Distance Film Screening & Discussion

DISTANCE is a psychological, insightful, and moving first feature film, which brings Lover’s insightful camera to two couples on an Army base in Georgia in the mid-1950s. A beautiful German woman (Eija Pokkinen) is desperately trying to save her crumbling marriage to a black Master Sergeant (Paul Benjamin). He finds himself in mid-life trapped in a marriage with a woman he has nothing in common with - she does not share his love of books and art and seems only attracted to his sensuality. His sense of responsibility will not allow him to leave a woman he no longer loves. He finds himself trapped by his inability to deal with his feelings of pride, rage and frustration. The second couple's story is a bittersweet love affair between a young private (James Woods) and a beautiful older career woman (Bibi Besch). Events turn tragic when the Master Sergeant takes the young private into his personal life, and his deteriorating marriage.

The Dove (De Düva) is a 1968 American short film that humorously parodies the films of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. The film borrows heavily from the plot lines of some of Bergman's most famous films made before 1968. There is a journey by car back to the location of childhood memories as in Wild Strawberries. The main characters meet with the shrouded figure of Death as in The Seventh Seal. The film was directed by George Coe and Anthony Lover. Madeline Kahn made her first film appearance, in a supporting role.

The Plot: Victor, a seventy-six-year-old physics professor traveling by chauffeured car to give a university lecture, decides to visit his boyhood home. In the outhouse, he finds a figurine of a dove which reminds him of a summer picnic from his youth. Later in the flashback, Victor (played by Coe) and his beloved sister Inga run through the woods until they come across Death, who has come to claim Inga. Victor wagers that Death will not win a badmintonska (badminton) competition with Inga -- parodying The Seventh Seal, in which the competition is a game of chess. Death agrees, with the condition that if he wins he will take both Inga and Victor. After Inga wins the competition, thanks in whole or in part to the accidental contribution of the Dove, she and Victor happily run to the lake to go skinny-dipping.

This is a film screening and discussion being co-sponsored by Westchester Collaborative Theater.