by Rod Jones
The Oklahoma City University Film Institute’s series will continue its 34th year at 2 p.m. Nov. 1 with Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s “Two Days, One Night”in the Kerr McGee Auditorium of Meinders School of Business. The school is located at N.W. 27th Street and McKinley Avenue.
Admission to all films in the series is free. The series is supported in part by the Thatcher Hoffman Smith Endowment Fund and endowments through OCU and the Oklahoma City Community Foundation.
In her Oscar-nominated performance as best actress in “Two Days, One Night,” Marion Cotillard as Sandra has just been released from the hospital to find that she no longer has a job. According to management, the only way Sandra can hope to regain her position at the factory is to convince her co-workers to sacrifice their much-needed yearly bonuses. Now, over the course of one weekend, Sandra must confront each co-worker individually in order to win a majority of their votes before time runs out.
With “Two Days, One Night,” the Dardennes turned a relevant social inquiry into a powerful statement on community solidarity. Rolling Stone magazine noted: “The Dardenne brothers have created a film for its time, bristling with peril and alive to every flicker of human decency.”
The theme of this year’s season is based on Viktor Frankl’s classic book “Man’s Search for Meaning.”Harbour Winn, director of the series, said the theme is intended to help participants come to understand the purpose of suffering.
“The films in this series stress the importance of an individual’s attitude to existence,” Winn said. “Even when life seems restricted by external forces, we can choose the attitude with which we live and make meaning, to find value.”
A discussion session follows each film screening for those who wish to participate. The remaining dates and films in the series are:
* Jan. 24, Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up”
* Feb. 7, Ritesh Batra’s “The Lunchbox”
* Feb. 21, Asghar Farhadi’s “About Elly”
* March 6, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Leviathan”
For more information about the series, call (405) 208-5472 or visit okcu.edu/film-lit.
