Common People: „Madame“ | Vilnius

The cycle of documentary film screenings “Common People” initiated by Kaunas Artists’ House (KAH) and the platform “Kitas Kinas” continues it’s events and invites to watch and discuss documentaries not only at Kaunas Artists’ House, but also in Vilnius – at Kirtimai Cultural Centre.

In a collaboration with Vilnius Queer film festival “Kreivės” screening of a film “Madame” (dir. Stéphane Riethauser, 2019) will be held at Kirtimai Cultural Center on September 30th 7 p.m. The screening of this film in Kaunas at Kaunas Artists’ House will take place on September 29th.

The film will be presented in both cities by Augustas Čičelis – an organiser and programmer of the Vilnius Queer Festival “Kreivės”, one of the initiators of the Lithuanian queer archive.

“Madame” takes us onto an intimate journey where Caroline, a flamboyant 90-year-old grandmother and her filmmaker grandson Stéphane explore the development and transmission of gender identity in a patriarchal environment. Promised to a domestic life in the 1920s, Caroline manages to free herself from the clutches of a forced marriage and becomes a successful businesswoman, defying the social rules of her time. In parallel, Stéphane struggles to play the role everyone expects in his Swiss bourgeois family, until the day he comes out of the closet and sets off on a crusade against homophobia and sexism. A family saga based on private archive footage, “Madame” offers a dialog between this extravagant matriarch and her gay grandson, challenging the taboos of gender and sexuality.

Dir. Stéphane Riethauser
Documentary, Switzerland, 2019, French, with English and Lithuanian subtitles, 94 min

Tickets and discounts: tickets cost €3 (€2 concessions – schoolchildren, students, seniors). Tickets can be purchased on the door and at “Tiketa” sales points in person and online.

The „Common People“ screening series aims to discuss not only the content of documentary films, but also the whole notion of documentary cinema. The series addresses questions of ethics, directorial decisions. To film or not to film? When does a director cross the line of closeness with their subject? Should documentary cinema reflect ‘reality’ or the vision of its creator? These questions and others are raised and discussed looking at films who maintain a close look at people telling their own stories: sensitive, creative, eccentric and based somewhere in the margins.

The project is curated by Karolis Žukas (Kitas Kinas) and Edvinas Grinkevičius (Kaunas Artists’ House).

Visual identity: Eglė Simonavičiūtė.

The project is financed by the Lithuanian Film Center, organised by Kaunas Artists’ House. Partners: platform “Kitas Kinas”, Kirtimai Culture Center, Kaunas Deaf Rehabilitation Centre, Vilnius Queer Festival “Kreivės”