SBS: September – November

Sweden’s vampire movie Let The Right One In, new seasons of Shameless, Tetsuya’s Pursuit of Excellence, Supersizers Go, Coast and Channel 4’s telemovies Red Riding Trilogy will air on SBS later this year.

Here is what’s coming up….

September:

SBS ONE

Shameless
With christenings, riots, salsa, school reunions, sibling rivalry, shootouts, cross-dressing, weddings, gigolos and messages from beyond the grave, the wonderful, inimitable world of Shameless returns to SBS ONE for a seventh series. This BAFTA award winning drama follows the humorous lives of the dysfunctional Gallagher family as they experience life on the edge in the fictional council estate of Chatsworth, in Northern England. The series charts the wickedly unpredictable chapters of a very unusual and off-beat family. Just be thankful they’re not your neighbours.

La La Land
Award-winning character comedian Marc Wootton (My New Best Friend; High Spirits with Shirley Ghostman) stars in this groundbreaking series about three hapless wannabes as they struggle to succeed in LA. La La Land isn’t a mockumentary but an innovative hybrid of reality and comedy – whilst Marc’s characters are fictitious, everybody else is real and utterly unaware they are talking to an actor. Wootton’s whacky but all-too-familiar characters include Brendan, a talentless documentary maker on a quest to become the next Morgan Spurlock. Shirley, a psychic medium on-the-run, ready to lie, cheat and drug his way to the top. And Gary, an East-London taxi driver squandering his late porn-star mother’s inheritance on becoming an actor. Whether it’s Brendan convincing Daryl Hannah to fake the release of a Condor he accidentally killed, Gary collaborating with cult director Tommy Wiseau, or Shirley assisting a private investigator on an adultery case, La La Land is always intense, provocative and painfully funny.

Modern Masters Season
Enjoy the latest and greatest from the modern masters every Wednesday night at 10pm on SBS ONE throughout the month of September. Titles include; Alejandro Amenabar’s Oscar award-winning The Sea Inside starring Javier Bardem, Ang Lees’ espionage thriller Lust, Caution set in WWII era Shaghai, a Continental reworking by Jacques Audiard in The Beat My Heart Skipped, the multi-award-winning Head-On by Fatih Akin and André Téchiné’s gripping feature The Girl on the Train.

How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth?
In a Cutting Edge special, naturalist Sir David Attenborough investigates whether the world is heading for a population crisis. In his lengthy career, Sir David has watched the human population more than double from 2.5 billion in 1950 to nearly seven billion. He reflects on the profound effects of this rapid growth, both on humans and the environment. While much of the projected growth in human population is likely to come from the developing world, it is the lifestyle enjoyed by many in the West that has the most impact on the planet. Some experts claim that in the UK consumers use as much as two and a half times their fair share of Earth’s resources. Sir David examines whether it is the duty of individuals to commit not only to smaller families, but to change the way they live for the sake of humanity and planet Earth.

SBS TWO
Made in Spain with Jose Andres – Brand New Series
Spanish chef Jose Andres, who trained at El Bulli in Spain, explores the culinary and cultural riches of Spain, highlighting the extraordinary cooking traditions of a country whose food and wine captures the imagination of nations across the world. In every episode Jose brings the exciting flavours of his native Spain to the audience.

Food Trip with Todd English
Join acclaimed chef and restaurateur Todd English on his travels around the world as he shares his taste and talent for reinventing traditional cooking. Todd explores a different dish or culinary tradition, drawing
inspiration for new recipes from each locale’s native cuisine and ingredients.

Taste Takes Off
New Zealand travel writer and television presenter Peta Mathias explores the flavours, the style and the sights of various destinations of the Pacific, including Thailand, Vietnam, Australia, California and Canada.

The Year of Anish Kapoor
Anish Kapoor is one of the most influential sculptors of his generation, known for works of staggering complexity and scale. He now faces his biggest challenge yet as the first living British artist to have a solo show occupying the entire Royal Academy gallery. His response is a series of audacious installations. With exclusive access to his studio, Alan Yentob follows him through a period of intense productivity. Kapoor talks candidly about his childhood in India, his early years as an artist and his creative process.

Syrian School
In this five-part series, Syrian School follows a year in the life of four schools in Damascus, a high-pressure cross roads in the Middle East. It concentrates on some remarkable characters finding their way in a country that has never before opened ordinary life up to cameras in this way and challenges the usual clichés of Arab life charting the highs and lows of the school year.

Ninja Warriors
GQ and Rolling Stone hail Ninja Warrior as one of TV’s best shows. The world’s top fighters, wrestlers, and athletes compete in one of the most difficult physical contests ever devised. Witness as Olympic athletes, K-1 fighters, and pro-wrestlers from around the world attempt the most diabolical course ever created and strive for true ninja greatness.

Unbeatable Banzuke
Unbeatable Banzuke throws down the gauntlet with over a dozen extreme physical challenges that make competitors wish they’d never been born. For the few, the proud, and the downright superhuman who go on to win, comes the honour of achieving the impossible – triumphing against all odds over the wildest, craziest, and most insane challenges ever seen on TV.

