Before his family settled in Denmark, filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel grew up in the Palestinian refugee camp of Ain el-Helweh, in Lebanon. Hastily built in 1948 and, at the time of filming, housing 70,000 refugees in one square kilometer, Ain el-Helweh is an unlikely source of nostalgia and yearning, but for Fleifel it represents the closest thing to a home, a precious concept given his family’s history and eventual settlement in Europe. Through the years Fleifel returned regularly to visit friends and family, always with camera in tow, and in A WORLD NOT OURS he shapes his extensive video diaries into an affectionate, witty, yet ultimately shattering portrait of this community. Gradually focusing on the experiences of Fleifel’s friend Abu Eyad, whose natural intelligence makes him an especially articulate and sensitive witness to the tragically circumscribed lives of Ain el-Helweh’s residents, A WORLD NOT OURS conveys the Palestinian experience with an insight that very few films have equaled. Followed by: Mahdi Fleifel XENOS 2014, 13 min, digital. In Arabic with English subtitles. “On a modern odyssey Palestinians are stranded in Athens. Their wandering has led them from a refugee camp in Lebanon, through Syria and Turkey to the Greece of the Euro crisis – a haven that turns out not to be substantially calmer than the sea.” –VIDEONALE Mahdi Fleifel 20 HANDSHAKES 4 PEACE 2014, 5 min, digital “September 13, 1993: Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, and Bill Clinton’s handshake on the lawn of the White House after signing the Oslo Accords. A historic moment, repeated 20 times. Tainted by countless shattered hopes and with a voice-over by intellectual Edward Said, expressing his outrage at the agreement.” –ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL Total running time: ca. 115 min.

Centered on the titular Anita – a young peasant girl working as a maid – Rassoul Labuchin’s film denounces the practices of child domestic labor. Made by one of Haitian cinema’s key figures, the story also doubles as a metaphor for the dependency and servitude imposed by U.S. imperialism. In clear defiance of one of the most repressive years of the Duvalier political regime, ANITA was immediately censored and removed from distribution. Undeterred, Labuchin and his team toured the film through provincial cities and the countryside, in a mobile effort of political education and community building. It was hugely popular with Haitian audiences and media as a poetic portrayal which felt true to the socio-economic and political realities of the island – and also widely celebrated when it was released internationally. ANITA brought an importantly gendered perspective to the documentation of the Duvalier years, while also honoring the friendship between the protagonist and another girl, Choupette, in a tribute to the forms of rebellion which might sometimes seem too minor to be registered. It was also the first Haitian film to be shot in Kreyòl. “ANITA turned out to be a turning point in the history of Haitian cinema, breaking from the stifling commercial network to build a real audience among the masses in the streets and alleys, from the outskirts to the small rural Catholic or protestant churches, and interacting with the emerging labor movements, cooperatives, and community, neighborhood, and youth organizations.” –Michaëlle Lafontant-Médard

“Set in Haiti five years after the devastating 2010 earthquake, Guetty Felin’s magical realist tale avoids the kinds of images of the disaster that saturated screens around the world. In his depiction of young Orphée’s grief over the loss of his father beneath the rubble of decimated buildings (represented in ghostly images that float beneath the ocean’s surface), Felin refuses to tell a story of victimhood. Instead, she gives the narrative back to the Haitian people, whose lives cannot be reduced to headlines. And as her characters begin to heal, Felin suggests that the island will too.” –AFRICAN FILM FESTIVAL NEW YORK “Felin taps into her past work in the documentary field, infusing the realities of modern-day Haiti with a lyrical touch. From its verité-style moments of Jaures the fisherman laboring by the beach to the theatrical scenes between muse Ama and her author, the film makes its fluid tonal shifts at a lulling, rhythmic pace.” –Cameron Bailey, TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Merzak Allouache’s third film, THE MAN WHO WATCHED WINDOWS is the story of Rachid, an austere bureaucrat who has just been transferred without warning from the National Archives to the cinema library. The constant motion of 1980s Algerian society displeases him, as does cinema; worse yet, books on cinema – the very idea of which disturbs him. Having dedicated his life to the state, Rachid is so agitated by his transfer that he is driven to paranoia and, ultimately, an act of violence. A singular and underappreciated film filled with creeping tracking shots and semiotic commentary, THE MAN WHO WATCHED WINDOWS is a tightly-calibrated portrait of a man who does not wish to understand the changing world around him.

“Filmed clandestinely under the Duvalier dictatorship, BITTER CANE is a documentary classic about the exploitation and foreign domination of the Haitian people. From peasant coffee farms in the rugged tropical mountains to steamy U.S.-leased or -owned sweatshops in the teeming capital, the film takes the viewer on a journey through Haitian history to a deeper grasp of the country’s political economy. Shot on 16mm, it was produced by Haiti Films, a collective of Haitian and North American filmmakers, who worked in close collaboration with the Haitian Liberation Movement (MHL), an underground revolutionary organization. […] After the fall of Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier’s regime in 1986, students and popular organizations projected the film on movie screens, walls, and bed-sheets in Haiti’s countryside and cities to raise political consciousness and understanding of the difficult anti-imperialist struggle that lay ahead.” –HAÏTI LIBERTÉ

At once a charming portrait of the diverse residents of a unique New York City neighborhood, a vibrant time capsule of the city at the very beginning of the 1980s, and a penetrating exploration of the social and political dynamics of a rapidly changing community, BRIGHTON BEACH is a long-lost gem of documentary cinema that has been newly restored by IndieCollect. Directed with great empathy and perceptiveness by Carol Stein & Susan Wittenberg, BRIGHTON BEACH captures the Brooklyn neighborhood known as the poor man’s paradise – a city by the sea down the street from the Coney Island boardwalk. Interspersing interviews with the neighborhood’s residents – including the Soviet Jews who had begun arriving in large numbers at the time – with archival footage of the area fifty years earlier, the film is both a portrait of a very particular time and place as well as a study of the ways in which urban communities function, cohere, and continuously transform themselves. “BRIGHTON BEACH is a film about survival, uprootedness, immigration, racism…marriage…how the poor find pleasure, how the old stay young, how people in crowded places share space, how the melting pot won’t melt. It is a film about a corner of gentleness and relief in a tough town.” –Carol Stein & Susan Wittenberg “The filmmakers interviewed locals of various ethnic persuasions (with a particular focus on the recent influx of Soviet Jews), interspersing everything with stock footage of Coney Island in the ’30s and moody shots of the boardwalk at dawn. A cameo by the Barry Sisters makes the film a must for connoisseurs of Yiddish kitsch.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE Directors Carol Stein & Susan Wittenberg will be here in person for selected screenings!

