Art of the Real 2017

Rat Film

An essayistic cultural history of rats, segregation, and scientific research in the city of Baltimore.

Risk

Closing Night • North American Premiere • Q&A with Laura Poitras and producer Brenda Coughlin • Post-screening reception for all ticket-holders

Laura Poitras returns to the knotty territory of political truth-telling and international espionage with this years-in-the-making portrait of controversial WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

2+2=22 [The Alphabet]

North American Premiere • Q&A with Heinz Emigholz

The first part of the director’s ambitious new “Streetscapes” cycle is a response to Godard’s One Plus One, an immersive look into both the recording of Kreidler’s album ABC and the architecture of Tbilisi.

Ama-San

U.S. Premiere

This intimate documentary focuses on the Japanese women who have been performing traditional dives (sans oxygen tanks) together for 30 years.

Another Year

U.S. Premiere • Q&A with Shengze Zhu and producer Zhengfan Yang

Through a simple premise—13 meals shared by a family of migrant workers over 14 months, rendered in leisurely long takes—Shengze Zhu’s compassionate film speaks volumes about socioeconomic realities in contemporary China.

Brothers of the Night

U.S. Premiere · Q&A with Patric Chiha

With visuals inspired by Fassbinder’s Querelle, Patric Chiha’s stylized film follows a group of Bulgarian Roma in Vienna who support their families back home by taking on gay sex work.

Casa Roshell

Mixing digital, 16mm film, and closed-circuit TV footage to locate a glamorous utopia within the confines of a Mexico City transgender club, Casa Roshell is a richly detailed and immersive portrait of a place whose patrons are allowed to own their identities and feel less alone.

The Dazzling Light of Sunset

Q&A with Salomé Jashi

In a provincial Georgian town, an ultra-low-budget local news team covers weddings, politics, and teenage beauty pageants with a remarkable code of professionalism.

Dark Skull

Q&A with Kiro Russo

Made in collaboration with a crew of Bolivian miners, this formally ambitious work tells an unsparing tale of grueling work, family drama, and drug abuse.

Doppelgänger: a cine-performance by Basma Alsharif

Live Event · U.S. Premiere

In this cine-performance, Alsharif weaves together the Occupation of Palestine, narrative cinema, and the possibility for Utopia.

Empathy

North American Premiere • Q&A with Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli

Rovinelli’s rigorous yet sensitive debut follows Em, a queer sex worker struggling to kick heroin, and depicts what it means to be young and at odds with oneself today.

From a Year of Non-Events

North American Premiere

Renninger and Frölke’s latest tenderly traces the daily rhythms and rituals of 90-year-old Willi Detert on his rural northern German farm by way of an elegantly interwoven tapestry of 16mm and Super 8mm images.

Gray House

North American Premiere • Q&A with Austin Lynch and Matthew Booth

Austin Lynch (son of David) and Matthew Booth candidly explore the American working class through a stunningly photographed weave of verité footage, interviews, landscapes, and fictional elements.

In Time to Come

U.S. Premiere • Q&A with Tan Pin Pin

Tan Pin Pin returns to themes of redevelopment and excavation of the past in Singapore, subtly questioning our relationship to time and each other.

The Modern Jungle

Q&A with Charles Fairbanks and Saul Kak

This bold, reflexive ethnography charts the relationship of an indigenous couple struggling with health problems and land rights.

Moyra Davey: Two Premieres

U.S. Premiere • Q&A with Moyra Davey + Book Signing!

Hemlock Forest (2016, 42m) + Wedding Loop (2017, 23m)
These two new works by artist Moyra Davey are personal and essayistic tributes to Chantal Akerman, Karl Ove Knausgård, and Julia Margaret Cameron.

The Other Day

Introduction by Ignacio Agüero

Ignacio Agüero’s documentary encompassed his family and national history, Chile’s economic problems, identity, and nature even while being shot primarily inside his home and through a door that leads to the street.

Pow Wow

Q&A with Robinson Devor

Robinson Devor (Zoo) illustrates the legend of a native American youth through breathtaking views of California’s Coachella Valley and interviews with its oddball denizens.

The Sky, the Earth, and the Rain

Introduction by José Luis Torres Leiva

In remote, rural southern Chile, Ana, Veronica, Marta, and Toro struggle to find connections with each other and discover themselves.

Streetscapes [Dialogue]

A director speaks at length to a psychoanalyst, confiding his obsessions, fears, ideas about cinema, and psychological blocks. Emigholz’s magnum opus is a playful, moving treatise on trauma and architecture in which foreground and background carry equal weight.

This Is the Way I Like It II

U.S. Premiere • Q&A with Ignacio Agüero

Moving between past and present, this fascinating portrait reveals today’s Chile through the eyes of one director (who remained in Chile throughout the dictatorship) and his contemporaries.

Untitled

North American Premiere

The late Michael Glawogger’s longtime editor combines the remarkable footage from the director’s final, unfinished project with excerpts from his journals for a revealing and moving elegy.

Voyage to Terengganu

North American Premiere • Q&A with co-director Badrul Hisham Ismail and composer Zulhezan

Retracing the early 19th-century travels of the great Malaysian writer Munshi Abdullah through the eastern Malaysian state of Terengganu, this humanistic travelogue explores contemporary beliefs about money, religion, and nationhood.

The Wind Knows That I’m Coming Back Home

U.S. Premiere • Q&A with José Luis Torres Leiva

A filmmaker prepares to shoot his first fiction film, about the real-life disappearance of two lovers in the woods of Chile’s remote Meulín Island in the early 1980s.

World Without End (No Reported Incidents)

Q&A with Jem Cohen

Jem Cohen (Museum Hours) offers a sweet-hearted, structuralist look at three cities along the Thames Estuary: Southend-on-Sea, Leigh-on-Sea, and Canvey Island.

Blah Blah Blah + Bang Bang

Two classics of the marginal cinema movement that opposed both the Cinema Novo movement and Brazil’s military government.

Hills of Disorder

Introduction by film scholar Ivone Margulies

Through a heady blend of re-enactments and archival news reports, the film tells the story of Carapiru, an indigenous man who survived the massacre of his tribe in 1978.