What a wonderful time we had with Paul St. Pierre. He left with more than just one tear in his eye when I took him to the airport.
He wants to thank all of you who made this event possible — and he says he will come back to Williams Lake at least once more and try out those keys and see if they work!
Now that we’ve had a blazing start to our Williams Lake Film Club season, we will get back to our more regular programming. Our film evenings have been changed to Tuesday evenings due to the great number of events that normally take place on Thursdays.
This means you have to check Thursday’s Tribune and the Tribune Weekend for your information. Our next film will be shown Tuesday, Sept. 27, at the Gibraltar Room. Back doors only open at 6:30 p.m.
We will show Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, a Chinese French co-production by writer and director Dai Sijie.
The drama, based on the filmmaker’s autobiographical novel, pays tribute to the power of fiction to change a person’s life.
Dai Jijie has also fashioned a tender love story filled with magical moments, and some unexpected humour and playfulness. The cinematography is simply spectacular.
Although this film takes us back to the years of 1971-1974, when two bourgeois, well educated young men from the city, Luo and Ma, have been ordered to attend a Maoist re-education camp run be peasants in the mountains.
This is one of the most charming and poetic films I have seen in a while.
Luo is a handsome 18-year old whose father, a dentist, has been labelled as a traitor for once giving a filling to Chiang Kai-shek, a lover of capitalism. Ma is a violinist. When his instrument is discovered, the peasants pass it around in a circle, thinking it a toy. When the party chief learns that the violin is for making music, he orders Ma to play something.
He plays Mozart and tells him the piece is called Thinking of Chariman Mao in order that he may keep his violin.
Luo’s cookbook has been burned as the possession of any Western book is forbidden.
When they find a secret cache of books, they take turns in reading them to the little Chinese seamstress.
Balzac becomes their favourite author.
Labour in this camp is often harsh and terrifying, but their friendship, their love for music and literature, and their love for the little Chinese seamstress pull them through.
It really is a gem of a film, with an unexpected ending which confronts you right with the present.
Before the film, we will show a 20-minute documentary prepared by the people of Slave Lake, Alta. It is called Wildfire — May 2011. We visited that town around the beginning of July and got a first impression of the unimaginable destructive power of a bush fire out of control.
We will bring along a piece of melted car which we peeled off a parking lot. You have to see it to believe it.
Membership forms and cards will be available at our next screening. Membership is still only $10. Admission is $9 regular, $8 for members, and $6 for seniors and elders (65 and over).
We will bring in 12 films. I call them “rare gems,” some new, some old, some extremely hard to find, but each one very special in it’s own way.
See you Tuesday, Sept. 27, 7 p.m. at the Gibraltar Room.