8:00 PM – 11:00 PM
"From time to time, we've programmed a movie we hope you'll take a chance on. You might remember a few years ago when we programmed Jacques Audiard's 2009 Cannes Film Festival winning prison gangster drama/spiritual awakening powerhouse Un Prophete. Or a year later, 2014's stunning Ukranian movie without any spoken dialogue about troubled teens in a deaf high school The Tribe written & directed by Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy.
Now, we hope you'll take another chance with us as we screen what this programmer feels is one of the greatest movies of the 2010's: the Russian sci-fi opus Hard To Be A God.
Adapted and directed by Aleksei German who died before its release (his family put on the final touches), Hard to Be A God tells the story of a group of astronauts from Earth who are living incognito on a planet much like our own where the society has never left the middle ages. The astronauts have sworn only to OBSERVE not to INFLUENCE events. But one astronaut, Don Rumata, posing as a local Duke, finds it increasingly hard not to act as he watches religious superstition, hypocrisy, and abuse keep people in poverty and keep idiots in power.
An utterly singular and strange movie where you feel YOU ARE ON THE PLANET rather then in a movie, you have to adapt to the movie's hypnotic strange rhythms and mind-blowing production design. But if you get on the wavelength of this movie, you experience something akin to a cross of Dune and Solaris."
