Spring 2017 Program Guide

Spring

2017 Program Guide

A p r i l / M ay / J u n e

Dear Friends, Welcome to Lightbox Film Center. We’re thrilled to announce that after nearly forty years as the hub of moving image culture in Philadelphia, our historic cinema has a new name.

If you’re a member or regular patron of our program, you know that it has long been a “hidden gem” of the local arts scene. With our new name, we hope to shed our “hidden” status and bring more visibility to the singular programming we do here, week after week, month after month, year after year.

As Lightbox Film Center, we will continue to showcase film, video and media works with artist talks, live music and other multidisciplinary programs inside International House Philadelphia. As part of IHP’s vibrant residential complex for international students and scholars, we have built a passionate community around a shared reverence for cinema. With our name change, we hope to expand the community and position ourselves for the next decade of moving image exhibition.

We’ll be celebrating our new identity on Thursday, May 18 with the Lightbox Launch Party, featuring a special 25th anniversary screening of Allison Anders’ classic Gas Food Lodging with an appearance

by Anders herself. To me, this film perfectly embodies both the indie aesthetic that activated my personal interest in cinema when I first came to International House as a volunteer in the 1990s, and a moment in our cultural history when quiet, thoughtful works were becoming readily accessible in mainstream spaces in a way they hadn’t been before. Lightbox Film Center is here to continue this tradition and ensure that filmgoers always have a rich, varied selection of moving image art they can’t find anywhere else in the Philadelphia region. The screening will be followed by a celebratory reception with music, food and cocktails. We hope you’ll join us for this exciting event, and for the incredible lineup of programs we have planned for the spring season.

Best wishes, Jesse Pires Chief Curator

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For more information on Lightbox Film Center, visit www.lightboxfilmcenter.org

Save the Date

LIGHTBOX LAUNCH PARTY Thursday, May 18 at 7pm Free Admission

Join us for a very special evening as we celebrate IHP’s newly renamed Lightbox Film Center.

This special launch party includes a 25th anniversary screening of the seminal indie film Gas Food Lodging with Director Allison Anders and special guests in attendance. The screening will followed by a reception featuring music, food and cocktails.

Gas Food Lodging

25th Anniversary Screening

With Director Allison Anders in Attendance Dir. Allison Anders, US, 1992, DCP, 101 min.

A sun-baked town in the middle of New Mexico is the backdrop for this poignant coming of age tale.

Allison Anders’ breakout indie story of a single mother (Brooke Adams) raising two teenage daughters is remarkable for its sincere depiction of women finding agency as individuals. Shade (Fairuza Balk) and Trudi (Ione Skye) have different ways of coping with the absence of a father, bringing no shortage of grief for their overworked mother. With a soundtrack by J Mascis, Gas Food Lodging is an enduring classic of the halcyon days of indie cinema, now begging to be rediscovered by a new generation of film lovers.

An American film and television director, Allison Anders spent her teens hitchhiking across the country, experiences she credits with giving her raw inspiration for her cinematic portraits. A graduate of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, Anders made her feature writing and directing debut with Border Radio (1987), a study of the LA punk scene, in collaboration with two classmates. Her first solo effort, Gas Food Lodging (1992), premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and earned her a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best New Director. The film received five Spirit Award nominations, including Best Director and Best Screenplay, and actress Fairuza Balk won the Best Actress award. Gas Food Lodging also won the Deauville Film Festival Critics Award. Later films include Mi Vida Loca, Four Rooms, Grace of My Heart, Sugar Town and Things Behind the Sun. She has received numerous awards for her work and has been featured in retrospective exhibitions around the world.

Anders is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship “Genius Grant” and a Peabody Award.

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PARTICIPATION TV

Co-presented with the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania

Another Look at the Miami Convention

Friday, April 7 at 7pm Dir. Women’s Video News Service, USA, 1972, video, b/w, 59 min.

The Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania presents a rare screening of the feminist masterwork, Another Look at the Miami Convention (1972) in celebration of the release of scholar William Kaizen’s new book Against Immediacy: Video Art and Media Populism (University Press of New England, 2016). Another Look was shot using Portapaks at the 1972 Democratic National Convention by the Women’s Video News Service for Manhattan cable television. Sponsored by Flo Kennedy, WVNS was the first all-women team of videographers/news reporters.

Their coverage of the convention focused on the newly formed National Women’s Political Caucus and the candidacy of Shirley Chisholm for president and other related events largely ignored by the mainstream media. They held extensive interviews with protesters gathered in a people’s park near the convention, including activists from the women’s movement and queer and trans movements, as well as a heated protest of a fashion show held as a fundraiser for the 3

Democratic Party. Featuring appearances by Gloria Steinem, Flo Kennedy, Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Nanette Rainone and others. The original hour-long version of Another Look is being screened here for the first time in its entirety since it was originally broadcast on cable television in 1972.

The screening will be followed by a conversation between Kaizen and special guests to discuss the importance of revisiting Another Look in our contemporary political context as well as the potential embedded in participatory media.

Free Admission

William Kaizen is an independent scholar and curator.

His research focuses on the history and politics of new media, from video art to video games. His most recent books are Against Immediacy: Video Art and Media Populism and Adventure (for Adults).

FILM WITH LIVE SOUNDTRACK

Courtesy of Filmmuseum München

Our Heavenly Bodies (Wunder der Schöpfung) with live accompaniment by Coupler

Saturday, April 8 at 8pm Dir. Hanns Walter Kornblum, Germany, 1925, Silent DCP, 91 min.

