Happy Centenary UPP!

Oxford should be proud to be home to one of Britain's oldest working cinemas. However, the Picture Palace can't boast a record of continuous service, as it spent much of the period between 1917 and 1976 as a storage facility. Nevertheless, it revived to enjoy a golden age as the Penultimate Picture Palace under the management of Bill Heine and Pablo Butcher before surviving another brief period of darkness, thanks to the efforts of Saied and Zaid Marham and Philippa Farrow and Jane Derricott.

We shall be covering The Ultimate Survivor in more detail when it's released on DVD. But this is a worthy tribute to Oxford's first purpose-built movie theatre and it represents an admirable directorial debut by Philip Hind, who corrals such luminaries as BBC Director General Mark Thompson, Private Eye editor Ian Hislop, sci-fi author Brian Aldiss, local cinema expert Ian Meyrick and the Oxford Times's own Christopher Gray to share their memories of the PPP, while also tracing a chequered history that includes pub-owning theatrical entrepreneurs, furniture dealers, squatters and Stanley Kubrick.

The perilous business of running a cinema is exposed in The Smallest Show on Earth, whose rickety Bijou has much in common with the PPP. Scripted by William Rose, this is closer in tone to sentimental `passing era' items like Genevieve (1953) than either the famous Ealing Comedies or the state-of-the-nation dramas that Basil Dearden had directed for the studio. But it still captures, with some poignancy, the moment when British movie-going changed forever and swish downtown venues replaced the local fleapit.

Arriving in Sloughborough to visit the cinema bequeathed in his great-uncle's will, Bill Travers is dismayed to discover he is the owner of the rundown Bijou and not the luxurious Grand. Trains shake the property to its foundations each time they pass and the staff are as decrepit as the premises. But his wife, Virginia McKenna, takes a shine to projectionist Peter Sellers, cashier Margaret Rutherford and janitor Bernard Miles and persuades Travers to do up the old place to coerce Grand manager Francis De Wolff into upping his offer for the land he needs for a new car park.

The renovations have their desired effect. But when Miles lets slip to rival commissionaire George Gross that the makeover is only a ruse, De Wolff drops the price and Travers and McKenna have no option but to re-open the Bijou with the B Wester, Killer Riders of Wyoming.

No one attends the first screening. But a small boy ventures in shortly afterwards and audiences are soon packing the auditorium to experience the juddering caused by the passing trains and the parched agony of watching the desert adventure Mystery of Hell Valley with the heating turned up. Indeed, such is the success that Travers hires June Cunningham to sell ice-creams. But some things never change, as Rutherford relives her days as an accompanist by playing along to an after-hours screening of Cecil Hepworth's silent melodrama, Comin' Thro' the Rye (1923).

However, De Wolff decides to sabotage the competition by sending Sellers a bottle of scotch in a newsreel tin and Travers's attempts to keep the film rolling result in chases speeding up, the sound going out of sync and the celluloid catching light in the projector. All looks lost. But the larcenously loyal Miles has other ideas.

Filmed in a theatre specially constructed between two railway bridges in Kilburn, this is the kind of cosy middlebrow picture that the angry young men of the British New Wave were to rail against into the early 1960s. Yet it provides a valuable record of how ordinary people spent their leisure time before every home had a television. Moreover, it also suggests how little has changed, as the big showcase venues continue to bombard audiences with the latest Hollywood offerings, while independents and arthouses struggle to survive by catering for those who prefer their entertainment to be less brashly commercial or a bit more cerebral.

Doing their bit for the latter cause, students at the Centre for Development and Emergency Practice at Oxford Brookes University have curated a 9th Human Rights Film Festival to explore a range of pressing issues of global concern. Screenings at various venues across the city between 2-11 March will be free and several will be followed by panel discussions with leading academics and activists.

Given the current unrest in the Arab world, it's apt that two titles focus on conditions inside Iran.

