Additional Films and Guests, New Americas Cinema
The leaders of seven wealthy democracies get lost in the woods while drafting a statement on a global crisis, facing danger as they attempt to find their way out.
From the mind of Guy Maddin comes a film that ricochets between comedy, apocalyptic horror, and swooning soap opera. The seven leaders of the world’s wealthiest democracies meet at the annual G7 summit in an attempt to draft a provisional statement regarding a global crisis. With unexpected and riotous performances from a stellar ensemble cast that includes Cate Blanchett, Alicia Vikander, and Charles Dance, our so-called leaders become spectacles of incompetence, contending with increasingly surreal obstacles in the misty woods as night falls and they realize they are suddenly alone. Rumours is a journey into the absurd heart of power and institutional failure in a slowly burning world. [104 min; comedy, drama; English]
This screening will be introduced by Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities and the Director of the Graduate Program in Social & Political Thought at York University as well as the author of Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2022) and co-author of Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern University Press, 2024) with Steven Swarbrick. They are currently at work on a new project, To Mean the World, selections from which have come out in recent issues of Critical Inquiry and Representations.
Presented in partnership with IU's Cultural Studies Program and their Cinema and Extinction Symposium. The Cinema and Extinction Symposium is devoted to rethinking the relationship between climate crisis, activism, and care. Rather than looking to restore hope and reknit broken bonds of sympathy, as has been the mandate for much eco-activism since at least the first Earth Day events were held in 1970, the artists and scholars at this symposium look to the negative—bad feelings, strained relations, cosmic solitude, irreversible decline—to decenter human stewardship as the ethical mandate tasked by climate change. By exploring nothingness, erasure, and absence as the places where another order becomes apprehensible, Cinema and Extinction offers both a critique of environmental care and a theory of negative life adequate to the conditions of the present.
"Rumours slowly becomes the kind of experience willing to subject its polite, well-groomed professional politicians to all sorts of film genres, the more disreputable the better." — Ty Burr, Washington Post
"As something that seeks to confuse and delight you in equal measures, this is seven courses of absurdity, served with a side of tongue in cheek from a trio who know what they’re doing." — David Fear, Rolling Stone
"Maddin and the Johnsons effectively develop their story—goofy and absurd though it may be—so that these constant digs at our ineffectual leaders do coalesce into something meaningful and alarming." — Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazine/Vulture
Any film screened at IU Cinema may contain content that viewers find sensitive or upsetting. Visit our Audience Advisories page to learn more.
