The Center for the Arts at Albright College will offer screenings of international films throughout February and March. The films will be shown at 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays, in Klein Lecture Hall, in the Campus Center. The films include:
Feb. 24: Do The Right Thing (1989, 120 min.) by Spike Lee. “June 28, 2014 saw the 25th anniversary of the release of Spike Lee’s 1989 Brooklyn masterpiece, Do the Right Thing. The movie was celebrated with a screening at Los Angeles County Museum of Art and a panel moderated by John Singleton; in the White House, where Barack and Michelle Obama recorded a video greeting to Lee, in praise of the movie they’d seen on their first date; with a party in Bed-Stuy, on the block where the film was shot, recently renamed Do the Right Thing Way, featuring Lee, Dave Chappelle, Chuck D, and thousands of fans; and at BAM [Brooklyn Academy of Music], which concluded BAMcinemaFest with a sold-out screening and a panel of cast and crew members.”-Sarah Larson, The New Yorker.
March 3: 34th Black Maria Film & Video Festival with festival founder and director John Columbus. In existence for more than 30 years, the Black Maria festival has been acclaimed for advocating, supporting and widely exhibiting outstanding short works by emerging as well as veteran film and video-makers.
March 10: Detour (1945, 67 min.) by Edgar G. Ulmer. Ulmer’s film noir classic is a “gritty, cheaply-made, fatalistic, cultish crime film about the bleak twists of fate. In a flashback story cynically narrated, a world-weary, identity-stealing hitchhiker (Tom Neal) is haplessly involved in an ambiguous death during his thumbing trek to Los Angeles, and later, with a nasty hitchhiker, the film’s blackmailing, vindictive femme fatale con, Vera (Ann Savage) whom he accidentally strangles with a telephone cord through a closed door.”-Tim Dirks, www.filmsite.org.
March 24: Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006, 84 min.) by Larry Charles. Borat explains: “although Kazakhstan a glorious country, it have a problem, too: economic, social and Jew. This why Ministry of Information have decide to send me to U S and A greatest country in a world! to learn a lessons for Kazakhstan.”
March 31: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965, 97 min.) by Sergei Parajanov. “The most plastic-fantastic of Soviet new-wave movies, set among the colorful Gutsul people of the remote eastern Carpathians, is ethnographic cinema run wild. This is a folk ballad-a tale of blood feuds, sorcery, and star-crossed love-that’s not so much lyric as lysergic. In this overwhelmingly beautiful movie, a sad, short, brutalized life is elevated to ecstatic myth.”-J. Hoberman, The Village Voice.
