Friday on TV: 107 Mothers behind bars and a North Korean family on the run | Television

MOVIE THEATER

Julie & Julia
AXN Movies, 9:10 p.m.

In the late 1940s, Julia Child published a gastronomy book that became a popular phenomenon in the USA. Decades later, in New York, Julie Powell is in crisis and, upon finding the famous book, decides to start the Julie / Julia project: within a year, she will test the 524 recipes and publish the results on a blog. Directed by Nora Ephron and starring Amy Adams and Meryl Streep (who, for this role, was once again nominated for the Oscar for best actress), the film is inspired by Powell’s autobiography.

Ticket to Paradise
TVCine Top, 9:30 pm

In a return to romantic comedies with big movie stars, Julia Roberts and George Clooney star in this film by Ol Parker, the director of Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. They play two divorced parents who travel to Bali, Indonesia, where their daughter plans to marry a man she has just met. They are determined to stop her from making the same mistake they did.

Turtles All the Way Down
HBO Max, streaming

Debut. In 2017, John Green, author of Blame it on the stars and other novels for young adults, he published his fifth self-written book. It’s the story of Aza, a high school student with obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety who goes after a runaway multimillionaire who was her late father’s neighbor. This is the film adaptation, directed by Hannah Marks, with Isabel Merced in the lead role. Go directly to HBO Max, without going through movie theaters.

107 Mothers
RTP2, 10:54 pm

Directed by Slovakian Peter Kerekes, based on a script by him and Ivan Ostrochovsky (awarded in the Horizons section of the Venice Film Festival in 2021), it takes place inside a women’s prison in Odessa, Ukraine. It focuses on the stories of 107 women who represent the meaning(s) of motherhood behind bars, in a place where you can enter pregnant but can only keep your children until they are three years old.

Slovakia’s candidate for nomination for best international film at the 94th edition of the Oscars, the film marks the debut of Kerekes, a director with a career as a documentary filmmaker, in fiction. It takes the form of a docudrama with a direct connection to reality: it results from the time he spent in the penitentiary collecting interviews and contains dramatizations, in many cases carried out by the inmates themselves.

DOCUMENTARIES

Iran Seen from the Sky
RTP2, 8:37 pm

Between natural and human landscapes, ranging from imposing mountains to arid deserts, including cities and historical landmarks that were the cradle of an entire civilization, the documentary miniseries “shows a kaleidoscope of today’s Iran”. It consists of two episodes, continuing on Monday.

Beyond Utopia
TVCine Edition, 10pm

Winner of the Audience Award for best documentary at the North American Sundance festival, where it premiered in 2023, it offers a rare glimpse into life in North Korea, at its most claustrophobic and distressing for those who want to escape the country. closed from the world. It is directed by Madeleine Gavin, based on images captured by her team, a clandestine network and a family of deserters who risk everything to escape.

Ahead are tortuous paths through forests, mountains and the greed of those who take advantage of the situation. They don’t really know what they will find on the other side of the border. They know they are in danger of death. They grew up with minds washed by the postcard of the supposed paradise advertised by the “supreme leader”. But they feel the urgency to escape torture, prisons and executions, the probability of being exiled or sent to work camps, the control of even their thoughts, the iron hand of a totalitarian and oppressive state, disguised as utopia and heroism.

The documentary also shows the efforts of a parish priest invested in a dangerous undertaking: helping to escape, rescuing victims and reuniting families separated by Kim Jong-un’s regime.

MUSIC

The Gift – Live Choir at the Lisbon Coliseum
RTP1, 10:42 pm

“An immersive and sensorial experience” that has “euphoria as its only result”. It was with these words that the band from Alcobaça invited fans to the concert at the Coliseu dos Recreios in Lisbon, on November 18, 2023, which was sold out to attend the highlight of the tour motivated by the album Coral (2022).

Ambitious and “outside the usual aesthetic universe” of The Gift, the album is governed by a specific concept and movement: it opens in an adagio, closes in an andantino and is based on the connection to the 48 voices of the Austrian choir with which they recorded in Vienna – and which they replicated live. This concert was recorded by RTP and is broadcast tonight.