THURGOOD
September 20 (Friday)
Film screening — 7:30 p.m., Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus

Directed by Michael Stevens
(United States, 2011, 105 minutes, color)

“Enthralling theater and television… This is dramatized legal history of the best kind,” said New York Times reviewer Ginia Bellafante. Laurence Fishburne presents a riveting one-man show as Thurgood Marshall, America’s first black Supreme Court Justice, reprising his widely-acclaimed, Tony-nominated 2008 Broadway performance, for which he received Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards. Gilbert King, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Devil in the Grove, about an early case in the legal career of Thurgood Marshall, said, “Fishburne is the first actor I’ve seen to come close to capturing Marshall’s charisma.” (see September 26 listing for information on an appearance by Gilbert King)

PEOPLE ON SUNDAY [MENSCHEN AM SONNTAG]
September 27 (Friday)
Film screening — 7:30 p.m., Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus

Directed by Robert Siodmak
(Germany, 1930, 74 minutes, b/w, silent with live piano accompaniment by Mike Schiffer)

The flirtations of a summer Sunday at the beach in Weimar Germany provide the principal content of a film that helped launch the careers of some of 20th century Hollywood’s most influential filmmakers, including Robert Siodmak (THE KILLERS), Billy Wilder (SUNSET BOULEVARD), Fred Zinnemann (FROM HERE TO ETERNITY), horror movie screenwriter Curt Siodmak (THE WOLFMAN), and B-movie king Edgar G. Ulmer (DETOUR). Blending documentary footage and fictional storytelling, the film features the camera work of Eugen Schüfftan, better known for Fritz Lang’s spectacular METROPOLIS (1927)..

Women Writers of the Middle East

Cosponsored by UAlbany’s Office of International Education, International Academic Program, Global Institute for Health and Human Rights, Women’s Studies, Center for Women in Government & Civil Society, and University Auxiliary Services in conjunction with the “Women of the Middle East” series. For more information on the entire series go to: https://www.albany.edu/intled

NO ONE KNOWS ABOUT PERSIAN CATS [KASI AZ GORBEHAYE IRANI KHABAR NADAREH]
October 22 (Tuesday)
Film screening — 7:00 p.m., [Note early start time] Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, Uptown Campus [Note Location]

Iranian musician Rana Farhan will provide film commentary and answer questions immediately following the screening.

Directed by Bahman Ghobadi
(Iran, 2009, 106 minutes, color, in Persian with English subtitles)

This quasi-documentary offers a glimpse into Iran’s forbidden underground music scene. Recently imprisoned Iranian musicians attempt to put together a band and secure travel documents to play some concerts in Europe, all the while trying to avoid police detection for their illegal activity. The film won the Cannes Film Festival Un Certain Regard Jury Prize and the Miami Film Festival Audience Award.

Ty Burr of the Boston Globe called it, “a tiny, wonderful movie about Iranian rock ’n’ rollers…. the director treats us to a fast, vibrant montage of Iranian faces and street scenes — as if to say, look, this is who we really are…. [The] message is exquisitely simple: Hear us. Please: Hear us.”

Women Writers of the Middle East

THE PEAR TREE [DERAKHTE GOLABI]
October 23 (Wednesday)
Film screening — 7:30 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, Uptown Campus [Note Location]

Directed by Dariush Mehrjui
(Iran, 1998, 95 minutes, color, in Farsi with English subtitles)

Goli Taraghi, who visits the Writers Institute on October 24th (see Visiting Writers page) wrote the screenplay of this film, which is based on her original short story. Intent on completing a new novel, an author with writer’s block returns to his family’s vacation house in the Iranian countryside, where he is beset by childhood memories. The film received the Silver Hugo for Best Feature at the Chicago International Film Festival.

