Our final week of films for the semester starts today! After this week, we’ll take a break to plan for the Spring semester. For those of you who’ve taken part in our Fall season’s Virtual Cinema screenings, keep an eye out for a user survey we’ll be sending out next week; we’d love your input on what worked and what didn’t, so we can recalibrate for next semester.
Opening today is Doña Flor and Her Two Husbands. It was a huge international success, and for decades was the highest grossing film in Brazil. It’s easy to see why: this Brazilian comedy follows the strange events that befall Doña Flor after she is left a widow by the death of her philandering husband. Attempting to marry more wisely the second time around, Doña Flor weds a stable, but boring, pharmacist “who performs his marital duties like a man trying to park a bread van.” (Time). When she discovers that her new sex life is less than satisfying, Doña Flor is visited by the sexy ghost of her late husband, who is more than happy to fulfill her needs.
Also opening today is The Killing Floor (pictured), which rounds out our Black Lives on Screen series. Praised by The Village Voice as the most “clear-eyed account of union organizing on film,” The Killing Floor dramatizes the true story of the WWI-era attempts to organize an interracial labor union in the Chicago stockyards, just 10 years removed from Upton Sinclair’s exposé The Jungle. The film, based on a meticulously-researched story by producer Elsa Rassbach, depicts the racial and class conflicts seething in Chicago’s giant slaughterhouses, and the brutal efforts of management to divide the workforce along ethnic lines, setting the stage for the Chicago Race Riot of 1919.
Both films will be shown in recent restorations!
