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Silent Classics To Strictly Luhrmann: 2015 Glasgow Film Festival Announces First Events

 Paul Merton paying live tribute to Buster Keaton. British Sea Power taking the O2 ABC back to its former cinematic history. Atmospheric new scorings of classic silent movies, a festival of internet cat videos, and a glitter-strewn homage to Baz Luhrmann in the grandiose surroundings of Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum.... sounds like February in Glasgow.

Glasgow Film Festival is delighted to announce that tickets are now available for the first six events from its 2015 programme. The festival has grown a reputation for unique screenings in unusual venues – pop-up cinema events that bring the film into 3D. Previous events include a mystery potholing expedition to watch The Descent in a cavern under Central Station, screenings of Jaws and Peter Pan on board Glasgow’s Tall Ship, and Tron screened in a mocked-up 1980s video game arcade.

In their 2015 programme, GFF will return to Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery for a very special live dance show and screening of Strictly Ballroom, and also take over the atmospheric, Gothic surroundings of Pollokshaws Burgh Hall, as composer Irene Buckley premieres a brand new soundtrack to 1928 classic The Fall of the House of Usher on the Hall’s original Wurlitzer Cinema Organ. Comedy legend Paul Merton and award-winning silent film pianist Neil Brand have teamed up to pay tribute to another legend, Buster Keaton, with a hilarious live show. GFF is delighted to host the Scottish premiere of British Sea Power’s hugely acclaimed film/live score project From The Sea To The Land Beyond. The band headline a night of supercool audio/visual treats, celebrating the O2 ABC’s origins as one of Glasgow’s oldest cinemas. The phenomenal French bassist Renaud Garcia-Fons and his live band create an Eastern-Western fusion score to Lotte Reiniger’s magical 1926 animation The Adventures of Prince Achmed, while GFF brings Walker Art Center’s famous Internet Cat Video Festival (purretty much does what it says on the tin) to the UK with a premiere at GoMA

Co-Director of Glasgow Film Festival,  Allan Hunter said:“Our special events are a large part of what makes Glasgow Film Festival distinctive: people love to experience cinema in new ways, and we’re lucky to have such a wealth of exciting venues available in the city. This is only the tip of the iceberg, too: we’re going to announce a different pop-up event for every night of the festival at our programme launch in January. The programming team have really let their imaginations run riot this year, so we think audiences will be pretty excited by what’s in store.”

Strictly Ballroom at Kelvin-Groove!
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum
Friday 20 February | 18.30 – 22.00 | £12/£10 | Tickets available from GFT Box Office

“Well of course, you can dance any steps you like! But that doesn’t mean you’ll...WIN!”

Following the success of 2014’s Monster Mash costume party and screening of Young Frankenstein, Glasgow Film Festival brings the glitz to Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum’s grand hall. As part of GFF’s Strewth! programme strand celebrating new and classic Australian cinema, audiences are encouraged to get their (Tina) sparkles on for a night of ritzy Aussie camp, wonderful dance and heart-thumping rhythm. Baz Luhrmann’s breakthrough feature, and the first of his Red Curtain Trilogy, Strictly Ballroom takes a tongue in cheek look inside the pressure-cooker world of competitive ballroom dancing, gleaming with fake tans and very real moves. The event combines a great film with a sequin-studded spectacular, as reigning Scottish Ballroom and Latin Dance Champions Tibor Poc and Hilary Mouat take to the floor ahead of the screening. And remember, a bit of musicality, please!

Part of the Strewth! strand celebrating Australian cinema

A Night at the Regal: Lost Map, Joe McAlinden, British Sea Power
O2 ABC
Thursday 19 February, 18.00 (doors) | £16/£14.50 | Tickets available from O2 ABC

In May 1896, Glasgow’s ABC venue (then an ice-rink called Hubner’s Palace) was site of the first-ever public film screening in the city. It opened as a fully-fledged cinema in 1929, under the name The ABC Regal, as one of the most prominent picture-houses in town. It has since become one of Glasgow’s biggest and most exciting music venues.