October:

SBS ONE
Movie: Let the Right One In
As Let Me In is released in Australian cinemas this month, take the opportunity to check out the Swedish original on SBS ONE. A vampire movie about alienation and love, this is the story of a bullied 12-year-old boy who develops a friendship with a vampire child. Due to this film’s success at various international film festivals, the rights for an English-language remake of the film were snapped up before the film had its theatrical release. The remake stars Aussie Kodi Smit McPhee from Romulus, My Father and The Road and Hit Girl’s Chloe Moretz.

Supersizers Go
Restaurant critic Giles Coren and writer and performer Sue Perkins return to SBS ONE to take us through six more eras of gluttony, gastronomy and gorgeous food from the ages. This time they’ll eat their way through typical menus from the 1950s, Marie-Antoinette’s Versailles, 1066 and the Norman invasion, 1980s London, the Romans and their vomitoriums and the Roaring 20’s. Once again resplendent in the period costumes of the day – be it shoulder pads, togas, hair shirts, wimples or Dior’s New Look – Giles and Sue explore the highs and lows of culinary history, and adopt the etiquette, social habits and mores of each era in their own highly individual way. Whether it’s the sushi, nouvelle cuisine or microwave food of the 80s or the liquamen fish gut sauce, flamingo tongues and milk-fattened snails of the Romans, Supersizers Go is an entertaining and compellingly comic look at what our ancestors really ate and how they really behaved while doing it.

November:

SBS ONE

Red Riding Trilogy
Compelling, complex, gripping and genuinely disturbing, the Red Riding Trilogy is a breathtaking, neo-noir epic based on horrific, factual events and adapted for the screen from David Peace’s series of groundbreaking novels. The Red Riding Trilogy follows controversial stories revolving around the manhunt for the brutal Yorkshire Ripper. Featuring a stellar cast including Sean Bean, Rebecca Hall, Paddy Considine, Mark Addy, Peter Mullan and directed by acclaimed theatrical directors; Julian Jarrold (Brideshead Revisted), James Marsh (Man on Wire) and Anand Tucker (Shopgirl). The three feature-length television episodes aired on Channel 4 last year and were released theatrically in the US in February 2010.

Tetsuya’s Pursuit of Excellence
Don’t miss your second chance to see this intimate documentary, following the story of Australia’s world-renowned restauranteur Tetsuya Wakuda. Wakuda arrived in Australia in the early 1980s as a 22-year-old with little money, no professional skills and no English. From an accidental beginning, Tetsuya chartered a course that has taken him to the top of fine cuisine around the world. In this documentary we hear from those who were his first friends and mentors in Australia; including Danny White, Armando Percuoco and Tony Bilso as well as his international colleagues Ferran Adria, Heston Blumenthal and Richard Geoffroy.

Coast
The BAFTA awarding winning Coast returns with the familiar team of experts to explore more spellbinding stories. Coast celebrates the unique character of the British Isles, featuring stories about the people, wildlife and events that make up the Britain’s coastal communities. Neil Ross (A History of Scotland) heads up a team five of presenters, Nick Crane, Alice Roberts, Miranda Krestovnikoff, and Mark Horton. Together they travel the length of the UK coastline and through a mixture of expert comment, compelling storytelling and computer-generated images, reveal a wealth of fascinating stories illustrating life as it is today, and as it was in the past. The new series opens with a journey from the most northerly tip of the British Isles, Muckle Flugga on Shetland, to the Old Man of Hoy, on Orkney.

Salam Father
Sam Ziusudras last saw his father in 1982. So when word comes from relatives in Iraq that Hussain Ziusudras’s remains have finally been found, Sam, 32, sets out to discover exactly why his father was murdered all those years ago, during the rule of Saddam Hussein. Sam’s journey takes him from suburban Perth, to Stockholm, and then back to Iraq, the country that he, his mother and his sister had to flee when he was just five years old. In Iraq Sam and his mother (whos decided to travel with him) reunite with family they havent seen in 27 years. For his mother, the reunion is utterly joyful but for Sam, joy only comes once hes overcome the anger he feels at the way his relatives seemingly abandoned them all those years ago. Then, camera in hand, he interviews relatives, friends and colleagues of his father’s to get their take on why he was killed. Salam Father is an extraordinarily poignant documentary that doesnt just tell the story of one man. Its also the story of a country, a tale of love, bravery and of family ties, it’s a refugee’s story, and it’s a telling piece on the state of Iraq, post-invasion.

SBS TWO
30 Years of Film on SBS: A Retrospective
To celebrate SBS TV’s 30 year anniversary; a specially curated month-long season of the best films from the last three decades of SBS. Pivotal films from each decade, including: 1980s – Ran, Wings of Desire, Fitzcarraldo, 1990s -Delicatessen, Cyrano de Bergarac and 2000 – Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Downfall will be screened. These titles have been selected to represent the quality and diversity of SBS film programming since the network first began broadcasting in 1980. Films will be programmed on SBS ONE across Friday (80s), Saturday (90s) and Sunday (00s) nights in November. To coincide with this, SOS will be dedicated to an Australian short film retrospective for four weeks in November, showcasing the best Aussie shorts from a crop of celebrated Aussie filmamkers including Jane Campion, Nash Edgerton and Warwick Thornton.