February 2020

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    26
    Sunday, January 26, 2020
    1:30 PM
    (89 mins)
    This collection of short works finds Varda observing people, spaces, and places from France to Iran, in L’opéra-Mouffe, Du côté de la côte, La réponse de femmes, Plaisir d’amour en Iran, Ulysse, and Les dites cariatides.
    Sunday, January 26, 2020
    3:30 PM
    Federico Fellini,
    Italy,
    1960,
    (174 mins)

    The May 16 screening has been canceled. Learn more

    BAMPFA Student Committee Pick
    Film to Table dinner follows the January 26 screening

    Marcello Mastroianni stars as a jaded reporter drawn to the decadence of Rome in Fellini’s masterpiece, filled with jaw-dropping set pieces of both excess and warmth. “Fellini’s bizarre, extravagant visuals are absolutely riveting” (Time Out). 
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    7 PM
    Sunday, January 26, 2020
    7 PM
    David Lynch,
    United States,
    1999,
    (111 mins)
    An elderly man drives his lawn mower across the Midwest to see his ailing brother in Lynch’s atypically sweet-natured work, released by Walt Disney Pictures. “It may be my most experimental film,” Lynch claimed.
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    3:10 PM
    • Film
    • In-Person
    Wednesday, January 29, 2020
    3:10 PM
    Roberto Rossellini,
    Italy,
    1945,
    (102 mins)

    Digital Restoration

    Open City also screens Saturday, February 22 (without lecture).

    A group of women and children (led by a charismatic Anna Magnani) try to shelter resistance forces from the Nazis. Rossellini’s moving, inspiring, and agonizing neorealist classic was cowritten by Fellini.
    Special admission: General: $15; BAMPFA members: $11; UC Berkeley students: $7; UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non–UC Berkeley students, disabled persons, ages 65+ and 18 & under: $12.
    • Russell Merritt
      Lecture
      Film historian Russell Merritt has been introducing films, lecturing, and serving as an occasional guest curator at BAMPFA for more than thirty years. 
    7 PM
    Wednesday, January 29, 2020
    7 PM
    David Lynch,
    United States,
    1990,
    (127 mins)

    Wild at Heart also screens Friday, February 14, with an introduction by Barry Gifford.

    Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern are star-crossed lovers on the run from various maniacs, including Harry Dean Stanton, William Dafoe, and Dianne Ladd, in Lynch’s fantastical winner of Cannes’s Palme d’Or.
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    7 PM
    • Film
    Thursday, January 30, 2020
    7 PM
    Agnès Varda,
    France,
    1985,
    (105 mins)

    Digital Restoration

    The short life and eventual death of a young female drifter forms the basis of Varda’s chilling look at alienation and idealism. “Like so many of the greatest films, it tells us a very specific story, strong and unadorned, about a very particular person” (Roger Ebert).
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    5 PM
    Friday, January 31, 2020
    5 PM
    Agnès Varda, JR,
    France,
    2017,
    (89 mins)

    BAMPFA Student Committee Pick

    Varda teams up with hipster artist JR on a road trip across rural France, meeting the locals and creating large-scale portraits. One of Varda’s last films, and a first-rate achievement in her brilliant career.
    7 PM
    Friday, January 31, 2020
    7 PM
    David Lynch,
    United States,
    1986,
    (120 mins)

    Digital Restoration

    Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Isabella Rossellini, and Dennis Hopper inhabit a small-town America steeped in psychic dread. Thirty years later, Lynch's color-saturated noir is “still a hilarious, red-hot poker to the brain” (Guy Maddin). 
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    3 PM
    Saturday, February 1, 2020
    3 PM
    Agnès Varda,
    France,
    1955,
    (80 mins)

    BAMPFA Collection

    Made outside the French film industry on a shoestring budget, Varda’s debut film about two reunited lovers in a Mediterranean fishing port has been called “truly the first film of the nouvelle vague.”
    5:30 PM
    • Film
    Saturday, February 1, 2020
    5:30 PM
    Federico Fellini,
    Italy,
    1954,
    (108 mins)

    La strada also screens Wednesday, February 26, with a lecture by Russell Merritt.

