Notes From The Program Director | Week of January 19th, 2024

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Notes From The Program Director

Week of January 19th, 2024

Melissa Tamminga

Rich Text

January 19-25, 2023

Hello, everyone!

Staying on by popular demand, Poor Things and The Boys and the Boatcontinue with us for another week. It was a delight to see sold out or nearly sold out screenings for both films and to hear spontaneous applause for both breaking out when the credits rolled. The films could not be more radically different from each other in tone, theme, and story, and it’s always a delight to remember the expansive range of what cinema is or can be.

And while we had to delay its opening date for a variety of reasons, this Friday we finally have on our screens Fallen Leaves, the latest film from the brilliant and wonderfully unique Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki. Fallen Leaves popped up on lots of best-of-2023 critics' lists--it's definitely in my top 5 of 2023-- and it's also shortlisted for Best International film at the Oscars. The shortlist for the International Film this year is one of best we’ve seen in a long while -- Perfect Days, The Zone of Interest, The Taste of Things, The Teacher’s Lounge, 20 Days in Mariupol, Four Daughters, The Monk and the Gun are all on it and all terrific -- but it would warm me to my very toes if Fallen Leaves snagged a nomination.

Fallen Leaves is a rare kind of romantic comedy -- wonderfully sweet at heart and very very funny -- but it goes about its comically romantic business in the driest, wryest, most deadpan-Scandinavian way possible. It's about two rather awkward and lonely, hapless people who find each other, but who, in the best and most-classic rom-com way, have to navigate obstacles in their way, whether obstacles of fate or obstacles of self-infliction. It’s the best kind of romantic story that proves the Shakespearean quip, “the course of true love never did run smooth,” but perhaps only the best kind of rom-com, like this one, that proves audiences can laugh and enjoy the bumps in the road at least as much as the true love at the end.

Fallen Leaves is also a film with a clear but gentle social conscience: the two lead characters are two blue-collar workers who have very little to live on, and they each struggle to get by in jobs with unjust and unyielding bosses. And it's within that landscape of their dreary jobs and lives that the timid, but ultimately joyous, spark of connection between them is all the brighter and more wonderful.

I must add, as well, that there is a perfectly wonderful dog in the story -- and he rivals even the very good doggie in Anatomy of a Fall. It is a movie, too, not just for rom-com lovers or dog lovers, but for movie lovers: the cinephiles will notice the delightful movie references throughout. In short -- and the film is a lovely short morsel of a film at only 81 minutes long --Fallen Leaves is practically perfect in every way.

We have two special events this week, and I’m delighted to say that one is the 6th annual Treaty Day Film Festival, on Saturday, January 20, “created in remembrance of the 1855 Point Elliott Treaty” and “celebrated to unify and educate the community on Indigenous perspectives and the issues we face today.” It’s an absolute pleasure and a privilege to be able to host this event, curated by Children of the Setting Sun Productions. They have programmed two wonderful programs: a short film program, starting at 10 am, including the films, “Jason Laclair: Story Pole,” “Walking Two Worlds,” “The Water Walker,” “Weaving the Path,” and “The Sound,” and a feature film program, starting at 12:45 pm, with the film Frybread Face and Me. Both programs are currently sold out, but check back on our website periodically to see if any tickets open up, and we welcome the community to come by our lobby on Saturday to chat with festival-goers and organizers and to stop by Children of the Setting Sun’s information table.

Last, Razing Liberty Square is on Sunday, 10 am, and it is a part of our Indie Lens Pop-up film series, a monthly series of 1-hour films provided to us and to you free, courtesy of PBS films. This is our twelfth season of Indie Lens Pop-Up, and for the series we are happy to again partner with Bellingham Human Rights Film Festival. Through the roster of documentaries this season, the goal is to ignite conversations on a range of topics impacting communities around the U.S., including climate gentrification, and race and gender equity in mainstream media. This season’s topics also aim to expand perspectives through deeply personal stories, like what it means to live with Parkinson’s disease, and how the Deaf and hard of hearing community redefine what it means to listen.

This month, Razing Liberty Square tells the story of Liberty City, Miami, “home to one of the oldest segregated public housing projects in the U.S.” But “now with rising sea levels, the neighborhood’s higher ground has become something else: real estate gold. Wealthy property owners push inland to higher ground, creating a speculators’ market in the historically Black neighborhood previously ignored by developers and policy-makers alike.” We look forward to the opportunity the film will give us this month to understand how climate gentrification threatens homes and livelihoods around the country and to consider how responses to climate change can be equitable for all.

See you at the movies, friends!

Melissa

Finally, Cinema East returns this month with Return to Dust, the 2022 film from Chinese filmmaker Ruijun Li. Watch out for the Sunday newsletter from Cinema East curator Jeff Purdue to offer us some introductory details about the film, and we’ll have the pleasure of a guest speaker, Roger Thompson, Professor of Chinese History at WWU, to introduce the film on the evening of the screening. In the meantime, I’ll be pondering what made Return to Dust so subversive or potentially threatening to the Chinese government, as critic Wendy Ide indicates it was, in her capsule review of the film for The Guardian:

“It’s an arranged marriage of convenience – other people’s convenience. Browbeaten Cao (Hai-Qing) is offloaded by her brother on to Ma (Wu Renlin), the humblest of peasants, with little more than a donkey to his name. But against all expectations, a tender bond develops between them. Together, they eke out a life governed by the rhythms of the natural world, finding in their marriage a solicitude and comfort that had been denied them both until now. It’s a gorgeous, quietly affecting film that finds an unassuming beauty in this simple life in rural China, but which doesn’t shy away from the extreme hardships faced by the very poorest. A sleeper hit domestically, [it was] unceremoniously pulled from Chinese streaming services, a victim, it is suggested, of a tightening official control over unflattering depictions of Chinese life.”

I am intrigued! I hope you are, too, and we’ll look forward to seeing you here on Tuesday, January 16, 7:45 pm.

See you at the movies, friends!

Melissa