Grand Tribute to Film Comedy - Part Two

Taking the baton from the first chapter of the tribute, presented in December 2025 and spanning from the silent era to the 1960s, the second section turns to the period from the 1970s to the early 21st century, bringing together six films that capture the genre in full swing.

An anarchic comedy led by one of cinema’s coolest anti-heroes, a pitch-black satire set against the backdrop of Yugoslav history, two playful takes on horror, a comedy driven by situations and untamed female energy, and a wildly irreverent take on British tradition by one of the greatest comedy ensembles of all time come together in a four-day programme built around the sheer pleasure of cinematic laughter.

The Big Lebowski (1998) by the Coen brothers, with Jeff Bridges in his unforgettable turn as The Dude, drifts with quiet composure through life’s absurdity and chaos, playfully dismantling the grand conventions of noir fiction in a delirious, almost hallucinatory flow.

Emir Kusturica’s epic Underground (1995), which earned the Serbian filmmaker his second Palme d’Or, unfolds five decades of Yugoslavia’s bloodstained history through a pitch-dark comedy infused with the undertones of tragedy.

Mel Brooks’Young Frankenstein (1974), one of the most successful comedies in American cinema, with the singular Gene Wilder, delivers a delirious and uproarious tribute to both a defining horror mythology and the cinema of an earlier era.

Edgar Wright’sShaun of the Dead (2004) writes a new golden chapter in the history of horror parody, blending dry British humour with millennial anxieties in one of the most genuinely funny films to have reached the big screen in the past twenty-five years.

Pedro Almodóvar’s iconic Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), winner of five Goya Awards and the film that propelled him onto the international stage, unfolds like an offbeat orchestra playing to its own restless rhythm, celebrating the layered complexity of the female psyche.

As for the closing note of the tribute, the irreverent Monty Python gleefully tear apart one of the most enduring myths of British literary and cultural tradition in the inimitable Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), a fearless comedy that forever reshaped the way we understand satire and humour.