    Fellini’s muse, Giulietta Masina, modeled her timeless character Gelsomina after Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp. She stars with a brutish Anthony Quinn in this classic that Martin Scorsese has called “the cornerstone of Fellini’s work.”
    8 PM
    Saturday, February 1, 2020
    8 PM
    David Lynch,
    United States,
    1986,
    (120 mins)

    Digital Restoration

    Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Isabella Rossellini, and Dennis Hopper inhabit a small-town America steeped in psychic dread. Thirty years later, Lynch's color-saturated noir is “still a hilarious, red-hot poker to the brain” (Guy Maddin). 
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    3 PM
    Sunday, February 2, 2020
    3 PM
    Nanfu Wang, Jialing Zhang,
    United States,
    2019,
    (89 mins)
    This chilling and complex documentary explores the lasting consequences of China’s one-child policy, which ended in 2015. Winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize, US Documentary.
    5 PM
    Sunday, February 2, 2020
    5 PM
    Agnès Varda,
    France,
    1975,
    (80 mins)

    Digital Restoration

    Varda’s playful and affectionate portrait of her own thoroughly Parisian neighborhood and the shopkeepers who keep it thriving. “Casual anthropology with a strongly humanist bent” (Slant).
    7 PM
    Sunday, February 2, 2020
    7 PM
    Călin Peter Netzer,
    Romania,
    2013,
    (112 mins)
    Grand prize winner at the 2013 Berlin Film Festival, this “ferocious psychological drama with the pace of a thriller” (Los Angeles Times) follows an upper-class Bucharest architect who’ll stop at nothing to keep her grown son out of jail. 
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    Tuesday, February 4, 2020
    5:30 PM

    Open to Curator’s Circle members at the $2,500 level and above

    Curator's Circle member reception and tickets to screening and public program featuring producer James Schamus in conversation.
    Curator's Circle members only event.
    7 PM
    • Film
    • Free
    Tuesday, February 4, 2020
    7 PM
    Kitty Green,
    United States,
    2019,
    (87 mins)

    Free Sneak Preview!

    A junior assistant to a powerful entertainment mogul grows increasingly aware of the abuse that insidiously colors every aspect of her workday. “An urgent, quiet scream . . . a jarring portrait of today’s contemporary workplace where too many women remain marginalized. And worse” (Film Comment).
    Free admission; first come, first served. Doors open at 6:30 PM.
    In Conversation
    • James Schamus
      James Schamus, who produced The Assistant, is an award-winning screenwriter (The Ice Storm), producer (Brokeback Mountain), and director (Indignation) as well as the former CEO of Focus Features.
    • Linda Williams
      Linda Williams is professor emeritus in film and media/rhetoric at UC Berkeley.
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    3:10 PM
    • Film
    • In-Person
    Wednesday, February 5, 2020
    3:10 PM
    Federico Fellini, Alberto Lattuada,
    Italy,
    1950,
    (97 mins)

    Variety Lights also screens Sunday, January 19 (without lecture).

    Following a troupe of small-time vaudevillians led by an incorrigible dreamer (Peppino De Filippo) and his fiancée (Giulietta Masina), this was Fellini’s first look at the passions and dreams of eccentrics living beyond bourgeois society—but not his last. 
    Special admission: General: $15; BAMPFA members: $11; UC Berkeley students: $7; UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non–UC Berkeley students, disabled persons, ages 65+ and 18 & under: $12.
    • Russell Merritt
      Lecture
      Film historian Russell Merritt has been introducing films, lecturing, and serving as an occasional guest curator at BAMPFA for more than thirty years.
    Wednesday, February 5, 2020
    7 PM
    (85 mins)
    Three short works that expand the nonfiction form: Vincent Carelli and Mari Corrêa’s Video in the Villages Presents Itself, on indigenous media in Brazil; Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s The Black Cave, exploring Puerto Rico’s Paso del Indio; and Laura Huertas Millán’s La libertad, taking its structure from the pre-Hispanic backstrap loom.
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    7 PM
    • Film
    Thursday, February 6, 2020
    7 PM
    Federico Fellini,
    Italy,
    1963,
    (138 mins)

    Film to Table dinner follows the February 15 screening

    8 1/2 also screens Wednesday, March 18, with a lecture by Russell Merritt.

    A jaded director (Marcello Mastroianni) fantasizes on his next great film—or his next sexual conquest—in Fellini’s metafictional masterpiece, “probably the most potent movie about filmmaking” (The Guardian). 
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    5 PM
    Friday, February 7, 2020
    5 PM
    Agnès Varda,
    France,
    1962,
    (90 mins)

