QUIET AMERICAN in Hanoi a few years back, as well as numerous Chinese art films like IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE), and acted by a cast of newcomers, PARANOID PARK is Gus Van Sant’s most interesting and visually arresting film to date.

From review by David Wiegand, San Francisco Chronicle:

“Gus Van Sant’s PARANOID PARK is appropriately structured like a ride on skateboard: It swoops back and forth in time, hovers in midair, twists back on itself over and over again, then rolls into silence.

Based on a novel by Blake Nelson, the film focuses on a young skateboarder who, like many teenagers, has no particular direction in life. When Alex (Gabe Nevins) is called to his high school’s main office to meet with a homicide cop, a poster on the door he walks through advertises a forthcoming career fair at the school. You know there’s little chance he’ll be attending.

The cop asks him about a particular night when Gabe and his older friend Jared (Jake Miller) had talked about going to Paranoid Park, an illegal, skater-built park under the freeway. They had checked the place out earlier that week, but Alex said he didn’t think he was ready for Paranoid Park. “No one’s ever ready for Paranoid Park,” Jared answered.

But on the night in question, Jared decides to head off to Oregon State University in search of female companionship, leaving Alex to hit Paranoid Park on his own. He meets up with some older kids, and something happens. While Van Sant’s script is swirling through time, we find out that a railroad security guard has been killed - cut in half by a passing train, except the autopsy reveals he was hit on the head first. A skateboard with DNA evidence on it has been fished out of the river.

PARANOID PARK is a film about guilt, about paranoia, about how something happens that may not have been intended, but it happened and you have to live with it. But, as Hitchcock and other masters of psychological thrillers knew well, guilt never rests easy in the heart or mind. As Alex, in typical teenage fashion, semi-sleepwalks through his day, through the locker-lined corridors of his school, through the mall and the streets of Portland, his face is expressionless. His voice is similarly flat as he narrates what he’s committing to his notebook. But, as Macy knew, something had happened to him.

As the sequence of events becomes clear, the audience increasingly feels every knot in the kid’s stomach, and that’s because Van Sant’s direction isn’t merely appropriate to the story - it becomes the story itself and pulls the audience along for the ride. Grainy scenes shot in handheld Super 8 snake in and out of other footage in 35mm. The lighting cascades from overexposed whiteout to shadowy darkness. Alex walks at a normal pace down the long school corridor on his way to be interrogated, but then the film decelerates to slow motion. At Paranoid Park, boarders launch themselves into the air and the film speed slows again: They hover for a second or two - we think, will they land on their boards, or slam their bodies into the sculpted concrete? - and then they descend.

In the hands of many other directors, all of this would be mere gimmickry. That’s far from the case here. The stylization not only mirrors what’s going on in Alex’s mind, but it also provides necessary context and perspective for the audience. Van Sant’s vision is beautifully realized by the brilliantly freewheeling cinematography of Christopher Doyle and a fine cast of mostly unknown actors, many of whom were recruited through an internet MySpace page. The result is that most of the kids, and especially Nevins, seem worlds more real than kids in most commercial films.

PARANOID PARK isn’t a big film, but it is exceedingly well made and provocative. For some of the way, it seems like a kind of skateboard whodunit. Soon enough, we understand it’s much more than that. And by then, we know we’re in for a ride to remember.”

* Advisory: Contains crude language, sexual situations and brief gore.

From Review by Jonathan Trout, BBC London:

“Gus Van Sant’s run of films about lithe, disaffected hipsters continues with the slight but poetic PARANOID PARK, the tale of Alex, a high-school skateboarder somehow caught up in a grisly death. Artily composed, highly subjective and light on plot - it’s still a long way from the mainstream, but well-built suspense and an instinctive feel for teen and skate life keep things ticking over until the paranoia peters out.

The amateur cast - Van Sant reportedly found them via MySpace - are largely excellent, and although Gabe Nevin’s blank-slate approach to Alex misfires on occasion, he makes for an intruiging lead. The airy style and disjointed structure reflect Alex’s numb, disconnected mind. His passivity - to his divorcing parents, the irrelevance of school, and hassle from his vapid cheerleader girlfriend - takes up most of the running time. Left isolated, the drama of the night at the skatepark drifts off into the everyday; it’s a neat idea, but leaves the resolution of a great story dissatifyingly meek.”