Based on Marjane Satrapi's four-volume series of autobiographical graphic novels and co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud, Persepolis (2008) bears many similarities to Art Spiegelman's Maus books, not least in the deceptive simplicity of the visual style. By opting for clean shapes and a minimum of colour, Satrapi is able to make the disruption of everyday life by the imposition of strict Muslim law seem all the more drastic. Furthermore, this monochrome modesty works to advantage in the segment in which the teenage Marjane is sent to Vienna by her liberal parents to escape restrictions in Teheran and the threat of Iraqi incursion, as it emphasises how far her outspoken sense of self is out of step with the confident attitudes of her new Western classmates.

However, it is during the Iranian episodes that this inspired picture proves most effective. Acknowledging the numerous faults of the Shah's tyranny, Satrapi still conveys the possibility for personal expression through Marjane's love of Bruce Lee and heavy metal music. But it's not just the prohibition of external cultural influences that Marjane resents as Ayatollah Khomeini's fundamentalism exerts its grip, as she also dislikes wearing the hijab and having her social life curtailed by bans on alcohol and the free association with boys.

There are occasional moments of untrammelled melodrama and clumsy comedy. But there is also great poignancy about incidents like Marjane receiving a swan carved out of bread by her imprisoned uncle, while her flights of fancy, including conversations with God and Karl Marx, subvert the theocratic uniformity demanded by a regime that has dimmed the spirit of her adored grandmother. Indeed, one of the film's strengths is its unflinching depiction of Marjane maturing from an eight-year-old innocent to a clued young woman, who finds coming to terms with her own physical and psychological development as difficult to deal with as the state-sanctioned chauvinism seeking to suppress her will.

Ably voiced by Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve and Danielle Darrieux, the female characters are the heartbeat of this consistently provocative, but never proselytising treatise on the price required for freedom. Yet for all the courage and conviction of its content, Persepolis retains its efficacy through the inky elegance of its Expressionist imagery.

Sound matters as much as the visuals in Bahman Ghobadi's No One Knows About Persian Cats, which follows the progress of two young Iranian musicians as they race against the clock to organise a covert gig, record an album and make arrangements to perform in Europe. The winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes and resembling a mumblecore hybrid of Fatih Akin's Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2005) and a youthful variation on Ghobadi's own Half Moon (2006), this is a celebration of the urban iconoclasm that helped drive this summer's post-electoral protests. But while it reveals the extent to which underground culture, mobile phones and social networking sites have taught a generation of Iranians to kick against the system, this is also a cautionary tale that warns about expecting too much too soon.

Fresh from another spell inside for playing music without a licence, Ashkan Koshanejad and Negar Shaghaghi receive an invitation to appear in London. However, they lack the documentation to secure their passage and could do with some new bandmates. So, when they meet wheeler-dealing bootlegger Hamed Behdad at an illicit recording studio, they decide to entrust him with the details, while they write some English songs. Behdad introduces them to an ageing rascal who can get them their passports and visas and then transports them around Tehran on his motorbike to watch a range of indie groups in the hope of recruiting instrumentalists for their tour.

However, things don't go smoothly, as the musicians Koshanejad and Shaghaghi are most keen to hire aren't free and they struggle to find a suitable venue for their debut show. Moreover, Behdad proves to be highly unreliable and Shaghaghi becomes convinced that he's going to rip them off. Yet when there's a delay with the money that Koshanejad's mother is supposed to be wiring from Germany, Behdad sells his bike to pay for the fake paperwork. And that's when he sees his contact being bundled into the back of a police car.

Working on a shoestring budget and within a 17-day shooting schedule, Ghobadi can't be faulted for trying to showcase as many bands as possible in this whistlestop survey of the Iranian rock scene. The mix couldn't be more eclectic and he shoots the various electric bluesmen, heavy metalists, daff-tapping folkies, strutting rappers and indie boppers in locations as different as cellars, rooftops, sitting rooms and ancient ruins. He also frequently complements the numbers with MTV-style videos (undoubtedly the film's visual highlight) that tellingly expose the harsh realities of life under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But for all Koshanejad's awkward hipness and the scarf-clad Shaghaghi's constant fretting, the linking episodes (with their surfeit of transient characters) are rather dull. There are exceptions, such as the droll price list for black-market documents and Behdad's motor-mouthed explanation to an unseen cop why he's in possession of so many counterfeit movies. But it's only on the day of the concert, when Koshanejad and Shaghaghi track down the missing Behdad to a wild party across town, that the story's poignant human element finally kicks in.

