Frustrated that Spike Lee’s best movie in years was never released here? Got a hankering to watch the cornerstone of Italian neorealism ... but not on your laptop?
Bored enough with blockbuster U.S. franchises, droll French comedies and seasonal programming to try something different? Are you leery of the multiplex air conditioning and the midsummer colds it induces?
This week, “Locarno Film Festival in Beirut” offers a three-day reprieve from the city’s cinematic status quo. Now in its second season, this brief screening cycle of prize-winning features from Switzerland’s best-loved film festival is staged by the Swiss Embassy, the Metropolis Cinema Association, the Sursock Museum and UBS, a Swiss multinational investment bank and financial services company.
All projections are free of charge and will be staged outdoors, on the Sursock Museum’s esplanade. The event’s programmers have selected three award-winning features from various editions of Locarno.
Screenings start Thursday, May 30, with “BlacKkKlansman.” Lee’s latest is based on the story of Ron Stallworth, an African-American cop from Colorado who in the 1970s managed to infiltrate the local Ku Klux Klan, an American organization known for its hatred of African-Americans, Catholics and Jews, as well its members’ fondness for bravely concealing their identities behind long dresses and hoods.
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“BlacKkKlansman” premiered last year at the Cannes Film Festival, where Lee’s stylish, impishly provocative technique and solid performances by John David Washington and Adam Driver won it the jury Grand Prix, the second-most prestigious prize of the festival after the Palme d’Or. Later in the season it took Locarno’s Prix du Public UBS and the 2019 Oscar for best adapted screenplay.
Friday evening’s feature is “Right Now, Wrong Then,” the 2015 by South Korean director Hong Sangsoo. For film buffs who’ve yet to sample South Korea’s distinguished film industry, Hong’s work is a fine place to start. Some critics have compared the writer-director to Woody Allen because of his prolific output, while at least one festival programmer has remarked, “All Hong’s films are the same and they’re all great.”
The winner of Locarno’s Pardo d’Oro in 2015, as well as the best actor award, “Right Now, Wrong Then” follows Ham, a filmmaker not unlike Hong himself, who arrives in the town of Suwon to present one of his films. Sightseeing beforehand, he meets a young artist, who’s heard his name but nothing else.
The first half of the film looks on as their evening together, walking, talking, eating and drinking, veers near romance. The second half follows their encounter a second time, when different decisions lead their conversation in slightly different comic directions.
Saturday evening, LFFIB will project Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 “Bicycle Thieves,” arguably the foundation stone of the Italian neorealist movement and one of the great films of the European canon. Its awards include a special jury prize at Locarno in 1949, an honorary Oscar in 1950, as well as a BAFTA and a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film in 1950.
Set in post-World War II Rome, the film recounts a day in the life of working-class Antonio, who scratches out a living doing day jobs on his bicycle. When his bike is stolen, he and his little boy Bruno spend the day trying to recover it. De Sica’s portrait of the daily struggles of the urban poor is as timely today as it was 70 years ago.
The “Locarno Film Festival in Beirut” will be staged May 30 to June 1 on the Sursock Museum’s esplanade. All screenings start at 8:30 p.m and are free of charge. For more details, see metropoliscinema.net.
This article has been adapted from its original source.