THE EDGE OF HEAVEN
2007 Directed by Fatih Akin 120 minutes
English, German and Turkish with English subtitles

Best Screenplay Award: 2007 Cannes Film Festival
Nominee for Golden Palm Award: 2007 Cannes Film Festival
2008 Academy Awards: Official German Entry for Best Foreign Language Feature
Prix Lux, Best Screenplay: 2007 European Parliament Film Awards
2008 German Film awards: Best Feature Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Editing

Six disparate characters collide in this intensely moving cross-cultural drama by the German-born Turkish filmmaker Fatih Akin. They include a boorish Turkish widower living in Germany; a prostitute he shelters in exchange for conjugal favors; his son, a mild-mannered, well-educated professor of German; the prostitute’s daughter, a fearless political activist; the young German woman she falls in love with; and her lover’s strait-laced mother, a former hippie. As these complicated people traverse geographic and cultural boundaries (two go to jail), Mr. Akin portrays them with compassion and understanding. Hanna Schygulla, Fassbinder’s muse, gives an especially magnificent performance as the lover’s mother.

We highly recommend this extraordinary movie!

From Review by Alex Davidson, MovieMail, U.K.

“Fatih Akin’s THE EDGE OF HEAVEN is his best yet, a complex ensemble piece examining race conflicts between Germany and Turkey. Featuring brilliant performances and a superb script (which won the screenplay award at Cannes), THE EDGE OF HEAVEN could well be destined for classic status.”

From review by Philip French, The Observer (London):

“This new film by Fatih Akin, the 34-year-old German director born in Hamburg of Turkish parents Begins in Hamburg, ends in Istanbul and, in the Brechtian manner, is divided into chapters, each introduced with a band performing traditional Turkish love songs beside the sea in Istanbul.

The movie opens with Ali Aksu, an elderly Turkish widower in Bremen, going as a client to a fortysomething prostitute in the city’s red light district. Discovering she’s Turkish and called Yeter, he invites her to come and live with him. His offer is frank, if not entirely honourable, and after two young Turkish zealots have made dangerous threats unless she repents, she moves in with the old man. Meanwhile his son, Nejat, a professor of German literature at Hamburg, meets Yeter, and is won over both by her honesty and by the fact that she’s working as a whore so her daughter back in Turkey can study economics and find a better life. But suddenly this seemingly happy arrangement goes horribly wrong – and the consequences are far-reaching.

If you dislike THE EDGE OF HEAVEN you could sneer at its use of coincidence. If you think well of it, as I do, you will accept it as a carefully patterned narrative of parallels, echoes and fateful encounters that reflect on the relationships between father and son, mother and daughter, on the themes of duty, obligation, sacrifice and redemption, and above all on the nature of family, exile, roots and national identity. Moreover, the characters themselves never become truly aware of the peculiar web of destiny in which they’re caught up. This is a movie rooted in reality that attains great moral and spiritual power. The images are simple yet memorable. A coffin comes down a conveyor belt from a plane in Istanbul; later a coffin goes up to the plane from the same airport. The day and night of a German mother grieving in an Istanbul hotel room is observed from the same high angle in a series of rapid dissolves. When first seen, the German bookshop has a picture of Oscar Wilde !
on the wall; under the new owner this is replaced by a photograph of Mario Vargas Llosa. Three female political firebrands are dragged from their flat and, shouting out their names, are thrown into a van by masked Turkish policemen; the watching crowd applauds.

The film uses English, Turkish and German, though only the professor-turned-bookshop owner speaks all three. It’s wonderfully acted, deeply moving and curiously illuminating. Especially affecting is the subtle performance as the German mother by Hanna Schygulla, one of the great figures in the new German cinema of 30 years ago.”

* Advisory: Sexual situations, strong language and violence.

From review by Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (London):

“This is an intriguing, complex, beautifully acted and directed piece of work, partly a realist drama of elaborate coincidences, near-misses and near-hits, further tangled with shifts in the timeline - and partly an almost dreamlike meditation with visual symmetries and narrative rhymes.

It is about the tension between Germany and Turkey, to whom postwar West Germany opened its doors for “guest-worker” labourers, thereby getting an economic boost but creating for itself an unacknowledged quasi-imperial legacy of guilt and cultural division. And it is about the gulf between the first- and second-generation Turkish-Germans, conflicted about their identity and their relation with the old country, itself conflicted as it prepares to join the European Union.