Across the Middle East, the tensions simmering in the tinderbox city of Jaffa are delineated with admirable equanimity by Palestinian Scandar Copti and Israeli Yaron Shani in the Oscar-nominated Ajami. The product of several months workshopping with a non-professional cast and shot in a rigorous vérité style, this is a sobering insight into the macho culture that exists on the mean streets of the eponymous multi-ethnic neighbourhood. Moreover, the elliptical temporal structure compels the viewer continually to reassess the ever-shifting situation and gain some idea of the complexity and unpredictability of daily life predicated on hatred, frustration and violence.

Thirteen year-old narrator Fouad Habash is the brother of Shahir Kabaha, the teenage head of his family who is being targeted by a Bedouin gang in a revenge killing. Restaurateur Youssef Sahwani attempts to broker a truce, but the only way Kabaha can pay the agreed fine is by drug dealing. Meanwhile, 16 year-old Ibrahim Frege arrives from Nablus in the hope of finding work to pay for his mother's bone marrow transplant. He is illegally hired by Sahwani, but promptly falls for his Christian daughter, Ranin Karim, who is secretly dating Kabaha.

Completing the story strands are Israeli cop Eran Naim, who is obsessed with tracing his missing soldier brother, and cosmopolitan Arab, Scandar Copti, who has alienated his community by having a Jewish girlfriend and is being investigated by the police for involvement in his brother's drug ring. Indeed, the sins of siblings prove crucial to the combustible action, with confused notions of honour and loyalty further reinforcing entrenched positions. But while the co-directors are to be applauded for the impartiality of their approach, this is often unnecessarily intricate, with the unsignalled flashbacks occasionally confusing as much as they illuminate. Moreover, the relentless hustling of Boaz Yehonatan Yacov's handheld imagery tends to disorientate the viewer rather than plunge them into the centre of the action.

The emphasis on the personal rather than the political is laudably shrewd. But the bipartite approach means that Shani and Copti end up compromising rather than critiquing and, thus, while this is technically more ambitious than the majority of films on the Arab-Israeli stand-off, its conclusions are remarkably conventional.

The remaining three features deal with the status of women, with Moolaadé (2005) suggesting that little has changed in Africa where equality is concerned since Ousmane Sembene made Senegal's first feminist feature, Black Girl (1965). That film scandalised a stubbornly conservative continent and so did this witty, but nevertheless fierce denunciation of female circumcision, which remains legal in 38 countries.

Just as he did in Xala (1974), his masterly study of post-colonial malaise, Sembene employs a mixture of patriarchal satire and humanist melodrama to highlight the unequal struggle between progress and tradition. As the wife who defies both her polygamous husband and the village elders by refusing to surrender five girls for `purification', Fatoumata Coulibaly dominates proceedings. But Zeïda also impresses as the disgraced solder whose travelling store opens up a world of temptation and knowledge to the increasingly receptive womenfolk. Yet, while this is poetic, provocative and unstoppably powerful, it has done little to shame states into reform and the campaign to outlaw this the barbaric practice continues.

Gender and racial discrimination come under the spotlight in Skin (2008). However, despite its good intentions, Anthony Fabian's tribute to Sandra Laing is told with the resolute narrative and stylistic conservatism of a Hallmark teleplay. Ella Ramangwane and Sophie Okonedo work hard as the spirited Laing at different stages of her life. But with everyone else reduced to enacting apartheid era caricatures, this fails to arouse either the political indignation or emotional prostration that Fabian has clearly striven for.