In 1925, German director Hanns Walter Kornblum set out to create a film unlike any that had come before. His aim was a film that would serve as both a summation of all the astronomical knowledge available at the time and a dreamy investigation of what wonders might await humanity at the advent of space travel. With the help of 15 special effects technicians and nine cameramen, Kornblum’s film is a technical marvel, one that revels in the beauty and mysteries of the universe, reminiscent of Carl Sagan’s COSMOS more than 50 years later.

Coupler is less a band than a creative organization.

Founded in 2012 by Lambchop veteran Ryan Norris, its core is Norris along with Rodrigo Avendaño and Rollum Haas though its membership has at points swelled to as many as eight. At its root, the project is an exercise in mutual cooperation of creative individuals and is an exploration of the intersections of man and machine, live and recorded, composed and improvised, stasis and flux.

Reconstructed and digitally restored by Filmmuseum München.

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ARTHOUSE REVISITED

Selected classics of world cinema and independent film as they were meant to be seen, on the big screen.

Pelle the Conqueror

Friday, May 5 at 7pm Dir. Bille August, Denmark/Sweden, 1987, DCP, 157 min. Danish & Swedish w/ English subtitles Lasse, an elderly and widowed farmer, and his young son Pelle, join a boatload of immigrants to escape from impoverished rural Sweden to Denmark’s Baltic island of Bornholm. They are employed at a large farm in Denmark, where they are treated as the lowest of the low. It is ultimately their loving relationship that sustains them through a difficult year. Pelle the Conqueror won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1988.

I Knew Her Well

Il Casanova di Federico Fellini (Fellini’s Casanova)

Friday, April 14 at 7pm Dir. Federico Fellini, Italy, 1976, DCP, 155 min., Italian w/ English subtitles Years before Stanley Kubrick‘s attempt to adapt Carlo Collodi’s classic tale Pinocchio, his AI (Artificial Intelligence) ended in Spielberg-ian ruin, director Federico Fellini undertook the epic adventures of this wanton puppet. His efforts ultimately led to Fellini’s Casanova, a historical biopic that is at once exactingly authentic and fairy-tale fantastic, with a long-nosed Donald Sutherland cast as the famous libertine.

Casanova journeys across the magic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, in-and-out of prison dungeons, outrageous court parties, bizarre fertility rites and Olympic orgies in a quest of sexual and political conquest. With cathedral-scale sets and Academy Award-winning costumes by Danilo Donati, Fellini’s stunning images are at their most potent.

Fellini’s Casanova undresses male hubris, reveals selfdelusion and exposes the dehumanizing puppetry of a hedonistic culture. This ain’t Disney.

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Saturday, June 17 at 7pm Dir. Antonio Pietrangeli, Italy, 1965, DCP, 115 min.

I Knew Her Well is at once a delightful immersion in the popular music and style of Italy in the 1960s and a biting critique of its sexual politics and culture of celebrity. Over a series of intimate episodes, just about every one featuring a different man, a new hairstyle, and an outfit to match, the unsung Italian master Antonio Pietrangeli, working from a script he co-wrote with Ettore Scola, composes a deft, seriocomic character study that never strays from its complicated central figure. I Knew Her Well is a thrilling rediscovery, by turns funny, tragic, and altogether jaw-dropping.

New 4K digital restoration, undertaken by the Criterion Collection in partnership with the Cineteca di Bologna.

Life of Jesus Saturday, May 27 at 7pm Dir. Bruno Dumont, France, 1997, 35mm, 96 min., French w/ English subtitles Led by the troubled Freddy, whose affection for a local girl sets off a disturbing series of events, the gang of disaffected teenagers inhabit a desolate village where they remain trapped by their own self-imposed ignorance. With touches of Robert Bresson and Italian neo-realism, Life of Jesus is a stunning work of cinematic poetry.

Print courtesy of the Institut Francais, special thanks to the Cultural services of the French Embassy in New York

Rediscovering a Philadelphia Pioneer: Donya Feuer’s Dance/Film Collaborations with Ingmar Bergman, Romola Nijinsky, and Others May 11 - May 13, 2017

Between 1967 and 2000, the American dancer, choreographer, theater director, and filmmaker Donya Feuer (1934–2011) created an impressive body of experimental dance film, collaborating with Ingmar Bergman, Romola Nijinsky, and other noted figures of dance, cinema and theater. Trained as a dancer

by Nadia Chilkovski in her native Philadelphia, Feuer joined the Martha Graham Dance Company in the early 1950s and went on to collaborate with Paul Sanasardo and Pina Bausch in New York.

After Feuer relocated to Sweden in 1963, Bergman appointed her director of the Royal Dramatic Theater of Stockholm. There she formed her own dance company, choreographed and performed in Bergman productions, served as an assistant director for his theater work, and directed many plays on her own.

Feuer’s intimate partnership with Ingmar Bergman is represented in this exhibition by their enchanting The Magic Flute (1975), which she choreographed, and by their remarkably modern piece for Swedish television, The Dance of the Condemned Women (1976). A consistent focus of her dance films is an intense questioning of what it means to dance, the thread that connects early pieces like With the Body as Down

Payment (1972), her two 1974 films on Nijinsky, and her award-winning feature film The Dancer (1994).

Feuer uses the camera to dissect physical effort, visualizing dance as an intentionally constructed personal and social act entailing not only calculation and skill, but also vulnerability and madness.

