The 27th International Film Festival of Kerala will provide an opportunity for delegates to experience silent films with live music, as it was done during the silent film era. As part of a special curated section of silent films in this edition of the festival, Jonny Best, resident pianist at the British Film Institute’s Southbank theatre, will provide live music during the screening of silent films. Jonny is one of a small number of pianists specialising in improvising silent film accompaniments.
The festival’s most alluring segment comprises five films, including the centenary screening of F. W. Murnau’s much-acclaimed silent horror film Nosferatu. This classic silent German Expressionist film is the first screen adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and a carefully veiled retelling of the novel. Erich von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives, Hollywood’s first million-dollar movie portrays a con artist who pretends to be a count in order to charm and swindle naive women for money. The film also marks its centenary.
Curtis Bernhardt’s The Woman Men Yearn For is a romantic drama about a couple who are unhappy with their circumstances and are determined to leave and be together.
The internationally acclaimed masterpiece of Swedish filmmaker Victor Sjöström The Phantom Carriage explores themes of unconditional love, the brutality of poverty, and the trials of life for people on the outskirts of a society where death is ever-present. The film was named the best Swedish film ever in the film journal FLM’s critic’s vote in 2012. Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Parson’s Widow is a horror-comedy based on the legend of a parson’s wife in the mid-1600s who survived three vicars.
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