MOVIES

Celebrating women

The International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES) will hold a three-day International Women's Day Film Festival from March 8 to 10 at the ICES Auditorium at 2, Kynsey Terrace, Colombo 8. The Festival will start at 5.00 p.m. on all three days.

The Festival will kick off with Rosenstrasse, a film by Margarethe Von Trotta, starring Katja Riemann and Maria Schrader on Tuesday, March 8, which will be followed by The Book Thief', a film by Brian Percival starring Geoffrey Rush, Emily Watson, Sophie Nelisse on Wednesday, March 9 and will conclude with Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple, starring Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover, Oprah Winfrey on March 10.

Rosenstrasse revolves around events in a street in 1943 Berlin, when hundreds of women stood, and waited, in defiance of the Nazis. While countless Jews were being sent to concentration camps for execution, Jewish husbands of Aryan wives suffered a different fate; they were separated from their families and imprisoned in a factory on a street named 'Rosenstrasse'. On that street these women stood in protest, in the name of love until they were reunited with their men.

The Book Thief is an American-German drama directed based on the 2005 novel of the same name by Markus Zusak, adapted by Michael Petroni. The film is about a young girl living with her adoptive German family during the Nazi era. Taught to read by her kind-hearted foster father, the girl begins borrowing books and sharing them with the Jewish refugee being sheltered by her foster parents in their home.

The film features a musical score by Oscar-winning composer John Williams. The Book Thief received Academy Award, Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations for its score. For her performance in the film Sophie Nelisse won the Hollywood Film Festival Spotlight Award, the Satellite Newcomer Award, and the Phoenix Film Critics Society Award for Best Performance by a Youth in a Lead or Supporting Role - Female.

Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple became one of the moviemaker's most remarkable successes. It won the National Board of Review's Best Picture Award, garnered 11 Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture) and earned Spielberg Best Director honours from the Director's Guild of America. The unforgettable characters of Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize novel populate the lyrical cinematic adaptation.

At the centre is Celie (movie debuting Whoopi Goldberg) whose search for fulfilment in a world closed to her becomes a triumph of cruelty overcome by love, of pain eclipsed by joy in this enduring screen treasure.