Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair - Year 3 Festival

About the Event

Schedule:

7:00 PM: IN VANDA’S ROOM

In Portuguese with English subtitles.

For the extraordinarily beautiful second film in his Fontainhas trilogy, Pedro Costa jettisoned his earlier films’ larger crews to burrow even deeper into the Lisbon ghetto and the lives of its desperate inhabitants. With the intimate feel of a documentary and the texture of a Vermeer painting, IN VANDA’S ROOM takes an unflinching, fragmentary look at a handful of self-destructive, marginalized people, but is centered around the heroin-addicted Vanda Duarte. Costa presents the daily routines of Vanda and her neighbors with disarming matter-of-factness, and through his camera, individuals whom many would deem disposable become vivid and vital.

Format: DCP

Distributor: Janus Films

Country: Portugal

Location: Los Feliz Theatre, 1822 N Vermont Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90027

Cost: $8.00 (member); $13.00 (general admission)

7:30 PM: SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK

Theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is mounting a new play. His life catering to suburban blue-hairs at the local regional theater in Schenectady, New York is looking bleak. His wife Adele (Catherine Keener) has left him to pursue her painting in Berlin, taking their young daughter Olive with her. His therapist, Madeleine Gravis (Hope Davis), is better at plugging her best-seller than she is at counseling him. A new relationship with the alluringly candid Hazel (Samantha Morton) has prematurely run aground. And a mysterious condition is systematically shutting down each of his autonomic functions, one by one. Worried about the transience of his life, he leaves his home behind. He gathers an ensemble cast into a warehouse in New York City, hoping to create a work of brutal honesty. He directs them in a celebration of the mundane, instructing each to live out their constructed lives in a growing mockup of the city outside. The years rapidly fold into each other, and Caden buries himself deeper into his masterpiece, but the textured tangle of real and theatrical relationships blurs the line between the world of the play and that of Caden’s own deteriorating reality.

Format: 35mm

Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics

Country: USA

Location: Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90028

Cost: $15.00 (members-only)

10:30 PM: HAPPY TOGETHER

In Cantonese, Mandarin and Spanish with English subtitles.

A couple take a trip to Argentina in search of a new beginning, but instead find themselves drifting ever further apart.

Format: DCP

Distributor: Janus Films

Country: Hong Kong/South Korea/Japan

Location: Los Feliz Theatre, 1822 N Vermont Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90027

Cost: $8.00 (member) ; $13.00 (general admission)

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