Manhattanville College's International Film Festival Kicks Off March 21 With Mexican Film, Like Water for Chocolate

Manhattanville College’s International Film Festival

Kicks Off March 21 With Mexican Film, Like Water for Chocolate

Purchase, NY March 14, 2016 -- Manhattanville College’s annual International Film Festival this year will feature six well-known films from Mexico, Norway, Taiwan, Japan, India, and Tunisia beginning March 21 and ending April 14. The theme this year is “food,” and before each film the audience can savor food belonging to the country of the film’s origin.

“Through foreign films, we can travel into worlds other than our own,” said Nimish Adhia, assistant professor of economics at Manhattanville who is overseeing the event. “This festival allows us to travel as a group, with a faculty member serving as a tour guide, and then we discuss what we saw. The films show how food, or a lack of it, is used to address a variety of issues such as identity, immigration, gender relations, social class and poverty.”

The films are free to the public and begin at 7:15 p.m. in the Berman Student Center on Manhattanville’s Purchase, NY campus. They include:

· Monday, March 21: Like Water for Chocolate, a 1992 film from Mexico in which a young woman falls in love but is able to express herself only when cooking.

· Wednesday, March 23: Hunger, a 1966 film from Norway in which a penniless young man yearning to be a writer verges on madness and starvation.

· Tuesday, March 29: Eat Drink Man Woman, a film from Taiwan which looks at ethnic and sexual conflicts in a Chinese family.

· Thursday, March 31: Tampopo, a 1985 film from Japan in which a truck driver stops at a small family-run noodle shop, and stays.

· Monday, April 4: Lunch Box, a 2013 film from India in which a lunch box connects a young alienated housewife to an older man at the dusk of his life.

· Wednesday, April 6: Secret of the Grain, a 2007 film from Tunisia and France, in which a family patriarch opens a portside restaurant a venture that leads to a suspenseful climax.

· Thursday, April 14: Manhattanville Student Films

Please email Nimish.Adhia@mville.edu for additional information about the films and the faculty discussants.

About Manhattanville College:

Manhattanville College (www.manhattanville.edu) is an independent, co-educational liberal arts institution dedicated to academic excellence and social and civic action. Manhattanville prepares students to be ethical and socially responsible leaders in a global community. Located just 30 minutes from New York City, Manhattanville serves 1,700 undergraduate students and 1,000 graduate students from more than 50 countries and 30 states. Founded in 1841, the College offers more than 50 undergraduate areas of study in the arts and sciences, and offers graduate programs in Education, Business, Creative Writing, as well as Continuing and Executive Education programs.