Cinema Arts Festival Houston 2009

Derek is a unique collaboration between Tilda Swinton and Isaac Julien, in which British artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman is remembered and celebrated. Revealing, frank, and charismatic interview footage is combined with a moving collage of home-movie footage, film extracts, music videos, and more. Derek is a film of Jarman’s life, as well as the story of England from the 1960s to the early 1990s. At its center is a daylong interview Jarman recorded in 1990 with film producer and author Colin MacCabe. A message in a bottle, it surveys Jarman’s life from the point of view of his death. Tilda Swinton, Jarman’s muse, companion, and collaborator on eight feature films, is the film’s narrator, reading a letter she wrote to Jarman a decade after his death. Clips of Jarman’s feature-length and Super 8 films are juxtaposed with news and current affairs footage of the times that his life illuminated, from ’60s swinging London through the Thatcherite nationalism of the ’80s and its repression of difference. From Sebastiane (1976) to Blue (1993), Derek Jarman’s films constantly interrogated art and history, and epitomized his own era. He was a painter, part of that moment that made ’60s London a capital of the art world. He was a filmmaker, perhaps the single most crucial figure of British independent cinema through the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. He lived as a gay man surfing the joys of Gay Liberation and the sorrows of AIDS. He lived as a participant observer, noting with pen or camera all that passed before him—from punk to Thatcher, from Hampstead Heath cruising to film premieres. Both a “heartbreaking and giddily alive biopic” and an “accomplished homage” ( Artforum ), Derek is a joyful requiem celebrating Derek Jarman’s life, vision, and legacy with the same maverick energy and affectionate creativity that made its subject one of the most important artistic mirrors of his time.

Introduced by Tilda Swinton and with a live performance by Houston Ballet II! The Cinema Arts Festival’s culminating event is a free outdoor presentation of The Red Shoes , a film that is, in Ian Christie’s words, “a stunning demonstration of cinema’s claim to have united the traditional arts in a new synthesis.” It is the perfect finale for our festival celebrating film and the arts. It is also a film for the whole family, and it is one of the titles that Tilda Swinton’s 8½ Foundation offers to children to initiate them to the wonders of classic films (although some parents may wish to wait until their kids turn 12, if they fear that the tragic ending, however stylized, may be too strong). Moira Shearer plays Victoria Page, a young dancer who is hired by Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) for his ballet company. She is given the chance, unexpectedly, to assume the leading role in his dance adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Red Shoes. The ballet is a big hit and Victoria becomes a star. But she has fallen in love with the composer, Julian, and thus arouses the jealousy of Lermontov, who cruelly forces her to choose between Julian and her love of ballet. The “Red Shoes” ballet, performed in full length, inspired countless Hollywood musicals that followed, starting with Minnelli’s An American in Paris. Director Michael Powell and producer Emeric Pressburger (known as The Archers) had developed their experiments with Technicolor in films like A Matter of Life and Death and Black Narcissus , and their mastery of studio techniques culminated in the magnificently designed dreamlike spectacle of The Red Shoes . Within this gorgeous artifice, an international ballet company, which evokes Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, is believably represented by Sadler’s Wells ballet star Shearer, leading Diaghilev dancer Leonide Massine and eminent choreographer Robert Helpmann.

With producer and actress Tilda Swinton and the director We can’t divulge the title of this special preview, but we can promise you an extraordinary performance by Tilda Swinton and a fascinating conversation with her and the film’s talented director after the screening.

With guest director Lynn Hershman-Leeson and actress Tilda Swinton Among Tilda Swinton’s several collaborations with media artist Lynn Hershman-Leeson (including Conceiving Ada and Strange Culture ), this unique cyber-sci-fi gem has been growing the most in its cult film status. Swinton plays not one but four roles. As biogeneticist Rosetta Stone, she devises a recipe through which she can download her own DNA into a “live” brew she is growing in her computer. She succeeds in breeding three Self Replicating Automatons—S.R.A.s—that look human but are intelligent machines. She names them Ruby, Marine, and Olive (Tildas 2, 3, and 4). To survive, the S.R.A.s need injections of male Y chromosomes found only in spermatozoa. Rosetta programs Ruby while she sleeps to absorb the images and dialogue of classic movie seductions, which have their intended effect in eliciting “donations” from men during the day. But the men are infected by a rash (shaped like a barcode) from their unprotected sex with a cyberhuman. Will Rosetta and Ruby manage to evade the health investigators (James Urbaniak and Karen Black) on the trail of the STD? Will Ruby be able to continue her quest to experience human art, spirituality, and ultimately love with the perfect Kinko’s copy boy (Jeremy Davies)?