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

Past Films

  • Al Momia

    • Saturday, August 27 4:30 PM
    Shadi Abdel Salam
    Egypt, 1969

    Digital Restoration

    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). 

  • Xiao Wu

    • Friday, August 26 7 PM
    Jia Zhangke
    China, Hong Kong, 1997

    Digital Restoration

    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.

  • I Know Where I’m Going!

    • Saturday, August 20 4:30 PM
    Emeric Pressburger, Michael Powell
    United Kingdom, 1945

    Digital Restoration

    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).

  • The Olive Trees of Justice

    • Thursday, August 4 7:30 PM
    • Friday, August 19 7 PM
    James Blue
    France, 1962

    Digital Restoration

    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).

  • Vittorio De Seta’s Short Films

    • Saturday, August 13 7 PM

    Digital Restorations

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

  • Badou Boy

    • Sunday, August 7 5 PM
    Djibril Diop Mambéty
    Senegal, 1970

    Digital Restoration

    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.

  • Queen of Diamonds

    • Wednesday, July 27 7 PM
    Nina Menkes
    United States, 1991

    Digital Restoration

    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. 

  • Prisoners of the Land

    • Friday, July 22 7 PM
    Mario Soffici
    Argentina, 1939

    Digital Restoration

    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. 

  • Wanda

    • Wednesday, July 13 7 PM
    Barbara Loden
    United States, 1970

    Digital Restoration

    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.

  • The Tree of Wooden Clogs

    • Saturday, July 2 7 PM
    Ermanno Olmi
    Italy, 1978

    Digital Restoration

    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).

  • Taipei Story

    • Friday, July 1 7 PM
    Edward Yang
    Taiwan, 1985

    Digital Restoration

    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.

  • The Color of Pomegranates

    • Thursday, June 30 7 PM
    Sergei Paradjanov
    USSR, 1969

    Digital Restoration

    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).

  • Forbidden Paradise

    • Saturday, June 25 7 PM
    Ernst Lubitsch
    United States, 1924

    4K Digital Restoration

    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.”

    Judith Rosenberg on Piano

  • Enamorada

    • Wednesday, June 22 7 PM
    Emilio Fernández
    Mexico, 1946

    Digital Restoration

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

  • Shadows

    • Friday, June 17 7 PM
    John Cassavetes
    United States, 1959

    Restored 35mm Print

    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.

  • Illustrious Corpses

    • Saturday, June 11 7 PM
    Francesco Rosi
    Italy, 1976

    Digital Restoration

    “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).

  • Lions Love ( . . . and Lies)

    • Thursday, June 9 7 PM
    Agnès Varda
    United States, 1969

    Digital Restoration

    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).

  • Sambizanga

    • Wednesday, June 8 7 PM
    Sarah Maldoror
    Angola, Congo, France, 1972

    Digital Restoration

    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).

  • L’Atalante

    • Saturday, June 4 7 PM
    Jean Vigo
    France, 1934

    4K Digital Restoration

    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).