Taking place at in the Drama Room at the WPCC, Smokescreen brings Dubbo residents the opportunity to witness iconic and influential films from the history of cinema.
The theme for 2022 is ‘The River’. These are films in which a river plays an important part in the telling of the story. Whether living on its edges or as a means of transport to trade with others, rivers are a symbol of connection. From creation myths and religious rituals they are metaphors for the flow of life. Rivers are agents of transformation. With its twists and turns, through the turbulence and the calm, a rivers simple beginnings eventually reach the open expanse of the great unknown.
Tickets include a complimentary standard drink at the Establishment following the film. The Establishment is an 18+ Venue only, please check each film for the Classification.
See all 11 films for $70 by purchasing a season pass or you can see a single film for $10.
African Queen (1951)
5 February
4pm
Based on C.S. Forester’s 1935 novel of the same name. The film is especially noted for Humphrey Bogart’s performance, which earned him the only Academy Award of his career.
Filmed on location in the Congo, this is a mis-matched couple, each of whose lives have been impacted by events outside of themselves. Hepburn’s character Rose by the aggression of German troops killing her brother and burning down her mission at the outbreak of WW1, and Bogart, well he is shy, amused and intimidated by this Bible-reading missionary lady who washes out her unmentionables each and every night, and who becomes netted by the thrill of adventure. It is a jolly good yarn, and a beefy slice of derring-do.
Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, and Robert Morley.
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)
5 March
4pm
Aguirre, the Wrath of God shows Herzog's mutual affection and abhorrence for Nature, how it remains ambivalent to human desire and cruel to our often maniacal ambitions, and yet how we continue to think, through our own deluded perspective, that we can somehow conquer it.
In the mid-16th century, after annihilating the Incan empire, Gonzalo Pizarro (Allejandro Repulles) leads his army of conquistadors over the Andes into the heart of the most savage environment on earth in search of the fabled City of Gold, El Dorado. As the soldier’s battle starvation, Indians, the forces of nature, and each other, Don Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski), ''The Wrath of God,'' is consumed with visions of conquering all of South America and revolts, leading his own army down a treacherous river on a doomed quest into oblivion. Featuring a seething, controlled performance from Klaus Kinski, this masterpiece from director Werner Herzog is an unforgettable portrait of madness and power.
Starring: Klaus Kinski, Helena Rojo, Del Negro
Frozen River (2008)
2 April
4pm
Frozen River is an American crime drama written and directed by Courtney Hunt. The screenplay focuses on a desperate but uneasy alliance of two working-class women. One is Ray Eddy, mother of two who has been abandoned by her gambling husband, the other is Lila, a widowed Mohawk who smuggles illegal immigrants from Canada into the United States.
Frozen River is a character study of a hard willed woman who is determined to do what it takes to provide for her children. It is a story of need and grim realism, grounded on the struggle for economic survival.
The idea for the film says Hunt, came from stories she and her husband had heard about Mohawks smuggling cigarettes by driving across the Saint Lawrence River, where it forms part of the international border between Canada and the United States, when it froze over.
Frozen River was shot in sub-freezing temperatures on location in Clinton County in upstate New York over a period of twenty-four days in March 2007.
Starring: Melissa Leo, Misty Upham and Charlie McDermott,
The River (1951)
7 May
4pm
Based on the novel by Rumer Godden, who was born in India and lived there for many years.
The film eloquently contrasts the growing pains of three young women with the immutability of the Bengal River around which their daily lives unfold. The character Harriet, with aspirations to writing, is as if an expression of Godden herself. Enriched by Renoir’s subtle understanding and appreciation for India and its people, The River gracefully explores the fragile connections between transitory emotions and everlasting creation.
It's a beautifully observed rite-of-passage and culture-clash story. It is about belonging, and the passage of time. There is death and birth, and the river continues to flow.
Martin Scorsese considers "The River" one of the two most beautiful colour films ever made, "I watch that film three times a year. Sometimes four."
Renoir was the son of the impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
Starring: Esmond Knight, Nora Swinburne and Arthur Shields.