Organized by Mark Franko, Temple University professor of dance, editor of Dance Research Journal, and author of Excursion for Miracles: Paul Sanasardo, Donya Feuer and Studio for Dance (1955–1964) (Wesleyan University Press). Special thanks to Joshua Siegel, Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art. All film descriptions are by Mark Franko. Except where noted, none of the films have need for subtitles.

This program is supported by a grant from the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation.

Additional support provided by the Esther Boyer College of Music and Dance at Temple University.

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De Fördömda kvinnornas dans (The Dance of the Condemned Women)

Sweden, 1976, video, 25 min.

Produced by Ingmar Bergman. Cinematography by Sven Nykvist. Music by Monteverdi. With Nina Harte, Helene Friberg, Lena Wennergren, Lisbeth Zachrisson.

After collaborating on Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Ingmar Bergman and Donya Feuer imbued the filmic image with the tactile qualities of dance by interpreting the final aria of Monteverdi’s dramatic madrigal Ballo delle ingrate. Courtesy Cinematograph.

Frukost (Breakfast)

The Dancer

Thursday, May 11 at 7pm Dir. Donya Feuer, Sweden, 1994, video, 90 min.

With Katja Björner, Natalia Makarova, Erland Josephson, Anneli Alhanko, Niklas Ek. Donya Feuer followed ballerina Katja Björner over five years, from her intensive training at the Royal Swedish Ballet School to international prominence. This awardwinning feature is the culmination of Feuer’s decadeslong experimentation with filming dance through close up and montage - an intense scrutiny of the body in motion - and her sustained meditation on the drama of a dancer’s commitment to her art.

Experimental Dance Works Program 1 Friday, May 12 at 7pm

Introduced by Mark Franko

Ett spel om föremål och människor (A Play for Objects and Chorus)

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Sweden, 1967, video, 27 min.

Music by Ulf Björlin. With Karin Thulin, Juliet Fisher, Lillemor Lundberg, Mats Ek, and others. This film documents a dance piece originally performed at the Historical Museum of Stockholm and designed specifically for a gallery of ancient rune stones. The dance company includes Mats Ek and other young performers who were under Feuer’s tutelage as she introduced modern dance to Sweden in the mid1960s. Courtesy Sveriges Television.

Norway, 1972, Norway, video, 17 min.

Music by Jan Gabarek. With Anne Borg, Roger Lucas, David Forde. A meditation on the choreography of everyday life, the film’s expressively danced family romance intimates a suicide by drowning, echoing Virginia Woolf’s own death. Courtesy NRK and The National Library of Norway.

Et Syn (A Vision)

Norway, 1972, Norway, video, 18 min.

With Inger-Johanne Rutter, Leonie Leahy, James de Bolt, Willy Simensen, Roger Lucas, Dmitri Cheremeteff, Anthony Greeves. A Vision is a triptych on human relationships that draws on motifs from Donya Feuer’s ballet God Is Alive and Fairly Good Health, as well as her explorations of youth and pop culture through modern dance. Courtesy NRK and The National Library of Norway.

Himlakropp (Heavenly Body)

Sweden, 1969, video, 12 min.

Music by Ulf Björlin. With Kari Sylwan, Karin Thulin.

Heavenly Body conveys Donya Feuer’s interest in the female dancer, reflecting the introspective (rather than expressionist) character of her choreography. Courtesy Sveriges Television.

Experimental Dance Works, Program 2 Saturday, May 13 at 5pm

Introduced by Mark Franko

Martha Graham at 100: A Personal Birthday Message from Donya Feuer Sweden, 1994, video, 10 min.

Donya Feuer’s tribute to Martha Graham, featuring an interview with company dancer Robert Cohan, was intended for broadcast on Graham’s 100th birthday.

Courtesy Sveriges Television.

The Nijinsky Films: A Life and Requiem for a Dancer

Sweden, 1975, video, 55 min.

Requiem for a Dancer is a fictionalized look at Vaslav Nijinsky, the premier dancer of the Ballet Russes, in which the centerpiece is the dancer’s training warm-up. Montage and the sounds produced by the body during performance (by James de Bolt) contribute to the film’s tactile and aural qualities. A Life, a companion piece, is Feuer’s rare film interview with Romola de Pulszky, Vaslav’s wife and biographer.

Courtesy NRK and The National Library of Norway.

Med kroppen som insats (With the Body as Down Payment) Norway, 1972, video, 24 min.

With James de Bolt, Leonie Leahy, Inger-Johanne Rütter, and other dancers from the Norwegian Opera. In this early investigation of the marriage between dance and film, Donya Feuer provides an invaluable record of the modern dance vocabulary and techniques that she developed with Paul Sanasardo in New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Courtesy NRK and The National Library of Norway.

The Magic Flute

Saturday, May 13 at 8pm Dir. Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1975, 35mm, 135 min.

Swedish w/ English subtitles

Introduced by Mark Franko With Josef Köstlinger, Irma Urrila, Elisabeth Erikson, Håkan Hagegård. Donya Feuer was known in Sweden for her innovative approach to the staging of period opera, an aspect of her work showcased in this collaboration with Ingmar Bergman, one of the most enchanting film operas in cinema history. As in their later theater work, choreography comprises not only the dance sequences themselves but also the subtle inflections that movement and gesture give to action within Bergman’s mise en scène. Courtesy Janus Films.

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SUBVERSIVE ELEMENTS

A monthly series dedicated to experimental film and artists’ moving image.

