Introduction to European Cinema - Filmhouse Cinema Edinburgh

6 Maybe you missed...
HUGO MARGARET
MAYBEYOUMISSED
Hugo
Fri 6 to Thu 12 Jan
Martin Scorsese • USA 2011 • 2h6m • Digital projection
U – Contains mild scenes of danger
Cast: Asa Butterfield, Chloë Moretz, Ben Kingsley, Sacha Baron
Cohen, Ray Winstone.
“The movies are our special place,” remarks Hugo’s title
character, and his words go a long way towards explaining
how Martin Scorsese, with his well-documented and
infectious passion for the history of cinema, came to make
a children’s fantasy.
Adapted from an award-winning book by Brian Selznick,
Hugo tells the story of an orphan (Asa Butterfield) who
lives inside the walls of a Parisian train station in the
early 1930s, tending to its giant clock and scheming to
rehabilitate an antiquated automaton his father left him.
The boy’s quest leads him to the angry old proprietor
of a little toy shop, who turns out to be none other than
the pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès (A Trip to the
Moon). Scorsese transforms this innocent tale into an
ardent love letter to cinema and a moving plea for film
preservation.
AUDIODESCRIPTION/SUBTITLES
See page two for details.
MAYBEYOUMISSED
Margaret
Fri 6 to Thu 12 Jan
Kenneth Lonergan • USA 2011 • 2h30m • Digital projection
15 – Contains very strong language, strong sex, a gory accident
scene and drug use
Cast: Anna Paquin, Mark Ruffalo, Jean Reno, Kieran Culkin, Matt
Damon.
Shot in 2005, Kenneth (You Can Count On Me) Lonergan’s
film has spent six years in legal and editorial limbo. It’s a
powerfully involving exploration of guilt and self-discovery,
packed with astonishingly complex moral maze of
characters and situations.
Lisa (Anna Paquin in an extraordinary performance) is a
Manhattan teenager living with her single mother Joan,
an actress starring in her breakout stage role while seeing
a new man. One day Lisa distracts a bus driver, who hits
a woman in the street, an accident that sends Lisa into a
spiral of sublimated guilt, as she lashes out in different
ways at a nice classmate, her teachers and mostly her
mother. And she doesn’t stop there, meddling in people’s
lives in her effort to achieve a sense of justice.
Lisa’s real problem is that she hasn’t yet developed an
adult sense of isolation and interdependence. So this is
actually an intricate coming-of-age movie, even though it
doesn’t feel like one. We watch in horrified recognition as
we see ourselves in every character, even as each one goes
through moments in which they are hugely unlikeable,
reacting badly and/or doing things that are intensely
selfish. Messy and overambitious, perhaps, but also an
endlessly fascinating study on the things we do and why
we do them.
DREAMS OF A LIFE
MAYBEYOUMISSED
Dreams of a Life
Fri 6 to Thu 12 Jan
Carol Morley • UK 2011 • 1h35m • Digital projection
12A – Contains brief moderate sex references and references to
domestic abuse
Documentary featuring Zawe Ashton, Neelam Bakshi, Jonathan
Harden, Daren Elliott Holmes, Cornell John.
Joyce Vincent died in her bedsit above a shopping mall
in North London in 2003. Her body wasn’t discovered
until three years later, surrounded by the Christmas
presents she had been wrapping, and with the TV still on.
Newspaper reports offered few details of her life – not
even a photograph. Filmmaker Carol Morley, shocked
and intrigued by Joyce’s story, set out to find out how this
awful, sad thing could happen to a seemingly popular, wellliked
young woman without anyone noticing.
Interweaving interviews with imagined scenes from Joyce’s
life, Morley tells her story with imagination and care,
making us question the society we live in and how much
attention we pay to those around us.