AMONG THE PALMS THE BOMB, or: or: Looking for reflections in the toxic field of plenty 2024, 85 min, DCP. In English, Spanish, and Cahuilla with English subtitles. A cinematic exploration that is the culmination of Marxt’s seven-year-long research into the Salton Sea – the largest lake in California, which is on the verge of ecological collapse – and the resilient community struggling to survive within this dystopian reality.

“‘Gidget meets Badlands’ is how writer-director James Dillinger describes his visceral, action-packed, black comedy feature. Tammy, a teenage timebomb, arrives in Orange County with her ignorant redneck parents, and eighteen years of bottled-up frustration give way to a summer of lethal excess. Get out the body bags; call in the SWAT team!” –EZTV GUIDE Preceded by: Jim Baker MOUSE KLUB KONFIDENTIAL 1976, 15 min, Super-8mm-to-DCP Jim Baker THE BRADY BUNCH 1981, 10 min, SD-video-to-DCP

While continuing to teach at Yale and write scripts, Roemer was asked by WGBH if he would be interested in making a film about the rites and customs of death. Roemer was interested in exploring the topic, but only from the point of view of those in the process of dying. Three and a half months of interviews with forty people led to a two-year project and would eventually leave Roemer physically and emotionally depleted. But as a result, DYING is unlike any other film in its attempt to address what is still the most taboo of subjects, with Roemer’s profoundly empathetic approach inspiring his protagonists to express on camera what few would under any other circumstances.

(LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE) by Jean Cocteau In French with English subtitles. “Jean Cocteau’s first full-length movie is perhaps the most sensuously elegant of all filmed fairy tales. As a child escapes from everyday daily life to the magic of a storybook, so, in the film, Beauty’s farm, with its Vermeer simplicity, fades in intensity as we are caught up in the Gustave Doré extravagance of the Beast’s enchanted landscape. In Christian Bérard’s makeup, Jean Marais is a magnificent Beast.” –Pauline Kael

Alberto Cavalcanti RIEN QUE LES HEURES / NOTHING BUT THE HOURS 1926, 52 min, 35mm One of the very first “city symphonies,” this film interweaves documentary, experimental, and narrative elements that together provide vivid images of Paris in the mid-1920s. The Brazilian-born Cavalcanti was at the time a central figure of the French avant-garde, but his fascinating career would later find him making pioneering documentaries for John Grierson’s GPO Film Unit in the UK in the 1930s, dramas, noirs, and musicals for Ealing Studios throughout the 1940s, and finally a wide array of films in Brazil, East Germany, France, and Israel in the years before his death in 1982. Douglass Crockwell GLENS FALLS SEQUENCE (1946, 8 min, 16mm) THE LONG BODIES (1947, 6 min, 16mm) Both films preserved by Anthology Film Archives. “The basic idea was to paint continuing pictures on various layers with plastic paint, adding at times and removing at times, and to a certain extent these early attempts were successful.” –Douglass Crockwell Total running time: ca. 70 min.

A WOMAN 1915, 20 min, 16mm EASY STREET 1917, 19 min, 16mm THE CURE 1917, 26 min, 16mm Total running time: ca. 70 min. “It is stupid to treat Charlie as a clown of genius. If there had never been a cinema he would undoubtedly have been a clown of genius, but the cinema has allowed him to raise the comedy of circus and music hall to the highest aesthetic level. Chaplin needed the medium of the cinema to free comedy completely from the limits of space and time imposed by the stage or the circus arena. […] [The] best Chaplin films can be seen over and over again with no loss of pleasure – indeed the very opposite is the case. It is doubtless a fact that the satisfaction derived from certain gags is inexhaustible, so deep does it lie, but it is furthermore supremely true that comic form and aesthetic value owe nothing to surprise. The latter is exhausted the first time around and is replaced by a much more subtle pleasure, namely the delight of anticipating and recognizing perfection.” –André Bazin, WHAT IS CINEMA

by Bruce Conner A MOVIE (1958, 12 min, 16mm) COSMIC RAY (1961, 4 min, 16mm) REPORT (1965, 13 min, 16mm) “Conner stands as a kind of twentieth century Pieter Bruegel. For like the great Flemish master he distorts the visible world in order to penetrate a reality of being rather than appearances; his vision is cosmic in breadth; he deals with some of the most provocative issues, both artistic and otherwise, of his time; and finally, with an evocative ambiguity and painful irony he touches something which we sometimes call the human experience.” –Carl I. Belz, FILM CULTURE COSMIC RAY and REPORT have been preserved by Anthology through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program, funded by The Film Foundation. by Tony Conrad THE FLICKER (1966, 30 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology with funding provided by the National Film Preservation Foundation.) “THE FLICKER is a tremendous harnessing of the raw power, the elemental material of the cinematic medium – light itself – to transport the spectator slowly at first, hardly perceptibly, then accelerating, through a non-objective non-abstract world of sheer energy. Time becomes the compelling pulse of white into black and back, space becomes the unbounded expansion and contraction of force; the screen becomes a new sun, the audience its creatures.” –Ken Kelman Total running time: ca. 65 min.

