WHAT IS WORLD CINEMA?

Starting this Tuesday at Chapter and running up to the start of the 2008 WOW! Wales One World Film Festival, we are running a season of films accompanied by a six-week evening class on world cinema.

Of course, the screenings are open to everybody, regardless of whether you attend the evening classes, but the two are complementary and the course fee of £40 (£30 concessionary) includes entry to all six films.

The seminars will take place on Thursday nights at 7.30pm in Chapter's Viewing Theatre (opposite Cinema 2), and will be led by experts in the field. For further information or to enrol, please contact Matt Beere on 029 2031 1050 or at matt.beere@chapter.org

Tuesday 5 February
The White Balloon (PG)

This extraordinary debut feature, about a 7-year-old's first journey alone into the streets of Tehran, is a movie of audacious subtlety and simplicity, and a deserving Cannes prize-winner. It takes place in 'real time', the 84 minutes leading to New Year (March 21), as little Razieh (Aïda Mohammadkhani) goes off to purchase, with her mother's last 500 toman , the 'chubby' gold-fish that has taken her fancy. Along the way, she encounters snake-charmers, irate shopkeepers, a country-born soldier, a young Afghan boy with a white balloon - a whole world hitherto 'forbidden'. Scripted in collaboration with leading Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, this is a film of small incident, minute, telling observations, and enormous heart and intelligence. Tethering the movie to the child's point of view (both literal and metaphorical), Panahi absorbs us so entirely into his heroine's delicate, enquiring world, that the loss of her money and her separation from her brother create an atmosphere of suspense as gripping as that of any Hitchcock thriller. Moreover, suggestive intimations of the troubled adult world - the mother's anxiety in the bazaar, the lonely 'outsiders' - combine to produce a feeling of almost metaphysical tension.

The seminar on Thu 7 Feb will be led by David Gillam, Director of the Wales One World Film Festival, and Tony Whitehead, Chapter's Cinema Programmer.

In a Menonite community on the outskirts of Chihuahua, Mexico, where traditional values are observed, a husband and father, breaks the rules by falling in love and having an affair with another woman. The latest film from the director of Japón and Battle in Heaven remains true to his unique vision.

The seminar on Thursday 14 Feb will be led by by David Gillam, Director of the Wales One World Film Festival.

Tuesday 19 February
Paradise Now (15)

Director Hany Abu-Bassad
With Kais Nashef, Ali Sulman, Lubna Azabal.
France/Germany/Israel/2005/90 mins/subtitled/15

This Oscar nominee is the story of two young Palestinian men as they embark on what may be the last 48 hours of their lives - childhood best friends who have been chosen to carry out a suicide mission in Tel Aviv. Acclaimed Palestinian filmmaker Heny Abu-Bassad exercises masterful control over the potentially difficult subject matter, refusing melodrama in favour of a sober reflection on why people turn their bodies into bombs.

The seminar on Thursday 21 Feb will be led by Gill Branston, Senior Lecturer in Film and Media at Cardiff University.

Tuesday 4 March
The Edukators (15)

Director Hans Weingartner
Starring Stipe Erceg, Daniel bruhl, Julia Jentsch
Germany, 2004, 2 hours 9 minutes, subtitles

Flatmates Jan (Daniel Brühl) and Peter (Stipe Erceg) have been close friends for ages - one reason the latter tolerates the former's oddities and outbursts of anger. There's also their shared secret: by night they break into the homes of holidaying rich folk, not to steal but to scare them out of their complacency by rearranging the contents and leaving sinister notes. Though Peter's girlfriend Jule (Julia Jentsch) shares their hatred of capitalism, he hasn't told her of these forays, but Jan, having fallen for her, lets the truth out while Peter's in Barcelona, at which point she suggests visiting the villa of a fatcat to whom she owes a crippling debt. That's when things start going horribly wrong.

It's also when the film takes off. Till then, the deft if unremarkable portraits of three idealistic, politically disaffected young folk are marred by excessive emphasis on the growing intimacy between Jan and Jule, mostly played out as mushy music-accompanied montage (thrashing chords make these scenes no less dramatically mawkish). But when Hardenberg t urns up to find a couple of Edukators at work on his home, the situation becomes more complicated, the movie more complex. Room's found, amid the suspense, for proper political/ethical discussion, emotional development and a broadening of themes explored, so that we get an engagingly human account of a changing world and changed individuals. It's never preachy, often funny and touching and, while pointing to global injustice, wisely refrains from simplistic heroes and villains stereotypes.

The seminar on Thursday 28 Feb will be led by Elis Jones of Reel Education.

Tuesday 11 March
The Wooden Camera

Director Ntshavheni Wa Luruli
With Andre Jacobs, Bo Peterson, Dana de Agrella.
South Africa/UK/2003/90 mins/no cert

Two thirteen-year-old kids, Madiba and Sipho, come across a dead body while playing along the railway line in their township Kayelitsha, close to Capetown. Sipho takes a gun from the man's attaché case, and revels in the status it gains him, becoming a gang leader. Madiba takes a video camera, and starts filming the township and its inhabitants, his everyday surroundings taking on a new beauty through the lens.

The seminar on Thursday 13 March will be led by Michael Carklin, Head of Department of Drama and Music at the University of Glamorgan.

Tuesday 26 February
Pather Panchali (U)

Director Satyajit Ray
Starring Kanu Bannerjee, Karuna Bannerjee,
Uma Das Gupta
India, 1955, 1 hour 55 minutes, B/W, subtitles

The first Indian film to cause any real stir in Europe, this is still something to wonder at - a simple story of country folk told with effortless beauty, drama and humanity. Ray's first film is a richly moving and poetic account of a boy's childhood in a small family eking out an existence in a ramshackle Bengali village. Ray has a remarkable eye for the visual poetry both of raw nature and everyday life, a natural way with symbolism, and an enduring faith in people's ability to grow with experience.

"Pather Panchali retains a fresh and pellucid beauty" Time Out

The seminar on Thursday 28 Feb will be led by Dr Aparna Sharma, journalist, lecturer, and independent filmmaker.