This week at MoMI:

"Shame" screens Thursday, July 28 at 6:00 p.m. followed by an in-person discussion with lead actress Deborra-Lee Furness!

This highlight of 1980s Australian New Wave cinema can't be missed!

A major 27-film retrospective of master Japanese filmmaker Hiroshi Shimizu comes to Museum of the Moving Image and Japan Society in NYC, co-organized with the National Film Archive of Japan and the Japan Foundation, New York. MoMI will present Part 1, from May 4–19, featuring Shimizu’s work at Shochiku studio, which includes his best-known films in the United States as well as rarely seen supreme masterpieces, Children in the Wind (1937) and its two-volume sequel Four Seasons of Children (1939). All films will be presented in 35mm prints imported from collections and archives in Japan. See full schedule for Hiroshi Shimizu Part I at MoMI.

Hiroshi Shimizu, Part II: The Postwar and Independent Years runs May 16–June 1, 2024 at Japan Society. 

An unsung master of Japanese cinema, Hiroshi Shimizu (1903–1966) was highly regarded by contemporaries Yasujirō Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi for his seemingly effortless formal ingenuity, distinguished by his signature linear traveling shots and his naturalistic, open-air depictions of regional Japan. Shot on location and frequently employing non-actors, the loosely plotted, low-key tragicomedies that comprise his most characteristic work foregrounded the transient lives and hardships of everyday people with a marked regard for those pushed to the margins of society, including drifters, migrant workers, war veterans, persons with disabilities, outcast women, and especially children, in whom the director took a personal philanthropic interest and of whom he remarked: “They are natural. They breathe the air. Films must have humans who breathe the air.” 

This two-part retrospective offers the first New York survey of the major yet often overlooked filmmaker in more than 30 years and the largest ever assembled in North America. Presented at the Museum, Part I: The Shochiku Years gathers the best films of Shimizu’s protean and varied career with the studio from his stark, strikingly modernist early melodramas, both silent and sound, through the lyrical tours of provincial life with which he would become chiefly associated. Highlights include the filmmaker’s best-known films in the United States (Japanese Girls at the Harbor, Mr. Thank You, The Masseurs and a Woman, Ornamental Hairpin) alongside rarer contemporaneous works that display the full stylistic and tonal range of this consummate craftsman’s accomplishments, including two of the director’s supreme masterpieces, Children in the Wind (1937) and its two-volume sequel Four Seasons of Children (1939). All films will be presented in 35mm prints imported from collections and archives in Japan. 

Part II: The Postwar and Independent Years opens at Japan Society on May 16 and will illuminate Shimizu’s output after his departure from Shochiku, particularly the trilogy of films he made with the orphans he personally adopted and brought up after World War II.

• Seven Seas: Virginity Chapter

  Imported 35mm print! Presented with live musical accompaniment on 5/4/24.

• Seven Seas: Chastity Chapter

  Imported 35mm print! Presented with live musical accompaniment on 5/4/24.

• A Hero of Tokyo

  Imported 35mm print, screening 5/4/24

• Japanese Girls at the Harbor

  Imported 35mm print! Presented with live musical accompaniment on 5/4/24.

• Forget Love for Now

  Imported 35mm print, screening 5/5/24

• A Woman Crying in Spring

  Imported 35mm print, screening 5/5/24

• Mr. Thank You

  Imported 35mm print, screening 5/5/24

• Children in the Wind

  Imported 35mm print, screening 5/10/24

• Sayon's Bell

  Imported 35mm print, screening 5/11/24

• Four Seasons of Children

  Imported 35mm print, screening 5/11/24

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

First Look, MoMI’s annual festival showcasing adventurous new cinema, returns for its 13th edition. This year’s festival introduces New York audiences to more than three dozen works from around the world, encompassing feature and short films; fiction and nonfiction; performances and experiments. The guiding ethos of First Look is openness, curiosity, discovery, aiming to expose audiences to new art, artists to new audiences, and everyone to different methods, perspectives, interrogations, and encounters.

• Sujo
• Lateral
• Gwetto
• Magic Mountain
• The Echo
• Footsteps
• Solaris Mon Amour
• Handful of Dirt
• Tendaberry
• Flying Lessons

...plus 27 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Following last year’s popular Snubbed series, this year the spotlight will be on performers who were “snubbed".
See Harrison Ford in The Fugitive, Sally Hawkins in Happy-Go-Lucky, Bette Davis in Of Human Bondage, Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop, Alfre Woodard in Clemency, Charles Grodin in The Heartbreak Kid, Pam Grier in Jackie Brown, and more.

See the full lineup.
movingimage.org/series/snubbed-2-the-performances/

• Back Street
• Of Human Bondage
• The Public Enemy
• Young Mr. Lincoln
• His Girl Friday
• The Maltese Falcon
• Scarface
• Strangers on a Train
• Psycho
• Bus Stop

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Our annual survey of some of our favorite films and television of the year returns with Beau Is Afraid and Succession with directors in person, Oppenheimer, Fallen Leaves, Ferrari, and much more.

See the full lineup
movingimage.org/series/curators-choice-2023/

• Oppenheimer
• Beau Is Afraid
• Anatomy of a Fall
• Fallen Leaves
• The Zone of Interest
• Godland
• The Holdovers
• Menus-Plaisirs - Les Troisgros
• R.M.N.
• Passages

...plus 21 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Pioneering Women in Australian Cinema encompasses comedy, musical, romance, and horror, as well as more underrepresented essayistic, autobiographical, documentary, and experimental styles into a revised cinematic historiography. The series seeks to highlight the contributions of queer, feminist, migrant, and Indigenous women filmmakers and their stories, which are focused on class, work, education, friendship, and—as always for such a geographically isolated country—dreams.

⇩ Click the link below for tickets and more info! ⇩
movingimage.us/series/pioneering-women-in-australian-cinema/

• Starstruck
• For Love or Money
• Sweetie
• The Cheaters
• My Brilliant Career
• On Guard
• Nice Coloured Girls
• Shadow Panic
• My Survival as an Aboriginal
• Witches, Faggots, Dykes and Poofters

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• May December

  Haynes in person

• Dark Waters
• Dottie Gets Spanked
• The Suicide
• Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud
• I'm Not There
• Poison
• Velvet Goldmine
• The Velvet Underground
• Safe

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Pulse
• The Village
• Unfriended: Dark Web
• We're All Going to the World's Fair
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
• Everyone Else
• Toni Erdmann
• A Hidden Life
• The Tree of Life
• 35 Shots of Rum

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

For much of cinema’s history, queerness was woven secretly into its fabric. As the decades wore on, and as queer artists wrestled with often inhospitable cultures and government or industry restrictions loosened, they began to assert their perspectives and sensibilities, playing with aesthetics to articulate a sense of queerness, decisively and cinematically. To commemorate the release of The Queer Film Guide: 100 Films That Tell LGBTQIA+ Stories, out May 16 from Smith Street Books and RIzzoli, author and critic Kyle Turner has guest programmed a selection of films that epitomize the complex, contradictory, and compelling ways queerness finds itself as code, language, or point of view, and underline how cinema can look back at itself, disassembling notions of desire, selfhood, and identity. These ten films are separated into three categories for your viewing pleasure: vers (Mulholland Drive, The Watermelon Woman), bottom (Morocco, Rope, The Fly, Jennifer’s Body), and top (Nitrate Kisses, Farewell My Concubine, Querelle, O Fantasma).

Organized by guest curator Kyle Turner.

movingimage.us/series/queer-cinema-top-to-bottom/

• Morocco
• Rope
• Jennifer's Body
• The Fly
• Querelle
• Nitrate Kisses
• O Fantasma
• The Watermelon Woman
• Mulholland Drive

It may be as American as apple pie, but the summer movie is still a relatively recent phenomenon. Steven Spielberg’s Jaws revolutionized the industry with its June 1975 media blitz, instantly iconic branding, and mammoth success (it didn’t hurt that the film was brilliant). George Lucas followed suit and upped his buddy’s ante two summers later with Star Wars. After this, every movie studio began to rethink its annual release slate to capitalize on audience expectations for summer spectacle. Of course, the summer movie is not all about adventure and horror: as the seventies gave way to the eighties, multiplexes saw more varieties of films, from romantic comedies to adult erotic thrillers to serious social dramas. This series brings together selections from the first two decades of the American summer movie, as well as some smaller hot-month titles released to appeal to alternative art-house crowds. Kick back in the air conditioning and enjoy these summer movies the way they were meant to be seen.

movingimage.us/series/see-it-big-summer-movies-70s-80s-edition/

• Jaws
• The Spy Who Loved Me
• The Omen
• Star Wars
• Blow Out
• Raiders of the Lost Ark
• The Green Ray
• Beat Street
• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
• Risky Business

...plus 11 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

First Look, MoMI’s annual showcase for adventurous new cinema, introduces New York audiences to more than two dozen works hailing from nearly as many countries, encompassing feature and short films; fiction and nonfiction; New York premieres and works in progress; experiments with—and exemplary expressions of—form. The guiding ethos of First Look is discovery, aiming to introduce audiences to new films, filmmakers to new audiences, and everyone to different methods, perspectives, interrogations, and encounters. For five consecutive days the festival takes over MoMI’s two theaters as well as other rooms and galleries throughout the Musuem—with in-person appearances and dialogue integral to the experience.

Filmmakers appearing in person will be announced later, along with the lineup for this year’s fourth annual Working on It program, daytime sessions open to the public in which filmmakers, critics, and students engage in conversations about the creative process via workshops and work-in-progress presentations. This year, First Look launches the Reverse Shot Emerging Critics Workshop, with a call for applications open to early-career writers in the Greater New York area. This year also begins a collaboration with Polish documentary festival Millennium Docs Against Gravity, with Artistic Director Karol Piekarczyk presenting two selections from their Warsaw showcase and engaging in the Working on It sessions. As in previous years, student work from both the Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the Missouri School of Journalism and the BFA Film Department, School of Visual Arts will be presented both officially in the festival program and as works in progress.