    Digital Restoration
    BAMPFA Student Committee Pick

    Shot entirely on location in the streets of Paris, Cléo chronicles two hours of a pop singer’s life. A score by Michel Legrand and cameos by Legrand, Jean-Luc Godard, and Anna Karina flavor this New Wave classic that proves Varda’s theme, “one isn’t born a woman, one becomes one.”
    7 PM
    • Film
    • In-Person
    Friday, February 7, 2020
    7 PM
    David Lynch,
    United States,
    1997,
    (134 mins)
    Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, and Balthazar Getty flicker across the nocturnal highways and haunts of a nightmarish Los Angeles in Lynch’s audacious “twenty-first-century noir horror film,” as he and cowriter Barry Gifford dubbed it. 
    • Barry Gifford
      Introduction
      Barry Gifford is the author of Wild at Heart and The Up-Down, among other books, and the co-screenwriter of the films Lost Highway, City of Ghosts, and Perdita Durango.
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    ICS
    8
    Saturday, February 8, 2020
    5 PM
    (80 mins)

    This program also screens Wednesday, January 22, with a lecture by Tom Luddy.

    These short films made in the sixties are both political and playful, in keeping with the times. Salut les cubains screens along with two works made in the Bay Area, Uncle Yanco (on Varda’s artist uncle) and Black Panthers (featuring Huey Newton and Kathleen Cleaver).
    Saturday, February 8, 2020
    7 PM
    David Lynch,
    United States,
    1992,
    (134 mins)
    Lynch’s prequel to his cult television show Twin Peaks heads deeper into the woods of small-town Americana, a province of murder, perversity, and crap interior decorating. “Lynch’s masterpiece” (Village Voice).
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    3:10 PM
    • Film
    • In-Person
    Wednesday, February 12, 2020
    3:10 PM
    Federico Fellini,
    Italy,
    1952,
    (86 mins)

    Digital Restoration

    The White Sheik also screens Thursday, January 16 (without lecture).

    Provincial newlyweds arriving in Rome get sidetracked by the wife’s obsession with a fumetto photo-comic star in Fellini’s solo directorial debut. “A funny, sardonic, and clever satire on popular heroes and ordinary people’s illusions” (Chicago Reader). 
    Special admission: General: $15; BAMPFA members: $11; UC Berkeley students: $7; UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non–UC Berkeley students, disabled persons, ages 65+ and 18 & under: $12.
    • Russell Merritt
      Lecture
      Film historian Russell Merritt has been introducing films, lecturing, and serving as an occasional guest curator at BAMPFA for more than thirty years.
    Wednesday, February 12, 2020
    7 PM
    Andrei Ujica, Harun Farocki,
    Germany,
    1992,
    (106 mins)
    The infamous televised speech Nicolae Ceauşescu delivered on the night his regime fell in 1989 is the centerpiece of this sophisticated investigation of the power of images.
    • Andrei Ujica
      CANCELED: In Person
      Due to unforeseen circumstances, we regret that Andrei Ujica will be unable to join us in person.
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    Thursday, February 13, 2020
    7 PM
    Andrei Ujica,
    Russia,
    1995,
    (96 mins)
    Ujică’s Russian-made precursor to The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu uses found footage to revisit the tale of a Soviet cosmonaut whose time in space corresponded with the sudden downfall of the Soviet Union.
    • Andrei Ujica
      CANCELED: In Person
      Due to unforeseen circumstances, we regret that Andrei Ujica will be unable to join us in person.
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    5 PM
    • Film
    Friday, February 14, 2020
    5 PM
    Agnès Varda,
    France,
    1965,
    (85 mins)
    Varda’s strikingly colorful, lyrical film examines a love triangle within a circular structure, as a carpenter seeks happiness with both his wife and his mistress. “Varda fills her frames with riots of nature and color” (Richard Brody).
    7 PM
    • Film
    • In-Person
    Friday, February 14, 2020
    7 PM
    David Lynch,
    United States,
    1990,
    (127 mins)

    Wild at Heart also screens Wednesday, January 29 (without introduction).

    Nicholas Cage and Laura Dern are star-crossed lovers on the run from various maniacs, including Harry Dean Stanton, William Dafoe, and Dianne Ladd, in Lynch’s fantastical winner of Cannes’s Palme d’Or.
    • Barry Gifford
      Introduction
      Barry Gifford is the author of Wild at Heart and The Up-Down, among other books, and the co-screenwriter of the films Lost Highway, City of Ghosts, and Perdita Durango.
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    ICS
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    1 PM
    Saturday, February 15, 2020
    1 PM
    Jacques Demy,
    France,
    1967,
    (124 mins)

    Digital Restoration
    Recommended for ages 12 & up

    Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac play twins lifted out of their small-town reveries by a troupe of wandering entertainers, including Gene Kelly. This musical by Varda’s husband, Jacques Demy, is “not merely charming or amusing, but profoundly moving” (Sight & Sound).
    Saturday, February 15, 2020
    3:30 PM
    Agnès Varda,
    France,
    1993,
    (65 mins)

    Digital Restoration

    Varda’s splendid documentary revisits the town of Rochefort on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the shooting of The Young Girls of Rochefort, and finds evidence of the film’s lasting effects on the townspeople.
    5 PM
    • Film
    Saturday, February 15, 2020
    5 PM
    Federico Fellini,
    Italy,
    1963,
    (138 mins)

    Film to Table dinner follows the February 15 screening

    8 1/2 also screens Wednesday, March 18, with a lecture by Russell Merritt.

