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Second Chance Cinema, the Princeton Adult School’s Annual Movie Course Begins February 7, 2011

Second Chance Cinema, the Princeton Adult School’s annual winter-spring movie course, will open its 16th season on Monday, February 7 at 7:30pm with a showing of the acclaimed 2010 American independent film and probable Oscar Best Picture nominee Winter’s Bone. All the selections on this year’s series will be screened at the Friend Center Auditorium in the Computer Science Building on the Princeton campus, located at the corner of Williams Street and Olden Avenue. The complete schedule of eleven “films you should have seen but didn’t” will continue on subsequent Monday evenings at 7:30pm through May 2nd.
 
All eleven programs will be introduced by the series curator, William Lockwood Jr., Special Programming Director for McCarter Theatre., and will include titles from France, Italy, China, Germany, Belgium, Japan and England, as well as the USA. The Second Chance series is designed to showcase films which never reached Princeton area movie theatres at all, or whose commercial engagements were so brief that most audiences missed them altogether. Nine of the eleven titles on this year’s series will be receiving their Princeton area premiere showings.
 
The 2010 edition of Second Chance Cinema will open with the Princeton Premiere of Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, cited as one of the year’s “Ten Best” on virtually  every critic’s list and a potential Oscar nominee in several categories, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay. The setting is the poverty-stricken backcountry of the Missouri Ozarks, where 17-year old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) searches for her missing father to save the family home.
 
The contemporary cinema of France will be represented by several titles, starting with Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum on February 14, a personal film about family relationships and letting go. The director examines the human condition in this story of a windowed Paris Metro conductor, his grown daughter, and his former girlfriend. The great French 87-year old French master Alain Resnais will be represented by his latest creation, Wild Grass, a human comedy in which two strangers inch towards each other through swirls of suspicion, fascination, intrigue and regret.
 
Also from France and Belgium comes Lorna’s Silence, the latest from the Dardenne brothers, whose work has been a regular feature on the Second Chance series. Their new release is another study in moral compromise focusing on an Albanian émigré struggling to save her sham marriage, her fragile dream of success, and her own conscience. In contrast, Jacques Audiard’s  A Prophet is a prison thriller in which crime becomes a metaphor for life and power. The film centers on a 19-year old French Arab who enters jail   as an illiterate teenager and is absorbed into the Corsican mafia and becomes the protégé of the prison’s mob boss.
 
Two of the series selections come from the cinema of the Far East. China is represented by Last Train Home, a documentary by Lixit Fan about the world’s largest human migration. Every New Year’s, 130 workers in China’s cities make their way back to their impoverished villages to visit the parents and children they have left behind. From Japan, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata is a modern-day horror story with particular contemporary relevance. When a Tokyo businessman loses his job, he is too ashamed to tell his family and his deception sets off a chain reaction among his wife and two sons.
 
Two other titles from the USA join Winter’s Bone on the 2011 schedule. The Messenger earned Woody Harrelson a Best Actor nomination last year in which he and Jon Foster are a “casualty notification team” whose job is delivering news of a child or spouse’s death in the Iraq war to their relatives. Oren Moverman’s story is one we don’t want to hear: how families are devastated by war and how large each of those sacrifices really is. And the faux documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop left critics wondering whether it was an elaborate prank playing a joke on the viewer. It revolves around the British street artists Banksy and his Boswell, a Frenchman named Thierry Guetta, and the result is a hall-of-mirrors look at the inanity of contemporary art and its practitioners wherein artists become objects and vice-versa.
 
From England, Fish Tank stars newcomer Katie Jarvis in the coming-of-age story of a young working class girl being raised in the London projects. A poster-child for the depression of underbelly England, Mia is seething with anger and acts our hostilities with almost feral anger in director Andrea Arnold’s answer to the Truffaut classic The 400 Blows.
 
The Second Chance series will conclude in May on a happier note, Italy’s I Am Love, which finds director Luca Guadagnino channeling Luchino Visconti in a story of passion and food, its characters pursuing pleasure at every opportunity At it center is Tilda Swinton as the grande dame of a wealthy Milanese clan who succumbs to the culinary and sexual arts of a handsome young chef.
 
Course registration for the complete series including the schedule of screenings and program notes is available from the Princeton Adult School at 609/683-1101, and you may register online at www.Princetonadultschool.org or by email at Reginfo.pas@verizon.net . Depending on final course enrollment, a limited number of single admissions to individual screenings may be available at the door at showtimes, but seating cannot be guaranteed.