Film Evenings

The Center regularly screens selected movies at its Film Evenings, soon to be extended to focus especially on urban themes.  From autumn 2008 the Center will start a series of film evenings "KinoMisto," dedicated to images of different cities, real or imagined, the representation of cities in movies and the relationship between cinema as an art form and the city, while embracing different continents, periods, and genres.

Utopia and Dystopia

Cities in films have been screened as contemporary locations, historic settings, as well as utopian and dystopian visions. The series "KinoMisto" at the Center will include Fritz Lang's dystopia Metropolis, Terry Gilliam's more recent Brazil, Michael Redford's 1984, and Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez's Sin City, but also the Soviet urban dystopia of Karen Shakhnazarov's City Zero.

Realism's City

At the same time, there will also be films with realistic urban settings. For example, Marseilles in Robert Guediguian's The Town Is Quiet and Jacques Deray's Borsalino, Le Havre in Marcel Carné's Port of Shadows, the slums of Rio in Fernando Meirelles's City of God, a small town on the border between Argentina and Paraguay in John Mackenzie's The Honorary Consul.

East Central Europe

Of course, films dedicated to cities of East Central Europe will make an important part of the program. Thus we will see Budapest in Nimród Antal's Kontroll, Prague in Jan Hrebejk's Up and Down, Vienna in Carol Reed's The Third Man, Warsaw in Dariusz Gajewski's Warszawa, Sarajevo in Michael Winterbottom's Welcome to Sarajevo, Odessa in Michale Boganim's Odessa... Odessa!

Metropolises

There also will be movies set in or referring to such metropolises as Paris, London, New York, Tokyo, Moscow, or LA, to name only a few. For example, Paris in René Clair's Under the Roofs of Paris and Gérard Oury's La Grande vadrouille, Berlin in Edmund Goulding's Grand Hotel and Walter Ruttmann's Berlin, Symphony of a Big City, Tokyo in Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog, New York in William Friedkin's The French Connection and Woody Allen's Manhattan, LA in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, Joel Coen's Barton Fink, and in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, Moscow in Georgiy Daneliya's I Walk Around Moscow and Karen Shakhnazarov's The Rider Named Death.