CINEMA REBORN 2024 - UPDATE - THE GOLDEN COACH, ISHANOU, BODY MELT

The stills above are from one of our 2024 crowd pleasers, the wonderful THE GOLDEN COACH from 1952  starring the fabulous Anna Magnani. See it at the Ritz on Sunday 5 May introduced by film-maker Margot Nash or at the Lido on Sunday 12 May introduced by cinephile Peter Hourigan. Peter's passion for the films of Jean Renoir dates back to his undergraduate days in the 1960s when, for the Melbourne University Film Society (MUFS), he curated an early and pioneering imported season of Renoir’s films, some for their Australian premieres. His love affair with The Golden Coach has survived the years since. 

....In the meantime it's just a week and a day until Cinema Reborn 2024 gets going in Sydney and a week after that in Melbourne.  All of our media is in place and you can read extensive notes on all of the films in the program if you click on the Cinema Reborn website.

If you would like to have your own document with the program notes from the website plus some special additional notes on a range of our films you can do so by browsing or downloading the Cinema Reborn catalogue.

We have printed a small number of copies of the catalogue and these will be on sale at the Cinema Reborn Information Desk in the foyer at the Ritz ($5, cash only) and at the box office at the Lido in Melbourne (credit card only).

ISHANOU/THE CHOSEN ONE

Our first ever film from India (stills above) was made by Aribam Syam Sharma in the far northwest state of Manipur, a long way from the major production centre of Mumbai. Several years ago the process of restoring the film was begun by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur and his colleagues at the Film Heritage Foundation in Mumbai. The restoration took two years but in 2023 the film was brought back when it was selected for Cannes Classics and then went on to screen at Bologna's Il Cinema Ritrovato and MoMA in New York's To Save and Project.

Ishanou will have a single screening in both Sydney and Melbourne and Shivendra has recorded his own introduction to the film. It provides some fascinating insights into the film's subject as well as history of the restoration itself, a true labour of love.

We have posted Shivendra's introduction on YouTube and you can see it if you click here

ISHANOU screens at 10.30 am on Saturday 4 May at the Ritz and at 10.30 am on Saturday 11 May at the Lido. Just click on the theatre name to book tickets.

BODY MELT

Cinema Reborn's first ever late night shock horror experience has a host of fans including Quentin Tarantino who said " I thought the movie was fantastic. I invited a whole bunch of friends over to watch it, and we were like 'Wow, this movie is so cool'"

Then there is film critic par excellence Adrian Martin who has written the program notes for us.  Here's some of Adrian's sober reflection: Brophy is among those practitioners of the film fantastique – like George Romero, Kathryn Bigelow or Larry Cohen – fond of a certain form of allegory that is specific to popular art. Narrative situations provide a prism whereby a series of variations on a central premise are illustrated, demonstrated, explored, contradicted, synthesised. In the popular-allegorical mode, characters are conceived of as variable bundles of traits, tics and appearances that are exemplary in  relation to the chosen field of inquiry. In Brophy’s work, pop-allegory meets the speculative ruminations of the essay-film. 

His key subject has long been the body and our experience of it: life seized as a calculus of bodily effects, stimuli, drives, mechanisms. Horror cinema offers an expressionist statement of what is, for him, a base, physical reality: bodies that devour and decay, consume and expel, peel and ravage. The dialogue reminds us (in its pop-allegorical mode) of such daily realities: a baby inside its mother is ‘the ultimate parasite’; everyone’s hooked on one drug or another. 

Maybe it's a movie to tell your kids about if you want to introduce them to the vast pleasures of Cinema Reborn 2024.  Plenty of seats  free for Friday night walkups at the Ritz  at 9.00 pm on 3 May and the Lido at 9.00 pm on 10 May.

AND IN THE MEANTIME

The Cinema Reborn 2024 page on the website of the Australian Cultural Fund enables our supporters to make a tax-deductible donation. All donations great and small are very welcome. The Australian Cultural Fund page can be found If You Click Here