Film Nos. 1-5, 7, 10 (Early Abstractions)

USA, 1946-57/assembled ca. 1964, 16mm-to-35mm, 23 min.

Restored by Anthology Film Archives and The Film Foundation with funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation.

A premiere of a brand new 35mm print of Smith’s landmark compilation Early Abstractions. This brilliant new print was made by doing an optical blow-up from Smith’s original 16mm master. You have never seen this classic work with such vivid color and detail.

Photo courtesy of Anthology Film Archives

Harry Smith New Restorations Presented by John Klacsmann & Andrew Lampert

Thursday, May 4 at 7pm An unparalleled animator, gifted painter, and notable musicologist, Harry Smith (1923–1991) was an underground renaissance figure bar none. Smith’s kaleidoscopic experimental films have influenced generations of wide-eyed enthusiasts, and his landmark six LP compilation The Anthology of American Folk Music (1952) laid the foundation for the folk music revival of the late ‘50s and ‘60s. Today, Smith is renowned not only for his dazzlingly ecstatic and eccentric works, but also for the vast assortments of curious objects that he voraciously collected throughout his colorful life. Anthology Film Archives and J&L Books recently joined together to issue two new publications focused on Smith’s most unusual collections, Paper Airplanes: The Collections of Harry Smith, Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 2 and String Figures: The Collections of Harry Smith, Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 2. Each book features new essays and richly detailed photographic documentation of Smith’s decidedly eclectic assembling and research obsessions. To celebrate the release of these publications, we present a program of newly preserved films alongside some very rare Harry Smith audiovisual surprises.

Both volumes will be available for sale at this screening.

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Film No. 6

USA, 1950, 16mm, silent, anaglyph 3-D 1.5 min.

New print by Anthology Film Archives. Smith’s shortest film abstraction is also his only known attempt to work in 3-D.

Film No. 15

USA, 1965-66, 16mm, silent, 10 min.

Preserved by Anthology Film Archives. In this film, Smith animates his extensive collection of Seminole patchwork.

Film No. 19

USA, 1980, 35mm, 12.5 min.

Completed over 15 years after the footage was shot and almost never publicly presented, Film No. 19 contains further outtakes from Smith’s abandoned Wizard of Oz adaptation. Made directly from Smith’s workprint, these captivating fragments offer a small taste of the masterpiece that Smith never finished.

John Klacsmann is Archivist at Anthology Film Archives in New York City where he preserves artist cinema.

Before joining Anthology in 2012, he worked as a preservation specialist and optical printing technician at Colorlab, a film laboratory in Maryland. He is a contributing editor to INCITE: Journal of Experimental Media.

Andrew Lampert is an artist, archivist, teacher and former Curator of Collections at Anthology Film Archives.

Cecelia Condit Videos

Possibly in Michigan

Introduced by Cecelia Condit, followed by a Q&A

Beneath the Skin

Friday, June 2 at 7pm

With morbid wit, Condit constructs collages of processed video, Super-8 film, found footage, original music and sung dialogue, layering autobiographical and archetypal references, popular and classical genres — from soap operas to fairy tales, music clips to gothic horror. Condit’s elliptical narratives, which have been termed “feminist fairy tales,” put a subversive spin on the traditional mythologies of female representation, especially the psychologies of sexuality and violence, or of aging and loss. Writes Condit: “I consider myself a storyteller whose work swings between beauty and the grotesque, humor and the macabre, innocence and cruelty. My videos explore the dark side of female subjectivity and address the fear, aggression and displacement that exist between ourselves and society, ourselves and the natural world.”

Cecelia Condit was born in 1947. She received a B.F.A. in sculpture from the Philadelphia College of Art and an M.F.A. in photography from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, American Film Institute, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. She is currently Professor of Film and Director of Graduate Studies in Film at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

USA, 1983, video, 12 min.

USA, 1981, video, 12 min.

Annie Lloyd

USA, 2008, video, 17 min.

Pulling up Roots USA, 2015, video, 9 min.

Some Dark Place USA, 2016, video 5 min.

Tales of a Future Past USA, 2017, video, 8 min.

Special thanks to Rebecca Cleman and Electronic Arts Intermix

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Uzbek Rhapsody: The Films of Ali Khamraev June 22 - July 1, 2017

“If there is a giant who sits astride the history of Uzbek cinema, it’s Ali Khamraev. An artist of rocksolid humanism and amazing expressive power. Ali Khamraev, one of those rare talents like Welles or Godard or Scorsese, whose love for the medium is so intense that his best films burst with crisscrossing energies and insights, like a fireworks display. Khamraev is a towering figure, a wizard with landscapes (they all seem charged, often enchanted) and an instinctual genius with actors.

Anyone interested in the Brechtian idea of the social gestus should study Khamraev’s ferocious 1972 masterpiece Without Fear, which deals with the Soviet modernization of a Muslim village in 1927 and the shock waves caused by the sight of unveiled women. Khamraev’s bravura talent isolates just the right gestures, merging the physical, the visual, and the dramatic with perfect precision. Nearly abstract visual forms of Khamraev’s Man Follows Birds, his 1975 medieval pocket epic, merits comparison with Paradjanov and Dovzhenko.” Kent Jones, Director, World Cinema Foundation.

Organized by Seagull Films with assistance of Mardjani Foundation. Curated by Alla Verlotsky.

