We’re showing three movies this week at The Bookworm: on Monday, the science fiction flick based off Kazuo Ishiguro’s award-winning novel Never Let Me Go; on Wednesday, the Chinese documentary Meishi (Coal) Street, about Beijing’s famous Qianmen nail house; and on Friday, the Japanese masterpiece Hana-bi (released in the US as Fireworks). Read on for more information!

Never Let Me Go

Monday, September 14, 8 pm – FREE

Directed by Mark Romanek and starring Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, and Keira Knightley; Roger Ebert gave Never Let Me Go four stars and called it “a meditative, delicate film… a good movie, from a masterful novel.” 

The book in question is 2005 the science fiction novel by Japanese-born British author Kazuo Ishiguro, which Time Magazine called it the best novel of 2005 and included it in its TIME 100 Best English-Language Novels from 1923 to 2005.

Never Let Me Go is September’s official Bookworm Book Club selection. Grab a copy of the book and join us on Wednesday, September 16 at 7:30 pm for a free-wheeling discussion.

Meishi Street

Wednesday, September 16, 8 pm – 20 RMB

Entire neighborhoods were demolished in the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. This documentary film, by visual artist Ou Ning, is about one of those neighborhoods — including the people who refused to vacate their homes.

Meishi Street shows evictees on Meishi Jie — translated as Coal Street — near Qianmen fighting for their rights. Ou handed his camera to one of the tenants, who captured stark ground-level images of his struggle against more powerful entities.

Hana-bi

Friday, September 18, 8 pm – FREE

We resume our Japanese movie month with Hana-bi, an award-winning film by Takeshi Kitano that follows a policeman who borrows money from the Japanese mafia — the Yakuza — to pay for his leukemia-stricken wife. Meanwhile, the main character’s partner, after a terrible injury, begins to create works of surrealist art while confined from his wheelchair.

A powerful and strong film that just might be unlike anything you’ve seen.