Tuesday, January 21 at 7pm
Rising Hope – FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
Directed by Theo Avgerinos (U.S. 2024) 104 min. DCP.
Rising Hope introduces audiences to a Mississippi Delta community—where hope survives, despite generational poverty. The documentary explores issues surrounding the state’s historically oppressive policies towards Black Mississippians, the massive employment loss following NAFTA, and the devastating effects of defunding public education for consecutive generations. More central to the film, however, is the vibrant tapestry of voices and personal narratives found within the Delta. The film follows a former news anchor turned church youth leader; a first-generation college student pursuing photography; the journeys of community non profits; and the profound life experiences of town mayors and local citizens. Through these transformational stories, audiences bear witness to extraordinary personal hardships, and their refusal to internalize the narrative of hopelessness. Bucknell alumnus Theo Avgerinos (‘00) will visit for a post-film discussion, and will be joined by the film’s cinematographer Chris Lytwyn, as well as participants from the film: Dr. Cora Jackson, Rev. Charlie Jackson, Jr. and Roderious Phillips. Special thanks to the Phi Gamma Delta/FIJI fraternity and Open Discourse Coalition for funding that made these visits possible.
Tuesday, January 28 at 7pm
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg – NEW 60TH ANNIVERSARY RESTORATION!
Directed by Jacques Demy (France 1964) 91 min. DCP. With Catherine Deneuve, Anne Vernon, Nino Castelnuovo, Marc Michel. French with English subtitles.
An angelically beautiful Catherine Deneuve was launched to stardom by this dazzling musical heart-tugger from Jacques Demy. She plays an umbrella-shop owner’s delicate daughter, glowing with first love for a handsome garage mechanic (Castelnuovo). When the boy is shipped off to fight in Algeria, the two lovers must grow up quickly. Exquisitely designed in a kaleidoscope of colors, and told entirely through the lilting songs of the great composer Michel Legrand, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is one of the most revered and unorthodox movie musicals of all time. “This jeu d’espirit of the French New Wave took the Palme d’or and Best Actress award at Cannes; garnered five Oscar® nominations; and, in its overwhelming romanticism, capped by a snow-blanketed Christmas climax at an Esso station, reduced packed houses around the world to bittersweet tears” (Film Forum).
“Elevates the quotidian to the spectacular… Umbrellas’ palette of sherbet-colored pastels remains undimmed.” – Melissa Anderson, Village Voice
Tuesday, February 4 at 7pm
La Chimera – Area Premiere!
Directed by Alice Rohrwacher (Italy 2023) 130 min. DCP. With Isabella Rossellini, Josh O’Connor, Alba Rohrwacher. Italian and English with English subtitles.
With her customarily bewitching mixture of earthiness and magical realism, Alice Rohrwacher conjures a marvelous entertainment set in a rural Italy eternally caught between the ancient and the modern. Josh O’Connor (The Crown) stars as Arthur, a ne’er-do well Englishman, handsomely rumpled and recently out of prison, who returns to a rural town in central Italy where he hesitantly reconnects with a ragtag group of tombaroli (tomb raiders), for whom he uses his uncanny powers of divination to locate graves that date back to the Etruscan period and teem with antiquities of immense value to collectors and museums. Yet the melancholy Arthur has other ghosts on his mind, including his long-lost love Beniamina, who haunts his memory like her own ghostly civilization. Featuring gorgeous rough-hewn textures from the great cinematographer Hélène Louvart and outstanding supporting work from Isabella Rossellini, Carol Duarte, and Alba Rohrwacher, La Chimera is a dreamlike descent into a majestically tattered world right beneath our own (New York Film Festival). A highlight from the 2023 NYFF Main Slate selection!
“La Chimera is the latest from Alice Rohrwacher, a delightfully singular Italian writer-director who, with just a handful of feature-length movies — the charming, low-key heartbreaker Happy as Lazzaro among them — has become one of the must-see filmmakers on the international circuit. Rohrwacher, who grew up in central Italy, makes movies that resist facile categorization and concise synopsis. They’re approachable and engaging, and while she’s working within the recognizable parameters of the classic art film — her stories are elliptical, her authorship unambiguous — there’s nothing programmatic about her work.” – Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
Tuesday, February 11 at 7pm
All We Imagine as Light – Area Premiere!
Directed by Payal Kapadia (France, India, Netherlands, Luxembourg 2024) 118 min. DCP. With Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam. Malayalam, Hindi, with English subtitles.
