Sombre

and

Pièces d’Identités

Thursday, 14 March 2002
Wisconsin Cinémathèque (4070 Vilas Hall)
7:00 and 9:00 p.m.

7:00 p.m. Sombre (Dir. Philippe Grandrieux, France, 1998. 35mm)
9:00 p.m. I.D. / Pièces d’identités (Dir. Mweze Ngangura, Belgium, 1999. 35mm)

Mweze Ngangura will be present to discuss his film with the audience.

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I.D / Pièces d’Identités: Mani Kongo, the venerable king of Bakongo (in Congo), sets out alone on a quest for his long-lost daughter, Mwana, whom he sent to Belgium to study medicine many years before. As soon as he arrives in Belgium, he finds his identity challenged by the attitudes of Westerners, both black and white, with whom he comes into abrasive contact. In this modern fairy tale, the uprooted king becomes an Everyman forced to endure the crime, corruption, decadence, and racism of contemporary European life in order to save his daughter from a potentially soul-destroying rootlessness.
Sombre: Following the route of the Tour de France, a solitary motorist, Jean, periodically stops off to pick up and brutally kill a prostitute. During a rain storm, he runs into a young woman, Claire, whose car has broken down. He offers her a lift…Philippe Grandrieux’s first full length cinema has unleashed a storm of controversy since its showing at the Locarno international film festival in 1998. It had critics solidly divided into two camps – those who regard it as an obscene, unwatchable mess, and others who rate it as a sublime masterpiece of the psychosexual thriller genre.

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