TBC
Nestled away in wintry East Anatolia, public-school art teacher Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu) yearns to leave the sleepy village for cosmopolitan Istanbul. Further disenchanted when he and Kenan (Musab Ekici), a colleague, come under public scrutiny, Samet fears circumstances will keep him in Anatolia and his dreams of a new life permanently out of reach. A silver lining is a budding relationship with Nuray (Merve Dizdar), a fellow teacher and firebrand who develops connections with both Samet and Kenan, forcing Samet to confront what he can't readily accept. Renowned for his nuanced, visually ravishing imagery, award-winning director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Winter Sleep) capstones the film with one of his greatest sequences, a dazzling metacinematic climax featuring an entrancing performance from Dizdar, who took home Best Actress at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.
A feature-length documentary about the sometimes unsettling but always fascinating world of the song-poem industry. In this little known subculture, ordinary people send in their heartfelt, but often bizarre, poems to companies that for a fee turn them into full-fledged musical productions. Advertising in the back of magazines, these companies lure the would-be songwriters with promises of fame and fortune. This peculiar concoction of American commerce, musicianship, and poetic longing create oddly compelling songs that are unlike anything youve ever heard. Off The Charts: The Song-Poem Story explores the lives and dreams of the songwriters and musicians who operate within this strange world. Features not-so-famous songs like, "Non-Violent Taekwondo Troopers", "I Am A Ginseng Digger", "Richard Nixon", "Jimmy Carter Says Yes!", "Annie Oakley", and "How's Everything in Denmark?"
PGfor brief strong language
On a quest to uncover Leonard Bernstein’s ‘universal language of music’, renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma travels the old ‘Silk Road’ with virtuoso musicians from diverse instrumental traditions to collaborate on rousing new musical explorations.
NR
Chronicles the journeys of broadcasters, educators and filmmakers who believed television could inspire a lifelong love of reading.
CCA's monthly Closer Looks series, May 2024. Selected by Paul Barnes. "Bruce Springsteen wrote a song called “Cautious Man”. It contains a line inspired by The Night of the Hunter, “"On his right hand Billy'd tattooed the word "love” and on his left hand was the word "fear” And in which hand he held his fate was never clear” In the film there’s a famous scene in which Robert Mitchum as an enigmatic Reverend says to a little boy, "Ah, little lad, you're staring at my fingers. Would you like me to tell you the little story of right-hand/left-hand?” The Night of the Hunter—incredibly, the only film the great actor Charles Laughton ever directed—is truly a stand-alone masterwork. A horror movie with qualities of a Grimm fairy tale, it stars a sublimely sinister Robert Mitchum as a traveling preacher named Harry Powell (he of the tattooed knuckles), whose nefarious motives for marrying a fragile widow, played by Shelley Winters, are uncovered by her terrified young children. Graced by images of eerie beauty and a sneaky sense of humor, telling its chilling story through visual fantasy, this ethereal, expressionistic American classic— featuring the contributions of the great silent actress Lillian Gish and renowned writer James Agee—is cinema’s most eccentric rendering of the battle between good and evil. Charles Laughton showed here that he had an original eye, and a taste for material that stretched the conventions of the movies. It is risky to combine horror and humor, and foolhardy to approach them through expressionism. For his first film, Laughton made a film like no other before or since, and with such confidence it seemed to draw on a lifetime of experience." -Paul Barnes A religious fanatic marries a gullible widow whose young children are reluctant to tell him where their real daddy hid $10,000 he'd stolen in a robbery.
TBC
CCA's monthly Closer Looks series, April 2024. Presented with an introduction by CCA Cinema Director Justin Clifford Rhody and a post-screening panel discussion by Eve-Lauryn Little Shell LaFountain, Abigail Smith, and Luna Galassini. "With her first and only feature film—a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in—Barbara Loden turned in a groundbreaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of character seldom seen on-screen. Set amid a soot-choked Pennsylvania landscape, and shot in an intensely intimate vérité style, the film takes up with distant and soft-spoken Wanda (Loden), who has left her husband, lost custody of her children, and now finds herself alone, drifting between dingy bars and motels, where she falls prey to a series of callous men—including a bank robber who ropes her into his next criminal scheme. An until now difficult-to-see masterpiece that has nonetheless exerted an outsize influence on generations of artists and filmmakers, Wanda is a compassionate and wrenching portrait of a woman stranded on society’s margins." -Criterion Wanda was restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by Gucci and The Film Foundation. About the panelists: Eve-Lauryn Little Shell LaFountain is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. She is a multimedia artist, filmmaker, and educator born, raised, and currently based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work explores identity, history, Indigenous Futurism, feminism, ghosts, magic, and her mixed Native American and Jewish heritage through lens based media and installations. She is a Mandel Institute Cultural Leadership Fellow, and has received support for her work from the Sundance Institute, Mike Kelley Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation, Cousin Collective and more. She has exhibited her work in venues and festivals around the world. She holds a BA from Hampshire College, and a dual MFA in Film & Video and Photography & Media from CalArts. Abigail Smith is a collage artist, field recordist, and experimental filmmaker. Her work has been exhibited internationally at festivals including IndieLisboa, Saigon Experimental Film Festival, Analogica, and Other Cinema. She received her Masters in Library and Information Science from Indiana university and works at the New Mexico Museum of Art. Smith is a co-founder of No Name Cinema and performs flute and percussion in free-improv and expanded cinema ensembles. Luna Galassini is a musician and filmmaker. Her performances and videos are informed by somatic practices, folk and rural histories, and the local ecology of New Mexico. Her work has been exhibited at No Name Cinema, Currents 826, REDCAT, The Box Gallery Los Angeles, and Visual Studies Workshop. She co-organizes the experimental concert series Santa Fe Noise Ordinance and lives in the rural village of Truchas.