The light, the lives, and the textures of contemporary, working-class Mumbai are explored and celebrated by writer/director Payal Kapadia, who won the Grand Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for her revelatory fiction feature debut. Centering on two roommates who also work together in a city hospital—head nurse Prabha (Kusruti) and recent hire Anu (Prabha)—plus their coworker, cook Parvaty (Kadam), Kapadia’s film alights on moments of connection and heartache, hope and disappointment. Prabha, her husband from an arranged marriage living in faraway Germany, is courted by a doctor at her hospital; Anu carries on a romance with a Muslim man, which she must keep a secret from her strict Hindu family; Parvaty finds herself dealing with a sudden eviction from her apartment. Kapadia captures the bustle of the metropolis and the open-air tranquility of a seaside village with equal radiance, articulated by her superb actresses and by the camera ,with a lyrical naturalism that occasionally drifts into dreamlike incandescence. All We Imagine as Light is a soulful study of the transformative power of friendship and sisterhood, in all its complexities and richness.
All We Imagine as Light is “the kind of modestly scaled and lightly plotted international movie — with characters who look and sound like real people, and whose waking hours are set to the pulse of life — that can get lost amid the year-end glut of Oscar-grubbing titles. So, it’s worth mentioning upfront that it is also flat-out wonderful, one of finest of the year.” – Manohla Dargis, New York Times
Tuesday, February 18 at 7pm
No Other Land – Area Premiere!
Directed by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor (Norway/Palestine 2024) 96 min. DCP. Arabic, English and Hebrew with English subtitles.
This eye-opening, vérité-style documentary, made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four directors over the course of five years, provides a harrowing account of the systematic onslaught of destruction experienced by Masafer Yatta, a group of Palestinian villages in the southern West Bank, at the hands of the Israeli military. Headed by Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham (also two of the film’s directors), the collective commits itself to filming and protesting the demolitions of homes and schools and the resulting displacement of their inhabitants, which were carried out to make way for Israeli military training ground. In addition to the indelible footage of destruction and expulsion captured by its undaunted witnesses, No Other Land serves as a moving portrait of friendship between Adra and Abraham, who form a philosophical and political alliance despite the drastic differences in their abilities to exist freely in this world. Winner of multiple awards including the Panorama Audience Award for Best Documentary Film at the 2024 Berlinale (NYFF62 program notes).
“[A] must-see…Shot over five years, it is an intimate, gravely harrowing chronicle of life in the Palestinian community of Masafer Yatta, in the occupied West Bank, where residents struggle to stay put as the Israeli military bulldozes their homes into rubble. The movie has been rightly praised since it had its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in February…” – Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
Tuesday, February 25 at 7pm
Meet John Doe
Directed by Frank Capra (U.S. 1941) 96 min. 35MM. With Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward Arhold.
From It’s a Wonderful Life to It Happened One Night; from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to Meet John Doe, a Frank Capra film has a singular worldview. It’s an amalgam of Capra’s gratitude for his own immigrant realization of the American dream, and his socially critical view of the crisis-ridden 1930s – which appeals “for a renewal of faith in American values, the freedom of the individual and the victory of justice over cynical profiteers and corrupt politicians” (Arsenal, Institut for Film). The darkest of Capra’s political fables, Meet John Doe has a wronged newspaper woman (Stanwyck) writing a letter from a fictitious John Doe, who threatens an imminent, public act of despair. The media runs with the story, and an unemployed drifter (Cooper) is cast as the public face of Doe. Then a villainous tycoon (Arnold) steps in to turn events to his advantage. “It’s Capra’s darkest satire and one of cinema’s great rebukes to incipient fascism and the manipulation of the masses, as personified by Arnold’s D.B. Norton. Could it also be a cynically self-aware treatment on the role of the filmmaker, especially one as adept at button-pushing as Capra? “(British Film Institute). Named by the British Film Institute as one of the “10 Essential Films” in the Hollywood auteur’s 35-plus film career. Preserved by the Library of Congress.
Tuesday, March 4 at 7pm
20 DAYS IN MARIUPOL
Directed by Mystyslav Chernov (Ukraine, U.S. 2023) 89 min. DCP. In Ukranian, Russian and English with English subtitles.
“A miraculous feat” – Tomris Laffly, Harper’s Bazaar. February 2022: As Russian troops advance on the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, a small crew of Associated Press reporters are trapped amongst the besieged civilian population. 20 DAYS IN MARIUPOL — winner of the 2023 Sundance Audience Award for World Cinema Documentary — is the unflinching visual chronicle of this harrowing ordeal. Ukrainian war correspondent Mstyslav Chernov (he directs, shoots, and narrates) and colleagues are the only international correspondents left in the city, witnesses to the first sighting of a “Z” on a Russian tank (a declaration of war), random shelling, the bombing of a maternity hospital, the digging of mass graves, and Russia’s eventual encirclement of the city. Their images of war crimes would soon go viral, potently exposing Russia’s monstrous lies that deny their targeting of Ukrainian civilians, and earning the AP team two 2023 Pulitzer Prizes: for Public Service Journalism and Breaking News Photography (Film Forum notes). Presented in connection with the Bucknell Humanities Center themed programming, “Narrating Russia’s Empires: Eurasian Resistance/s.” Introduction by professor Lenora Murphy (Russian Studies).
