OKLAHOMA CITY UNIVERSITY FILM INSTITUTE

Our 28 Year, 2009-2010

Join us for our tenty-eighth year and explore eight international films the theme of "This I Believe." A discussion session follows each film for those who wish to stay.

9/27/2009, The Edge of Heaven, Fatih Akins, Germany(2007), 116
Kerr McGee Auditorium, Meinders School of Business

Claimed by many to be the greatest film of the past year, The Edge of Heaven weaves together overlapping, intergenerational tales of friendship and sexuality into a powerful narrative of universal love. With echoes of Crash and other films of similar structure like Magnolia and Babel, Akin intertwines different sets of German and Turkish characters to render a piercing sense of the human condition and contemporary cross-cultural events. Nominated for the Golden Palm and Winner of Best Screenplay at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, the film also includes a shattering performance by the great German actress Hanna Schygulla. -“A story about generational expectations and cultural shifts, The Edge of Heaven raises questions it can't answer, which makes it only more powerful. Beautiful, captivating, enrapturing!” L A Times -“Comes close to perfection.” Washington Post -“Akin's film is so full of life that it leaves you breathless.” Wall Street Journal -“By the end you know the characters in it so well that you can't believe you've seen the movie only once, yet on a second viewing it seems completely new. And that may be because the world they inhabit is immediately recognizable—until we get to heaven, it's where we live—and like no place you've been before. Extraordinary.” NY Times

10/11/2009, Still Life, Jia Zhang Ke, China(2006), 108
Kerr McGee Auditorium, Meinders School of Business

More than a million people have been displaced in central China in the cause of generating electrical power to meet the needs of the future; Jia's flowing river of a picture washes over a few of them as they struggle to adjust to life's currents in the present. Still Life offers an empathetic portrait of those left behind by a modernizing society in the wake of the construction of the Three Gorges River Dam that is flooding whole cities where people have lived for 2,000 years. A nurse and a miner both try to save what can be salvaged and accept what must be left behind. A fictional treatment of a life-changing reality described in the documentary shown last spring, Up the Yangtze. -“A modern master of postmodern discontent, Jia Zhang-ke is among the most strikingly gifted filmmakers working today whom you have probably never heard of.” N Y Times - “Breathtaking. The results are exhilarating, expertly choreographed and a movie to change one’s view of both cinema and life.” Newsday

10/25/2009, Danzon, Maria Novaro, Mexico(1992), 103
Kerr McGee Auditorium, Meinders School of Business

Mexican film legend Maria Rojo stars in this delicately crafted drama as Julia, a single mother employed as a telephone operator. The high point of her week is to relax at the danzon, a weekly dance where dancing partners needn’t be romantic. When Julia’s regular partner turns up missing, she travels to Veracruz to search for him. In the course of her quest, she ends up finding herself. Rojo offers a subtle portrait of an everyday woman who faces trouble in order to uncover her strengths; director Novaro provides a richly feminine celebration of popular traditions from Mexico’s contagious past. -“The gentle and earnest story of one women’s voyage of self-discovery.” NY Times -“Charms because it’s filled with small and convincingly detailed instances of human delicacy and generosity.” Boston Globe -“Dance isn't merely a metaphor for romance; it is the formalization of love's language and rituals, the choreography of dreams.” Washington Post

11/8/2009, 12, Nikita Mikhalkov, Russia(2007), 159
Kerr McGee Auditorium, Meinders School of Business

Nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, acclaimed director Mikhalkov’s film is an ambitious and enthralling dissection of the many personal and social quandaries facing modern-day Russia. Inspired by Sidney Lumet's 1957 classic, 12 Angry Men, the film opens with the closing arguments in the trail of a Chechen teenager accused of murdering his adoptive Russian father. Thinking their deliberation will be brief, the jurors instead find themselves embroiled in the complexities of the case and divided by racism and prejudice. As they deliberate, each of the jurors, as in a Dostoevskian novel, takes center stage to confront, connect and confess. Having won an Oscar for Burnt by the Sun, Mikhalkov once again displays his mastery of drama and humor in a uniquely Russian style. Dramatically charged and brilliantly acted, 12 is as much a statement about the importance of justice as it is a loving meditation on a country and a people still struggling to find their way forward. The film offers a brilliant look at fear, trust, and the triumph of the human sprit. -“Expansively, dramatically, magnificently Russian, Mikhalkov's loose remake of 12 Angry Men plays like vintage jazz from a veteran band.” Variety - “The stories the jurors tell, of course, are different ... filled with arguments that reference local tensions and situations possessing a distinctly Chekhovian flavor.” NPR -“A powerful new film inspired by a powerful older one.” Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

1/24/2010, Fanny and Alexander, Ingmar Bergman, Sweden(1982), 188
Kerr McGee Auditorium, Meinders School of Business

