Saúl Armendáriz, a gay amateur wrestler from El Paso, rises to international stardom after he creates the character ‘Cassandro,’ the “Liberace of Lucha Libre.” In the process, he upends not just the macho wrestling world, but also his own life. Based on a true story. Directed by Academy Award® winner Roger Ross Williams.

Chulas Fronteras is a zesty introduction to Norteña music and culture that exists along the Texas-Mexican border. The music is a fusion of traditional Mexican harmonies, German dancehall rhythms and a little something extra. From soulful, lively dance tunes to political work songs, música Norteña has evolved since the turn of the 20th century into a unique Mexican-American hybrid. Blank links the music’s spirit and vitality to the strong family bonds of Tejanos. The plight of migrant workers adds a sobering backbeat to this joyous film. A lyrical journey through the heart of Chicano culture as reflected in the love songs of the Tex-Mex Norteña music tradition, constructed from outtakes from Chulas Fronteras and brought to life by long time collaborator of Les Blank’s, Maureen Gosling.

Each morning Donya (Anaita Wali Zada) leaves her tight-knit community of Afghan immigrants in Fremont, California. She crosses the Bay to work at a family-run fortune cookie factory in San Francisco. Donya drifts through her routine, struggling to connect with the culture and people of her new, unfamiliar surroundings while processing complicated feelings about her past as a translator for the U.S. government in Afghanistan. Unable to sleep, she finagles her way into a regular slot with a therapist (Gregg Turkington) who grasps for prospective role models. When an unexpected promotion at work thrusts Donya into the position to write her own story, she communicates her loneliness and longing through a concise medium: the fortunes inside each cookie. Donya’s koans travel, making a humble social impact and expanding her world far beyond Fremont and her turbulent past, including an encounter with a quiet auto mechanic (Jeremy Allen White) who could stand to see his own world expanded. Tenderly sculpted and lyrically shot in black-and-white, Babak Jalali’s FREMONT is a wry, deadpan vision of the universal longing for home.

A lighthearted take on director Yasujiro Ozu’s perennial theme of the challenges of inter­generational relationships, Good Morning tells the story of two young boys who stop speaking in protest after their parents refuse to buy a television set. Ozu weaves a wealth of subtle gags through a family portrait as rich as those of his dramatic films, mocking the foibles of the adult world through the eyes of his child protagonists. Shot in stunning color and set in a suburb of Tokyo where housewives gossip about the neighbors’ new washing machine and unemployed husbands look for work as door-to-door salesmen, this charming comedy refashions Ozu’s own silent classic I Was Born, But . . . to gently satirize consumerism in postwar Japan.

In the mid-‘70s, filmmaker James Szalapski documented the then-nascent country music movement that would become known as “outlaw country.” Inspired, in part, by newly-long-haired Willie Nelson’s embrace of hippie attitudes and audiences, a younger generation of artists including Townes Van Zandt, David Allan Coe, Steve Earle and Guy Clark popularized and developed the outlaw sound. It borrowed from rock, folk and bluegrass, with an edge that was missing from mainstream Nashville country. This newly-restored documentary includes rarely-captured performances of the aforementioned musicians as they perfected this then-new style and helped change the course of country music history.

24 hours in the lives of three young men in the French suburbs the day after a violent riot. . “Winner of the Palm d’Or and Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival and of the César – France’s Oscars – for Best Picture, this is where the revolution begins. Teenage best friends – one African, one Arab, one Jew – live bored, desperate lives in the banlieue, the high-rise ghetto encircling Paris. During an anti-police riot, one of the friends steals a cop’s gun – death incarnate. LA HAINE follows the trio’s dire and hilarious adventures around Paris – a city on a knife-edge as police battle the banlieue kids. Director Kassovitz’s groundbreaking, thrilling B/W camera movement, street dialogue and gritty realism is a lightning bolt, a youthquake, a cry of rage.” –David N. Meyer . Closer Looks is an in-depth cinema series curated by the award-winning filmmaker and editor Paul Barnes, film critic and writer David N. Meyer, and founder/programmer of local microcinema No Name Cinema, Justin Clifford Rhody. The series showcases a broad range of eras, regions, and subjects, all unified by their integral contribution to the history of cinema as an art form. Each film screening is followed by an in-depth overview and audience conversation by the presenters to contextualize and explore the importance of the evening’s film.

Over the course of a single hectic day in New York City, three people from Feña's past are thrust back into his life: his foreign father, his straight ex-boyfriend, and his 13-year old half-sister. Having lost touch since transitioning from female to male, Feña must navigate the new dynamics of these old relationships while tackling the day-to-day challenges that come with living a life in-between.

A young Navajo filmmaker investigates displacement of Indigenous people and devastation of the environment caused by the same chemical companies that have exploited the land where she was born. On this personal and political journey, she learns from Indigenous activists across three continents. Director: Ivey Camille Manybeads Tso Features: LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, Louise Goy, Makai Lewis Run time: 1 hr. 15 min. Film: Documentary This special event is sponsored by 350 Santa Fe, an all-volunteer organization formed in early 2020 to promote rapid and just reductions in greenhouse gas emissions through education and advocacy in Santa Fe and New Mexico, with support from the Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Charitable Trust and CCA. The director of this acclaimed environmental documentary, Ivey Camille Manybeads Tso of the Navajo Nation, will attend and host a Q&A with the audience following the screening.

