Experimental Tuesday
Tuesday, March 27 – 7pm – Free Screening

Cover Your Eyes in Delight! An Evening of Vladmaster-y!

Stereoscopic artist Vladimir in person!

Vladmasters are handmade View-Master™ reels designed, photographed, and hand-assembled by Portland, Oregon-based artist Vladimir. Her Vladmasters make use of toys, neglected household objects, and odd ephemera to tell 28-picture tales of train chases, missing steam shovels, disastrous dinner parties, and overly adventurous cockroaches. Her live performances offer simultaneous Vladmaster experiences in which every attendee is given a viewer and set of disks and then led through the story by a soundtrack featuring music, narration, sound effects, and ding noises to cue the change from image to image. Vladimir will be on hand tonight to lead us through four of her wondrous tales. Promises Vladimir: “The CLACK of hundreds of viewers turning simultaneously fills the air. Mass euphoria ensues.” View-Master™ and accompanying soundtrack to be provided! Please note: arrive early! Limited seating! Co-presented with Milwaukee’s own Paper Boat Boutique.

World Cinema
Friday, April 6 – 7pm
Saturday, April 7 – 5 & 9pm
Sunday, April 8 – 7pm

In Between Days

Aimie, a newly arrived Korean immigrant teenager, has fallen in love with her best and only friend, Tran. She tries to express her feelings for him, but is scared of losing their friendship. Their misunderstood affection for each other creates a delicate relationship that is challenged by the demands of living in a new country. To spend more time with
Tran, Aimie drops out of her English class, which she is failing. She fights against her mother who wants to remarry and then realizes she’s losing Tran to an Americanized Korean girl. Aimie’s world becomes more isolated, until she is forced to look inside herself for answers.

(So Yong Kim, Korean and Eng. w/ Eng. St., 82 min., 16mm, 2006)

 

World Cinema
Friday, April 6 – 9pm
Saturday, April 7 – 7pm
Sunday, April 8 – 5pm

The Motel

Winner – Humanitas Prize – Sundance Film Festival 2005

Thirteen-year-old Ernest lives and works at a sleazy hourly-rate motel on a strip of desolate suburban bi-way with his Mother, his Grandfather and his little sister.  This is the family business. Misunderstood by his family and blindly careening into puberty, Ernest befriends Sam Kim, a self-destructive yet charismatic Korean American man who has checked in. Sam sees himself in Ernest, a boy lost in the worst stages of pre-pubescence with nobody to help guide him.  After they bond over a midnight snack of
fried chicken, Sam becomes inspired to take Ernest under his wing and teach him the steps to manhood.

(Michael Kang, US, English & Cantonese w/ Eng. St., 76 min., 35mm, 2005)

 

Documentary Frontiers
Tuesday, April 10 – Thursday, April 11 – 7pm

Salvador Allende

A leftist revolutionary or a reformist democrat? A committed Marxist or a constitutionalist politician? An ethical and moral man or, as Richard Nixon called him, a "son of a bitch"? Acclaimed Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán returns to his native country thirty years after the 1973 military coup that overthrew Chile's Popular Unity government to examine the life of its leader, Salvador Allende, both as a politician and a man. Salvador Allende portrays the life, times and political formation of the Valparaiso-born doctor who was active in Socialist Party politics as a senator and who ran unsuccessfully for President three times before finally being elected in 1970.

(Patricio Guzmán, 100 min., 35mm, 2004)

 

World Cinema
Friday, April 13 – Friday, April 20 – Free Screenings

The 29th Annual
Latin American Film Series

The 29th annual Latin American Film, April 13-20, 2007, offers contemporary films highlighting the diversity of Latin America and the Caribbean. All films will be shown in their original language with English subtitles. Cosponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, UWM Union Programming, Union Theatre, and the Department of Film. For more information, see

http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/CLACS/outreach/filmseries.html

 

World Cinema
Saturday, April 21 – 7 & 9pm
Sunday, April 22 – 5 & 7pm

Mala Noche

*New 35mm Print

Based on the Walt Curtis autobiographical novel of the same name, Mala Noche is a story of “amour fou”. Walt is madly in love with a young illegal Mexican immigrant. However, the object of his unrequited affection does not speak any English and finds Walt strange and undesirable. Walt attempts to create whatever kind of bond he can with the young man in Gus Van Sant’s first feature film re-released on a new 35mm print. Co-sponsored by the LGBT Film Festival.

