Year: 2022
Country: USA
Director: Amanda Kramer
Cast: Sophie von Haselberg, Cricket Arrison, Reshma Gajjar, Shelley Long
Genre: music, thriller, comedy
Runtime: 80 min.
Age: 16+
An incredible stand-up musical with Sophie von Haselberg, the daughter of legendary actress and singer Bette Midler
Give Me Pity! is an imaginary TV show from the 1970s and 1980s featuring the eccentric and dazzling, funny and splendid Sissy St Claire. The shining star to whom this entire 80-minute film is dedicated is faultlessly styled based on the most kitsch and dressy period of the twentieth century. Give Me Pity! is jokes, songs, disco dancing, costume sketches in which Sissy is transformed (even Russian classic comedian Arkady Raikin might have envied this desperate actress), a sparkling revue, an acid “blue light” with a blood-chillingly surreal nightmare forcing its way through the colourful celebration.
Amanda Kramer is an artist and musician for whom cinema, while an ardent passion, is not her only interest. It is not an obsession but a love that creates space for spectacular experiments with style. Give Me Pity! is her fourth feature, a funny and terrifying retro-hallucination which was co-written by wonderful comedienne Sophie von Haselberg, whose first film role was in Woody Allen’s Irrational Man.
Awards & Festivals:
International Film Festival Rotterdam – participation
Edinburgh International Film Festival – participation
Melbourne International Film Festival – participation
Fantasia Film Festival – participation