At the movie’s centre is Nejat (Baki Davrak), a second-generation Turk who has attained what might be the greatest distinction Germany has to offer: he is a university professor, lecturing on Goethe. His rascally old father, Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz), also in Germany, has offered cohabitation rights to the Turkish prostitute Yeter (Nursel Köse) for whom he is a regular, and who is only too eager to escape the bullying Muslim activists who patrol the red-light district - but doesn’t see Ali’s yet unrevealed darker side. Having established this fraught, tense family relationship, Akin spins the narrative thread off sideways to investigate the situation of Yeter’s fugitive daughter Ayten (Nurgül Yesilçay) and her relationship with an idealist young German, Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska) who between them are reviving the spirit of Baader-Meinhof for a new generation. Lotte’s mother is Susanne, played by Hanna Schygulla, a casting decision that is partly a kind of ancestor-worship of Rain!

It is a glitteringly confident narrative pattern, gesturing at the globalised, historical forces that govern individual lives; in some ways it is like a very, very much better version of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s mediocre film BABEL - there is some similar business with a handgun - but not as schematic and superficial. The web of happenstance and dramatic reversals of fortune may teeter on the brink of unbelievability, but it is a measure of Akin’s confidence as a storyteller that his world so plausibly enfolds us.

To the political institutions involved, Akin directs a fierce satiric pessimism. A Turkish revolutionary is refused asylum by a German court not on the grounds of terrorist activities - of which it is in fact unaware - but on the Catch-22 basis that a country about to be admitted to the EU club couldn’t possibly be tyrannical. Later, after repatriation, we see the Turkish government cut a cynical deal to release this same suspect from prison to placate the German authorities. Amid the bureaucracy and the institutional bad faith, however, individual Turks and Germans find common ground: friendship and love.

This is perhaps not a film for everyone; it does need a leap of faith, though not a very big leap. What I think is beyond doubt is that Akin - already the winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival for his 2004 film Head-On - is a director who has found a real voice. He tackles big ideas, big themes, in the service of which he creates believable human beings and elicits tremendous performances from his actors. It is bold and exhilarating film-making.”

From review by Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle:

“The experience of seeing THE EDGE OF HEAVEN is cumulative, sober and profound. By the time it’s over, audiences will feel as if they’ve seen whole other worlds, sides of worlds and worlds within worlds. They will feel as if they’ve come to know a handful of characters deeply and intimately, because they will have seen them in moments of emotional extremity.

The German title, AUF DER ANDEREN SEITE (”On the Other Side”), is less poetic but more descriptive. The characters go to other sides of themselves, and, like the audience, to other places and encounter other sides of life. Writer-director Fatih Akin assumes the role of a guide, maintaining a somber and observant tone, while always nudging the story along. Though the plotting is unconventional, it in no way ever begs audience indulgence or tests a viewer’s patience. Rather, from very early in the film - virtually from the first seconds - the viewer is hooked.

Akin takes us into Turkish slums, prison yards and shops, and also shows us sides of Germany we haven’t seen or thought of. A German of Turkish descent, Akin is only 34, but he has the ruefulness and insight of someone 20 or 30 years older. That’s a great gift, to know things without having to learn them.”

From review by A. O. SCOTT, New York Times
(Published: May 21, 2008)

“There are six principal characters in THE EDGE OF HEAVEN: two mothers, two daughters, a father and a son, all arranged in more or less symmetrical pairs. In the course of this extraordinary film by the German writer-director Fatih Akin (which won the best screenplay award in Cannes last year) children are lost, lost parents are never found, and generational and geographical distances grow wider.

Yet at the same time, as the lives of the characters cross and entwine, there is a sense of human connections becoming stronger and thicker, of a fragile moral order coalescing beneath the randomness and cruelty of modern life. And even as the movie bristles with violence - accidental and systematic, sexual and political - its tone is curiously gentle.

