The Melbourne Cinémathèque & ACMI present
Simon, the Magician
When
Wed 12 Jul 2023
A Hungarian magician is called upon to assist French police with a murder investigation. A re-imagining of the religious tale of Simon Magus set in contemporary France, Enyedi’s refreshingly dreamlike film forgoes a focus on the murder mystery to examine Simon’s experience as a foreigner, his journey from Budapest to Paris, his awkward interactions with the locals, his strange magical abilities, his sense of alienation and disorientation, and his bizarre showdown with a rival magician. With Péter Andorai, Julie Delarme and Péter Halász.
Courtesy of the Hungarian National Film Archive.
Also screening on Wed 12 July
Program
Magic, Whimsy and Lightbulb Moments: Ildikó Enyedi’s transportive cinema
On Body and Soul (2017) – Wed 12 Jul, 7pm
Simon, the Magician (1999) – Wed 12 Jul, 9.15pm
My Twentieth Century (1989) – Wed 19 Jul, 7pm
The Mole (1987) – Wed 19 Jul, 9pm
About the program
Born in Budapest in 1955, Ildikó Enyedi has forged a singular, thoroughly independent career in film. Her uniquely imaginative and witty cinema, steeped in magic realism, given to flights of fancy and shifts in relationships between the quotidian and the transcendent, across parallel or intersecting planes of reality, dream and illusion, is “dedicated to liberating the imagination from the ideological constraints of – and obsession with – the [former Soviet Bloc’s] traumatic history” (Catherine Portuges).
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About Melbourne Cinémathèque
Australia's longest-running film society, Melbourne Cinémathèque screens significant works of international cinema in the medium they were created, the way they would have originally screened.
Melbourne Cinémathèque is self-administered, volunteer-run, not-for-profit and membership-driven.
