features

Benoît Delépine, Gustave de Kervern

Belgium | 2004 | 92mins | 35mm | Black & White | Subtitled

Aaltra is no ordinary film. It is a glorious road movie for wheelchair users. Ben, a farmer, and Gus, a commuter, are neighbours in a small Belgian village, but they cannot stand each other. In addition, both are unhappy with their lives. One day a fight leads to an accident. The result is they both end up paralysed from the waist down and have to spend the rest of their lives in wheelchairs. They reject the possibility of suicide and, instead, undertake a strange journey to Finland, to find the manufacturer of the farm machinery that caused their handicap to get some financial redress.

During their journey, the relationship between the two and their view of life change. The feature debut by directors, actors and writers Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern is consistent and disre-spectful, dryly comic and captivating.

Sam Fuller

2004 | USA | 159mins | 35mm | Colour and Black & White

This is fictional life based on factual death. A grizzled soldier leads a platoon that is about to storm the beaches of North Africa. From there he leads his men on to France, Sicily and Belgium. While he loses scores of soldiers along the way he manages to retain a core group through the campaign of Griff, Zab, Vinci and Johnson. With a hard-bitten detachment they watch a mix-ture of cocky and callow soldiers meet their fate in combat.'By now, we'd come to see our replacements as dead men who tem-porarily had the use of their arms and legs,' remarks the Fulleresque narrator Private Zab.

The 1980 release of The Big Red One could never be regarded as a true repre-sentation of war veteran Fuller's vision as the studio edited the original. After the success of Charlie, film historian Schickel has added nearly an hour from the original shooting script.

What was admittedly a pretty decent war movie is now a true Sam Fuller movie, full of that tabloid absurdity - sudden death and sudden laughter wildly mixed - that was his trademark. And his glory.-Richard Schickel

Kaosu Hideo Nakata

Japan | 2003 | 90mins | 35mm | Colour | Subtitled

Hideo Nakata, (best known for directing Ringu, which inspired the recent American remake, The Ring), further consolidates his position as one of Asia's finest directors with a film that is thoroughly engrossing thanks to an intelligent and well executed story that begs to be watched. Borrowing elements from sources like the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock and film noir, Nakata crafts a dark and intriguing tale of betrayal where nothing is as it seems.

A man gets involved in a kidnapping scheme with the wife of a wealthy business-man. She lets herself be tied up and confined in his house while he sends the ransom demand. When he returns home that night, however, he finds her laying dead on the floor. In a panic he buries her body deep in the woods and tries to return to his ordinary life. One day, he thinks he spots her walking down the street. Is his mind playing tricks on him, or has she somehow returned from the grave?