That compassion does not always come easily or express itself clearly is one of Mr. Akin’s central insights. He is generous with his characters, even at their worst, but he also regards them with a measure of detachment as their good intentions go astray and their bad impulses bear terrible fruit. Similarly, while he is acutely aware of viciousness, injustice and hypocrisy in both Turkey (where his parents were born) and his native Germany, his camera absorbs the authentic beauty in both countries, from tidy Bremen to pulsing Istanbul to the tea-covered hillsides and fishing villages of the Black Sea coast.

THE EDGE OF HEAVEN has a cumulative power, both intellectual and emotional, of its own. By the end you know the characters in it so well that you can’t believe you’ve seen the movie only once, yet on a second viewing it seems completely new. And that may be because the world they inhabit is immediately recognizable - until we get to heaven, it’s where we live - and like no place you’ve been before.”

IN BRUGES
2007    Directed by Martin McDonagh     107 minutes
English only.  No Vietnamese translation

Colin Farrell and Ralph Fiennes star in this edgy, action-packed, and highly entertaining comedy/thriller, written and directed by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh.

Review by Philip French, The Observer (London):

“Playwright Martin McDonagh, author of “The Lieutenant of Inishmore”, makes his feature debut as writer-director with IN BRUGES, a stylish, funny, exciting thriller in a tradition of tales about professional assassins that goes back through Tarantino’s PULP FICTION (1994) and Pinter’s THE DUMB WAITER (1957) to Hemingway’s THE KILLERS (1927). It centres on two Irish hitmen, the edgy young novice Ray (Colin Farrell) and the reflective, more experienced Ken (Brendan Gleeson). They’ve been sent by their London boss, Harry (Ralph Fiennes), to await their next assignment in the quiet, beautiful, medieval, Belgian town of Bruges (known to its Flemish citizens as Brügge).

The time is Christmas, there’s a chill in the air, snow is on the way, Bruges’s famous canals are shrouded in mist like Venice. Ken takes the opportunity for sightseeing. Ray is bored stiff and burdened by the guilt of accidentally killing a child while carrying out a recent contract to murder a priest in London.

They engage in philosophical conversations about life and their bizarre profession, which are even funnier and more scabrous than the exchanges between Samuel L Jackson and John Travolta in PULP FICTION. There’s a marvellous row with a family of obese American tourists. Ray meets a pretty Dutch girl, who’s working for a film company that’s in Bruges to make a dream sequence paying homage to Nicolas Roeg’s DON’T LOOK NOW, and featuring an aggressive American dwarf.

Drugs enter the equation, sudden outbursts of violence ensue and then the menacing Harry arrives with homicide in mind. Looking at the array of weapons offered him by a Russian mafioso, Ray says: ‘All I want is a normal gun for a normal person.’

McDonagh’s plotting is fiendishly clever, his dialogue crashes in on us like a tide throwing nails ashore with each wave and his black humour is laced with serious moral issues. Farrell, his eyebrows constantly wrinkling like a pair of leeches limbering up for a fight, Gleeson, the ultimate principled hitman, and Fiennes, the family man as sadistic killer, have rarely been better.”

Review by Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times:

“You may know that Bruges, Belgium, is pronounced “broozh”, but I didn’t, and the heroes of IN BRUGES certainly don’t. They’re Dublin hit-men, sent there by their boss for two weeks after a hit goes very wrong. One is a young hothead who sees no reason to be anywhere but Dublin; the other, older, gentler, more curious, buys a guidebook and announces: “Bruges is the best-preserved medieval city in Belgium!”

So it certainly seems. If the movie accomplished nothing else, it inspired in me an urgent desire to visit Bruges. But it accomplished a lot more than that. This film debut by the theater writer and director Martin McDonagh is an endlessly surprising, very dark, human comedy, with a plot that cannot be foreseen but only relished. Every once in a while you find a film like this, that seems to happen as it goes along, driven by the peculiarities of the characters.

Brendan Gleeson, with that noble shambles of a face and the heft of a boxer gone to seed, has the key role as Ken, one of two killers for hire. His traveling companion and unwilling roommate is Ray (Colin Farrell), who successfully whacked a priest in a Dublin confessional but tragically killed a little boy in the process. Before shooting the priest, he confessed to the sin he was about to commit. After accidentally killing the boy, he reads the notes the lad made for his own confession. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

The movie does an interesting thing with Bruges. It shows us a breathtakingly beautiful city, without ever seeming to be a travelogue. It uses the city as a way to develop the characters. When Ken wants to climb an old tower “for the view,” Ray argues “why do I have to climb up there to see down here? I’m already down here.” He is likewise unimpressed by glorious paintings, macabre sculptures and picturesque canals, but is thrilled as a kid when he comes upon a film being shot.

