SPECIAL SCREENINGS: FILM MEETS PHILOSOPHY 14 PFF

11.6 (Tuesday), 18:00 | Cinematheque
THE BEAUTY OF VICE [Lepota poroka, 1986]
dir. Živko Nikolić, ME, 105’

In the backward mountain villages of Montenegro live a young married couple, Luka [Milutin Karadzić] and Jaglika [Mira Furlan], vowing lifelong fidelity. Faced with poverty, the two, with excitement and fear, accept the offer of their former neighbor and recent godfather Gjorge, called “Georges" [Petar Bozhovic], to follow his example and go to the Adriatic coast in search of easy money.

There, Luka gets a job in a salt pan, and Jaglika, unwillingly, becomes an assistant at the nudist camp where Georges works. Traditionally brought up, she is at first disgusted by the ubiquitous nudity. But gradually, as she gets closer to some of the guests, Jaglika discovers more and more her own sensuality, so long limited by the rules of the environment she comes from.

The most popular film of Montenegrin director Zivko Nikolić, “The Beauty of Vice," questions the values not only of traditional, patriarchal environments in the SFR Yugoslavia but also of the entire system at the time, which, on the verge of its collapse, begins to face attractive liberal Western values. And years later, precisely because of the success of this film (and on the occasion of several of his other films), Nikolić will be accused of mocking the Montenegrin tradition, and he will not be spared from physical threats either.

For her role in this film, Mira Furlan received the award for best actress at the Pula Film Festival in 1986.

12.6 (Wednesday) 21:00 Open-air Cinema: “A Quiet Summer”
LAURENCE ANYWAYS [2012]
dir. Xavier Dolan, CA, 168’

Lawrence Alia [Melvil Poupaud] is an award-winning writer and professor of literature who lives in Montreal with his girlfriend, Frédéric "Fred" Bellaire [Suzanne Clément]. On the day of his thirty-fifth birthday, in a moment of deep despair, Lawrence reveals to Fred his most insurmountable secret: that his male body does not correspond to what he truly feels he has always been: a woman.

Fred doesn't take the news lightly at first and accuses Lawrence of telling another lie and that he should have told her he was gay a long time ago. But soon, to the dismay of her sister and mother, she comes to the conclusion that Lawrence needs her more than ever. Throughout the following years, long after their separation, Fred becomes his only and greatest support. Together, the two defy the prejudices of their mutual friends, ignore the advice of their families, and try to overcome the phobias rooted in a society that, long before they try to understand, marginalizes and excludes.

“Lawrence Anyways" is the third film of Xavier Dolan (born in 1989), which he made at the age of 22, after the great success of his previous two films, "I Killed My Mother" [J'ai tué ma mère, 2009] and “Heartbeats” (Les amours imaginaires, 2010). The film premiered in the Certain View program at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, where Suzanne Klémann won the Best Actress award and Xavier Dolan won the Queer Palme. In the same year, the film won the Best Canadian Feature Film award at the Toronto International Film Festival.

13.6 [Thursday], 21:00 Open-air Cinema: “A Quiet Summer”
THE GOLD RUSH [1925] 
dir. Charlie Chaplin, US, 95’

During the gold rush, sometime in the late nineteenth century, a poor man goes to the mountains of Alaska in the hope of finding his fortune there—some small fortune that would change his lonely, miserable life.

After surviving a terrible storm, which he spends in a state of constant stress, sheltered in a cabin with a notorious criminal and a good-natured but hungry gold prospector, he falls in love with Georgia, a beautiful ballroom dancer. Purely for fun (and to piss off an aggressive suitor of hers), she starts dancing with him. But still, despite the promise, she forgets to visit the little man on New Year's Eve, although he is excitedly waiting for her in the hut, with dinner and a gift ready.

The complete work of Charlie Chaplin (director, screenwriter, editor, producer, and lead actor), The Gold Rush is inspired by several photographs of the last great migration of its kind, the mass search for gold in the Klondike, as well as the story of the tragedy in the Sierra Nevada from the winter of 1846–1847, when a group of snowbound migrants are forced to eat leather from their own shoes to survive, and then human flesh. That in "The Gold Rush" these harrowing events are turned into two unforgettably comic scenes (in the first Chaplin cooks his shoe, and in the second Big Jim, his starving friend, imagines it as a roast chicken) is just another testimony in favor of Chaplin's thesis that comedy is what tragedies turn into with time and, even more, the ultimate proof of his unsurpassed cinematic genius.

Chaplin has stated several times that "The Gold Rush" is the film by which he would most like to be remembered, so it is not surprising that in 1942, carried away by the success of "The Great Dictator," he released a second version, re-edited and without intertitles, and with sound effects, music, and narration. Neglected, the original version entered the public domain in 1953, four decades before it was restored and selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States' National Film Registry as a "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant achievement."