In April, Kinomania will show iconic films starring Sean Connery and Michel Piccoli, who left us in 2020.
Kinomania film festival will be held in compliance with all anti-epidemic measures. The audience is asked for order in the cinemas, to wear masks and to keep their distance, the organizers from the National Palace of Culture announced.
Moviegoers can enjoy the adventure The Man Who Would Be King (1975) on April 6 at the Lumiere Cinema. The film is directed by John Houston and is an adaptation of the story of the same name by Rudyard Kipling. In addition to Sean Connery, the cast also include Michael Kane, Christopher Plummer and Said Jaffrey. The imperialist parody is about two British soldiers who decide to present themselves as the kings of Kafiristan and heirs of Alexander the Great, and the locals consider them demigods.
The film has four Oscar nominations, two BAFTA nominations, a Golden Globe nomination, and an American Screenwriters Guild nomination for an adapted screenplay.
Within the program of the Kinomania film festival and as the main focus of the French Film Festival, six films with the participation of the great Michel Piccoli, called by the French “the sacred monster of the seventh art”, will be shown. They will be screened at the Lumiere and Odeon cinemas, as well as at the French Institute.
On April 3, the Lumiere cinema will screen the infamous La Grande Bouffe (1973) directed by Marco Ferreri and starring Marcello Mastroianni, Hugo Toniatsi, Philippe Noiret and others. The story is grotesque to the consumer society and tells the story of four friends who overeat to death. The film received the FIPRESCI Award at the Cannes Film Festival.
The atmosphere is different in Strange Affair from 1981 (April 18, Lumiere Cinema), where Piccoli plays a tyrannical, obsessive boss with macho manners. Directed by Pierre Granier-Deferre, the film tells the story of the anxious atmosphere that surrounds a young man blinded by the aura of his seemingly likable but unscrupulous boss. For his performance in Strange Affair, Piccoli won the Silver Bear for Best Actor in Berlin, and the production won one award and four Cesar nominations.
We Have a Pope from 2011 (April 11, Lumiere Cinema) by director Nanni Moretti is one of Piccoli’s latest films. A mixture of refined humor and a deeply touching portrait of a man elected to a position charged with crushing responsibilities, it is a reflection of the director’s subtle sense of irony and deep humanism, imbued with a great sense of humor and Piccoli’s magnificent performance as a man who is caught in an existential and political labyrinth. The film is in the competition program of Cannes, has two nominations for the European Film Awards, as well as three awards and eight nominations for “David of Donatello”.
In Max and the Junkmen from 1971 (April 10, Lumiere Cinema), Michel Piccoli brilliantly plays a cop obsessed with catching a gang of thieves at a crime scene – to the point that he traps them with the help of a prostitute. … The director of the production is Claude Sautet, and Piccoli is partnered by the wonderful Romi Schneider.
Actress Anouk Aimée is a partner of Michel Piccoli in A Leap in the Dark from 1980 (April 17, Lumiere Cinema) directed by Marco Bellocchio. Writing about the film, Gilles Jacob says in the book “About the Cannes Film Festival with Love”: “… This is a story about a brother and sister who have lived together since they were born, and in it, the complex structure of human beings is caused by the unspoken and the undisclosed. “For their performance, Piccoli and Aimée won awards for best male and female roles at the Cannes Film Festival, respectively. The production also won Donatello’s David for directing.
Piccoli plays a radically different role in Themroc (1973) by director Claude Faraldo. The disciplined worker Themroc, living under the influence of his mother, suffers a mental breakdown, which brings him to a state of primary animal impulses, freed from social norms.
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