National Theatre Live: Small Island

Small Island
adapted by Helen Edmundson
based on the novel by Andrea Levy

 

Andrea Levy’s Orange Prize-winning novel Small Island comes to life in an epic new theatre adaptation. Experience the play in cinemas, filmed live on stage as part of National Theatre Live’s 10th birthday.

SMALL ISLAND embarks on a journey from Jamaica to Britain, through the Second World War to 1948 – the year the HMT Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, England.

The play follows three intricately connected stories. Hortense yearns for a new life away from rural Jamaica, Gilbert dreams of becoming a lawyer, and Queenie longs to escape her Lincolnshire roots. Hope and humanity meet stubborn reality as the play traces the tangled history of Jamaica and the UK.

A company of 40 actors took to the stage of the National Theatre in London in this timely and moving story.

????? ‘One of the most important plays of the year. Andrea Levy’s epic makes momentous theatre.’ – Guardian

????? ‘Exceptional performances. A gripping state-of-the-nation epic.’ – Daily Telegraph

????? ‘Extraordinary. A spectacular adaptation of Andrea Levy’s Windrush novel.’ – Observer

????? ‘Rufus Norris’s effortlessly enjoyable production is everything a show should be. It speaks to all of us, today.’ – Metro

National Theatre Live: The Audience (Encore)

Academy Award®-winner Helen Mirren (The Queen), plays Queen Elizabeth II in the Tony Award®-winning production of The Audience. Captured live from London’s West End in 2013, the original broadcast returns to international cinemas to mark National Theatre Live’s 10th birthday.

For 60 years, Queen Elizabeth II has met with each of her 12 prime ministers in a private weekly meeting. This meeting is known as The Audience. No one knows what they discuss, not even their spouses.

From the old warrior Winston Churchill, to Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher and finally David Cameron, the Queen advises her prime ministers on all matters both public and personal. Through these private audiences, we see glimpses of the woman behind the crown and witness the moments that shaped a monarch.

The Audience is written by Peter Morgan (The Queen) and directed by two-time Tony Award® winner and Academy Award®-nominated director Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot, The Hours), and was presented in the West End by Matthew Byam Shaw for Playful Productions, Robert Fox and Andy Harries.

?????    ‘Wholly tremendous.’ – Daily Telegraph

?????    ‘Funny and truthful, good-hearted, spiky, full of surprises. I loved every minute.’ – The Times

????     ‘Helen Mirren makes The Audience a right-royal night out.’ – Independent

????     ‘Helen Mirren dazzles again as Queen.’ – Metro

National Theatre Live: All About Eve

All About Eve

by Joseph L Mankiewicz
adapted and directed for the stage by Ivo van Hove

Gillian Anderson (X-Files, NT Live: A Streetcar Named Desire) and Lily James (Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again) lead in All About Eve, broadcast live to cinemas from the West End in London. All About Eve tells the story of Margo Channing. Legend. True star of the theatre. The spotlight is hers, always has been. But now there’s Eve. Her biggest fan. Young, beautiful Eve. The golden girl, the girl next door. But you know all about Eve…don’t you…?

???? ‘Lily James is excellent and Gillian Anderson is incredible in one of those “I was there” moments.’ – Time Out

???? ‘This is event theatre done with tremendous panache.’ – Daily Mail

???? ‘An acting masterclass from Gillian Anderson.’ – Financial Times

???? ‘Gillian Anderson is arresting in Van Hove’s emphatically successful update of classic film.’ – Independent

???? ‘Anderson’s arresting performance combines irresistible allure and drop-dead wit.’ – Independent

???? ‘Lily James is excellent at portraying the self-loathing and discontent that drives Eve.’ – Time Out

Roger Waters Us + Them

Roger Waters, co-founder, creative force and songwriter behind Pink Floyd, presents his highly anticipated film, US + THEM, featuring state-of- the-art visual production and breath-taking sound in this unmissable cinema event. 

Filmed in Amsterdam on the European leg of his 2017 – 2018 Us + Them tour which saw Waters perform to over two million people worldwide, the film features songs from his legendary Pink Floyd albums (The Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall, Animals, Wish You Were Here) and from his last album, Is This The Life We Really Want?

Waters collaborates once more with Sean Evans, visionary director of the highly acclaimed movie Roger Waters The Wall, to deliver this creatively pioneering film that inspires with its powerful music and message of human rights, liberty and love.

“Kiarostami and Koker”

In 1986, Abbas Kiarostami filmed Where Is the Friend’s House?, the tale of a schoolboy trying to return his friend’s notebook, in the village of Koker; it became his first international success. In 1990, after an earthquake devastated the Koker area, killing 50,000 people, Kiarostami made a risky journey to see if the kids from his film had survived; a year later, he dramatized that trip in the poetic road movie And Life Goes On. In 1993, he returned to the area to make Through the Olive Trees, a drama of social and romantic longing set during the making of And Life Goes On. The three films, which became known as the Koker Trilogy, are among Kiarostami’s most acclaimed works.

For this special event during Abbas Kiarostami: A Retrospective, critic Godfrey Cheshire, who visited Koker with Kiarostami in 1997, will discuss the trilogy’s evolution and artistic ramifications along with a screening of Through the Olive Trees.

Picture: Through the Olive Trees.

