Our friends at Grolsch Film Works have a website where you can find out what they’ve been up to and read/watch interesting stuff about films. Every week we’ll be plucking the highlights. This is that.
AN INTERVIEW WITH THE WOMAN BEHIND SAUDI ARABIA’S FIRST EVER FILM
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On first look, you wouldn’t imagine that Wadjda, a charming coming-of-age drama about a young girl who dreams of riding her own bike, would hold so many implications for the state of Arab cinema. But as the first Saudi Arabian female film director, Haifaa Al-Mansour, has also written and directed its first film entirely on location in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Wadjda (12-year-old Waad Mohammed) wants a green bike so she can race with her best mate Abdullah (Abdullahman Al Gohani). Her mother (Reem Abdullah), along with much of the ultra-conservative society around her, strongly disproves, seeing it as immoral and against Islamic principles. It is only very recently, in April 2013, that Saudi Arabia lifted its ban on women riding bicycles, although only in controlled areas. Wadjda’s entrepreneurial streak sees her selling friendship bracelets and memorising the Koran in order to get the dirhams she needs to buy that bike.
BAND T-SHIRTS IN FILMS
Here’s a game for you: it’s called “Spot The Band T-shirt”. It’s a game we’ve been playing ever since we noticed that kid from Mud wearing a Fugazi T-shirt. After getting over the fact that this 12-year-old listens to Fugazi, we started to think of young Edward Furlong, another hip kid, sporting a Public Enemy tee in Terminator 2; and then, inevitably, a flurry of others sprang to mind.
STEVE MCQUEEN’S ’12 YEARS A SLAVE’ GETS A TRAILER
Expectation. Hype. Anticipation. These are words often thrown in director Steve McQueen’s direction, and with good reason, since he’s previously given us the hard-hitting prison drama Hunger (2008) and the astonishingly stirring Shame (2011), both starring McQueen’s go-to thesp Michael Fassbender. Now, the director’s upcoming film 12 Years A Slave, again starring Fassbender, has a trailer and once again expectations are sky-high.
COMPUTER CHESS
36-year-old Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha, Beeswax) is best known to cinephiles as one of the key proponents of the so-called ‘Mumblecore’ movement, a strand of American indie cinema which blossomed in the early noughties and made a virtue of amateur acting, minimal production values and its characters’ terminal solipsism. But times are changing; the movement seems to have sputtered out, while one of its leading lights, Greta Gerwig, has made her defining leap into the mainstream popular consciousness starring in Noah Baumbach’s delightful Frances Ha. In a just and fair world, the superb Computer Chess – while low-key, laidback and determinedly eccentric – would see Bujalski follow-suit in the household name stakes.
Keep your peepers peeled for more Grolsch Film Works updates next week. Go to grolschfilmworks.com to see what’s happening right now.
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