FREE SCREENINGS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
University of Michigan Benzinger Library, Residential College
1423 East Quad (701 East University, A2 MI 48109)
Public entrance off of East University, door closest to Willard
Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (59 min)
7.10pm on Thursday, March 15, 2018
Good Bye, Lenin! (2hrs 1min)
4.10pm on Friday, March 16, 2018
Note: Sizwe Bansi contains adult situations, and Good Bye, Lenin! is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has, as critic Peter Branshaw notes, “Communist rioting and violence and post-Communist nudity, strong language and alcohol consumption.”
These free screenings form part of the interdisciplinary course and film series Personal, Present and Immediate*: Making Performance on Socio-Political Questions. Post-screening discussions of each work will be moderated by Artist in Residence and Visiting Professor Eryn Rosenthal.
* “Personal, present and immediate”: From Murray v. Maryland (1935), one of the precedents to the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
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More about this week’s screenings:
Sizwe Bansi is a comedic parable set in New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, South Africa that questions the nature of identity in relation to the state-sponsored violence of Apartheid. The play began as a series of improvisations, devised by South African actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona with director/playwright Athol Fugard in the early 70s (Kani and Ntshona won a rare joint Tony award for their performances in Sizwe in 1975). On Thursday, we’ll be watching a video of the original actors in their 1974 stage production in London.
Good Bye, Lenin! is a 2003 movie by German director Wolfgang Becker, set in East Berlin at the fall of the Berlin Wall. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian calls the film a “Rip Van Winkle parable… It combines satire of the communist state and its desperate and sentimental delusions and state-sponsored infantilism, with a love story: the kind of love story rarely celebrated in the movies or anywhere else – a boy’s love for his mother.”