Not only a stunning ethnographic portrait of a community and landscape, Eldorado XXI is also a haunting, immersive experience—a trance that blends the grandeur of a mythical land with the shadow of colonialism, blurring the limits of cinematic narrative. Please watch on the biggest screen you can.
Peter Nestler’s second film like his first gives potent voice to the voiceless: Swiss children give us their impressions of their daily lives as we see images of Nestler’s own perspective. Beautiful and deceptively simple, these essays create the sense of a new generation beginning to define itself.
Director Batin Ghobadi realizes a mosaic of tones and themes in this gripping tale of a troubled police officer up against a missing person case. Doubling as a portrait of the landscapes and culture of Iraqi Kurdistan, this slept on feature debut is ambitious, accomplished, and ripe for discovery!
We continue our partnership with New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center to showcase their series on the unknown but essential documentarian Peter Nestler. Short but dense, his first film exhibits his utterly imperative technique: portraiture equal parts hard-edged poetry and political incision.
We close our John Schlesinger tribute with the third of his early masterpieces. Julie Christie returns in front of the camera for this sharp satire of swinging London—she would go on to win an Oscar for her role—while the movie continues to contend as one of the great portraits of the 1960s.
John Schlesinger’s second feature—another instant classic—built on his first, again working with screenwriter Willis Hall to capture social frustrations of a new, young Britain. Tom Courtenay (recently in 45 Years) is perfect as Billy, but we adore young Julie Christie’s breakthrough performance.
Before coming to Hollywood and making Midnight Cowboy, John Schlesinger began his feature filmmaking career with three masterpieces of a new generation of British cinema. His debut, which won Berlin’s Golden Bear, is a richly textured portrait of the social tensions between class, sex and romance.
We want to celebrate Bastille day in style with a summery dose of pure Frenchness. This irreverent, absurdist comedy overtly steals the spirit and style of a sacred tradition of French New Wave cinema, romanticizing its ethos while charmingly parodying the stereotypes that populate Gallic movies.
Finnish director Pirjo Honkasalo (3 Rooms of Melancholia) is also a cinematographer—which explains the stunning, inked black and white of her moody and subtly surreal paean to the uncertainty of adolescence growing up in poor surroundings. A nocturnal odyssey and an awakening, gorgeously realized.
The director of The Republic creates a razor sharp satire of city planning by reconstructing an inherently absurdist bureaucratic process. Working from the actual manuscript of the inciting town meeting and shooting in intimate close-ups, this is a slapstick comedy of rhetoric and facial gestures.
In this nearly forgotten intimate historical drama, the mores of a working class town in the Canadian prairies are surveyed in a heartbreaking story of a young woman facing adversity in all sides of her life. Dynamic turns from Carol Kane & Donald Pleasence alone make this ripe for rediscovery.
The allure of motherhood has attracted filmmakers since cinema’s early days—the large legacy of indelible on-screen mums proves it. With the fearless Huppert (who else?) as his partner in crime, Honoré boldly pushes boundaries in Ma Mère, a sun-drenched, transgressive tale of incest and obsession.
After genuine whatsit Symbol, Hitoshi Matsumoto returned to the gleeful play and destruction of our genre expectations of his first film, Godzilla parody Big Man Japan, with this goofball chambara (swordplay movie). The ingenious scenario forces gag after gag so our hero can escape harakiri.
And now for something completely different: TV comedian turned director Hitoshi Matsumoto and his hilarious, oddball, upside down approach to popular filmmaking. One man (Matsumoto!) is trapped in a room; another, a Mexican wrestler, starts his day. Only pure ingenuity could connect them together.
Romanian New Wave director Radu Jude follows up his award-winning Aferim! with this wry adaptation mixing an author’s writings with his life. Shooting his colorful 35mm production in playfully old fashioned 4:3, this ode to an ingenious and poetic soul is a delightful mix of melancholy and humor.
We follow yesterday’s celebration of Jean Cocteau with his final film and most expansive artistic statement. Answering nearly all of the images & ideas on creation and mortality found in Blood of a Poet, Cocteau concludes both his art and his life with this luminous and lively work of surrealism.
Today we celebrate poet-playwrite-painter-filmmaker-novelist Jean Cocteau’s birthday with his first feature, The Blood of a Poet. With it, he courageously introduced all of the dark romantic surrealism of his art to a newly born medium and irrevocably changed its expressive potential.
The world premiere of an audacious new film by Wilkins, a Whitney Biennial 2017 selected artist. A unique cinematic experience, it blurs the lines between film, theater, radio, podcasts & gallery installations as its images fade from black to white and we hear an epic drama of utopian ideals tested.
Our final film from the Oberhausen festival’s prestigious competition is an absurdist vision of male communal play. A dream passes from man to man during sports practice, throwing the world subtly askew in Mexican director Gabriel Herrera Torres’s unexpectedly strange and impressively grand short.
Shalimar Preuss’ film revives French Impressionist cinema with a renewed sense of realism in this lovely short vision of childhood and femininity. A pastoral setting alongside a riverbank gives way to an arresting flow of images culminating in a deeply mysterious finale waiting to be untangled.
It is our great pleasure to exclusively present this 60s-set Nordic charmer and knock-out debut. Triumphant winner of last year’s Un Certain Regard in Cannes, shot on gorgeous monochrome 16mm and based on the true story of the most romantic of boxers, one thing’s for sure: it’ll make you happier.
Our partnership with the Oberhausen Film Festival continues further into the fertile world of modern avant-garde cinema with this brief sojourn into the streets of London and racial and class injustices manifest in the modern city. Ayo Akingbade’s approach is poetic, rhythmic, & entirely enveloping.
Austrian visual artist Josef Dabernig always brings a delightfully fresh, odd-angled approach to cinema, and this competitor at Oberhausen is no different. A clever, droll opposition of haunted architecture à la Last Year at Marienbad, lingering guests played by family & friends, and a fatal story.
We continue our partnership with the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, one of the premiere venues for the art of the short film, to show a selection of the best from the International Competition of the 2017 festival. We begin with a stunning prize-winning doc made in a volcano’s shadow.
From Alien and Paris, Texas to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, there’s little disputing that Harry Dean Stanton is one of the most distinct character actors to ever grace American cinema. This intimate and rare docu-portrait of the man attempts to unfurl his mysterious essence and tangled past.
We close our series dedicated to Moretti’s early comedies with a self-inquiry into filmmaking, political ennui, and men’s relations with their mothers. Sound familiar? Yet this film only expands on those which came before it with a more intimate confessional style aimed at the state of modern Italy.
We continue our excursion into the world of Nanni Moretti’s comedies with this early work which delicately unfurls the lives of its young characters—their anxieties, politics and romantic ambitions—with a graceful sense of humor distinct to the director. A slight yet key work in Moretti’s oeuvre.
If you only know Palme d’Or winner The Son’s Room, our triple bill of Nanni Moretti’s early comedies will be a special treat. Shot on Super 8, this debut feature already boasts a perfect balance between autobiography, social commentary and satire, launching what would become the Moretti touch.
With remarkable variety of form and a graceful touch, this expansive yet tremendously sensitive debut by Huang Ya-li is an epic and detailed immersion into a remarkable group of writers in Taiwan. Spanning three decades of political turmoil and war, we movingly watch their struggle to create art.
Jeff Lipsky has quietly delivered a few of the strangest independents in recent years, and the beguiling and un-categorizable Molly’s Theory of Relativity is no exception. A portrait of a relationship? A family drama? A philosophical quandary? Or perhaps it’s just unsolvable–it is for you to decide.