DEUX FOIS 1968, 64 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In French and Spanish with English subtitles. “An intentionally elementary meditation on certain primary functions of film, that could be said to be at the roots of film editing as such – expectations, exploring the picture, perceptual memory, relationships between on-screen and off-screen space – all explored in a series of free-standing sequence shots of perfect simplicity.” –Noël Burch “This cinema ‘au feminin’ reminds us what the imperialist eye had repressed: different modes of editing impulses; what is seen and heard alters our perspective.” –Serge Daney, CAHIERS DU CINÉMA NOTES ON JONAS MEKAS 2000, 26 min, digital “My purpose in filming NOTES ON JONAS was not to make a portrait per se. As a film editor, I was mainly curious to know about his editing technique. When I tried to get an interview, Jonas played his accordion, his tuba, his harmonica… He even organized a jam session in the basement of AFA. I wondered: ‘Is Jonas too shy to let himself be interviewed by a woman?’ Enlisting a cameraman to shoot the film instead of me did the trick. Jonas invited us to his loft on Broadway and to his editing room. How happy I was to be watching as he gave me a long master class.” –Jackie Raynal Total running time: ca. 95 min.

With a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren traveled to Haiti begin to assemble an anthropological study of Voudun. She gathered the footage over the course of visits to the island between 1947 and 1952. Dance and choreography were foundational to her artistic practice, which also melded them with her experimental filmmaking into a form of “choreocinema.” This significantly shaped the footage she collected for DIVINE HORSEMAN, which is particularly attentive to embodied rituals and ceremonies. Early in her career and before beginning this project, Deren had been a secretary to Katherine Dunham – the famed African American dancer, choreographer, and ethnographer who pioneered a participatory cross-cultural interlacing of dance and anthropology in her Haitian and Trinidadian fieldwork. Although Deren continued her research for years, explored initiation into Voudun practices, and published a book of the same name in 1953, she was unable to complete the film. It was posthumously edited by her husband Teiji Ito and his wife Cherel Winett Ito. The resulting work, drawing voiceover commentary from Deren’s book, accentuated the more anthropological aspects of the documentary study. Yet it also retains the hallucinatory, hypnotic, and poetic qualities of Deren’s earlier cinematic experiments.

A deserted colonial mansion in Haiti is populated with three almost anonymous characters. With a minimal narrative and highly stylized look, this first-feature by Haitian-American Michelange Quay is an allegorical diagnosis of power told in silences and gestures. EAT, FOR THIS IS MY BODY unfolds as an enigmatic and surreal staging of the racial and sexual politics inherited by colonization and enslavement. As is named in the title, food and more broadly consumption, are central vehicles for the film’s tableaus and bridging of Haiti’s past and present. Thickly visual and shot in captivating 35mm, EAT, FOR THIS IS MY BODY maintains an ambivalent tension between its dreamy, feverish aestheticization and irredeemable structures of violence. Preceded by: Michelange Quay THE GOSPEL OF THE CREOLE PIG / L’EVANGILE DU COCHON CREOLE 2004, 19 min, 35mm-to-digital. In French and Haitian Creole with English subtitles. Quay’s short film is an impressively condensed treatment of Haitian history through the “Creole Pig.” The animal serves as a metaphor and a symbol, calling up Voudon practices, national identity, and exploitative dynamics. With an elliptical, meditative approach, the film also functions to expose class antagonisms and the ongoing predatory actions of the U.S. in Haiti. Total running time: ca. 130 min.

Viking Eggeling SYMPHONIE DIAGONALE (1924, 8 min, 35mm) “This early experimental short is one of only two films completed by Swedish-born artist Viking Eggeling, who worked in Paris, Milan, and ultimately Germany. It utilizes paper cutouts, tin foil, and frame-by-frame photography to create a playful show in which cubist, even art deco, circles and lines dance – diagonally – across the black screen.” –FACETS Dwinell Grant COMPOSITION #2 CONTRATHEMIS (1941, 5 min, 16mm, silent) “An attempt to develop visual abstract themes and to counterpoint them in a planned, formal composition.” –Dwinell Grant STOP MOTION TESTS (1942, 3 min, 16mm, silent) A pixillated self-portrait of the filmmaker in his studio. COLOR SEQUENCE (1943, 3 min, 16mm, silent) “Pure solid-color frames which fade, mutate and flicker. A research into color rhythms and perceptual phenomena.” –William Moritz Ken Jacobs & Bob Fleischner BLONDE COBRA (1959-63, 35 min, 16mm-to-35mm. With Jack Smith.) Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from The Film Foundation. “BLONDE COBRA is an erratic narrative – no, not really a narrative, it’s only stretched out in time for convenience of delivery. It’s a look in on an exploding life, on a man of imagination suffering pre-fashionable Lower East Side deprivation and consumed with American 1950s, 40s, 30s disgust. Silly, self-pitying, guilt-strictured and yet triumphing – on one level – over the situation with style… enticing us into an absurd moral posture the better to dismiss us with a regal ‘screw off.’” –Ken Jacobs Total running time: ca. 60 min.