    A jaded director (Marcello Mastroianni) fantasizes on his next great film—or his next sexual conquest—in Fellini’s metafictional masterpiece, “probably the most potent movie about filmmaking” (The Guardian). 
    Google Calendar
    ICS
    8 PM
    Saturday, February 15, 2020
    8 PM
    David Lynch,
    United States,
    2001,
    (146 mins)

    BAMPFA Student Committee Pick

    An ingenue recently arrived in Los Angeles (Naomi Watts) becomes involved with a raven-haired amnesiac beauty (Laura Harring) in Lynch’s Chandler-by-way-of-Borges postmodern noir, one of Sight & Sound’s “greatest films of all time.”
    Google Calendar
    ICS
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    Sunday, February 16, 2020
    12:30 PM
    Andrei Ujica,
    Romania,
    2010,
    (180 mins)
    A portrait of a nation—and a cult of personality—through found footage, Ujică’s dissection of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu’s media masquerade is “a cinematic tour de force” (New York Times).
    • Andrei Ujica
      CANCELED: In Person
      Due to unforeseen circumstances, we regret that Andrei Ujica will be unable to join us in person.
    5 PM
    • Film
    Sunday, February 16, 2020
    5 PM
    Agnès Varda,
    France, United States,
    1980,
    (81 mins)

    Digital Restoration

    Varda’s documentary looks at the murals of Los Angeles as backdrop to and mirror of the city’s many cultures circa 1980.
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    3:10 PM
    • Film
    • In-Person
    Wednesday, February 19, 2020
    3:10 PM
    Federico Fellini,
    Italy,
    1953,
    (105 mins)

    I vitelloni also screens Saturday, January 25 (without lecture).

    Fellini paired with the great Italian comic everyman Alberto Sordi for this look at the not-so-young sons of the middle class, (barely) growing up in the provincial town of Rimini. “One of the screen’s great portrayals of the hell-raising and malaise of young men” (Chicago Tribune). 
    Special admission: General: $15; BAMPFA members: $11; UC Berkeley students: $7; UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non–UC Berkeley students, disabled persons, ages 65+ and 18 & under: $12.
    • Russell Merritt
      Lecture
      Film historian Russell Merritt has been introducing films, lecturing, and serving as an occasional guest curator at BAMPFA for more than thirty years.
    7 PM
    • Film
    Wednesday, February 19, 2020
    7 PM
    Maya Da-Rin,
    Brazil,
    2010,
    (100 mins)
    The invisible border that the Amazon River forms between Colombia, Brazil, and Peru is the main character in Maya Da-Rin’s beautiful film, which moves between nature, culture, and commerce. With Jesse Lerner and Scott Sterling’s short Natives.
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    Thursday, February 20, 2020
    7 PM
    Agnès Varda,
    United States,
    1969,
    (110 mins)

    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).
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    4 PM
    Friday, February 21, 2020
    4 PM
    Nanfu Wang, Jialing Zhang,
    United States,
    2019,
    (89 mins)
    This chilling and complex documentary explores the lasting consequences of China’s one-child policy, which ended in 2015. Winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize, US Documentary.
    7 PM
    Friday, February 21, 2020
    7 PM
    Agnès Varda,
    France,
    2000,
    (82 mins)

    Digital Restoration
    Film to Table dinner follows the December 28 screening

    Varda’s rumination on the art of “living off the leftovers of others” visits food scavengers and cultural rebels, and finds inspiration in both past and present, rural and urban, the political and the highly personal. “Beautiful, absorbing, and touching” (Jonathan Rosenbaum).
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    3 PM
    • Film
    Saturday, February 22, 2020
    3 PM
    Agnès Varda,
    France,
    1991,
    (118 mins)

    Digital Restoration
    Recommended for ages 12 & up

    Inspired by the memories of her husband, director Jacques Demy, Varda crafted this affecting and enlightening portrait of the artist as a young boy in 1940s Nantes. “A one-of-a-kind celebration” (New York Times).
    5:30 PM
    • Film
    Saturday, February 22, 2020
    5:30 PM
    Roberto Rossellini,
    Italy,
    1945,
    (102 mins)

    Digital Restoration

    Open City also screens Wednesday, January 29, with a lecture by Russell Merritt.

