Europe Day is over, the Eurovision Song Contest is over, but May is not yet: The state capital of Munich has called for the “Europe May” month of action with several cooperation partners. The aim is to celebrate and honor the good old continent – before the European elections take place on June 9th. The workshop cinema is also celebrating: European film classics from the years 1960 to 1966 will be shown here on five evenings.
In the 1960s there were signs of a new beginning, the Nouvelle Vague conquered the film world from France, the British discovered their own New Wave, while young German filmmakers declared “Papa’s Cinema” dead.
:The “Kino am Olympiasee” starts the new season
In the coming weeks there will be dozens of films to see here and at other open-air locations, some in the original version. But that’s not all. Comedy, family events and the European Football Championship also play a role.
Of course, this film series can’t cover all of that, but it’s still worth seeing: It starts with the Czech comedy “Ostře sledované vlaky” (1966), which was shown in this country under the title “Love According to Timetable”. Jiří Menzel told the story of a trainee railway officer who becomes an unwilling hero at the end of the Second World War.
On May 24th, “Plein soleil – Only the Sun Was Witness” by René Clément is on the schedule. It is the first film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel “The Talented Mr. Ripley”, Alain Delon plays Tom Ripley, who murders a rich American in Italy and assumes his identity. (The story was recently remade as an eight-part series for Netflix.)
The Christa Wolf film adaptation “The Divided Sky”, which was made in the GDR in 1964, is also on the schedule, as is the Spanish film “Nueve cartas a Berta” (“Nine Letters to Berta”), in which a student talks about life in the Franco- Dictatorship tells. The series comes to an end on May 27th with superstar cinema from Italy: Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni prove three times in Vittorio De Sica’s “Ieri, oggi e domani” (“Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow”) why they are the dream couple of the… Italian cinemas were considered.
European Film Classics – The 1960s, Thursday, May 23rd to Monday, May 27th, at 8 p.m., Workshop cinema Fraunhoferstrasse 9