By Rama Gaind
‘Of Time and the City’ (Madman Entertainment)
This film by Terrence Davies has a strong personal stamp coupled with a passion that a certain distance.
Davies takes a trip back to his childhood and the city of Liverpool and, thereby, unfolds an engrossing autobiography.
A joyful remembrance of Davies’ childhood home and a eulogy of what is now lost, this documentary comprises mostly of archival footage and photographs set to contemporary and classical music.
It’s a visual poem: a hymn to former glories, a critique of past indulgences and a dreamlike reminder of how you can never return to the perfection of your memories.
Special DVD feature includes an interview with director Davies.
‘Chevolution’ (Madman Entertainment)
A fascinating biography of an image that shows how an artist’s work can take on a life of its own.
It’s the image that launched a thousand T-shirts.
In 1960, Cuban photographer Alberto ‘Korda’ Díaz captured a photo of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara during a mass funeral. History conspired to enable this dynamic portrait to explode on the world scene in 1968 in Europe and Latin America, when it became an international symbol of protest and dissent. It is being constantly reinvented and transformed.
With the Internet in the last decade, the image has once again travelled the globe in many forms from protest to commerce.
Find out why and how this photograph became so important.
‘Chris & Don – A Love Story’ (Madman Entertainment)
This is a true-life story, a joyful celebration of an extraordinary couple.
It tells of the passionate three-decade relationship between British writer Christopher Isherwood (whose ‘Berlin Stories’ was the basis for all incarnations of the much-beloved ‘Cabaret’) and American portrait painter Don Bachardy, 30 years his junior.
From Isherwood’s Kit-Kat-Club years in Weimar-era Germany (the inspiration for his most famous work) to the couple’s first meeting on the sun-kissed beaches of 1950s Malibu, their against-all-odds saga is brought to dazzling life by a treasure trove of multimedia.
