Film Preservation: Celebrating The Film Foundation

June 4–August 27, 2022

This series showcases an impressive range of world cinema that has been preserved thanks to a concerted effort by The Film Foundation and the World Cinema Project over more than thirty years.

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  • Shadows

  • Sambizanga

  • Taipei Story

  • The Color of Pomegranates

  • Upcoming
    Films
  • Upcoming
    Events
  • Selected
    Objects
  • Past
    Films
  • Past
    Events

Upcoming Films

  • L’Atalante

    Jean Vigo
    France, 1934

    4K Digital Restoration

    • Saturday, June 4 7 PM

    Vigo’s only full-length feature, a poetic masterpiece on the theme of passionate love, follows a young barge captain and his peasant bride in their first days together. “One of the most magical of French masterpieces” (Variety).

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  • Sambizanga

    Sarah Maldoror
    Angola, Congo, France, 1972

    Digital Restoration

    • Wednesday, June 8 7 PM

    A searing, indelible portrait of anticolonial struggle in 1960s Africa, Maldoror’s adaptation of a novella by the Angolan writer José Luandino Vieira—“a courageous and powerful piece of filmmaking”—was banned by the Angolan government until the country obtained its independence from Portugal in 1975 (Basia Lewandowska Cummings, Africa Is a Country).

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  • Lions Love ( . . . and Lies)

    Agnès Varda
    United States, 1969

    Digital Restoration

    • Thursday, June 9 7 PM

    Varda’s experimental feature, shot in Hollywood in 1968 and starring Warhol superstar Viva, is a deliberately decadent riff on fantasy, immaturity, and violence. “More than a time capsule of events and moods—it’s a living aesthetic model for revolutionary times” (Richard Brody).

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  • Illustrious Corpses

    Francesco Rosi
    Italy, 1976

    Digital Restoration

    • Saturday, June 11 7 PM

    “An astute analysis of corruption . . .  an absorbing, resonant, at times near majestic whodunit . . . the Italian analogue to Watergate-era conspiracy thrillers like The Parallax View and The Conversation” (J. Hoberman, New York Times).

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  • Shadows

    John Cassavetes
    United States, 1959

    Restored 35mm Print

    • Friday, June 17 7 PM

    Time never caught up with Cassavetes’s first film; his tale of three Black Manhattanites is still inherently hip, mordantly funny, terribly sad, and very New York.

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  • Enamorada

    Emilio Fernández
    Mexico, 1946

    Digital Restoration

    • Wednesday, June 22 7 PM

    This classic Fernández-Figueroa collaboration starring Pedro Armendáriz and María Félix marries the Mexican Revolution and The Taming of the Shrew.

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  • Forbidden Paradise

    Ernst Lubitsch
    United States, 1924

    4K Digital Restoration

    • Saturday, June 25 7 PM
    Judith Rosenberg on Piano

    Lubitsch’s long-unavailable Forbidden Paradise brims with comic touches, as officer Alexei saves the czarina from revolutionary conspirators and is rewarded with her love; it represents a crucial refinement toward the “Lubitsch touch.”

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  • The Color of Pomegranates

    Sergei Paradjanov
    USSR, 1969

    Digital Restoration

    • Thursday, June 30 7 PM

    This magical work, rich in period music, reimagines Armenian history and culture through the life and writings of its greatest poet. “Watching [it] is like opening a door and walking into another dimension, where time has stopped and beauty has been unleashed” (Martin Scorsese).

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  • Taipei Story

    Edward Yang
    Taiwan, 1985

    Digital Restoration

    • Friday, July 1 7 PM

    Pop star Tsai Chin and director Hou Hsiao-hsien star in Yang’s breakthrough work, a treatise on loves gone wrong, urban alienation, and sorrow within the bright lights of a mid-1980s Taipei caught between past and present.

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  • The Tree of Wooden Clogs

    Ermanno Olmi
    Italy, 1978

    Digital Restoration

    • Saturday, July 2 7 PM

    Olmi won the Cannes Palme d’Or with this intimate epic of life, love, and work among three peasant families in turn-of-the-century Italy, “a fully articulated work of cinematic art” (Andrew Sarris).

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  • Wanda

    Barbara Loden
    United States, 1970

    Digital Restoration

    • Wednesday, July 13 7 PM

    With her first and only feature film—a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in—Loden turned in a groundbreaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of character seldom seen on-screen.

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  • Prisoners of the Land

    Mario Soffici
    Argentina, 1939

    Digital Restoration

    • Friday, July 22 7 PM

    This passionate tropical noir, set in plantation-era Misiones, Argentina, weaves a love triangle around the class struggles of the birth of contemporary Latin America and is widely acclaimed as one the greatest Argentine films. 

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  • Queen of Diamonds

    Nina Menkes
    United States, 1991

    Digital Restoration

    • Wednesday, July 27 7 PM

    Shot with beautiful compositional rigor, Queen of Diamonds follows the life of Firdaus (Tinka Menkes), a blackjack dealer in a Las Vegas landscape that juxtaposes glittering casino lights and barren desert landscapes. 

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  • The Olive Trees of Justice

    James Blue
    France, 1962

    Digital Restoration

    • Thursday, August 4 7:30 PM
    • Friday, August 19 7 PM

    Blue tells a powerful story of common people living and struggling in their daily lives, while providing a valuable testimony to the complexity of the Algerian struggle for independence. “A neorealist take on the Algerian War made with nonprofessional actors is newly restored and still resonates today” (J. Hoberman, New York Times).

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  • Badou Boy

    Djibril Diop Mambéty
    Senegal, 1970

    Digital Restoration

    • Sunday, August 7 5 PM

    Anticipating the director’s fanciful 1973 feature Touki Bouki, Badou Boy is an acerbically humorous portrait of Dakar, Senegal’s capital. With Contras’ City, Mambéty’s first short, which also riffs on life in Dakar.

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  • Vittorio De Seta’s Short Films


    Digital Restorations

    • Saturday, August 13 7 PM

    De Seta’s vivid documentary glimpses of postwar Sicily capture “the vitality of an unspoiled culture” (Martin Scorsese).

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  • I Know Where I’m Going!

    Emeric Pressburger, Michael Powell
    United Kingdom, 1945

    Digital Restoration

    • Saturday, August 20 4:30 PM

    Powell and Pressburger’s most romantic, lyrical film sets a love affair against the vast beauty of Scotland’s Hebrides Islands in “one of the finest of all screen romances” (Elliot Stein, Village Voice).

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  • Xiao Wu

    Jia Zhangke
    China, Hong Kong, 1997

    Digital Restoration

    • Friday, August 26 7 PM

    A small-time, undermotivated pickpocket finds himself on the wrong end of China’s economic leap forward in Jia’s debut feature, a milestone in contemporary Chinese cinema.

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  • Al Momia

    Shadi Abdel Salam
    Egypt, 1969

    Digital Restoration

    • Saturday, August 27 4:30 PM

    An impressive directorial debut by Salam, Al Momia is “an examination of cultural imperialism in reverse: . . . the film develops into a study of the importance of defending the past from would-be cultural exploiters. Slow-moving but absorbing, and quite beautifully shot” (Time Out). 

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