Thursdays: May 16, May 23, May 30, June 6 4:30-6:30p, In-person at CCA Poet Elizabeth Jacobson returns to CCA with her popular workshop series Intimate Immersion. During this four-week virtual intensive participants will focus on generating new poems, critiquing each other’s work, revising their poems, and looking at elements of craft. Each meeting, participants are invited to bring a new poem (with copies for everyone) for workshop discussion. Since this is the first look, the process creates a deep, concentrated attention distinctive from preparing critique notes ahead of time. Additionally, contemporary poems are provided as a catalyst for the following week's writing prompt. This is an intimate, focused immersion to reinforce the writing practice and foster the evolution of new poems. Tuition (for all four in-person sessions): $250 Please register early as class size is limited to 8 participants. We will meet in CCA’s conference room, which is in the same building as the cinema. About Elizabeth Jacobson: Elizabeth was the fifth Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico and an Academy of American Poets 2020 Laureate Fellow. Her third collection of poems, There are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral, is forthcoming from Free Verse Editions, 2025. Her previous book, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air won the New Measure Poetry Prize (FVE/Parlor Press, 2019) and the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book. Her other books include Her Knees Pulled In (Tres Chicas Books), two chapbooks from Dancing Girl Press, Are the Children Make Believe? and A Brown Stone, and Everything Feels Recent When You’re Far Away, Poetry and Art from Santa Fe Youth During the Pandemic (Axle Books, 2021), which she co-edited. Elizabeth is a Reviews Editor for the on-line literary journal Terrain.org, and she is co-founding director of Poetry Pollinators, an eco-poetry public art initiative supporting native solitary bees. Her community projects have received eight consecutive grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry.
NR
In this acclaimed film which won top directing and acting prizes at the Venice Film Festival, writer-director Garrone presents a “reverse shot” of the immigration experience while unfurling an epic, cinematographically magnificent odyssey from West Africa to Italy. The story is told through the mind’s eye and experiences of two Senegalese teenagers living in Dakar who yearn for a brighter future in Europe. Yet between their dreams and reality lies a treacherous journey through a labyrinth of checkpoints, the scorched Saharan desert, a fetid North African prison and the vast waters of the Mediterranean where thousands have died packed inside vessels barely fit for passage.
Master Class #1 – Editing - The Relationship Between the Director and Editor On Monday, March 25 at 6pm, CCA is happy to host the first in its series of Master Classes, which will offer cinema fans greater insights to the many different aspects of filmmaking. The series begins with Master Class #1 – Editing - The Relationship Between the Director and Editor -- conducted by Paul Barnes, ACE (America Cinema Editors). Here’s his description of the class: The class will compare my editing work for two completely different filmmakers – Errol Morris, for whom I cut The Thin Blue Line – a film that BROKE every rule of editing - and Ken Burns, for whom I cut The Roosevelts: An Intimate History – a film that MAINTAINED every rule of editing. We will screen the opening scene in both films and then I will present an extensive analysis behind the decisions the directors and I made for every cut, every choice of image, every line of dialog, every sound effect and piece of music, etc etc. I will talk about the role of an editor as a "chameleon", getting inside the skin, inside the head of the director to be able to help realize the director’s vision for their film. These two directors couldn’t be more different in temperament and aesthetics. So, the contrast between the two is very illuminating about the editing craft. For those of you who know nothing about editing – this will be an eye opener, I guarantee it! -- Paul Barnes
PGfor some language, partial nudity and smoking.
Hirayama is content with his life as a toilet cleaner in Tokyo. Outside of his structured routine he cherishes music on cassette tapes, books, and taking photos of trees. Through unexpected encounters, he reflects on finding beauty in the world.
PG-13for thematic material, some language and brief drug material.
Fran likes to think about dying. It brings sensation to her quiet life. When she makes the new guy at work laugh, it leads to more: a date, a slice of pie, a conversation, a spark. The only thing standing in their way is Fran herself.
NR
Debut writer-director Felipe Gálvez asserts himself as a revelatory new cinematic voice with THE SETTLERS, a searing and indelible take on the Western. Blending historical specificity with vivid visual style, this Cannes Un Certain Regard FIPRESCI Prize winner creates a singular immersive vision, arresting in both content and form. At the turn of the 20th century, three horsemen embark on an expedition across the Tierra del Fuego archipelago at the behest of a wealthy landowner, tasked with securing his vast state-appointed property. Accompanying a reckless British lieutenant and an American mercenary is mestizo marksman Segundo, who comes to realize, amidst rising tensions within the group, their true mission is to murderously “remove” the indigenous population. Set against stunning mountain landscapes, Chile’s Best International Feature Film entry to the 96th Academy Awards® is a visceral reckoning with national myth and the attendant violence. Painterly yet piercing, this acclaimed frontier epic turns a bold eye to the past, daring to reimagine its depiction in the present and for the future.