CINEMA REBORN FEBRUARY NEWSLETTER - 2023 DATES EXTENDED, KIESLOWSKI'S TRILOGY, CHARITABLE DONATIONS

 

CINEMA REBORN – DATES FOR OUR 2023 SEASON EXTENDED

 

After a lot of consultation, advice, and cooperation from our suppliers and our venue Cinema Reborn 2023 will now take place from 26 April to 2 May at the Randwick Ritz.

 

We’ll be screening eighteen films from ten countries and five continents. The full program with links to the Ritz website for bookings and the Cinema Reborn website for information on all titles will be released on 14 March. Screenings on Monday and Tuesday 1-2 May will almost entirely be repeats of a large number of the titles screened from Wednesday 26 April to Sunday 30 April. It should be noted however that a number of our titles this year will have one screening only.

Three Colours Red

 

Krysztof Kieslowksi’s THREE COLOURS TRILOGY  to feature at Europa Europa Film Festival

Krzysztof Kieslowski's remarkable trilogy has been given a magnificent 4K restoration and will be a centrepiece at the forthcoming Europa Europa Film Festival which takes place at the Randwick Ritz from 16 February to 7 March. Each of the films will screen once only at 6.20 pm on three successive Saturdays 18 February, 25 February and 4 March. For bookings hit the link above.

  

What follows are some extracts from a piece about the Trilogy by Peter Bradshaw first published in The Guardian. 

For some cinephiles, reconsidering Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colours trilogy is like finding an old photo of yourself in 90s clothes and a 90s haircut. This series of three conceptually interlocking movies – his last work, in fact, before he died following heart surgery in 1996 – was by far Kieslowski's biggest international hit… featuring the luminous stars of each: Juliette Binoche, Julie Delpy and Irène Jacob, a gorgeous young aristocracy of French cinema….

 

Three Colours White

But watched again sympathetically, the movies themselves stand up, not as the dreamy conversation-pieces of a thousand studenty parties – with blokes pretending to like them to impress their dates – but as an operatic triptych, a dramatic cine-poem of intense strangeness, indulgent and confident, set somewhere which looks like the real world, but isn't.

The trilogy shifts gear from high tragedy to low comedy to intense drama in a world of happenstance and coincidence: it is variously sentimental, grandiose, sexy, eerie and uncanny. The movies are shot through with moments of bizarre black comedy, anxiety and cynicism about Europe itself. …

But watched again sympathetically, the movies themselves stand up, not as the dreamy conversation-pieces of a thousand studenty parties – with blokes pretending to like them to impress their dates – but as an operatic triptych, a dramatic cine-poem of intense strangeness, indulgent and confident, set somewhere which looks like the real world, but isn't.

Three Colours Blue

The trilogy shifts gear from high tragedy to low comedy to intense drama in a world of happenstance and coincidence: it is variously sentimental, grandiose, sexy, eerie and uncanny. The movies are shot through with moments of bizarre black comedy, anxiety and cynicism about Europe itself. With the Eurozone and the European ideal in such crisis, now is an interesting moment to watch the Three Colours again.

The films are Three Colours: Blue (1993), Three Colours: White (1994) and Three Colours: Red (1994), notionally colour-schemed in the manner of the French flag, and – again, notionally – structured around the classic themes of the French republic: liberty, equality and brotherhood. With a little effort, the relevance of each can be detected in each film, but as Kieslowski himself cheerfully conceded, these concepts were there because the production funding was French. The real themes of the trilogy are more disparate, more chaotic, less high-minded, and far more interesting: the unending torture of love, the inevitability of deceit, the fascination of voyeurism and the awful potency of men's fear and loathing of women. To throw everything away, including one's very identity, and start again – that is another powerful, recurrent motif.

Cinema Reborn Organising Committee Member Angelica Waite has convened a panel of Speakers to introduce each of the films.

Blue

Introduced by Angelica Waite, a film programmer and organising committee member at Cinema Reborn Film Festival. With a BA (Hons) in Film Studies, her Honours research explored generative processes of truthmaking in documentary film, with a focus on Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up (1990). She is a co-founder of collaborative film screening and publication project The Film Group.  

 

White

Introduced by Matilda Mroz, a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sydney and the author of a number of articles and books on Polish film, including Framing the Holocaust in Polish Aftermath Cinema: Posthumous Materiality and Unwanted Knowledge (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). She has a PhD in film studies from the University of Cambridge.  

 

Red

Introduced by Janice Tong, by day the managing director for a tech media company, and by night a cinephile whose thesis was on love, time and memory in the films of Wong Kar-wai. Janice has published work in a number of books and journals, including Chinese Films in Focus II, Contretemps, and Senses of Cinema. Her blog, Night, covers a range of films and auteurs.

 

CINEMA REBORN CHARITABLE DONATIONS

Cinema Reborn is an organisation devoted exclusively to exploring the Cinema's heritage. It is managed and organised by a group of dedicated film professionals here working solely on a voluntary basis to assemble an annual selection of cinema classics from around the world.

Cinema Reborn is designed to attract both Sydney residents and visitors from other states and New Zealand. It forms part of a unique network of international events devoted to screening the cinema's past and has built relationships with film archives and long time production houses around the world. Each selection will be having its Sydney premiere in the unique surroundings of one of Sydney's few remaining art deco picture palaces.

The costs of assembling and presenting Cinema Reborn, notwithstanding the hundreds of hours freely donated by Committee Members, volunteers, writers and presenters, are such that box office revenue cannot cover the cost of acquisition of titles, freight and logistics, venue hire, additional professional support from projectionists and staff, and the production of supporting print and online material. Cinema Reborn has relied, since its inception, on the generosity of donors who support our aims and are committed to the annual project of bringing cinema classics back to a big screen in perfect new digital copies. Without such support the event could not be presented.

To make a tax deductible donation to support our work CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE AUSTRALIAN CULTURAL FUND