Gone But Not Forgotten
La Traviata
February 26 Opera film: La Traviata, starring Placido Domingo and Teresa Stratas, with the
Metropolitan Opera Orchestra & Chorus, conducted by James Levine. Tickets £8 from HLSI.
March 12 Orchestra Seats
France 2006, 106 mins. (dir. Danièle Thompson), starring Cécile de France, Valérie Lemercier, Albert Dupontel and Claude Brasseur.
A cross generational romantic comedy set in the Avenue Montaigne, an area dominated by theatres and galleries, it tells three stories involving a pianist, an actress and an art collector, linked together by the central character of the charming waitress from the provinces who has come to work in Paris.
April 23 Au revoir les enfants
France 1987, 104 mins. (dir: Louis Malle), starring Gaspard Manesse and Raphaël Fejtö.
A French boarding school run by priests during WW2 appears to be a safe haven until a new student arrives.
He is a Jewish boy who, using an assumed name, is being hidden from the Nazis by the priests. Louis Malle
based this film on what actually happened at his own boarding school. The film won many awards, including
The Golden Lion at the 1987 Venice Film Festival, and was Oscar-nominated for Best Foreign Film in 1988.
April 30 Special Event Romeo & Juliet
Starring Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, and the Royal Ballet (1966). Tickets £8 from HLSI.
Japan 1951
88 mins. (dir. Kenji Mizoguchi), starring Kinuyo Tanaka and Masayuki Mori.
This is one of Mizoguchi's sympathetic studies of the ambiguous moral climate of post-war Japan in which, perhaps inevitably, traditional values are challenged by new thinking. Tanaka plays an aristocratic woman determined to maintain her family's way of life despite her loveless marriage and free-thinking husband. But her attitudes are challenged by the arrival of her handsome young cousin, just back from the war, who romantically opens her eyes to new and exciting possibilities.
An evening of mostly silent films, including Buster Keaton's The General. A contribution to HLSI's Summer programme. Tickets £8 fvrom HLSI.
UK 1966
120 mins. (dir. Fred Zinnemann), starring Paul Scofield, Wendy Hiller, Leo McKern, Orson Welles and Susannah York.
The story of Sir Thomas More, who stood up to Henry VIII when the King rejected the Roman Catholic Church in order to obtain a divorce from Catherine of Aragon and then marry Anne Boleyn. The play and screenplay by Robert Bolt portray More as a man of principle, envied by his rivals and loved by the common people. Th