“VITAL. A dizzying reminder of the brutality and banality of war…Mr. Chernov’s stunned, quiet, almost whispery narration makes him a successor to Dante’s Virgil as he steers us through this infernal tableau… This is war in close-up, with its ultimate effects given their due prominence…Astute observations, together with the harrowing imagery, lift 20 Days in Mariupol to the ranks of the great war documentaries. It is also a searing drama that radiates suspense…Though Mr. Chernov is modest about his accomplishments, [the film] also constitutes a stirring tribute to his courage and that of his fellow AP journalists on the scene… In an age when journalism is facing rising criticism for grandstanding, massaging facts and naked partisanship, these professionals remind us all that those who gather and disseminate true information and images remain indispensable to any attempt to make sense of the world.” – Kyle Smith, The Wall Street Journal
Tuesday, March 18 at 7pm
Who by Fire – Exclusive Area Engagement!
Directed by Philippe Lesage (Canada/France U.S. 2024) 155 min. DCP. With Noah Parker, Arieh Worthalter, Aurélia Arandi-Longpré, Paul Ahmarani. In French with English subtitles.
A getaway at a secluded log cabin in the forest becomes the site of escalating, multigenerational tensions and anxieties in this disquieting, impeccably mounted coming-of-age drama from Quebecois filmmaker Philippe Lesage. Ostensibly a merry reunion between well-known film director Blake Cadieux (Worthalter) and his longtime friend and former collaborator Albert Gary (Ahmarani), the vacation gradually becomes something far more complex and less stable, especially with the combustible admixture of Albert’s teen son’s best friend, Jeff (Parker), and Albert’s self-asserting daughter Aliocha (Arandi-Longpré). Long-simmering middle-aged resentments surface, set against the anxieties of the young, all captured sensitively by Lesage, who in recent years has proven unparalleled in evoking the psychological contours of teenagers finding their paths through treacherous emotional landscapes. Featuring thrillingly choreographed dinner sequences of mounting tension, Who by Fire confirms Lesage as a major contemporary filmmaker, with its assured tonal negotiation of the naturalistic and the oneiric, the joyous (especially an epic dance interlude to The B-52s) and the ominous (Lincoln Center notes).
“Lesage underlines his ability to carve a semblance of a horror movie from everyday domestic drama — confirming him as a filmmaker of considerable grace and daring.” – VARIETY
Tuesday, March 25 at 7pm
A Woman is a Woman – Recent Restoration!
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard (France 1961) 84 min. DCP. With Anna Karina, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Claude Brialy. In French with English subtitles.
“I want to be in a musical with Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly… choreographed by Bob Fauce (sic)!” declares Anna Karina, and she almost gets her wish in this first color, ‘Scope, and mostly studio-shot film by then-husband Jean-Luc Godard, the second of their 7½ collaborations. It’s a simple story — Karina’s Angela, an afternoon stripper in the sleazy Zodiac Club, yearns for motherhood, but live-in boyfriend Jean-Claude Brialy “isn’t ready yet,” while hanger-on Jean-Paul Belmondo is more than happy to oblige. This being an early Godard film, that story is festooned with eccentric musical moments, cinematic in-jokes galore, anarchic humor, and a 1961 Paris stunningly photographed by New Wave master Raoul Cotard (Breathless, Jules et Jim, Contempt). A Woman is a Woman is a jeu d’esprit of the New Wave that won a jury prize from the Berlin festival for its “originality, youth, audacity and impertinence,” while the enchanting Karina (in her first major role) was named Best Actress, “a revelation possessing qualities rare in an actress” (adapted from Film Forum notes).
“An intoxicating expression of that devotion, and of the idea, more liberating then than now, that movie love was the stuff that movies could be made of.” — A.O. Scott, The New York Times
Tuesday, April 1 at 7pm
The Graduate – Selected by Visiting Producer and Bucknell Alum Chris Bender (’93)!
Directed by Mike Nichols (U.S. 1967) 105 min. DCP. With Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Katherine Ross.
Benjamin Braddock (Hoffman) graduates from college, moves back home and searches for direction, bouncing between an affair with the wife of his father’s partner (“Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me…aren’t you?”) and her daughter, the woman of his dreams. The Graduate’s tale of restlessness and ennui, and its legendary Simon & Garfunkel soundtrack,was a generational milestone, and it remains a classic of the American screen – recommended viewing before commencement, Class of 2025!
“The funniest American comedy of the year… Hoffman is so painfully awkward and ethical that we are forced to admit we would act pretty much as he does, even in his most extreme moments. Bancroft, in a tricky role, is magnificently sexy, shrewish, and self-possessed enough to make the seduction convincing… Benjamin’s acute honesty and embarrassment are so accurately drawn that we hardly know whether to laugh or to look inside ourselves.” – Roger Ebert
Tuesday, April 8 at 7pm
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl – Area Premiere Engagement!
