Film Screenings at The Theatre - October 2020
For the month of October, I programmed two important documentaries for The Theatre that I am personally looking forward to sharing and watching with an audience. I have also invited guest speakers to join me for a post screening discussion for both films.
Here’s a list of practical information and keep scrolling to read information about the films and the speakers.
Dates:
Saturday, October 17 and October 24 31 at 7.00pm
Location:
The Theatre, Mall of the Emirates, Dubai
The venue has its own separate entrance on the second level of the mall’s parking, between rows A5 and A6 (on the Ski Dubai side of the mall).
Ticket price:
AED 45 - Row A–F (Regular stalls)
AED 75 - Row G–H (VIP stalls)
AED 55 - Row J–N (Gold stalls)
AED 45 - Row P–W (Balcony)
Tickets can be bought online from Book My Show.
The booking link for each film can be found after the film synopsis below.
Saturday, October 17 at 7.00pm (doors open at 6.30pm)
Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project
Director: Matt Wolf
2019 | 87 min | USA | PG-15 | Documentary | English language
Marion Stokes was secretly recording American television twenty-four hours a day for thirty years. It started in 1979 with the Iranian Hostage Crisis at the dawn of the twenty-four hour news cycle. It ended on December 14, 2012 while the Sandy Hook massacre played on television as Marion passed away.
In between, Marion recorded on 70,000 VHS tapes, capturing revolutions, lies, wars, triumphs, catastrophes, bloopers, talk shows, and commercials that tell us who we were, and show how television shaped the world of today. Before the era of “fake news,” Marion was fighting to protect the truth by archiving everything that was said and shown on television.
The public didn’t know it, but the networks were disposing their archives for decades into the trashcan of history. Remarkably, Marion saved it, and now the Internet Archive will digitise her tapes and we’ll be able to search them online for free. A mystery in the form of a time capsule, the film delves into the strange life of a radical Communist activist who became a fabulously wealthy recluse archivist. Marion’s work was crazy but it was also genius, and she would pay a profound price for dedicating her life to this visionary and maddening project.
Guest speaker for the post screening discussion:
Kevin Jones, an arts consultant, writer, critic and educator. In 2019, he founded Juniper Mind, a consultancy that challenges artists, brands and institutions to think more critically. He will join me for a talk titled “Home and the World: Our Relationship to Media”. It will be about archives, echo chambers, reclusiveness and more.
Saturday, October 24 31 at 7.00pm (doors open at 6.30pm)
Citizen Jane: Battle for the City
Director: Matt Tyrnauer
2016 | 92 min | USA | PG-15 | Documentary | English language
In 1960 Jane Jacobs’s book The Death and Life of Great American Cities sent shockwaves through the architecture and planning worlds, with its exploration of the consequences of modern planners’ and architects’ reconfiguration of cities. Jacobs was also an activist, who was involved in many fights in mid-century New York, to stop “master builder” Robert Moses from running roughshod over the city.
This film retraces the battles for the city as personified by Jacobs and Moses, as urbanisation moves to the very front of the global agenda. Many of the clues for formulating solutions to the dizzying array of urban issues can be found in Jacobs’s prescient text, and a close second look at her thinking and writing about cities is very much in order. This film sets out to examine the city of today through the lens of one of its greatest champions.
Guest speaker for the post screening discussion:
Alamira Reem Al Hashimi (BA Arch; MPL; PhD), an urbanist, architect and historian and author of Planning Abu Dhabi: An Urban History, a book that explores and documents the trajectory of Abu Dhabi’s urban planning. Considered to be one of the leading researchers on the urban development of the UAE, her current role as Cultural Advisor and Project Manager of the “UAE Architecture Project” aims to advance architectural and planning knowledge of the UAE locally and globally.
The Theatre is following the required government regulations with regards to cleanliness and social distancing, including reduced seating capacity with vacant seats next to the booked seats.
