Sponsored by the Division of Student Affairs University of Illinois-Springfield
(All movies will be shown at 7 p.m. in Brookens Auditorium)
9/15 The Squid and the Whale (English), 2005, 81 minutes, Rated R
Park Slope, Brooklyn, 1986. When Walt Berkman, an impressionable 16-year-old, passes off the Pink Floyd song "Hey You" as his original work and performs it at a high school talent show, he's perfectly content with his rationale. "I felt I could have written it so the fact that it was already written was kind of a technicality." At the same time, his 12-year-old brother Frank drinks beer and wonders openly about his mother's sex life. Both are simply reacting to the fall-out from the bomb dropped on their comfortable family life when their parents, Bernard--a once promising author and now middle-aged academic and Joana burgeoning writer with a book deal--announce that they are splitting up. The familiar, steady foundation is shaken. Walt and Frank are relegated to alternating weekends and a jumbled calendar of Mom or Dad nights. The kids are left to grapple with the confusing and conflicted feelings that arise from the sudden collapse of their parents' marriage.
9/22 Waging a Living (English), 2005, 85 minutes, Not Rated
The term "working poor" should be an oxymoron. If you work full time, you should not be poor, but more than 30 million Americans - one in four workers - are stuck in low wage jobs that do not provide the basics for a decent life. WAGING A LIVING chronicles the battle of four low-wage workers to lift their families out of poverty. Shot over a three-year period in the northeast and California, this observational documentary captures the dreams, frustrations, and accomplishments of a diverse group of workers who struggle to live from paycheck to paycheck. By presenting an unvarnished look at the barriers that these workers must overcome to escape poverty, WAGING A LIVING offers a sobering view of the elusive American Dream.
9/29 Hawaii, Oslo (Norwegian), 2004, 125 minutes, Not Rated
Hawaii, Oslo is the story of a handful of people who cross each other's path without necessarily knowing each other, during the hottest day of the year, in Oslo. We follow Frode and Milla. They are having their first child, who they are told will not live long. We follow Bobbie-Pop, a faded singer who tries to commit suicide. We follow Leon, an institutionalized kleptomaniac who is loking for Åsa, to whom he has a ten year old deal to get married. We meet Leon's brother, Trygve, who fetches Leon at the institution to celebrate his birthday, but who himself has plans to use his leave from prison to run away. And most of all we meet the angel Vidar, Leon's best buddy at the institution, who sees things no one else can see, and who may be able to save everyone - except himself?
10/6 Thumbsucker (English), 2005, 96 minutes, Rated R
Dubbed "the King Kong of oral obsessives" by his hippie dentist, Justin Cobb is a 16-year-old desperate to find a way to break this embarrassing habit he has retained since infancy. His father, a former football star, tries to help by providing an antidotal cayenne-pepper cream and a healthy dose of flyfishing. His mother, who works as a nurse helping the rich and famous sober up, seems more concerned with a fantasy romantic relationship with TV-star Don Johnson than with her son's problems. Hypnosis seems to work, but the problem surfaces in other forms from drug addiction to alcoholism.
10/13 Transamerica (English), 2005, 103 minutes, Rated R
Bree, a pre-operative, male-to-female transsexual, holds down two jobs and saves every penny so that she can pay for one last operation that will make her a woman at last. One day, however, she receives a strange phone call. It appears that on the other side is Toby, apparently her son, who must be the product of a somewhat clumsy sexual encounter years ago when she was a man. He stays in New York, incarcerated. Bree flies from Los Angeles to New York in order to get the boy out of jail. At first she is reluctant to do so, but her therapist convinces her to face up to her past. The boy is handed over to her without a word of explanation and Toby believes the woman to be some Christian missionary determined to convert reprobates to Jesus; Bree sees no reason to clear up the misunderstanding. However, she finds out that the boy just wants to escape from her and hitchhike to Los Angeles. She persuades him to accompany her back to the west coast--secretly planning to leave him at his stepfather's along the way. Toby is happy to take her up on her offer.
10/20 Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (Inuktitut), 2001, 172 minutes, Rated R
Centuries ago, in what would become the Canadian Arctic, Atuat is promised to the malevolent Oki, son of the leader of their tribe. But Atuat loves the good-natured Atanarjuat, who ultimately finds a way to marry her. Oki's sister, Puja also fancies Atanarjuat, and when she causes strife between him and his brother Amaqjuaq, Oki seizes the opportunity to wreak a terrible revenge on Atanarjuat.
10/27 Following Sean (English), 2005, 87 minutes, Not Rated
In Following Sean award-winning documentary film maker Ralph Arlyck starts from a simple proposition: whatever happened to Sean, the four-year-old son of Haight Street hippies? While in film school in San Francisco in the late 1960s, Arlyck had made a fifteen-minute film featuring his four-year-old neighbor Sean Farrell, the son of his upstairs neighbors, Johnny and Susie. The film soon became a cause celèbre, heralding or damning (depending upon the viewer’s point of view) America’s love and peace generation, while Arlyck himself moved back to New York. Some thirty years later, Arlyck decided to head back to San Francisco to find out what happened to Sean.
11/3 Nobody Knows (Japanese), 2005, 141 minutes, PG-13
Four siblings live happily with their mother in a small apartment in Tokyo. The children all have different fathers and have never been to school. The very existence of three of them has been hidden from the landlord. One day, the mother leaves behind a little money and a note, charging her oldest boy to look after the others. And so begins the children's odyssey, a journey nobody knows. Though engulfed by the cruel fate of abandonment, the four children do their best to survive in their own little world, devising and following their own set of rules. When they are forced to engage with the world outside their cocooned universe, the fragile balance that has sustained them collapses. Their innocent longing for their mother, their wary fascination toward the outside world, their anxiety over their increasingly desperate situation, their inarticulate cries, their kindness to each other, their determination to survive on wits and courage.
11/10 Fateless (Hungarian), 2005, 135 minutes, Rated R
Gyuri Koves is a Hungarian Jewish teenage boy caught up in the daily dramas of adolescence. When Nazi soldiers take over his native Budapest and begin imposing restrictions on the city's Jewish citizens, his comfortable life changes profoundly. Gyuri resents these restrictions, especially since he has never considered himself particularly Jewish. A rapid succession of events forces him to reconcile himself to this new daily reality. His father is taken by the Nazis and Gyuri himself is deported to a series of distant concentration camps, where survival becomes a daily goal. Gyuri prevails and is liberated by American soldiers. Still clad in his striped prison clothes, he returns to Budapest. Immediately, he senses the indifference of his neighbors to his experience. Former friends urge him to "put the ordeal out of his mind," while a sympathetic intellectual keeps referring to the camps as "the lowest circle of hell." Gyuri can relate to neither cliché and is left to ponder the meaning of his experience alone.
11/17 My Architect (English), 2003, 116 minutes, Not Rated
World-famous architect Louis Kahn (Exeter Library, Salk Institute, Bangladeshi Capitol Building) had two illegitimate children with two different women outside of his marriage. Son Nathaniel always hoped that someday his father would come and live with him and his mother, but Kahn never left his wife. Instead, Kahn was found dead in a men's room in Penn Station when Nathaniel was only 11. Nathaniel travels the world visiting his father's buildings and haunts in this film, meeting his father's contemporaries, colleagues, students, wives, and children.
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