Detailed schedule
In collaboration with this year’s Tbilisi International Film Festival, Culture.pl proudly presents a number of screenings under the tagline Cinema for Social Change. The films selected for our programme address some of the essential political and social issues facing all of us today, representing not only a range of important topics but also a wide variety of cinematic styles. These films do not provide any answers to the issues they address; rather what they attempt to do is to provide a human face to those issues, to move these discussions out of the realm of abstract political debate and onto the terrain of the actual lives of citizens from around the world - from Iraq to Bolivia to Georgia to Poland and beyond.
The screenings are complemented with workshops conducted by Richard Pena, Q&As, a lecture and discussion with participation of Adam Michnik.
Curators:
- Richard Peńa - Director Emeritus of the New York Film Festival and Professor of Film Studies at Columbia University.
- Adam Michnik - legendary Polish dissident, journalist, historian and now publisher of Poland’s largest daily newspaper.
As a professor of film history, I tell my students that the cinema had many inventors, but we tend to focus on two primary groups: the American inventor Thomas Edison and his assistant WKL Dickson, and Louis and Auguste Lumière, two French brothers whose father manufactured photographic equipment. While we honor both, in the end we give pride of place to the Lumières, as their invention, the cinematographe, enabled the moving images it created to be projected on a screen before a public; in contrast, the Edison device, the kinetoscope, was kept inside a box that allowed one viewer at a time. Thus, from its very origins, the cinema was a “social medium,” so its predilection for addressing topical events or controversial issues seemed a natural direction for new medium.
Since that time, the cinema has always taken part in public debates, sometimes advocating change, at others warning of the terrible effects of new developments in politics or social relations. Our film series brings together a wide variety of films from around the world, each one of which sees as its purpose addressing some pressing issue. Not that these films avoid the notion that they’re works of art; each one, we think you’ll agree, is beautifully and effectively made, with excellent performances by such international stars as Vincent Lindon (WELCOME) or Gael Garcia Bernal (EVEN THE RAIN), and are often stunningly photographed (THE PRICE OF SEX). Yet all of the filmmakers represented here also want their films to become part of a national or international dialog; these films and filmmakers may not have the answers, but they are surely asking all the right questions.
In WELCOME, a swimming coach is asked by a young immigrant to train him to swim the English Channel so that he can join his fiancée in the UK; despite his doubts about the young man’s prospects, the coach comes to care and respect his student, connecting with him on a level of physical achievement that provides a way of surpassing cultural or ethnic difference. And in THE MIRACLE OF HISTORY, we follow the often slow and at times tense road taken by Poland as it seeks to entire the European community. All our films will transport you to different, often unfamiliar worlds, yet the problems they discuss will no doubt resonate with your own lives. I look forward to seeing you at the movies.
--Richard Peña, Director
Timetable
27th November, 2pm / Shota Rustaveli Theatre and Film University
MASTERCLASS WITH RICHARD PENA*
American Independent Cinema: History and Practice
How can we define “American Independent Cinema,” a term often used but little understood? In order for there to be an “independent cinema,” there would also have to be a “dependent cinema,” one from which the independent filmmakers saw themselves as breaking away from or providing an alternative to. Of course, the “dependent cinema” par excellence” was the American commercial cinema, usually simply called Hollywood. Dominating at times as much as 70% of international film distribution, it also had a virtual stranglehold on filmmaking and film exhibition in the US. Yet, even in those years of its greatest power, there were always some brave artists who simply resolved to beat the system by avoiding it, and thus they created their own films. Tracing the history of American cinema from 1920s through today, and touching on such movements as the leftwing “Film and Photo Leagues,” ethnic cinemas such as African American and Yiddish films, the American Avant-Garde as well as the “New Left Cinema” of the 1960s, this workshop will look a the role of “independent production” in America today and its prospects for the future.
