May 26 - June 1
- Sunday
- Monday
- Tuesday
- Wednesday
- Thursday
- Friday
- Saturday
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CINEMA
June 2 - 8
- Sunday
- Monday
- Tuesday
- Wednesday
- Thursday
- Friday
- Saturday
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MUSIC
ALL UPCOMING EVENTS
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Cost: $10
"In Madeleine Olnek’s Wild Nights With Emily, the life and work of Emily Dickinson are subject to a delightfully droll—even gay—reinterpretation. For believers in the legend of the hermetic poet who never left her bedroom, it may come as a surprise that the Emily (Molly Shannon, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) of Olnek’s film is not a melancholic recluse, but the heroine of a romantic comedy.
Olnek’s version of events is supported by studies of Dickinson's poems which revealed that references to possible lovers were covered up. Historians debate the meaning of such findings, but Olnek’s film is free of equivocation. Her Emily is a woman who loves women, and her film details one version of how her life might have differed from her legacy.
The film is largely narrated by Mabel Todd (Amy Seimetz), who assembled and edited the first posthumous collection of Dickinson’s poetry. A faithless reader—and, notably, the mistress of Emily’s brother—Mabel erases Emily’s dashes and scrubs out the poet’s loving dedications to her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert (Susan Ziegler). As Mabel presents a sanitized version of Emily, Olnek undercuts her account with scenes of Emily and Susan in love, in bed and in correspondence.
The tension between what we see and what we hear of Emily’s life provides the film with much of its levity. As the gaudy, pink-clad and ill-tailored Mabel delivers her chaste accounts of the Dickinson household, Olnek gleefully cuts to scenes of petticoats and hoop skirts akimbo. This is an irreverent film, but its lightness is meaningful. With each silly flourish, Olnek offers joy and companionship to a figure whose history was more conveniently presented to generations of readers as solitary." (Teo Bugbee, The New York Times)
"Molly Shannon is brilliant and warm as the literary icon." (Jude Dry, IndieWire)
"This is a great example of Olnek's style. It's respectful, but it's also alive. It's serious, but it's also tongue-in-cheek. Olnek's approach gives Emily room to breathe. At last." (Sheila O'Malley, RogerEbert.com)
"The film’s playful tone is a corrective to a century of scholarship that insisted on projecting the image of a moody spinster onto Emily Dickinson." (Pat Brown, Slant Magazine)Contact: info@fundycinema.ca | (902) 542-1050
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THEATRE
The Tempest by William Shakespeare
Friday May 31, 7:00p–9:45p
Presented by Just Us! Coffee Roasters Co-op
▶ Show DetailsCost: $15 available at the door from 6pm
In Shakespeare’s great drama of loss and reconciliation, a long-deposed ruler uses magical arts to bring within her power the enemies who robbed her of her throne and marooned her on a remote island. But what revenge does she mean to take?
Prof. Anthony Harding of Acadia Lifelong LearningContact: ntlive@justuscoffee.com
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CINEMA
Die Unsichtbaren (The Invisibles)
Sunday June 2, 7:00p–8:50p
Presented by Fundy Cinema
▶ Show DetailsCost: $10
While Joseph Goebbels infamously declared Berlin "free of Jews" in 1943, some 1,700 managed to survive in the Nazi capital until liberation. Claus Räfle’s gripping docudrama traces the stories of four real-life Jewish survivors who learned to hide in plain sight. Masterfully weaving their stories together in an unusual mix of first-person interviews, archival footage, voiceover narration and dramatic reenactments Räfle delivers a testament to the resourcefulness, willpower and sheer chance needed to survive against incredible odds.
Hanni Lévy (Alice Dwyer) is an orphan who has just turned seventeen. Completely on her own, she only narrowly escapes being arrested. She dyes her hair blond and becomes invisible to her persecutors, mingling among the many pedestrians on the Kurfürstendamm and often seizing the opportunity to disappear into dark movie theaters.
In order to avoid deportation, Cioma Schönhaus (Max Mauff, The Reader) also takes on a different identity. Working as a passport forger, he joins his friend Ludwig Lichtwitz (Sergej Moya) and electrician Werner Scharff (Florian Lukas; The Silent Revolution, The Grand Budapest Hotel) in saving the lives of dozens of Jews in danger. With his regular income, Cioma even manages to regain a certain measure of normalcy, going on sailing trips and frequenting restaurants.
