Free for members of Scarecrow Video and the Grand Illusion. $10 for non-members, space-available after all members have been seated.
The debut feature from playwright Fernando Arrabal, founder of the Panic Movement alongside Alejandro Jodorowsky, VIVA LA MUERTE is a tour-de-force considered by many to be the pinnacle of Spanish avant-garde filmmaking. During the Spanish Civil War, young Fando lives with his protective mother and, due to his arrested father, endures the taunts of his schoolmates. Though he loves his mother, Fando indulges in sadistic fantasies when he suspects his father didn’t kill himself in prison as she claims. As fantasy and reality blur, Fando’s reveries become increasingly more depraved. Fueled with fantastical images of violence, sexuality and biting political commentary, this is one of the strongest films in the Seventies’ surrealist canon—fit for arthouses, but packed with some of the more extreme imagery outside of an Italian cannibal film.