Unless otherwise noted, all the films in this program are silent. With the exception of GNIR REDNOW, all films have been preserved by Anthology Film Archives. ROSE HOBART ca. 1936/68, 20 min, 16mm CENTURIES OF JUNE 1955, 10 min, 16mm. Photographed by Stan Brakhage. THE AVIARY 1954, 11 min, 16mm. Photographed by Rudy Burckhardt. GNIR REDNOW 1955, 5 min, 16mm. Photographed by Stan Brakhage. NYMPHLIGHT 1957, 8 min, 16mm. Photographed by Rudy Burckhardt. A LEGEND FOR FOUNTAINS 1957/65, 17 min, 16mm. Photographed by Rudy Burckhardt; completed by Lawrence Jordan. ANGEL 1957, 3 min, 16mm. Photographed by Rudy Burckhardt.

(ORPHÉE) by Jean Cocteau In French with English subtitles. “Orpheus could only exist on the screen. A drama of the visible and the invisible, ORPHEUS’s Death is like a spy who falls in love with the person being spied upon. The myth of immortality.” –Jean Cocteau

(LE SANG D’UN POÈTE) by Jean Cocteau In French with English subtitles. “Adolescent angels wandering about, black boxers with perfect bodies taking flight, school-children in capes killing each other with snowballs, a mirror becomes a swimming pool, and the hallways of a furnished hotel turn into a labyrinth.” –Georges Sadoul

In his controversial masterpiece, Chaplin offers both a cutting caricature of Adolf Hitler and a slytweaking ofhis own comic persona. Chaplin, in his first pure talkie, brings his sublimephysicality to two roles: the cruel yet clownish “Tomainian” dictator and the kindly Jewishbarber who is mistaken for him. Featuring Jack Oakie and Paulette Goddard in stellar supportingturns, THE GREAT DICTATOR, boldly going after the fascist leader before the U.S.’s officialentry into World War II, is an audacious amalgam of politics and slapstick that culminates inChaplin’s famously impassioned speech.

Cancel those Fire Island plans and book yourself a stay at Anthology in August, because the EZTV retrospective organized by our dear friend Elizabeth Purchell is one of the most mind-blowing queer repertory programs New York has seen in years (see page ? for more details). “Narrow Rooms” is thrilled and honored to partner with Purchell and her new distribution label – MUSCLE Distribution – to co-present the opening night screening of this monumental retrospective, which comprises three incredible, rarely-seen works by Ken Camp, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker who was making “Narrow Rooms”-style movies (dark, dirty, disturbing, gay) a decade before the directors of the comparatively tame “New Queer Cinema” era. These films go hard and will leave you unsettled, unnerved, and afraid. The program begins with SHOCK VIDEO, an experimental shot-on-film trailer for Camp’s as-of-yet unfinished Super 8 horror feature AFTER THE COMET. The second – much lighter – entry in the program is the first episode of Camp’s campy gay soap opera spoof AS THE WORLD BURNS, which takes place in a seemingly picture perfect Reaganite California suburb where all the female character’s husbands’ are mysteriously turning gay. The program concludes with Camp’s masterpiece HIGHWAY HYPNOSIS, a structuralist gay horror film that follows a serial killer as he travels from LA to Las Vegas. Though there are very few frames of actual “horror” in the film, the cumulative effect is far more disturbing than the graphic gore flicks of the 1980s. Ken Camp HIGHWAY HYPNOSIS 1984, 63 min, SD-video-to-DCP Preceded by: Ken Camp SHOCK VIDEO 1985, 12 min, Super-8mm-to-DCP Ken Camp AS THE WORLD BURNS: EPISODE 1 1982, 19 min, SD-video-to-DCP

In 1984, EZTV created its own in-house video magazine called EZTV Eye that featured a mix of video art pieces, music videos, and newsreel-style documentaries. Though short-lived (in fact, there may have only ever been a single episode), the series was a testament to the vibrancy and diversity of the various scenes that had begun to build around the Video Gallery by its second year of operation. For this program, we’ll construct a hypothetical episode of the series with an eclectic selection of shorts from videomakers John Dorr, Sebastian, Mark Addy, Mark Shepard, and more. Ken Camp AS THE WORLD BURNS: EPISODE 3 1982, 21 min, SD-video-to-DCP Graham Dent CONAN THE WAITRESS 1984, 6 min, SD-video-to-DCP John Dorr DO IT YOURSELF VIDEO FOR POETS 1987, 8 min, SD-video-to-DCP Sebastian THEY SAVED GIDGET’S BRAIN 1983, 30 min, SD-video-to-DCP Plus additional titles to be announced!