All Festival Passes, good for all screenings including Opening Night and all Working on It sessions, are on sale now through February 13, 2023 at the early bird rate of $100 (regularly $120) with code EARLYBIRD.

First Look is presented with support from lead sponsors MUBI, SVA Film Program, and Lismore Road; The Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the Missouri School of Journalism; The Harriman Institute at Columbia University; Polish Cultural Institute New York; Villa Albertine; Kickstarter; Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program; The Paper Factory; Topo Chico; Pig Beach; Tacuba; and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Additional support was provided by the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

movingimage.us/series/first-look-2023/

• Fremont
• Away
• Rodeo
• Jill, Uncredited
• Herbaria
• Agrilogistics
• The Eight Mountains
• The Taste of Mango
• Before You Were Here
• Feet in Water, Head on Fire

...plus 32 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The brilliance of the selection of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles as the greatest film of all time in Sight & Sound‘s 2022 critics’ poll is that the choice feels both subversive and merited. By picking an avant-garde narrative film after a 50-year reign by Citizen Kane followed by the 2012 selection of Vertigo, the magazine has exhilaratingly disrupted the canon. (Not incidentally, it is the first #1 film directed by a woman.) With its unrelenting focus on domestic life, Akerman’s film eschews grand themes and stylistic flourishes (unlike Citizen Kane, indeed a great film.)

Akerman always forged her own path in cinema, but she was deeply inspired by the underground films she saw while living in New York City in 1971 and 1972 (those by Michael Snow in particular), and by the great tradition of international art cinema including Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. This series allows us to appreciate Jeanne Dielman as the unique masterpiece that it is while also seeing its deep roots in cinema history. It should be noted that Akerman did not believe in film polls (“It is tiring and not really necessary to do those kinds of things”), and that when she did once consent to name her favorite films, Vertigo was her top choice.

Organized by curator-at-large David Schwartz.

movingimage.us/series/jeanne-dielman-and-its-roots/

• Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
• La région centrale
• Wavelength
• La chambre
• Hotel Monterey
• Mouchette
• Mamma Roma
• Je, Tu, Il, Elle
• Le Bonheur
• Moses and Aaron

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Organized by guest curator Shelly Kraicer.

movingimage.us/series/qiu-jiongjiong/

• Ode to Joy
• A Portrait of Mr. Huang
• A New Old Play
• The Moon Palace
• Madame
• My Mother's Rhapsody
• Mr. Zhang Believes

Every January the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences announces its nominations for the Academy Awards. From that moment, two stories develop: one about the film professionals who have been recognized by their peers, and another about those that have been overlooked. Common parlance calls the latter “snubs”—as if the voting body were actively rejecting some potential honorees—and media outlets call them out with ambulance-chasing relish. Once the cycle completes, the import of these snubs fades into history. Yet in certain cases the lack of recognition lingers, and still shocks and appalls. Some have come to be considered classics, or they have aged better than other films of their era, or they expose moments of inequity, prejudice, and injustice.

For this series, we’ve chosen American films that received no Academy Award nominations. That’s right: zero, zilch, bupkus. Unfortunately, it was hard to narrow the list down: any number of configurations could offer a slate of films worthy of a film historical canon. We strove to represent each era from the nearly 100 years since the formation of the Academy Awards, as well as to focus on films about which there was or has developed a narrative of exclusion, from traditionally overlooked genres (The Big Sleep, In a Lonely Place) to racial exclusion (Paul Robeson in Show Boat) to inhospitality towards innovation (Gimme Shelter, The Thin Blue Line) to the ineffable, bizarrely persistent sense within the industrial ecosystem that it wasn’t yet a filmmaker’s “time” for recognition (Miller’s Crossing), to bafflement over performers escaping their pigeonholes (The Night of the Hunter, Rushmore, Uncut Gems).

Organized by Eric Hynes, Curator of Film, Edo Choi, Associate Curator of Film, and Reverse Shot co-editor Michael Koresky.

movingimage.us/series/snubbed/

• The Docks of New York
• City Lights
• Show Boat
• Make Way for Tomorrow
• The Women
• The Big Sleep
• In a Lonely Place
• The Night of the Hunter
• All That Heaven Allows
• Gimme Shelter

...plus 14 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The Museum’s annual survey of some of our favorite films of the year returns with another rich harvest of cinema—and television—at its best. Curators’ Choice focuses on shows and films that either debuted for broadcast or premiered theatrically during the calendar year 2022. While journalists, industry insiders, market analysts, and armchair speculators endlessly debated the fate of fickle moviegoing and streaming subscriptions, these selections suggest an alternative narrative for the moving image in 2022, one defined by evolving processes and forms, the instability and anxieties over how we encounter the work perhaps freeing artists to let the work become whatever it may. It’s also a year in which numerous filmmakers told their own stories, and in so doing made some of their best work. The survey comprises festival standouts, Hollywood’s finest, awards season staples, overlooked gems, vanguard innovations in form and genre, and two of the most audacious documentaries in recent memory. Uniting them all is our desire to watch and appreciate these exemplars of the moving image on the big screen, which we’ll do every weekend from early December 2022 through mid-January 2023. More titles soon to be added!

Organized by Curator of Film Eric Hynes and Associate Curator of Film Edo Choi.

movingimage.us/series/curators-choice-2022/

• Expedition Content
• My Imaginary Country
• We Met in Virtual Reality
• The Fabelmans
• Armageddon Time
• No Bears
• Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
• Stars at Noon
• We're All Going to the World's Fair
• RRR

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Paweł Łoziński’s nonfiction films don’t merely observe; they lean forward, they inquire, they connect. Often it’s the director doing the asking and connecting, whether it’s with his Warsaw neighbors or his own father, the Oscar-nominated Polish master Marcel Łoziński. At other times there are proxies, as with the incisive therapist in You Have No Idea How Much I Love You, or subjects leading one another down revealing pathways of conversation in Chemo and Birthplace. These engagements, inquiries, and seemingly casual encounters are energized by the filmmaker’s formal rigor: defining compositional frameworks, adherence to conscribed locations, set durational parameters. Yet these films are anything but clinical or predetermined. His practice assumes limitations and imperfections that can be accepted, fought, or worked around—like how one might (and probably ought to) approach other humans, and much like how Łoziński himself treats the people in his films.

His latest, The Balcony Movie, both exemplifies and distills his methods and tendencies after 30 years of filmmaking. Curious about the people who passed below his balcony in Warsaw, and intrigued by how a camera might encourage connections, he spent a year filming his encounters with neighbors and strangers. He’s not a voyeur, nor is he a street reporter with an agenda—he calls out to them, hoping they’ll stop and respond and share something about themselves. He never ventures beyond the balcony, which serves as both a barrier and catalyst for deeper connections. The film won the Grand Prix–Semaine de la Critique at the 2021 Locarno Film Festival and received its New York premiere at MoMI’s First Look Festival earlier this year. It is Academy Award–eligible in the feature documentary category.

This weekend-long retrospective showcases eight of Łoziński’s nonfiction films, including his fascinating collaboration with Marcel, Father and Son, as well as his father’s How It’s Done (2006), all presented by the filmmaker in person. Co-presented with the Polish Cultural Institute New York.

movingimage.us/series/pawel-lozinski/

• The Balcony Movie
• Birthplace
• Sisters
• The Way It Is
• How It's Done
• Chemo
• Father and Son
• You Have No Idea How Much I Love You

The Museum’s annual survey of some of our favorite films of the year returns with another rich harvest of cinema—and television—at its best. Curators’ Choice focuses on shows and films that either debuted for broadcast or premiered theatrically during the calendar year 2022. While journalists, industry insiders, market analysts, and armchair speculators endlessly debated the fate of fickle moviegoing and streaming subscriptions, these selections suggest an alternative narrative for the moving image in 2022, one defined by evolving processes and forms, the instability and anxieties over how we encounter the work perhaps freeing artists to let the work become whatever it may. It’s also a year in which numerous filmmakers told their own stories, and in so doing made some of their best work. The survey comprises festival standouts, Hollywood’s finest, awards season staples, overlooked gems, vanguard innovations in form and genre, and two of the most audacious documentaries in recent memory. Uniting them all is our desire to watch and appreciate these exemplars of the moving image on the big screen, which we’ll do every weekend from early December 2022 through mid-January 2023. More titles soon to be added!

Organized by Curator of Film Eric Hynes and Associate Curator of Film Edo Choi.

movingimage.us/series/curators-choice-2022/

• Expedition Content
• My Imaginary Country
• Descendant
• Riotsville, USA
• Nope
• Dos Estaciones
• The Eternal Daughter
• Introduction
• In Front of Your Face
• The Novelist's Film

...plus 16 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

For several years now, the most consistently adventurous, unpredictable, intelligent, and dynamic films have been works of nonfiction. While never a simple, stodgy, info-based category of film—regardless of what some have claimed or assumed—today’s nonfiction filmmakers are newly committed to inventing new genres and modes, and to expanding, exploding, refining, and interrogating them as they happen. These are days of artistic masterpieces, crises de coeur, impeccably crafted yarns, and purposefully irreconcilable experiments all working within the deceptively nondescript “documentary” catchall. This ongoing series will showcase some of the most exciting and challenging works of recent nonfiction.