 

10 on Ten

“As [director Abbas Kiarostami] goes through basic topics like “Script,” “Subject,” “Location,” and “Music” and elucidates his thoughts on each and how they’ve changed over the course of his filmmaking, the effect is akin to having a private session with one of cinema’s greatest — imagine the difference between Bresson reading his “Notes on Cinematography” to you and explaining each tenet, and idly paging through the text alone. Kiarostami’s lessons in 10 ON TEN are illuminating and fascinating.” – Jeff Reichert, IndieWire

“I cannot claim that I didn’t enjoy [Kiarostami’s] lecture, that I didn’t come away from 10 ON TEN with the desire to grab an XL1 and document something, that I didn’t find exhilarating the director’s insistence that digital video frees film from the clutches of capital and censorship.” – Michael Koresky, IndieWire

Picture: Abbas Kiarostami directing.

“Unseen Kiarostami”

Abbas Kiarostami gained international attention when his film Where Is the Friend’s House? won several prizes at the 1989 Locarno Film Festival, and in the next decade a string of masterpieces made him one of the world’s most acclaimed auteurs. But Kiarostami’s filmmaking career actually began in 1970, and the current series Abbas Kiarostami: A Retrospective – July 26 through August 15 – includes 21 of his early films (the features The Traveler and The Report, plus shorts and short features) that have rarely been seen in the U.S.

Critic Godfrey Cheshire, whose interviews with Kiarostami about these films are included in Cheshire’s new book Conversations with Kiarostami, will discuss this period of Kiarostami’s work after a screening of the early masterpiece A Wedding Suit. Other highlighted titles include Bread and Alley, Experience, and Fellow Citizen.

Picture: Abbas Kiarostami directing.

“Cinema in Revolution”

In early 1979, while the Iranian Revolution was at full boil, Abbas Kiarostami made the extraordinary Case No. 1, Case No. 2, about attitudes toward informing and resistance. In a classroom skit, a teacher threatens to punish a group of boys unless one reveals who created a disturbance the teacher did not see. This is followed by two outcomes – one in which a boy informs, and one in which no one does. Kiarostami then interviews a group of prominent adults (including “hanging judge” Sadegh Khalkhali and the later-executed Sadegh Ghotbzadeh) and elicits a fascinating range of responses that reflects Iran’s current turmoil.

For this special screening of Case No. 1, Case No. 2, critic Godfrey Cheshire and film professor Jamsheed Akrami will discuss the film, which the new Islamic Republic first gave an award to, then banned. Screening as part of the series Abbas Kiarostami: A Retrospective, from July 26 through August 15.

Save big and see more of the Abbas Kiarostami retrospective with a discount Ticket Pack for three, five or ten admissions! See all three World Premiere restorations of “The Koker Trilogy,” bring a friend or two or three to a few screenings or treat yourself to more movies at a better ticket price. With a Ticket Pack, you can save up to $6 per ticket – IFC Center members save up to $8 per ticket. Click here to purchase.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Staff Pick! Chosen by April.

“It’s one thing to wash that man right outta your hair, and another to erase him from your mind. ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND imagines a scientific procedure that can obliterate whole fields of memory — so that, for example, Clementine can forget that she ever met Joel, let alone fell in love with him. “Is there any danger of brain damage?” the inventor of the process is asked. “Well,” he allows, in his most kindly voice, “technically speaking, the procedure is brain damage.”

The movie is a labyrinth created by the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, whose Being John Malkovich and Adaptation were neorealism compared to this. Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet play Joel and Clementine, in a movie that sometimes feels like an endless series of aborted Meet Cutes. That they lose their minds while all about them are keeping theirs is a tribute to their skill; they center their characters so that we can actually care about them even when they’re constantly losing track of their own lives. (“My journal,” Joel observes oddly, “is … just blank.”)

For Jim Carrey, this is another successful attempt, like The Truman Show and the underrated The Majestic, to extend himself beyond screwball comedy. He has an everyman appeal, and here he dials down his natural energy to give us a man who is so lonely and needy that a fragment of memory is better than none at all. Kate Winslet is the right foil for him, exasperated by Joel’s peculiarities while paradoxically fond of them. 

Kaufman’s mission seems to be the penetration of the human mind. His characters journeyed into the skull of John Malkovich, and there is a good possibility that two of them were inhabiting the same body in “Adaptation.” But both of those movies were about characters trying to achieve something outside themselves. The insight of ETERNAL SUNSHINE is that, at the end of the day, our memories are all we really have, and when they’re gone, we’re gone.” – Roger Ebert (2004)

Screening as part of our Weekend Classics series, Staff Picks.

Where Is the Friend’s House?

The first film in Kiarostami’s sublime, interlacing Koker Trilogy takes a simple premise — a boy searches for the home of his classmate, whose school notebook he has accidentally taken — and transforms it into a miraculous child’s-eye adventure of the everyday. As our young hero zigzags determinedly across two towns, aided (and sometimes misdirected) by those he encounters, his quest becomes both a revealing portrait of rural Iranian society in all its richness and complexity and a touching parable about the meaning of personal responsibility. Sensitive and profound, WHERE IS THE FRIEND’S HOUSE? is shot through with all the beauty, tension, and wonder a single day can contain. 

Screening as part of Abbas Kiarostami: A Retrospective, Fri Jul 26 through Thu Aug 15.

Save big and see more of the Abbas Kiarostami retrospective with a discount Ticket Pack for three, five or ten admissions! See all three World Premiere restorations of “The Koker Trilogy,” bring a friend or two or three to a few screenings or treat yourself to more movies at a better ticket price. With a Ticket Pack, you can save up to $6 per ticket – IFC Center members save up to $8 per ticket. Click here to purchase.