    A group of women and children (led by a charismatic Anna Magnani) try to shelter resistance forces from the Nazis. Rossellini’s moving, inspiring, and agonizing neorealist classic was cowritten by Fellini.
    8 PM
    • Film
    Saturday, February 22, 2020
    8 PM
    David Lynch,
    United States,
    1976,
    (90 mins)
    Lynch’s debut feature, still creepy after all these years: “a masterpiece of texture . . . an ingenious assemblage of damp, dust, rock, wood, hair, flesh, metal, ooze” (Village Voice).
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    2 PM
    • Film
    Sunday, February 23, 2020
    2 PM
    Roberto Rossellini,
    Italy,
    1946,
    (126 mins)

    Digital Restoration

    An episodic, semidocumentary portrait of wartime Italy, from Sicily during the Allied invasion to the Po Valley near the war’s end. “One of the strongest antiwar films ever made” (New York Times), it was cowritten by Fellini.
    Sunday, February 23, 2020
    4:30 PM
    Agnès Varda,
    Belgium, France, Venezuela,
    1977,
    (121 mins)

    Digital Restoration

    Two very different women search for their place in the world over the course of a decade in Varda’s look at friendship and feminism. “Remains almost unique as a commercial French film concerned with the militant aspects of the women’s movement” (Alison Smith).
    Sunday, February 23, 2020
    7 PM
    Ivana Mladenović,
    Romania,
    2017,
    (120 mins)
    Two men form an unlikely couple in one of Bucharest’s toughest Romany neighborhoods in this naturalist drama, a gay, Romany Romeo and Juliet.
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    3:10 PM
    • Film
    • In-Person
    Wednesday, February 26, 2020
    3:10 PM
    Federico Fellini,
    Italy,
    1954,
    (108 mins)

    La strada also screens Saturday, February 1 (without lecture).

    Fellini’s muse, Giulietta Masina, modeled her timeless character Gelsomina after Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp. She stars with a brutish Anthony Quinn in this classic that Martin Scorsese has called “the cornerstone of Fellini’s work.”
    Special admission: General: $15; BAMPFA members: $11; UC Berkeley students: $7; UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non–UC Berkeley students, disabled persons, ages 65+ and 18 & under: $12.
    • Russell Merritt
      Lecture
      Film historian Russell Merritt has been introducing films, lecturing, and serving as an occasional guest curator at BAMPFA for more than thirty years.
    7 PM
    Wednesday, February 26, 2020
    7 PM
    Chantal Akerman,
    France,
    1977,
    (106 mins)
    New York City, imposing and anonymous, serves as the visual counterpoint to Chantal Akerman’s reading of her own mother’s letters in this personal, beautifully photographed film. With Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum’s short Measures of Distance.
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    Thursday, February 27, 2020
    7 PM
    Radu Jude,
    Romania,
    2018,
    (138 mins)
    Radu Jude dissects the rise of neofascism and the reemergence of anti-Semitism in Europe in this metafictional black comedy. “A complicated meditation on the responsibilities—and limits—of art in the face of horror” (New York Times).
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    4 PM
    • Film
    Friday, February 28, 2020
    4 PM
    Alfred Hitchcock,
    United States,
    1946,
    (101 mins)

    4K Digital Restoration

    Trying to infiltrate a group of Nazis in Latin America, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman find themselves entangled in a cruel love affair. Hitchcock’s polished, perverse thriller exploits an espionage plot to explore the nature of love and loyalty. 
    Friday, February 28, 2020
    7 PM
    Agnès Varda,
    France,
    2008,
    (110 mins)

    Digital Restoration

    Varda takes a cinematic stroll through her long career—and the history of French film—in this first-person documentary. “For all its melancholy and its profound awareness of mortality, [it is] one of the jolliest, more life-affirming self-portraits in recent cinema” (Sight & Sound).
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    Saturday, February 29, 2020
    5:30 PM
    Roberto Rossellini,
    Italy,
    1949,
    (87 mins)
    Cowritten by Fellini, Rossellini’s episodic tribute to the People’s Saint is constructed with crafty simplicity, rich humanity, and earthly joy. “A glorious hallucination of perfect harmony between man and nature” (Dave Kehr).
    Saturday, February 29, 2020
    7:30 PM
    (52 mins)
    Discover or revisit the rare short works of David Lynch, from films he made as a student in the late sixties to later evocations of dreams and nightmares.