Welcome, or No Trespassing
This week we are showing Welcome, or No Trespassing (1964, dir. Elem Klimov) on Wednesday, 6/17, at 8pm.
Here is the link to RSVP. Doors are at 7:50 and we’re starting the movie at 8:10!
We’ve made it a little bit of a tradition here at the From Below to have a “School’s Out” screening this time of year to celebrate the start of summer and the liberation from responsibilities for those of us still living according to an academic calendar. This year, there’s a little extra to celebrate, as Teacher Stefan just ably finished their first year as educator-warden for third graders! It’s been such a delight for me, as I’m sure it has for many of our frequent From Belowers, to hear about Stefan’s experiences in the classroom, from learning about aircraft disasters throughout history from certain students, to using beavers as a lens to teach about the ecological and colonial history of Oregon, to raising a handful of cockroaches alongside the children, to working out how to craft arguments and learn things from maps.
As we turn to summer, and some of us get a few months off from daily classroom management, the children still need to be tended to, and thus: the institution of summer camps. Elem Klimov wields this institution masterfully in his debut film Welcome, or No Trespassing to create a delightful satire on Soviet bureaucracy, painting a tale of resistance by the youthful, anarchic campers against their stodgy, rules-obsessed counselors. We are continuing the thread from last week’s screening of The Legend of Suram Fortress, in examining the careers of directors somewhat known as “One Hit Wonders” — Klimov is primarily known for his final film, the utterly devastating Come and See (1985). While both films are centered around the experiences of children in authoritarian situations, they couldn’t be further apart tonally. Instead, Welcome, or No Trespassing is clearly a precedent for films more in the vein of Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (which immediately reveals itself to be not quite so original from the first frame of Welcome). Since Welcome is a brisk 70 minutes, we may throw in a short treat centered around similar themes as well!
By the way, if you don’t know about Portland’s own Budding Roses, it’s simply the best, most radical summer camp around. We have tons of friends who are heavily involved in organizing the camp, and they put together an incredible, empowering curriculum that gets campers thinking about how to be active community members and autonomous decision-makers. If you have kids in your life, you should think about getting them involved, and if you don’t, consider making a donation or volunteering.
One last note for your calendars! INFEST FEST IS COMING. While we’ll have another summery screening for the last week of June, we’ve called the exterminators and hired the fumigators for a July full of films of pests, vermin, and other nuisances that terrorize our domestic spaces. Because what better place than a domestic microcinema to see movies about the little things that unsettle the stability of our homes and our sanity?
Estivally,
Charlie, Stefan, Stark