“Ernie Gehr [makes] cinematic magic, often from the least likely materials. Indeed, Gehr’s most famous film, SERENE VELOCITY (1970), in which the filmmaker transforms an institutional hallway in the basement of a classroom building at the State University of New York at Binghamton into a nexus of visual and conceptual energy, merely by adjusting his stationary camera’s zoom lens every four frames for twenty-three minutes, can be read as Gehr’s manifesto. For Gehr the most everyday spaces and the most mundane actions offer the imaginative filmmaker the most interesting potential. No other filmmaker, with the exception of Michael Snow, has so relentlessly and so productively explored the capacity of filmmaking to develop the visual (and auditory) opportunities afforded by the cinematic apparatus itself.” –Scott MacDonald, A CRITICAL CINEMA 5

Georges Franju BLOOD OF THE BEASTS / LE SANG DES BÊTES (1949, 20 min, 16mm. In French with English subtitles. Archival print courtesy of the Harvard Film Archive.) “This documentary on the slaughterhouses of Paris is one of the great masterpieces of the subversive cinema; here, for once, we are face to face with death, and are neither protected nor cheated. […] A dream-like quality permeates the intense realism of the images; a surrealist intent – akin to Buñuel’s slitting of the eyeball in UN CHIEN ANDALOU – is discernible in this anti-bourgeois film. But the eyeball, however shocking, was fictional; BLOOD OF THE BEASTS is real.” –Amos Vogel, FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART Jean Genet UN CHANT D’AMOUR (1950, 26 min, 16mm, silent) “Genet’s only film – hounded by the censors, unavailable, secret – is an early and remarkably moving attempt to portray homosexual passions. Already a classic, it succeeds as perhaps no other film to intimate the explosive power of frustrated sex…. Like all Genet’s early work, the entire film is, in effect, a single onanistic fantasy, filled with desperate frustration and sensuous nostalgia.” –Amos Vogel, FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART “There’s no smoke without fire; UN CHANT D’AMOUR is a communion in which Genet takes us into the prison in order to liberate us from it.” –Derek Jarman Total running time: ca. 50 min.

ZORNS LEMMA (1970, 60 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.) “A major poetic work. Created and put together by a very clear eye-head, this original and complex abstract work moves beyond the letters of the alphabet, beyond words and beyond Freud. If you don’t understand it the first time you see it, don’t despair, see it again! When you finally ‘get it,’ a small light, possibly a candle, will light itself inside your forehead.” –Ernie Gehr & HAPAX LEGOMENA I: (nostalgia) (1971, 36 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.) “In (nostalgia) the time it takes for a photograph to burn (and thus confirm its two-dimensionality) becomes the clock within the film, while Frampton plays the critic, asynchronously glossing, explicating, narrating, mythologizing his earlier art, and his earlier life, as he commits them both to the fire of a labyrinthine structure; for Borges too was one of his earlier masters, and he grins behind the facades of logic, mathematics, and physical demonstrations which are the formal metaphors for most of Frampton’s films.” –P. Adams Sitney Total running time: ca. 100 min.

Ian Hugo BELLS OF ATLANTIS (1952, 10 min, 16mm. Preserved by the Library of Congress through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by The Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation.) A film poem, based on Anaïs Nin’s HOUSE OF INCEST, narrated by and featuring Nin. “[BELLS OF ATLANTIS was] inspired by the prologue to my HOUSE OF INCEST and the line: ‘I remember my first birth in water.’ The film evoked the watery depths of the lost continent of Atlantis. It is a lyrical journey into prenatal memories, the theme of birth and rebirth from the sea.” –Anaïs Nin Ken Jacobs LITTLE STABS AT HAPPINESS (1959-63, 18 min, 16mm. With Jack Smith. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.) “Material was cut in as it came out of the camera, embarrassing moments intact. 100’ rolls timed well with music on old 78s. I was interested in immediacy, a sense of ease, and an art where suffering was acknowledged but not trivialized with dramatics. Whimsy was our achievement, as well as breaking out of step.” –Ken Jacobs Helen Levitt, Janice Loeb, and James Agee IN THE STREET (1952, 12 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.) Levitt’s short, lyrical documentary portrait of life in Spanish Harlem, shot by Levitt, Janice Loeb, and James Agee. “Informality is indeed the crucial and virtually definitive quality of IN THE STREET; it is even the guiding principle and vision. […] This is the extreme realization of a classic ‘naturalistic’ genre, the German ‘street film,’ where the street was imaged as the arena of the everyday and random, the channel in which the ‘stream of life’ conveniently became microcosmic.” –Ken Kelman, THE ESSENTIAL CINEMA Willard Maas GEOGRAPHY OF THE BODY (1943, 7 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from The National Film Preservation Foundation.) “The terrors and splendors of the human body as the undiscovered, mysterious continent.” –Willard Maas Total running time: ca. 55 min.

by D.W. Griffith (1916, 170 min, 35mm, silent) Griffith’s immensely influential silent epic intercuts four parallel tales from history (spanning Babylon, Christ’s Judea, Reformation Europe, and turn-of-the-century America) to embroider a moral tapestry on personal, social, and political repression through the ages. The visual poetry is overwhelming, especially in the massed crowd scenes, and the unbridled eroticism of the Babylon harem scenes demonstrates just what Hollywood lost when it later bowed to the Hays Code. While the (partly self-financed) production ruined Griffith financially and baffled audiences with its multiple plots and labyrinthine structure, it has been enormously influential on generations of filmmakers, including Eisenstein, who studied the film closely.