When the EZTV Video Gallery first opened in the summer of 1983, Dorr envisioned the space as presenting “an alternative vision of contemporary culture and reality, a vision in no way controlled by the mass media, lowest-common-denominator ethic.” This was accomplished through EZTV’s wildly varied programming, which featured everything from more traditional narrative video to live performance and cutting-edge video and computer art – and often works that incorporated multiple elements from all of the above. For this program, we’ll present a wide swath of video and digital art spanning much of EZTV’s 45-year history.

Founded by On Our Backs magazine founders Nan Kinney and Deborah Sundahl at the height of the lesbian sex wars of the 1980s, Fatale Video was one of, if not the very first, companies dedicated to making erotic videos by and for lesbians. When a program featuring Fatale’s first two shorts nearly caused a riot (!) at the 1985 San Francisco Lesbian & Gay Video Festival, festival programmer and EZTV associate John Canaly decided to bring them to the Video Gallery at the end of September 1985. This kind of programming would eventually lead to some of the more high-minded critics and video artists of the era giving the space the dismissive (and perhaps a bit homophobic) nickname, SleazyTV. For this special screening, we’ll be playing a preserved copy of the original tape assembled for this program’s run at EZTV, with all of the original shorts, trailers, and snipes intact. Ingrid Wilhite FUN WITH A SAUSAGE 1984, 16 min, Super-8mm-to-DCP O. Wow PRIVATE PLEASURES 1985, 30 min, SD-video-to-DCP Ingrid Wilhite L’INGENUE 1985, 12 min, SD-video-to-DCP Debi Sundahl SHADOWS 1985, 30 min, SD-video-to-DCP

EZTV founding member (and director since 1994) Michael J. Masucci began a decade-long collaboration with dancer and choreographer ia Kamandalu (formerly Kim McKillip) in 1986 as part of his three-part video/performance piece BALLET LEMURIA. Under the name Vertical Blanking, the duo created early examples of what became known as “desktop video,” combining analog video with hot-rodded desktop computer equipment, experimental soundtracks, and live performance elements. The short videos in this program explore a wide range of themes, including feminism, Pan-Pacific mythology, UFO/UAP conspiracies, consumerism, and televangelism. Vertical Blanking NIGHTLIGHT 1992, 4 min, SD-video-to-DCP Vertical Blanking DEPOSITION 1991, 7 min, SD-video-to-DCP Vertical Blanking CLONE SHOPPING CLUB 1992, 5 min, SD-video-to-DCP Michael J. Masucci & ia Kamandalu LEMURIA 1986, 20 min, SD-video-to-DCP Michael J. Masucci & Nina Barlow BAD TV 1986, 12 min, SD-video-to-DCP Vertical Blanking THEATER OF DREAMS (I THOUGHT THIS IS WHAT YOU WANTED) 1989, 7 min, SD-video-to-DCP Vertical Blanking DEEP THOUGHT 1992-2025, 20 min, SD-video-to-DCP

In its early years, EZTV’s position as an exhibition space allowed it to build networks with videomakers in other cities – most notably San Francisco’s John Canaly and Washington, DC’s Video Free Earth. Founded by federal workers Jamie Walters and Leonard Bravermen in 1982, Video Free Earth frequently collaborated with poets, performers, and activists like Chasen Gaver, Jack Guidone, and Isabel-Lee Malone on a series of wickedly satirical and thought-provoking videos like A KENNEDY TRILOGY and LOUISE NEVELSON TAKES A BATH. This program represents the first retrospective of the group’s work since the passing of all of its principal members. Jamie Walters THE KENNEDY TRILOGY 1980-82, 25 min, SD-video-to-DCP Jamie Walters UNDER SUSPICION 1984, 2 min, SD-video-to-DCP Hunter Wolkoff VICKI PICKS A TIE 1984, 12 min, SD-video-to-DCP Jamie Walters LOUISE NEVELSON TAKES A BATH 1983, 4 min, SD-video-to-DCP Gregory J. Ford DESK IN HELL 1982, 11 min, SD-video-to-DCP Jamie Walters FRESH OUT OF IDEAS 1984, 2 min, SD-video-to-DCP Jamie Walters GLORIA’S POINT OF VIEW 1984, 4 min, SD-video-to-DCP Jamie Walters THRU THE CRT 1984, 24 min, SD-video-to-DCP