The lack of respect with which the Black musician Thelonious Monk was treated in Autumn, 1969. At the end of his European tour, legendary jazz musician Thelonious Monk appears on an interview show in Paris for French state television.

A woman is sucked into a world of secrets and betrayal as the battle over her estranged father's massive estate reveals him to be more than the genial patriarch she'd assumed in this twisted satire.

“An entrancing, deeply moving effort, one that is certain to steal the hearts of audiences” –Playlist Based on his a true story, Chloe Zhao’s film—a winner at Cannes and the Independent Spirit Awards—stars breakout Brady Jandreau as a once-rising star of the rodeo circuit warned that his competition days are over after a tragic riding accident. Back home, Brady finds himself wondering what he has to live for when he can no longer do what gives him a sense of purpose: to ride and compete. In an attempt to regain control of his fate, Brady undertakes a search for new identity and tries to redefine his idea of what it means to be a man in the heartland of America. (U.S., 2017, 105m, Sony Pictures Classics)

André is having an affair with Christine, whose husband Robert is himself hiding a mistress. Christine's married maid is romantically entangled with the local poacher. At a hunting party, the passions of servants and aristocrats dangerously collide. . “Considered one of the greatest films ever made, THE RULES OF THE GAME, by Jean Renoir, is a scathing critique of corrupt French society on the brink of WWII. Renoir said he wanted to tell a “light” story about a world dancing on a volcano. The film is cloaked in a comedy of manners in which a weekend at a marquis’ country château lays bare some underlying ugly truths about a group of haut bourgeois acquaintances. The film has had a tumultuous history: it was subjected to cuts after the violent response of the premiere audience in 1939, and the original negative was lost during World War II; it wasn’t reconstructed until 1956. The restored film premiered in 1957 at the Venice Film Festival and THE RULES OF THE GAME was finally recognized for what it was – one of the 20th century’s undisputed masterworks.” -Paul Barnes . Closer Looks is an in-depth cinema series curated by the award-winning filmmaker and editor Paul Barnes, film critic and writer David N. Meyer, and founder/programmer of local microcinema No Name Cinema, Justin Clifford Rhody. The series showcases a broad range of eras, regions, and subjects, all unified by their integral contribution to the history of cinema as an art form. Each film screening is followed by an in-depth overview and audience conversation by the presenters to contextualize and explore the importance of the evening’s film.

With a stunning mix of the surreal and the naturalistic, Djibril Diop Mambéty paints a fractured portrait of the disenchantment of postindependence Senegal in the early 1970s. In this picaresque fantasy-drama, the disaffected young lovers Anta and Mory, fed up with Dakar, long to escape to the glamour and comforts they imagine France has to offer, but their plan is confounded by obstacles both practical and mystical. Alternately manic and meditative, Touki bouki has an avant-garde sensibility characterized by vivid imagery, bleak humor, unconventional editing, and jagged soundscapes, and it demonstrates Mambéty’s commitment to telling African stories in new ways. . Closer Looks is an in-depth cinema series curated by the award-winning filmmaker and editor Paul Barnes, film critic and writer David N. Meyer, and founder/programmer of local microcinema No Name Cinema, Justin Clifford Rhody. The series showcases a broad range of eras, regions, and subjects, all unified by their integral contribution to the history of cinema as an art form. Each film screening is followed by an in-depth overview and audience conversation by the presenters to contextualize and explore the importance of the evening’s film.

Winner of the Grand Prix at the first Tokyo International Film Festival in 1985, Typhoon Club is widely regarded as the seminal film of director Shinji Somai’s career. A work of raw, elemental power, it follows an ensemble of junior high students in a provincial town, beset by a summer-y malaise as a typhoon looms. When the storm makes landfall, the teens find themselves holed up in their school unsupervised, while another classmate (Yuki Kudo) disappears alone on a harrowing trek to the big city. Set adrift in a world suddenly unmoored, the students let loose their pent-up angst and burgeoning passions in a series of propulsive, phantasmic scenes—part apocalypse, part utopia—as the deluge rages on into the night. Observed in daring long takes, director Somai gives material form to the students’ turbulent inner lives. When day breaks and the rains let up, the youngsters open their eyes to a world in ruins—or a world renewed. The 10th best Japanese film of all time, according to Japan’s Kinema Junpo poll. "I can say with absolute conviction that no Japanese filmmaker makes a film without being conscious of Shinji Somai’s existence. That is how significant Somai's presence is in the history of Japanese cinema… For anyone who wants to see a movie that has the power to change and sustain your life, I urge you to see Somai’s films." - Ryusuke Hamaguchi, director of Drive My Car "Maybe the last great master of Japanese film history." - Kiyoshi Kurosawa, director of Cure "Shinji Somai is one of the most personal and original Japanese filmmakers, and a master whose work has been almost completely neglected outside Japan." - Chris Fujiwara, critic and programmer "This is cinema." - Hou Hsiao-hsien "One of the most beautiful and touching teenage films I’ve ever seen. An absolutely devastating film." – Bernardo Bertolucci