A Celebration of Swedish Author Stig Dagerman (1923-1954)
with his daughter Lo Dagerman and translator Steven Hartman
October 25 (Friday)
Reading and Film Screening — 7:30 p.m., Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus

Stig Dagerman was considered to be Sweden’s next great literary phenomenon for his critically acclaimed fiction and essays published during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Then in 1954, at the age of 31, he committed suicide. His work is currently experiencing a revival in the United States and Europe as several noted authors, translators, and publishers have praised his writing. Working with the author’s daughter, Lo Dagerman, Steven Hartman, UAlbany Ph.D. graduate and former graduate assistant at the Writers Institute, has translated and published a number of Stig Dagerman’s stories in American literary magazines since the early 1990s. These translations have been collected in the new volume, Sleet (2013). This event will feature readings and discussions of Dagerman’s work by Lo Dagerman and Hartman, as well as screenings of short films based on Hartman’s translations of two stories, Our Need for Consolation (19 min., 2012), and The Games of Night (20 min., 2008), directed by the author’s grandson, Dan Levy Dagerman.

EXTERMINATING ANGEL [EL ÁNGEL EXTERMINADOR]
November 1 (Friday)
Film screening and discussion with novelist and screenwriter William Kennedy and Writers Institute Director Donald Faulkner — 7:00 p.m. [Note early start time], Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus

Directed by Luis Buñuel
(Mexico, 1962, 95 minutes, b/w, in Spanish with English subtitles)

The guests at a lavish dinner party find that they are psychologically unable to leave the host’s mansion in this surrealistic masterpiece by director Luis Buñuel. As the days pass, the “trapped” guests become increasingly belligerent and bizarre in their behaviors, ultimately reverting to various forms of savagery. Nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, the film received the FIPRESCI international critics’ prize.

Sponsored in conjunction with UAlbany’s School of Criminal Justice’s Food, Crime, and Justice Film Series 

Directed by Aleksandr Sokurov
(Russia, 2002, 99 minutes, color, in Russian with English subtitles)

Widely acclaimed as both a technical masterpiece and a captivating spectacle, this tour of three hundred years of Russian history represents, in its entirety, the single longest continuous shot in motion picture history. Featuring two thousand actors and three live orchestras, the film follows an invisible narrator and a group of dead souls as they cavort through thirty-three rooms of the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg. Writing in the Village Voice, J. Hoberman called it, “Sublime…. blithely anachronistic and slyly achronological…. [a] dazzling dance to the music of time.”

THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES
November 15 (Friday)
Film screening and discussion with Ben Coccio — 7:00 p.m. [Note early start time], Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus

Directed by Derek Cianfrance; screenplay co-written by Ben Coccio and Derek Cianfrance
(United States, 2012, 140 min., color)

Ben Coccio, filmmaker, screenwriter, and Niskayuna native, and Derek Cianfrance, award-winning film director, collaborated on this hit independent movie that was filmed in Schenectady. THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES is the story of a travelling motorcycle stuntman (Ryan Gosling) who resettles in Schenectady after discovering that he is the father of a child with his former hometown girlfriend (Eva Mendes). Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, Richard Roeper said, “An outstanding supporting cast and an immensely talented creative team [have] put together a film that touches greatness.... not a single element is timid or safe.” Coccio will offer commentary and answer questions immediately after the screening.

Seminar: Ben Coccio will hold an informal seminar on screenwriting at 4:15 p.m. in the Science Library Room 340, Science Library.

THE MAKIOKA SISTERS [SASAME-YUKI]
November 22 (Friday)
Film screening — 7:30 p.m., Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus

Directed by Kon Ichikawa
(Japan, 1983, 140 minutes, color, in Japanese with English subtitles)

Set in 1938 this film follows the lives of four sisters as they confront changing cultural attitudes between centuries-old Japanese tradition and encroaching elements of modern society. Gentle in tone and visually lush at times, the film is a lyrical adaptation of a novel by popular Japanese author Junichiro Tanizaki.

Directed by Leo McCarey
(United States, 1957, 119 minutes, color)

AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER is considered one of the most romantic films of all time, according to the American Film Institute. A handsome playboy, played by Cary Grant, and a beautiful nightclub singer, played by Deborah Kerr, fall in love while on a cruise from Europe to New York. Despite being engaged to other people, the two agree to meet at the top of the Empire State Building in six months. Do they both keep the appointment?