Tuesday, August 16 | 7 pm

Paula Rego: Secrets & Stories

Nick Willing, 2017, UK, 92 min

A unique insight into the life and work of celebrated painter Paula Rego directed by her son, filmmaker Nick Willing. Notoriously private and guarded, Rego opens up for the first time, surprising her son with secrets and stories of her unique life, battling fascism, a misogynistic art world and manic depression.

Born in Portugal, a country which her father told her was no good for women, Rego nevertheless used her powerful pictures as a weapon against the dictatorship before settling in London, where she continued to target women’s issues such as abortion rights. But above all, her paintings are a cryptic glimpse into an intimate world of personal tragedy, perverse fantasies and awkward truths.

The film combines a huge archive of home movies and family photographs with interviews spanning 60 years and in-depth studies of Rego at work in her studio. What emerges is a powerful personal portrait of an artist whose legacy will survive the years, graphically illustrated in pastel, charcoal and oil paint.

Nick Willing has a varied filmography. Although he is best known for his popular fantasy television shows, he has also written and directed theatrically-released movies, thrillers, social realist dramas, before recently focussing on feature documentaries. The one common thread is innovative story telling.

In the last two years he has brought his experience as a screenwriter of fiction to help tell factual stories. In Secrets & Stories, Nick spent a year interviewing and filming his mother, the painter Paula Rego, to better understand her and her work. He discovered that she had kept major secrets about her life from him, secrets that helped explain much of her life, and his. The experience was so affecting that it’s hugely developed Nick’s interest in the intimate and insightful power of documentary. The film won both the Grierson and Royal Television Society awards for best Arts program and encouraged him to stay in the medium to make Unstoppable, Sean Scully & The Art of Everything, an equally probing and revelatory film about the outspoken abstract painter.

Thursday, August 18 | 7 pm

Namatjira Project

Sera Davies, 2017, Australia, 87 min

An extraordinary first-hand account of the international battle to reclaim the artwork and heritage of one of Australia’s most important Indigenous figures: Albert Namatjira. Namatjira was one of those rare artists who actually changed the course of history. The founder of the Indigenous art movement, he became an international icon and was the first Indigenous person to be granted Australian citizenship. But Namatjira was never fully accepted by white Australia, and after being wrongfully imprisoned in 1959, he soon died, despondent and broken. Then, in 1983, the Australian Government sold the rights to his work to an art dealer—despite Namatjira having left his art to his wife and children. Now, 60 years after Namatjira’s death, his family want it back. Working with the Namatjira family, filmmaker Sera Davies takes us on a journey from the sun-blasted deserts of their Aranda homeland to the lavish opulence of Buckingham Palace, as they fight to have Namatjira’s legacy returned to its rightful home. A captivating story of Australian race relations lensed through the bitterly contested history of one of its most venerated figures, Namatjira Project is a powerful, important addition to the canon of modern Indigenous culture.

Sera Davies is a director, cinematographer, photographer and video artist whose work has been screened internationally. Sera has directed and shot documentaries and short films with some of Australia’s hardest to reach communities and most prolific arts and social change companies and NGOs, such as Big hART Inc, Back to Back Theatre and World Vision. She is passionate about representing people who are under-represented in traditional media. She has worked on numerous films, documentaries, video installations, music videos and TVCs, including Big hART’s documentaries for ABC Drive and Nothing Rhymes with Ngapartji, Back to Back theatre’s film installation The Democratic Set and Genevieve Lacey’s sound and film work Pleasure Garden.

Tuesday, August 23 | 7 pm

Joyce Carol Oates: A Body in the Service of Mind

Stig Björkman, 2021, Sweden, 94 min

Joyce Carol Oates is often described as “America’s foremost woman of letters” and her extraordinary talents are recognized around the globe. With words as her constant companion JCO has penned over 100 novels across a variety of genres throughout her award-winning career.

Swedish director Stig Björkman approached JCO with his idea to make a documentary with her for over 9 years before she finally agreed. The movie takes us behind the genius of one of the most-read contemporary writers. The now 83-year-old writer’s life story is one of a changing society. With her work as a navigator the movie takes us back to her childhood and university years. We learn about societal events that affected her deeply and are evident in her writing, like the 1960s riots in Detroit, the tragic Chappaquiddick incident and the life of Marilyn Monroe.

Throughout her life JCO has been an ardent observer of political, social and societal landscapes and changes. JCO gathers inspiration from real events, either her personal experiences or those she culls from the headlines. The ideas evolve through her imagination and take on a new form that reflects the present moment. Her creativity transforms people and events, yet they are always based in reality.