Humphrey Jennings LISTEN TO BRITAIN (1941, 19 min, 35mm) Jennings’s film is a masterpiece of sound mixing; it creates an audio landscape of Britain during the war, with images both accompanying and conflicting with the multitude of sounds. Dimitri Kirsanoff MÉNILMONTANT (1924-25, 38 min, 35mm, silent) “[T]o a remarkable degree, MÉNILMONTANT seems an autonomous creation, as sophisticated and demanding as any narrative film of the silent period, without obvious imitators. Although Richard Abel has astutely called attention to aspects the film shares with Abel Gance’s LA ROUE (1923) and Leon Moussinac’s LE BRASIER ARDENT (1923)…and with Jean Epstein’s COEUR FIDÈLE (1923)…any comparison of the film as a whole with those admirable works would have to underline the intensity, uniqueness, and exceptional rigor of Kirsanoff’s achievement.” –P. Adams Sitney, THE CINEMA OF POETRY Total running time: ca. 60 min.

These 35mm prints are the result of a preservation project undertaken by the Museum of Modern Art. DEATH IN THE FORENOON (1934/66, 2 min, 35mm) CANARIES (1969, 4 min, 35mm) & FILM PORTRAIT (1971, 81 min, 35mm) “FILM PORTRAIT is an autobiography in the sense that it deals explicitly with Jerome’s most personal life’s relationship to film. It draws on film clips taken in his childhood and his whole childhood involvement in art and life. It comes closest to any kind of filmic answer to Proust. […] FILM PORTRAIT is, I believe, the only direct autobiography we have in film. There is Jonas Mekas’s WALDEN, which is diary but not autobiography in a strict sense. We have Cocteau’s BLOOD OF A POET, ORPHEUS, and TESTAMENT OF ORPHEUS. One could say that this last is autobiographical, but it is also allusive and poetic; whereas Jerome’s FILM PORTRAIT is a very straight attempt to present autobiography on film. Of course, subsequently, James Broughton’s TESTAMENT and my own SINCERITY & DUPLICITY series of autobiographical films were very much inspired by Jerome’s FILM PORTRAIT as well as by Jonas’s WALDEN. […] Jerome Hill’s films are great because they are poised on wit and achieve a balance – a gentle, intentional, particularly American balance.” –Stan Brakhage, FILM AT WIT’S END Total running time: ca. 90 min.

DUO CONCERTANTES (1962-64, 6 min, 16mm) HAMFAT ASAR (1965, 13 min, 16mm) GYMNOPEDIES (1968, 6 min, 16mm) THE OLD HOUSE, PASSING (1966, 45 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.) OUR LADY OF THE SPHERE (1968, 9 min, 35mm) “With a taste for nostalgic romanticism…Jordan creates a magical universe of work using old steel engravings and collectable memorabilia. His 50-year pursuit into the subconscious mind gives him a place in the annals of cinema as a prolific animator on a voyage into the surreal psychology of the inner self.” –Jackie Leger Total running time: ca. 85 min.

by Ken Jacobs (1969, 115 min, 16mm, silent) “Original 1905 film shot and probably directed by G.W. ‘Billy’ Bitzer, rescued via a paper print filed for copyright purposes with the Library of Congress. It is most reverently examined here, absolutely loved, with a new movie, almost as a side effect, coming into being.” –Ken Jacobs

by Marcel Hanoun (1958, 68 min, 16mm. In French with projected English subtitles.) “Based on a true incident, the film chronicles the wanderings of a woman and child looking for work and lodging in Paris. This is the only plot, and Hanoun has little interest in embellishing it with background and motivation: he never even makes it clear, for example, whether the woman is the child’s mother, guardian or companion. UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE is, more than a narrative, a formal stylistic exercise so rigorously disciplined and understated that it makes the visual asceticism of Robert Bresson seem almost Fellini-esque by comparison.” –TIME

Rudy Burckhardt HAITI 1938, 15 min, 16mm The production of this travelogue by Swiss-American photographer and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt must be contextualized by the 1915-34 U.S. invasion and occupation of Haiti. Yet this record of Port-au-Prince also deserves attention because it formally avoids the racist, exoticizing, and stereotypical depictions that were the cultural arm of American imperialism. Instead, it offers an enduringly moving glimpse into the mundane rhythms of everyday life, focused on bustling markets, street scenes, the inside and outside of homes, trees, and landscapes. Humberto Solás SIMPARELE 1974, 30 min, 35mm-to-digital. In Spanish with English subtitles. The Cuban director best known for the revolutionary epic LUCÍA (1968) shot another sort of historical film on people’s resistance taking place on the neighboring island of Haiti, made in collaboration with Haitian artists. SIMPARELE was made a few years into the beginning of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s rule and doubled as a condemnation of the dictatorial dynasty. “SIMPARELE is history interpreted through people’s art. The film synthesizes the primary forms through which the Haitian people have expressed themselves in the centuries since the island’s colonization by the French and the massive importation of African slaves to fuel its plantation economy. It is a composite of dance, theatrical tableaux, poetry, song, folk painting, legend and religious ritual. SIMPARELE acknowledges the powerful role which Afro-Haitian culture has played in these people’s political struggle as both repository for people’s history and the raw material from which that history can be reconstructed and transformed.” –Louise Diamond & Lyn Parker Moira Tierney RADIO HAÏTI 2001, 4 min, 16mm New York’s Haitian community takes it to the bridge to protest a year of mortal policing, Easter 2000. Sarah Maldoror REGARDS DE MÉMOIRE 2003, 24 min, digital. In French with English subtitles. Sarah Maldoror’s lyrical and militant contributions to Pan-African Cinema focused on global revolution, the many roles of women, Black culture, and the everyday. Filmed in Martinique, Haiti, and France, REGARDS DE MÉMOIRE centers on the writer Édouard Glissant and his fellow Martinican, the poet and political figure Aimé Césaire. Tracing shared histories of colonization and transatlantic slavery from Senegal to the Caribbean, the documentary evokes the memories of the Haitian Revolution and legacy of Toussaint Louverture. Carlos Adriano BRAZIL IS THEE HAITI IS (T)HERE / O QUE HÁ EM TI 2020, 16 min, digital. In English, French, Haitian, and Portuguese with English subtitles. “On March 16, 2020, in Brasília, the capital of Brazil, an anonymous and unknown Haitian man challenged the chief of the nation: ‘Bolsonaro, it’s over. You are not the President anymore.’ This film-poem is a counterpoint between this act of protest, and the catastrophic military operations held by the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, commanded by Brazil.” –SHEFFIELD DOC FEST Total running time: ca. 95 min.

