Dumpster Raccoon: CABARET (1972)

This Pride season, Dumpster Raccoon Cinema delves into queer art and resistance in the face of mounting fascism (timely!) with a screening of the smash queer classic (and easily one of the greatest films ever made) – CABARET (1972)!



Berlin under the Weimar Republic: a city flat broke but thrumming with cultural churn and a vibrant libertine social scene. Its queer experimentality is centre stage at the Kit Kat Klub presided over by its wonderfully weird host (Joel Grey), and where headline singer Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli, in a star-making turn that cemented her status as a gay icon) and bisexual ex-pat writer Brian Roberts (a cooly handsome Michael York) form a fast – and complicated! – friendship, negotiating shared men and a shared life. But as the forces of fascism begin to muster in Germany, it becomes harder and harder for this unique found family to imagine a future against the rising tide…



Cabaret is a film with an astonishingly star-studded provenance – emerging from gay literary icon Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories and its subsequent expansion into the stage-play I Am a Camera by one of Hollywood’s most influential gay writers, John Van Druten, only to then be turned into a Broadway musical by two of the greatest to ever do it, Kander & Ebb! Its inimitable songs and precisely sketched characters are adapted for film by none other than director Bob Fosse, who infuses what might have been a creaky period piece instead with a frenetic, desperate, and experimental energy that captures the spirit (if not exactly the historical veracity) of an era of embattled persecution and resistance, garnering the unlikely and sophisticated little film a record-breaking number of Academy Awards. (ANTHONY OLIVEIRA)



With special LIVE PERFORMANCE, video preshow by host Anthony Oliveira, and cocktails by the Shameful Tiki Room – sponsored by Bay Street Video!

You may also like the following events from Revue Cinema:

• This Wednesday, 28th May, 09:30 pm, IT FEEDS - Cast & Crew In Attendance! in Toronto
• This Thursday, 29th May, 06:45 pm, TRAINWRECK (2024) - Crew In Attendance! in Toronto
• This Thursday, 29th May, 09:30 pm, THE RUBBER GUN (1977) - Toronto Theatrical Premiere of New Restoration! in Toronto

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