Roumanian Film Screening, Friday December 1st

My (minor) beef with Pittsburgh is NOT that there ain’t things to do, galleries to crawl, culture to bask in, local artists to find, out of town interests coming through, avant garde performers to shake us up, never-before seen films (like the recent Turkmenistan Film Festival) or directors resurrected from obscure archives---but that there is some strange lack of connective tissue letting a broader local audience in on the news.

I might venture to say that Pittsburgh doesn't take its responsibilities as a (multi-faceted, cosmopolitan) audience seriously. Some say that Pittsburgh is less a city than a collection of small towns, and if this is true, it is true in more senses than just geographic.

One example of this was the impressive performance at University of Pittsburgh’s Stephen Foster Memorial Theater on November 1st by Puerto Rican performance artist, Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya. His postmodern, multimedia take on Prometheus Bound was free of charge, it was thought-provoking, and it was a one-night-only gig, but it was attended by a modest audience of undergrads in the Theater and Hispanic Departments, and a few faculty. (Where were Pittsburgh's actors, performance artists, spoken word folk, avant poets?) It seems that the Universities in town have the clout and money to get some great folks to speak, screen, or read, but because the revenue from the event is not the point, there is a lack of incentive to advertise. The artist gets paid even if no one shows up and I suppose also is complacent about publicity.

All this is a rant to precede the simple announcement that a great looking film from Roumania, 2005, will be playing for free on University of Pittsburgh’s campus this Friday, December 1st, at 6:00pm. It’s FREE! You’d pay $10.00 and an insulting 50 cents if you were seeing this at Film Forum, and you’d think you were the shit.

The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu
(Moartea domnului Lăzărescu)
2005, 153 minutes
In Roumanian with English subtitles
6:00 pm, Friday, December 1st
4130 WW Posvar Hall
University of Pittsburgh
230 S. Bouquet Street, south of Forbes Ave.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0456149/