Not everything cinema has to offer can be learned in a classroom – those grittily realistic or poetic flights filled with a representation of youth so achingly true that they will pierce your young heart. These require a singular relationship between you and the big screen.
So, leave the guide behind and come to School’s Out.
Summertime
A rollerskating poet collides with selfie opportunists in Venice Beach. A babysitter soliloquises her queer pride for fellow passengers on a Metro bus. A young man rails against gentrification on his city-wide search for a cheeseburger. Over one oppressive summer’s day in LA, the lives of 25 young people intersect like cracks in concrete. Their respective stories – shared via the medium of spoken word and slam poetry – speak to experiences of race, gender, sexuality and capitalism in the cultural West. Upon reaching critical mass, they craft a lyrical love-letter to the City of Angels, emphasising the therapeutic role that writing, music and creativity play in our everyday lives. Summertime is an audacious joyride, fueled by DIY verve and the power of words.
Screens with short film Wirun
Tues 27 Jul 5.30pm @ Palace Nova Eastend Cinemas
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Perfect 10
Summertime sadness is eating at Leigh (debutant Frankie Box),a lonely teen living on the outskirts of Brighton. Leigh lacks a meaningful relationship with her dad Rob (William Ash, Mad About Mambo) whose strategy for parenting is avoidance. and is struggling with her lost confidence as a gymnast since the loss of her mother. Then her half-brother Joe (Alfie Deegan) turns up unexpectedly, giving her the attention she yearns for, while leading her by the hand into petty crime hijinks. Eva Riley’s feature debut takes British social realism and reboots it for Zoomer viewers. These characters are real and raw and very relatable for a young audience.
Screens with short film Wilma
Wed 28 Jul 5:30PM @ Palace Nova Eastend Cinemas
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Beans
Based on true events, this radical coming-of-age story remembers the 1990s Oka Crisis through children’s eyes. Sweet, obedient Tekehentahkhwa (Kiawenti:io Tarbell, Anne with an E) – nicknamed ‘Beans’ for the ease of her white peers – is a Mohawk girl standing at the cliff face of adolescence. When a land rights dispute divides her small hometown, Beans is inspired by her First Nations family, fighting to protect a pine forest and sacred burial grounds for the expansion of a golf course. Closer to home, she finds excitement under the broken wing of older teen April (Paulina J Alexis, Ghostbusters: Afterlife). Soon enough, Beans is going toe-to-toe with racist cops, sleazy boys, even her own parents, as she struggles to decide not what she wants to be when she grows up, but who.
Screens with short film Sparkles
Thurs 28 Jul 5:30PM @ Palace Nova Eastend Cinemas
Book Here