Through the eyes of ten-year-old Alexander and his younger sister Fanny, we witness the great delights and conflicts of the Ekdahl family, a sprawling, convivial bourgeois clan in turn-of-the-century Sweden. Bergman intended Fanny and Alexander to be his swan song, and it is the legendary filmmaker’s warmest and most autobiographical film, a triumph that combines his trademark melancholy and emotional intensity with immense joyfulness and sensuality. Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and honors around the world, the film is one of the most successful in Bergman’s illustrious career and his crowning achievement. The most requested film from last year. -“If the uncut Fanny and Alexander is Bergman's greatest work, as I think, it's because it's his most inclusive. He shows almost everything: all his moods, conflicts, styles and many of his favorite actors.” Chicago Tribune -“Bergman glides beyond the mere telling of his story into a kind of hypnotic series of events that have the clarity and fascination of dreams. Rarely have I felt so strongly during a movie that my mind had been shifted into a different kind of reality.” Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times -“Bergman's 1982 career summation and the kind of rich, timeless, cautionless magnum opus we can only receive, like benedictions, from artists who've paid their generation's dues of sweat, risk, tears, and honesty.” Village Voice -“The work of an artist resigned to life's mystery, full of wonder at the passage of time, full of forgiveness for past wrongs, and full of understanding.” SF Chronicle

2/7/2010, Tuya's Marriage, Quan An Wang, Mongolia/China(2006), 96
Kerr McGee Auditorium, Meinders School of Business

In the grasslands of Mongolia, Tuya—beautiful, hardworking and hardheaded—lives with her children, 100 sheep, and husband. After her husband loses his legs in an accident, Tuya works her family's land until she collapses from a back injury and decides their only hope for survival is divorce. And so Tuya begins the long, comic search for a new beau who can care for both her and her disabled ex. Winner of the top prize at the 2007 Venice Film Festival, this comic film and its distinctive heroine will appeal to all. -“Tuya's Marriage is thoroughly gratifying in its consistent inventiveness and has a grasp of human nature so universal that there's no feeling of the exotic about the film and its people.” LA Times -“Tuya’s Marriage finds an austere beauty in a landscape of scrub and grassland ringed by forbidding slate-blue mountains.” NY Times -“More modern-day folklore than ethnographic study, it is a wonderfully assured piece of cinema.” Chicago Tribune -“A compact near-masterpiece that combines a slow-motion romantic comedy with a docudrama-style portrait of a remote, nomadic culture as it is gradually eroded by the tides of the 21st century.” Salon.com

2/21/2010, Song of Sparrows, Majid Majidi, Iran(2008), 96
Kerr McGee Auditorium, Meinders School of Business

From Iran, the country once again most requested on evaluation forms last year, comes another film by Majidi. In fact, people wrote, “Anything by Majidi.” Working at an ostrich farm outside of Tehran, Karim leads a simple and contented life with his family in their small house until one day when one of the ostriches runs away. Thus begins another one of Majidi’s unforgettable parables. When Karim travels to the city to help his elder daughter’s hearing, he finds himself mistaken for a motorcycle taxi driver. He then begins his new profession: ferrying people and goods through heavy traffic. How will this change impact his life? -“At times funny, sad, poignant and suspenseful, Sparrows is a showcase for Majidi's masterful storytelling.” SF Chronicle -“The images in The Song of Sparrows have a poetic grace that's to be desired in storytelling.” Boston Globe -“A fable of a righteous man’s relationship to his family, his community and most of all his faith..” NY Times

3/7/2010, Lorna's Silence, Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Belgium(2008), 105
Kerr McGee Auditorium, Meinders School of Business

The destiny of a young woman caught between love and the law of the underworld provides the subject for this riveting drama. Lorna, a young Albanian woman living in Belgium, has her sights set on opening a snack bar with her boyfriend. Since to do this she needs Belgian citizenship papers, she becomes an accomplice in a diabolical plan devised by a mobster. Winner of the Best Screenplay Award at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. Written and directed by the Dardenne brothers, the masters of modern cinema whose award-winning features include L'Enfant, The Son, Rosetta and La Promesse—two of which have won them the Golden Palm at previous Cannes festivals. -“Belgium's Dardenne brothers make some slight adjustments to their formula but maintain their unblinking commitment to human nature and the possibility of grace in lowly circumstances.” Variety -“Lorna’s Silence, with a narrative that turns partly on a mysterious pregnancy, evokes, subtly but unmistakably, a range of maternal biblical associations.” NY Times -“Lorna's Silence is a gritty, deceptively low-key, no-fuss, no-frills movie of consistent originality and surprise in which suspense arises straight up from the heroine's evolving character.” LA Times

Admission to the eight-film series is free, but donations help sustain the Institute's mission. Donations can be made at each film or mailed to the OCU Film Institute Endowment at Oklahoma City University or the OCU Film Institute’s Designated Endowment in the Community Foundation of the Kirkpatrick Family Fund. Oklahoma City University and the Thatcher Hoffman Smith Endowment Fund for the university’s Center for Interpersonal Studies through Film and Literature also support the Institute.

Director: Dr. Harbour Winn
Coordinator: Dr. Mitzi McGuire