(Gus Van Sant, 1985, 78 min., 35mm)

 

Special Experimental Tuesday on Monday
Tuesday, April 23 – 7pm – Free Screening

Pine Flat

Sharon Lockhart in person!

Filmmaker/photographer Sharon Lockhart’s new film measures the experience of American childhood, specifically that of the girls and boys of Pine Flat, California, located in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. Shot over the course of three years in and around the town, the film offers a characteristic structuralist approach to ethnographic portraiture. In a series of extended takes, of fixed composition and uniform duration, Pine Flat generously offers a singular contemplative position, both intimate and detached, as we observe the town’s children, alone, at play, in a world largely devoid of adults.

(Sharon Lockhart, USA/Germany, 16mm, color/sound, 135min., 2005)

 

Share the Earth Environmental Film Series
Wednesday & Thursday, April 25 & 26 – 7pm
Free Screenings

Films and visit
by documentary filmmaker Judith Helfand

Judith Helfand defines herself as a filmmaker/organizer and has worked as a documentary producer and educator for the past ten years. She is currently a professor in New York University's undergraduate film and television department. Her award-winning films include A Healthy Baby Girl and Blue Vinyl. Using her personal experience with DES-related cancer as a jumping off point, Helfand makes honest, useful and human links between home and the shop floor, between suburban/urban consumers and workers, between the academy and the street, between institutions of faith and higher learning and a toxic marketplace that is highly vulnerable to evolved, conscious, politicized consumers. She is currently at work on a new "toxic comedy" about global warming. In her films and talk in the Union Theatre, she will link filmmaking to social change and talk about the power of personal narrative. For more information visit www.uniontheatre.uwm.edu/helfand

 

World Cinema
Friday, April 27 – 7pm
Saturday, April 28 – 5 & 9pm
Sunday, April 29 – 5 & 7pm

The Iceberg (L’iceberg)

Fiona is the manager of a fast-food restaurant.  She lives comfortably with her family in the suburbs.  In other words, Fiona is happy… until one day she accidentally gets locked into a walk-in fridge.  She escapes the next morning, half frozen and barely alive, only to realize that her husband and two children didn't even notice she was missing.  But when Fiona develops an obsession for everything cold and icy: snow, polar bears, fridges, icebergs – she drops everything, climbs into a frozen goods delivery truck and leaves home for a real iceberg.

(Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon & Bruno Romy, Belgium, French w/ Eng. St., 35mm, 2005)

 

LAST MINUTE SCHEDULING CHANGE!

World Cinema
Friday, April 27 – 9pm – Free Screening

Mon Oncle

Gerard's family lives in an efficient and well-designed universe until his idiosyncratic uncle, Monsieur Hulot comes to visit. The comic genius Jacques Tati directs and stars as M. Hulot.

(Jacques Tati, France, French w/ English St., 35mm, 1958)

World Cinema
Saturday, April 28 – 7pm – Free Screening

The General

With Live Musical Accompaniment by Casey Meehan and Josh Dumas!

Consistently ranked among the greatest films ever made, Buster Keaton's The General is so brilliantly conceived and executed that it continues to inspire awe and laughter with every viewing. Rejected by the Confederate army as unfit and taken for a coward by his beloved Annabelle Lee, young Johnnie Gray sets out to single-handedly win the war with the help of his cherished locomotive. What follows is, without exaggeration, probably the most cleverly choreographed comedy ever recorded on celluloid. Johnnie wages war against hijackers, an errant cannon, and the unpredictable hand of fate while roaring along the iron rails. Insisting on accuracy in every detail, Keaton created a remarkably authentic historical epic, replete with hundreds of costumed extras, full-scale sets, and the breathtaking plunge of an actual locomotive from a burning bridge into a river. “[Keaton's films] have such a graceful perfection, such a meshing of story, character and episode, that they unfold like music.” – Roger Ebert CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

(Buster Keaton, Clyde Bruckmann, Eddie Cline, 76 min., 35mm, 1926)

 

Hollywood versus History
Monday, April 30 – presentation begins at 6:30pm, screening at 7pm
Free Screening

Eight Men Out

In 1919, eight members of the Chicago White Sox conspired to throw the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds in the infamous “Black Sox Scandal” Director John Sayles recreates a long gone era in this acclaimed film that examines what possessed these talented players to betray the national pastime.  Prior to the screening Mr. Ed Benoit, III will present historical contextualization for this film and lead discussion afterwards.  Co-sponsored with Phi Alpha Theta (History Honors Society).

