View movies from around the world starting Thursday, June 27, with the free “Global Lens 2013” film series.
Three cinematic works from Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East will be shown this summer in Room C118 at Parkland, starting at 6:30 p.m.; more movies will follow in the fall. Films are 90 minutes to 128 minutes in length, with English subtitles. All films and popcorn are free.
MODEST RECEPTION (Paziraie Sadeh)
June 27
Director: Mani Haghighi (Iran 2012)
Leila and Kaveh are a mysterious pair from Tehran, traveling the mountainous countryside in their Lexus coupe to push big bags of money on the locals. This turns out to be not so easy, but fascinating to watch, as the cagey couple invent increasingly brazen stratagems to place cash in the hands of the wary, proud or indifferent. Will they push things too far? Are they losing sight of their mission? What exactly is their mission?
SOUTHWEST (Sudoeste)
July 18
Director: Eduardo Nunes (Brazil 2011)
In this gorgeously dreamlike and mysterious tale, a young woman named Clarice gives birth on her deathbed to a baby girl also christened Clarice by the bruxa (or witch) attending the nearly simultaneous moments of death and birth. Spirited away to a remote lakeside village, baby Clarice lives her whole life in the span of twenty-four hours, and yet (as the film’s vast, black-and-white panoramas suggest) even so compressed a lifetime remains impossible to fully grasp or contain.
STUDENT
August 1
Director: Darezhan Omirbayev (Kazakhstan 2012)
A solitary philosophy student steers his directionless life toward the commission of a violent crime, spurred on by postmodern musings and a post-Soviet order characterized by growing inequality, institutional corruption and a ruthless ethic of “eat or be eaten.“ Inspired by Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, director Darezhan Omirbayev roots his nameless student in the losing segment of Kazakhstan’s new capitalist era, whose population watches the rich rise above common legal proscriptions and old-fashioned communal values.
Global Lens is an annual touring film series launched in 2003 by the Global Film Initiative to support the distribution of critically acclaimed cinematic works from around the world.These films capture scenes of extraordinary courage, reconciliation, personal struggles, comedic family situations, and more. Films include English subtitles where necessary. Visit
http://www.globalfilm.org/ for more information.
Parkland Art Gallery sponsors the free film series. The Global Lens series is cosponsored by the Center for Global Studies at UIUC with partial funding from the Title VI Program of the U.S. Department of Education. Parkland Art Gallery programming is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.