sneak peek in focus
Spike Lee
Three incredibly different Focus on seasons are opening at ACMI in the coming months.
Here's a heads-up on what's to come:
Focus on Johnnie To this November will see Hong Kong's most successful directorial export showcased in a retrospective of 12 of his solo works. With a career spanning 30 years with nearly 50 producing and directing credits to his name, To is known as the master auteur of Hong Kong film. Now a veteran of the industry, he joined the Jury of the 2008 Venice Film Festival and enjoyed a similar retrospective of his work at the 2008 International Film Festival Rotterdam.
The ten-day season will open with the Australian premiere of Sparrow (2008), his latest release, which opened the 10th Osian Cinefan Film Festival of Asian and Arab cinema in New Dehli in August and screened at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival.
In December, ACMI opens Focus on Spike Lee, a career survey of the provocative, powerhouse filmmaker. The season will open with Lee's break-out hit, Do The Right Thing (1989), which Lee penned, earning a nomination for Best Original Screenplay Oscar and sealing his reputation as a socially engaged filmmaker.
This season highlights Lee's ability to be undaunted by subject matter. We can also reveal films screening include; Malcom X (1993) starring Denzel Washington in a role that earnt him an Oscar nomination; and a special one-off screening of When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006), Lee's impassioned portrait of New Orleans and its citizens in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
Frequently setting his films in New York to a ghetto blaster soundtrack of Public Enemy, Lee's other hallmarks include writing, directing and starring in his own films, as well as the regular casting of Denzel Washington, Ossie Davis and Delroy Lindo, which served to revolutionise the role of African American talent in contemporary cinema.
2009 opens with Focus on William Klein. Not quite American, not quite French, like Klein himself (a New Yorker who has lived most of his adult life in Paris) his films are impossible to pigeon-hole - startling, raw, funny, shocking, expressionistic, stylish and seductive. This season spotlights Klien as artist, photographer and filmmaker, across fashion to agit-prop, op-art to manic fiction feature films and groundbreaking 'direct cinema' documentaries.
This program of rarities unleashes Klein's eclectic career and creative genius; from maverick fashion photographer (1950s Vogue) and distinguished photojournalist; to off-the-wall fiction filmmaker and documentary chronicler of celebrity, counterculture, sports heroes and political icons.
You heard it here first: the season will feature Klien-on-Klien documentary, In and Out of Fashion; a treat for lovers of fashion with haut couture fairytale pastiche of the French fashion World Who Are You Polly Maggoo? (1965); the caustically delirious, comic-strip satire of an American superhero in Paris, Mr Freedom (1968); and the science fiction farce The Model Couple (1975), among others.
Click here for program information on Focus on Johnnie To and stay tuned for program information on our future Focus on seasons.
Published Monday, 20 October 2008
|
