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<FONT FACE="Verdana"><B>This week at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre...<BR>
</B><BR>
<FONT COLOR="#800000"><H2>Manderlay (R)<BR>
</H2></FONT><B>Saturday & Sunday, March 18 & 19<BR>
3:50 PM & 7:00 PM<BR>
</B>$5/adult<BR>
KFS passes accepted for Sunday showings<BR>
<B>(see Review below)<BR>
* * *<BR>
<BR>
Next week at the Kenworthy<BR>
</B><BR>
University of Idaho Women’s Center presents<BR>
<B>Lunafest<BR>
</B>March 23<BR>
7:00 PM<BR>
$5/adult, $3/student or senior<BR>
<BR>
An evening of bluegrass featuring<BR>
<B>Prairie Flyer &<BR>
Grangeville Bluegrass Co.<BR>
</B>Friday, March 24<BR>
7:00 PM<BR>
$12/adult, $8/child under 13<BR>
<BR>
<B>Transamerica (R)<BR>
</B>March 25 - 26<BR>
4:25 & 7:00 PM<BR>
$5/adult<BR>
<BR>
Regular movie prices: $5/adult, $2/child 12 or younger<BR>
KFS series pass prices: $30/10 films, $75/30 films.<BR>
KFS passes accepted year-round for Sunday movies!<BR>
<BR>
For more information on movies, events, rental rates, and/or to download a schedule, visit www.kenworthy.org<BR>
<BR>
<B>Coming in April:</B> <I>Sirius Idaho Theatre</I> presents A Walk in the Woods & Collected Stories; The Celestine Prophecy; The Best of Youth; Cache; Why we Fight.<BR>
<B>* * *<BR>
Also in March at the Kenworthy-<BR>
</B><BR>
University of Idaho presents<BR>
<H2>American Indian Film Festival<BR>
</H2><B>March 29 - April 1<BR>
</B><BR>
MOSCOW, Idaho “American Indian Activism and Leadership” is the theme of this year’s American Indian Film Festival hosted by the University of Idaho. <BR>
<BR>
The films selected for this year’s festival bring to light national and local issues and concerns, including dam removal, young tribe members struggle with pop-culture and American Indian leadership representation. <BR>
<BR>
The four day festival begins March 29 with ceremonial opening with remarks by Rebecca Miles, a member of the Nez Perce Tribe, and the first female elected chairman in the tribe’s history, and ends April 1 with a presentation by John Trudell, American Indian activist and actor. <BR>
<BR>
<B>The free films, partially funded by the Idaho Humanities Council, will be shown at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre at 7 p.m. each day, with panel discussions following the screening. <BR>
</B><BR>
The following is the film schedule with brief descriptions: <BR>
<BR>
<U>Wednesday <B>March 29<BR>
</B></U><B><BR>
</B>Film: “Thunderbird Woman-Winona LaDuke”<BR>
Filmed on the White Earth Reservation: A story of Winona LaDuke Anishinaabe (Ojibwe), a leading figure in the struggle for American Indian land rights and sovereignty, vice-presidential candidate, novelist, environmentalist, anti-nuclear activist and mother.<BR>
<BR>
Panel: American Indian women leaders and activists, including Rebecca Miles. <BR>
<BR>
<U>Thursday <B>March 30<BR>
</B></U><B><BR>
</B>Film: “Doing it?”<BR>
An abstinence-education documentary. Three Nez Perce high school students are influenced by the images and messages they see on television and want to find out if everyone is “doing it”. Filmed in Lapwai in March 2005, it was produced by Nez Perce Tribe Students for Success Program.<BR>
<BR>
Film: “Surviving Lewis and Clark: The Nimiipuu Story”<BR>
This documentary focuses on the contributions of the Nez Perce people to the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Highlights the major events that have contributed to some of the social and economic difficulties in today’s Nez Perce homeland.<BR>
<BR>
Panel: Dialogue with filmmakers and actors<BR>
<BR>
<U>Friday <B>March 31<BR>
</B></U><B><BR>
</B>Film: “Unconquering the Last Frontier”<BR>
This documentary chronicles the Elwha Klallam Tribe’s struggle to survive in the midst of hydroelectric development in Washington. <BR>
<BR>
Film: “The Snowball effect”<BR>
Film explores the controversy surrounding the recently proposed ski resort expansion and snowmaking with wastewater on the San Francisco Peaks. American Indian tribal officials, spiritual leaders, Forest Service officials and concerned citizens discuss the issues of economic misconceptions, threats to the environment, global warming, sacred lands protection and public health concerns associated with groundbreaking studies on wastewater. <BR>
<BR>
Panel: Native Americans and non-Native Americans working with treaty rights, salmon preservation, sacred land, economic development and private property right issues.<BR>
<BR>
<U>Saturday <B>April 1</B></U><B> <BR>
<BR>
</B>5 p.m. - 8 p.m. UI Native American Student Association will be selling Indian tacos outside the Kenworthy. <BR>
<BR>
Film: “Trudell - The Movie”<BR>
A documentary about American Indian activist John Trudell, a poet, singer and powerful voice of the human spirit. His work began as an activist for American Indian rights and freedoms and was the national spokesperson during the Indians of All Tribes Occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969. He assisted in the formation of American Indian Movement (AIM) in the ‘70s and has appeared in several movies, including “Incident at Oglala,” “Thunderheart,” “On Deadly Ground” and “Smoke Signals.” <BR>
