Friday, Dec. 17 at the church building. Dinner and a movie! Please RSVP and provide count (to gro.nitcotek@ofni or on Facebook) for free pizza at 6pm–movie is at 7pm.
We’ll be watching Roberto Rossellini’s 1952 film, Europe ’51. The film stars one of the great actresses in cinema history—Ingrid Bergman—in the second of four films she made with her then husband, the great Italian director Rossellini. As the title makes plain, the film is about a specific place and time—post-WWII Europe—and deals with a rich socialite’s spiritual journey after a personal tragedy.
Though the movie deals with specific political options facing Europe (and Italy where the film takes place) in the aftermath of fascism, defeat in the War, and the increasing shadow of Cold War, the narrative asks universal questions about the problems existentially facing mankind’s suffering and grief, abundance amid poverty, and the reality of death, and the pale solutions the world manufactures to solve them.
A unique blend of classic Italian Neo-realism and, thanks to the presence Ms. Bergman, classical Hollywood, Europe ’51 is a movie ripe for discovery as the culture presented will seem very familiar to the one we are living in now, and the story it tells searches for moments of grace in a world literally and spiritually falling apart.