Vancity Theatre
June 11 – July 7, 2014
The Beautiful Game is an unironic nickname for the swifty flowing soccer played, followed, and very much loved in Latin America, and especially in Brazil. Vancity Theatre will celebrate the original football in June and July with a series of movies; through documentaries, biopics, and dramas, this film series looks at the sport in its social and political contexts, and explores its still-growing influence in the world.
Wednesday, June 11, 2014, 7pm
Director: Renato Terra
Featuring: Zico, Renaldo
(Brazil, 2014, 85 min.)
Portuguese with English subtitles
Transports us into the football stadium and the emotions that come with it, causing goose bumps to any supporter” —Paulo Vinicius Coelho, Folha de São Paulo
Winner: Audience Award, Best Documentary, Rio Film Festival
Our celebration of the Brazilian World Cup Finals kicks off with this Gala Canadian premiere of the new documentary by Renato Terra (A Night in 67), a rousing chronicle of the passion and fanaticism driving Brazil’s national sport, soccer. Featuring interviews with legends like Zico and Romário, rabid fans and archival footage, the film focuses on the rivalry between two of the largest football clubs in Brazil: Flamengo (’Fla’) and Fluminense (’Flu’).
The Gala ticket price includes live music performance by the Celia Enestrom band and caipirinhas.
World Cup Soccer: Brazil vs Croatia Free on the Big Screen
Thursday, June 12, 2014, 12:30pm
(150 min.)
Join us at the Vancity Theatre for the opening match of the tournament, free on the big screen. Hosts and 5-time World Cup champions Brazil take on underdogs Croatia.
Free and open to all—no membership required.
Monday, June 16, 2014, 6:30pm
Director: Carlos Cuaron
Cast: Gael Garcia Bernal, Diego Luna
(Mexico, 2008, 103 min.)
Mixes soap-opera sentimentality with playful, jumpy aggression and dresses a bittersweet, rags-to-riches fable in the bright clothes of pop satire.” —AO Scott, New York Times
The Cuaron brothers’ follow up to international hit Y Tu Mama Tambien reunites stars Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna for a piquant pop satire on Mexico’s obsession with soccer and celebrity. It’s a long way from Gravity, to be sure, an earthy, rough and ready comedy about two brothers plucked from the obscurity of their life on a banana plantation by virtue of their exhilarating soccer skills.
Bernal’s Tato—nicknamed Cursi (“Corny”)—is a quickfire striker. Beto—known as Rudo (“Rough”)—is a great keeper. But the talent scout who discovers them when his car breaks down only has room for one player. A penalty kick will decide their fate …
What follows is a broad (but naturalistic) satire about a hick becoming an overnight celebrity, his love-hate relationship with his brother, and the effect of all this money and good fortune on his love-life, his football, and his family.
The comedy has a pretty sour, cynical bite: corrupt managers select players for financial gain; a TV hottie switches her affections for maximum celebrity coverage; fans are fickle and abusive; the player’s agent creams off profits and bribes officials. And it’s not just footie: the boys’ sister is being courted by the local drug baron. Their mum couldn’t be more proud.
Rudo y Cursi is a grave and calculated affront to the men of Mexico, and that’s the source of its roistering charm.” —Ty Burr, Boston Globe
Monday, June 23, 2014, 8:30pm
Director: José Henrique Fonseca
Cast: Rodrigo Santoro
(Brazil, 2014, 116 min.)
Portuguese with English subtitles
Powerfully acted and dazzlingly shot in heavenly black and white, Heleno is a feverish opera… The road to ruin is blindingly beautiful.” —Jeanette Catsoulis, New York Times
He was the soccer player Pele idolized in the 1940s, Brazil’s best striker, a dashing, cavalier talent with movie star looks and a burning desire to win. But Heleno was also an erratic talent, plagued with psychological problems, and despised by some of his teammates. His career was brilliant, but cut brutally short. As the Uruguayan poet Eduardo Galeano put it, “He had Rudolph Valentino’s face and the temper of a mad dog. On the playing field he sparkled. One night, in a casino, he lost all his money. Another night, who knows where, he lost all his desire to live.”