The Cinema of Gender Transgression is proud to present the first cohesive program of work by Hazel Katz, whose filter of socio-political and cultural critique cuts deep. Whether it be an exegesis on canonical cinematic history assembled through loose association and braided narrative form (WHO GETS TO DIE), a critical examination of borders and empire, or a fiction narrative about one slice of a bestie road-trip-cum-post-surgery debacle (SYDNEY & KIM), these films are pointed, and often staunchly different in approach. BABY SIS 2022, 8 min, digital WHO GETS TO DIE 2021, 22 min, digital SYDNEY & KIM 2023, 17 min, digital WHO GETS TO FLY 2025, 14 min, digital (work-in-progress)

This is the debut film by Iranian director Panah Panahi, who follows a family’s road trip across the Iranian countryside. The reason for their journey gradually unfolds as the film progresses, set between the confined space of the car and expansive wide shots of the landscape, where a family of four faces an imminent departure. Each family member’s point of view is carefully developed, highlighting their emotional clashes and quiet connections. The cruelty of forced displacement is conveyed through intimate fragments of family life, elevated by an exquisite blend of classical music including a recurring Schubert piano sonata and catchy Iranian pop. Preceded by: Saj Issa PLEIN AIR PERFORMANCE 2024, 5 min, digital

Raganelli’s moving tribute to and portrait of Barbara Loden, made one decade after the success of WANDA, is a riveting and poignant documentary of the filmmaker at work and reflecting on the lessons of her career. I AM WANDA presents an intimate account of the visionary actor-writer-director in the flow of her life as an acting teacher, artist, and mother.

“Shooting in the rural Tuscan woods, Cottafavi crafts a portrait of lumberjack Guglielmo who works at the edge of poverty while reeling from the loss of his wife. There is no sign of hope for Guglielmo, but he teaches fresh blood the life and trade he’s led while looking forward to some brief respite at home where he can gather his thoughts. A peasant’s portrait, and a reflection of rural life in Italy after reconstruction, IL TAGLIO DEL BOSCO is a bleak film that offers a very gentle reprieve for the real heroes of society, the every-day man.” –Liam Kenny

EMPATHY follows a heroin-addicted professional escort as she moves between NYC, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles. Combining frank images of the actual labor of sex work with intimate portraits of her interpersonal life, the film is an alternately humorous and harrowing look at a seldom depicted side of American life as well as a meditation on the performativity at the core of documentary filmmaking and the sex industry alike.

UNTITLED 2009, 3 min, digital WE’VE LOVED YOU SO MUCH 2010, 10 min, 16mm 3PM (PUMA AUTOMATIC) 2014, 3 min, digital FUCK WORK 2015, 12 min, digital MARRIAGE STORY 2020, 9.5 min, digital-to-35mm LIFE STORY 2024, 10 min, digital-to-35mm. With McKenzie Wark.

Call-and-response, the infectious tradition of crying out and beckoning a reply from an audience, is rooted in histories of Afro-diasporic embodiment. We spot it across the Black music lineages that Kearra Amaya Gopee presents in PAPPYSHOW IN THE DARK TIME, MY LOVE – a work whose protagonists, asked what they would do if they could take revenge, slice through scenes of subjects writhing in ecstatic rebellion to soca, techno, and noise. Amidst practices of Black worship, call-and-response remains central as preachers, much like DJs with their dancers, summon the spirit while commanding control over their disciples. Omolola Ajao considers the haunting power of this phenomenon in works like PSALMS XIX, in which they juxtapose television pastor oration with dissenting scripture to observe the intimacy of natural transgression. In I BELIEVE I SAW ALIENS, Ajao reckons with the consequences of Black performativity in the public sphere, taking a close look at the vernacular performances of Black stars as they encounter normative white gazes. Omolola Ajao PSALMS XIX 2024, 5 min, digital I BELIEVE I SAW ALIENS 2023, 12 min, digital Kearra Amaya Gopee PAPPYSHOW IN THE DARK TIME, MY LOVE 2022, 26 min, digital

Mamá Icha left her hometown of Mompox, Colombia, more than ten years ago to emigrate to the U.S. and help raise her grandchildren. Though she has spent years abroad, she has never stopped longing for home. She has sent money back consistently, investing in the construction of her dream house, determined one day to return. Finally finding a way, she returns to Colombia, embodying a powerful act of reverse immigration, going back to the place she never stopped calling home. But returning is not what she envisioned. Instead, she encounters unexpected tensions with the very people she hoped to reunite with. LA CASA DE MAMÁ ICHA explores the emotional complexities of aging, belonging, and the cost of migration, as well as the desire to end one’s life where it began.

