January 20 • The Great White Silence • UK • 1924 •  Cert U

Departing from Lyttleton on New Zealand’s South Island in 1910, pioneering director Herbert Ponting was charged with keeping a detailed cinematographic record of the fateful British Antarctic expedition fronted by Captain Scott and his hearty entourage.

Ponting’s varied photographic findings coalesce into an awe-inspiring silent (that’s been beautifully restored by the BFI) which, like the works of filmmaker-ethnographer Robert Flaherty, appears to allow elements of fiction and performance to filter into the straight scientific findings.

February 17 • Undertow • Peru • 2009 • 100 mins • Cert 15

In world cinema terms, you can’t get much further off the beaten track than this extraordinary Peruvian drama. And it’s a tribute to the film-makers that nothing about it feels all that strange. The setting is almost abstract: a fishing village with a clear sea, rocky shore, humble shacks, sunbleached boats and little else. Miguel appears to be a pillar of this community; popular, pious and soon to be a father. But he’s conducting a secret affair with Santiago, the local outsider artist.

Just when this is looking like a routine, if distinctive, study of a sexual identity in a conservative community, though, a tragedy occurs (it’s better as a surprise) and the story takes on a curious supernatural aspect.

March 16 • A Separation • Iran • 2011 • 122 mins • Cert PG

An unhappily married couple break up in this complex, painful, fascinating Iranian drama by writer-director Asghar Farhadi, with explosive results that expose a network of personal and social faultlines. A Separation is a portrait of a fractured relationship and an examination of theocracy, domestic rule and the politics of sex and class – and it reveals a terrible, pervasive sadness that seems to well up through the asphalt and the brickwork. Farhadi, like Haneke, takes a scalpel to his bourgeois homeland.

April 20 • The Wasteland • Brazil • 2010 • 99 mins • Cert PG

The production notes for Lucy Walker’s excellent documentary, though not the film itself, include a celebrated quote from Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/ Out of this stony rubbish?” etc) that throws light on the work of Vik Muniz, the New Yorkbased Brazilian sculptor, artist and photographer. Born to an impoverished family in São Paulo in 1961, Muniz transforms apparent rubbish and other discarded materials to comment on the waste, exploitation and hidden beauties of life, and Walker follows one of his most ambitious projects.

The subjects are sensitively observed and the process of the work lucidly explained. Muniz is a gifted, modest and altogether delightful man, and his project is both aesthetically fascinating and philosophically stimulating.

May 11 • AGM • The Artist (tbc) • USA • 2011 • 100 mins • Cert U

Not only is “The Artist” one of the best films of the year, it is also one of the most unique and beautiful films of the past decade. Sure it’s a silent film -- and black and white to boot -- but you’ll love the “The Artist” because it’s made up of the best movie ingredients like classic Busby Berkeley-styled dance numbers, car chases, sword fights, epic and sweeping romantic scenes and Chaplin-esque slapstick moments, all neatly tied together in one delightful, simple story with one of the best film finales in recent years.
 

June 15 • Incendies • Canada • 2010 • 130 mins • Cert 15

The new film from Canadian director Denis Villeneuve is based on Wajdi Mouawad’s 2003 play Scorched. It’s an image of women and children slaughtered on a burning bus during the Lebanese civil war in the 70s, and the image extends to the incineration of history, of memory, and the bitterness of revisiting the charred remains of violence and tragedy. Villeneuve’s movie speaks of the transgressive obscenity of war, particularly civil war, and how its survivors must come to terms with having been shaped by atrocity. As a cinematic prose-poem, it has undoubted force.

July 6 • Life Above All • France • 2010 • 100 mins • Cert PG

Oliver Schmitz’s film sets out as a character-driven film about one of the nearly one million children orphaned by AIDS in South Africa but its schematic structure oversimplifies the drama, despite an interesting, mostly debut cast.

Fear, of course, is the driving force behind any taboo, and fear of AIDS on a continent that has been decimated by it, where a cure is still nearly impossible, is understandable. Subsequently, the film’s hopeful but formulaic ending - that lessons of forgiveness and acceptance are quickly learned - undermines its very premise. If it were that easy to change people’s minds about AIDS, it wouldn’t be taboo anymore.

Reviews are taken from a variety of sources including the Guardian, FilmWeek and IMDb