Organized by Associate Curator of Film Eric Hynes

movingimage.us/series/new-adventures-in-nonfiction/

• I Didn't See You There
• Bulletproof
• Searchers
• A Night of Knowing Nothing
• Mayor
• Acts of Love
• President
• Democrats
• Day After...
• Maidan

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

As part of this first ever twelve-film U.S. retrospective, the Museum will be presenting ten titles on rare archival prints and six with newly translated English subtitles.

Organized by guest curator Max Carpenter.

This event is co-organized by The Japan Foundation and supported through the JFNY Grant for Arts & Culture.

With special thanks to Ricardo Matos Cabo, María Palacios Cruz, Oliver Wright, and the Open City Documentary Festival for their support and co-curation; Sakiko Yamagami of Siglo, Ltd. and Motoko Tsuchimoto for their commitment to preserving Tsuchimoto’s legacy; and Day for Night, Kelly Li, Courtisane, and Haus der Kunst for their subtitle translations.

movingimage.us/series/noriaki-tsuchimoto/

• On the Road : A Document
• Exchange Student Chua Swee Lin
• The World of the Siberians
• Prehistory of the Partisans
• Minamata: The Victims and Their World
• Minamata Revolt: A People's Quest for Life
• The Minamata Mural
• The Stolen Sea
• The Shiranui Sea
• My Town, My Youth

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

October 21, 2022 - January 1, 2023 movingimage.us/series/see-it-big-extended-cuts/

*Please note: the running times noted in Letterboxed may not match those of the versions the Museum is showing in the series.

• Once Upon a Time in America
• Little Shop of Horrors
• Das Boot
• The Cotton Club
• Donnie Darko
• The New World
• The Act of Killing
• Ishtar
• Brazil
• Heaven's Gate

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

October 28-30, 2022

• The Masque of the Red Death
• The Tomb of Ligeia
• House of Usher
• The Pit and the Pendulum
• Tales of Terror
• The Haunted Palace

The Festival introduces New York audiences to formally inventive works that seek to redefine the art form while engaging in a wide range of subjects and styles. The 2022 lineup includes both nonfiction and fiction, features and shorts, as well as forms that fall outside the boundaries of traditional theatrical distribution, from gallery presentations to live performances to artist talks.

This year, the festival will premiere 38 works, including 18 features representing more than 30 countries. Artists will appear both in person and remotely.

Opening Night, on Wednesday, March 16, presents the New York City premiere of Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović’s Murina, a simmering, sexually charged coming-of-age tale set in scenic coastal Croatia that won the Caméra d’Or (Best First Feature) at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival and was executive produced by Martin Scorsese, preceded by the New York premiere of Tsai Ming-liang’s sorrowful ode to Hong Kong, The Night. The Closing Night selection, on Sunday, March 20, is the New York premiere of Pawel Lozinski’s delightful and insightful documentary The Balcony Movie. Recipient of the Grand Prix at the 2021 Locarno Film Festival’s Critics Week (Semaine de la critique), the film was shot entirely from the balcony of Lozinski’s Warsaw apartment, which proves to be a uniquely advantageous perch for encountering the struggles and moods of the times.

This year’s festival showcases the New York premiere of Julie Lecoustre and Emmanuel Marre’s Zero Fucks Given, an exhilarating portrait of contemporary malaise starring Adèle Exarchopoulos (Blue Is the Warmest Color) as a flight attendant in crisis, the U.S. premiere of celebrated Russian film and theater director Kirill Serebrennikov’s hallucinatory tour de force Petrov’s Flu, and celebrates the return to First Look of Ukrainian master Sergei Loznitza (whose Donbass opened First Look 2019) with his two latest features, Babi Yar. Context (Special Jury Prize of the Cannes L'Œil d'or for best documentary), a meticulous record of a horrific event during the Holocaust; and the definitive Lithuanian liberation history Mr. Landsbergis (IDFA Award for Best Film). Also from Ukraine is Reflection, a haunting new work by rising star Valentyn Vasyanovych (Atlantis), who will be the subject of a MoMI retrospective immediately following First Look (March 25–27). Additional highlights include the North American premiere of famed Chinese contemporary artist Qiu Jiongjiong’s splendid A New Old Play (Special Jury Prize at Locarno 2021) and the East Coast premiere of Indonesian auteur Edwin’s rambunctious Locarno Golden Leopard recipient Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash (presented by MoMI’s ongoing Disreputable Cinema series); extraordinary Cannes-awarded features from emerging filmmakers, which in addition to Murina includes the U.S. premiere of Omar El Zohairy’s surreal comic vision Feathers (recipient of the Grand Prix at Cannes’ Critics Week); new shorts from major figures in international cinema, including The Night and Radu Jude’s Semiotic Plastic; plus the world premieres of Nathaniel Dorsky’s William and Laura Harrison’s The Limits of Vision, and the North American premiere of Philipp Fleischmann’s Untitled (34bsp), which are part of a special First Look edition of MoMI’s recurring experimental showcase Persistent Visions.

Tickets and Festival passes on sale now.

• Murina
• The Night
• Petrov's Flu
• Constant
• Bunker
• A New Old Play
• Zero Fucks Given
• Faritra
• Day After...
• A Thousand Fires

...plus 26 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Ongoing

• Earth II
• Soylent Green
• Europium
• Ascension
• Taxidermize Me
• Holgut
• Birds of America
• Annihilation
• First Reformed
• Force Majeure

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

October 15-23, 2022

• Here at the Water's Edge
• Light and the City
• Discovery in a Landscape
• Discovery in a Painting
• The Sun and Richard Lippold
• An Essay on Death: A Memorial to John F. Kennedy
• Claw: A Fable
• Stations of the Elevated

For sixty-plus years, Caan lent his incomparable magnetism to a wide spectrum of films, playing both tough guys and punching bags, talkers and mumblers, charmers and monsters. With his broad-shouldered athleticism and a granite-cut jaw, Caan brought a frank physicality to the screen, making even mild-mannered performances seem subtly threatening. Yet he also drew from a deep reserve of emotion, exemplifying a postwar American masculinity that reinvented itself one mission, one conflict, one heartbreak at a time. A son of Jewish immigrants, the Bronx-born, Sunnyside-raised Caan could have taken over the family’s meat delivery business, but instead he wound his way through competitive sports (he played football at Michigan State) before alighting upon acting, studying under Sanford Meisner during the explosion of New York talent in the early 1960s.

September 16 - October 15, 2022

• Elf
• Bottle Rocket
• Alien Nation
• Games
• The Killer Elite
• Thief
• The Yards

White Zombie: Nightmares of Empire is the second in a series of film programs presented in conjunction with the exhibition Living with The Walking Dead, which will be on view from June 25, 2022–January 1, 2023.

• White Zombie
• Ouanga
• The Ghost Breakers
• I Walked with a Zombie
• Zombie Flesh Eaters
• Invisible Invaders
• Creature with the Atom Brain
• Zombies of Mora Tau
• Dead of Night
• Shock Waves

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

MoMI's summer screening series returns bigger and better than ever! The ideal film format for ambitious cinematic spectacles, 70mm film offers a bigger, brighter image than 35mm.

⇩For tickets and more info, visit our website!⇩
movingimage.us/series/see-it-big-70mm-6/

• Brainstorm
• Licorice Pizza
• Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood
• Sleeping Beauty
• Tron
• Streets of Fire

Among the first to utilize deep focus, tracking shots, crane shots, and dolly shots, James Wong Howe was a trailblazing cinematographer. Born in China at the dawn of the 20th century and arriving in the United States as a young child, Howe would come of age within and alongside Hollywood, serving as one of the industry’s major stylistic and technical innovators from the early 1920s through the mid-1970s.

• Hud
• Mantrap
• The Thin Man
• The Prisoner of Zenda
• After Tomorrow
• Hangmen Also Die!
• The Hard Way
• Go Man Go
• Pursued
• Kings Row

...plus 9 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Few film subgenres have proven more resilient than the zombie horror movie, the modern version of which began with George A. Romero’s deathless 1968 indie masterpiece Night of the Living Dead. In conjunction with MoMI’s Living with The Walking Dead exhibition (which examines a series that itself owes a clear debt to Romero’s work), we present Romero’s cinematic zombie corpus, plus a delirious selection of modern variations from other filmmakers.

⇩ Click the link below for tickets and more info ⇩
movingimage.us/series/films-of-the-dead-romero-co/

• Night of the Living Dead
• The Return of the Living Dead
• Day of the Dead
• One Cut of the Dead
• Shaun of the Dead
• Dawn of the Dead
• The Dead Don't Die
• Land of the Dead
• Night of the Living Dead
• Diary of the Dead

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The Museum’s annual survey of some of our favorite films of the year returns with another rich harvest of cinema—and television—at its best. The first iteration since 2019, following a pandemic-dictated hiatus, Curators’ Choice 2021 evidences a year of stunning ambition, excellence, experimentation, irreverence, liberation, and fury. While 2021 was a challenging year for the movies, with Hollywood and audiences gradually returning to theaters, it’s been a wildly exciting time for international, independent, and festival-oriented films. From idiosyncratic musicals (Annette) to revisionist westerns (The Power of the Dog); from feminist noirs (Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time and Nina Wu) to deluded male melodramas (Red Rocket); and from exuberant family fare (The Mitchells vs. the Machines) to masterful achievements in serial storytelling (The Underground Railroad), this year’s Curators’ Choice offers a wide-eyed, peripheral view of the current state of the cinematic arts.

Organized by Curator of Film Eric Hynes and Assistant Curator of Film Edo Choi.

• Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time
• What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?
• Bergman Island
• The Mitchells vs. The Machines
• Benedetta
• The Underground Railroad
• The Souvenir: Part II
• Days
• Undine
• The French Dispatch

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Often we praise movies for their restraint. We’re putting a stop to such gentility with our latest edition of See It Big, a properly super-sized, two-part, bursting-at-the-seams program that features a selection of films that push cinematic style into excess. The makers of these films, which span the silent era to the 21st-century, really pile it on: teeming canvases, crammed frames, ornate art direction and costume design foregrounded by lush camerawork and intense performance style. Featuring works from such directors as Ulrike Ottinger, Jean Renoir, Aleksei German, Powell and Pressburger, Paul Thomas Anderson and more, this series is too damn much! See It Big is a collaboration between Museum of the Moving Image and Reverse Shot.

• French Cancan
• The Tales of Hoffmann
• Beauty and the Beast
• Khrustalyov, My Car!
• Boogie Nights
• Ivan the Terrible, Part I
• Ivan the Terrible, Part II: The Boyars' Plot

Often we praise movies for their restraint. We’re putting a stop to such gentility with our latest edition of See It Big, a properly super-sized, two-part, bursting-at-the-seams program that features a selection of films that push cinematic style into excess. The makers of these films, which span the silent era to the 21st-century, really pile it on: teeming canvases, crammed frames, ornate art direction and costume design foregrounded by lush camerawork and intense performance style. Featuring works from such directors as Francis Ford Coppola, Vera Chytilová, Cecil B. DeMille, Federico Fellini, Sally Potter, Hype Williams, Zhang Yimou, and more, this series is too damn much! See It Big is a collaboration between Museum of the Moving Image and Reverse Shot.

• The Sign of the Cross
• The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
• Tommy
• The Scarlet Empress
• Flaming Creatures
• Fellini Satyricon
• Toby Dammit
• The Grand Budapest Hotel
• The Impossible Voyage
• Daisies

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

FILM HIGHLIGHT | May 10, 2024
The Masseurs and a Woman

The first part of our acclaimed retrospective of Japanese filmmaker Hiroshi Shimizu, The Shochiku Years, co-presented with the Japan Society, continues this weekend. This is the first New York survey of Shimizu in more than 30 years and the largest ever assembled in North America, with rare prints you won't have the chance to see again, and this weekend is jam-packed with extraordinary titles that showcase the sensitivity and brilliance of this great, unsung master of cinema.

One of our very favorites is 1938’s tender and unique The Masseurs and a Woman, screening this Sunday, May 12, at 5:30 p.m, in a 35mm print courtesy of the National Film Archive of Japan. Shimizu’s most eccentrically personal film, which he conceived and wrote himself and shot on his favored Izu peninsula, The Masseurs and a Woman is set mostly at a hot springs resort in the mountains. There, Tokuichi (Shin Tokudaiji) and Fukuichi (Shinichi Himori), both blind masseuses, come across a variety of characters whose dilemmas range from tragic to comic, including a mysterious young woman (Mieko Takamine) who will stir Tokuichi’s romantic longing. The film elegantly weaves a series of fine-grained studies of lonely, transient souls seeking temporary refuge from society.

Read Imogen Sara Smith's "Discovering Hiroshi Shimizu" in Reverse Shot.

See the schedule for Hiroshi Shimizu – Part I: The Shochiku Years and get tickets.

Part II: The Postwar and Independent Years opens at Japan Society on May 16 and will illuminate Shimizu’s output after his departure from Shochiku, particularly the trilogy of films he made with the orphans he personally adopted and brought up after World War II. 

FILM HIGHLIGHT | May 3, 2024
Hiroshi Shimizu – Part I: The Shochiku Years

Every once in a while, there’s a cinema retrospective in New York that reminds us of the breadth and depth of film history, and of the importance and singularity of certain film artists whose work has perhaps not been as widely known as it should be. Starting tomorrow, we are proud to present the first part of a major series celebrating the Japanese filmmaker Hiroshi Shimizu, an unsung master of the craft who should be mentioned in the same breath as Ozu and Mizoguchi. This is the first New York survey of Shimizu in more than 30 years and the largest ever assembled in North America—co-organized with Japan Society, the National Film Archive of Japan, and the Japan Foundation, New York.

Shot on location and frequently employing non-actors, the loosely plotted, low-key tragicomedies that comprise his most characteristic work foregrounded the transient lives and hardships of everyday people with a marked regard for those pushed to the margins of society, including drifters, migrant workers, war veterans, persons with disabilities, outcast women, and especially children, in whom the director took a personal philanthropic interest and of whom he remarked: “They are natural. They breathe the air. Films must have humans who breathe the air.”

Presented at the Museum, Part I: The Shochiku Years gathers the best films of Shimizu’s protean and varied career with the studio from his stark, strikingly modernist early melodramas, both silent and sound, through the lyrical tours of provincial life with which he would become chiefly associated. All imported 35mm prints!

There are so many highlights it’s hard to narrow it down, but a great place to start is his beloved Mr. Thank You, screening this Sunday, May 5. This charming road movie follows a genial local bus driver (matinee idol Ken Uehara) along his route as he transports a group of travelers, comprising a microcosm of Japanese society, from the far reaches of the Izu peninsula to the train station that links it to Tokyo. Rediscovered in the 1970s, Shimizu’s film is now recognized as a classic of Japanese cinema.

Read Imogen Sara Smith's "Discovering Hiroshi Shimizu" in Reverse Shot.

Tickets are only $7 for MoMI members at the Senior/Student level and above and $15 for the public (with discounts for seniors, students, and youth). There is a $1.50 transaction fee per ticket for all online purchases (waived for MoMI members). Become a member today!

See all of Part I: The Shochiku Years with a $130 series pass! See the full schedule and get tickets here.

Part II: The Postwar and Independent Years opens at Japan Society on May 16 and will illuminate Shimizu’s output after his departure from Shochiku, particularly the trilogy of films he made with the orphans he personally adopted and brought up after World War II. 

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

For those seeking daring, exciting contemporary international cinema, look no further than the work of Radu Jude. The Romanian filmmaker takes a caustic, intelligent, no-prisoners approach to contemporary social and political hypocrisies with an inventiveness and clarity of purpose that most filmmakers today could only dream of. As evidenced by his recent work like Aferim! and Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, he’s an irreverent artist keyed into his own aesthetic and cultural world view.

His latest, the acclaimed and exhilarating Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, plays this Sunday, April 28, and next weekend at MoMI. In it, an exhausted, overworked, and underpaid film production assistant Angela (a staggering Ilinca Manolache) drives around Bucharest on her latest gig: filming work-accident victims auditioning to be in a safety equipment video for a German multinational corporation. At the same time, Angela maintains her own side project—a trash-talking, wildly profane TikTok alter-ego Bobiță.

Complicating matters, Jude intercuts her travels with clips from an existing Romanian movie: the feminist 1981 film Angela Moves On, following the travels of a female cab driver around the city’s same sights and locations. This anarchic satire is an unforgettable ride through the vulgar indignities of the 21st century. Featuring cheeky supporting appearances from the great German actress Nina Hoss and B-movie director extraordinaire Uwe Boll.

A MUBI release.

FILM HIGHLIGHT | April 19, 2024
David Lebrun: Looking Back, Moving Forward

We’re thrilled to welcome experimental filmmaker David Lebrun this weekend for a trio of programs showcasing his remarkable work. For nearly six decades, Lebrun has illustrated unique histories with a singular vision and precise technique. His work encompasses a variety of genres from experimental animation to documentary, and is informed by his background in anthropology, as well as his interest in psychedelia, spirituality, and philosophy. Lebrun invites us to look at the past with curiosity and wonder while imagining possibilities for a shared tomorrow.

The series David Lebrun: Looking Back, Moving Forward, will be presented chronologically across three separate programs, starting tonight, Friday, April 19, and continuing tomorrow, Saturday, April 20. The selection will feature such acclaimed works as 1970’s The Hog Farm Movie, a hallucinatory record of a cross-country odyssey by 40 painted buses in the summer of 1968; the animated documentary Proteus (pictured above) weaving poetry and oceanography, technology, history and myth, which Scott Foundas called “the most dazzling film I saw at Sundance this year” when it premiered in 2004; and nine films from his Transfigurations, an immersive cinematic project that provides new ways of experiencing ancient art.

Lebrun will appear in person for introductions and discussions at all three programs.

Tickets are free for MoMI members at the Senior/Student level and above and $15 for the public (with discounts for seniors, students, and youth). Become a member today! 

This program is part of our ongoing series Persistent Visions, programmed by Edo Choi and Becca Keating. 

Learn more about all of these and get tickets now!
There is a $1.50 transaction fee per ticket for all online purchases (waived for MoMI members).

Museum of the Moving Image is located at 36-01 35 Ave, Astoria, New York, 11106.

Screening this week at MoMI
Please note that paid Museum admission includes a ticket to a regular same-day screening (if one is offered that day). When you check in at the front desk simply request a film ticket. Tickets are distributed first-come, first-served. Face masks are welcome in the building and during screenings. Please review visitor guidelines here.

Friday, April 19
Queens World Film Festival continues at the Museum.
3:00 p.m. Classic Warner Bros. Cartoons (MoMI Moviehouse / World of Animation)
5:00 p.m. The Sweet East (New Release)
7:00 p.m. David Lebrun Program I: The Sixties (1966–1970) (Persistent Visions)

Saturday, April 20
Queens World Film Festival continues at the Museum.
1:00 p.m. Fargo (Art & Craft)
3:15 p.m. David Lebrun Program 2: Animation (1976–2004) (Persistent Visions)
5:00 p.m. David Lebrun Program 3: Transfigurations—Reanimating the Past (2018–2024) (Persistent Visions)
6:00 p.m. The Sweet East (New Release)

Sunday, April 21
Queens World Film Festival continues at the Museum.
1:00 p.m. MoMI Teen Council presents Common Enemy and panel discussion with Jose Elias, Angel Lugo, and Alex Wolfe
3:00 p.m. 1968 (Always on Sunday: Greek Film Series)
6:00 p.m. About Thirty (Arturo a los 30) with Martin Shanly and star Camila Dougall in person (Las Premieres)

April 22–27
1:00 p.m. daily Elemental (Spring Recess / World of Animation)

FILM HIGHLIGHT | April 5, 2024

Henry Fool

The films of Hal Hartley all but helped define the legendary American independent film of the 1990s. Richly textured while maintaining a wry distance, his comic dramas cut through the noise of life with a pinpoint-precise sense of human flaw and foible.