Much of her writing features young girls and women, people of colour, the mistreated and underprivileged. The America depicted in the works of JCO is a mélange of the ordinary and the extraordinary. Most importantly, when reflecting on events, inhabitants and mythologies of the United States her sight is razor sharp and cunning.

Stig Björkman is a Swedish writer, director and film critic. Björkman was the editor of Chaplin (1964–72) and has written a number of books on the art of film and interviews with, among others, Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen and Lars von Trier. As a director he made his debut with the short Letitia (1964) and feature Jag älskar, du älskar (1968). In 1972 he made Georgia, Georgia about Black American singer Georgia Martin and in 1975 the artistic breakthrough Den vita väggen. Björkman has often worked with the writer Sun Axelsson and has also done translations for a wide range of international films into Swedish. After making a number of documentaries about Ingmar Bergman, Björkman was asked, for the 100th anniversary of Ingrid Bergman’s birth, by daughter Isabella Rossellini, to make of a biography of Ingrid Bergman based on her private diaries and films from the family's private collection. Jag är Ingrid premiered at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, where Ingrid Bergman was the festival's personality of the year.

Thursday, August 25 | 7 pm

Sirens

Rita Baghdadi, 2022, USA/Lebanon, 78 min

Co-founders and guitarists of the first all-female metal band in the Middle East, Lilas and Shery battle friendship, sexuality and destruction in their quest to become thrash metal rock stars.

“A beautifully balanced portrait of young women screaming to be heard within their notoriously oppressive culture. Sirens manages to offer what every revolution needs: hope” – Rebecca Landman, Collider

“A roof-raising rock-doc with heart to match its decibels” – Screen Daily 

“Sirens is a powerful reminder that punk isn’t dead if you know where to look.” – Indiewire

Rita Baghdadi is an award-winning, Moroccan-American documentary filmmaker. Her bold, character-driven work has been supported by Sundance, Tribeca, Netflix, HBO, Film Independent and the International Documentary Association. Rita got her start as a cinematographer, filming verité documentaries such as Served Like a Girl, which The Hollywood Reporter recognized for its “unfussy intimacy.” Rita’s feature documentary directorial debut, My Country No More, was awarded Best Feature at the 2018 Big Sky Film Festival, broadcast on PBS’s Independent Lens and is now streaming on Amazon. Her documentary City Rising won the LA-area Emmy award for Best Social Issue Film and is being used as a tool for activism around housing inequality. Rita is the co-founder of Lady & Bird Films and is a member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia. When she is not in the field, she is an active mentor dedicated to empowering women and girls of colour through documentary film training. Her latest feature documentary, Sirens, premiered in competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.

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Réminiscences d’une session d’enregistrement où quinze musiciens, à Beyrouth, ré-imaginent un classique égyptien [Reminiscences of 15 musicians in Beirut attempting a re-imagination of an Egyptian classic]

Charles-André Coderre, 2021, Canada/Lebanon, 13 min

This film documents the circumstances surrounding the creation of Jerusalem In My Heart’s live recording of “Wa Ta’atalat Loughat Al Kalam” (The language of speech has broke down) in 2017 (Beirut, Lebanon).

Ya Garat Al Wadi is a popular piece of Egyptian music arranged by the legendary composer Mohammad Abdel Wahab and written by the poet Ahmad Shawqy in 1928. Over the years, it has been interpreted by many influential artists, such as Fairuz and the Rahbani brothers. Most notably, towards the end of the 1960s, the Lebanese singer Nour el Houda made an unforgettable contemporary rendition of this composition for television. More than 90 years later, this piece continues to fascinate the cultural imaginary, to the point where in December 2017, with the initiative of the experimental composer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (Jerusalem in My Heart), an orchestra of 15 musicians was formed over the period of five days in Beirut to once again reinterpret this great classic of Arab music for a contemporary audience.

With Abed Kobeissy, Ali El Hout, Bashar Farran, Eliana Awad, Firas Andary, Imad Hashisho, Jad Saliba, Jihad Assaad, Layale Chaker, Reda Bitar, Sam Shalabi, Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, Sharif Sehnaoui, Tony Elieh, Fadi Tabbal.

Charles-André Coderre lives and works in Montreal. He makes films and works on 16mm live projections for film and music performances. His films are distributed by Light Cone (Paris), CFMDC (Toronto) and Vidéographe (Montréal). Since 2017, he co-organizes, with Michael Bardier (Heavy Trip) the OK LÀ! music and expanded cinema series in Verdun.