Tuesday, August 24 at 7:10pm
MALNI—Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore – Exclusive Area Premiere!
Sky Hopinka (US 2020) 80 min. DCP.
A poetic, experimental debut feature circling the origin of the death myth from the Chinookan people in the Pacific Northwest, Małni – towards the ocean, towards the shore follows two people as they wander through their surrounding nature, the spirit world, and something much deeper inside. At its center are Sweetwater Sahme and Jordan Mercier, who take separate paths contemplating their afterlife, rebirth, and death. Probing questions about humanity’s place on earth and other worlds, Sky Hopinka’s film will have audiences thinking (and dreaming) about it long after.
“Watching Malni…I felt a sense of replenishment. A lyrical art film that uses ancestral storytelling techniques to share experiences of Indigenous living and political resistance.”— Cassie Da Costa, Vanity Fair
Tuesday, August 31 at 7:10pm
SANKOFA – Archival Print!
Haile Gerima (USA/Ghana/Burkina Faso/Germany 1993) 125 min. 35MM.
The story begins with Black American model Mona, who is taking part in a photo shoot at a Ghanaian slave fort. Mona undergoes a journey back in time and place to a slave plantation in North America where she becomes Shola, a house slave, and experiences the suffering of slavery firsthand. In becoming Shola and returning to her past culture and heritage, Mona is able to recover her lost slave identity and confront her ancestral experience. The film’s narrative structure follows the concept of “Sankofa,” an Akan word that signifies the recuperation of one’s past in order to comprehend the present and find one’s future. Sankofa is an influential work in African Diaspora cinema and also consolidated Gerima’s principled position as an independent filmmaker.
Presented in conjunction with Bucknell’s first year reading of and programming around Ta-Nehisi Coates‘ The Water Dancer. Introduced by Thelathia “Nikki” Young, Associate Provost for Equity and Inclusive Excellence and Associate Prof. of Women’s and Gender Studies and Religion.
Tuesday, September 7 at 7:10pm
ANNE AT 13,000 FT – Exclusive East Coast Premiere!
Kazik Radwanski (Canada 2019) 75 min. DCP. With Deragh Campbell, Dorothea Paas.
Anne hasn’t been the same since the jump. While skydiving for her best friend Sara’s bachelorette party, the 27-year-old felt focused, free, above it all. Back on the ground, the pressures of her daily life threaten to overwhelm her. Her coworkers at the daycare center are constantly questioning the way she connects with the children. At Sara’s wedding, she meets a nice guy named Matt, but she can’t help bringing him into ever-more-awkward social situations. As the stressful circumstances mount, Anne prepares for another jump. From a rip-roaring skydive to moments of quiet reverie, this electrifying pairing of two of the brightest young stars in cinema captures its protagonist’s experience with an unflinching directness, a volatile mix of Dardenne brothers immediacy and Cassavetes naturalism.
“There is simply no one else today experimenting with form and character, and succeeding on both fronts, like Radwanski.” – Barry Hertz, Globe and Mail
Tuesday, September 14 at 7:10pm
SOLARIS
Andrei Tarkovsky (Soviet Union 1972) 166 min. DCP. With Natalya Bondarchuk, Donatas Banionis, Jüri Järvet, Vladislav Dvorzhetskiy. Russian with English subtitles.
Ground control has been receiving mysterious transmissions from the three remaining residents of the Solaris space station. When cosmonaut and psychologist Kris Kelvin is dispatched to investigate, he experiences the same strange phenomena that afflict the Solaris crew, sending him on a voyage into the darkest recesses of his consciousness. With Solaris, the legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky created a brilliantly original science-fiction epic that challenges our conceptions about love, truth, and humanity itself.
Tuesday, September 21 at 7:10pm
EYIMOFE (THIS IS MY DESIRE) – AREA PREMIERE!
Arie and Chuko Esiri (Nigeria 2020) 116 min. DCP. With Emmanuel Adeji, Mary Agholor, Kemi Lala Akindoju, Ivy Akinyode.
A triumph at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival, the revelatory debut feature from codirectors (and twin brothers) Arie and Chuko Esiri is a heartrending and hopeful portrait of everyday human endurance in Lagos, Nigeria. Shot on richly textured 16 mm film and infused with the spirit of neorealism, Eyimofe traces the journeys of two distantly connected strangers—Mofe (Akuwudike), an electrician dealing with the fallout of a family tragedy, and Rosa (Ami-Williams), a hairdresser supporting her pregnant teenage sister—as they each pursue their dream of starting a new life in Europe while bumping up against the harsh economic realities of a world in which every interaction is a transaction. From these intimate stories emerges a vivid snapshot of life in contemporary Lagos, whose social fabric is captured in all its vibrancy and complexity.
