MFAH Film Houston Premieres: Bitter Lake

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presents another in its Houston Premieres series. Enjoy these critically acclaimed, award-winning international films as they make their Houston debut!

Bitter Lake
Directed by Adam Curtis
2015
UK
137 minutes

Meet the filmmaker at a pre-film reception in the Caroline Wiess Law Building’s North Foyer at 6:00 p.m. Post-film discussion with filmmaker Adam Curtis; moderated by Bill White, former mayor of Houston.

Iconoclastic journalist Adam Curtis (The Century of Self; The Power of Nightmares) returns to the Museum with his latest film. Bitter Lake investigates the intervention—and depiction in mainstream media—of powerful Western countries in Afghanistan.

The documentary features Curtis’s trademark voiceover commentary, brilliantly edited archival footage (taken from decades filmed by the BBC and discovered in cardboard boxes in Kabul), and testimonials from the Afghani people and the soldiers stationed in their midst, set to a disarming musical soundtrack.

“Over a 20-plus year career at the BBC, Curtis has perfected a unique cinematic approach to history’s savage ironies. His perennial concern is power, specifically the ability to warp systems of thought intended for understanding the world into tools utilized for controlling it, with unpredictable results.

Curtis repurposes audio and video from the massive BBC archives into pointed direct citations, whimsical metaphors, and abstract cinematic onslaughts. The result is a dreamlike atmosphere where everything we think we know feels suddenly uncertain.” —2015 True/False Film Festival

This film includes some scenes of armed conflict containing graphic imagery and explicit language.

About the Moderator
Bill White, chairman at Lazard Houston, is the author of America’s Fiscal Constitution and was Houston’s mayor from 2004 to 2009. He is passionate about film and presented The Last Picture Show in the Museum’s first season of Movies Houstonians Love in 2006.

Read more about Adam Curtis and Bitter Lake here.

Community Partner: Houston Cinema Arts Festival.