.png)
A debut feature that announces two multi-hyphenate talents (who display as much invention behind the camera as charisma in front of it), we were overjoyed that NEW STRAINS was picked up for distribution by MEMORY. You now have another chance to see it on the big screen with an audience. Don't miss it! BUY TICKETS
Screening dates and times are as follows:
June 21 @ 7pm - Q&A with the filmmakers moderated by director Raven Jackson (All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt)
June 21 @ 9pm - Q&A with the filmmakers moderated by programmer Creston Brown (Presidium Overactive)
June 22 @ 7pm - Q&A with the filmmakers moderated by director Josephine Decker (Madeline’s Madeline)
June 22 @ 9pm - Q&A with the filmmakers moderated by LAFM co-founder Sarah Winshall
coming soon from Mezzanine
Anhell69
directed by Theo Montoya
2023, 75, Colombia/Romania/France/Germany, DCP
Thursday, June 20
2220 Arts + Archives
2220 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA, 90057
doors: 7:30
film: 8:00
Followed by a pre-recorded conversation with director Theo Montoya
This arresting, supremely confident debut feature from Colombian filmmaker Theo Montoya is a vividly conceived and dreamlike docufiction – at once a blissful evocation of queer nightlife in Medellin, and a deeply felt elegy for queer lives lost in an era of austerity and violence. A young filmmaker (Montoya) tells the story of his past while recalling the pre-production of his first film, a B-movie wherein Colombia’s ghosts, (whose presence recalls the spectral figures in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) walk among the living. Yet amid real-life interviews with teenagers and twentysomethings, the filmmaker must reckon with ghosts both real and imagined, as Colombia’s new lost generation finds community and transcendence in the club. A self-described “trans film” and a triumph of personal filmmaking, Anhell69 is an act of documentary as pure cinema.
In Spanish with English subtitles. A Sentient.Art.Film release.
Winner: Venice Film Festival (Critic’s Week), Jury Special Mention
Official Selection: True/False, SXSW 2023
Special thanks to Keisha Knight and Tony Nguyen (Sentient.Art.Film).
“With Anhell69, Montoya has constructed an indelible, at times shattering portrait of a collection of lovers and fighters who have embraced hedonistic nihilism, just in order to find a place to exist.” -Michael Sicinski, In Review Online
“Part documentary, part celebration of outsider lives, and part remembrance, it’s a defiantly hybrid piece that’s cunning, challenging…[and] seemingly conceived to play out on the border between life and death itself.” -Jonathan Holland, Screen International
A Lonely Woman (a.k.a. A Woman Alone)
directed by Agnieszka Holland1981, Poland, 92m, DCP
Wednesday, July 10
2220 Arts + Archives
2220 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA, 90057
doors: 7:30
film: 8:00
Guest curated by programmer David Schwartz. Co-presented with the Polish Cultural Institute New York.
Although it was made during the optimistic period of the Polish Solidarity movement, Agnieszka Holland’s A Woman Alone is an astonishingly dark film that fully rejects patriotic mythology and the cliches of romantic drama. Completely scorned by society, family, and co-workers, the single mother Irena, unforgettably portrayed by Maria Chwalibóg, asks “Who am I?,” quickly providing the answer “nobody.” Meanwhile, her miserable soon-to-be lover Jacek, who dreams of fleeing to the West, asks “What is so special about Poland? There is nothing to be found here.” The two then embark on what may be the grimmest sex scene ever committed to film.
A film that makes Wanda look like a screwball comedy, A Woman Alone is exhilarating for its razor-sharp social critique, its intense psychological realism, an underlying worldview laced with honesty and black humor, and a series of shocking plot turns that spirals towards tragedy. The film was prescient; shortly after it was made, martial law was imposed in Poland, and the movie, which was made for television, was banned. It was not released until 1987, by which time Holland was in exile, making films in Germany and France. Ahead of its time, A Woman Alone stands as one of Holland’s most uncompromising achievements, and is a perfect companion to her new film, Green Border, which raises many difficult questions about her home country. -David Schwartz
"As a meditation on feverish utopia, [A Lonely Woman] remains a sobering record of its time." -Ela Bittencourt, The House Next Door
"So ferocious it makes her other films seem operettas by comparison, A Lonely Woman is set on the eve of martial law—a stunning evocation of ignorance, superstition, poverty and disorder that attacks virtually every institution in communist Poland while suggesting a stratum of society impervious to reform." - J. Hoberman
"It is not a happy experience, but I would not know all that movies can and should do without it." -Amy Taubin, Screen Slate
David Schwartz is an independent film programmer and writer. He is Curator-at-large at Museum of the Moving Image, where he worked for many years as Chief Curator. He hosts the Emelin Theatre Film Club in Mamaroneck, NY, and programs for other venues, including the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, New York and Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee, New Jersey. He also programmed and managed the Paris Theater in Manhattan. David writes about film regularly for publications including Reverse Shot, Screen Slate, and Film Comment, and edited the book David Cronenberg: Interviews. He has taught film history at Purchase College and New York University. In 2019, he received a Career Achievement Award from the New York Film Critics for his tenure at Museum of the Moving Image. He is on the board of directors at the Film-maker’s Cooperative. For more about his work, visit david-schwartz.net
Special thanks to Tomek Smolarski (Polish Cultural Institute NY).
Comentários