His 1998 film Henry Fool might be his greatest achievement. We’re screening it this weekend, with an introduction by guest curator David Schwartz, as part of our ongoing Queens on Screen series, celebrating cinematic depictions of our home borough. The neighborhood Woodside is the lovingly filmed setting for this rowdy, hilarious saga, in which a depraved wanderer with a literary flair named Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan), inspires the shy sanitation worker Simon Grim (James Urbaniak) to write a book-length poem that, of course, catapults him to fame. In her New York Times review, Janet Maslin wrote, “Shot so beautifully by Michael Spiller that its squalid Queens, N.Y., settings assume an instant mythic quality, Henry Fool is a perfect modern parable.”

This unlikely ode to bohemian life is also a bracing examination of the age-old struggle between art and commerce, and a domestic odyssey about young adults looking to escape their tortured family lives, featuring Parker Posey in a winning comic supporting role. Henry Fool won the Best Screenplay award at Cannes.

Playing this Sunday, April 7, at 5:00 p.m., in a 35mm print.

Learn more and get tickets!

FILM HIGHLIGHT | March 29, 2024

David and Nathan Zellner Present

A quarter century into a film career unlike any other in American cinema, spanning lo-fi genre mashups and viral shorts to a Robert Pattinson western, adventurous Colorado auteurs David and Nathan Zellner are coming to MoMI this Sunday, March 31. In addition to presenting a special preview screening of their seventh feature, the uproarious and entirely sincere Sasquatch Sunset, which debuted to acclaim at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, they will present two films that afternoon. 
The first, at 1:00 p.m. is their own rarely screened cult classic Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, starring Oscar nominee Rinko Kikuchi (Babel) as a Tokyo office worker who finds a battered VHS tape of a fictional film (the very real, but very fictional Fargo) and becomes convinced the movie’s lost satchel of money is real, embarking on a mission to Minnesota to solve the mystery of the buried fortune. 
Then, at 3:30, they present a favorite film of theirs, Paul Newman’s 1971 directorial effort  Sometimes a Great Notion, an inspiration for their latest film. Adapted from the novel by Ken Kesey, this sweeping saga set in the Pacific Northwest follows a hard-bitten Oregon lumber family that bucks their close-knit community to deliver a shipment of logs during a strike. The film, which co-stars Henry Fonda and Lee Remick, was nominated for two Oscars, including Best Supporting Actor for Richard Jaeckel in a knockout performance. 
Special Easter offer: tickets for Kumiko and Sometimes a Great Notion are 50% off with the discount code ZELLNER50 and free for Museum members at the student/senior level and above. Become a member today!

NOTE: RSVPs are at capacity for the free Sasquatch Sunset screening at 6:00 p.m., but limited tickets may be available on standby. 

Get tickets for Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter

Get tickets for Sometimes a Great Notion

There is a $1.50 transaction fee per ticket for all online purchases. 

Screening this week at MoMI
Please note that paid Museum admission includes a ticket to a regular same-day screening (if one is offered that day). When you check in at the front desk simply request a film ticket. Tickets are distributed first-come, first-served. Face masks are welcome in the building and during screenings. Please review visitor guidelines here.

Friday, March 29
3:00 p.m. The Red Shoes (MoMI Moviehouse)
5:00 p.m. Flying Lessons + Oreo (Marvels of Media Festival 2024)
6:30 p.m. The Last Temptation of Christ (MoMI Loves)
7:30 p.m. The Zone of Interest (New Releases)

Saturday, March 30
1:30 p.m. Magnificently Awesome Animations: Four Shorts with filmmakers Alba Enid Garcia and Nicholas Amodio in a panel moderated by Lauren Melissa Ellzey (Marvels of Media Festival 2024)
2:30 p.m. Bending Conventions: Six Shorts with filmmakers Daniel Oliver Lee, Madison Cahill, and Samara Huckvalein (Marvels of Media Festival 2024)
2:30 p.m. The Last Temptation of Christ (MoMI Loves)
4:30 p.m. The Wedding Banquet (Queens on Screen)
6:00 p.m. Spirit Riser with Dylan Mars Greenberg in person (Disreputable Cinema)

Sunday, March 31
1:00 p.m. Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter with filmmakers Nathan Zellner and David Zellner in person (David and Nathan Zellner Present)
1:00 p.m. The Wedding Banquet (Queens on Screen)
3:30 p.m. Sometimes A Great Notion introduced by Nathan Zellner and David Zellner (David and Nathan Zellner Present)
4:00 p.m. The Zone of Interest (New Releases)
6:00 p.m. Sasquatch Sunset with directors Nathan Zellner and David Zellner in person (David and Nathan Zellner Present)

Thursday, April 4
4:00 p.m. Philip K. Dick Festival Opening Night: International Sci-Fi Film Shorts Followed by a Q&A with directors and producers and special guest Matthew Modine
(The Philip K. Dick Science Fiction Film Festival 2024)

Please consider making a donation to MoMI. Everything we do is possible because of the generosity of you and the entire MoMI community! 
Donate today!

FILM HIGHLIGHT | March 22, 2024

The Red Shoes

It’s hardly hyperbole to say that the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger are among the most visually dazzling works of cinema ever made. And their most innovative and gorgeously mounted production might be 1948’s The Red Shoes, a peerless mix of romantic backstage melodrama and phantasmagorical musical that shines a light on the obsessive drive that can fuel the lives of artists. It’s a must-see on the biggest screen possible. 

An influential masterpiece that has inspired generations of filmmakers and dancers,
The Red Shoes is the story of a rising star ballerina (Norma Shearer) who comes undone by her own perfectionism for her craft, while also becoming embroiled in a love triangle with a possessive impresario (Anton Walbrook) and a composer (Marius Goring). Meticulously directed, with eye-popping Technicolor cinematography by Jack Cardiff, the Best Picture–nominated The Red Shoes features an unforgettable extended fantasy ballet, Oscar-winning art direction and musical score, and a memorable climax that tragically expresses how art can completely consume a life. 

The Red Shoes screens in gorgeous restored 4K DCP this Saturday and Sunday at 1:00 p.m. (and again next Friday). As part of the ongoing MoMI Moviehouse series, tickets are free for members at the Senior/Student level and above / $15 public (with discounts for seniors, students, and youth). Become a member today!

Get tickets for The Red Shoes

There is a $1.50 transaction fee per ticket for all online purchases. 

Screening this week at MoMI
Please note that paid Museum admission includes a ticket to a regular same-day screening (if one is offered that day). When you check in at the front desk simply request a film ticket. Tickets are distributed first-come, first-served. Face masks are welcome in the building and during screenings. Please review visitor guidelines here.

Friday, March 22
6:45 p.m. The House of Mirth (Snubbed 2: The Performances)
7:00 p.m. Tendaberry (First Look 2024)

Saturday, March 23
1:00 p.m. The Red Shoes (MoMI Moviehouse)
3:30 p.m. Support The Girls (Snubbed 2: The Performances)
5:30 p.m. The Featherweight with DOP Adam Kolodny and screenwriter Steve Loff in person (First Look 2024)

Sunday, March 24
1:00 p.m. The Red Shoes (MoMI Moviehouse)
3:30 p.m. Something Wild (Snubbed 2: The Performances)

Thursday, March 28
6:30 p.m. Marvels of Media Festival Opening Night: Unique Romances
Please consider making a donation to MoMI. Everything we do is possible because of the generosity of you and the entire MoMI community! 

Donate today!

FIRST LOOK DAY 5 | MARCH 17, 2024

It's the final day of First Look 2024, our annual festival of adventurous films from around the world! Last night we had a sold-out audience for Robert Kolodny's The Featherweight, presented screenplay readings of works by the 2023 Sloan Student Prize winners, and welcomed hundreds of festival goers to see exciting new work. Before the festival closes out tonight with the Ross brothers' Gasoline Rainbow (more tickets available now), come see festival alum Midi Z's new film The Clinic, or hear directly from filmmakers appearing with their films. Read below to find the full lineup today at First Look. There's something for everyone—you don't want to miss it. And, be sure to check out Reverse Shot for new reviews of select films! 

Please note: if traveling by subway, take the R train to the Museum. The N train to Queens is not running (but service from Queens to Manhattan is normal).

COMING UP TODAY

Today, March 17, 12:30 p.m.
Mimang preceded by the short The Perfect Square. With director Kim Taeyang in person. Get tickets

Today, March 17, 12:30 p.m.
The Clinic. Get tickets

Today, March 17, 2:15 p.m.
Arthur&Diana preceded by the short A Running Woman. With director Sara Summa in person. Get tickets

Today, March 17, 2:30 p.m.
Samsara preceded by the short Print Analysis (2B). With director Lois Patiño in person. Get tickets

Today, March 17, 4:45 p.m.
Limitation preceded by the short Threat Assessment. With directors Elene Asatiani, Soso Dumbadze (Limitation), and Todd Chandler in person. Get tickets

Today, March 17, 5:00 p.m.
An Evening Song (for three voices). With director Graham Swon and cast in person. Get tickets

Today, March 17, 7:30 p.m.
CLOSING NIGHT
Gasoline Rainbow. With directors Bill and Turner Ross in person.       
Get tickets

Become a Museum member to see nearly all First Look films for free (senior/student level and above)—and become a MoMI supporter year-round!

