The Film Programme - 11/01/2008

Wim Wenders, the director behind Paris, Texas discusses some of the films that are being shown as part of a new retrospective - in particular, one of his earlier films, Alice in the Cities. Mike Nichols, the director of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate and Closer talks about his latest film Charlie Wilson's War, starring Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman - about a Texas congressman’s covert dealings in Afghanistan. The film is adapted from George Crile’s 2003 book Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History. Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu on his Palme d’Or winning film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which tells the story of two students who try to arrange an illegal abortion for one of them during the communist regime of the late 1980s. Film critic Adrian Wootton on the 1938 film La Bête humaine. Directed by Jean Renoir - and based on an Emile Zola novel by the same name – the film tells the story of a train engineer who witnesses the murder of the stationmaster by the husband of a woman with whom the stationmaster has been sleeping with. After the train engineer develops a fixation with said woman himself, sex and violence - and trains - are the order of the day.