East Hampton Library's Festival to Showcase World Cinema
For those whose taste in films includes the offbeat and independent, the East Hampton Library will present free screenings of six foreign films in its annual Winter International Film Festival, which will open on Sunday at 2 p.m. with “Antonia’s Line,” a Dutch production that won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1996. The festival continues on consecutive Sunday afternoons with the exception of Feb. 5. All films have English subtitles.
As in years past, Steven Spataro, the adult reference librarian, has chosen the films from the extensive catalog of Film Movement, a distributor devoted to independent cinema. Mr. Spataro was drawn to film as an adolescent, when he would read Roger Ebert’s book at a library where his mother worked.
Directed by Marleen Gorris, “Antonia’s Line” opens after World War II, when the strong-willed Antonia returns to her small hometown after inheriting her mother’s farm. She and her free-spirited artist daughter ingratiate themselves with the town’s eccentrics, and as the years pass, full of both love and tragedy, the women foster a circle of strong liberated women.
“Finding Gaston” is a 2014 Spanish-language documentary about the Peruvian chef Gaston Acurio, a one-time law student who studied at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and returned to Peru to apply his knowledge of international cuisine to his homeland. The film explores the inspirations and dreams of Mr. Acurio, who now owns 44 restaurants around the world and of whom Nick Miroff of The Washington Post wrote, “Calling Acurio a celebrity chef today is like saying Oprah is a talk-show host. He is more of a modern food shaman: artist, interpreter, healer, impresario, and national pitchman.”
“The Dinner,” directed by Ivano De Matteo, is a 2014 Italian adaptation of the internationally best-selling novel of that title, by the Dutch writer Herman Koch. It focuses on two brothers, their wives, and the monthly dinner they share at a posh restaurant. During the meal, their forced familiarity is shattered by a violent incident that exposes the moral shortcomings of their privileged lives.
From South Korea comes “My Love, Don’t Cross That River,” a 2014 documentary that was that country’s most successful film of all time. In making the film, the director Jin Moyoung spent 15 months with a couple who had been married for 76 years. The Los Angeles Times critic Katie Walsh called it “a moving tribute to the beauties and mysteries of life and death, an exploration of how growing old gives the gift of time . . .”
Its title may sound oxymoronic, but the 2012 film “The Jewish Cardinal” is based on the true story of Jean-Marie Lustiger, who was born in Paris in 1926 to a Jewish family, converted to Catholicism at the age of 13, and eventually became archbishop of Paris, while maintaining his cultural identity as a Jew. When Carmelite nuns establish a convent within Auschwitz — where his mother was killed in 1942 — he is forced to mediate between Jewish and Catholic interests and eventually negotiates the nuns’ departure from the former concentration camp.
The festival will conclude with “Wondrous Boccaccio,” a 2015 film by the Italian brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. Loosely based on the stories of “The Decameron,” the film is set in 14th-century, plague-stricken Florence, where 10 young men and women escape to a country estate and spend their days telling stories of love, fate, and resurrection. The film was shot in medieval castles, towers, and ruins in Tuscany and Lazio.