Committed to making political films about Haiti’s history and dedicated to the collective memory of his fellow Haitians, Arnold Antonin is one of the pillars of Haitian Cinema. He entered filmmaking through anti-dictatorship militancy, and his monumental debut feature, AYITI MEN CHIMIN LIBETE, retraces the struggle of Haitian people for their sovereignty. It chronicles Taïno resistance to the Spanish conquest, transatlantic slavery, the rebellion of 1791 and founding of the first Black Republic, the return to the plantation economy and eventual peasant revolts, the American occupation and the beginning of the Duvaliers’ rule. Celebrated as the first Haitian feature film, it comprises a collage of footage of daily life, visual and textual archival materials, photographs, drawings to fill in the gaps, and interviews with militants and organizers such as Rodophe Moïse, Ulrick Jolly, and Justin Castera. AYITI MEN CHIMIN LIBETE was an openly anti-Duvalierist denunciation that functioned as both a history lesson and a call to arms for the Haitian people. Initially made with a Kreyòl voiceover to be accessible to the Haitian masses, it was quickly translated into French, Spanish, English, Italian, and German to circulate widely as internationalist propaganda aimed at militants, students, and workers. The closing title card, with a wink to Marx’s Thesis Eleven, says it all: “This film may be used in the anti-Duvalier struggle by anyone, with due credit to the makers. This film sets out to expose to Haitians what happens and what has happened in their country, in order to change things. This is an appeal to all that they unite to crush the criminal and depraved Duvalier dynasty. Finally, it tries to inform other peoples about the continued struggle of the Haitian people against local and foreign exploitation.”

Raoul Peck is the most widely-known Haitian filmmaker, and his debut feature HAITIAN CORNER anchored a cinematic trajectory with political purpose. The film is a collective portrait of Haitian identity in exile while being centered on the story of Joseph Bossuet. A poet and factory worker who moves to New York, he often visits the “Haitian Corner” bookstore, a space frequented by many fellow exiles from the Duvalier regime, whose daily lives are the rhythm of Peck’s film. Before escaping, Joseph had been imprisoned and tortured for seven years by the dictator’s brutal paramilitary secret police, the Tonton Macoute. When he spots one of his torturers one day in New York, Joseph is plunged back into traumas that are both individual and shared, as the film touches on vengeance, state terror, and class struggle. HAITIAN CORNER serves as an exploration of how the past always disrupts and coexists with the present, of what people hold onto and leave behind, and of the central importance of memory. The film was very popular in Haiti and received international acclaim. “[Peck is] the best Haitian filmmaker for his film HAITIAN CORNER which made me relive my season in hell and which brought me to believe that the future will be enchanting.” –Rassoul Labuchin

Although both are named after a Haitian form of oral call-and-response storytelling, KRIK? KRAK! TALES OF A NIGHTMARE is in some ways the opposite of “Krik? Krak!” (1995), Haitian-American writer Edwidge Dandicat’s short story cycle which chronicles women’s experiences of belonging, immigration, and identity at the level of the everyday. Evident in the title, the documentary is instead frankly sensationalizing – bringing together newsreel footage, interviews, and fictional segments in a feverish and surrealist twist on the documentary genre. Capturing the terror and misery of the Duvalier period, it does however make critical connections between the dictatorship and American imperialism.

Though MAMBAR PIERRETTE represents the first fictional feature by French-Cameroonian filmmaker Rosine Mbakam – who visited Anthology in 2019 to present theatrical runs of her remarkable THE TWO FACES OF A BAMILEKE WOMAN and CHEZ JOLIE COIFFURE – the new film closely resembles her earlier films in its observational, de-dramatized focus on daily life and its dedication to portraying a strong-willed, unapologetic, and charismatic female protagonist. With the beginning of the school year in the city of Douala, a long line of customers come to Mambar Pierrette, the neighborhood dressmaker, to have their clothes ready for upcoming social events and ceremonies. More than a seamstress, Pierrette is the confidant of her customers. But when it starts pouring and the rain threatens to flood her workshop – one of many misfortunes she will be forced to bear – Pierrette struggles to stay afloat. “Mbakam’s lucid studies of labor and displacement in the lives of Cameroonian women seem to grow in political breadth with every effort, from her mother’s doorstep, to an expat-owned beauty parlor, to a sex worker’s bed. […] As with her previous work, MAMBAR PIERRETTE is attuned to the rhythms of laboring women and the communities enriched by their presence. Her pivot to fiction feels anchored by the same careful eye which surveilled Sabine – the salon manager of CHEZ JOLIE COIFFURE – framing her in mirrors, between clients; a kinetic, reassuring presence. […] Pierrette’s misfortunes are not framed as pitiable [so much as] they are indictments of neocolonialism in Cameroon, those residual creases in the country’s socioeconomic fabric. ‘I didn’t want to tell the story of Pierrette the way the West would, I wanted to tell it the way we live it,’ Mbakam told Film Comment. It takes a certain amount of reverence to relay your country to an international audience cavities and all, though Mbakam has always understood the whorling nature of homesickness.” –Saffron Maeve, SCREEN SLATE “Mbakam’s heroines are not victims, they are lucid and assertive, able to read their environments and endear their audiences with ease. Yet, in this film, Mambar’s spotlight is stolen towards the end by the appearance of a clown whose brief, moving monologue touches on subversive gender expression, popular justice, and the state of performing arts in Cameroon – ‘Art is dead in this country’, he laments, a cutting declaration and one that the film is actively resisting.” –Abiba Coulibaly, ULTRA DOGME