Tuesday, September 28 at 7:10pm
WORKING GIRLS – Restoration!
Lizzie Borden (U.S. 1986) 93 min. DCP. With Amanda Goodwin, Ellen McDuff, Marusia Zach, Louise Smith.
Sex work is portrayed with radical nonjudgment in Lizzie Borden’s immersive, richly detailed look at the rhythms and rituals of society’s most stigmatized profession. Inspired by the experiences of the sex workers Borden met while making her underground feminist landmark Born in Flames, Working Girls reveals the textures of a day in the life of Molly (Smith), a photographer working part-time in a Manhattan brothel, as she juggles a steady stream of clients, balances relationships with her coworkers with the demands of an ambitious madam, and above all fights to maintain her sense of self in a business in which the line between the personal and the professional is all too easily blurred. In viewing prostitution through the lens of labor, Borden boldly desensationalizes the subject, offering an empathetic, humanizing, often humorous depiction of women for whom this work is just another day at the office.
Tuesday, October 5 at 7:10pm
DO THE RIGHT THING – 30th Anniversary Restoration!
Spike Lee (U.S. 1989) 120 min. DCP. With John Turturro, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Richard Edson, Rosie Perez, Bill Nunn.
On the hottest day of the year on a street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, everyone’s hate and bigotry smolders and builds until it explodes into violence. Centered around the daily travails of pizza delivery boy Mookie (Lee himself), the scope of the story widens to document tension building up within his neighborhood. As raw today as it was when it was first released, Do The Right Thing boasts an ensemble cast of characters played by any number of actors who are now highly recognizable. (Adapted from The Frida Cinema’s notes)
“Said more about the state of contemporary race relations, and with more complexity and brazen confidence, than any other film in the American cinema to date… Lee’s masterstroke was to deploy all the characteristics associated with an uncomplicated good time at the cinema—it’s funny, has an attractive cast and a marketable soundtrack crammed with popular hits—as a Trojan horse for incendiary political content.” – Ashley Clark, Reverse Shot
Tuesday, October 19 at 7:10pm
Chão (Landless) – Director in Person!
Camila Freitas (U.S. 2019) 110 min. DCP. Portuguese with English subtitles.
“Over a period of four years, Camila Freitas documented the lives of a group of landless workers in the Brazilian state of Goiás. Since 2015, the workers have occupied a portion of a factory site and demanded land reform. Chão provides insights into the group’s everyday routine, which is divided between tilling the land, political activism, and talk of what a better future might look like. The film thus delves into the microstructures of local political action while also demonstrating just how dependent the Landless Workers Movement is on Brazilian politics, global capital, and the agricultural industry. Occupying a space between frank realism and potent atmospherics that draw their power from poetic digressions, such as deliberately exaggerated moments on the soundtrack, impressionistic close-ups, and cinematographic micro-narrations, Chão documents life in the resistance, where hope can sometimes seem like the only thing capable of countering the realities of the world. It was only recently that Jair Bolsonaro, the new president of Brazil, added the landless to the list of enemies of the nation and called on landowners to take up arms to defend their property.” —Alejandro Bachmann, Berlinale Forum. Introduced by Bret Leraul, Assistant Professor of Comparative and Digital Humanities, and presented in conjunction with his course “Arts of Extraction: Hemispheric Representations of Ecological Injustice.”
Tuesday, October 26 at 7:10pm
The Thing
John Carpenter (U.S. 1982) 109 min. 35MM. With Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, T.K. Carter.
The spectacles of CGI may create ethereal worlds and untold marvels, but pixels will never achieve the sheer viscous, loathsome ickiness on display in Carpenter’s remake of the 1951 classic (The Thing from Another World). Rob Bottin and Stan Winston’s effects co-star with an ensemble cast led by Kurt Russell as researchers stuck at an isolated Antarctic outpost where they’ve run afoul of an ancient, awakened evil, in one of the bleakest films ever underwritten by an American studio (Metrograph Program notes). Introduced by Bucknell Biology Professor Tristan Stayton
Tuesday, November 2 at 7:10pm
Mogul Mowgli
Bassam Tariq (UK 2020) 90 min. DCP. With Riz Ahmed, Alyy Khan, Sudha Buchar.