Born to white parents in South Africa in 1955, Laing had a rare genetic irregularity that gave her skin a black pigmentation. Initially, her Afrikaner shopkeeper father Abraham (Sam Neill) suspected his wife Sannie (Alice Krige) of cuckolding him with one of their impoverished Piet Retief customers. But once he had accepted her condition, he campaigned vigorously in the courts to have his daughter classified as white after she was expelled from the exclusive school where she boarded with her older brother. However, the teenage Sandra's passion for Swazi vegetable seller Petrus Zwane (Tony Kgoroge) led to her ostracisation and she was only reunited with her mother many years later.

Fabian confides in the closing captions that Sandra's brothers, Leon and Adriaan, still refuse to acknowledge her. But such an approach to the material is highly selective and somewhat mischievous, as Sandra and Leon were reconciled in 2008. Obviously, a director is entitled to a degree of dramatic licence and a 107-minute running time limits the amount of information that can be conveyed. But the facts in a biopic should be paramount. No mention is made here of Petrus's polygamy or the fact that Sandra had six children by three different fathers and spent nine years struggling to retrieve three of them from the welfare system. This tactic of restrictive disclosure suggests a lack of trust in the audience's ability to accept Sandra for herself and, by resorting to stereotypical prejudices and soap operatics, Fabian seriously undermines the authenticity of his story.

The debuting Joshua Marston proves much more successful in showing how poverty and a broken romance prompt 17 year-old Catalina Sandino Moreno to act as a mule for a Colombian drug baron in Maria Full of Grace (2004). Earning Moreno a share of the Best Actress prize at the Berlin Film Festival (with Charlize Theron for Monster) and an Oscar nomination, this is both a shocking exposé of the hideous indignities endured by often hapless smugglers and a compelling human drama.

Stuck in a dead-end relationship with Wilson Guerrero, Moreno quits her tedious job at a rose plantation just as she discovers she's pregnant. Refusing to marry her loser boyfriend, she travels to Bogota to find work as a maid. However, en route, she meets Jhon Alex Toro and is seduced by the prospect of making big bucks trafficking drugs for Jaime Osorio Gomez.

Having been taught how to ingest latex pouches filled with heroin, Moreno swallows 62 pellets and boards a plane for New York with best friend Yenny Paola Vega and Gomez's trusted associate Giulied Lopez. The latter begins to feel unwell during the flight and a fellow mule is arrested at Newark Airport, with only Moreno's pregnancy sparing her from being x-rayed by customs officials. But the ordeal is far from over, as Gomez's henchmen stand guard over the women in a Jersey City hotel room until they have delivered their cargoes.

When Lopez's condition deteriorates, however, Moreno and Vega escape and hide out with Vega's sister, Patricia Rae, who puts them in touch with Queens activist Orlando Tobón, who promises to help them and advise them on making a fresh start in the United States. Moreno is excited by her new sense of empowerment. But she is fully aware that any decision she makes could have dire consequences for her grandmother, mother and sister back home.

Despite frequently being unbearably tense, this is an uncompromising slice of social realism. Jim Denault's camerawork is unobtrusive, but insistent, while Marston refrains from directorial flourishes to concentrate on the minutely researched detail and restrained performances that make this so authentic. Moreno (whose acting experience had been limited to amateur stage productions) superbly shifts from disaffected teen to frightened child, as she realises the danger she is in from both the chemicals inside her body and the customs officials and thugs involved in a desperate drug war. But Marston refuses to pass judgement on her actions, as his emphasis is always on the exploitation of the vulnerable rather than the morality of the crimes circumstances have forced them to commit.

Completing the programme are Leslie Woodhead and Ewa Ewart's record of an infamous school siege, Children of Beslan (2005); Dominic Brown's Forgotten Birds of Paradise, which provides a rare insight into the struggle of the West Papuan people to gain independence from Indonesia; and Gender Against Men (both 2009), which investigates the hidden world of sexual and gender-based violence against men in the conflicts blighting DR Congo, northern Uganda and southern Sudan. For full film and venue details, see www.brookes.ac.uk/go/humanrights