FLICKS CINEMA 'Minimata' (M)

'MINIMATA' (M) Friday 2nd July 10-30am / 6pm / 8-15pm
Minamata is a forthright, heartfelt movie, an old-fashioned “issue picture” with a worthwhile story to tell about how communities can stand up to overweening corporations and how journalists dedicated to truthful news can help them. A nearly unrecognizable Johnny Depp plays 'Life' photographer W. Eugene Smith in this earnest look at his mission to document a pollution-ravaged Japanese community.
Real-life US photojournalist W. Eugene Smith's glory days were in the second world war and the decades following, working for 'Life' magazine in that now-forgotten era when analogue cameras were incapable of lying and magazines with compelling photos could command newsstand sales.
The drama finds him in his declining years, drunk, depressed, impossible to work with – and of course ripe for Hollywood-style redemption. Apparently by chance, he finds himself befriended by Japanese-American Aileen (Minami Hinase) who alerts him to an environmental atrocity in Japan that he could do something about, if he chose to rouse himself from his grumpy self-indulgent ennui. In the coastal town of Minamata on Japan’s south-western coast, the Chisso corporation has been dumping mercury waste into the water, which is poisoning the fish and then the humans who eat them. Minamata was hardly an isolated case, as an end-credits montage reminds us. Despite decades of corporate propaganda extolling their virtues there has been an enormous change in public sentiment over the past half-century, brought about in part by crusaders like Gene and Aileen Smith.
Showing at 10-30am / 6pm / 8-15pm Friday 2nd July TEXT BOOKINGS to 0210 222 5558