Film Screenings at Louvre Abu Dhabi - 10,000 Years of Luxury
A new season of weekly film screenings at Louvre Abu Dhabi curated by me will start later this month on November 22 and will go on until December 18.
This season of screenings is linked to the museums’s latest exhibition, 10,000 Years of Luxury which opened on October 30 and will go on until February 18, 2020.
The screenings are free to attend. You can register here, or collect a free ticket at the museum’s ticket desk.
About the screenings and the line up:
This film program invites viewers to think about luxury in the context of fashion, royalty, art, and to also contemplate the meaning of luxury related to time and in architectural spaces.
Wednesday, November 20 at 6.00pm
Phantom Thread
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
2017 | 130 min | Drama | PG-18 | English
Set in the glamour of 1950’s post-war London, renowned dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) and his sister Cyril (Lesley Manville) are at the centre of British fashion, dressing royalty, movie stars, heiresses, socialites, debutantes and dames with the distinct style of The House of Woodcock.
Women come and go through Woodcock’s life, providing the confirmed bachelor with inspiration and companionship, until he comes across a young, strong-willed woman, Alma (Vicky Krieps), who soon becomes a fixture in his life as his muse and love interest. Once controlled and planned, he finds his carefully tailored life disrupted by love.
Director Paul Thomas Anderson paints an illuminating portrait both of an artist on a creative journey, and the women who keep his world running.
Wednesday, November 27 at 6.00pm
The King and I
Director: Walter Lang
1956 | 133 min | Musical | PG-15 | English
Academy-Award winning classical musical, with music from Rogers and Hammerstein. Set in the 1860s, teacher and widow Anna Leonowens (Deborah Kerr) travels to Siam to teach the children of its king (Yul Brynner).
During the course of her stay, she enlightens the king as to changing times and helps him reassess his relationship to one of his several wives.
Wednesday, December 4 at 6.00pm
How to Steal A Million
Director: William Wyler
1966 | 127 min | Comedy | PG-15 | English
Classic 1960’s romantic heist comedy, starring Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole. Charles Bonnet (Hugh Griffith) is an incorrigible third generation art forger in Paris who dupes connoisseurs into labelling his works as authentic and then sells them at elevated prices. So great is his enthusiasm for his profession that he permits his grandfather's ‘Cellini Venus’ to be exhibited at a Paris museum.
His daughter, Nicole (Hepburn in clothes designed by Givenchy), knows that the hoax will be discovered when government officials appraise the statue, and to protect her father, she blackmails ‘society’ burglar Simon Dermott (O’Toole) into helping her steal the tiny statue from the museum. Taken by Nicole's charms, he agrees to assist in the burglary.
Wednesday, December 11 at 6.00pm
Time Thieves
Director: Cosima Dannoritzer
2018 | 85 min | Documentary | PG-15 | English
Forget water, oil and rare earths – there is a new resource everyone wants: our time. Time Thieves reveals how companies monetise our time without our knowledge and how the social networks have, in their own words, become ‘the new clockmakers’.
Who hasn’t come across the situation where an airline has us printing our own boarding passes and checking in our own luggage, saving the company a fortune in working hours? Who hasn’t spent hours assembling a piece of furniture, or struggled with an automatic cashier? Haven’t we all asked ourselves who should be paying whom for doing all the work?
The documentary Time Thieves travels the globe to investigate how time has become money, how the clock has taken over both our working and personal lives, and how we can claim back control over this precious but finite resource.
Wednesday, December 18 at 6.00pm
Have You Seen My Movie?
Director: Paul Anton Smith
2016 | 120 min | Film Essay | PG-18 | English
Told entirely with found footage, Have You Seen My Movie? is a love letter to the magic and power of cinematic experiences as shared by strangers in the dark. Clips from 1000+ films are cut together to create a new cinema-going experience.
Director/editor Paul Anton Smith (assistant editor on Christian Marclay’s The Clock) tells the story of movie-going by turning the camera back on the audience.
Smith uses iconic and obscure scenes from over a thousand movies of every genre, spanning 80 years of cinema, to hold up a mirror to all of the romance, mystery, and mayhem of our collective imaginations.
Previous film screenings curated by me for Louvre Abu Dhabi:
Cinem’Art 2018
Japanese Connections
Roads of Arabia
Rembrandt, Vermeer and the Dutch Golden Age
Photographs: An Early Album of the World
Cinem’Art 2019
Rendezvous in Paris: Picasso, Chagall, Modigliani & Co (1900 - 1939)