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White, White Storks

Thursday, June 22 at 7pm Uzbekistan, 1966, 35mm, 82 min., b/w, Uzbek w/ English subtitles In the village of White Storks, a married woman, Malika, falls in love with Kaium. Their passion scandalizes the villagers along with Malika’s father, who is torn between understanding the attitudes of a beloved daughter and the burdens of tradition.

Without Fear

Friday, June 23 at 7pm Uzbekistan, 1972, 35mm, 96 min., b/w, Uzbek w/ English subtitles An Uzbek Red Army officer in the 1920s is in charge of his local village. His task is modernization, and one of the first, gigantic steps is to allow women to drop their veils and enlighten themselves. A brave teenage girl offers to step forward and set the example, setting off a series of charged, tragic encounters from which no one, from the soldier’s young bride to his militant father-in-law to the intransigent mullahs, emerges unscathed. Shot in stark black-and-white and written by the estimable (and, during this period of Soviet filmmaking, seemingly omnipresent) Andrei Konchalovsky, Without Fear is at once philosophically lucid, melodramatically engaging and altogether electrifying.

The Seventh Bullet

Saturday, June 24 at 5pm Uzbekistan, 1972, 35mm, 84 min., b/w, Uzbek w/ English subtitles The Seventh Bullet is set after the Russian Civil War as Soviet power had established itself in Central Asia in the wake of the Basmachi rebellion. Despite the Soviet presence in the area, Basmachis continue to arrive from across the border, bringing death and destruction to peaceful villages. One of the bands of rebels is led

by Khairulla who is pitted against the militia leader Maxumov. At first it seems hopeless for Maxumov as the rebels capture most of his men, winning them over to their side. He has only one strategy left; to give himself up, and try to explain to the people that Khairulla has deceived them. Later in pursuit of his enemy, he chases Khairulla across a river. He has only one bullet left - the seventh, and he must not miss his target.

Man Follows Birds

Saturday, June 24 at 8pm Uzbekistan, 1975, 35mm, 87 min., Uzbek w/ English subtitles A portrait of a young boy’s coming of age under the open skies of medieval Uzbekistan. Ali Khamraev’s stylistic tour de force is almost unclassifiable - a mystic vision, an eastern western, a pageant of color and movement, a portrait of adolescence painted in broad, expressionistic strokes. Man Follows Birds moves from one sumptuous moment to the next ecstatically colored landscapes, a trio of friends waking up covered in apple blossoms, the hero imagining his beautiful and long-dead mother in images that have an abstract power and beauty. A film that truly deserves the word “visionary.”

The Bodyguard

Friday, June 30 at 7pm Tadzhikistan, 1979, 35mm, 91 min., Uzbek w/ English subtitles When a Red Army unit captures Sultan Mazar, the brains behind the Basmachi contingent, they decide to escort the prisoner to the Bukhara province. The difficult mission is entrusted to a grizzled mountain trapper and conscientious revolutionary named Mirzo.

His expertise is essential to traverse the precarious paths and steep mountain ridges along the way, impossible terrain for the inexperienced. A group consisting of Mirzo, his brother Kova, the Sultan,

his daughter Zaranghis and slave Saifulla set off on this journey, pursued doggedly along the way by Fattobeck, the ruthless new head of the Basmachis.

They are forced to fight on the mountain ridges as well as negotiate the natural dangers and harsh elements.

Triptych

Saturday, July 1 at 2pm Uzbekistan, 1979, 35mm, 76 min., Uzbek w/ English subtitles Triptych is the story of three women: an illiterate girl who wants to build a house, a school teacher who goes to a northern Uzbekistan village where traditions and strict Muslim practices have kept the people subjugated, and an old woman kidnapped in her youth by a poor peasant who considers her his property.

I Remember You

Saturday, July 1 at 5pm Uzbekistan, 1985, 35mm, 92 min., Uzbek/Russian w/ English subtitles Reminiscent of Fellini’s Amarcord, whose title it references, I Remember You is an autobiographical meditation on the past. The main character, at the request of his seriously ill mother, leaves Samarkand and heads on a voyage across Russia in search of the grave of his father, who died during the war. This poetic odyssey, which also proves to be a journey into subconscious memory, is rendered in images of extraordinary intensity and beauty. The beautiful Gulya Tashbayeva, wife of the filmmaker, gives a haunting performance.

Bo Ba Bu

Saturday, July 1 at 8pm Uzbekistan/Italy/France, 1998, 35mm, 82 min., Uzbek w/ English subtitles Bo Ba Bu, a controversial cross-cultural sexual parable, stars Arielle Dombasle (Eric Rohmer’s Pauline at the Beach) as a European traveler who appears out of nowhere in the Central Asian desert. She is taken into captivity by two shepherds, Bo and Bu, who name her Ba and treat her as property and sexual object. The fact that Khamraev’s drama is both trading in primal archetypes (the eternal triangle, male rivalry and sexual jealousy, women as commodities of exchange) and completely without dialogue (the characters communicate with grunts and gestures) suggests the allegorical nature of the exercise; to less sympathetic critics, the film treads into the territory of soft-core exploitation.

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45 YEARS OF WOMEN MAKE MOVIES

A year-long celebration of the most significant distributor of independent films by and about women.

