PELHAM, NY — On Thursday, July 13th at 7:30 p.m. The Picture House Regional Film Center (TPH) will host an advance screening of Amnesia (1 hr., 36 mins.), followed by a discussion with the critically-acclaimed director, Barbet Schroeder led by TPH’s critic-in-residence Marshall Fine. Amnesia was selected to screen in the Special Screenings section at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and opens in New York on Friday, July 21st.
Set in Ibiza in the early 1990s, Amnesia follows central character, Martha (Marthe Keller), a non-Jewish German woman who left Germany shortly before the outbreak of WWII and who, repulsed by the atrocities of the Nazis, never returned and refuses to speak her native language. When Amnesia begins a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Martha has been settled for decades in on the idyllic Spanish island where she lives a quiet, lonely life in a small hillside home with beautiful, panoramic Mediterranean views. Her solitary routine is interrupted by the arrival of a new, young neighbor, Jo (Max Riemelt), a 25-year-old aspiring DJ from Berlin who’s trying to break into Ibiza’s burgeoning electronic dance music scene. The ensuing platonic relationship ensconced in the mysteries surrounding Martha’s past and a surprise visit from Jo’s mother and grandfather steer this dramatic film to its conclusion.
After the screening TPH’s critic-in-residence Marshall Fine will moderate a discussion and Q&A with the director Barbet Schroeder. Schroeder is an Iranian-born Swiss film director and producer who started his career in French cinema in the 1960s, working together with directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette. An internationally renowned director, producer, and actor, his work has ranged from the 1960s counter-culture hit More (1969), to the classic documentary portrait of Général Idi Amin Dada (1974), to mainstream Hollywood vehicles such as the Oscar-nominated Reversal of Fortune (1990) and Single White Female (1992).
Tickets to the special screening and discussion are $15/general admission, $12/students, seniors, and members and are available at www.thepicturehouse.org or at the box office, 175 Wolfs Lane, Pelham, NY 10803.