After taking an almost two-month Christmas break since Nov. 26, Reel North Film Festival resumes its movie season of monthly Saturday night double features Jan. 14 in the Basement Bijou Room of Thompson Public Library with The First Grader and Beginners, both released in 2010.
Reel North Film Festival kicked off its season Oct. 22 with the big-wave surf movie Riding Giants, and The Perfect Game, based on the true story of the Mexican Industriales de Monterrey, who on Aug. 23, 1957, behind the perfect-game pitching of Angel Macias, defeated La Mesa Northern from southern California 4-0, before 10,000 fans in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, to become the first team from outside the United States to win the Little League World Series.
Those flicks were followed on Nov. 26 by The Tree of Life, which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and Alone in the Wilderness, the story of Dick Proenneke, who retired to the Alaskan wilderness at the age of 51 in 1968. He documented the building of his cabin and his life alone through written journals and 3,000 feet of eight-millimetre film.
Doors open at 6:30 p.m. Jan. 14 with The First Grader showing at 7 p.m. and Beginners at 9 p.m. Admission is $5 per person and snacks, including Old Dutch barbecue potato chips, will be provided.
The First Grader is a 104-minute biographical drama directed by Justin Chadwick, written by Ann Peacock, and starring Naomie Harris, Tony Kgoroge and Sam Feuer, telling the true story of Kimani Ng'ang'a Maruge, an illiterate member of the Kikuyu tribe in Kenya who enrolled in a rural primary school in 2003, when he was 84, to get the education he could never afford as a child. The ensuing controversy exposes political corruption and tribal resentments, which mingle with memories of the Mau Mau uprising against British rule in the 1950s.
You can watch a trailer for The First Grader at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns030fCDorE
Beginners is writer and director Mike Mills autobiographically-inspired 105-minute tale spun largely from his relationship with his own father about a dad who comes out of the closet as being gay near the end of his life.
Starring Ewan McGregor, as the son, Oliver, and 82-year-old Canadian Shakespearian stage legend Christopher Plummer as the newly-widowed gay dad, Hal. Plummer is widely expected to snag an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor.
Oliver in fact is rocked by two announcements from his elderly father: that he has terminal cancer, and that he has a young male lover.
You can catch a trailer for Beginners at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFM3AE64bgw
The RNFF Saturday night double features debuted on March 8, 2008 so film buffs wouldn't have to wait an entire year until the following November and the next full three-day festival to see festival genre films. Ironically, they are all that remains of the festival at the moment.
The double feature Saturday debuted with Into the Wild and Once, both released to critical acclaim in 2007.
Into the Wild is the true story of Christopher McCandless, a 24-year-old Virginian and Emory University graduate, who in the spring of 1992, after drifting around the United States for two years, hitchhiked to Alaska and set off into the wilderness with little more than a .22-caliber rifle and a 10-pound sack of rice. Directed by Sean Penn it is based on the 1996 book by Jon Krakauer.
Near the Teklanika River, McCandless set up camp in an abandoned International Harvester bus, a 1940s relic of the Fairbanks City Transit System. He lived there for four months, from late April to late August, before finally starving to death. When his body was discovered in September, he weighed only 67 pounds.
Once, directed by John Carney, features the Academy Award-winning best song "Falling Slowly" and tells the story of an Irish busker who meets a young Czech pianist on the streets of Dublin, leading to friendship and musical collaboration with the potential for romance.