AND THE SUN FLOWERS 2008, 5 min, digital “Within this wallpaper: a floral forest of hidden depth and concealment, the hues and fragrance of another era. Surface decoration holds permeable planes, inner passages. There emerges a hypnotic empyrean flower, a solar fossil, a speaking anemone, of paper, of human muscle, of unknown origin, delivering an unreasonable message of rare tranquility.” –Mark McElhatten SOUND OVER WATER 2009, 6 min, 16mm “I wanted to shift the interpretation of a single image – a flock of birds – through fluctuating abstraction. By re-photographing and hand processing the images, the read changes. It’s ambiguously figurative – schools of fish, crashing waves, light on water – and then ends with the series of photographs acting as document, accentuating the gap between actual and perceptual.” –Mary Helena Clark BY FOOT-CANDLE LIGHT 2011, 9 min, digital “In the dream we call cinema there is no either, no or. We move from cave to forest to theater and back again, certain only that we are elsewhere, at least until the reel runs out. Here is objective truth, or ‘hypnosis’ by another name.” –Ben Russell THE PLANT 2012, 8 min, 16mm-to-digital A spy film, built on the bad geometry of point-of-view shots. ORPHEUS (OUTTAKES) 2012, 6 min, 16mm “Using footage from Cocteau’s ORPHÉE, Clark optically prints an interstitial space where the ghosts of cinema lurk beyond and within the frames.” –Andrea Picard THE DRAGON IS THE FRAME 2014, 14 min, 16mm An experimental detective film made in remembrance: keeping a diary, footnotes of film history, and the puzzle of depression. FIGURE MINUS FACT 2020, 13 min, digital “Night, like mourning, remakes space through absence: forms at the threshold of perception heighten sound and touch. When someone dies there is a pull towards the concrete and tangible, but disbelief creates a world of unreliable objects. FIGURE MINUS FACT draws and redraws coordinates between spaces, senses, and objects, groping in the dark, desiring to see something that’s not there. Spaces become evidentiary yet deceptive in a subjectless portrait of loss.” –Mary Helena Clark Total running time: ca. 65 min.

This program features works – both by Clark and by others – that relate to ideas in Clark’s exhibition at Bridget Donahue Gallery. Michael Snow PUCCINI CONSERVATO 2008, 10 min, digital “Commissioned to honor Puccini’s 150th birthday, the lighthearted PUCCINI CONSERVATO – which observes Snow’s stereo while a track from La Bohème plays – takes a subtle, good-natured jab at recorded music. (When opera is canned, where do you look?)” –Chris Kennedy Mary Helena Clark THE GLASS NOTE 2018, 9 min, digital A collage of sound, image, and text explore cinema’s inherent ventriloquism. Across surface and form, the video reflects on voice, embodiment, and fetish through the commingling of sound and image. Rosemarie Trockel EGG TRYING TO GET WARM 1994, 4 min, video “EGG TRYING TO GET WARM features an egg spinning on a hot plate – Trockel’s sly commentary on the sexist social assumptions implicit in the domestic setting.” –Diane Solway Mary Helena Clark UNTITLED 2024, 8 min, ??? This work-in-progress is premised as an examination of disgust. Charlotte Prodger PASSING AS A GREAT GREY OWL 2017, 6 min, digital Found footage of a female biologist mimicking the call of the male Great Grey Owl is counterposed with video of the legs of women as they urinate in various wildernesses. The collision of these activities in landscape points towards an exuberant queer territoriality. Mary Helena Clark EXHIBITION 2022, 19 min, digital EXHIBITION moves through gallery rooms and archives, compounding multiple biographies into a single imaginary subject. A woman marries the Berlin Wall, stabs a Velásquez painting as an act of protest and longing, declares herself a doorknob, and plumbs the erotics of the Klein bottle. Using citation, appropriation, and museological forms of display, the film is a meditation on the assertion and refusal of subjecthood. Total running time: ca. 60 min

“Inspired by the kingdom of 19th-century king Henri-Christophe, one of the revolutionary leaders who won for Haiti its independence from French colonial rule, but set in a modern milieu, MOLOCH TROPICAL presents a fictionalized portrait of the final days marking the collapse of a regime. The hot air is thick with a tightly coiled tension at President Jean de Dieu’s palatial fortress outside Port-au-Prince. His security force rattles with civil unrest and international diplomats one by one turn their backs on the president’s summit invitation. Hobbling around his quarters, de Dieu erratically exerts scraps of control as his authority rapidly disintegrates into humiliation. Using symbolism and an almost Shakespearean madness that reverberates across modern governments, Peck meticulously drapes the poetic across the political in a searing critique on the universal malady of absolute power corrupting absolutely.” –TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL

Antonin’s fourth documentary historicizes and condemns the triple exploitation – commercial, political, and ideological – of what is known as “l’art naif” or “naïve art.” The style was identified and coveted by the American art market (with C.I.A. approval) to support a primitivized image of Haiti and Haitians. In addition to feeding a lucrative and exploitative artistic commerce at the mercy of American interests, “l’art naïf” was also weaponized by the Duvalier dictatorship for its own ends. NAIVE ART AND REPRESSION IN HAITI includes numerous interviews with artists. A comment by one of them is a chilling testimony: “I can’t make anything I want to. I’m a slave to an American capitalist who wants to satisfy his escape fantasies. If I made another type of painting, I wouldn’t be able to sell it.” Antonin’s documentary functions to both expose the collusions of art and power, while ultimately calling for a renewed and autonomous Haitian artistic and cultural production.

