Cine Of The Times presents The Fast And The Furious (2001) incl. pre-show

Cine of the Times is our new Celebrating Cinema event series, launching on Wednesday, 17 June. Every month, film critic Hugo Emmerzael and media studies scholar Dan Hassler-Forest pick a film from the century so far — arthouse one month, pulp the next, covering titles that somehow became canon and the ones we’re still arguing about. Paired with a Celebrating Cinema podcast episode about the film, Hugo and Dan continue the conversation live in the cinema with curated clips, an extended introduction, and a discussion afterwards that opens up to the room.

We’re starting where the century actually started: The Fast and the Furious. Twenty-five years ago, Rob Cohen’s car movie was a small-budget story about Los Angeles street racers, immigrant car culture, and a cop who didn’t want to be one. Today, the same franchise is a seven-billion-dollar engine where Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson have spent a decade publicly feuding, cars get launched into orbit, and “family” is a marketing strategy. What does the arc from Echo Park to outer space tell us about American cinema?

The Fast and the Furious (2001) screens in a brand new 4K restoration. Listen to the Celebrating Cinema episode first, then join us in person to discuss.

 

Hugo Emmerzael is an Amsterdam-based film critic and curator whose work sits at the intersection of cinema, music and culture at large. He’s an editor at Filmkrant and Deputy Digital Editor of the Locarno Pardo, with bylines at MUBI Notebook, Filmmaker Magazine and Little White Lies.

Dan Hassler-Forest is a media studies professor at Utrecht University whose work reads pop culture through a political lens — superheroes, transmedia franchises, the politics of fantasy. He’s best known for the 2019 Washington Post essay arguing that The Lion King is a fascist story.