Michael Jackson and Rihanna as her spiritual parents and dreams of becoming a big-name rapper. For the time being, her only fans are the other teenage girls in a Tehran shelter. Her family has a very different future planned for her: as a bride she’s worth $9,000. Iranian director Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami (Going up the Stairs) poignantly shifts from observer to participant altering expectations, as Sonita’s story unfolds in this personal and joyful portrait. An intimate look at creativity and womanhood, Sonita highlights the rarely seen intricacies and shifting contrasts of Iranian society through the lens of an artist who is defining the next generation.

The Same Difference

The Revival: Women and the Word

Thursday, April 27 at 7pm Dir. Sekiya Dorsett, USA, 2016, video, 82 min.

The Revival: Women and the Word chronicles the U.S. tour of a group of Black lesbian poets and musicians, who become present-day stewards of a historical movement to build community among queer women of color. Their journey to strengthen their community is enriched by insightful interviews with leading Black feminist thinkers and historians, including Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Nikki Finney and Alexis Deveaux.

As the group tours the country, the film reveals their aspirations and triumphs, as well as the unique identity challenges they face encompassing gender, race, and sexuality. This is a rarely seen look into a special sisterhood - one where marginalized voices are both heard and respected.

Sonita

Thursday, May 25 at 7pm Dir. Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami, Iran/Germany/ Switzerland, 2015, video, 91 min., English & Farsi w/ English subtitles Two-time Sundance Film Festival award winner Sonita tells the inspiring story of Sonita Alizadeh, an 18-year-old Afghan refugee in Iran, who thinks of 13

Friday, June 16 at 7pm Dir. Nneka Onuorah, USA, 2015, video, 78 min.

The Same Difference is a compelling documentary about lesbians who discriminate against other lesbians based on gender roles. Director Nneka Onuorah takes an in-depth look at the internalized hetero-normative gender roles that have become all too familiar within the African American lesbian and bisexual community. Onuorah shows how these behaviors reproduce the homophobic oppression and masculine privilege of the straight world, while looking for solutions in compelling discussions with community members. Self-identified studs - and the women who love them - discuss hypocrisy in terms of gender roles, performative expectations, and the silent disciplining that occurs between community members.

This film features many queer celebrities, including actress Felicia “Snoop” Pearson from the critically acclaimed HBO drama The Wire, and Lea DeLaria from Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, living daily with opinions about how identity should be portrayed.

Onuorah’s engaging documentary shines a light on the relationships and experiences within the queer black female community, intersecting race, gender and sexuality.

Special thanks to Patricia White, Eugene Lang Research Professor of Film and Media Studies at Swarthmore College.

FAMILY MATINEE PROGRAMS dear cat, Darwin, and carries on her family’s research in secret. But she soon finds herself at the center of a shadowy and far-reaching conspiracy, and on the run from government agents, bicycle-powered dirigibles and cyborg rat spies.

Phantom Boy

Only Yesterday

Saturday, April 8 at 2pm Dir. Isao Takahata, Japan, 1991, DCP, 118 min.

Deftly switching between past and present, Only Yesterday is a Studio Ghibli masterpiece of time and tone, rich with humor and stirring emotion, following a 27-year-old office worker as she journeys through memories to the countryside. From Academy Award-nominated director Isao Takahata (The Tale of The Princess Kaguya) and General Producer Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away), this critically acclaimed film has never before been released in North America until now - in celebration of its 25th anniversary.

Saturday, June 10 at 2pm Dir. Jean-Loup Felicioli & Alain Gagnol, France, 2016, DCP, 84 min.

The highly anticipated new film from the Academy Award-nominated writers and directors of A Cat in Paris is a stylish noir caper, set in the shadowy streets and alleyways of New York. Leo has a secret.

A mysterious illness has transformed him into a phantom boy, able to leave the confines of his body and explore the city as a ghostly apparition. While in the hospital, he befriends Alex, a New York City cop injured while attempting to capture a nefarious gangster who has taken control of the city’s power supply. Now they must form an extraordinary duo, using Leo’s phantom powers and Alex’s detective work to foil the plot and save New York from destruction.

April and the Extraordinary World

Saturday, May 13 at 2pm Dir. Christian Desmares & Franck Ekinci, France, 2015 DCP, 103 min.

From the creators of the Academy Award-nominated Persepolis and the mind of renowned graphic novelist Jacques Tardi, comes a riveting sci-fi adventure set in an alternate steampunk universe: Paris, 1941. A family of scientists is on the brink of discovering a powerful longevity serum when all of a sudden a mysterious force abducts them, leaving their young daughter April behind. Ten years later, April (voiced by Academy Award nominee Marion Cotillard) lives alone with her 14

SPECIAL SCREENINGS

On the Silver Globe New Resoration Friday, April 28 at 7pm Dir. Andrzej Zulawski, Poland, 1988, DCP, 166 min.

Polish w/ English subtitles Zulawski’s sci-fi epic that almost wasn’t. On the Silver Globe, which tells the tale of a strange new society evolving on a distant, earth-like planet, was abruptly halted during its production in 1977. More than a decade later the film was completed using the original footage and newly recorded voiceovers. This new digital restoration was personally approved by Zuławski and DP Andrzej Jaroszewicz. Courtesy of the Polish Film Institute.

Les Hautes Solitudes

Friday, May 19 at 7pm Dir. Philippe Garrel, France, 1974, DCP, 80 min., b/w, silent A key to understanding the first decade of Garrel’s filmmaking life, here stripped down to its barest quintessence. Moving portraiture, entirely silent, in stark black-and-white, of Jean Seberg in her Paris apartment, over a decade removed from her icon-making performance in Breathless, and a few tragic years before her early death. The young Garrel, already an old hand at creating cinema, brings his own spiritual intensity to capturing the faces of his friends and lovers: Nico, Tina Aumont and Laurent Terzieff. “The idea was to make a film out of the outtakes of a film that never existed in the first place.”

