Friday, May 1
PREMIERE
HOME FROM HOME: CHRONICLE OF A VISION
Celebrated German filmmaker Edgar Reitz, who just received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the German Film Awards, continues his visionary sweep through history with this black-and-white prequel to his ‘Heimat’ juggernaut, returning to the fictional Hunsrueck village of Schabbach and the Simon family in HOME FROM HOME: CHRONICLE OF A VISION.
In the mid-19th century, hundreds of thousands of Europeans emigrated to faraway South America. It was a desperate bid to escape the famine, poverty and despotism that ruled at home. Their motto was: “Any fate is better than death”. In HOME FROM HOME, a sweeping, epic evocation of the mass exodus of the German farmers and craftsmen to the New World, Reitz chronicles a domestic drama and love story set against the backdrop of this forgotten tragedy.
The film is centered around two brothers who realize that only their dreams can save them. The younger of them, Jakob, reads every book he can lay his hands on, and dreams about leaving his village, Schabbach, for adventures on an unknown continent and the freedom of the wild South American jungle. He studies the languages of the native South Americans and records his heroic attempts to escape the rural confines of the Hunsrück in an astonishing diary that not only tells us his story but reflects the aspirations and philosophies of a whole era. Everyone who encounters Jakob is drawn into the maelstrom of his dreams: his parents, bowed by the unremitting toil involved in making a living from the soil; his belligerent brother Gustav; and above all Henriette (Henriette), the comely daughter of a gem cutter fallen on hard times. Gustav’s return from military service is destined to shatter Jakob’s world and his love for Henriette. In this film that Trevor Johnson of Time Out calls “a magnificent, career-capping achievement from one of the great storytellers of our era.”
A Corinth Films release.
“It is nearly four hours, but never dull for a moment; indeed, there is a boxset addictiveness to the whole thing.”
— Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Friday, May 8
PREMIERE
THE WHITE KING
One part Orwell’s 1984, one part “A Handmaid’s Tale” and one part “The Man in the High Castle,” THE WHITE KING is a sci-fi drama set in a dystopian future. Based on the international best-seller by György Dragomán, the stark genre film called “eerily prescient given the current state of political affairs” (WOW247) stars Jonathan Pryce (“Game of Thrones”), Fiona Shaw (“Killing Eve,” Harry Potter series), Agyness Deyn (Sunset Song), Greta Scacchi (“War & Peace”), Ólafur Darri Ólafsson (The BFG), Ross Partridge (“Stranger Things”) and newcomer Lorenzo Allchurch.
Djata (Allchurch) is a care-free twelve-year-old growing up in “The Homeland,” a totalitarian state shut off from the outside world. Filled with Big Brother-like surveillance cameras and propaganda posters, the agrarian small town community at first seems peaceful and orderly, kept safe by an enormous statue dominating the landscape. But when Djata’s father, Peter (Partridge) is whisked away to a deadly work camp, the young boy and his mother, Hannah (Deyn) are labeled traitors and forced to navigate a world of propaganda, abuse and secret police. Before his father was taken away, however, he passed a secret to Djata that could change everything.
“Stunning… a modern day Orwellian nightmare.”
— The Upcoming
“Bold and brave… a powerful and evocative tale.”
— Pop Matters
Friday, May 15
PREMIERE
JASPER JONES
Adapted from Craig Silvey’s acclaimed coming-of-age novel, JASPER JONES from notable Australian director Rachel Perkins (Bran Nue Dae) and starring A Wrinkle in Time’s Levi Miller, Toni Collette, Hugo Weaving and Angourie Rice (Spiderman series, The Beguiled), tackles prejudice, class, justice and death through the eyes of a teenager in a moving drama set in small-town Australia in the late ’60s.
