Thelma & Louise (USA, France, 1991, director: Ridley Scott)
August 2 at 23:59 Town Hall Square
Thelma & Louise tells the story of a waitress called Louise and a housewife Thelma who decide to break out of their everyday lives and hit the road to the mountains for a weekend. Their road trip, however, turns into a crime spree after Louise kills a man who was attempting to rape Thelma. After the movie came out in 1991, it seemed that this might change completely the role of women on-screen. But Thelma & Louise celebrates its 25th anniversary this year and we are still waiting for the expected boom of female buddy pictures and hordes of female action figures. Go figure… You should definitely use the opportunity to see this movie because of the fact that you rarely have a chance to see a film where female characters make up 69% of the spoken words on the big screen. And of course, you just can’t miss the movie that salutes the true friendship with such passion.
Fitzcarraldo (West Germany, 1982, director: Werner Herzog)
August 4 at 23:00 On the viewpoint of Dome Church Northern Tower
This feverish jungle fantasy brings the divine combo – Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski – together again. Although Fitzcarraldo is one of the most popular works of Herzog, it is maybe even more famous because of its disastrous production process than the story of the film. Albeit Fitzcarraldo is loosely based on the story of Jose Fermin Fitzcarrald, a real-life rubber baron at the turn of the 19th and 20th century, the history of the rubber era in Peru did not interest Herzog at all. The main topic of the movie is Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald’s love and obsession towards music. The love is so strong that he wants to bring opera to the Amazon jungle. For this purpose, he has to raise money with his rubber business, and for that being possible, with the help of a thousand natives, he has to drag a huge boat over a mountain to create a shortcut for his rubber business. According to Herzog an image like the ship moving across a mountain should give us all courage for moving towards our own dreams.
Junction 48 (Israel, Germany, USA, 2016, director: Udi Aloni)
August 4 at 23:59 Town Hall Square
If this classic delirium of the jungle is not for you, then maybe you would like to take a look at the life of a young Palestinian musician Kareem from Lod, an Israeli city near Tel Aviv. After the car accident kills his father and bounds his mother to a wheelchair, he finds comfort in the world of hip-hop. From now on Kareem and his girlfriend Manar start to use their music to fight against the oppression of Israeli society. The role of Kareem is played and inspired by Tamer Nafar, the real life hip hop star from the first Palestinian rap band DAM who’s Arabic language lyrics are largely influenced by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the struggle for equal rights for Palestinians. Junction 48 is the love story with the focus on music – the universal language of freedom.
Don Juan (Sweden, Finland, 2015, director: Jerzy Sladkowski)
August 5 at 19:00 Athena Center
Don Juan’s main storyline sounds almost like a horror tale. Marina, the mother of twenty-two-year-old Oleg thinks that his son is not a real man but just an autistic slacker. He doesn’t listen to the online lectures of the University of Nizhny Novgorod he supposed to listen, he doesn’t have friends nor girlfriend. Oleg’s mother has a certain plan to fix the boy at any cost and subjects him to a series of unconventional treatments. The main problem seems to be that the poor boy doesn’t even care about all the aforementioned problems until the several „helpers“ throughout the movie make it clear that a man can only be unhappy and hopeless if his main aim is not chasing girls. Although the story seems to have a happy ending it’s still quite disturbing with its unintentional message that we are worthless if we are alone.
Bugs (Denmark, Netherlands, France, Germany, 2016, director: Andreas Johnsen)
August 6 at 19:00 Athena Center
Andreas Johnsen is an extremely curious person, so when his friends at Nordic Food Lab told him about their three-year research project on edible insects, he knew he wanted to make a film about it. And he did, raising several questions about our future food: what we eat, how we produce it, where does the food come from, why do we eat what we eat, could we eat something else that might be better for our planet and healthier for us? Alongside these serious questions, the movie makers travel around the world to find out how the different insects are cooked and how they taste in various places. Must see for all the food lovers!
