Doc's Kingdom

Screening on Film

Directed by Robert Kramer .
With Paul McIsaac, Vincent Gallo, Joao Cesar Monteiro.
Portugal/France, 1987, 35mm, color, 90 min.

An American doctor is operating in a Lisbon suburb. Doc, Kramer's alter ego, lives a painful existence, shared between his warehouse on the quai and the hospital. Loneliness and alcohol are the signs of a ragged life. But his past is catching up with him. His son Jimmy, pursuing his mother's death, finds him and is determined to finally get to know him. Doc's Kingdom is the poor and derisory kingdom of a lonely King Lear. A film about the death of utopia.

PRECEDED BY

Ghosts of Electricity

Directed by Robert Kramer.
France, 1997, 35mm, color, 19 min.

One of Kramer’s final films was this short commissioned by the Locarno Film Festival for its 50th anniversary. Ghosts of Electricity imagines a world in which both the cinema and the sciences share a humanist interest in the bettering of our lives.