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Canadian Urbanism Uncovered

Events Guide: Metropolis, HIFF Screening

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HALIFAX – Start Saturday night off right with Halifax Independent Film Festival‘s screening of Metropolis featuring live, local musical accompaniment by Lukas Pearse, Tim Crofts, Geordie Haley and D’Arcy Gray.

Fritz Lang’s 1927 expressionist, sci-fi film, Metropolis, is set in a futuristic city sharply divided between the working class and the city planners; the plot further thickens when the son of the city’s mastermind falls in love with a working class prophet who predicts the coming of a savior to mediate their differences.

WHAT: Screening – Metropolis with live musical accompaniment
WHEN: Saturday, April 2nd, 7pm – 10pm
WHERE: Alumni Hall, King’s New Academic Building, 6350 Coburg Road
HOW MUCH:  $5 Suggested Donation

Metropolis was produced in Germany, during a stable period of the Weimar Republic; the film is set in a futuristic urban dystopia and makes use of this context to explore the social crisis between workers and owners in capitalism. The film was produced in the Babelsberg Studios by Universum Film A.G. (UFA). The most expensive silent film ever made, Metropolis cost approximately 5 million Reichsmark. Metropolis was cut substantially after its German premiere, and much footage was lost over the passage of successive decades. There have been several efforts to restore the film, as well as discoveries of previously lost footage. A 2001 reconstruction of Metropolis, shown at the Berlin Film Festival, was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in that same year. In 2008, a copy of the film – 30 minutes longer than any other known surviving copy – was located in Argentina. After a long period of restoration in Germany, the restored film was shown publicly for the first time simultaneously at Berlin and Frankfurt on February 12, 2010.

Tonight’s special screening is presented at HIFF, by the Atlantic Film Co-operative (AFCOOP), University of King’s College, Dalhousie University Department of English, Dalhousie University and Situating Science.

Photo care of Metropolis 1927.

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