Lunenburg County Film Series

OSCAR NOMINATIONS: Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Screenplay

For one day only, February 14th, comes one of the year’s best films (Audience Award at Sundance 2009) and featuring one of the year’s most acclaimed performances from Carey Mulligan, winner of Best Actress -  National Board of Review, Toronto Film Critics, Chicago Film Critics, Washington Film Critics, Dallas Film Critics, British Independent Film Awards.

Winner - Best Foreign Language Film - Critics Choice Awards 2009

Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations for Foreign Language Film

Broken Embraces, starring Oscar-winner Penelope Cruz, is a steamy, scheming and romantic melodrama. Director Pedro Almódovar’s witty screenplay provides the intricate canvas on which this very Spanish dance of life and death is played out.

Broken Embraces leaves the viewer in a contradictory state, a mixture of devastation and euphoria, amusement and dismay that deserves its own clinical designation. Call it Almodóvaria, a syndrome from which some of us are more than happy to suffer. - A.O. Scott, The New York Times

Cruz exudes a sensual aura of mystery that holds you spellbound. And Almodóvar, a true poet of cinema, creates images — horrifying and healing — that live inside your head like a waking dream. You want to miss a movie like that? I didn’t think so. - Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

Watch the trailer at Youtube here.

Broken Embraces runs 2h8min so there will not be a short film this month. The film will begin at 7 pm.

Oscar Nominations: Best Foreign Language Film, Best Cinematography

Austrian director Michael Haneke (Caché, The Piano Teacher) directs one of the most acclaimed films of 2009 — Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Best Film at the European Film Awards, Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globe Awards and nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards.

“At first glance, The White Ribbon (Das Weisse Band) is the most mannered and most beautiful of Haneke’s films. Set in a village in rural northern Germany in 1913, with World War I looming on the horizon, it’s a gorgeously photographed and oddly riveting chronicle of a late-stage feudal society running on fumes. Shot in spectacular black-and-white by cinematographer Christian Berger, and marvelously acted by a first-rate German ensemble, The White Ribbon captures a mood of thickening tension and mounting violence as a series of brutal but apparently unrelated events — vandalism, fires, accidents and abductions — turn the people of the village against each other and shatter what remains of a fragile social consensus.

If Haneke’s most obvious point is that the hierarchical, aristocratic society of peasant Germany was replaced by something much worse — by the “New Order” created by its mistreated children, a generation later — it definitely can’t be reduced to a fable about the roots of fascism. “The White Ribbon” is a dense account of childhood, courtship, family and class relations in a painfully repressed and repressive society, which seems to channel both early Ingmar Bergman and the “Bad Seed”/”Children of the Corn” evil-tot tradition.

Haneke’s title refers to a ribbon parents of the period affixed to the sleeves of preadolescent children suspected of “impure” thought and behavior (i.e., masturbation). On one level, this story is about a very simple notion: The physical and psychic violence inflicted on one generation by another is always passed along, often in heightened and more dramatic form. But this severe and striking period piece is also a story that subtly but constantly reminds us that it is a story, and as such cannot be trusted. Even at the risk of undermining his own film, Haneke wants us to see history as a problematic and partial narrative, one that has more to teach us about the present than the past.” ~ Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com

October  6 & 7 - EASY VIRTUE
November 3 & 4 - BRIGHT STAR
December 1 & 2 - CAIRO TIME
January 5 & 6 - A SERIOUS MAN
February 2 & 3 -  CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY
March 2 & 3 - BROKEN EMBRACES (Los Abrazos Rotos)
April 6 & 7 - THE WHITE RIBBON (Das Weisse Band)
May 4 & 5 - I Killed My Mother (not confirmed)

If you are on our email mailing list you should have received an order form for a season pass. If you didn’t receive one please contact info@lunenburgfilms.com or print the attached pdf file below. You can also pick up an order form for a Season Pass at the following locations or on the night of one of our screenings:

Sagors Bookstore in Bridgewater

Fulton’s Pharmacy in Lunenburg

The LaHave Bakery in Mahone Bay

Buying a $48 season pass means you get two films for free when compared with the cost of paying the single admission of $8 for each of our eight regular screenings. Pass holders have also received free admission to the bonus screening we’ve held at the end of May the past five seasons.

To print a season pass order form click here:
order-form-2009.pdf

You are invited to participate in voting for the Film Circuit People’s Choice Award given to the best Canadian and International film shown during the 2009 season at Film Circuit locations across the country.
Click on the link: People’s Choice Award