Icarus Films will be teaming up with Bullfrog Films
to celebrate the New Year with the Jan. 21 DVD debut of the documentary
filmmaker Steve Bradshaw’s Anthropocene.
Coined by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen (Nobel Prize
for Chemistry in 1995), the arrival of the term “Anthropocene” in scientific
circles argues that our notion of nature is quickly becoming out of date. They argue that humanity forms nature in
this new epoch and that the Holocene period is now in transition.
Steve Bradshaw (The Real
Life on Mars, The Perfect Famine)
followed the 2013/2014 HKW studies with this documentary film. For some 20 years Bradshaw had been working
with the BBC as a reporter and frontline radio documentary producer with such
far-ranging subjects as genocide in Rwanda, the UK’s health record, Parliamentary
lobbying and the debate on global warming.
Anthropocene
examines the issue of the planet being influenced more by mankind than nature
through a series of interviews and archival footage … is it a drama, a comedy
or something surreal. The debate is
joined, the outcome is now, uncertain.
Among the presenters are Prof. Will Steffen (Climate
Change Institute, Australian National University), Prof. Erle Ellis (Geography
& Environmental Systems, University of Maryland), Prof. Jan Zalasiewicz (Dept
of Geology, University of Leicester), Dr. Monica Berger Gonzalez (Institute for
Environmental Decisions, Zurich) and Prof. John McNeill (School of Foreign
Service, Georgetown University).
Also heading home on DVD on Jan. 21 from Icarus
Films is the Distrib Films release of director Thomas Lilti’s The
Freshmen.
This is the third film in a trilogy of movies
directed by doctor-turned-filmmaker Thomas Lilti … The
Freshmen joins The
Country Doctor (July 25, 2017) and Hippocrates
(Jan. 15, 2019) on DVD from Icarus.
With a keen eye for detail (drawing from his own
medical school experiences), Lilti introduces us to students Benjamin (William
Lebghil — Kiss and Tell, (Girl)Friend, C'est la Vie!), a
recent high school graduate and the son of a doctor, and Antoine (four-time César
Awards nominee, Vincent Lacoste, who also starred in Lilti’s Hippocrate),
who failed to pass the necessary exams not once, but twice … this is third and
final attempt.
They bond, for very difference reasons, and help
each other — their relative strengths and weaknesses — to facedown the intense
competition (close to 400 fellow students) and the harsh and seemingly
relentless class load. This yields a
film that becomes one part comedy (some really terrific bits) and one part a melancholy
tale (a certain sadness creeps in … the recognition that this is just the first
hurdle and more awaits once the examination is conquered).
A solid box office drama in France, The
Freshmen will be a welcome arrival on DVD
in the New Year for those cinephiles
looking something beyond the noise the current crop of domestic theatrical blockbusters.
The Freshmen is
presented in French with English subtitles.
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