Dark River (2018)
4 June
4pm
Following the death of her father, Alice returns home to Yorkshire for the first time in 15 years to claim the tenancy of the family farm she believes is rightfully hers. Once there, she encounters older brother Joe, a man she barely recognizes. Joe is thrown by Alice's sudden arrival, angered by her claim and finds her presence increasingly impossible to deal with. Battling to regain control in a fragile situation, Alice must confront traumatic memories to find a way to restore the farm.
The river as a refuge, and as a means/attempt to wash away the physical and emotional trauma of past events.
Emotions can be like a river, where you can be enveloped and supported or become overwhelmed and drown.
Starring: Ruth Wilson, Mark Stanley, and Sean Bean.
River Queen (2005)
2 July
4pm
An intimate story set during the 1860s in which a young Irish woman Sarah, and her family find themselves on both sides of the turbulent wars between British and Maori during the British colonization of New Zealand.
Starring: Samantha Morton, Kiefer Sutherland, and Cliff Curtis.
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Wild River (1960)
6 August
4pm
Wild River embraces some of cinema’s master-themes: the confrontation of the old and the new, and the sociological-moral concerns.
A Tennessee Valley Authority bureaucrat comes to the river to do what none of his predecessors have been able to do - evict a stubborn octogenarian from her island before the rising waters engulf her. It is a battle of wills between government authority and generations-old land owners, and their reaction to the destruction of their land.
If Wild River was an essay, its central topic would fall under “the general heading of progress”. But the film shows us there is no such thing as progress in general: there is only, in each case and circumstance, the particular problem, the isolated breakthrough, and the irretrievable loss.
But is the new necessarily superior, is the old necessarily bad? In this collision of the old and the new, Kazan spins the situation around, to keep viewing it from a fresh angle, and the transition between them is complex and uneasy.
Starring: Montgomery Clift, Lee Remick and Jo Van Fleet
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Dead Man (1995)
3 September
4pm
On the run after murdering a man, accountant William Blake encounters a strange aboriginal American man named Nobody who prepares him for his journey into the spiritual world.
The river in burial ritual, a passage into the spirit world.
The boat set adrift with a body as symbolising safe passage into the afterlife.
The association between water/rivers/ocean and immortality.
Starring: Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, and Crispin Glover.
Hotel by the River (2018)
1 October
4pm
Convinced he's on the verge of death, an ageing poet invites his two bickering sons to an isolated hotel for a final goodbye.
The hotel also hosts a newly single woman who has a friend keep her company and with whom she shares a room, strolls and conversations. The poet is drawn to the beautiful girls and cannot resist the temptation to discover more. Their lives intersect, connect and disconnect and potentially become a metaphor for modern life.
Starring: Gi Ju-bong, Kim Min-hee and Kwon Hae-hyo.
FILM NOT RATED
DOUBLE FEATURE
5 November
Film 1: 2pm
River of Grass (1994)
They hang out in motels, seemingly unable to really be on the run, stuck in the Everglades and like so many people who talk about leaving but never do.
(The Florida Everglades is actually a slow moving river, 60 miles wide and over 100 miles long. It's called the River of Grass because of the way it looks. With sawgrass marshes – cypress swamps and mangrove forests, the 'glades is a spectacular sight.)
Starring: Lisa Donaldson, Larry Fessenden and Dick Russell.
Film 2: 4pm
Heart of Darkness (1993)
From Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novella of the same name. A trading company manager travels up an African river to find a missing outpost head and discovers the depth of evil in humanity's soul. In the late 1970's, Francis Ford Coppola used the Conrad story as a structural underpinning for his Vietnam movie, "Apocalypse Now." The novella's theme of alienation, greed, corruption and exploitation have struck some of this century's more dominant chords.
Tim Roth as Marlow is the narrator, describing a journey he makes for a Belgian trade company up the Congo River to find Kurtz, a former company agent suspected of hoarding vast quantities of ivory. With a crew of black workers, Marlow navigates the river through a series of work stations, each run by white men straining pitifully for the semblance of power that money from the ivory will bring them. All of their talk is of the mysterious Kurtz, who, depending on the speaker, is either insane or a prodigy, an illuminated man.
Starring: Tim Roth, John Malkovich and Isaach De Bankole.
FILM NOT RATED