José Henrique Fonseca’s handsome black-and-white, impressionistic bio-drama goes very Raging Bull-ish, to tell a piece of the story of Heleno de Freitas, a Brazilian soccer star with matinee-idol charisma. He lived wild, played hard, brought sports glory to his country, and died at the age of 39 in 1959, deranged by syphilis. Rodrigo Santoro (Paulo on Lost, Xerxes in 300, and even better, Raúl Castro in Che) is mighty matinee-idol charismatic himself in the title role, alternating between swaggering lady-killer and ravaged victim of self-destruction. B+ —Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly
Monday, June 30, 2014, 8:30pm
Director: Walter Salles, Daniela Thomas
CAST: Sandra Corveloni, João Baldasserini, Vinícius de Oliveira
(Brazil, 2008, 113 min.)
A beguiling blend of urban poetry and extremely well-observed social realism.” — Wally Hammond, Time Out
Amid the ensemble cast of Walter Salles’s sensationally shot, tough-knocks urban drama one face stands out, the kind of face that owns a film and haunts you long after you’ve seen it.
It’s the face of Dario, who dreams of being a professional footballer. The actor playing him has a ravaged magnetism, just about the worst skin you’ve ever seen, and holds the screen with his hopes and surliness, like Jean-Pierre Léaud in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows.
Then the penny drops. Amazingly, this is Vinícius de Oliveira, whom Salles cast as the orphaned urchin Josué in his breakthrough film Central Station (1998).
He’s scarcely recognisable, and the realisation unleashes a shockwave of empathy, making you wonder what he’s been up to for the past decade, how things are working out. Salles and his co-director Daniela Thomas, who worked together on the 1996 movie Foreign Land, made this follow-up to chart the changes in Brazilian society over the past 10 years. But they hold up no better mirror to these than the pitted and pleading face of this no-longer-boy.
De Oliveira grew up as a wannabe soccer star, too, fatherless, with two brothers. Dario has three, from different fathers, and a mother trying her best, played in the film’s most tender and accomplished performance by Cannes Best Actress-winner Sandra Corveloni.
The template for this oddly lyrical inner-city dirge, with each of the four boys struggling to improve his lot, is Italian neorealism—Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers, especially—but it is not a nostalgic piece, and, for me, it’s the better film.
The gifted cinematographer Mauro Pinheiro Jr and that master of darkly keening sound-worlds Gustavo Santaolalla play up poverty and loneliness, the yawning despair of São Paulo’s empty highways at night.
The shame and terror of criminal enterprise hits with more force here than the high-octane machismo of other Brazilian hits.
—Tim Robey, The Daily Telegraph
The film’s title refers to the line of players down which the ball is passed when all are playing properly together. It could hardly be more appropriate for a film that confirms that the unflashy virtues of teamwork are as vital in cinema as they are in life. —Paul Julian Smith, Sight & Sound
Monday, July 7, 2014, 8:45pm
Director: Emir Kusturica
Featuring: Diego Maradona, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Emir Kusturica, Ernesto Cantu
(France/Spain, 2008, 90 min.)
English, Spanish, Serbo-Croat, Italian with English subtitles
“The Sex Pistol of footballers,” is how renowned director Emir Kusturica (Time of the Gypsies; Underground; Black Cat White Cat) describes Diego Maradona: sporting hero, people’s champion, fallen idol and inspiration to millions. Enjoying unprecedented access to the man himself, as well as to extensive archives, Kusturica takes the audience on an intimate whirlwind tour of places and people closest to this god of football. From Argentina to Naples, from Cuba to Barcelona; from family and childhood friends to fellow players and world leaders (Fidel Castro), Maradona by Kusturica traces the great man’s incredible story, from the humblest of beginnings to world-domination; from spectacular, tragic fall to glorious rebirth.
Punk, political and exuberant , featuring an original score from Manu Chao, Maradona by Kusturica is both a unique documentation of a growing friendship between the director and his subject and a passionate exultation of a true legend of our times.
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