This section showcases important works from renowned filmmakers that have been digitally remastered, restored, and preserved with the assistance of generous partners.
U.S. Premiere of New Restoration
Set in 1977 during the Lebanese Civil War, Borhane Alaouié’s melancholic, meditative docu-fiction study of longing and life is a too-little-seen masterwork of Lebanese cinema, an entrancingly personal and atmospheric film poem about human connection in troubled times.
New 4K Restoration · Intro by Luiz Oliveira on Oct. 1
A landmark work of militant cinema and a key film of the Cinema Novo movement, Black God, White Devil interweaves documentary elements and iconoclastic formal experimentation to yield one of world cinema’s all-time great shots across the bow.
New Restoration
Ablaze in breathtaking Technicolor, the first of Jacques Tourneur’s remarkable Westerns is a complex, morally ambiguous portrait of an Oregon mining community which Martin Scorsese has called “one of the most mysterious and exquisite examples of the Western genre ever made.”
New Restoration
Edward Yang observes the self-absorption of a gaggle of 20-something urbanites and once again searches for the soul of a country he no longer quite recognizes in this panoramic satire set in the material world of 1990s Taipei.
New Restoration · Q&A with Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda
Set in a fictitious African country, Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda’s meticulously composed medium-length comedy recounts the tale of the country’s president—the founder and “first citizen” of his nation—settling in for an all-night game of checkers. Presented with Radu Jude's The Potemkinists.
New Restoration
One of Portugal’s greatest filmmakers portrays one of its greatest writers in this biographical gem, following the final days in the life of the 19th-century writer Camilo Castelo Branco, tormented by his own internal tensions as his health takes a dive and the possibility of continuing to write grows ever more remote.
New 4K Restoration
Cauleen Smith’s enduringly rich 1998 feature debut, a landmark in American independent cinema, follows a woman in a photography class in Oakland as she begins photographing the young black men of her neighborhood, having witnessed so many of them fall victim to senseless murder and fearing the possibility of their becoming extinct altogether.
New Restoration
Inspired by the events surrounding a 1969 mass shooting in Pihtipudas, Finland, Mikko Niskanen’s riveting four-part mini-series, which chronicles the plight of a farmer, has been hailed as the crowning achievement of Finnish filmmaking by no less an authority than Aki Kaurismaki.
New Restorations
This program collects four newly restored short and medium-length films by the pioneering queer Black experimental filmmaker Edward Owens: Autre Fois J’ai Aimé Une Femme (1966); Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts (1967); Tomorrow’s Promise (1967); and Remembrance: A Portrait Study (1968-70).
Opens August 25 · New 4K Restoration!
Completed in 1971 but not released until perestroika in 1987, Kira Muratova’s fourth feature is a majestic psychodrama centering on the relationship between a mother and a son and rendered with a borderline avant-garde sense of aesthetic freedom and formal experimentation.
New 4K Restoration
At long last presented in a striking new restoration worthy of the film's reputation, Jean Eustache’s hard-to-see masterpiece uses an obsessive, talkative ménage à trois as the jumping-off point for an intense exploration of sexual politics among liberated yet alienated moderns.
World Premiere of New 4K Restoration · Intro by Claire Denis and Isaach De Bankole
Claire Denis’s rarely screened second feature is a radically physical cinematic journey into the shadowy (under)world of illegal cockfighting, starring Isaach De Bankole and Alex Descas as immigrants living on the outskirts of Paris who dream of a life outside the brutal environment of feathered pugilism in which they earn money.
U.S. Premiere of New Restoration
Pedro Costa’s surprising, lushly atmospheric first feature is a beguiling fairytale about the trials undergone by two brothers in the wake of their father’s violent death. “O Sangue,” Costa said in a 2006 interview, “was also the beginning of my love [...] for domestic cinema. A kind of cinema that shows how people live.”
New 4K Restoration
A landmark work in British avant-garde film and video, the Sankofa collective’s greatly influential first film, The Passion of Remembrance, ambitiously explores themes of racism, homophobia, sexism, and generational tensions as embodied in the reality known by a Black British family over the years.