Eugen Friede (Aaron Altaras) is also forced to go into hiding, but is fortunate to arrive at a comfortable home with good meals and a flirtatious young woman, the daughter of his supportive host. Yet Eugen, too—like all of the "invisibles"—will soon be obligated to move on. He joins the resistance group led by Hans Winkler (Andreas Schmidt), which is active in distributing leaflets about the true deeds of the Third Reich.
Ruth Arndt (Ruby O. Fee), together with her friend Ellen (Viktoria Schulz), dreams of a life in America. But before contemplating an escape from Germany, the two young women disguise themselves as war widows and, in secret gatherings, serve black market delicacies in the home of a Nazi officer (Horst Günter Marx).
All of them live from one day to the next, fully aware that they could be arrested and deported at any moment. Their irrepressible will to live and ingenuity give them the hope that they might make it through until the end of the war . . .
"The Invisibles is a powerful testament to the remarkable courage of those forced into heroism, and to the exceptional strength of those who chose it freely." (Elizabeth Weitzman, TheWrap)
"A film like The Invisibles is part of bearing 'precise witness.' We clearly need reminders, and constant ones, of the end result of 'otherizing' an entire group of people." (Sheila O'Malley, RogerEbert.com)Contact: info@fundycinema.ca | (902) 542-1050
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MUSIC
VCLA Showcase
Friday June 7, 7:30p
Presented by Valley Community Learning Association
▶ Show DetailsCost: Tickets are $10
Tickets: Available at VCLA office (Kentville) and The Box of Delights Bookshop (Wolfville).
Come for an evening of music, poetry and art. We have a wonderful line up of musicians: Sahara Jane, Ken Shorley, The Dearlies, Kim Barlow, The Gilberts and VCLA's own K-town records.
K-town records was born this year at VCLA, as Sahara Jane and Ken Shorley hosted a music production program involving some of our adult learners and folks from Kentville. The outcome is a wonderful array of original songs which will also be presented on June 7th.
We will also showcase poetry from a creative writing group that we host at VCLA as well as artwork from an art program run by VCLA at Open Arms in Kentville.
The VCLA showcase will be a celebration of art and community. All proceeds will go toward supporting adult and family literacy in the Valley.Contact: vclapublish@gmail.com
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Cost: $10
"Diane, written and directed by Kent Jones, is a tender, wrenching, and beautifully made movie, and part of what’s revelatory about it is that it’s a story of boomers who are confronting the ravages of old age (disease and death, the waning of dreams), yet they’re doing it with a stubborn echo of the hopes and desires they had when they were younger. They’re getting on, but the movie is keenly aware, in a way that movies almost never are, that they remain every inch who they were. The past hangs over Diane not just as burden or nostalgia (though it can be that, too) but as an enthralling and entangling reminder of life’s mystery.
The title character is a widow, played by the 70-year-old Mary Kay Place (I'll See You in My Dreams), who lives in rural Massachusetts, where she has spent the better part of her life. Her neighbors include friends and relatives who go back with her for decades; they’re a time-worn community. Yet everyone seems separate, somehow. Diane’s days are filled with encounters—she has lunches with her good friend, Bobbie (Andrea Martin), at the local buffet, a place where they both agree that the food is terrible, and she plays gin rummy with her cousin, Donna (Deirdre O’Connell), who’s in the hospital fighting a losing battle with cervical cancer.
She also spends a great deal of time—too much of it—looking after her son, Brian (Jake Lacy; Carol, Obvious Child), who’s around 30 and has made a mess of his life. He has no job, his house is a dirty wreck, and he’s an addict, struggling with the lies that mask his apparently losing battle with recovery. Brian, it’s implied, has been Diane’s ne’er-do-well albatross for years, and their fraught relationship is starting to drag her down, but the interplay between these two, like everything else in the film, is ferociously present tense. Jones’ dialogue is layered with hints of what happened in the past, but you never catch him showing his hand in an expository way. The scenes percolate with inner life, creating the sense that we’re eavesdropping.
