UPC brings foriegn films to LSU
The LSU Union Programming Council is sponsoring its annual International Film Festival starting Tuesday, March 17. Combined with the Cinema Club at LSU’s 3rd annual Outhouse Festival on April 27 and 28, the LSU movie season has officially begun.
The International Festival will screen five globe-spanning films in the Union Colonnade Theater. Start times for all films will be 7 p.m.
1998’s Best Foreign Film Oscar winner “Life Is Beautiful” (Italy) opens the International Festival Tuesday. Though best known for director Roberto Benigni’s over-joyous acceptance speech, “Life Is Beautiful” stands out as an endearing comedy set in a WWII Nazi concentration camp.
The 1997 Best Foreign Film, “Koyla” (Czechoslovakia) will be screened on Thursday. This drama follows an unemployed musician and the abandoned 5-year-old Czech boy who he must raise as his son.
“The Red Violin,” a centuries spanning epic that won the Oscar as 1999’s Best Foreign Film, plays Friday. The film examines the history of a rare violin from the Italian workshop in which it was made across five countries and 300 years to an auction in present-day Montreal, and the lives the instrument affects.
On Monday, March 25, the festival will screen 2000’s “Adanggaman.” This bold drama from the Ivory Coast explores the controversial role that black Africans played in selling their own countrymen to the European slave trade.
The finale of the International Film Festival is a showing of the 2000 blockbuster “Traffic.” Former LSU student Steven Soderbergh won an Oscar for directing this moving three part drama about America’s war on drugs. The festival’s only domestic product, “Traffic” features and all-star cast, including Michael Douglas, Catherine-Zeta Jones and Benicio del Toro, who won an Oscar for his supporting role in the picture.