<BR>
Presentation / Question and answer: with John Trudell.<BR>
<BR>
Contacts: Katie Dahlinger, UI Communications and Marketing, (208) 885-7251, <FONT COLOR="#0000FF"><I><U>kdahlinger@uidaho.edu<BR>
</U></I></FONT><B>* * *<BR>
<BR>
This week’s movie review-<BR>
</B><BR>
<FONT COLOR="#800000"><H2>Manderlay<BR>
</H2></FONT><BR>
Written and directed by Lars von Trier<BR>
Running time: 2 hours, 18 minutes<BR>
Rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has strong language, nudity, and one fairly graphic sex scene.<BR>
<BR>
<BR>
<B><I><U>As reviewed by Sean Axmaker writing for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer<BR>
</U></I></B><BR>
The second of Lars von Trier's grand cinematic statements about "America" (which von Trier has never actually visited) takes on nothing less than the volatile issue of racism and the legacy of slavery. He tackles it with teeth bared behind a sneering grin.<BR>
<BR>
"Manderlay" picks up where "Dogville" left off, right down to von Trier's sober, exaggerated theatricality, mannered dialogue (which plays like a 1930s stage play) and vast, sparsely set artificial stage.<BR>
<BR>
Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard, taking over the part from Nicole Kidman with earnestness in place of Kidman's innocence), the idealistic gangster's daughter, stumbles across an Alabama plantation where slavery remains in effect in 1930, 70 years after abolition.<BR>
<BR>
Driven by good intentions and righteous indignation, emancipator Grace transforms the plantation into a grand experiment in "freed enterprise." She awards the slaves communal owners and makes the former owners indentured servants under her "benign" dictatorship, decreeing democracy and equality at gunpoint while posing as just another working-class comrade.<BR>
<BR>
It looks more like a lampoon of communism than a satire of American liberal idealism and social paternalism, while the scattershot spray of von Trier's satirical potshots both lambaste and embrace racial and social stereotypes. The timing of the release only makes the irony of a Danish director -- especially one this arrogant and intellectually garish -- criticizing race relations in America all the more entertaining.<BR>
<BR>
At heart, it's an absurdist comedy with a deadpan delivery and run through with the very hypocrisy that von Trier mercilessly ridicules.<BR>
<BR>
Yet it's so ruthlessly witty and meticulously plotted -- unexpectedly so, given its messy dramatic sprawl -- that it delivers a satisfying kick. Not for von Trier's sarcastic satirical jabs but for his shameless bravado, his flagrant desire to offend everyone, and his brazen take on poetic justice in a fantasy America only he could imagine.<BR>
<BR>
<BR>
<B><I><U>As reviewed by Philip French writing for the (London) Observer<BR>
</U></I></B><BR>
A sequel to Dogville, Manderlay is the second film in a projected trilogy of smug Scandinavian sermons that Lars von Trier is delivering (in a form of English) on America, its sins and hypocrisies. This one, in 12 chapters, is set in 1935 Alabama, where the do-gooding heroine Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard) discovers a plantation where slavery is preserved and takes a bet with her cynical gangster father (Willem Dafoe) that she can liberate the slaves and turn them into a self-respecting liberal community.<BR>
<BR>
Naturally, everything goes wrong because the blacks have been conditioned to servitude and the whites intend to keep them that way. As in Dogville, the heroine is humiliated in every possible way. Staged like an impressionist play of the 1940s (the skeletal sets are reminiscent of Brecht), Manderlay is a puerile film, its thinking much like the crude Soviet view of American history. One can well understand Nicole Kidman not wishing to continue playing Grace after Dogville.<BR>
<BR>
<BR>
<B><I><U>As reviewed by Stephen Holden writing for the New York Times<BR>
</U></I></B><BR>
To warm to "Manderlay," the chilly second installment of Lars von Trier's not-yet-finished three-part Brechtian allegory examining United States history, you must be willing to tolerate the derision and moral arrogance of a snide European intellectual thumbing his nose at American barbarism.<BR>
<BR>
That might not be such a bad thing given today's climate of national self-congratulation, in which the phrase "the American people" is wielded as a synonym for collective virtue. <BR>
<BR>
Set in Alabama in 1933, the movie lays out an excoriating examination of the legacy of slavery in the United States. If there's nothing in the film that hasn't been said before about America's persistent racial strife and the reasons for it, its tone is that of a practical joker strewing whoopee cushions at a gathering, then sitting back to cackle at the rude noises made by credulous fools taking their seats.<BR>
