The distance between Laurel Canyon and the Greek island of Hydra is more than 7,000 miles, but they share a connection and an intimacy, as told in ECHO IN THE CANYON and MARIANNE & LEONARD: WORDS OF LOVE. The time was the '60s, and music was the tie that binds.
MARIANNE & LEONARD is about the enduring love between Canadian singer-songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen, the Norwegian woman he met on the Greek island of Hydra in the early 1960s. "It is a story that is at once simple and threaded with startling complexities. Its emotional entanglements and narrative twists can seem the stuff of fiction. They shed sometimes discomfiting light on the expansions and excesses of 1960s and '70s counterculture that its main players helped to define." (NY Times)
"Achieving the kind of balance to which Cohen always aspired, 'Marianne & Leonard' is heartbreaking and heartening in Zen-like equal measure." - Washington Post
Filmmaker James Longley's middle name is Bertrand, and it is a tribute to philosopher Bertrand Russell. It seems fitting for the thoughtful Academy Award nominated filmmaker, who is known for his work in Gaza, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan. I am pleased to present his most recent film, ANGELS ARE MADE OF LIGHT. The film follows students and teachers at a school in an old neighborhood in Kabul that is slowly rebuilding from past conflicts. Interweaving the modern history of Afghanistan with present-day portraits, the film offers an intimate and nuanced vision of a society living in the shadow of war. "Stirring and gorgeous." -Variety
In 1895, within months of seeing the first secret screening of the films of the Lumiére brothers, Alice Guy-Blaché, a 22-year-old secretary decided that this new invention could be used to tell stories as well as documentaries. She directed one of the first narrative films, went on to establish her own film company, and wrote, directed and produced thousands of films. And then her name vanished from history. Filmmker Pamela Green embarked on a fascinating, almost-two-decade long odyssey to restore Guy-Blache to her rightful place in the film pantheon. BE NATURAL: THE UNTOLD STORY OF ALICE GUY BLAHCHÉ, narrated by Jodie Foster, plays Saturday and Sunday in the Rosebud.
By request, KINKY BOOTS returns this weekend after two sold out shows, and PAVAROTTI returns as well for one week. MAIDEN enters its fourth big week, moving up to the Starlight Room Friday.
--Rocky