While mainstream sources might describe this film as a 1980s period piece about a coming-of-age romance between a high-school outcast and a corpse, we’re going to say it’s a Hollywood B goth comedy castration panic film that argues for the use of dildos. Directed by Robin Williams’s daughter, whose name is Zelda (very trans, don’t you think?), this film enters the canon of trans-adjacent romance, mixed with genital panic.

Norman Felton STUDIO ONE: THE HOLLYWOOD COMPLEX 1957, 60 min, 16mm-to-digital. With Tony Randall, David Opatoshu, William Redfield, Michael Tolan, Barbara Loden, and Lawrence Fletcher. In this drama of generational estrangement, class shame, and the oppositions of west and east coast worlds, television, and moviemaking, Sam Garson travels to visit his producer son in Hollywood. Al is embarrassed by his father and socially shuns him, while Al’s roommate befriends the older man. Loden appeared on several anthology tele-dramas of the late 1950s and early 1960s, often in supporting, secondary roles. Such is the case for this appearance on “Studio One”, wherein Loden plays the character Darlene, a showgirl girlfriend of one of the Hollywood producer son’s friends. Plus: Excerpts from THE ERNIE KOVACS SHOW (1956) Barbara Loden on THE DICK CAVETT SHOW (1971)

Michael Elliott CBS PLAYHOUSE: THE GLASS MENAGERIE 1966, 103 min, 16mm-to-DCP. With Shirley Booth, Hal Holbrook, Barbara Loden, and Pat Hingle. In this “CBS Playhouse” adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s 1948 play, Loden stars in the role of Laura, opposite Hal Holbrook (then mainly known for his one-man show, “Mark Twain Tonight”) and Pat Hingle. THE GLASS MENAGERIE was recently recovered and reconstructed through the work of the Paley Center and archivist Jane Klain. Plus: Barbara Loden interviewed with John Lennon and Yoko Ono on THE MIKE DOUGLAS SHOW (1971)

PROGRAM 5: TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPES BLACK RAIN WHITE SCARS 2014, 8 min, DCP VALLEY PRIDE 2023, 13 min, DCP IMPERIAL VALLEY (CULTIVATED RUN-OFF) 2018, 14 min, DCP IMPERIAL IRRIGATION 2020, 20 min, DCP CIRCULAR INSCRIPTION 2016, 7 min, DCP IN A BEAUTIFUL AND QUIET LOCATION / WUNDERSCHÖN UND RUHIG GELEGEN 2015, 13 min, DCP. Co-directed by Jakub Vrba. In German with English subtitles.

“MARIA ZEF is one of Cottafavi’s finest films and one of the greatest of all 20th-century TV movies. Shot in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of northern Italy and recorded almost entirely in Friulian (one of Italy’s most unique dialects), it also stands as a proud achievement within the small body of Friulian cinema. Cottafavi was interested in the region as far back as 1936, when the Maria Zef story inspired him to one day make the film. Finally realized decades later, MARIA ZEF is about Mariute and Rosute, 15- and 9-year-old girls respectively, whose mother falls prey to a fatal illness. They are retrieved by their uncle, Barbe Zef, a raging alcoholic living in desolate conditions. Mariute helps rebuild the farm while raising Rosute single-handedly. When Rosute has to stay at the local hospital, Barbe Zef’s alcoholism threatens to ruin Mariute’s life.” –Liam Kenny

An incandescent film observing the life of a French underclass girl, MILLA carves out images of profound beauty and great tenderness. Like Loden’s Wanda Goronski, the film’s working-class subjects, played by nonprofessionals, have been “given no chance” by a society that thrives on class inequality. Massadian bestows these young vagabonds with a gaze of deep care and reverence.

Set in London, during the Thatcher-era, this film offers an unconventional portrait of race, class, and sexuality. It centers on Omar, a young British-Pakistani man navigating family expectations and economic ambition, who partners with his former lover Johnny, a white working-class punk, to transform a run-down laundrette into a thriving business. Their relationship unfolds against a backdrop of social unrest, racism, and generational conflict. Boldly blending romance, politics, and dark humor, the film challenges stereotypes and explores the complexities of identity in a multicultural society. Preceded by: Maria Thereza Alves ABOUT A VILLAGE 2012, 17 min, digital

“NELLA FANTASIA was filmed at an offshore oil rig situated in the middle of the North Sea off the coast of Norway. Marxt traveled to the platform and spent ten days collecting visual and acoustic impressions amid the loneliness of windstorms and waves. The result is a divine melancholic monologue on solitude and nothingness.” –25 FPS FESTIVAL Preceded by: LOW TIDE 2013, 3 min, DCP TWO SKIES 2013, 4 min, DCP HIGH TIDE 2014, 8 min, DCP REIGN OF SILENCE 2013, 7 min, DCP

This film, a sordid psychological thriller about men, women, and the lies they tell each other, is a great entry point into the anxieties at the heart of the witch films that would eventually come to dominate the 1960s horror cycle. When a psychology professor with a focus on superstition learns his wife practices witchcraft, his worldview is tested and his life is brought to the brink. Bridging the gap between classic ’40s horror films like CAT PEOPLE and titans like ROSEMARY’S BABY with crafty plotting and stark cinematography, NIGHT OF THE EAGLE is a haunting look at some of the simmering fears around gender, religion and the social contract that eventually defined the politics of the decade.