The festival will take over the O2 ABC for one night, as a joint venture between the new Cinema City and Sound & Vision programme strands, celebrating the venue’s history with film and music. Lost Map Records artists eagleowl and Monoganon investigate the relationship between sound and the moving image; Jarman Award nominees Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, directors of the recent Nick Cave documentary 20,000 Days on Earth (winner: Directing Award, Sundance Film Festival 2014/ BIFA 2014 Best Newcomer winners) bring a live performance of their new film EDIT, live scored by Joe McAlinden (formerly of the band Superstar). Headlining the event are those pioneers of the esoteric rock soundscape, British Sea Power, who will perform the Scottish premiere of their hugely acclaimed live score created around Penny Woolcock’s powerful documentary From the Sea to the Land Beyond, with screening. This perfect synchronicity of film and music, sound and vision, has won awards and acclaim at rare screenings since its 2012 premiere at Sheffield Doc Fest; GFF is delighted to bring it to Scotland. Part of the Cinema City and Sound & Vision strands.

The Fall of the House of Usher: a silent classic with live organ score
Pollokshaws Burgh Hall
Sunday 22 February | 20.00 - 22.00 | £12/£10 | Tickets available from GFT Box Office

“Some silent films hold you outside: You admire them, but are aware of them as a phenomenon. With The Fall of the House of Usher, I barely stirred. A tone, an atmosphere, was created that actually worked...less a fiction than the realization of some phantasmagoric alternative reality.” – Roger Ebert

Based on Edgar Allan Poe’s jet-black short story, this 1928 film by French silent master Jean Epstein is the first true Gothic horror and an iconic visual masterpiece exploring the beauty and tension of life, love, and death. An ethereal new live score by composer Irene Buckley, featuring organ, electronics and live vocals, will be performed using the original Wurlitzer Cinema Organ in the historic, appropriate setting of Pollokshaws Burgh Hall to immerse the audience in a compelling meditation on the macabre. Buckley created the live soprano soundtrack to The Passion of Joan of Arc, which Glasgow Film Festival screened inside Glasgow Cathedral in 2013; the festival is delighted to welcome her back.Part of the Special Events strand

Buster Keaton Night with Paul Merton and Neil Brand
In partnership with Fruitmarket Nights: Classic Silent Movies
Old Fruitmarket
Monday 23 February, 19.30 | £14 (£12); £5 for under-26s | Tickets available from Glasgow Concert Halls and GFT Box Office

Paul Merton might never have become a comedian were it not for the influence of Buster Keaton: fabulous clown, unbelievably dauntless stunt man, matchless player/director. Merton and renowned silent film pianist Neil Brand are two of the most engaging and knowledgeable silent comedy buffs around, and together they present a fantastic evening of classic comedy, fascinating insights and facts and live music to celebrate one of the greatest funny men of all time.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed
In partnership with Fruitmarket Nights: Classic Silent Movies
Old Fruitmarket
Sunday 1 March, 18.30 | £14 (£12); £5 for under-26s | Tickets available from Glasgow Concert Halls and GFT Box Office

Lotte Reiniger’s classic silent film The Adventures of Prince Achmed inspires a remarkable East-West fusion from the phenomenal French bass player Renaud Garcia-Fons. Reiniger’s gorgeous silhouette animation tells stories from Arabian Nights, a world full of enchantments and danger, wizards, flying horses, evil genies, princes and princesses. Garcia-Fons and his live band draw on the musical traditions of the Mediterranean, taking sounds and ideas from Spain, Turkey, Morocco and Southern France, fusing them into an amazing new crossover score led by his own astounding playing. This event is suitable for all the family, but a special treat for lovers of silent film, fantasy, and brilliant world jazz. Part of the Sound & Vision and Modern Families strands

Cat Video Festival
GoMA
Saturday 21 & Sunday 22 February, 13.00­–16.00| FREE (advance booking on EventBrite)

GoMA and Glasgow Film Festival are delighted to present the UK premiere of the Internet Cat Video Festival, brainchild of the prestigious Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. As the first offline, social celebration of online cat videos, the Internet Cat Video Festival has proved to be a massive hit with audiences of all ages, and is now coming to Scotland following its roaring (or should that be purring?) success across the pond. The festival is a free live event, featuring a programme specially curated by Will Braden, creator of the Henri Le Chat Noir videos and recipient of the first Golden Kitty (People’s Choice) Award. Accompanied with some extra feline-themed activities, the videos in the programme range from clips dating back to 1901, to brilliant animations and shorts featuring some more familiar feline faces, and everything in-between. Part of the Modern Families strand

The eleventh annual Glasgow Film Festival will run from 18 February until 1 March and as ever  Cinehouse  will do their best to be there. The full programme will be launched on the evening of Wednesday 21 January and will be online from Thursday 22 January, we hope to be at that launch so stay tuned for those details. The tickets will be  on sale from Monday 26 of January at 10am. Passes for FrightFest go on sale from 10am on Thursday 22 January.