First Look festival runs March 13–17, 2024.
See all films and buy tickets here.

#Firstlookfest
Follow @movingimagenyc on Instagram, Letterboxd, and X 

Copyright © 2024 Museum of the Moving Image, All rights reserved.

Museum of the Moving Image
36-01 35 Avenue
Astoria, NY 11106

FIRST LOOK DAY 4 | MARCH 16, 2024

Yesterday we closed out the evening with the NY premiere of Haley Elizabeth Anderson's Tendaberry playing to a packed house, including many family and friends of the filmmakers (pictured above), following a slate of terrific presentations by Bill and Turner Ross, Keith Wilson, and others. First Look heads into two packed days of screenings and discussions starting today with eagerly anticipated premieres of two New York films, Flying Lessons and The Fetherweight; the experimental shorts program Illuminations; a documentary shot inside a video game, Knit's Island; and films from Armenia, Brazil, Iran, and Germany. Find the schedule below and plan your festival day! There's something for everyone—you don't want to miss it. 

Please note: if traveling by subway, take the R train to the Museum. The N train to Queens is not running (but service from Queens to Manhattan is normal).

COMING UP TODAY12:30 p.m. Sloan Screenplay Readings
Select scenes from the two screenplays awarded the 2023 Sloan Student Prizes—Grand Jury Prize winner Justine Beed’s La Forza and Discovery Prize winner Lara Palmqvist’s The Garden—will be read by professional actors as part of this special program, produced and directed by Mêlisa Annis, and followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers. This event is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Free with RSVP

Today, March 16, 1:00 p.m.
Flying Lessons preceded by the short This Is For Jonas Mekas. With director Elizabeth Nichols in person.
The magnetic pull between artist and filmmaker yields something beguiling and precious, celebrating the fiery Philly even as she and the world she fought to protect are being actively extinguished.Get tickets
Read Reverse Shot review

Today, March 16, 2:00 p.m.
What Did You Dream Last Night, Parajanov? This poignant, warts-and-all portrait of a family separated by space but still profoundly connected in each other’s hearts, minds, and dreams is composed almost entirely of webcam footage between the Berlin-based, Iranian émigré filmmaker, his parents, and his friend. Get tickets

Today, March 16, 3:00 p.m.
Illuminations: Elsewhere/Here. With Lewis Klahr, Bram Ruiter, Carl Elsaesser, Simon Liu, Erica Sheu, Bruno Delgado Ramo, and Mike Stoltz in person.
Playful, elusive, and tactile, these eclectic works are unified by their filmmakers’ attempts to orient themselves in a world of constant, turbulent flux. Get tickets
Read Reverse Shot review

Today, March 16, 3:45 p.m.
Achilles. In Farhad Delaram’s seductive, shape-shifting debut feature, a former filmmaker who works nights at a Tehran hospital starts to awaken to life when he meets a patient whose supposed fits of madness he innately understands. Get tickets

Today, March 16, 6:15 p.m.
1489. With director Shoghakat Vardanyan in person. Documenting her family’s attempts at locating her brother after he goes missing in a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Shoghakat Vardanyan films things we don’t often see. Get tickets

Today, March 16, 6:15 p.m.
Behind Closed Doors. With director João Pedro Bim in person. 
This astonishing and ingenious film features archival audio document of the meeting that decided Brazil's Institutional Act No. 5, which suspended the constitution, combined with blithe moving image propaganda perpetuated by the government. Get tickets

Today, March 16, 8:00 p.m.
Knit's Island. With director Ekiem Barbier and producer Boris Garavini in person.
The filmmakers drop into the fictional landscape of the videogame DayZ as journalistic avatars and must battle a zombie apocalypse while endeavoring to stay alive long enough to film their interactions with the surprising community of people who spend their time in this VR world. Preceded by the short I Would Like to Rage. Get tickets
Read Reverse Shot feature/review

Today, March 16, 8:00 p.m.
SHOWCASE SCREENING
The Featherweight. With director Robert Kolodny in person.
Imagine a lost feature by the Maysles Brothers or Ricky Leacock, filmed right when they might have consorted with a colorful and tragic character like Pep, and you’ve got The Featherweight. Advance tickets sold out. Limited standby tickets may be available at the door.Become a Museum member to see nearly all First Look films for free (senior/student level and above)—and become a MoMI supporter year-round!

First Look festival runs March 13–17, 2024.
See all films and buy tickets here.
#Firstlookfest
Follow @movingimagenyc on Instagram, Letterboxd, and X 

Copyright © 2024 Museum of the Moving Image, All rights reserved.

Museum of the Moving Image
36-01 35 Avenue
Astoria, NY 11106

FIRST LOOK DAY 4 | MARCH 16, 2024

First Look 2024, our annual festival of adventurous films from around the world, including right here in New York, kicked off yesterday in high style, with an exciting roundup of workshops, activities, receptions, and screenings. The Museum was a hive of bustling activity starting at noon, including our Reverse Shot critics workshop and work-in-progress screenings as part of Working on It: Day One. And with our opening night New York premiere of Fernanda Valadez and Astrid Rondero's brilliant and moving Sujo we presented what will be remembered as one of the year's most exquisitely made and urgent films, with director Valadez and cinematographer Ximena Amann appearing in person (pictured above). That film was preceded by an invigorating 3-D screening of Charlie Shackleton's cinematic experiment Lateral. Read below about all the exciting things coming up today at First Look. There's something for everyone—you don't want to miss it. And, check out our 2024 festival trailer! 

COMING UP TODAY

12:30 p.m. Sloan Screenplay Readings
Select scenes from the two screenplays awarded the 2023 Sloan Student Prizes—Grand Jury Prize winner Justine Beed’s La Forza and Discovery Prize winner Lara Palmqvist’s The Garden—will be read by professional actors as part of this special program, produced and directed by Mêlisa Annis, and followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers. This event is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Free with RSVP

Today, March 16, 1:00 p.m.
Flying Lessons preceded by the short This Is For Jonas Mekas. With director Elizabeth Nichols in person. Get tickets

Today, March 16, 2:00 p.m.
What Did You Dream Last Night, Parajanov? Get tickets

Today, March 16, 3:00 p.m.
Illuminations: Elsewhere/Here. With Lewis Klahr, Bram Ruiter, Carl Elsaesser, Simon Liu, Erica Sheu, Bruno Delgado Ramo, and Mike Stoltz in person. Get tickets

Today, March 16, 3:45 p.m.
Achilles. Get tickets

Today, March 16, 6:15 p.m.
1489. With director Shoghakat Vardanyan in person. Get tickets

Today, March 16, 6:15 p.m.
Behind Closed Doors. With director João Pedro Bim in person. 
Get tickets

Today, March 16, 8:00 p.m.
Knit's Island preceded by the short 
I Would Like to Rage. With director Ekiem Barbier and producer Boris Garavini in person. Get tickets

Today, March 16, 8:00 p.m.
SHOWCASE SCREENING
The Featherweight. With director Robert Kolodny in person.      
Get tickets

Become a Museum member to see nearly all First Look films for free (senior/student level and above)—and become a MoMI supporter year-round!
First Look festival runs March 13–17, 2024.
See all films and buy tickets here.

#Firstlookfest
Follow @movingimagenyc on Instagram, Letterboxd, and X 

Copyright © 2024 Museum of the Moving Image, All rights reserved.

Museum of the Moving Image
36-01 35 Avenue
Astoria, NY 11106

FIRST LOOK DAY 3 | MARCH 15, 2024

If you haven't yet attended First Look 2024, you're in luck: there are a lot more exciting screenings and events to come today and all weekend. Yesterday featured an incredible array of dynamic works in progress and performances for the second day of our Working on It sessions, including Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri's dazzling, atmospheric Spectral Transmissions (pictured above in our Redstone Theater). Today and tonight there is so much to see, including the hotly anticipated Tendaberry by Brooklyn filmmaker Haley Elizabeth Anderson; a new documentary inspired by Solaris and Alain Resnais; an epic documentary from China; and a special artist reception with Fiona Tan, presenting her new work Footsteps. Learn more below. 

COMING UP TODAY

12:30–5:30 p.m. Working on It Day 3
See work-in-progress presentation by legendary editor Mary Lampson and Marley McDonald; a presentation by documentary filmmaker Joe Peeler; a talk with director Zhang Mengqi and Hong Guo-Juin; a discussion by Bill and Turner Ross; a screening of Fiona Tan's Footsteps; and a live performance by Keith Wilson. Followed by a reception sponsored by Lismore Road. Get tickets

5:30 p.m. Fiona Tan: Footsteps Artist Reception
Join us for a reception with artist Fiona Tan to celebrate the opening of Footsteps, now on view in the Amphitheater Gallery. The reception will include a conversation between Tan and curator Sonia Epstein. Free with RSVP

Today, March 15, 6:30 p.m.
Kuba Mikurda's Solaris Mon Amour preceded by Izabela Zubrycka's short Handful of Dirt. With Mikurda and Zubrycka in person. Get tickets

Today, March 15, 6:45 p.m.
Self-Portrait: 47 KM 2020. With director Zhang Mengqi in person. Get tickets

Today, March 15, 8:00 p.m.
SHOWCASE SCREENING
Tendaberry. With director Haley Elizabeth Anderson and actress Kota Johan in person. Get tickets

FIRST LOOK IN THE NEWS

The New York Times highlights several films, including Tendaberry and An Evening Song (for Three Voices), in their Weekend roundup

On Reverse Shot, read Mark Asch's review of Tendaberry and David Schwartz on Solaris Mon Amour.

