2019-20 SEASON
Masters: Abbas Kiarostami
Filmmaker, poet, and photographer Abbas Kiarostami was born in 1940 in the Iranian capital of Tehran. He began making films in the 1970s, in the years leading up to the 1979 revolution, working primarily as a documentarian. From early on, Kiarostami’s films had a special focus on children, with whom he would develop an effective and idiosyncratic manner of working. A turn to narrative fiction films in the 1980s, first with Where is the Friend’s House? (1987), the first film in his newly restored Koker Trilogy, and then Close-Up (1990), a fiction-documentary hybrid, would be the beginning of the director’s remarkable ascent to international prominence. His focus on real people and locations, a product of his documentary background, has earned comparisons to the Italian Neorealist masters of the immediate postwar period, but his work is also suffused with elements adopted from Persian poetry and art. With our Masters: Abbas Kiarostami series, Calgary Cinematheque highlights five universally humanistic works from the filmmaker’s rich cinematic legacy.
FOCUS: Sexuality
Jean-Luc Godard famously once said “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.” Film critic Pauline Kael seemingly echoed this statement when she titled one of her books Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. Both filmmaker and critic observed the obvious relationship of sexuality and violence to cinema itself, and in both cases the amorous element comes first. Our Focus: Sexuality series explores how sexuality over the course of the last century has paralleled the development of cinematic language. Featuring films from the 1920s up to the 1990s, this globe-spanning series presents key films that consider subjects such as female sexual autonomy, gender fluidity and performativity, amorous power dynamics, and toxic predation. These are firebrand movies, emphasizing how the presentation of sexuality and human relationships on-screen is limited by the specific sociocultural framework of their era. In their emotional and cinematic power, these films are still strongly resonant and provocative today.
SPOTLIGHT: Taiwanese new Wave
In the early 1980s, Taiwanese cinema was at a crossroads. Nobody was watching locally made melodramas or kung fu movies anymore, instead opting for films from Hong Kong. Taiwanese society was also rapidly changing, with soaring high-tech economic growth driving people into the concrete jungles of Taipei and the cities. To revitalize the film industry, the state-run Central Motion Picture Corporation turned to a time-tested method to revitalize national cinemas – give the reins over to young filmmakers. These filmmakers, including Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang, pursued a radical break from the previous stylistic and aesthetic traditions, favouring location shooting, long takes, and deliberate editing to reflect the rapidly changing world around them. Each responded to the alienation wrought by globalization in their own unique ways: Hou with pensive reflection, Yang with meticulous exhumation, and Tsai with melancholy detachment. With this series, Calgary Cinematheque presents five key films from one of film history’s most influential movements.
Contemporary World Cinema
One-time opportunities to find rising masters and see critically acclaimed, under-exposed world cinema.
Library Screening Series
For the third year in a row, Calgary Cinematheque presented free monthly screenings at the architecturally celebrated new Central Library. Each library screening included a pre- or post-film lecture, providing an in-depth learning opportunity to place the film and its series in context.
With a story that’s almost literally “ripped from the headlines,” Close-Up (1990) tells the real-life tale of a young working-class man named Hossein Sabzian who had impersonated legendary Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf in order to insinuate himself into the lives of the Ahankhahs, a middle-class family living in Northern Tehran.