The great Iosseliani and a marabou stork reveal the strange world of Paris at the turn of the 21st century. Screening as part of the programme Animalistic Anomalous.
Farewell, Home Sweet Home
- Date:
- 25 Feb 2026,
19:30–21:45
- Age restrictions
- 16+
Adieu, plancher des vaches!
1999, Otar Iosseliani
France–Switzerland–Italy
118 minutes, French with Russian subtitles
Starring: Niko Tarielashvili, Lily Lavina, Mirabelle Kirkland, Otar Iosseliani
T
A well-to-do bourgeois family lives in a château near Paris. The father cheerfully gets drunk and builds a giant toy railway, the son hangs out with bums, and the mother, who runs the business with an iron fist during the day, gathers guests in the evenings to sing to them falsely but enthusiastically. A huge marabou stork sits on her shoulder.
Shot from Farewell, Home Sweet Home, 1999
It’s an absurdist fable in a Buñuelian vein that recalls similar, carefully-patterned, multi-character films like Altman’s Short Cuts and Anderson’s Magnolia.
—Philip French, The Observer
The stork looks at the eccentrics, drunkards, dreamers and weirdos who inhabit the film philosophically, maintaining a wise silence. The director, however, sees their lives as a panorama of delightful absurdity.