Read Graham Swon's essay on dream-states movies at The Talkhouse.

Become a Museum member to see nearly all First Look films for free (senior/student level and above)—and become a MoMI supporter year-round!

First Look festival runs March 13–17, 2024.
See all films and buy tickets here.

#Firstlookfest
Follow @movingimagenyc on Instagram, Letterboxd, and X 

Copyright © 2024 Museum of the Moving Image, All rights reserved.

Museum of the Moving Image
36-01 35 Avenue
Astoria, NY 11106

FIRST LOOK DAY 2 | MARCH 14, 2024

First Look 2024, our annual festival of adventurous films from around the world, including right here in New York, kicked off yesterday in high style, with an exciting roundup of workshops, activities, receptions, and screenings. The Museum was a hive of bustling activity starting at noon, including our Reverse Shot critics workshop and work-in-progress screenings as part of Working on It: Day One. And with our opening night New York premiere of Fernanda Valadez and Astrid Rondero's brilliant and moving Sujo we presented what will be remembered as one of the year's most exquisitely made and urgent films, with director Valadez and cinematographer Ximena Amann appearing in person (pictured above). That film was preceded by an invigorating 3-D screening of Charlie Shackleton's cinematic experiment Lateral. Read below about all the exciting things coming up today at First Look. There's something for everyone—you don't want to miss it. And, check out our 2024 festival trailer!
 
COMING UP TODAY
12:15–5:30 p.m. Working on It Day 2
See work-in-progress presentations by Swetha Regunathan, Anna Zamecka, Khary Jones, Kuba Mikurda, students at the Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the Missouri School of Journalism; a presentation by Robert Kolodny; artists Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher with work-in-progress Spectral Transmissions; and a talk by Ekiem Barbier and Boris Garavini. Followed by reception sponsored by Lismore Road. Get tickets

Today, March 14, 6:00 p.m.
First Sight: 2024 Award-Winning Shorts from the Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism. With filmmakers Maya Bell, Morgan Hadley, Beatričė Bankauskaitė, and Bradford Siwak in person. Get tickets
Today, March 14, 6:30 p.m.
Hazel (dual) + Gwetto. With filmmakers Kevin Jerome Everson and Michaël Andrianaly in person. Get tickets
Today, March 14, 8:00 p.m.
SHOWCASE SCREENING
The Echo. With director Tatiana Huezo in person. Get tickets
Today, March 14, 8:15 p.m.
Magic Mountain. With directors Mariam Chachia and Nik Voigt in person. Get tickets

Become a Museum member to see nearly all First Look films for free (senior/student level and above)—and become a MoMI supporter year-round!
First Look festival runs March 13–17, 2024.

See all films and buy tickets here.

#Firstlookfest
Follow @movingimagenyc on Instagram, Letterboxd, and X 

Copyright © 2024 Museum of the Moving Image, All rights reserved.

Museum of the Moving Image
36-01 35 Avenue
Astoria, NY 11106

FILM HIGHLIGHT | March 8, 2024

Happy-Go-Lucky

Sally Hawkins’s was the unparalleled critical darling of awards season in 2008 for her breakout performance in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky. The British performer won Best Actress awards at the Berlin Film Festival and the Golden Globes, before sweeping the critics’ awards. When all was said and done, she had won Best Actress from the National Society of Film Critics, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Boston Society of Film Critics, and the New York Film Critics Circle. And then… she wasn’t nominated for the Oscar. 
There are many reasons why this ridiculous “snub” happened: Hawkins was largely unknown in the U.S.; her competition included big stars, eventual nominees like Angelina Jolie, Meryl Streep, and Kate Winslet; and the film she was in was a comedy, historically one of Oscar’s least beloved genres. Also, a major factor was undoubtedly the singular delight of her character, Poppy, in Happy-Go-Lucky. Poppy simply isn’t the kind of role that wins Oscars. A bouncy primary school teacher from North London, Poppy is happy, sweet, delighted, and seems to sail through life without a care in the world, taking life’s challenges, pains, and pleasures with big doses of optimism and bonhomie. And Hawkins makes it look easy. 
Writer-director Leigh, working his usual methods of creating characters with actors through extended months of rehearsals and improvisation, finds new paths towards dramatic conflict, pitting Poppy’s Pollyanna ways against the less cheerful folks around her. The brilliance of Hawkins’s performance is that she welcomes the viewer to try and understand her—whether we are confounded, judgmental, or sympathetic—without ever giving clues or reasons for the state of her psychology or the meaning of her ebullience; Happy-Go-Lucky is a film about our shared reality and perception. 
Happy-Go-Lucky screens in this year’s edition of our Snubbed series, highlighting performances that didn’t make the cut. The film plays Saturday, March 9 at 6:00 and Sunday, March 10, at 1:00. Tickets are only $7 for MoMI members (Senior/Student level and above).

Get tickets for Happy-Go-Lucky

Screening this week at MoMI
Please note that paid Museum admission includes a ticket to a regular same-day screening (if one is offered that day). When you check in at the front desk simply request a film ticket. Tickets are distributed first-come, first-served. Face masks are welcome in the building and during screenings. Please review visitor guidelines here.

Friday, March 8
4:00 p.m. Support The Girls (Snubbed 2: The Performances)
7:00 p.m. The Heartbreak Kid (Snubbed 2: The Performances)
7:15 p.m. Nofinofy with director Michael Andrianaly in person (New Adventures in Nonfiction)

Saturday, March 9
1:00 p.m. Muppets Most Wanted - 10th Anniversary Screening introduced by Craig Shemin (Jim Henson's World)
1:30 p.m. All of Me (Snubbed 2: The Performances)
3:30 p.m. Something Wild (Snubbed 2: The Performances)
4:00 p.m. Frida with director Carla Gutiérrez in person (Las Premieres)
6:00 p.m. Happy-Go-Lucky (Snubbed 2: The Performances)

Sunday, March 10
12:30 p.m. Muppets Most Wanted - 10th Anniversary Screening introduced by Craig Shemin (Jim Henson's World)
1:00 p.m. Happy-Go-Lucky (Snubbed 2: The Performances)
3:00 p.m. Polydroso (Always on Sunday)
3:30 p.m. All of Me (Snubbed 2: The Performances)
5:00 p.m. The Heartbreak Kid (Snubbed 2: The Performances)
5:30 p.m. Stop Making Sense: 40 Anniversary Re-Release (New Releases)

Please consider making a donation to MoMI. Everything we do is possible because of the generosity of you and the entire MoMI community!  Donate today!

FILM HIGHLIGHT | February 16, 2024

New York, New York

In 1977, Martin Scorsese was hot off the critical and commercial success of his violent urban crime drama Taxi Driver. His next project was perfectly counterintuitive: a grand Hollywood musical that fused the classical MGM style with his penchant for raw emotional realism. The result, New York, New York, starring Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli, baffled audiences at the time, even as it offered an original tune written for the film by Kander and Ebb called “New York, New York.” You might have heard it…   
As the years have passed, and Scorsese’s legend status grew, the film has been re-evaluated and is considered by many—including us—to be one of his best, most ambitious, and singular achievements. The film depicts the difficulty of a marriage between two independent creatives, and Scorsese pushes the story into dark, exhilarating territory. The final half hour, when Scorsese gives the film over to pure movie musical magic, makes for one of his most sustained feats of grand filmmaking. And one of the reasons the film works so brilliantly well is the performance of Liza Minnelli as Francine, a jazz singer in post–World War II New York who embarks on a doomed romance with De Niro’s volatile saxophonist. It’s an emotionally astonishing performance that may be the equal of her Oscar-winning work in Cabaret—but she was shamefully unnominated this time. 
We’re showing the film, screening in 35mm, for this year’s edition of our Snubbed series, highlighting performances that didn’t make the cut. New York, New York plays tonight at 6:30 and Sunday at 5:30. 

Tickets are only $7 for MoMI members at the Senior/Student level and above; $15 for the public. Become a member today!

Get tickets for New York, New York

Screening this week at MoMI
Please note that paid Museum admission includes a ticket to a regular same-day screening (if one is offered that day). When you check in at the front desk simply request a film ticket. Tickets are distributed first-come, first-served. Face masks are welcome in the building and during screenings. Please review visitor guidelines here.

Friday, February 16
3:00 p.m. Gilda (Snubbed 2: The Performances)
6:00 p.m. Alphaville (Science on Screen)
6:30 p.m. New York, New York (Snubbed 2: The Performances)
8:00 p.m. Johnny Mnemonic (Science on Screen)

Saturday, February 17
12:45 p.m. Beloved (Snubbed 2: The Performances)
3:45 p.m. My Own Private Idaho (Snubbed 2: The Performances)
4:00 p.m. Afrikan Poetry Theatre’s Black History Month Film Festival hosted by Vernon “Smij” Williams
6:00 p.m. The Heartbreak Kid (Snubbed 2: The Performances)

Sunday, February 18
12:45 p.m. Top Hat (Snubbed 2: The Performances)
1:00 p.m. Under the Cherry Moon—please note this screening has been canceled.
3:00 p.m. Dignity (Always on Sunday)
3:15 p.m. My Own Private Idaho (Snubbed 2: The Performances)
5:30 p.m. New York, New York (Snubbed 2: The Performances)

Monday, February 19
12:30 p.m. The Boy and the Heron (Eng. Dub) (World of Animation)

Tuesday, February 20
12:30 p.m. The Boy and the Heron (World of Animation)

Wednesday, February 21
12:30 p.m. The Boy and the Heron (Eng. Dub) (World of Animation)

Thursday, February 22
12:30 p.m. The Boy and the Heron (World of Animation)

Please consider making a donation to MoMI. Everything we do is possible because of the generosity of you and the entire MoMI community! 
Donate today!

