*The screening on Thursday January 18 will be introduced by Sheldon Penn (University of Leicester).

Edmundo Nobile (Enrique Rambal) invites friends over for an opulent dinner party. While the guests enjoy their food, the servants disappear one by one. Afterward, the visitors retire to the salon for an evening of music and conversation -- but in the morning, they are mysteriously incapable of leaving the room. As days go by and they run out of food and water, panic and madness set in. The army and the police arrive, but fail in their attempts to enter the house as conditions inside deteriorate.

Sheldon Penn is Associate Professor in Latin American Studies at the University of Leicester. He teaches and researches on Latin American literature and cinema and has written about the French and Spanish films of Luis Buñuel. His book on the influence of Henri Bergson across a century of literature and cinema in Mexico, including a chapter on the director Carlos Reygadas, is forthcoming.