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Film at Lincoln Center (FLC) announces updated titles for its Winter/Spring 2021 Virtual Cinema slate. FLC’s Virtual Cinema showcases a wide-ranging mix of new releases, recent festival favorites, and repertory titles that movie lovers can enjoy from the safety and comfort of their homes.

Upcoming Virtual Cinema releases include Maya Da-Rin’s New Directors/New Films selection The Fever, a heartrending look at the daily hardships of a father and daughter from Brazil’s indigenous Desana tribe; Jill Li’s Lost Course, which documents a grassroots movement against corruption in Southern China over 10 years and garnered the prestigious Golden Horse Award; and Ephraim Asili’s dynamic hybrid film The Inheritance, the Opening Night selection of NYFF58’s Currents section, which chronicles the history of Philadelphia-based Black liberation group MOVE alongside dramatizations of the filmmaker’s own experiences in an activist collective. As a prelude, FLC will also screen Asili’s sprawling The Diaspora Suite, a series of five short films exploring connections within the African diaspora.

Additionally, FLC is partnering with A24 for the release of Lee Isaac Chung’s acclaimed Minari. A portion of proceeds from rentals purchased through FLC’s unique link will benefit the organization. And as previously announced, a new restoration of Olivier Assayas’s Demonlover opens February 12.

FLC Virtual Cinema titles now playing include Identifying Features, Martin Eden,
Mirror, Notturno, Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time, Smooth Talk, and select films from World of Wong Kar Wai: As Tears Go By, Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, Happy Together, In the Mood for Love, The Hand, and 2046. For more information on these titles, visit our Virtual Cinema.

All Virtual Cinema rentals support Film at Lincoln Center, helping to ensure it remains a vibrant center for the cinema community.

Film descriptions and additional details are listed below. New releases and revival runs are organized by Florence Almozini, Dennis Lim, and Tyler Wilson.

FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS

Opening February 12
Minari
Lee Isaac Chung, 2020, USA, 115m
English and Korean with English subtitles
A tender and sweeping story about what roots us to people and places, Minari follows a Korean-American family that moves to a tiny Arkansas farm in search of their own American Dream. The family home changes completely with the arrival of their sly, foul-mouthed, but incredibly loving grandmother. Amidst the instability and challenges of this new life in the rugged Ozarks, Minari shows the undeniable resilience of family and what really makes a home. An A24 release.

This title will be hosted on a different platform rather than the FLC Virtual Cinema, but ticket purchases will still support FLC. Rentals will be available for pre-order starting February 8.

Still from Minari

Opening February 12
Demonlover – New Restoration!
Olivier Assayas, 2002, France, 122m
French, English, and Japanese with English subtitles
Assayas’s radical, thought-provoking cyber-thriller depicts the international aristocracies of capitalism in the early 2000s and their amoral double agents. Connie Nielsen stars as a ruthless executive at an internet company, where her insatiable ambition situates her in a bloody corporate conflict for illicit 3D manga pornography. Featuring a deranged ambient score by Sonic Youth and an international cast including Gina Gershon, Chloë Sevigny, and Charles Berling, Demonlover twists the conventions of the espionage thriller into a perceptive indictment of cyber culture and the entrepreneurs who exploit it. A 2003 Film Comment Selects selection. New 2K restoration of the unrated director’s cut supervised by Olivier Assayas. A Janus Films release.

Rental is $12 with a special 20% discount for Film at Lincoln Center Members.

Demonlover tickets are on sale now!

Opening February 26
The Diaspora Suite
Ephraim Asili, 2010-2017, TRT: 78m
Made over the course of seven years and shot on 16mm in Brazil, Canada, Ethiopia, Ghana, Jamaica, and the United States, this cycle of five short films by Ephraim Asili, the director of The Inheritance (NYFF58), collapses time and space to reveal the hidden resonances between the Black American experience and the greater African diaspora. Encompassing history, politics, music, dance, poetry, and ritual, The Diaspora Suite is by turns playful, moving, and radical in its construction of a one-of-a-kind vision of Pan-African identity. A Grasshopper Film release.

Still from Fluid Frontiers

Forged Ways
2010, USA, 16m
Through its rhythmic montage and observational imagery, the first installment of Asili’s The Diaspora Suite links the United States and Ethiopia, conveying the peculiar feeling of uprootedness. While a man navigates the streets of Harlem, images of cities and villages in Ethiopia evoke a sense of dislocation. Asili finds unexpected harmonies between two places with thousands of miles between them.

