SAT JUNE 18, 2022 7:30 PM FUNNY GAMES / SPOORLOOS $8.00 (member) ; $13.00 (general admission) Aero Theatre | ‘BLEAK WEEK: Cinema of Despair’ Series Encore Tickets are no longer on sale for this event.
ABOUT THE FILMS: FUNNY GAMES, 1997, Janus Films, 109 min, Austria, Dir: Michael Haneke. Michael Haneke’s most notorious provocation, FUNNY GAMES spares no detail in its depiction of the agony of a bourgeois family held captive at their vacation home by a pair of white-gloved young men. In a series of escalating “games,” the sadistic duo subject their victims to unspeakable physical and psychological torture over the course of a night. A home-invasion thriller in which the genre’s threat of bloodshed is made stomach-churningly real, the film ratchets up shocks even as its executioners interrupt the action to address the audience, drawing queasy attention to the way that cinema milks pleasure from pain and stokes our appetite for atrocity. FORMAT: 35mm SPOORLOOS, 1988, Janus Films, 106 min, Netherlands, Dir: George Sluizer. A young man embarks on an obsessive search for the girlfriend who mysteriously disappeared while the couple were taking a sunny vacation trip, and his three-year investigation draws the attention of her abductor, a mild-mannered professor with a clinically diabolical mind. An unorthodox love story and a truly unsettling thriller, Dutch filmmaker George Sluizer’s SPOORLOOS (THE VANISHING) unfolds with meticulous intensity, leading to an unforgettable finale that has unnerved audiences around the world. FORMAT: 35mm, courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive