We continue our retrospective devoted to Kevin Jerome Everson with one of the American artist’s best shorts. By juxtaposing a doctor’s visit with the re-telling of a tragic tale, the film movingly evokes the visceral impact that experience, memory, and trauma can have on the human body.
We proudly continue our partnership with the New York Film Festival to bring you some of the best films directly from its Projections sidebar. First is up-and-coming German filmmaker Helena Wittmann’s sun-lit evocation of youths’ desire to travel, one that mysteriously breaks-up a group of friends.
Best known for ushering in the modern idea of zombies, the late George A. Romero applied an incisive level of social commentary in his underrated—even forgotten—non-undead films. Thus, the stellar Season of the Witch takes aim at the nuclear family and invokes witchcraft as an attractive answer.
Some of the most ruthless films by Claude Chabrol are the stories of how the French resisted or collaborated with the Nazis during World War 2. This Vichy drama, made after the fervor of the French New Wave had died, is one of his rarest but most gripping, devoted to the harsh decisions of wartime.
Our Chabrol retro continues with his 50th feature: a lively thriller of thievery, charming deceits, and ambiguous romance. The ideal amount of Hitchcockian inspiration seasons this picture’s DNA for a perfect concoction of mystique and uncanny wit. Did we mention it also stars Isabelle Huppert?
Continuing our retrospective of mysteries from the French New Wave’s Claude Chabrol, we present this wicked little picture that’s at once an erotic thriller and a droll comedy of perversion and class satire. Laura Smet stars in the title role and as one of Chabrol’s most unforgettable femme fatales.
In his debut film, a multi-faceted exploration of drag racing in the Midwest, Kevin Jerome Everson fully encompasses the community, ecstasy, and expertise of this unusual sport. Gently drifting between fiction and reality, Cinnamon is an eloquent expression of black unity and excellence.
This radical documentary offers a different side of Chinese underground cinema: A lively self-portrait of director Ning Li’s rise as an avant-garde performance artist against much political adversity. Tape is an integral look at a complicated modern society’s relationship with art and artists.
As a special treat after our release of Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda is this sensorial immersion into a rare concert experience. Watch the great composer perform the debut of his latest musical masterpiece, with accompanying video imagery by Shiro Takatani and experimental filmmaker Takashi Makino.
Tuinieren wordt op een verfrissende manier geherinterpreteerd als een anti-beschavingsbeweging in deze wereldberoemde documentaire. Het biedt daarnaast een serie van onderling verbonden portretten, Wild Plants geeft een unieke blik op één van de meest bescheiden en onderschatte subculturen.
Like George A. Romero’s original classic Night of the Living Dead the best horror films often come from low-budget ingenuity and storytelling invention. Canadian auteur Bruce McDonald (Weirdos) crafted Pontypool on such terms, repurposing zombie mythos for a bilingual nation often divided.
Next in our survey of films by the wry New Wave mystery-maker Claude Chabrol is this romantic bon mot. Well, romantic in the Chabrolian sense: charged with perversion, tainted by crime, viewed with an eye towards subtle satire. A dark criminal comedy, perhaps? Ludivine Sagnier was made for this.
Today we begin a 5-film, 3-decade survey of the French New Wave’s master of suspense, Claude Chabrol. In a gesture towards his delightful perversity, we begin at the end with Chabrol’s final film: His only movie with Gérard Depardieu, it proves there’s always more to a mystery than meets the eye.
Next in our Kevin Jerome Everson series is a feature that showcases the artist’s devotion to spending time with and making images from the working-class, in a culture where labor is most often hidden by popular media. Long takes create a fascination with the details, rhythms and expertise of work.
Mothers continues the welcome tendency of Chinese underground cinema’s political subversiveness from a new, uncanny perspective: the daily processes of a birth control center, and their increasingly exploitative methods of enforcing the state’s one child law. Defiant, brave, necessary.