American Hunger
2013, USA/Ghana, 19m
Oscillating between a street festival in Philadelphia, the slave forts and capital city of Ghana, and the New Jersey shore, American Hunger is a rich and atmospheric meditation on personal experience and collective histories. Asili weaves in quotations by Malcolm X, James Baldwin, and Hollis Frampton as the film whirls from location to location, black-and-white to color, and reality to fantasies.

Many Thousands Gone
2014, USA/Brazil, 8m
Filmed on location in Salvador, Brazil (the last city in the Western Hemisphere to outlaw slavery) and Harlem, New York (a historic center for the African diaspora), Many Thousands Gone draws parallels between summer afternoons on the streets of the two cities. A silent version of the film was given to jazz multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee to create an interpretive score. The final film is a combination of Asili’s images and McPhee’s real-time “sight reading” of the score. An NYFF53 selection.

Kindah
2016, USA/Jamaica, 12m
Shot between Accompong, a Maroon village in Jamaica, and the city of Hudson in New York, the alternately sparse and polyrhythmic Kindah examines Asili’s relationship to the African diaspora. The title alludes to the Kindah Tree, a historical mango tree that symbolizes kinship and community in Jamaican Maroon culture. An NYFF54 selection.

Fluid Frontiers
2017, USA/Canada, 23m
Visually tracing the Windsor-Detroit slave pass of the Underground Railroad, with on-site readings of notable texts by Motor City’s most storied African-American poets, Asili deftly captures the city not simply as a repository of memories but as a landscape of living history. An NYFF55 selection.

Still from Fluid Frontiers

Rental is $10 with a special 20% discount for Film at Lincoln Center Members. 

Opening March 5
Lost Course
Jill Li, China, 2019, 180m
Mandarin with English subtitles
Nearly 10 years in the making, Jill Li’s revelatory debut film—a documentary about the struggle against corruption in South China—follows the grassroots movement for justice led by a group of people from the fishing port of Wukan. The film begins in 2011, shortly after protests broke out against local Communist Party officials who had been secretly selling off community-owned land. With astonishing access, Li (acting as her own cinematographer) observes the key figures galvanizing a local revolution as they go from hard-won triumphs to, gradually, the same malfeasance and lies they had originally condemned. Lost Course offers a timely and deeply affecting look at government wrongdoing and its infective reach into even the most idealistic minds. An Icarus Films release.

Rental is $12 with a special 20% discount for Film at Lincoln Center Members.

Opening March 12
The Inheritance
Ephraim Asili, 2020, USA, 100m
Pennsylvania-born filmmaker Ephraim Asili has been exploring different facets of the African diaspora—and his own place within it—for nearly a decade. His feature-length debut, The Inheritance, is a vibrant, engaging ensemble work that takes place almost entirely within the walls of a West Philadelphia house where a community of young people have come together to form a collective of Black artists and activists. Based partly on Asili’s own experiences in a Black liberationist group, the film interweaves a scripted drama of characters attempting to work towards political consensus with a documentary recollection of the Philadelphia liberation group MOVE, which was the victim of a notorious police bombing in 1985. Asili’s film is an endlessly generative work of politics, humor, and philosophy, referencing the legacies of the Black Arts Movement and featuring Black authors and radicals, members of MOVE, as well as poets Ursula Rucker and Sonia Sanchez. An NYFF58 selection. A Grasshopper Film release.

Rental is $12 with a special 20% discount for Film at Lincoln Center Members. All rentals include access to a bonus Q&A with Ephraim Asili on activism, art, and his latest masterpiece.

Opening March 19
The Fever
Maya Da-Rin, 2019, Brazil, 98m
Portuguese with English subtitles
In her spellbinding first feature, Brazilian director Maya Da-Rin takes a delicate, metaphorical look at the fragile political state of her country from a perspective most moviegoers haven’t seen. Da-Rin centers on the working and home lives of a father and daughter of indigenous Desana descent—middle-aged Justinio (a splendid, quietly expressive Regis Myrupu, who won Best Actor at the Locarno Film Festival) and Vanessa (Rosa Peixoto)—who have moved from their community to the northwestern city of Manaus. There, he works as a security guard in a massive warehouse; she has a position in a hospital and has recently been accepted to study medicine in Brasilia University. Trying to support his family, all the while dreaming of a soul-sustaining return to the Amazonian rainforest, Justinio must contend with encroaching obstacles, including casual racism, reports of a wild animal on the loose, and a mysterious malaria-like illness. Da-Rin keeps the film at once realist and mythic, modern and spiritual, leading to a symbolic, emotional conclusion. A 2020 New Directors/New Films selection. A KimStim release.

Still from The Fever

Rental is $12 with a special 20% discount for Film at Lincoln Center Members. All rentals include access to an extended discussion with Maya Da-Rin on her extraordinary feature debut.