Diane is anecdotal in form, but it’s a true journey, all built around Mary Kay Place's remarkable performance. Her Diane is a churchgoer, with an ingrained belief that it’s her job to take care of others; she delivers casseroles to friends and serves food at a homeless shelter. But she does it with a very old school kind of tough love. She doesn’t hesitate to call Brian out on his chicanery, and though she’s surrounded by a circle of supportive women, she has a way of lashing out at their weak spots. Beneath her becalmed surface, Diane is haunted, carrying shadows from her past, and that’s the puzzle we put together as we watch the movie—the story of her own addiction and selfish passion, which has guided the karma of her life in ways she never expected, leading to the moment of invisible reckoning she’s at now.
There’s a mournfulness to Diane, but the movie is never sodden—it’s intensely enjoyable and alive. And the film’s ending is majestic. It’s a vision of turmoil and peace and mystery and memory, along with something that hasn’t always accompanied this generation’s journey into old age: a glimpse of God." (Owen Gleiberman, Variety)
"This is a movie that notices things and people that we are trained to ignore, and you are not likely to forget it." (Dan Callahan, TheWrap)
"It’s a pinhole portrait of life on Earth; a non-judgmental story about trying to reconcile meaning with meaningless before the well runs dry and it rains again." (David Ehrlich, IndieWire)Contact: info@fundycinema.ca | (902) 542-1050
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Cost: $10
A young man of just 22, dressed in a black beret and a dark narrow suit, is on an airplane flying from St Petersburg to Paris. It is 1961 and Rudolf Nureyev (Oleg Ivenko), not yet the imperious figure of legend, is a member of the world-renowned Kirov Ballet Company, traveling for the first time outside the Soviet Union.
Parisian life delights Nureyev and the young dancer is eager to consume all the culture, art and music the dazzling city has to offer. But the KGB officers who watch his every move become increasingly suspicious of his behavior and his friendship with the young Parisienne Clara Saint (Adèle Exarchopoulos, Blue Is the Warmest Colour). When they finally confront Nureyev with a shocking demand, he is forced to make a heart-breaking decision, one that may change the course of his life forever and put his family and friends in terrible danger.
From Nureyev’s poverty-stricken childhood in the Soviet city of Ufa, to his blossoming as a student dancer in Leningrad, to his arrival at the epicentre of western culture in Paris in the early 1960s and a nail-biting stand-off at the Le Bourget airport, The White Crow is the true story of an incredible journey by a unique artist who transformed the world of ballet forever.
The White Crow was inspired by the book Rudolf Nureyev: The Life by Julie Kavanagh and directed by Ralph Fiennes (The Invisible Woman).
"Lovely, elegant, and curiously opaque ... The film’s many ballet scenes are stunning, to say the least." (Peter Debruge, Variety)
"Oleg Ivenko, a Ukrainian dancer in his acting debut, is persuasive in The White Crow." (Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal)
"An athletic, confident, undemanding film." (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian)Contact: info@fundycinema.ca | (902) 542-1050
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THEATRE
Coriolanus by William Shakespeare
Friday June 21, 7:00p–10:00p
Presented by Just Us! Coffee Roasters Co-op
▶ Show DetailsCost: $15 at the door from 6pm on June 21
CORIOLANUS, from Canada's Stratford Festival, is directed by genre-defying theatre artist Robert Lepage. Lepage takes the story about the rise and fall of a legendary general who must face off against the angry Roman mob and infuses it with the energy of Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring. The production was included in the “Best Theatre of 2018” lists in The Washington Post, the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail and NOW.
Contact: ntlive@justuscoffee.com
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THEATRE
Broken Leg Theatre - Over the Moon
Saturday June 22, 7:00p–9:00p
Presented by Donna Holmes
▶ Show DetailsCost: Tickets for this family-friendly performance are only $10.
Tickets: At the Door or by contacting Donna at donnaholmes712@gmail.com
Broken Leg Theatre is Over the Moon about the fact that humanity took its first steps on our bright satellite 50 years ago next month. Join us for our next show - it'll be out of this world!
Broken Leg Theatre is a variety show that often features local performance artists such as The Dead Sheep Scrolls, DanceConXion, the Ukulele Ladies, Valley Ghost Walk ghosts, and more three times a year. Every show is simply amazing!! Don't miss it!
