ELGIN – Screen the best in foreign cinema this spring during the Elgin Community College Humanities Center’s International Film Series.
The series on the first and second Fridays of each month is part of the center’s effort to foster cross-cultural understanding through cinema. Screenings will be in the Arts Center, Building H, Room H142, on the ECC Spartan Drive Campus, 1700 Spartan Drive, Elgin.
Admission is free, but donations will help support ECC study-abroad scholarships.
For information about the film series, visit eccifs.org.
• “Life, Above All”: 7:30 p.m. Friday and Feb. 8.
A child tries to hold her family together against prejudice, disease and ignorance in this South African drama. Chanda is 12 years old, but already she’s been forced to take on many of the responsibilities of an adult in her household.
Her father is gone, her stepfather is an irresponsible alcoholic, and her mother has been physically and emotionally devastated by AIDS and the death of her youngest child.
Her mother is persuaded to move out of the community, but Chanda knows she needs her mother no matter how ill she may be, and sets out to find her and bring her back home.
• “A Separation”: 7:30 p.m. March 1 and 8.
Set in contemporary Iran, “A Separation” is a drama about the dissolution of a marriage.
Simin wants to leave Iran with her husband, Nader, and daughter, Termeh, and sues for divorce when Nader refuses to leave behind his father, who has Alzheimer’s disease.
Her request having failed, Simin returns to her parents’ home, but Termeh decides to stay with Nader.
When Nader hires a young woman to assist with his father in his wife’s absence, he hopes his life will return to normal.
But when he discovers the new maid has been lying to him, he realizes there is more on the line than just his marriage.
• “Good Bye, Lenin!”: 7:30 p.m. April 5 and 12.
Before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Alex’s proudly socialist mother falls into a coma.
That’s a big problem for him when she awakens after eight months and is told her heart is so weak that any shock might kill her. And what could be more shocking than the fall of the Berlin Wall and the triumph of capitalism in her beloved East Germany?
To save his mother, Alex transforms the family apartment into a kind of socialist-era museum where his mother is lovingly duped into believing that nothing has changed.