-Philippe Garrel 15

Karl Marx City Philadelphia Premiere Friday, May 26 at 7pm Dir. Petra Epperlein & Michael Tucker, Germany, 2016, DCP, 89 min. German w/ English subtitles Twenty-five years after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), filmmaker Petra Epperlein returns to the proletarian Oz of her childhood to find the truth about her late father’s suicide and his rumored Stasi past. Had he been an informant for the secret police? Was her childhood an elaborate fiction?

As she looks for answers in the Stasi’s extensive archives, she pulls back the curtain of her own ostalgia and enters the parallel world of the security state, seeing her former life through the lens of the oppressor. Reconstructing everyday GDR life through declassified Stasi surveillance footage, the past plays like dystopian science fiction, providing a chilling backdrop to interrogate the apparatus of control and the meaning of truth in a society where every action and thought was suspect.

La mort de Louis XIV (The Death of Louis XIV)

Saturday, June 10 at 7pm Dir. Albert Serra, Portugal/France /Spain, 2016, DCP, 115 min.

Acclaimed Catalonian filmmaker Albert Serra’s latest work, The Death of Louis XIV is an adaptation of Saint Simon’s memoirs starring Jean-Pierre Léaud as the sun-King. The cult actor, who has worked with all major directors from the Nouvelle Vague, plays the dying king who cannot move from the Château de Versailles. His wife Madame de Maintenon, his son Louis XV and his doctor Fagon dread his last breath and try to hide it from the public, to preserve the future of France.

Maurizio Cattelan: Be Right Back Philadelphia Premiere Thursday, June 15 at 7pm Dir. Maura Axelrod, USA, 2016, DCP, 95 min. English & Italian w/ English subtitles An art world upstart, provocative and elusive artist Maurizio Cattelan made his career on playful and subversive works that send up the artistic establishment, until a retrospective at the Guggenheim in 2011 finally solidified his place in the contemporary art canon. Axelrod’s equally playful profile leaves no stone unturned in trying to figure out: who is Maurizio Cattelan?

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IN COLLABORATION After Spring

Tuesday, April 18 at 7pm Dirs. Steph Ching & Ellen Martinez, USA, 2016, 101 min.

Presented in partnership with the Nationalities Service Center and City of Philadelphia - Office of Immigrant

Affairs

Exhumed Films Ex-Fest Part VII

Saturday, April 29 at 11am The seventh annual 12-hour marathon of exploitation films from all genres! $35 General Public, $25 IHP Members

INTERCULTURAL JOURNEYS Concert Rahim AlHaj: Letters From Iraq Sunday, May 21 at 7pm A poignant telling through music of war, its aftermath and its consequences, performed with string quintet and Arabic percussion surrounding AlHaj’s poignant and masterful oud playing.

Scribe Video Center’s Producers’ Forum 95 And 6 To Go Wednesday, May 10 at 7pm Dir. Kimi Takesue, USA, 2016, 85 min.

With filmmaker Kimi Takesue in person An affectionate portrait of the director’s widowed grandfather, whose memories become intertwined with the fictional screenplay she is writing, revealing the fine line between life and art, rumination and imagination.

The House On Coco Road

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PROGRAMS Wolf 2017 Symposium: African Film and Media

Friday, April 21 at 7pm More information on this event can be found at http:// cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/events/2017/April/ Wolf2017SymposiumAfricanFilmandMedia

2nd annual Penn Bioethics Film Festival

Tuesday, June 6 at 7pm Dir. Damani Baker, Grenada/USA, 2016, 78 min.

April 4-6, 2017

With filmmaker Damani Baker in person

Tuesday, April 4 at 6pm Dir. James Cameron, USA, 2009, video, 161 min.

The House on Coco Road is an intimate portrait of Fannie Haughton, an activist and teacher who moves her children from Oakland, California in 1983 to participate in the Grenada’s Afro-centric Socialist Revolution, only to find her family in harm’s way of a U.S. military invasion.

Producers’ Forums are supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Philadelphia Cultural Fund and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. $10 General Public, $7 Students/Seniors, $5 Scribe and IHP members

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$15 General Public, $10 IHP Members, $8 Students

Avatar Her

Wednesday, April 5 at 6pm Dir. Spike Jonze, USA, 2013, video, 126 min.

Ex Machina

Thursday, April 6 at 6pm Dir. Alex Garland, USA, 2014, video, 108 min.

For more info: http://www.pennbioethicsfilmfest.org/

SPECIAL EVENTS

Culture & Cuisine

April 4 at 6:30pm International House Philadelphia and the Board of Delegates cordially invite you for an evening of Culture & Cuisine. Join us to meet and share a meal with IHP residents and friends from around the world in an intimate setting, dining on authentic fare while learning about different cultures and traditions.

Iftar Dinner

June 20 at 8pm People of all faiths and cultures are invited to the Iftar Dinner, served at sunset during Ramadan, where we traditionally gather together to break the fast observed during Ramadan. The Ramadan holiday, which lasts a month, commemorates the time Muslims believe the Koran was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad.

During Ramadan, Muslims fast from dawn until dusk each day as a way to build character and selfdiscipline. Our Iftar dinner begins with the traditional breaking of the fast with dates and a water or yogurt drink. Guests will learn about Ramadan and share an authentic meal with our community.