This film centers on a former Argentine telenovela star who relocates to New York in search of a new beginning. When his initial plan falls through, he chooses to stay, confident that his talent will open doors. Instead, too light-skinned to fit Latino stereotypes, yet with an accent that marks him as foreign, he faces a string of rejections. As his savings dwindle, he drifts into precarious work and growing invisibility. Unwilling to return home in defeat, he navigates survival through performance, pretending both emotionally and professionally.

“What does it mean to hold the legacy of beloved ones on changing formats? How do mourning and memory change across time and tech? Whatever could it mean that twice in my life (in my late 20s and then in my late 50s), two friends (so different from each other) asked me to tape them – as AIDS activists and collaborators – as they were nearing death? PLEASE HOLD is an experimental documentary engaging with decades of activist media, two death-bed/legacy videos, and the wisdom of many living ‘AIDS workers,’ as we all sit together in one (changing) format, video – VHS, hi-8, digital, Zoom – to address these and other questions: How do neighborhoods, queer bars, videos, sweaters, and scarves hold ghosts? How do we let them go?” –Alexandra Juhasz

Alejandro is an aspiring toy designer from El Salvador trying to bring his original ideas to life in New York City. As his work visa is close to expiring, his only chance to avoid deportation is an unusual job assisting an eccentric and demanding art critic. Caught between the surreal challenges of the U.S. immigration system and the unpredictable world of New York’s art scene, Alejandro barely navigates a labyrinth of bureaucracy while fighting to pursue his dream. The debut feature film from writer/director Julio Torres, PROBLEMISTA is a bizarre and visually rich comedy that tackles ambition, identity, and survival. Preceded by: Allora & Calzadilla UNDER DISCUSSION 2005, 6 min, digital Shekhar Bassi FAUX DEPART 2012, 9 min, digital

“RALF’S COLORS is an experimental portrait of a schizophrenic person living in Lanzarote (Canary Islands), whom I accompanied for over 5 years. The film shows the struggle of his inner life in contrast to the deserted volcanic surroundings.” –Lukas Marxt Preceded by: FISHING IS NOT DONE ON TUESDAYS 2017, 15 min, DCP. Co-directed by Marcel Odenbach.

Re-envisioning the outlaw couple genre, Reichardt’s charming indie debut upends the conventions of “a girl and a gun.” Describing her first feature as a “road movie without the road, a love story without the love, and a crime film without the crime”, Reichardt’s couple-on-the-run caper is set in the Florida Everglades of her adolescence.

Steeped firmly in the genre of silent film, Sequinette Jaynesfield’s 16mm and Super-8 films reflect neither the slapstick of Buster Keaton, the underdog pathos of Chaplin, nor the in-camera tricks of either, yet harken back to the 1920s through sheer, unbridled, queen glamour. Marked by a cast of recurrent characters, they’re rife with speakeasies, painted ladies, and Ragtime – but queer AF. Set design and costumes take center stage in these filmic renderings of queens, queens, queens, from gestural one-liners like RACK FOCUS to absurdist pseudo-John-Waters-inspired camp narratives like FANCY PHONE NUMBERS. These by-any-means-necessary productions stem from the heart of queer, nightlife community, to deliver a “by us, for us” vibe that is incomparable. Jaynesfield will be here in person following the screening, for a conversation with Dusty Childers! BROKEN: BATTLE OF THE GODDESSES 2019, 7.5 min, 16mm-to-digital STEVEN’S AUNT’S HAT 2018, 1 min, 16mm-to-digital RACK FOCUS 2018, 3.5 min, 16mm-to-digital FANCY PHONE NUMBERS 2021, 23 min, 16mm-to-digital QUEEN DOWN 2016, 3 min, digital CELLO SCREEN TEST 2017, 4.5 min, Super-8mm-to-digital GOOD QUEEN: A FOWL REVOLT 2018, 9 min, 16mm-to-digital

“Marxt and Smiljanic organized material they and others recorded during a solar eclipse in March 2015, to create a small catalogue of cosmic visual data. Eclipse chasers and collectors are seen readying themselves and positioning their optical instruments; an outer-space weather fairy analyses recent solar storms; an early warning radar station waits for signals from on high, while a thick fog makes it impossible to see ahead.” –Joachim Schätz Preceded by: BEAUTIFULLY MAINTAINED AND WELL LOCATED / SEHR GEPFLEGT UND GUT GELEGEN 2021, 9 min, DCP. Co-directed by Jakub Vrba. In German with English subtitles. MARINE TARGET 2022, 9 min, DCP LOADING PIT 2019, 10 min, DCP

An investigation of leftist politics and femme identity in the context of an increasingly right-wing world, SO PRETTY moves freely between fictional depictions and semi-documentary, adaptation and translation, looking towards the artistic and personal worlds its characters generate across time and culture as a space for new tensions and potentials.