(John Sayles, 120 min., 1988)

 

Experimental Tuesday
Tuesday, May 1 – 7pm – Free Screening

Animato!

A program of animated shorts featuring Maureen Selwood's Mistaken Indentity, Larry Jordan's Blue Skies Beyond the Looking Glass, Stan Vanderbeek's Breathdeath, Emily Breer's Moby Richard, and Tom Kalin's Every Wandering Cloud.

Share the Earth
Thursday, May 3 - 7pm - Free Screening

The Power of Community:
How Cuba Survived Peak Oil

In the early 1990s, Cuba 's curtailed supply of Soviet oil resulted in major challenges: both how to feed the nation and how to sustain an economy on much less readily available energy. The Cuban people responded to the food crisis by largely abandoning their large scale agricultural system based on fluid fossil fuels and by developing a system of locally managed and operated farms and urban plots worked sustainably. Their successful transition from an industrial, petroleum-based society to a sustainable one is documented in this inspiring film.

"Everyone who is concerned about Peak Oil needs to see this film. Cuba survived an energy famine during the 1990s, and how it did so constitutes one of the most important and hopeful stories of the past few decades. It is a story not just of individual achievement, but of the collective mobilization of an entire society to meet an enormous challenge.” Richard Heinberg, author, The Party's Over, Powerdown , and The Oil Depletion Protocol

 

World Cinema
Friday, May 4 – 7pm
Saturday, May 5 – 5 & 9pm
Sunday, May 6 – 5 & 7pm

Climates
(Iklimler)

Winner - Fipresci Award - 2006 Cannes Film Festival

Beautifully drawn and meticulously observed, Climates vividly recalls the cinema of Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni with its poetic use of landscape and the incisive, exquisitely visual rendering of loneliness, loss and the often-elusive nature of happiness. During a sweltering summer vacation on the Aegean coast, the relationship between middle-aged professor Isa and his younger, television producer girlfriend Bahar brutally implodes. Back in Istanbul that fall, Isa rekindles a torrid affair with a previous lover. But when he learns that Bahar has left the city for a job in the snowy East, he follows her there to win her back. “Nuri Bilge Ceylan's film paints a haunting portrait of existential solitude, one in which the images speak louder and often more forcefully than do any of the words.” – Manhola Dargis NEW YORK TIMES

(Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey/France, in Turkish w/ Eng. St., 101mins., 35mm, 2006)

 

World Cinema
Friday, May 4 – 9pm – Free Screenings
Saturday, May 5 – 7pm

The Passenger
(Professione: reporter)

*New 35mm Print!

This haunting and unique film is a portrait of a drained journalist, played by a very young Jack Nicholson, who finds his deliverance when a man in a neighboring hotel room dies. Assuming the dead man’s identity, he winds up embroiled in international arms smuggling while traveling the countryside with a beautiful stranger. Shot on location in Africa, Spain, Germany and England. “[A] cryptic, beautifully shot tale of the ultimate alienated protagonist. . . .and the ultimate existential love affair.” – Michael Wilmington CHICAGO TRIBUNE

(Michelangelo Antonioni, France/Italy/USA, English, 35mm, 1975)

Documentary Frontiers
Tuesday, May 8 – Thursday, May 10 – 7pm

Wrestling With Angels

Wrestling With Angels is a feature documentary film about the Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America, Caroline or Change, Homebody/Kabul). It tells the story of a relentlessly creative spirit at work and of how Kushner, raised in the Deep South, would become an outspoken activist, a compassionate spokesperson for outsiders, and one of America's most creative playwrights. At its core the film explores the mystery of creativity, and is an inspiring tale of how a passionately committed person can make a difference for social justice. Co-sponsored by the LGBT Film Festival

(Freida Lee Mock, USA, 98 min., 35mm, 2006)

 

Locally Grown
Thursday, May 10 - 9pm

I Pity the Fool

As a city dismantles itself, clues to its past resurface. Collections of scraps sifted from rubble—an archeology of unanswered questions—combine to tell a surrogate narrative filled with missing pieces and forgotten motives, old letters, photographs, and home movies. Fractured moments occurring on one summer day, maybe two, echo events from thirty years earlier. The day is sunny, but it is humid, and clouds are gathering. It is going to rain.

(Brent Coughenour, 85 minutes, super 8/DV, 2007)

World Cinema
Saturday, May 12 – 7pm – Free Screening

Senior Screening

A special evening showcasing the films and videos completed by the UWM Department of Film’s graduating seniors.