FILM HIGHLIGHT | February 9, 2024

Opening Night

Gena Rowlands was so overwhelmingly great in so many of her husband John Cassavetes’s films that it’s difficult to choose a favorite. Yet we’re particularly fond of her staggering work in Opening Night, the 1977 theater-set drama that was made—and sometimes gets lost—between her Oscar-nominated roles in A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and Gloria (1980). Due partly to the film’s strange distribution woes—it wasn’t released widely and officially until 1991—Rowlands wasn’t nominated for Opening Night, but rarely has an actor dove into a role with more fierce bravery. 
Rowlands plays Myrtle Gordon, a successful but increasingly neurotic actress in her forties, conflicted about portraying an older woman, a role too close to the skin, and dealing with her own alcoholism. She is haunted by hallucinations of an alluring teenage female fan, a symbolic image of a younger self, whose car accident she blames herself for. As reality starts to blur with dreams and the actress and character begin to merge, Myrtle reveals some profoundly uncomfortable truths about “the gradual lessening of [her] power as a woman” (as one character puts it) in the public eye. 
Opening Night plays tonight at 6:30 p.m. and tomorrow, February 10, at 2:30 p.m., and see the complete lineup for Snubbed 2: The Performances. Tickets are only $7 for MoMI members at the Senior/Student level and above; $15 for the public. Become a member today!

Get tickets for Opening Night

Screening this week at MoMI
Please note that paid Museum admission includes a ticket to a regular same-day screening (if one is offered that day). When you check in at the front desk simply request a film ticket. Tickets are distributed first-come, first-served. Face masks are welcome in the building and during screenings. Please review visitor guidelines here.

Friday, February 9
3:00 p.m. Bus Stop (Snubbed 2: The Performances)
6:30 p.m. Opening Night (Snubbed 2: The Performances)

Saturday, February 10
12:30 p.m. A Henson Valentine with Craig Shemin, Karen Falk and Rollie Krewson in person (Jim Henson's World)
1:00 p.m. Bus Stop (Snubbed 2: The Performances)
2:30 p.m. Opening Night (Snubbed 2: The Performances)
3:00 p.m. Clemency (Snubbed 2: The Performances)
5:00 p.m. About a Teacher with a panel discussion featuring leaders in the public school education field

Sunday, February 11
12:30 p.m. Gilda (Snubbed 2: The Performances)
1:00 p.m. Under The Cherry Moon (MoMI Moviehouse)
2:45 p.m. Beloved (Snubbed 2: The Performances)
3:00 p.m. Clemency (Snubbed 2: The Performances)
5:30 p.m. The Gods of Times Square (Disreputable Cinema)

This screening series runs at Museum of the Moving Image Friday, Aug 19 - Sunday, Sep 11
White Zombies: Nightmares of Empire is the second in a series of film programs presented in conjunction with our Living with The Walking Dead exhibition, which will be on view until January 1, 2023.

The zombie of American cinema has always proven especially adept at communicating specifically Black anxieties: a class of creatures, not alive and not quite dead, their bodies untethered from their own will, helplessly bound as they are to do the bidding of one sinister master. Historically inspired more by the paranoid colonial writings of William Seabrook in The Magic Island (1929) than the “zombi” of Haitian Vodou, the cinematic zombie has often unwittingly become a reflection of the monstrous evil that first wrought it. Thus, the cinematic zombie, although born of the African diaspora, may not be Black at all, but inescapably white—a creature that embodies the imperialistic project itself—one that seeks to reduce its denizens to mere bodies, violently charged to spread hegemony and empire. This series, beginning with the Bela Lugosi horror classic White Zombie (1932), pictured above, will chart the zombie’s propensity to mirror not just the horror of imperialism but also a multitude of its anxieties, from miscegenation to war. But even as the zombie over the years migrated away from its Black origins, the figure has struggled to become fully raceless or to shed its roots in imperialistic exploits. Guest programmed by Kelli Weston.

Following the August 28 screening of The Ghost Breakers, there will be a panel with writer-researcher Yasmina Price and scholar Dr. David Bering-Porter, moderated by guest curator Kelli Weston. This panel will trace the zombie’s evolution from its symbolic, racialized origins to its current, more raceless depictions, exploring the figure’s rich political overtones, concerning the state, the body, labor, and much more.

The mini screening series FUTURE MAN: DOUGLAS TRUMBULL Friday, August 5 - Friday, August 12. Two films directed by Trumbull, Brainstorm and Silent Running, will be shown!

One of the most innovative and influential artists in the history of film, Douglas Trumbull sadly passed away earlier this year. A longtime friend of the Museum, he was last at MoMI for a special screening of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in October 2021—just the latest of many visits at which he spoke in depth about his work on that and other films. Probably no single figure in movies has contributed more to the development of special effects in the second half of the 20th century than Trumbull, beginning with that Kubrick collaboration when he was in his early twenties and continuing with key contributions to Star Wars, the first Star Trek film, Blade Runner, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. He also directed two features, the existential space thriller Silent Running and Brainstorm, starring Natalie Wood in her final role. Alongside a 70mm screening of Brainstorm, which rightfully opens our See It Big: 70mm! series and a digital restoration of Silent Running, we will be joined by special guests to discuss the groundbreaking career of the visionary filmmaker.

Join us for these special screenings!

Museum of the Moving Image's annual 70mm series returns Aug 5 - Sunday, Sep 4 with an exhilarating selection of classics new and old!

With a higher resolution and more light hitting the frame, 70mm film offers a bigger, brighter image than 35mm. It also offers richer sound, with more space on the soundtrack. It is the ideal film format for ambitious cinematic spectacles, yet 70mm movies have become increasingly rare. Filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, whose Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood and Licorice Pizza, respectively, are in this series, help to keep the tradition alive. In this selection of 70mm screenings, we’re also pleased to present original eighties favorites Tron and Brainstorm from the late special effects legend Douglas Trumbull; and a rare 70mm presentation of the gorgeous hand-drawn Disney classic Sleeping Beauty. The most expensive animated film ever made, Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty was originally formatted for Super Technirama 70mm exhibition.

Join us for ourAugust 20th screening of Sleeping Beauty to catch a special introduction with award winning filmmaker and animation historian John Canemaker.

The Australian drama Shame (1988) screens Thursday, July 28th at Museum of the Moving Image. The screening and preceding reception will be attended by starring actress Deborra-Lee Furness.

While traveling through the Australian Outback on holiday, lawyer Asta Cadel has motorcycle troubles and gets waylaid in a small town. Soon she falls for mechanic Tim Curtis (Barry) and befriends his teenage daughter, Lizzie (Buchanan), who was recently assaulted by the son of a local bigwig. Asta persuades Lizzie to press charges, but when the townspeople resolve to keep the incident a secret, Asta and the Curtis family find themselves targeted for a campaign of terror. A highlight of the gathering Australian New Wave of the 1980s, Shame (like many of the films in MoMI’s Pioneering Women of Australian Cinema series) centers a strong, distinctive, independent female protagonist, played here by the strikingly charismatic Furness, who has continued with a storied career as a performer, producer, and director. The Museum is thrilled to welcome Furness for a conversation about the film and her career following the screening.

This week we kick off our Pioneering Women in Australian Cinema screening series! Screenings will run at Museum of the Moving Image Thursday, Jul 21 - Sunday, Aug 14. Click the link to see the full schedule and purchase tickets!

In 1979, Gillian Armstrong premiered her debut fiction feature, My Brilliant Career, at the Cannes Film Festival. Incredibly, it was the first Australian feature directed by a woman since films like The Cheaters, made by the McDonagh sisters in the early 1930s. The foundations for this breakthrough had been laid throughout the 1970s thanks to the giddy rush of the Australian New Wave cinema, the progressive Whitlam government (1972–75), the country’s thunderous Women’s Liberation movement, and the creation of the nation’s first major film school (AFTRS). In the 1980s and 1990s, women slowly but surely set themselves up behind the camera; this series pays tribute to that generation of filmmakers and is the first of its kind presented in the United States. Pioneering Women in Australian Cinema encompasses comedy, musical, romance, and horror, as well as more underrepresented essayistic, autobiographical, documentary, and experimental styles into a revised cinematic historiography. The series seeks to highlight the contributions of queer, feminist, migrant, and Indigenous women filmmakers and their stories, which are focused on class, work, education, friendship, and—as always for such a geographically isolated country—dreams.

Museum of the Moving Image is screening Baz Luhrmann's very first feature film, Strictly Ballroom, as part of its Musical Matinees screening series this month.

One of the most successful Australian films of all time, Strictly Ballroom premiered 30 years ago at the Cannes Film Festival, where it introduced the world to the signature stylings of 29-year-old Baz Lurhmann. Employing a mockumentary framework yet gleefully busting beyond any constraints of realism, the film follows Scott Hastings, a scion of competitive ballroom dancing royalty who bucks tradition and defies his own family with a flashy, contemporary performance style. Based on a culture he grew up within, and adapted from own University-penned stage production, Luhrmann’s debut is a remarkably apt first film for a director whose fast, frisky, frenzied, populist, and carnivalesque impulses segued seamlessly into Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge, and The Great Gatsby. Three decades later, it’s clear that while Strictly Ballroom’s budget was much smaller, his ambition was anything but.

Screening at MoMI
Saturday, Jul 9 at 1:00 PM
Friday, Jul 15 at 2:00 PM
Sunday, Jul 10 at 1:30 PM