True to its name, SOMETHING WEIRD, must be seen to be believed. This wild, incoherent, quasi-collage of acid, ESP, karate, witches, and serial killers takes being a product of its time to a new level; its screenwriter was a professor with an impassioned interest in the potential military uses of telepathy and extrasensory perception who hoped the film would be a way to share his warning to the world. While Lewis’s decision to put his friend’s passions on screen may not have been particularly consciousness-raising (or particularly lucrative, either), this oddball flick serves beautifully today as a vivid portrait of the gonzo intersections between the movies, the New Age, and the stranger political concerns of the period.

“Cordelia Coventry (Irene Roseen) is an actress whose appearance in a series of laundry detergent commercials brings her fame and fortune as ‘America’s favorite housewife.’ Can her cynical but idealist director (George LaFleur) truly transcend the banalities of American popular culture? And what part does the Hillside Homo Hacker (Leonard Lumpkin) play in making Cordelia aware of the strange contusions that mediate between art and reality?” –Original press synopsis Preceded by: Ken Camp AS THE WORLD BURNS: EPISODE 2 1982, 14 min, SD-video-to-DCP

What is it with trans guys and werewolves?! Allow the revisiting of this coming-of-age classic to illuminate the relationships between transmasculine identity and werewolf identity, as the notions of transition, puberty, monstrosity, self-realization, and tokenization become centrally shared topics. When high school nerd Scott Howard (Michael J. Fox) learns from his father that being a werewolf runs in the family, he decides to take advantage of his “freakish” trait.

THE DEVONSVILLE TERROR is another brashly feminist film whose idiosyncrasies elevate familiar material, offering a jolt of freshness in a soon-to-be-oversaturated straight-to-video landscape of witch horror in the 1980s. It blends the feminist conventions of the previous decade’s witch horror cycle with the slasher conventions of the day, all filtered through the dreamy arthouse stylings of its director, New German Cinema and Video Nasty pioneer Ulli Lommel, whose collaborators included Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Andy Warhol. Its naturalistic treatment of masculine entitlement to feminine bodies is uncomfortably familiar and viscerally direct. Like SOMETHING WEIRD, the film also incorporates the psychedelic and New Age elements of its moment, serving as a time capsule for a country on the cusp of radical transformation as the counterculture drew its very last gasps.

“THE FOUNTAINHEAD takes up Frank Capra’s principle: the modest, perfect man who acts alone against everyone, found in films like MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON, IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, MR DEEDS GOES TO TOWN, as well as in Hawks’s SERGEANT YORK and Leo McCarey’s GOOD SAM. The last three films star Gary Cooper, and most of these films end in a trial. This myth of the ideal man was a good fit for the Roosevelt era, and became somewhat obsolete after the end of the war. […] The plot of the film is extraordinary: an architect destroys the skyscraper he designed, because his successors have not respected his design. And it’s a building intended as low-income housing. The right of the author versus improving the welfare of ordinary people; it’s a parable of the cinematic problem of the final cut. The film’s bias reflects a very right-wing attitude, since the screenwriter Ayn Rand was very anti-communist. Nevertheless, Vidor’s film is a masterpiece.” –Luc Moullet

While it was largely dismissed at the time as a cheapie softcore rehash of ROSEMARY’S BABY for the jet-set, there’s more to THE MEPHISTO WALTZ than initially meets the eye. This kinky tête-à-tête pairs Jacqueline Bisset and Alan Alda as an artistic young couple tempted by wealth, influence, sex, and black magic. Replete with body swapping, crash zooms, and swinger parties, the film takes the broader strokes of Ira Levin’s classic tale and bends them in a less Catholic, more overtly erotic direction to twisted, surprisingly feminist ends.

