Film Screening
“THE RAPE OF THE SABINE WOMEN” at Anthology Film Archives
In conjunction with the exhibition Anonymous Was A Woman: The First 25 Years
April 1, 2025–July 19, 2025
As a cinematic sidebar to Anonymous Was A Woman: The First 25 Years, Anthology Film Archives continues this film series throughout May, showcasing moving-image work by selected AWAW-awarded artists. Like the exhibition at the Grey, these screenings celebrate the transformative impact women artists have made on contemporary art and film since the award’s founding in 1996.
THE RAPE OF THE SABINE WOMEN
by Eve Sussman (AWAW 2010) & Rufus Corporation
2006, 80 min, DCP
“This feature-length work, conceived in a five-act operatic format, is based on the founding legend of Rome but reinterprets its outcome of peaceful settlement as a chaotic fall from midcentury idealism. Reframed as a 1960s period piece, this lushly produced film imagines the Romans as chic secret agents in tailored suits and skinny ties; the Sabine women as exotic butchers’ daughters in a meat market; and their legendary union as an affluent, International Style idyll by the Aegean Sea. Inverting the original Roman source, this new version of the classical myth tracks not the origins of empire, but the end of utopia. […] Shot on location in Greece and Germany with a cast of hundreds, this epic drama is loosely based on the myth of the abduction of the Sabine women, with visual inspiration from Jacques-Louis David’s 1799 history painting ‘Intervention of the Sabine Women’ and other paintings that deal with the topic.” –SFMOMA
Purchase tickets in advance on Anthology’s website; tickets are also available at Anthology’s box office.