The physical, spiritual, social catastrophes in the aftermath of an earthquake are captured with brave immediacy in this documentary. Director Du Haibin, armed with but a consumer camcorder, captures a community’s resilience and a government’s indifference as an microcosm of political failure.
From the master American filmmaker Michael Mann, Manhunter is a truly experiential foray into two opposing minds. Belying its 80s neon hues and (welcome!) pop music cues, the film grows into a complexly woven inquiry into the origins of serial murder and its amorphous relation with domesticity.
“We zijn blij dat we deze regionale curiositeit kunnen presenteren in deze sprankelende restauratie gemaakt van de originele 35mm negatieven. Vorige versies werden geplaagd door slecht geluid en doffe kleuren die de locatie geen eer aandeden. Hier uw kans om de film te zien als nooit tevoren!” —NWR
A profound disenchantment with the world pushed The The’s founder and singer song-writer Matt Johnson into silence. Fifteen years later, the beloved post-punk band are making an epic comeback. This achingly intimate doc is an invaluable window into the enigmatic artist stepping out of the shadows.
Adapted from Christiane Rochefort’s evocative novel, Love on a Pillow finds French cinema’s preeminent sex symbol Brigitte Bardot realizing a very complicated woman and performance inside a dark, tangled love story. A flawed, yet remarkable film for its emotional sincerity. Happy birthday B.B.!
Het heden en verleden van een Amerikaanse gemeenschap worden prachtig geportretteerd in dit nieuwe item uit onze serie. Everson’s werk combineert natuur met geënsceneerde scenario’s. Deze film bouwt op hoe creatie kan samensmelten met natuur door een beeld van de kunstenaar: een bronzen kerkbel.
A mesmerizing, shape-shifting movie that goes from uneasy romance to thriller to something where reality gradually slips away from our heroine, in a manner reminiscent of Repulsion. Matthew Lessner’s second feature is a sly and slippery tale of an increasingly dangerous, hallucinogenic vacation.
The virtuous documentation of labor in China continues with yet another act of bravery: director Yu Guangyi followed his subjects into a brutal winter to cinematically retain their now-extinct traditions in these eloquent 90 minutes. The rare documentary formed as though it were an adventure film.
We return to the work of Zhao Dayong (Street Life) with this sprawling yet intimate portrait of a moribund small town in southwest China haunted by its own cultural history. An essential film in this movement for providing a sympathetic cinematic space to peasants otherwise forgotten by modernity.
After the success of our summer series devoted to under-appreciated mainstream French director Claude Sautet, we’re introducing one of his best we didn’t show, on the occasion of the birthday of star, Romy Schneider. Told in fragments, this melodrama of a romantic triangle also stars Michel Piccoli.
The ever-familiar subject of a young man’s coming of age is refreshingly probed in this New York indie set in the fading light of summer, youth, and first love. Completely alive with surprising characterizations, the film thoughtfully examines the gap between two Dominican-American generations.
With an examining gaze more patient than sensational, Bertrand Bonello’s atmospheric brothel-set drama is bold in its unique disruption of typical film form and grammar. It is driven by the fascinating dynamic between its ensemble of actresses, including Noémie Lvovsky, Esther Garrel & Adèle Haenel.
Presenting a new retrospective on the American director Kevin Jerome Everson, a multi-disciplinary artist who reveals through documentation and sly play the black experience in the US. This exemplary feature offers necessary perspective of the people who give their time to the democratic process.
Giving voice to the hidden victims of poverty who co-exist alongside the wealthiest echelons of Shanghai society, the always incisive 8th generation filmmaker Zhao Dayong offers a brave and sensitive macrocosmic document of class in modern china with this necessary vision of street life.
An arthouse landmark, Yoshishige Yoshida’s epic charts two crucial moments of upheaval in his country: the 1920s, rife with political assassinations, and the tumultuous 60s. Made in the director’s radical, high modernist style, this is the rare classic that is both under-seen and still provocative.