Special Screenings / Events
From Where We Stand (2023)
Lucie Kaye · 60m · DCP
Lucy Kaye’s one-hour documentary and deep dive into the life and times of residents of three post-industrial towns in the North of England is moving, visually haunting, and (in parts) disturbingly raw. Filmed across Wakefield, Halifax and Middlesbrough, the film brings together stories of loss, migration, friendship, and mutual aid, to convey a strong sense of place and lived experience. Exploring our relationship to the places we live and our sense of belonging, the film challenges stereotypes and gives a vital voice to those not often heard.
This film is funded by UK ESRC "Governance after Brexit," made in collaboration with the University of Leeds, Northern Exposure Research project.
Friday, April 4 4pm
The Godfather Part II (1974)
Francis Ford Coppola · 202m · 35mm
What Coppola called “extending the story in both the past and the present,” The Godfather: Part II brackets the story of the first film, shifting between the rise of the Corleone family through the eyes of Vito Corleone (Robert DeNiro), and, fifty years later, his son Michael (Al Pacino), the new Don of the family. Spanning half a century, the film studies the decline of Michael and his family, turning a close eye on their dynamics.
Saturday, April 5 7pm
Frances Ha (2012)
Noah Baumbach · 86m · 35mm
27-year-old Frances (Greta Gerwig) moves to New York City to pursue her dream of being a dancer. Managing a rapidly complicating housing situation and relationship to her best friend (Mickey Sumner), Frances smiles through the pangs of early adulthood. Gerwig and Baumbach spent a year co-writing Frances Ha over email without meeting up in person, and without Gerwig even planning on starring in the film.
Friday, April 25 9:30pm
La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2024)
Peter Watkins · 345m · DCP
Watkins’s reenactment of the Paris Commune — the revolutionary proletarian government in 1871 Paris — is another instance of his experimental approach to documentary-fiction. La Commune was shot in under two weeks with hundreds of actors, mostly non-professional, who are the populist backbone of the film. In long-take interviews, they talk about their own sentiments regarding the Commune, on which they had done individual research at Watkin’s behest.
Saturday, April 26 12pm
How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022)
Mike Leigh · 104m · 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.
Sunday, April 27 1pm
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
Resti / D(z)iga / Parabola / Spirit Level (2014 / 2013 / 2013 / 2017)
Marco G. Ferrari · 11m / 4m / 27m / 32m TRT 74m · DCP
Four sustained studies in environment and structures — in D(z)iga, the Contra Dam, and in Parabola, the Canton of Ticino through surrounding construction sites. Resti documents a shipwreck off the Chicago lakefront, while Spirit Level is an exploration of explores three holy sites in India through fragmented superimpositions. Marco Ferrari’s films are about the relationship between observation and interpretation, openness and imposition.
Followed by Q&A with Filmmaker.
Saturday, May 10 6:30pm
The Tango Lesson (1997)
Sally Potter · 100m · 35mm
Following up on her adaptation of Orlando, this film unconventionally turns inwards to tell the semi-autobiographical story of Sally as she takes lessons from, and eventually falls in love with, her tango instructor Pablo. Power and creativity also play a part in this mature picture of a relationship with all its desires and compromises. The attention to its dance sequences becomes one of the film’s highlights.
Followed by Q&A with Marya E. Gates, author of Cinema Her Way