The debut narrative feature from award-winning documentary filmmaker Bassam Tariq (These Birds Walk) follows the story of a British Pakistani rapper (Ahmed, fresh off his Oscar-nominated performance in Sound of Metal) who, on the cusp of his first world tour, is struck down by an illness that forces him to face his past, his family, and the uncertainty of his legacy. At turns intimate, quiet and vulnerable – then aggressive, feverishly and seething – Mogul Mowgli’s writing, cinematography and sound design are riveting and vital.
“Critic’s Pick. Electrifying. The puzzles and paradoxes of identity are the wellsprings of (Zheen/Zed’s) art… He writes seething, witty rhymes about the complicated history of the skin he lives in. Mogul Mowgli, Bassam Tariq’s astute, compact fictional feature debut, is a portrait of the artist as a son, brother and patient… existing somewhere between dream and memory, fantasy and hallucination… Tariq stitches domestic drama, satire and magical realism into a tissue of moods and meaning, held together by the shattering credibility of Ahmed’s performance.” – A.O. Scott, The New York Times
Tuesday, November 9 at 7:10pm
Breathless – 60TH ANNIVERSARY 4K RESTORATION!
Jean-Luc Godard (France 1960) 90 min. DCP. With Jean Seberg, Jean-Paul Belmondo. French with English subtitles.
There was before Breathless, and there was after Breathless. The story is simple: Small-time crook Michel (Belmondo) steals a car and murders a policeman. While on the run, he reconnects with Patricia (Seberg), a journalism student living in Paris, and tries to convince her to go on the lam with him. The film is an icon: Jean-Luc Godard burst onto the film scene with this jazzy, free-form, and sexy homage to the American film genres that inspired him as a writer for Cahiers du cinéma. With its lack of polish, surplus of attitude, anything-goes crime narrative, and effervescent young stars, Breathless helped launch the French New Wave and ensured that cinema would never be the same.
“As fresh and startling as it was 50 years ago!” – Martin Scorsese
Tuesday, November 16 at 7:10pm
THE MORTAL STORM– Archival Restoration!
Frank Borzage (U.S. 1940) 100 min. 35MM. With Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart, Robert Young, Frank Morgan, Robert Stack.
MGM’s first anti-Nazi film, The Mortal Storm, released in June 1940 before America officially entered World War II, is a melodrama surrounding the family of a Jewish professor who is sent to a concentration camp, while his daughter (Sullavan) attempts to escape across the border with a former student of the professor, played by Jimmy Stewart. Written by two refugees from Nazi Germany, George Froeschel (a former newspaper editor) and Paul Hans Rameau (a well-known scriptwriter, persecuted for being gay), who knew the Nazis first hand, this is only one of two films made in Hollywood during the war that explicitly identifies the victims of Nazism as Jews (the other being Andre de Toth’s 1944 None Shall Escape). When the film was released in neutral parts of Europe, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister, banned all MGM films in German territories, in retaliation (Jan-Christopher Horak for UCLA).
35mm restored print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by the Juanita Scott Moss Estate.
Tuesday, November 30 at 7:10pm
SISTERS WITH TRANSISTERS – AREA PREMIERE, PROJECTIONIST’S CHOICE!
Lisa Rovner (UK 2020) 84 min. DCP.
The advent of electronic music in the 20th century was a radical break from all musical traditions that came before it, allowing artists to create compositions that were completely divorced from the Western canon, fantasias that were built out of tones that could only be realized through electrical impulses, intricate tape loops, punch cards, or modified samples plucked from the natural world. Narrated by legendary multimedia artist Laurie Anderson, Sisters with Transistors showcases the music of and rare interviews with female electronic pioneers Clara Rockmore, Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Éliane Radigue, Maryanne Amacher, Bebe Barron, Suzanne Ciani, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Spiegel, and Wendy Carlos. As Lisa Rovner’s documentary demonstrates, these women—many of whom were classically trained musicians, brilliant mathematicians, or a combination of both—relished the freedom of electronic music, even as they were discriminated against because of their gender and because of their chosen medium. Sisters with Transistors is an essential primer for those interested in discovering this vital, oft-overlooked history but also offers plenty of pleasures for crate-digging experimental music obsessives who know the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s output like the back of their hand. Introduced and selected by film projectionist Andy Seal!
Tuesday, December 7 at 7:10pm
2021 Student Film Showcase!
The final projects of 12 film students are unveiled!