From the organizer: The Onion Cellar presents a screening of ROHMER IN PARIS and IT'S SUCH A BEAUTIFUL DAY.

20.00 - 21/2/2016
1-3 Lê Công Kiều - District 1 - HCM City

Tickets: 40,000 VND
Tickets for both Onion Cellar screenings that evening: 70,000 VND

ROHMER IN PARIS 

Dir - Richard Misek, using footage from various films by Eric Rohmer
2014, 66 minutes
English, with subtitles in Vietnamese

https://youtu.be/0FMC5AlyBm0
http://www.rohmerinparis.com/

So you are a dreamy young‘un, a college student, or perhaps (un)lucky enough to have a 9-5 somewhere. You travel through the city everyday, passing crossroads and streetlamps and buildings, for work, for silly gatherings with friends. The same route everyday, there and back. The familiar strangers’ faces, the familiar friendly faces.

On surface, the days repeat themselves, more or less, and yet the possibilities are endless. Little rendezvous of odds-and-ends conversations, fleeting encounters with other young‘uns of the city that make hearts skip… You are like them all. You don’t exactly have any great ideas about life, you don’t rescue anyone. Would a director ever care to make films about you and your little universe?

Here comes Eric Rohmer.

Rohmer’s Nouvelle Vague films – more often than not set in Paris – are charming in their own unassuming ways, with their light tender stories, with a little romance, a little humour – just like real life. 

Life imitating art: like in many classic Rohmer films, it all began with a chance encounter. And before he knew it Richard Misek became so infatuated with Eric Rohmer and his films that he went on to watch all of them, not once, not twice… But simply watching them proved not enough: he went on to analyse every glance the characters exchange, every route they follow, all the crushes happening on the pavements, all the coincidences, all the tricks life plays; he cataloged doors, stairways, cafés, metro stations, benches, tree-lined boulevards, of Paris.

This process eventually manifested into ROHMER IN PARIS, an uncategoriseable piece of moving-image painstakingly assembled using clips from various Rohmer films set in Paris, guiding audiences through this maze of a city – the beautiful Paris of a lost golden age. And perhaps, ROHMER IN PARIS will take you to the heart of the Nouvelle Vague that changed cinema forever. 

IT'S SUCH A BEAUTIFUL DAY 

Dir - Don Hertzfeldt 
2012, 62 minutes
English, with subtitles in Vietnamese

Offiicial Saigon premiere
The Vietnam premiere of the film was part of The Onion Cellar's Sad & Beautiful World film festival in 2013 [https://www.facebook.com/events/256243251190957]


https://youtu.be/pN8Kd3zR_mE

“Meet Bill, a disconnected, ailing man, as he drifts through the unreliable, disorientating fragments of his past and present. Bill sees the world through small moving holes, and his many, fragmented social encounters reveal a man who is paranoid, obsessed, anxious and generally unable to connect with the world around him. 

"It’s only after overcoming a serious illness (we assume it’s cancer) that Bill slowly begins to get it together and comes to see the beauty that life can offer when you’re looking.” (Chris Robinson – Sight and Sound Magazine)

“Bill’s been slapped in the face with something horrible and the world is looking very different to him: sad and beautiful. It’s somebody facing death who hasn’t really yet lived. The routine things he’s used to doing are suddenly completely redundant.

"You begin to see how death enriches life and gives everything its meaning. It’s the people who drift around wasting their time, weirdly assuming they’re going to live forever, that are the depressing ones, at least to me.” (Don Hertzfeldt)

A COUPLE OF THINGS

Something not known (and remembered) by many: in one of its past lives (2011-2013) The Onion Cellar was a double-headed (tiny) monster, whose strange doings unfolding in tandem in both the North and the South. Ambient bliss at Saigon Outcast, noise terror at Dương Thụ's Cà Phê Thứ Bảy, or how about those Sunday nights at Decibel? Or that time when Zeni Geva and CoCC shared the stage at the Darts Darts Darts (RIP)? Seriously, if you remember them moments (and us), you're Kool (with a capital K) !

And now: not even joking. Thirty-one months after its last event in Saigon, The Onion Cellar will be back in the buzzing city. For now, 'for one night only' (to mark the new year? or perhaps the success of the con.....?) - ON A BEAUTIFUL ROOFTOP IN DOWNTOWN SAIGON - but who knows what the future might bring (right?)

Anyway, two of the films that have proved much loved by the folks in Hanoi will now make their way to Saigon for the first time, on the same night of the 21st of February

_ Oskar M

[text by Lê Hà My, additional text by Oskar M]