Viva Lewes Issue #157 October 2019
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ON THIS MONTH: FILM<br />
Maiden, The Leopard, Red Desert<br />
Film ’19<br />
Dexter Lee’s cinema round-up<br />
This month’s book-to-film offering (Oct 3rd)<br />
features a much-loved classic. To Kill a Mockingbird<br />
won a Pulitzer prize for author Harper Lee<br />
in 1950, and its screen adaptation won three<br />
awards in the 1962 Academy Awards, including<br />
best actor for Gregory Peck, and best adapted<br />
screenplay for Horton Foote.<br />
Luchino Visconti’s historical epic The Leopard<br />
(6th) didn’t win an Oscar, but did bag the Cannes<br />
Palme D’Or in 1963. Based on Giuseppe Tomasi<br />
di Lampedusa’s eponymous novel, it’s set during<br />
Garibaldi’s military campaign in Sicily in 1860.<br />
Burt Lancaster stars; the costumes are stunning.<br />
This is the first of an Italian 1960s mini-season<br />
at Depot. It’s accompanied by Michelangelo<br />
Antonioni’s existential 1964 masterpiece Red<br />
Desert, starring Monica Vitti and Richard Harris<br />
(16th, preceded by an Italian meal for those who<br />
choose), and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s metaphorical<br />
and thought-provoking masterpiece, Theorem<br />
(23rd), starring Terence Stamp as a young man<br />
who has a dramatic effect on the lives of a bourgeois<br />
Italian family he visits.<br />
From the sublimely ridiculous to the ridiculously<br />
sublime: <strong>October</strong>’s dementia-friendly<br />
offering is the Elvis Presley vehicle Blue Hawaii<br />
(8th), all surfboards, colourful shirts, and complicated<br />
love triangles.<br />
Depot is celebrating European Arthouse<br />
Cinema Day with a preview of the latest film<br />
by French ‘new New Wave’ director François<br />
Ozon. By the Grace of God (13th) examines the<br />
after effects of the Lyons Catholic Church<br />
sexual abuse scandal; the film gets a week’s run<br />
later in the month (from 25th).<br />
The oldest film of the month, and this month’s<br />
choice in the Michael Voigt Film Club, hasn’t<br />
lost any of its vibrancy. Howard Hawks’ 1940<br />
screwball comedy His Girl Friday (16th) stars<br />
Cary Grant as an unscrupulous journalist<br />
trying to stop his former colleague – and lover<br />
– Rosalind Russell from getting married, by<br />
trying to involve her in an unfolding scoop.<br />
And the month should end with a few more: exact<br />
details weren’t released as we went to press,<br />
but expect at least one horror movie at Depot<br />
on Halloween (31st, obvs).<br />
There are two films at the <strong>Lewes</strong> Film Club,<br />
in the All Saints, and both feature powerful<br />
female leads. Benedikt Erlingsson’s 2018<br />
offering Woman at War (11th) sees Halldóra<br />
Geirharðsdóttir portray a mild-mannered<br />
Reykjavik choir instructor leading a double life:<br />
by night she is a hardened eco-terrorist. Can<br />
she pull off one-last manoeuvre before fulfilling<br />
her life dream and adopting a child? Alex<br />
Holmes’ Maiden, meanwhile (22nd) is a moving<br />
and illuminating documentary examining how<br />
Tracy Edwards turned from ship’s cook to yacht<br />
skipper in order to lead the first-ever all-female<br />
crew in the Whitbread Round the World Race<br />
in 1989, confronting chauvinistic ridicule from<br />
the yachting fraternity, and biblical weather<br />
conditions, along the way.<br />
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