
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.