Directed by Rungano Nyoni (Zambia/U.K./Ireland 2024) 95 min. DCP. With Susan Chardy, Elizabeth Chisela, Henry B.J. Phiri. In Bemba and English with English subtitles.
A middle-aged man’s sudden death brings about a reckoning with the past for an extended Zambian family in Rungano Nyoni’s scalding drama. Balancing domestic realism and expressionistic absurdity with precision and constant surprise, Nyoni, in the follow-up to her feature debut, I Am Not a Witch, commandingly delineates the contours of a community caught between tradition and modernity. Nyoni’s film centers on Shula (a furious and touching Susan Chardy), whose stoical response to finding her uncle’s body on the street in the middle of the night hints at the many emotional fissures that will lead to the exposure of difficult truths long repressed. The film’s compositional rigor, inventive sound design, and unexpected narrative turns and digressions confirm Nyoni as a distinctive new voice in international cinema (New York FIlm Festival notes). Winner of the Best Director prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section. An A24 release.
“As it unfolds, the funeral ceremony becomes a kind of movie within a movie, at times edging into near-documentary specificity. In the funeral’s rituals and formations — in how attendees gather and separate as they strike alliances, voice complaints and settle scores — it also elegantly expresses the familial, cultural and social intricacies of Shula’s world, both its attractions and its burdens. Inside the house, women crowd the kitchen preparing food, including for a smattering of men seated outside. When Shula asks what some would like to eat, she does so on her knees, echoing the supplicating mourners. As Nyoni does throughout, she doesn’t embellish this scene; she doesn’t need to. She says all she needs to with each lapidary image, with every resonant silence and with the undaunted power of Shula’s gaze.” – Manohla Dargis, Critic’s Pick, The New York Times
Tuesday, April 15 at 7pm
The Art of the Short Film
Films by Jack Chambers, Vittorio de Seta, Rose Lowder and Bucknell students! TRT approximate 53 minutes.
On the occasion of the Bucknell Film Club’s Spring Film Challenge (on the theme of nature), we have curated a program that presents student entries alongside an eclectic and historically ranging selection that illustrates the artistry and vision of the short film, as imagined by filmmakers Vittoria de Seta (The Golden Parable, Italy, 1955), Rose Lowder (Bouquets 1-10, France, 1994-1995) and Jack Chambers (Mosiac, Canada, 1964–66). Student filmmakers are: Valeria Diaz, Jack Royal, Tudor Lazea, Dani Kuck, Isaac Callahan, Matt Blair, Miguel Camacho. Join us after the program for a reception and award announcements!
Tuesday, April 22 at 7pm
Killer of Sheep – New Restoration!
Directed by Charles Burnett (U.S. 1977) 82 min. DCP. With Henry Gayle Sanders, Kaycee Moore, Charles Bracy, Angela Burnett.
Writer-director Charles Burnett examined the black Los Angeles ghetto of mid-70s Watts through the eyes of Stan, a sensitive dreamer growing detached from the psychic toll of working at a slaughterhouse yet finding moments of respite slow dancing with his wife in the living room and holding his daughter. Compared by film critics to Italian neorealist films like Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief, Killer of Sheep was shot on location near Burnett’s family home with a mostly amateur cast of friends and acquaintances and documentary-style cinematography. In 1990, the Library of Congress selected it as one of the first fifty films on the National Film Registry, and in 2002 the National Society of Film Critics named it one of the 100 Essential Films of all time – essential accolades for a film that had never been shown theatrically or made available on video due to the expense of music rights. Thanks to a UCLA Film and Television Archive restoration and Milestone Films, the film finally received an international release in 2007. Introduced by Ken Eisenstein, Visiting Assistant Professor in Film/Media Studies. Co-sponsored by Bucknell’s Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Gender (CSREG) and the Griot Institute for Africana Studies.
“An American masterpiece, independent to the bone.” – Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
Tuesday, April 29 at 7pm
Woman in the Dunes
Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara (Japan 1964) 147 min. DCP. With Eiji Okada, Kyoko Kishida. Japanese with English subtitles.
One of the sixties’ great international art-house sensations, Woman in the Dunes was for many the grand unveiling of the surreal, idiosyncratic worldview of Hiroshi Teshigahara. Eiji Okada plays an amateur entomologist who has left Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle that resides in a remote, vast desert; when he misses his bus back to civilization, he is persuaded to spend the night in the home of a young widow (Kishida) who lives in a hut at the bottom of a sand dune. What results is one of cinema’s most bristling, unnerving, and palpably erotic battles of the sexes, as well as a nightmarish depiction of everyday Sisyphean struggle, for which Teshigahara received an Academy Award nomination for best director.