My 20th Century, dir. Ildikó Enyedi (1988)
28th January 2020 at Anglia Ruskin University, East Road (LAB 005)
Entrance Free – All Welcome
My 20th Century is the highly original first film of Ildikó Enyedi, the director of On Body and Soul. It is a playful, witty, surreal, and erotic celebration of the beginning of the twentieth century, when many new inventions – electric light, the telegraph, the cinema, flight – seemed to offer a Utopian future for humanity. It tells the contrasting stories of two identical twin girls, born in Budapest in 1880 at the same time as Edison’s electric light bulb is revealed to the world. One becomes an anarchist, the other a high-society gold digger. Among other striking episodes, it includes a lecture by Otto Weininger, author of the notorious Sex and Character, delivered to the Budapest Feminist Society. The film won the Camera d’Or prize for best first feature at Cannes in 1989.