There he meets two fascinating characters: First he sees the fetching young blond Chloe (Clemence Poesy, who was Fleur Delacour in HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE). Then he sees Jimmy (Jordan Prentice), a dwarf who figures in a dream sequence. He gets off on a bad footing with both, but eventually they’re doing cocaine with a prostitute Jimmy picked up and have become friends, even though Ray keeps calling the dwarf a “midget” and having to be corrected.

Without dreaming of telling you what happens next, I will say it is not only ingenious but almost inevitable the way the screenplay brings all of these destinies together at one place and time. Along the way, there are times of great sadness and poignancy, times of abandon, times of goofiness, and that kind of humor that is really funny because it grows out of character and close observation. Farrell in particular hasn’t been this good in a few films, perhaps because this time he’s allowed to relax and be Irish. As for Gleeson, if you remember him in THE GENERAL, you know that nobody can play a more sympathetic bad guy.

Martin McDonagh is greatly respected in Ireland and England for his plays; his first film, a short named SIX SHOOTER starring Gleeson, won a 2006 Oscar. In his feature debut, IN BRUGES,” he has made a remarkable first film, as impressive in its own way as HOUSE OF GAMES, the first film by David Mamet, who McDonagh is sometimes compared with.

Yes, it’s a “thriller,” but one where the ending seems determined by character and upbringing rather than plot requirements. Two of the final deaths are, in fact, ethical choices. And the irony inspiring the second one has an undeniable logic, showing that even professional murderers have their feelings.”

MAI’S AMERICA
2002    Directed by Marlo Poras       71 minutes
English only.

MAI’S AMERICA is a personal journey that defies all expectations. Mai, a smart, vivacious, and resilient Vietnamese teenager, travels to America for her senior year of high school, shouldering her family’s high expectations and her own visions of western-style success. Yet, nothing in Mai’s wildest imagination could prepare her for what she finds in rural Mississippi, where encounters with white Pentecostal and black Baptist host-families, a local transvestite, and South Vietnamese immigrants challenge her long-held ideas about America, the concept of freedom, her identity and even her homeland of Vietnam.

Relatively privileged in Hanoi, Mai finds herself on a lower rung of the American economic ladder when she lands in Meridian, Mississippi. Her host family, composed of self-described rednecks, proves a challenge to her usually outgoing and upbeat personality. Plagued by unemployment and depression, the family shows little curiosity in their Vietnamese guest. At school, she finds it equally difficult at first to form real bonds.

But Mai is nothing if not persistent. She soon wins the heart of her host grandmother, who expresses an interest in her Vietnamese culture, and finds a worthy mentor in her high school history teacher.

THE LOVER
1992    Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud     115 minutes
English version, with Vietnamese audio option

The first foreign film ever shot on location in Vietnam after 1975, THE LOVER is based on the autobiographical novel by French author Marguerite Duras, whose youthful real-life romance with a Chinese man in 1920s Saigon caused a major scandal.

Although the young lovers are able to transcend their differences in age, race and class, theirs is a future that French colonial Vietnamese society will never allow.

Narrated by Jeanne Moreau, THE LOVER was nominated for an Oscar in 1993 for Best Cinematography, and won a César in France for Best Music Score.

“Of course, Duras never intended THE LOVER as a romance, but as Proustian minimalism. Annaud captures her remorse for things past, the sensory delicacies of Indochina, in the sumptuousness of his images.”
– Rita Kempley, The Washington Post

HANOI CINEMATHEQUE
Hanoi’s unique ‘art-house cinema’, is a members-only film society.

Memberships are available at the box office for only 100,000VND per year.

Members receive regular emails with detailed schedules and reviews of the films.

Tickets to the films are by donation.

HANOI CINEMATHEQUE 22A Hai Ba Trung Street (at the end of the alley leading to Artist’s Hotel) RESERVATIONS: Tel: 936 2648 (14:00 - 20:00) Fax: 936 2649 Email: info2@hanoicinema.org CAFE CINEMATHEQUE from 17:00 weekdays and from 13:30 weekends.