[News Boquete] Sunday Movie: 1:00PM at the BCP Theater - "Queen of Katwe"

"The Clubhouse" in the BCP Hex Room is now open, and food and drinks - including popcorn - will be available for purchase.   
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We don't charge admission, but we do ask for donations to support BCP and the Film Club program.

Upcoming Films: 

• 12/17 - The Iron Giant (USA - 1999)
• 12/24 - Joyeux Noël (France - 2005)

( I did a lot of research and put a lot of thought into selecting films for the holiday season, and chose two films to be screened before Christmas based on my strong association of Christmas with an admonition to seek "peace on earth."  Both films show the possibilities of peace - and how hard it is to achieve and maintain.  The Iron Giant setting is small-town Maine from fall to winter in 1957.  Joyeux Noël is based on the true story of allied and German soldiers setting down their rifles and fraternizing on Christmas day, 1914 during the bloody trench warfare in France during WWI.)   
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Sunday, December 10 @ 1:00pm - Queen of Katwe (USA - 2016)   2hrs, 4 minutes - Rated "PG" 

Ratings:  7.4 - IMDB,  93% - Rotten Tomatoes,  3/4 - Roger Ebert    

From the "Wired" magazine website: 

Queen of Katwe...is a very Disney movie in that it centers around a family and has a happy ending. But it is a very un-Disney story in that it unblinkingly examines the poverty, violence, and racism its protagonists face every day. It is, in the words of its director, "a radical film for Disney in many ways. … It has beauty and barbarity side-by-side."

Queen of Katwe was shot over a couple of months in Uganda and South Africa. Nair, Nyong'o, Oyelowo, and newcomer Madina Nalwanga, who plays Phiona, all spent time with their offscreen counterparts to learn how to best represent their lives onscreen. It was tight to schedule the shoot to work among its stars' other big projects—but it worked.

The result is a film that tells a very shiny story not too dissimilar from any sports drama or, say, Akeelah and the Bee—except that it happens in one of the poorest countries in the world and involves a young girl (Phiona was 11 years old when she won her first chess championship in Uganda) whose family is often left homeless and who, in one of the movie's more gut-punching scenes, asks her coach, "Very soon, men will start coming after me—where's my safe square?" It was, to hear its director tell it, not sanitized and also very real.

"Disney didn't shy away from the reality I was bringing to them," Nair says. "But there was also a vibrancy to it. It's not the suffering Africa that people associate with these stories. It's not about hanging your head and wanting to be saved by somebody who comes from the outside."

That second part is what Oyelowo finds most encouraging. "The excuse in the past for crowbarring white protagonists into these kinds of films has been to try to make them relatable to a Western audience," he says, "or just to not make them at all because 'Oh, people won't be able to relate. It's in a place called Katwe with people with funny names.' So to have the largest media company in the world back this film is something very special."

Link to trailer

 

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David van Harn

Curator, Boquete Film Club

 

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