JASPER JONES tells the story of Charlie Bucktin (Miller), a bookish fourteen year-old boy living in a small Australian town. One night during the scorching summer of 1969, he is startled by Jasper Jones (Aaron McGrath), the town’s mixed race outcast, who appears outside his window desperate for help. Entrusted with a dangerous and terrifying secret, Charlie’s life is forever changed as he embarks on a journey to solve a chilling mystery, all while defeating the local racists, dealing with the breakup of his parents and falling head over heels in love. Called Australia’s Stand By Me, Sarah Ward of Screen International calls the film “an engaging mystery, a warm-hearted account of friendship and an exploration of courage in the face of prejudice,” and Richard Kuipers of Variety calls it “a beautifully composed portrait of life…[a] marvelously entertaining and ultimately uplifting tale”.
“One of the best and most heartfelt Australian films of the last decade.”
– Richard Gray, The Reel Bits
“Compelling as a whodunnit, touching as a coming-of-age story, insightful as a picture of race relations and crafty as a drama about secrets, concealing a few of its own for a final, satisfying reveal.”
— Luke Buckmaster, The Guardian
Friday, May 22
PREMIERE
WITHIN THE WHIRLWIND
From Christine Ruppert, producer of The Last King Of Scotland, Marleen Gorris, Academy Award-winning director of Antonia’s Line, and international star Emily Watson (“Chernobyl,” Breaking The Waves, Hilary And Jackie, Angela’s Ashes, The Proposition, Red Dragon), WITHIN THE WHIRLWINDbears witness to one woman’s tenacious will to survive ten years of imprisonment in a Soviet Gulag.
Teacher and writer Eugenia Ginzburg was swept up in one of Stalin’s brutal purges in the 1930’s, as the dictator tightened his grip on the Soviet Union. Though most Americans are familiar with the Nazi Holocaust, few are aware of similar purges that took place in other countries, such as the mass annihilation of millions of Soviet citizens as a result of Stalin’s intense desire to eliminate would-be political enemies. Thanks to the survivors there is a wealth of information and first-hand accounts of what entailed life in the Soviet Union’s version of a concentration camp, and what it took to survive. WITHIN THE WHIRLWIND is Eugenia Ginzburg’s story.
Born to a Jewish pharmacist in 1905, Eugenia and her husband lived in Kazan with their two children in 1937. Both Communist Party officials, Eugenia was suddenly arrested on charges of participating in a Trotskyist Counter Revolutionary group and hauled away to a notorious prison camp. Ginzburg endured years of imprisonment, hard labor, and brutal cold. She wrote two memoirs, Journey Into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind, on which this film is based. Starring Watson, Ian Hart and Ulrich Tukur, this film is shot in the English language.
A Corinth Films release.
Friday, May 29
PREMIERE
TAKE ME TO THE RIVER
Leading into Gay Pride Month this June is Matt Sobel’s assured directorial debut, the story of Ryder, an artsy, confident California teen who is heading to Nebraska for a family reunion, where he plans to come out to his conservative relatives. Of this acclaimed drama, an Official Selection of Sundance, Ibid Shah of Indiewire says, “[this] quietly engaging debut is one of the great discoveries of the 2015 Sundance Film Festival: [Sobel’s] fish-out-of-water observations have a personal edge…”
After holds off on his pronouncement at his mother’s request, Ryder (Logan Miller) nevertheless makes a showy entrance at the cookout with his short shorts and his eye-catching shades. No one seems particularly impressed except his 9-year old cousin Molly, who likes to follow him around. When they go to the barn to look for birds in the rafters and she comes back screaming and inconsolable, Ryder comes under suspicion and, in the process of clearing his name, learns that some family secrets are sometimes better kept that way. Josh Hamilton, Ricard Schiff, Robin Weigert and Ursula Parker round out the impressive ensemble.
“Superlatively acted culture-clash indie chillingly evokes primal dread
and sexual transgression…”
— Ronnie Scheib, Variety
“Played out like a genuinely strange waking dream…
we rarely see such taxing audacity from first time filmmakers.”
— The Playlist