Early Bird tickets, which offer vouchers for bundles of discounted tickets, and an opportunity to book tickets early on Friday 23 January, are available now until 4 January, priced at 10 films for £50, 20 films for £90 and 40 films for £160. See www.glasgowfilm.org/festival/earlybirdfor full information.

source:Thepeoplesmovies

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A Marriage Made In Heaven, When You Buy Ganja & Hess On Dual Format This January

Eureka! Entertainment have announced the release of Ganja &Hess. Flirting with the conventions of blaxploitation and the horror cinema, Bill Gunn’s revolutionary independent film Ganja & Hess is a highly stylized and utterly original treatise on sex, religion, and African American identity. Later recut and released in an inferior version, this edition represents the original release, restored by The Museum of Modern Art with support from The Film Foundation, and mastered in HD from a 35mm negative. Ganja &Hess will be released in a Dual Format (Blu-ray & DVD) edition on 26 January 2015.

Check out this clip Eureka! have sent us...


Duane Jones (Night of the Living Dead) stars as anthropologist Hess Green, who is stabbed with an ancient ceremonial dagger by his unstable assistant (director Bill Gunn), endowing him with the

blessing of immortality, and the curse of an unquenchable thirst for blood. When the assistant’s beautiful and outspoken wife Ganja (Marlene Clark) comes searching for her vanished husband, she and Hess form an unexpected partnership. Together, they explore just how much power there is in the blood.

SPECIAL DUAL FORMAT (BLU-RAY + DVD) EDITION:

• Brand new 1080p high-definition transfer
• Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• Feature-length commentary with producer Chiz Schultz, lead actress Marlene Clark, cinematogropher James Hinton and composer Sam Waymon
• Select scene commentary with historian David Kalat
• The Blood of the Thing: film historian David Kalat leads an interview-based documentary about the film
• Gunn’s original screenplay available via DVD-Rom and BD-Rom
• Reversible Sleeve
• 24-page booklet featuring a new essay by critic and author Kim Newman and a vintage letter written by Gunn to the New York Times, illustrated with archival images

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Eureka! Entertainment Reveal Masters Of Cinema First Quarter 2015 Line Up

Eureka Entertainment have announced via their twitter feeds (@eurekavideo and @mastersofcinema) their forthcoming releases in The Masters of Cinema series and Eureka Classics collection for the first quarter of 2015.

The latest slate of films from Eureka!'s The Masters of Cinema Series & Eureka! Classics collection bring together some of the most heralded masterpieces of the 20th century. Releases in the Masters of Cinema Series include Two for the Road, one of the great films by Stanley Donen (Singin' in the Rain, Charade), starring Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney; Fritz Lang’s masterpiece, Metropolis [Reconstructed & Restored] in brand new SteelBook packaging and including a second Blu-ray with more special features; Claude Lanzmann’s landmark documentary meditation on the Holocaust, Shoah and 4 Films After Shoah, a series of films made by Claude Lanzmann as follow-ups to Shoah (including The Last of The Unjust); Elia Kazan at his best with Wild River, a masterful recreation of a difficult, complex period in American history; Sidney Lumet’s The Offence, a harrowing and compellingly constructed chamber drama of police brutality and mental anguish starring Sean Connery; Raymond Bernard’s depiction of the travails of one French regiment during World War I, Wooden Crosses; Man of the West, Anthony Mann’s extraordinary western starring Gary Cooper; and finally Federico Fellini's adaptation of Petronious' myth of Satyricon. The Eureka Classics Collection sees the arrival of Bill Gunn’s revolutionary independent film Ganja &Hess and The Other, the psychological horror film helmed by the legendary director Robert Mulligan. And in cinemas The Last of the Unjust, will be joined by Life of Riley, the final film by the French master Alain Resnais.