Ben and Arthur are a happy gay couple desperate to get married and live happily ever after. But there are serious obstacles in their path in the form of a bitter ex-wife, a government that won’t recognize gay marriage, and Arthur’s evil homophobic brother Victor, who will stop at nothing to force his brother to renounce his sinful lifestyle. As Victor’s campaign to turn Arthur straight gets underway, he’s forced to take increasingly “drastic measures”, setting all the characters on a collision course towards what Buzzfeed called “a violent, high-stakes conclusion that makes most Lifetime movies look tame.” Made as a response to Bush-era marriage equality laws, amateur filmmaker Sam Mraovich’s low-budget love story became an instant camp classic that Queerty proclaimed “the worst gay movie of all time” (overlooking thousands of more obvious titles) and Rotten Tomatoes called the “gay equivalent” to Tommy Wiseau’s camp cult classic THE ROOM. Good? Bad? Who cares about labels like this when there’s so much mind-melting pleasure to be had in watching something so singularly strange and (perhaps) unintentionally hilarious. Mraovich doesn’t even care if you hate his movie, telling Buzzfeed, “when people are talking about your creative project, that’s always good, even if it’s bad.” We agree, and invite you to smoke a joint, grab a beer, and join us for a very twisted and funny screening. “If Tommy Wiseau's THE ROOM is the overwrought, melodramatic, and self-pitying heterosexual camp classic of choice, then Sam Mraovich’s BEN & ARTHUR is its gay equivalent. […] Every scene, every line, every hissy fit is simultaneously hilariously amateur and hysterically fever-pitched.” –Michael Adams, ROTTEN TOMATOES

NEW YORK STORY 1980, 27 min, 16mm-to-DCP. With Jackie Raynal, Sid Geffen, and Gary Indiana. In this autobiographical short film, Loulou (Raynal) looks for editing work in New York before marrying a journalist, Sid. But, quickly growing bored, she tells her husband about her desire to have an affair with somebody else. In NEW YORK STORY, Raynal combines different cinematic eras: the 1970s, the dramas of the 1940s, and even the silent slapstick of the 1920s. HOTEL NEW YORK 1984, 52 min, 16mm-to-DCP. With Jackie Raynal, Sid Geffen, Suzanne Fenn, and Gary Indiana. “HOTEL NEW YORK can be seen as a description of a fight; the fight of an immigrant with her new city and the fight of a filmmaker with her desire to make films within precarious boundaries. In HOTEL NEW YORK Jackie Raynal plays and wins.” –CAHIERS DU CINÉMA “One day in New York, I took my linen to a small Chinese laundry. Then I forgot it for a few weeks. When I went back, the laundry wasn’t there anymore, the building had been demolished! I was haunted by the thought of my bedsheets gone forever with the laundry. This experience was the starting point for the NEW YORK HOTEL script. I wanted to write and make this film to show how everything is transient over there. Things change all the time and are immediately replaced, much quicker than in Europe. The story stemmed from my own experience and impressions as a foreigner. It’s a comedy-drama.” –Jackie Raynal, LIBÉRATION Total running time: ca. 85 min.

Anthology presents a week-long revival run of Martha Coolidge’s emotionally shattering and formally innovative NOT A PRETTY PICTURE (1975). A self-reflexive documentary that was the culmination of the early non-fiction films Coolidge made before turning towards narrative fiction with VALLEY GIRL (1983), NOT A PRETTY PICTURE has been newly restored by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation. “Driven to restage her experience of rape at sixteen, Martha Coolidge’s feature-length directorial debut is a multifaceted documentary about an intensely personal experience. The actors she cast, all deliberately chosen, make for a rag-tag ensemble. The female lead who plays the director’s young self was also a rape victim, and one of the schoolgirls was Coolidge’s real roommate, and is thus older by a decade than the rest of the crew. As amateur as the film may appear on the surface, NOT A PRETTY PICTURE is both a compelling exercise in catharsis and an attempt at a larger critique of silence around rape. In viewing the film, a rare kind of alienation emerges – one that is both troubling and captivating.” –Bora Kim “The film’s anguished restaging of sexual violence suggests an absolute limit of experience that defies expression. In the documentary framework, both women confront the mores of a time that openly shamed and blamed victims. Several scenes evoke the Hollywood movies of Coolidge’s youth – teen comedies, melodramas, horror films, even musicals – as if suggesting the media’s distortions and falsifications of women’s lives, to which her film offers a crucial corrective.” –Richard Brody, THE NEW YORKER

“The Haitian revolution was a test case for the ideals of the French Revolution: What does the promise that all men are brothers who enjoy the same inviolable rights even mean as long as colonies and slavery exist? Nothing, according to the enslaved inhabitants of Haiti, who rebelled against the owners of the sugar cane plantations in 1791. In 1961, Antillean writer Édouard Glissant dedicated his play ‘Monsieur Toussaint’ to their leader Toussaint Louverture, which in turn serves as the basis for OUVERTURES. Louis Henderson, Olivier Marboeuf and the theater group The Living and The Dead Ensemble film themselves rehearsing the play in Port-au-Prince. The result is an experiment in three parts: a study retracing Louverture’s steps, an analysis of shared authorship and collective filmmaking and finally the outburst of a magical reality in which the spirits of the dead are alive.” –BERLINALE

