Dear Enemy
Dashur Armik
Gjergj Xhuvani
Albania, France, Germany | 2004 | 90mins | 35mm | Colour | Subtitled

Friday 14th | 2.00pm | Cork Opera House

This second offering from Gjergj Xhuvani continues his chronicle of modern Albania and places him among the great directors of Balkan cinema.

September 1943. Fascist Italy surrenders. The 20,000 citizens of the central Albanian city of Elbasan now ravage army depots. Harun Bonata, a wholesale grocer, loads stolen goods on his small truck and takes off quickly. He is stopped by a wounded Italian soldier, a deserter, who threatens to hurt Harun if he doesn't take him to his home and hide him. Harun is already hiding a wounded partisan, his brother, and his brother's wife. That night, Hoakin also arrives at the house. He's the town watchmaker, a Jew who made it to Elbasan after fleeing from the Nazis in Poland.

Harun signs a contract with German collaborator Ethem Bey, to supply food and goods for the German army. In their newly imposed situation, the partisan, the Italian and the Jew strike up a friendship. After the German army pulls back, Ethem Bey also seeks refuge in Bonata's house. The absurdity of taking sides is made clear and allegiances are eventually displaced in favour of day-to-day survival.

Dumplings
Gaudzi
Fruit Chan
Hong Kong | 2005 | 91mins | 35mm | Colour | Subtitled

Saturday 15th | 11.30pm | Cork Opera House

In downtown Kowloon, Mei, a Chinese black-market midwife, does a roaring trade in her 'special dumplings', dumplings that are guaranteed to renew youthful beauty. One of her best customers is ageing actress Qing, who is so desperate to hold onto her looks and her wandering husband that she's willing to go to almost any lengths to recapture her lost vitality.

So what's the secret ingredient? What's in Mei's dumplings? While they possess a potency that makes them an elixir to combat the wages of time, what hides inside that thin wrapper might eventually be more problematic than those who gulp them down might think.

Originally made as one section of a three-part horror omnibus with cinematography from the Asian horror film stalwarth Christopher Doyle (alongside contributions by Park Chan-wook and Takashi Miike), Chan has expanded his nightmarish vision to feature length, and the result is a richer, more complex and nastier film.

Factotum
Bent Hamer
USA, Norway | 2005 | 93mins | 35mm | Colour

Monday 10th | 9.00pm | Kino Cinema

A perfect rendition of slow-paced, low-life urbanity and alcoholism, and an excellent interpretation of the writing of Charles Bukowski. Bukowski's alter ego Henry Chinaski, played by Matt Dillon in an expertly pitched performance combining the necessary burly physicality with a bad-tempered drawl, bounces from one dead-end job to another in order to pay for a life of drinking, gambling and writing short stories. Along the way he falls in with fellow lost soul Jan, and they embark on a tempestuous relationship fuelled by sex and alcohol.

Factotum recreates Bukowski's combina-tion of paint-stripping toughness and bleak humour, angrily reacting against a bureau-cratic world that forces people to spend their time in meaningless ways. Chinaski knows what he'd rather be doing; drinking and writing. Despite the squalor and the variety of broken characters he runs into he never compromises on his ideals.

An effortless blending of offbeat Scandinavian sensibility with the quintessentially American down-and-out milieu. Arguably one of the best adaptations of Bukowski's work, deadpan timing and ace performances bring out the morose humour and surprising warmth in the often miserabilist scribe's voice. - Variety