<BR>
As in its notorious forerunner, "Dogville," "Manderlay's" main character is Grace, the guilt-ridden, Candide-like do-good daughter of a cynical gangster (Willem Dafoe) who doesn't have an idealistic bone in his body.<BR>
<BR>
As he did in "Dogville," John Hurt narrates in an unctuous, flowery voice that suggests a sardonic parody of Alistair Cooke on "Masterpiece Theater" inflected with echoes of Lionel Barrymore reading Dickens's "Christmas Carol."<BR>
<BR>
Mr. von Trier cited "The Threepenny Opera" as an inspiration for "Dogville," which was set in an imaginary Colorado town in the months before "Manderlay" begins. The inspiration for the sequel is Jean Paulhan's preface to Pauline Reage's "Story of O," which describes a rebellion in 1838 by newly liberated slaves in Barbados. When they asked the owner who had freed them to re-enslave them, he refused, and they responded by killing him and his family, moving back to their old quarters, and resuming their old ways — the point being that institutionalized oppression and self-loathing, instilled over generations, form habits not easily broken.<BR>
<BR>
A version of those events takes place in "Manderlay" after Grace, while traveling through Alabama with her father and his slicked-up goons, stops in front of a plantation (named Manderlay) where a young black woman appears, begging for help. Against her father's advice, Grace follows the woman through its iron gates where she finds a community of slaves under the thumb of a tyrannical, shotgun-wielding white matriarch, Mam (Lauren Bacall).<BR>
<BR>
Because slavery was abolished 70 years earlier, Grace is outraged, but also feels guilty and indirectly responsible. "We brought them here, we abused them, and made them what they are," she tells her father, pleading that he leave her there with four of his henchmen and a lawyer.<BR>
<BR>
No sooner has Grace arrived than Mam dies, Grace takes over and consigns the plantation's white overseers to hard labor (in one scene she even forces them to serve a meal in blackface). But Manderlay's oppressive social order, codified in a book, "Mam's Law," continues as before. The belatedly freed inhabitants prove more resentful than grateful. To understand them, Grace enlists the co-operation of Wilhelm (Danny Glover), Mam's sly, mild-mannered house slave who eventually emerges as the cautious, well-meaning architect of the oppressive system. And as time passes, Grace herself gradually becomes more Mam-like.<BR>
<BR>
Grace's reforms initially bear fruit. She teaches the people how to vote, and the lawyer draws up contracts that turn the plantation into a productive co-operative whose residents are equal shareholders. Grace, however, is not prepared for the thieves and gamblers inside and outside the community. Nor is she equipped to deal with natural disasters that include a dust storm that nearly destroys the first cotton crop. A barrier of trees known as the Old Lady's Garden once protected the fields but is removed when Grace has the trees cut down for timber. The parallels between the dust storm and the recent New Orleans catastrophe are inescapable.<BR>
<BR>
The movie bluntly and leeringly confronts the stereotype of the black man as a sexual superman, when Grace finds herself consumed by desire for Timothy (Isaach De Bankolé), a proud, contemptuous young stud claiming descent from African royalty, who makes her cover her face during their brutal coupling.<BR>
<BR>
In "Manderlay" Mr. von Trier uses the same Brechtian distancing techniques that he brought to "Dogville." The movie was filmed on a nearly bare stage, in which pieces of wood denote a fence and shacks; the names of locations on the plantation are stenciled on the floor like directions for blocking. The brownish-gray cinematography underscores a bleak, Depression-era mood.<BR>
<BR>
But make no mistake: this deeply misanthropic, anti-American film insists the United States is ruled by crooks and gangsters and cursed by the legacy of slavery whose poison has seeped to its very core.<BR>
<BR>
<I>Film reviews researched and edited by Peter Haggart<BR>
<BR>
</I><B>* * *<BR>
<I>Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre<BR>
</I>508 S. Main Street, Moscow, Idaho<BR>
</B>208-882-4127<BR>
Sign up for this weekly email on events and movies at the Kenworthy by logging onto our website <BR>
<FONT COLOR="#0000FF"><U>http://www.kenworthy.org<BR>
<BR>
</U></FONT>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~<BR>
PAMELA PALMER, <B>Volunteer<BR>
</B>Mailto:ppalmer@moscow.com<BR>
Film and Events Committee <BR>
Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre<BR>
<BR>
http://www.kenworthy.org<BR>
To speak with a KPAC staff member, <BR>
call (208) 882-4127<BR>
Mailto:kpac@moscow.com<BR>
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