New Releases and Restorations
A Complete Unknown (2024)
James Mangold · 141m · DCP
There comes a time in every rising star’s career where they will need to perform in a serious biopic. A Complete Unknown is that film for Timothée Chalamet, arguably this generation’s greatest star. Set in the unrest and upheaval of the 1960s, the film follows Bob Dylan as he ascends from a no-name 19-year-old with a guitar to the voice of a generation — and oh what a voice it is!
Saturday, March 29 6:30pm
The Room Next Door (2024)
Pedro Almodóvar · 107m · DCP
Former war journalist Martha (Tilda Swinton), with only months of her life left due to cancer, asks her long-separated friend Ingrid (Julianne Moore) to accompany her on one last weekend cabin getaway. Stylishly melancholic scenes twist and pull the two along as their past vibrant connection is given a new, albeit short, life. Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature, The Room Next Door retains his flair for drama and is as challenging as it is enthralling.
Sunday, April 6 5pm
Nickel Boys (2024)
RaMell Ross · 140m · DCP
Elwood Curtis’s (Ethan Herisse) promising future is shattered when he’s wrongfully sent to Nickel Academy, a brutal reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. There, he forms a deep bond with Turner (Brandon Wilson) as they endure the harsh realities of the institution. Nickel Boys is a powerful story of friendship and resilience in the face of oppression, based on actual events that inspired Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
Saturday, April 12 5:30pm · Sunday, April 13 1pm
The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived (2011)
Heiny Srour · 62m · DCP
Lebanese filmmaker Heiny Srour and her team documented Dhofar’s socialist feminist rebellion against British colonial power, crossing 500 miles of desert by foot to reach the zone of conflict. The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived remains one of the few documentations of the People’s Liberation Army’s struggles, achievements, and the reforms they enacted in the process. Srour says of the shoot, "On a moral level, these were the happiest days of my life."
Saturday, April 12 4pm
Leila and the Wolves (1974)
Heiny Srour · 90m · DCP
Told in a patchwork of fantasy sequences, archival footage, and reenactments, the recently restored Leila and the Wolves follows a woman who time travels into the previous half century to uncover the stories of women throughout the history of Lebanon and Palestine. An exploration of historicity, oral traditions, and the power of collective memory, Leila reexamines the past to open space for stories of Arab women’s political agency and struggle.
Sunday, April 13 4pm
Pilgrim, Farewell (1982)
Michael Roemer · 102m · 35mm
A sensitive yet honest depiction of a woman with terminal cancer and her struggle to resolve her resentment of her family and the world. Simplistic and elegant in its construction, Roemer uses the confines of its story to reexamine many of the themes explored in his earlier films while still telling an ultimately moving tale about the human spirit when faced with death.
Saturday, April 19 7pm · Sunday, April 20 4pm
Hard Truths (2024)
Mike Leigh · 97m · DCP
After starring in Leigh’s Secrets & Lies, Marianne Jean-Baptiste returns to play Pansy, a bitter and abrasive housewife whose anger and trauma isolate her from everyone but her sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin). Meanwhile, Chantelle’s life is filled with warmth, and her disposition couldn’t oppose Pansy’s more starkly. Mike Leigh’s difficult, yet compassionate study of family shows how love and care survive even in our most frustrating relationships.
Saturday, April 26 7pm
All We Imagine as Light (2024)
Payal Kapadia · 118m · DCP
This ethereal film follows three women through Mumbai and to the Indian seaside as they are brought together through their individual loneliness. The glittering images of All We Imagine As Light pass slowly, the characters sinking achingly into the dreamy world around them. Kapadia’s film won the Grand Prix at Cannes and topped this year’s Sight & Sound year-end poll.
Co-sponsored by UChicago SASA.
Saturday, May 3 7pm
I’m Still Here (2024)
Walter Salles · 137m · DCP
Centered around a grounded performance by Fernanda Torres, I’m Still Here follows Eunice Pavia, whose husband is arrested by the Brazilian government and later goes missing. After also being arrested herself, Pavia decides to publicly investigate her husband’s disappearance, and ends up facing both a political battle and a fight to protect her family.
Sunday, May 4 4pm
Love Hotel (1985)
Shinji Sōmai · 88m · DCP
Shinji Sōmai’s mournful and enigmatic contribution to the studio Nikkatsu’s “Roman Porno” series tracks the relationship between a call girl and a taxi driver made destitute by the yakuza as their affair rekindles two years after a brutal beginning in a Tokyo love hotel. The neon-lit surfaces of the film ache with longing in this plaintive study of sensuality and loss as love becomes a means of transaction, memorization, survival.
Friday, May 9 9:45pm · Saturday, May 10 9:30pm
7 Walks with Mark Brown (2024)
Vincent Barré, Pierre Creton · 104m · DCP
Documentarian Creton and sculpter Barré follow paleobotanist Brown through the Normandy countryside, as Brown gives a learned, divagating account of various plant species they come across. The first part of the film, shot digitally, shows the crew and their equipment walking after the botanist, a sort of behind-the-scenes for the second part of the film — "the Herbarium," shot on 16mm — which showcases the aforementioned flora with rich, profound elegance.
Preview screening.
Saturday, May 24 4pm
Va, Toto! (2017)
Pierre Creton · 94m · DCP
Creton’s novelistic documentary Va, Toto! begins when a wild boar piglet refuges in the home of his neighbor in their tiny French coastal town. He initially wanted to tell just this one story, yet the film spirals out into other narrative threads, like a professor’s adventure with wild monkeys in India and a farmer recounting his dreams. Creton wrote, "it seemed artificial to me to recount one, isolated story, since in life there is no such thing."
Sunday, May 25 2pm
La Musica (1967)
Marguerite Duras, Paul Seban · 81m · DCP
Marguerite Duras’s first film, co-directed by Paul Seban, is about a man and a woman who meet in their former hometown to finalize their divorce, three years after separating. One cannot look away from the deeply cutting performances of Robert Hossein and Delphine Seyrig, and the latter is especially at her melancholic height in this film, as her character states: "Some people cry in the afternoon when their love has faded. I go to the cinema."
