Sentimental Education

May 10, 2015 · Knoxville Museum of Art · 2:00 p.m.

Sentimental Education has screened at major film festivals in Europe and South America. The Public Cinema is proud to present its North American premiere.

This film doesn’t tell a new story, but it certainly tells an old one in new ways. Julio Bressane’s Sentimental Education, like Gustave Flaubert’s novel of the same name, is a romance of sorts between a young man and an older woman. Josi Antello plays Áurea, a shy schoolteacher who, like Selene in the myth of Endymion, is overcome by the beauty of a stranger. She takes him in as a student and delivers a series of flirtatious monologues that detail her past, her former loves, and her faded ambitions as a writer. Sentimental Education is a deeply strange and shape-shifting film, and Antello’s performance is something otherworldly.

Júlio Bressane has been making daring films since 1967 but his work has not been distributed widely. A critic for Cinema Scope magazine joked that, after a 2006 retrospective at the Torino Film Festival, “Bressane’s work enjoyed a sort of renaissance, whereby his audience has rocketed from an average of five spectators per screening to maybe 20.” This event is a once in a lifetime opportunity to see his work on a big screen.

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