ZYZZYVA Movie Matinee with Ingrid Rojas Contreras: Amarcord (35mm)

Co-presented by Zyzzyva Magazine and Litquake, San Francisco’s Literary Festival

This year’s Litquake festival will take place October 8th-24th! For more information about Litquake’s festival and year-round programs, visit litquake.org.

The series wherein famous authors choose a film that intersects with their artistic obsessions.

Andrew Sean Greer is a Pulitzer Prize winning author whose humor, warmth, and candor could ignite a room from the page. For this special Litquake Festival installment, Greer introduces Amarcord, the dramatic comedy directed by Federico Fellini for this special matinee.

Fellini recreates his hometown of Rimini in this carnivalesque film, where the director satirizes his childhood. Time magazine says: “Fellini is so bountiful with incident and observation that he makes most other filmmakers seem stingy.” Winner of an Academy Award for best foreign-language film, Amarcord remains one of the director’s best-loved creations, beautifully weaving together Giuseppe Rottuno’s colorful cinematography, Danilo Donati’s extravagant costumes and sets, and Nino Rota’s nostalgia-tinged score.

Greer’s Villa Coco reaches a magical and madcap tone that is in kin with this Fellini film. In Villa Coco, a young man takes an unspecified job with a charismatic elderly Baronessa at her crumbling villa in the Tuscan hills. David Sedaris says: “No one writing in English is funnier or more charming than Andrew Greer.”

Doors open at 12:00 p.m.
Show starts promptly at 12:30 pm.
Q&A with the author follows the movie.

Book signing and a chance to shop Andrew Sean Greer’s recommended reading list (courtesy of Dog Eared Books) will be available both before and after the show.

Zyzzyva Movie Night was created and is produced by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Andrew Sean Greer is the author of eight works of fiction, including the bestsellers Less and its companion Less Is Lost. Greer has taught at a number of universities, including Stanford and the Iowa Writers Workshop, a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellow, a judge for the National Book Award, and a winner of the California Book Award and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. He is the recipient of a NEA grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He lives in San Francisco and Italy. His latest novel is Villa Coco.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her memoir The Man Who Could Move Clouds was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It won a California Book Award. Her debut novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was a National Bestseller, and a recipient of a California Book Award. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Believer, and Zyzzyva, among others. She lives in California.