Amadeus
Winner of eight Academy Awards this is the biopic of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, directed by Milos Forman based on the play by Peter Schafer, who also wrote the screenplay.
This 1984 film plays a little loose with the facts, instead concentrating on creating a realistic portrayal of the life and times of Mozart. But the use of ‘facts’ here results in a film about envy, genius and love.
We get a very 80s version of Amadeus as performed by Tom Hulce, Amadeus as childlike Jim Morrison. But in the conflicted Salieri we get a more nuanced performance by F. Murray Abraham.
If you’re looking for an easy metaphor to get you into the film just look to the wigs, they’re glorious.
Suffragette
This 2015 film directed by Sarah Gavron is a fictionalised recounting of the Suffragette movement.
Carey Mulligan plays Maud Watts, a fictional character caught up in the movement. Maud is a composite character used to convey the many ways in which women were treated as the inferior sex, at the beginning of the last century.
A thematically strong film this is a great way of opening up discussions around issues of gender equality.
Man on Wire
One of the two documentaries on the list, James Marsh’s film tells the story of how Philippe Petit walked a tight rope across the Twin Towers.
A heist movie of sorts, the film, through archival footage and some recreations, goes through the difficulties in pulling off this illegal act.
The audacity of the act is fascinating in itself but beneath the surface we can see how Petit gathers, and manipulates, those around him.
The final act itself is not only one of courage but also all about the arrogance of Petit, the crowd looks up to see this one man walk and dance his way back and forth across the expanse.
Whale Rider
A Maori girl, Pai (Keisha Castle-Hughes) must prove to her community that she is a worthy new chief, even though she is female. Her main stumbling block is her Grandfather, Koro (Rawiri Paratene), a man who clearly adores his granddaughter but can’t conceive of a world with a female chief.
Niki Caro’s film is full of humour and wit, with a very clear vision of what constitutes appropriate symbols and metaphors for this age group, and this culture. Tradition, family, responsibility and love are the core themes, along with the overt discussion of gender roles. This is not confined to the community’s attitude to women but also its attitude to their expectations of men, and particularly fathers.
Hotel Rwanda
Northern Irish director Terry George manages that most difficult of tasks, making a film about genocide accessible to a younger, and thus wider, audience.
Don Cheadle plays Paul Rusesabagina in this biopic of the hotel manager’s rescue of hundreds of Tutsi refugees from the marauding Hutu militia.
George makes the important decision to concentrate on Hutu Rusesabagina’s relationship with his Tutsi wife, Tatiana (Sophie Okonedo). Importantly for a biopic we see Rusesabagina change over the course of the film as he glimpses the genocide happening outside the grounds of his hotel.
This is one of those films where you think you are witnessing horrors but George, resisting the opportunity to shock us with images of acts of genocide, instead shows us the reactions of the characters, most memorably Rusesabagina’s son near the beginning of the film and the hotel manager himself during a return journey to his hotel. Both are traumatised by what they see.
The real punch delivered here is not the historical significance of the genocide but the fact that moments like this are still happening and the west is still sitting back and ignoring the results of their colonial actions.
Watch it before showing it, but the discussions that a film of this sort bring out can lead a class to many places. And it creates a great chance to introduce literature, as comparative or supplementary pieces, from beyond the predominantly white western world.
CinÉireann / June 2018 15
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