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April Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wedne 4

Avatar, 6pm Culture & Cuisine Dinner, 6:30pm

Her, 6

18 After Spring, 7pm

May

95 And 6 To

21 Rahim AlHaj: Letters from Iraq, 7pm

June

6 The House On Coco Road, 7pm

20 Iftar Dinner, 8pm

19

esday

Thursday

6pm

o Go, 7pm

Friday

5

Saturday

6

7 Another Look at the Miami Convention, 7pm

Ex Machina,6pm

Only Yesterday, 2pm Our Heavenly Bodies, 8pm

8

14 Il Casanova di Federico Fellini, 7pm

21 Wolf 2017 Symposium: African Film and Media, 7pm

27 The Revival: Women and the Word, 7pm

Ex-Fest Part VII, 11am

4 Harry Smith new restorations Film Nos. 1-7, 10, 15, 19, 7pm

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29

28 On the Silver Globe, 7pm

5 Pelle the Conqueror, 7pm

11 The Dancer, 7pm

12 Experimental Dance Works, Program 1, 7pm

18 LIGHTBOX LAUNCH PARTY Gas Food Lodging, 7pm

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April and the Extraordinary World, 2pm Experimental Dance Works, Program 2, 5pm The Magic Flute, 8pm

19 Les Hautes Solitudes, 7pm

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25 Sonita, 7pm

Karl Marx City, 7pm

27 Life of Jesus, 7pm

2 Cecelia Condit Video Program, 7pm

10 Phantom Boy, 2pm The Death of Louis XIV, 7pm

15 Maurizio Cattelan: Be Right Back, 7pm

16 The Same Difference, 7pm

22 White, White Storks, 7pm

17 I Knew Her Well, 7pm

23 Without Fear, 7pm

30 The Body Guard, 7pm

24 The Seventh Bullet, 5pm Man Follows Birds, 8pm

July 1

Triptych, 2pm I Remember You, 5pm Bo Ba Bu, 8pm

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WELCOME TO INTERNATIONAL HOUSE PHILADELPHIA IHP is pleased to broaden the horizons of its Residents, Members and the Greater Philadelphia community by offering a wide range of renowned international and independent films, concerts, cultural celebrations, art exhibitions and special events. For information on films and programs, visit www.ihousephilly.org/calendar.

TICKETS

General INFORMATION • General Information; call 215.387.5125, email info@ihphilly.org or visit www.ihousephilly.org.

• To rent IHP’s Ibrahim Theater for a film screening or special event: 215.387.2275 or email events@ihphilly.org.

• Advanced tickets can be purchased online at www.ihousephilly.org/calendar for most listed films and events.

• Tickets can be purchased at IHP’s Box Office, which is open Tuesday - Saturday from 12 to 8pm and at other select times. Phone: 215.387.5125.

•

Unless noted, tickets prices for IHP films are $10 for General Admission, $8 for seniors and students. Ticket prices for Family Matinees are $5 and children under the age of 2 are free.

• IHP Members and Residents enjoy free admission to most films.

GETTING HERE International House Philadelphia is located at 3701 Chestnut Street in the heart of University City. It is easily reached by public transportation or car.

Metered street parking is available on Chestnut and nearby streets. Discounted parking for IHP guests is available at the Sheraton University City parking garage, 3549 Chestnut Street. Bring your parking receipt to the IHP Front Desk or Box Office for a validation stamp to receive a $2.00 discount on the regular parking rates at the Sheraton garage, which is open 24 hours.

Film programs presented by International House are funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts, The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, The Philadelphia Cultural Fund and The Wyncote Foundation. www.ihousephilly.org/calendar

Like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ihousephilly

Follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ihousephilly

Follow us on Instagram @Ihousephilly

Cover Image:

The Death of Louis XIV Saturday, June 10 at 7pm

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON OUR F 21

www.ihousephill

BECOME A MEMBER IHP Members enjoy free admission to most films screened in our state-of-the-art Ibrahim Theater, plus discounts on films and programs presented with partner organizations throughout the year. For more information on becoming an IHP Member, visit www.ihousephilly.org/ membership or call 215.387.5125 and select menu option 2.

All Members enjoy the following benefits: • Free admission to most IHP film screenings • Discounted admission to partner film screenings • Guest passes to film screenings • Discounted admission to concerts, live performances, lectures, & other cultural events • Subscription to our quarterly program guide • 10% discount at our Cafe • Exclusive access to members-only events

MEMBERSHIP LEVELS Student Membership $40 a year with a valid student ID, includes two guest passes.

Young Friends Membership $60 a year for ages 40 and under, includes two guest passes.

Individual Membership $75 a year, includes four guest passes.

Household Membership $140 a year with two adults and two children, includes four guest passes.

FILMS AND UPCOMING EVENTS VISIT:

ly.org/calendar

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WWW.IHOUSEPHILLY.ORG 1-215-387-5125

International House Philadelphia has a critical three-fold mission: to maintain a diverse and welcoming community for students, scholars and professional trainees from around the world, while introducing them to the American experience; to broaden the horizons of its residents and the Greater Philadelphia community through high-quality international arts and cultural programs; and to encourage understanding, respect, and cooperation among people of all nations. Founded in 1910, IHP was the first International House in the world.

JOIN TODAY. Become a Member!

IHP is an independent, member supported, Mission-Driven Organization.

3701 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104