Imitation of Life - WFS Film Fest screening - members only booking

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BOOKING DETAILS

To book, you must have a valid full year membership to the Wellington Film Society. You can book up to two seats per film - but all attendees must be valid full year members. We are making half the seats in the theatre bookable. The rest of the seats will be available on the day on a 'first come, first served' basis.

If you have a three film sampler membership, you cannot book in advance. You can attend screenings on the ‘first come, first served’ basis for the remaining seats. We will clip your card for each screening you attend. Bring a buddies are not valid.

Your membership must be valid at the time of booking, and also at the time of the screening in June. If you need to renew during this time, make sure you do so via our website - https://wellingtonfilms.nz

You must book through Humanitix using the same name and email as your Wellington Film Society membership, in order to enable cross-referencing.

Places are bookable per film rather than for the whole festival – so you can pick what you want to see.  We’ll be clearing and cleaning the theatre between films so you’ll need to leave, just like between our usual Monday 6 and 8:30 screenings. Seating will be unallocated for all screenings, as normal.

On the day of the screening, we will check both your Humanitix booking via a QR code, and your Film Society membership.

Please be on time, if you are not, we may give your booking away to members who are waiting. Please be seated in the cinema five minutes before the screening time. After that point we do not guarantee your booking is valid.

FILM DETAILS

The much-lauded king of the Hollywood melodrama, Douglas Sirk (Written on the Wind, All That Heaven Allows) spent the 1950s in Hollywood making a string of influential films. We featured several of his most high-profile works in our 2015 season, and now he returns to our programme with the last film he made in Hollywood, and one of his most complex and absorbing melodramas, Imitation of Life.

Instead of merely focusing on one subject, Sirk’s film pulls as many different issues into its plot, several of which could be conceived as ‘playing the part’. Not only is this an examination of Lora (Lana Turner)’s struggles to make it in the theatre, it is also a study of a fraught relationship between mothers and daughters, and a tale of romance found, abandoned, and found again. Some of the film’s most compelling scenes, though, are between Lora’s friend and housekeeper, Annie (Juanita Moore), and her biracial daughter, Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner). Able to pass as white, Sarah Jane distances herself from her mother in increasingly tragic ways.

Critics at the time dismissed the melodrama as a shallow genre, appealing only to the interests of simple audiences (by which they mostly seemed to mean ‘women with free time to go to the movies’). Such a perspective fails to acknowledge how difficult it is to make an audience cry, and how easy it is to aim for tragedy and wind up with farce. Sirk’s films are the conclusive response to that criticism, and nowhere is Sirk more genuine and insightful than Imitation of Life.

“Sirk’s cool, elegant style – smooth as silk on top, jagged and hot with feeling below – has rarely been joined to a more perfect subject.” — Michael Wilmington, The Chicago Tribune