Based on a True Story

This sensitive drama from Anthony Fabian tells the remarkable true story of Sandra Laing, a black girl who was born to white Afrikaner parents in 1950’s South Africa. Due to a genetic throwback, Sandra’s hair is frizzier than that of her parents, and her skin darker. As her conservative father seeks to defend her mother from persistent accusations of infidelity, Sandra becomes embroiled in a series of legal battles to classify her race. Amazingly, The Laings’ campaign is successful and the dark-skinned Sarah is officially classified as white. She is legally entitled to attend a “white” school, sit in the “white” section in waiting rooms and dine in “white” restaurants. Her parents blankly ignore the stares from racist onlookers, and their policy of “reclassifying” their daughter appears to work, for a while.

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The Founding of a Republic, a star-studded epic which marks the 60th Anniversary of China’s Communist revolution, opens in UK cinemas on Thursday.

The film, which tells the story of the communist rise to power in 1949 from Chairman Mao’s days as a young soldier, was made by the state-run China Film Group, and stars over 100 of the country’s best-known actors, including Hong Kong king-fu heros Jackie Chan and Jet Li, as well as Crouching Tiger actress Zhang Ziyi.

The film’s producers hope that the cast list and subject matter will attract both older viewers and the internet-savvy younger generation, with the film tipped to be one of the highest-grossing films the country has seen for years.

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On 16th November, 1859, the flamboyant American author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote, reads an article about four members of a well-respected Kansas family who were brutally murdered one night. The notion of two very different worlds colliding - the protective unit of Clutter family and the rootless, amoral sphere inhabited by their killers - enthralls him, and Capote phones up William Shawn, editor of the New Yorker, to ask if he would be interested in a magazine article examining the effect of the murders on the local community. Shawn gives him the nod of approval and Capote leaves for the wind-swept plains of the Mid-West along with his childhood friend Harper Lee.

Speaking to an agent from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, Capote admits that he is not bothered whether the murderers are caught or not - he is satisfied that the subject matter will play to his ambitions of producing writing that combines the emotional intensity of fiction with the raw urgency of hard facts. But when two young vagabonds, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, are arrested and charged with the crime, Capote realises their stories could bring him the wealth and acclaim he so craves. Six years later he would publish In Cold Blood, a “nonfiction novel” that made him the most famous writer in America, a millionaire, and destroyed him from the core.

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Landing director Ken Loach a Palme D’Or at the 2006 Cannes film festival, The Wind That Shakes the Barley charts the IRA’s attempts to oust the British in the early 1920s and the civil war that followed the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922.

The film opens in 1920 as newly-qualified doctor Damien O’Donovan (Cillian Murphey) abandons his plans to find work in a London hospital after he witnesses the brutal murder of his childhood friend by British Black and Tan troops. Along with his brother Teddy (Pádraic Delaney), Damian joins a “flying column” of the embryonic IRA, which exploits its superior knowledge of the Irish countryside to take pot shots at unsuspecting British troops. As the brothers’ zeal increases, so do their acts of violence, which include the shooting of unarmed British landlords and childhood friends who have aligned themselves with the occupying nation.

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Based on a real-life incident at a California high school in 1967, Dennis Gansel’s cautionary thriller takes a disturbing look at fascism’s ongoing appeal.

Set in an affluent German town, The Wave sees hip schoolteacher Rainer Wenger tackle the subject of ‘autocracy’ for a school project week by creating his own mini-dictatorship in the classroom. He sets himself up as commander-in-chief with his pupils assuming the role of dedicated followers. Initially sceptical, the teenagers soon embrace the idea enthusiastically, choosing a uniform for the group, giving it a name (The Wave), designing a logo which they later spray-paint all over town, and greeting each other with a secret handshake. By working together they establish new friendships, become more creative and achieve more academically.

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Valkyrie is an old-fashioned espionage thriller based on a large-scale plot within the Nazi ranks to assassinate Hitler. It’s one of those ‘what if’ tales which, had it succeeded, might have completely changed the fate of Europe.

At the centre of the conspiracy is Claus von Stauffenberg, played by Tom Cruise, a one-eyed German officer whose bravery has earned him priceless access to Hitler’s bunker. Unknown to the higher echelons of Hitler’s army, however, von Stauffenberg has despised the Führer for years. In 1943 he joins a cabal of equally disenchanted officers who plan to topple the Third Reich and recapture their beloved Vaterland.

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Adapted from Peter Morgan’s stage play, Frost/Nixon sets itself up as a boxing match between the hulking intellect of America’s most notorious ex-president, four years after the Watergate scandal came to a head, and the “lightweight” talkshow host David Frost, who stakes his whole reputation as well as his entire savings on extracting the confession Nixon never gave.

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The Children of Huang Shi recounts the true story of a British journalist’s rescue of dozens of Chinese orphans in the face of the advancing Japanese.

The British reporter George Hogg (Jonathan Rhys Myers) has been sent to China to report on the 1930s war involving the Japanese invaders and the Nationalist and Communist Chinese. Reckless and inexperienced, he takes hundreds of covert photos of the atrocities for newspapers back home, including a massacre of Chinese civilians. However, the Japanese soon twig that he is not the aid worker he said he was and capture him, along with all of his photos.

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Based on the autobiographical graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis is an animated coming-of-age tale set against the backdrop of the Iranian revolution. Told through the eyes of a child (as reflected in Satrapi’s simplistic yet expressive black-and-white artwork), the story gives a potted history of modern Iran and shows how the various political upheavals affect her own liberal-minded family on a personal and often tragic level.

Though based in a Middle-Eastern context, Satrapi’s film is truly universal in its appeal and sentiment. After translations of the original novel met with worldwide success, Satrapi told the New York Times, “Suddenly I said to myself, ‘This is a universal story.’ I want to show that all dictatorships, no matter if it’s Chile, the Cultural Revolution in China or communist Poland, it’s the same schematic.”

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We are all fat, lazy and complacent. We use television as a way of switching our minds off to what is going on in the world around us. The media has great potential to educate, to promote political debate, to bring about justice, yet we are contented with air-headed trash if it brings in a few bucks through advertising.

This is the message that Edward Murrow gives to a room of CBS employees in 1958, but one that could apply equally today. In his second film as director, which was shot when the ‘war on terror’ was in full swing, Clooney offers a rebuke to contemporary US journalists who lose sight of the truth because they are too concerned with appeasing advertisers and the government. Clooney can’t be accused of falling into this camp: he was paid $1 each for writing, directing, and acting in the film and even offered to mortgage his house in order to fund it. Clooney would have been familiar with newsrooms of this era because his father was a news anchor for some 30 years.

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