Romance Languages

Come and enjoy conversation while strengthening your language skills.

Italian Coffee Hour
Wednesdays 4:00-5:30
106 Riley House
Come join us for espresso, biscotti, and enjoy conversation while strengthening your language skills!

Come and enjoy conversation while strengthening your language skills.

Come and enjoy conversation while strengthening your language skills.

Italian Coffee Hour

Wednesdays, 4:00-5:30
106 Riley House

Come join us for espresso, biscotti, and enjoy conversation while strengthening your language skills!

Nenette

7:00 P.M.
Kresge Auditorium
Visual Arts Center

Nenette is an enchanting lady in her fortieth year, and the oldest resident of the Menagerie du Jardin des Plantes in Paris. She is also an orangutan. Famed documentarian Nicolas Philibert (To Be and to Have) sensitively captures her engaging personality in this "fascinating study" (San Francisco Chronicle) of life lived behind a zoo's walls.

Born in 1969 in Borneo and brought to France in 1972, Nenette has spent the vast majority of her life in captivity, but it has not been a bore. She has outlived three husbands, borne four children, and baffled zookeepers with her inscrutable mood swings. Philibert fixes his camera on her for the entire running time, revealing both a disdainful diva and a kind, mournful soul. Her enigmatic gaze begs for interpretation, raising serious questions about the morality of caging animals. Even her keepers speculate as to the thoughts percolating behind her aged brow.

NENETTE is an "absorbing, contemplative film" (The Guardian), and essential viewing for animal lovers the world over. It searches for the spirit of an orangutan, and finds it.

Free and open to the public.  Discussion to follow.

Sponsored by the Departments of Romance Languages, Biology and Education, the Film Studies Program, the Counseling Center, the Blythe Bickel Edwards Fund, and with support from the Bowdoin French Club.

TOMBOY

7:00 p.m.
Beam Classroom, Visual Arts Center

A sensitive portrait of childhood just before pubescence, Tomboy, the second film by writer-director Céline Sciamma, astutely explores the freedom of being untethered to the rule-bound world of gender codes. About 20 minutes elapse before we learn the real name and biological sex of Laure, a gangly, short-haired kid about to go into fourth grade. Her family has just moved to a suburban apartment complex a few weeks before the school year starts. The clan’s relocation provides Laure an opportunity for re-invention, introducing herself to her playmates as Michaël —an identity that gives her the liberty to go shirtless and wrestle with the other boys, attracting the attention of crushed-out Lisa. Sciamma shows a real gift for capturing kids at play, filming the August afternoons devoted to soccer and water battles as their own otherworldly time zone. But the director doesn’t present an uncomplicated view of childhood: Laure/ Michaël, beginning to reciprocate Lisa’s smitten feelings, lives in anxiety of being found out as much as she revels in being a boy. Extremely empathic, Tomboy isn’t simply an earnest plea for tolerance: Childhood itself, the film intimates, is full of ambiguities, of sorting out what you are drawn to and what repels you.

Join us for the Latin American and Spanish Film Festival. Celebrate the culture and the language and expand your understanding of world cinema!

Every evening from Monday January 28th through Friday, February 1st, 2013, view a new Spanish-language film presented by Bowdoin faculty members from Romance Languages, Music, Anthropology, Latin American Studies, History, and Film Studies.

Kicking off the film festival, Elena Cueto-Asin, Associate Professor and Chair of Romance Languages, presents an epic about the life of a Spanish playwright, novelist, and poet:

LOPE
Though lesser known than his contemporary Miguel de Cervantes, Felix Arturo Lope de Vega y Carpio was a prolific Spanish playwright, novelist, and poet who dominated the theater scene during Spain's Baroque period.

This romantic epic has a stellar cast of renowned Spanish actors including Pedro Almodovar favorite Leonor Watling, Luis Tosar, Antonio de la Torre, Pilar Lopez de Ayala, and Sonia Braga. And Alberto Amman brings tremendous passion to the role of Lope, the incorrigible but endearing Casanova.

This multi-award winning film brings to life the amorous adventurer who was constantly derailed by his passion for women as he struggled to establish himself as a playwright.

(Andrucha Waddington, 106 minutes, Drama/Biopic, 2010, Spanish with English subtitles)

Sponsored by a grant from the Spanish Film Club, the Blythe Bickel Edwards fund, Latin American Studies Program, Bowdoin Film Society, Department of Romance Languages, Latin American Student Organization, Film Studies Program, Department of English, and Department of Music.

The Spanish Film Club series was made possible with the support of Pragda, the Secretary of State for Culture of Spain, and its Program for Cultural Cooperation with United States' Universities.