If you'd like to be involved in Broken Leg theatre (on the stage or behind the scenes), or if you would like to reserve a ticket, please contact Donna Holmes at donnaholmes712@gmail.com or check out our Facebook page at https://facebook.com/brokenlegtheatre. :O)Contact: donnaholmes712@gmail.com
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CINEMA
Unga Astrid (Becoming Astrid)
Sunday June 23, 7:00p–9:03p
Presented by Fundy Cinema
▶ Show DetailsCost: $10
"Long before she found fame with the 'Pippi Longstocking' series, the Swedish children's author Astrid Lindgren had an unplanned pregnancy that changed her life. In Becoming Astrid, the Danish director Pernille Fischer Christensen uses that formative event as a fulcrum, building a lightly fictionalized portrait of the young Lindgren (played by Alba August) from its emotional and practical fallout.
We meet her in the 1920s, a strong-willed, spirited teenager whose quirky personality demands an escape from the small village in rural Sweden where her religious family farms on church land. The shame of the pregnancy means banishment—and liberation—to secretarial school in Stockholm, where her choice seems to be between an unwise marriage or a life without her child. It will take all her resolve to choose neither.
In many respects, Becoming Astrid is your standard biographical drama, its familiar beats untroubled by narrative daring or stylistic surprises. But Erik Molberg Hansen’s relaxed camera movements and fuzzy-soft compositions are quite beautiful, and the performances—including the superb Trine Dyrholm (Love is All You Need, A Royal Affair) as the baby’s Danish foster mother—are pitch-perfect. Best of all is the magnetic August, whose open, mobile features can slide from plain to lovely with just a shift in the light and whose embrace of the character is a joy to watch.
Bracketed by scenes filled with the voices of children as the aging Lindgren reads her fan mail, Becoming Astrid transforms teenage trauma into the wellspring of a lifelong gift." (Jeannette Catsoulis, The New York Times)
"Throughout Becoming Astrid, August acquits herself brilliantly; the woman we come to know is a tangle of impulses and qualities, and feels vibrantly alive." (Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune)
"This film about an exemplary woman, made by women, is as much a pleasure as it is a lesson." (Glenn Kenny, RogerEbert.com)Contact: info@fundycinema.ca | (902) 542-1050
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Cost: $10
"There is a knowing irony in calling this fanciful Shakespeare biopic All Is True. Written by Ben Elton and directed by its star Kenneth Branagh (My Week with Marilyn), the film plays so fast and loose with the playwright’s final years that it’s clear that accuracy is not the priority here.
But there is a succinct emotional truth to All is True, whose name comes from the alternative title to Shakespeare’s play, Henry VIII. It was during a performance of that play that a cannon burnt the Globe Theatre to the ground—and it is in the aftermath of that disaster that the film begins. Shakespeare, vowing that he is 'done with stories', returns to his family in Stratford to live out the rest of his days, but he has been absent for so long that his arrival disrupts their lives entirely.
He is promptly consigned to the guest room by his wife Anne, played with commanding steeliness by Judi Dench (Nothing Like a Dame, Philomena) who, at 84, is 27 years older than her real-life counterpart, but she’s so good you don’t begrudge her for it. Meanwhile, his sharp-tongued daughter Judith (Kathryn Wilder), a 28-year-old 'spinster', resents him for dredging up the death of her twin brother Hamnet. His other daughter, Susanna (Lydia Wilson), is unhappily married to Puritan John Hall, and may be having an affair with a local haberdasher.
As Shakespeare, Branagh delivers every nuance. Having directed and starred in countless adaptations of the Bard’s plays, he could easily have reeled off each line as a bombastic soliloquy. Instead, his Shakespeare is weary and conflicted, wretchedly egotistic one moment ('Through my genius I’ve brought fame and fortune to this house'), overly meek the next—as in a memorable scene with Ian McKellen’s (Mr. Holmes) Earl of Southampton.
In the same scene, Shakespeare is told that for all his genius he has lived 'the smallest life'. That may be so, but the film paints that life so richly it hardly matters." (Alexandra Pollard, The Independent)
"All Is True is sentimental, theatrical, likable—and unfashionable." (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian)
"A tender, intelligent imagining of the playwright in retirement." (Jonathan Romney, Screen International)
"Slowly, as the thematic center of the film begins to take shape, so does Branagh's character—and in those moments the audience is treated to what amounts to nothing short of a Christmas gift for any Anglophile or Shakespeare lover." (Dana Schwartz, Entertainment Weekly)Contact: info@fundycinema.ca | (902) 542-1050