Released on 19 January 2015, Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn 'make something wonderful out of being alive' in Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road. Featuring a score by Henry Mancini, the film will be released for the first time on Blu-ray in a Dual Format (Blu-ray and DVD edition).

Also available from 19 January 2015, Fritz Lang’s, Metropolis [Reconstructed & Restored], the mother of all sci-fi films and a major influence on Ridley Scott (Blade Runner), George Lucas (Star Wars), and pop culture in general (referenced by Madonna, Beyonce and countless others) will be re-released in a 2-disc Blu-ray set in brand new SteelBook packaging, now featuring Giorgio Moroder presents: Metropolis and a 45-min documentary exploring the film’s rediscovery.

Shoah is a work of genius from Claude Lanzmann, an heroic endeavour to humanise the inhuman, to tell the untellable, and to explore in unprecedented detail the horrors of the past. It is one of the most powerful and important, and greatest, films of all time. Premiering on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK, alongside the four films Lanzmann made as follow-ups to Shoah, each of which explore in further depth specific aspects and events of the Nazis' extermination programme. These four films (including The Last of the Unjust, released theatrically on 9 January) will also be released as a standalone DVD set, entitled 4 Films After Shoah. Both Lanzmann box sets will be released on 26 January 2015 to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

The final Monday of the month will also see the release in a Dual Format (Blu-ray and DVD) edition of Ganja &Hess. Flirting with the conventions of blaxploitation and the horror cinema, Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess is a highly stylized and utterly original treatise on sex, religion, and African American identity. The edition will represent the original release, restored by The Museum of Modern Art with support from The Film Foundation, and mastered in HD from a 35mm negative.

Expected later in the first quarter of the year, Sean Connery stars as a burned out British Police Detective Sergeant in Sidney Lumet's The Offence, who finally snaps while interrogating a suspected child molester, played by Ian Bannen . Also starring Trevor Howard (Gandhi, The Third Man) and Vivien Merchant (Frenzy, Alfie), The Offence will be released on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK as part of the Masters of Cinema Series.

Like the classic horror films The Exorcist, The Omen, and The Shining, Robert Mulligan's psychological horror film The Other eschews gore in favour of richly detailed psychological horror in its depiction of deeply disturbed children and has gained a huge reputation for its haunting atmosphere and moody cinematography, which critic Roger Ebert has described as "perverse and menacing”. The Other will be released for the first time in the UK on Blu-ray in a Dual Format (Blu-ray and DVD) edition as a Eureka Classic.

Elia Kazan’s Wild River was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. Starring Montgomery Clift, Lee Remick (Anatomy of a Murder, The Omen). Wild River will be released on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK as part of the Masters of Cinema Series.

Raymond Bernard used a masterful arsenal of film techniques, from haunting matte paintings to jarring documentary-like camerawork in battle sequences, to create Wooden Crosses, a pacifist work of enormous empathy and chilling despair. Wooden Crosses will be released for the first time in the UK on Blu-ray in a Dual Format (Blu-ray and DVD) edition as part of the Masters of Cinema Series.

The controversial and extremely loose adaptation of Petronius’s classical Roman satire, Satyricon, written and directed by Federico Fellini, follows the exploits of two pansexual young men as they move through a landscape of free-form pagan excess. A new 4K digital restoration of Satyricon will be released for the first time in the UK on Blu-ray as part of the Masters of Cinema Series.

And finally, regarded by Jean-Luc Godard as Mann’s greatest film, Anthony Mann's final foray into the western genre is a disturbing examination of man's baser instincts, rising in intensity to the level of Shakespearean tragedy. Starring the legendary actor Gary Cooper Man of the West is the story of Link (Cooper) who tried to forget his killer past until an old evil man and a ruthless gang made him remember. Man of the West will be released for the first time anywhere in the world on Blu-ray as part of The Masters of Cinema Series.

In the last film directed by the prolific French director before his death in March, Alain Resnais turns for the third time to the work of Alan Ayckbourn for inspiration in a sparkling comedy about middle-class infidelity, Life of Riley (Aimer, boire et chanter) will be released in UK & Eire cinemas on 6 March 2015.

Managing Director of Eureka Entertainment, Ron Benson stated “New restorations and home viewing and Blu-ray premières abound - we continue our quest to release the very finest in world cinema, using the very best available materials, all with a meticulous attention to detail."

Further details for all releases will be announced in due course.

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