Kynodontas (Dogtooth)

Kynodontas (Dogtooth) is showing at the Schwarzman Centre on Tuesday 17 November, as part of the Laughing at Utopia film series. It's Yorgos Lanthimos' 2009 film, a lesser-known classic from the director who went on to Poor Things, The Favourite and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. If you've only seen his more recent work, this is a good place to see where he started.

Dogtooth is a brutal deconstruction of the things we usually take for granted: the nuclear family, the relationship between parents and children, and the very idea of 'home'. It also takes on language itself as something we just agree on, imagining instead a man-made semantic dystopia. It's a cold, precise kind of film, and it doesn't pull its punches.

The screening is part of Laughing at Utopia, a series curated by the TORCH Humour Network and Ultimate Picture Palace — Oxford's oldest independent cinema — which looks at the playful and provocative relationship between utopia and satire. That, in turn, sits inside Utopia Now!, a wider season at the Schwarzman Centre asking what role the arts can play in making a better future possible.

The night is introduced by Dr Kutay Onayli, a historian and literary scholar of the late Ottoman Empire and the Eastern Mediterranean. His work on mass-market satire examines how laughter helped ordinary people make sense of identity in a world falling apart, so he's a fitting person to set the scene for a film that uses satire to strip back the familiar. The screening starts at 19:00 and runs for two hours, at the Schwarzman Centre's Oxford Cinema in the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, OX2 6GG.