This rich array of fiction, nonfiction, and experimental works interrogates film as a medium and asks what cinema’s social and cultural role is or could be.
Read full descriptionFilm to Table dinner follows
Chris Marker’s cinematic psalm to Andrei Tarkovsky transports the viewer into Tarkovsky’s films and his world. With Marker’s short on the Russian director Alexander Medvedkin, The Train Rolls On.
Bill Morrison presents his beautiful meditation on a rare trove of silent nitrate film, as well as the barren Canadian Yukon town where it was found. “Both awe-inspiring and humbling” (New York Times).
BAMPFA Collection
A lifelong film archivist faces a new beginning with the threatened closure of his institution in this loving black-and-white ode to a life lived among the reels. “An elegy to cinephilia” (Slant). With Morgan Fisher’s Standard Gauge and Alexi Manis’s Luminous.
BAMPFA Collection
A remarkable examination of what happens when a film on the Warsaw Ghetto, discovered shortly after World War II and thought to be documentary footage, turns out to be an unfinished propaganda film.
Lipman’s fascinating kino-essay examines a 1965 collaboration between Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton. “Testifies to an almost inexhaustible fascination with the pleasures and paradoxes of cinema” (New York Times). With the original article: Samuel Beckett’s Film.
This profile of Naum Kleiman, an acclaimed film historian and former director of Moscow’s Cinema Museum and Eisenstein Center, celebrates “a modest, inspiring cultural figure [with a] conviction that cinema can be used to construct a free civil society” (Hollywood Reporter).
A bootleg DVD, an old TV, and beat-up benches are all you need to keep cinema alive—at least in one run-down Burkinabe neighborhood—in Téno’s tribute to African hustle and cinephilia. With Christian Bruno and Natalija Vekic’s Ed and Pauline and Emily Chao’s Bruce Takes Dragon Town.
The film essayist behind Red Hollywood and Los Angeles Plays Itself returns with this personal history of cinema, inspired by Gilles Deleuze. “Less a lecture than a wordless, associative, haunted journey not just through the history of cinematic innovation, but through the 20th century itself” (The Guardian).
Acclaimed Iranian director Makhmalbaf blurs the line between fiction and reality by turning a casting call into cinema, and his prospective actors into subjects, in this tribute to (and wry jab at) the power of film. “Witty and slyly relevant” (Variety).
Experimental filmmaker Zoe Beloff revisits the Hollywood exile of two revolutionaries—Sergei Eisenstein and Bertolt Brecht—in an illustrated presentation and a trilogy of short films.