Dear No Home Movies subscribers, I hope you have spent or that you are still spending a great summer! As you can see from the snapshot above, we are here to remind you that, you may not know it, you need cinephiles like us at No Home Movies to pick and share great cinema with you!
If you have spent the summer swimming, sunbathing, playing sports and the like, well, don’t worry, there is plenty of time to make it up, enter that dark room and immerse yourself into the dream world of cinema, the limbo between reality and imagination. We look forward to accompanying you with our fall season program!
We are not going to unveil all our picks yet, but we are announcing the dates.
18th September, premiere
Our first date, our premiere. Here, we are planning a screening seeking to shake you to the core, a descent into madness of high calibre. Alternatively, a selection of a much more contemplative nature. We shall see! Stay tuned for more.
9th October, remembering Chantal Akerman
The 5th of October 2015 Chantal Akerman took her life and left us at the age of 65. We want to honour her memory with a screening close to that tragic date. Akerman’s influence and heritage is of such immense magnitude that is very hard to narrow it down to one specific element. From Avant-guard to documentary and feminist politics her work is foundational. From our humble position as film curators, we wish to share our appreciation for the great director who inspired this very film club all the way to the choice of the name (a hint to the film we are showing?)!
29th October, Halloween Special
A special night screening that will hunt you forever. Do you dare to miss it?
20th November, Indian Cinema
Although the term “Indian” Cinema is obviously very broad and deceiving, giving the incredible diversity and richness of the cinematic production coming from India, we want to give you a hint to our focus for the month of November. We are going to continue the philosophy inaugurated by our previous season’s screening of Mambéty’s Touki Bouki.
18th December
Our last screening for 2022, what is going to be? A Christmas movie perhaps? Or a selection of experimental films that you could only see at Bubblan and No Home Movies?
All our screenings will be unveiled soon enough, be sure to subscribe to the newsletter to get to know what is coming directly in your inbox.
New model for subscription
This fall we are changing the way to join the film club: we are making it simpler and more rewarding. In order to make the screenings happen there are Licences Fees that the cultural association KUF takes care of.
Instead of paying an entrance fee for each screening you will be able to purchase a subscription and a season pass granting you access to all the screenings at a very reasonable price. This will allow KUF to handle the Licences and it gives you the opportunity to come as you please. More info in the next newsletter.
Some viewing recommendations
Now that we have teased our upcoming program, I would like to briefly share some meaningful and exciting films that have accompanied me this summer months. I started this post with a snapshot from Olivier Assayas’ latest meta-creation: the series Irma Vep, inspired by the Louis Feuillade's classic silent film serial Les Vampires (1915-1916), and by the feature “Irma Vep” (1996), the cult, also by Assayas, that already tried to reimagine the heroine from the original. The 2022 series (it can be seen on HBO) is an inventive, playful, but also painful dissection of our cinematic (but not only) obsessions, desires and ghosts.
The film that should have won La Palme D’Or (sorry Ruben, you know it’s true), Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future” has also been an uplifting experience this summer. If uplifting may sound as a strange word for this disturbing film, well, that is because, as usual, the discourse around this sort of challenging films is always thwarted by expectations and cheap tweets.
Cronenberg’s vision of mankind’s future is definitely bleak and frightening, but, in the end, the premise becomes a vehicle for philosophical reflection around the meaning of art, pain, attraction and how all those things intersect with our most immediate way of being: our body.
At the end of June, I visited Bologna for the festival Il Cinema Ritrovato. An exquisite festival for cinephiles curated with extreme dedication. A vast selection of restorations from across the world, special retrospectives and classics: a true feast for the eye. Here are some highlights: an astounding pre-revolution Iranian film "The Spring” (1972) by Arby Ovanessian; a Brazilian Cinema Novo gem “Black God, White Devil” (1964); a psychedelic Czeck fable “Až přijde kocour” (1963), winner of Special Jury Prize at Cannes, where a cat is gifted with the power of show people’s “true colour” by simply looking at them. The only way to stop him it is, obviously, to put sunglasses on him.
More picks: Govindan Aravidan’s “Thampu” (1978) a Fellinian portrait of a circus in the outskirts of an Indian village; the films of Japanese director Kenji Misumi “Kiru” “Ken” & “Kenki”; Jean Eustache’s epic “La Maman et la Putain”, a 4 hours long tour de force of dialogue-heavy French New Wave vibes. It might seem punishing but in reality, a painful and delightful observation of human relationships, love and their absolute messiness. Last viewing recommendation from Bologna: “Buck and the Preacher” (1972) a revisionist western from Sidney Poitier with the director himself together with Harry Belafonte. Bringing to the fore the experience of African American on the frontier it challenges American mythology.
Last but not least, I would like to mention the action films by Indian director S. S. Rajamouli. His latest sensation “RRR” (2022) managed to reach Western audiences and it is a feast of kinetic entertainment. Also, who doesn’t love to see arrogant British colonial officers getting their ass kicked by mythological fighters? With smaller budgets then American counterparts these films manage to deliver incredible set pieces and choreographies that should make the whole Marvel team wonder way their CGI is so boring and uninteresting?
But if you are more into the epic mythological sagas then look no further, the Baahubali 1&2 (2015, 2017) films have it all: action, romance, drama, music, dance and more. All extremely well curated, well shot and highly entertaining. So, when despair hits you, Cinema’s magic comes to the rescue. To indulge into that limbo between reality and imaginations might seem like a dangerous endeavour where the risk to lose oneself is high. Who knows, for all I know, that limbo, that dream space can be such a profound experience. Let’s share that together for another season!
Welcome to No Home Movies.