“A mobster’s widow is expected to testify in front of a grand jury in Los Angeles, but must make it there from Chicago without being intercepted by those who would kill her before she talks. Enter Detective Sergeant Brown, tasked with protecting the woman he blames for the death of his partner, Forbes. Nobody knows her identity but him. Or does he? Richard Fleischer’s high-strung, claustrophobic 71-minute noir thriller takes place almost entirely within the confines of the small interiors of a train, which reveals a world of double identities.” –Joshua Peinado

[TOIVON TUOLLA PUOLEN] Kaurismäki’s THE OTHER SIDE OF HOPE begins with the parallel stories of Khaled, a Syrian asylum seeker who arrives in Helsinki hidden aboard a coal freighter, and Wikström, a middle-aged Finnish salesman who abruptly quits his job and his marriage to open a small restaurant. Their paths intersect when Khaled, rejected for asylum and on the run from the authorities, turns up at Wikström’s restaurant in need of shelter and work. Navigating between satire, drama, and comedy, the film blends a sharp sense of humor with a quiet tenderness, expressed through subtle gestures that deeply impact the characters’ fates. The absurdities of the immigration system are set in contrast with small, humane acts that have the power to twist the story’s direction and subvert expectations. Preceded by: Forensic Architecture THE LEFT-TO-DIE BOAT 2011, 18 min, digital

The third feature by Argentine filmmaker María Aparicio, winner of the Cinema Tropical Award for Best Latin American Film, UNDEFINED THINGS is a delicate meditation on cinema, memory, and mourning. Eva, a 50-year-old film editor – portrayed with quiet grace by Eva Bianco – is working with her young assistant, Rami, on a documentary about people living with blindness, while grappling with the recent death of Juan, a filmmaker friend whose films she once edited. As loneliness and doubt begin to settle into her daily life, Eva starts to question her relationship to cinema and the meaning of her craft. With a subtle and introspective narrative, the film explores the boundaries between fiction and documentary and the persistence of images as traces of the past.

Like THE PLOT AGAINST HARRY, VENGEANCE IS MINE is a masterpiece that was virtually unknown for decades (in contrast to the 20 years that elapsed before the rediscovery of HARRY, the later film languished in obscurity for almost twice as long). VENGEANCE IS MINE opens with Jo (Brooke Adams), in an unbroken take of over a minute, smiling, thinking, closing her eyes, as she flies into her New England hometown. We do not yet know she is fleeing a physically abusive relationship, nor that she is returning to attempt reconciliation and to say goodbye to her adoptive mother, before starting a new life in Seattle. Through a series of unexpected occurrences – declining to return to her sister’s house after being attacked by her estranged husband and instead taking refuge at the home of the neighbors she has just met – Jo finds herself witness to a family coming apart under the stress of mental illness. Instead of backing away, she finds herself compelled to become more involved in their lives. In his final film, Roemer’s ideas of character come to their fullest fruition. Roemer has said that his characters believe themselves to be proactive, while they are, in fact, reactive. They may think they know what they are doing, but, in the end, they are at the mercy of chance. What all of Roemer’s work shares is an assuredness of its own pace, in step only with itself – all of his films are utterly original works that confront major themes in a minor key. “Roemer is known for only two films, both masterpieces: NOTHING BUT A MAN (1964) and THE PLOT AGAINST HARRY (1971). […] The rediscovery of a third Roemer feature as good as the others is a cause for celebration, and something of a miracle.” –A.S. Hamrah, SCREEN SLATE

Barbara Loden’s tough, austere portrait of an alienated woman unmoored in Appalachia was a landmark work of American independent cinema. Loden based her film on a 1960 Sunday News story about a female accomplice to a bank robbery who expressed gratitude to her judge for her twenty-year jail sentence. What kind of woman could be “that passive and numb,” Loden asked? Shot on location amid the ruins of Scranton’s anthracite mining and the rest stops, motels, pubs, and parking lots of Pennsylvania and Connecticut, WANDA tarries with the enigma of a woman “without any redeeming qualities at all” (Loden). A poetic, unsentimental film of unvarnished beauty, the film traces the itinerancy of its unforgettable anti-hero (played by Loden herself), who abandons her life as coalminer’s wife and mother to drift “in the sea of her own insignificance” (as per Berenice Reynaud), across deindustrialized landscapes of precarity.

In WANDERLUST Italian retiree Giuseppe returns to his ancestral home in Istria, a region now divided between Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia. This tripartite geography, once Yugoslavia, now EU fringe, is no incidental detail in Želimir Žilnik’s hands. Donning his father’s Austro-Hungarian Navy coat, Giuseppe, following his mother’s advice, sets off in search of a wife – though what he may truly be seeking is continuity. Žilnik’s film, shaped by decades of probing migration and the absurdity of borders, drifts through faded monuments and provisional identities. What unfolds is a quiet, wry meditation on aging, inheritance, and the soft ruins of socialism. Giuseppe’s journey is both sentimental and strategic: a melancholic proposal across nations that no longer exist, where desire and memory remain perpetually in transit.