MON JUN 5, 2023 7:30 PM MOTHER AND SON / THE SECOND CIRCLE $8.00 (member) ; $13.00 (general admission) Aero Theatre | Pre-recorded Q&A with filmmaker Aleksandr Sokurov. Moderated by Chris LeMaire, Senior Film Programmer at American Cinematheque. Rare 35mm prints! ‘Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair – Year Two’ Tickets are no longer on sale for this event.
ABOUT THE FILMS: MOTHER AND SON, 1997, Aleksandr Sokurov , 73 Minutes, Tamasa, Russia In Russian with English subtitles Equal parts breathtakingly beautiful and relentlessly sad, Aleksandr Sokurov’s poetic masterpiece follows the final moments shared between loving mother and son. A visual experience of the loneliness and heartfelt emotion of the pair, the film explores themes of life and death in a harsh world that offers little comfort. FORMAT: 35mm THE SECOND CIRCLE, 1990, Aleksandr Sokurov, 92 Minutes, Russia In Russian with English subtitles In a remote Siberian village, an anonymous young man emerges from a blizzard to claim his late father’s body. Navigating the detritus of an old man’s final friendless decade and the dehumanizing maze of red tape that are his father’s sole legacy, the boy inadvertently picks through the debris of unraveled family ties and confronts the yawning gap between alienated Soviet generations. Scorned and ignored, his labor of mourning becomes as transformative as the labor of birth. “I’ll burn everything, but not my father,” the young man warns a funeral director. As he finds himself in his father’s lifeless eyes, the reluctant young pilgrim discovers that they have more in common in death than they did in life. FORMAT: 35mm