28th November, 4pm / Writers’ House of Georgia
MASTERCLASS WITH RICHARD PENA*
Women and Social Change: relationship between filmmakers and the feminist movement
A recent United Nations report showed conclusively that a nation’s development is intrinsically linked, both politically and economically, to the share of participation of women in every aspect of society. “Feminist” ideas about equality or inclusion are no longer admirable or worthy position: they can now be seen as essential aspects for a nation’s well-being and improvement. By taking on our mothers, wives, sisters and female friends as partners in society, we men are just not being nice to them: we’re in fact being good to ourselves.
Although there were important women filmmakers from the very earliest days of cinema—indeed, Frenchwoman Alice Guy could properly be called cinema’s first true director—overwhelmingly, in every cinematic culture at least until the 1970s, men have been the primary figures. Perhaps that’s one reason why those women who were brave enough to attempt to make their own films often gravitated to areas such as documentary, experimental cinema, animation or occasionally independent features. In that way, women have often been the “lightning rods” for social change in the cinema, often going places where male filmmaker feared to tread.
In this workshop we will discuss the role of women in creating socially engaged cinemas around the world. The relationship between filmmakers and the evolving feminist movement will also be featured, as well as clips from key films that illustrate these connections.
1st December, 2 pm / Amirani 3
BEATS OF FREEDOM, 2010, Leszek Gnoiński, Wojciech Słota, Poland, 78 min
A story of a remarkable time in Poland, when alternative rock exploded with a force unseen anywhere else in the socialist bloc.
1st December, 3 pm / Tbilisi State University
LECTURE AND DEBATE WITH ADAM MICHNIK *
"Accession to the European Union - Realities and Expectations" (debate)
2nd December, 7pm / Cinema Rustaveli
MIRACLE OF THE HISTORY, 2014, Katarzyna Kolenda-Zaleska, Poland , 86 min.
The history and aftermath of Poland's entrance into the European Union. Clear-eyed and provocative, it chronicles a milestone in European history whose impact is being felt even today.
3rd December, 2pm / Amirani 2
KREDITIS LIMITI (Line of Credit) 2014, Salomé Alexi, Georgia / France, 85 min.
An ironic, bleakly comic drama about sliding down the economic scales in post-Soviet Georgia. Nino, a fortysomething woman from a well-off family, is finding it hard to make ends meet while keeping up appearances.
3rd December, 9pm / Amirani 2
THE SOUND OF TORTURE , 2013, Keren Shayo, Israel, 58 min.
A disturbing look at the camps for Eritrean refugees in Sinai desert, and the Swedish-Eritrean journalist who has devoted herself to exposing the torture victims’ stories and ending their suffering.
Q&A after the screening.
4th December, 2pm / Amirani 3
THE PRICE OF SEX , 2011, Mimi Chakarova, USA, 73 min.
The award-winning film follows the lives of several young women, exploring the causes for their acceptance of attractive sounding jobs in Greece, Turkey and Dubai that then turn out to be nothing more than sexual slavery.
Q&A after the screening.
4th December, 9 pm / Cinema Rustaveli 4
EVEN THE RAIN, 2010, Iciar Bolain, Spain, 103 min.
As a director and his crew shoot a controversial film about Christopher Columbus in Bolivia, local people rise up against privatization of the water supply.
Q&A after the screening.
5th December, 12pm /Amirani 1
WELCOME, 2009, Philippe Lioret, France, 110 min.
A compelling immigration drama about a young Kurdish man,who makes his way to French Atlantic coast but is frustrated in his attempts to cross the channel to join his girlfriend in the UK. Thus he enlists the aid of a swimming coach to train him to swim across the channel.
*Free entry. Translation into Georgian will be provided.
Tickets available at Amirani Cinema and Rustaveli Cinema.
16th Tbilisi International Film Festival
1st to 5th December 2015.
Tbilisi, Georgia
Organising partners:
Georgian Public Broadcaster's First Channel and Radio 1
Tbilisi International Film Festival
Georgian National Film Center
Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Tbilisi