On Sunday 22 November, independent cinemas around the world join the eleventh edition of European Arthouse Cinema Day, a day that celebrates European cinema and the experience of watching films together. Nearly 660 cinemas in 45 countries are taking part, with special screenings, gatherings and conversations for their audiences. CineCiutat is one of them.
At a time when everything seems to push us apart, arthouse cinemas are still places where we can meet, discover and talk. Championing diverse perspectives, creative freedom and independent programming is also a way of caring for cultural exchange, mutual understanding and democratic values.
This year’s edition celebrates the richness of European cinema and the people and places that bring it to audiences. Each cinema puts together its own programme: premieres, restored classics, documentaries, short films, family screenings and Q&As with filmmakers.
Twenty years ago, Sandra Hüller won her first Silver Bear at the Berlinale for Requiem. This February she won another, for Best Leading Performance, for Rose, by Austrian director Markus Schleinzer. This is the film we have chosen for European Arthouse Cinema Day: on Sunday 22 November at 7.30 pm we are screening it at CineCiutat, followed by an online conversation with Sandra Hüller.
Rose is a black-and-white film set in the 17th century, after the Thirty Years’ War. A soldier with a scar across his face arrives in an isolated Protestant village and lays claim to a farm he says he has inherited. That soldier is a woman who has been living as a man for years. Schleinzer draws on the many documented cases of women throughout European history who passed as men in order to take control of their own lives. It is Austria’s submission to the Oscars.
Hüller is arguably the most important actor in European cinema today. She proved it in Toni Erdmann, Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest. In Rose she works with very few words: she does everything with her body, and with a restraint that slowly comes undone. We are drawn to a film about someone who has to invent herself in order to exist, and it feels like a fitting way to stand up for cinemas as places where we can be who we are.
Twenty years after that first Bear, we have the chance to hear her talk about the second. Come along!
Tickets here.
European Arthouse Cinema Day is organised by the International Confederation of Arthouse Cinemas (CICAE), in collaboration with national arthouse cinema associations and other partners from the audiovisual sector. It is supported by Creative Europe MEDIA, the CNC, the FFA, Eurimages and the Europa Cinemas network.