Guardian of the underworld, Cerberus still has a muzzle but here he is called Rainer and has the breasts and the voice of a woman, wears a studded black leather jacket, and a flash camera fit for the paparazzi. Talking to us from the great beyond, he details the successive reincarnations of Conann the Barbarian, a bloodthirsty Amazon from ancient times. A visceral and impulsive queer illusionist, Bertrand Mandico (a prolific maker of highly inventive short films since the late 1990s, whose first feature, THE WILD BOYS, had its NYC premiere run at Anthology in 2018) casts his magic lantern on an imaginary pre-history, as well as some new little shops of horrors, rendered simultaneously in color and black-and-white. Both Mandico and his star Elina Löwensohn will be here in person during opening weekend! “In Mandico’s hot queer extravaganza, the divine Elina Löwensohn stars as the dog-headed demon Rainer, who narrates from the Underworld a dark tale of the heroine Conann and her six transformations across human epochs. From Conann’s early childhood as a barbarian slave to the neon-tinged 1980s, where the monstrous boomboxes clank alongside the shining swords. Delight your senses with a surreal fantasy that takes pride in cannibalism, torture, perverse sex, blood and guts and lots and lots (lots) of glitter!” –KINO SVETOZOR “‘You’re not from here, are you?’ It is a question posed in Bertrand Mandico’s latest surreal spectacle, but it could also be a challenge applied to anyone who dares enter his demented world of cannibalism, kinky sex, torture and relentless bloodletting. CONANN reworks the mythic barbarian tale, turning it into a saga of a female warrior that spans decades and features different actors playing the titular role.” –Tim Grierson, SCREEN INTERNATIONAL

In 1937, tens of thousands of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent were exterminated by the Dominican army, based on anti-Black hatred fomented by the Dominican government. In 2013, the Dominican Republic’s Supreme Court stripped the citizenship of anyone with Haitian parents, retroactive to 1929. The ruling rendered more than 200,000 people stateless, without nationality, identity, or a homeland. In this dangerous climate, a young attorney named Rosa Iris mounts a grassroots campaign, challenging electoral corruption and advocating for social justice. STATELESS traces the complex tributaries of history and present-day politics, as state-sanctioned racism seeps into mundane offices, living room meetings, and street protests. At a time when extremist ideologies are gaining momentum in the U.S. and around the world, STATELESS is a warning of what can happen in a society when racism runs rampant in the government. Filmed with a chiaroscuro effect and richly imbued with elements of magical realism, STATELESS combines gritty hidden-camera footage with the legend of a young woman fleeing brutal violence to flip the narrative axis, revealing the depths of institutionalized oppression.

This compilation brings together the two short films that, along with SHE IS CONANN, comprise the “Barbarian cycle”: WE BARBARIANS (2023) and RAINER, A VICIOUS DOG IN A SKULL VALLEY (2023). Woven together with newly-shot interludes and an additional short film, THE LAST CARTOON – NONSENSE, OPTIMISTIC, PESSIMISTIC (2023), the complete work makes its U.S. debut here at Anthology! “These works, though filmed on the same sets and featuring the same cast as CONANN, operate as meta-cinematic companion pieces. They offer a nuanced commentary on the film industry and the contemporary state of cinema.” –Martin Kudlac, SCREEN ANARCHY

In 2017, Anthology hosted musician, actor, filmmaker, and photographer Tav Falco, who presented a selection of his short films, as well as his feature-length work, URANIA DESCENDING, a sui generis work inspired by the silent screen tradition of serial cinema pioneered by Louis Feuillade and others. URANIA DESCENDING was conceived as the first in a triptych of episodes – and now, six years later, the trilogy has finally been completed. Raised in Arkansas and Memphis, but based in Europe since the late 1990s and now in Bangkok, Falco was mentored by noted Memphis photographer William Eggleston. After a 1978 musical performance involving the chain sawing of a guitar that caught the attention of Big Star’s Alex Chilton, the two teamed up musically and evolved into the self-styled “art damage” band, Tav Falco’s Panther Burns. Falco continues to lead the group to this day, while also focusing on films and photography. Channeling silent movie stylistics and old-world atmospherics, THE URANIA TRILOGY follows a disenchanted American girl, Gina Lee, who impulsively travels to Vienna, the imperial city on the Danube. Quickly slipping into discreet yet decadent dalliances at Cafe Central and at the notorious Hotel Orient, she becomes embroiled in an intrigue to uncover buried Nazi plunder. “THE URANIA TRILOGY is a filmic poem infused with metaphor, mood, and Stimmung, where the past overtakes the present and the present overtakes the past. The film flickers with the fateful caprice of tarot cards fingered in a Viennese bordello. It emerges as a corporeal fable and offers cabalistic hygiene for a vital elegance.” –Tav Falco

A haunting and tender meditation on displacement, grief, and memory. Haitian-Canadian filmmaker Miryam Charles’s debut feature is dedicated to her 14-year-old cousin Tessa, whose tragic death in 2008 was the origin point for the filmmaker’s contemplation of their family’s history of migration and relationship to Haiti. Shot in lustrous 16mm, Charles renders traumatic histories with a loving touch, recalling classics of Black women’s diasporic cinema such Martina Attile’s DREAMING RIVERS (1988) and Julie Dash’s DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST (1991). THIS HOUSE moves between sensitively artificial interiors and vibrantly realistic landscapes, offering a cinematic wake for the irrecuperable loss of a beloved young girl – and the solace of impossible elegy. “In this ornate experimental documentary, Charles presents meticulously gathered Haitian soundscapes, an assortment of Caribbean flora, precious keepsakes, and staged recollections. With these elements, she conjures a reunion across realms, showing a family that is still standing despite being profoundly changed by what they have suffered.” –Nataleah Hunter-Young Preceded by: FLY, FLY SADNESS / VOLE, VOLE TRISTESSE 2015, 6 min, 16mm-to-digital An anonymous narrator describes the aftermath of a mysterious explosion in Port-au-Prince that transforms the voices of all its individual inhabitants into one single voice. A FORTRESS / UNE FORTERESSE 2018, 6 min, 16mm-to-digital After the death of their adoptive daughter, a couple goes to Haiti looking for her relatives. There, they meet with a DNA specialist who might have the power of resurrection. SECOND GENERATION 2019, 5 min, 16mm-to-digital A few days before her wedding, a young woman learns that her fiancé is accused of sexual assault. She goes to Haiti to confront the alleged victim. Total running time: ca. 95 min.