Event
VIVA - NYUFF Opening Night
The New York Underground Film Festival is proud to present the New York Premiere of VIVA, the first feature by writer/director/actress Anna Biller. A tribute to the best of vintage sexploitation films, VIVA is the story of a 1970's suburban housewife who is astonished to find herself smack in the middle of the sexual revolution.
Barbi (played by Biller) is bored with her life. While her husband, Rick, is at work or away on business trips, she spends her days at home, often retreating to the bathtub with a glass of wine and the thought "is this all?"
Her life is upended when Rick walks out on her after a fight. Sheila, a neighbor whose husband has also just left her, comes over with a new philosophy and plan: women's liberation.
They immediately discard their bras and head for the adventure of the big city. There they meet a veteran brothel madam, and sign up as call girls, in the hopes of finding true love. Endlessly optimistic, Barbi moves from man to man, calling her new persona VIVA, which in Italy means to live - "because that's what I want to do now: to live. In fact, from now on, I'm going to be a new woman."
In her search she meets a man for each season, from the egoist bohemian to the mellow nudist, all of them instructing her to chill out and engage in the sexually liberated and emotion-free lifestyle that they define as "modern".
Unsurprisingly, Barbi is not totally comfortable in her new role as liberated woman. The unfamiliar world of free sex and orgies has just as many expectations of her as her old life in the suburbs. But she bears it, and continues to look forward.
In the film VIVA, I am reworking old sexploitation movies from the 60's and early 70's, from a woman's point of view. Vintage sexploitation films interest me because they revolve around fantasies of a woman's power over the male, her beauty, her desirability, her sex appeal. The idea was to make a movie that seems like a sexploitation movie, and that offers up all the spectacle and lurid promise of that genre, while at the same time talking about what women really go through, their fantasies and sexual trials." -A. Biller
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LocationAnthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue
New York, NY 10003
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: No |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: No |
| Wheelchair Accessible: No |
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