The Oklahoma City University Film Institute series will continue at 2 p.m. Feb. 5 with Lasse Hallstrom’s “My Life as a Dog.”
All films in the series are screened free to the public in the Kerr McGee Auditorium of Meinders School of Business at N.W. 27th Street and McKinley Avenue.
The series is supported in part by the Thatcher Hoffman Smith Endowment Fund and endowments through Oklahoma City University and the Oklahoma City Community Foundation.
A multifaceted masterpiece set in Sweden of the late 1950s, “My Life as a Dog” looks back at the time of Sputniks and the first Johansson-Patterson boxing match. The seriocomic story chronicles the experiences of a confused 12-year-old boy shipped out during his mother’s terminal illness to stay with relatives in the country.
Hallstrom’s film is most of all about perspective—the relativity of the trivial and the cosmic, the painful and the comic. The foreign film from the 1980s was nominated for Best Director and Screenplay Oscars. It won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film.
The theme of this year’s season is based on Atul Gawande’s recent book “Being Mortal.” Winn, director of the series, said the films were selected to show “how we, as individuals and a culture, confront, avoid and deal with finitude.” Topics covered include how societies deal with people who are aging, the importance of life and how it is lived with need for a healthy and ethical awareness in knowing we all ultimately die.
A discussion session follows each film screening for those who wish to participate. Other dates and films in the series are:
* Feb. 19, Asghar Farhadi’s “Fireworks Wednesday”
* March 5, Ciro Guerra’s “Embrace of the Serpent”
For more information about the series, call 405-208-5707 or visit okcufilmlit.org.
