As we head into the new year, Le CiNéMa Club now screens a very special film with the theme of “eternal return”: Andrew Horn’s 1984 feature Doomed Love. A would-be romance of ideas, of thoughtful gestures and kind words, a semi-musical with few songs but a cadence all its own, and a continuous marvel of visual ingenuity, the film is a true lost classic of New York independent cinema. Selected for the Berlinale’s Forum section in 1984, it travelled widely in independent and underground cinema clubs upon its initial release, but has screened only rarely since the ‘80s. We are immensely proud to present it now as an online premiere, and for an extended run of two weeks.

At the start, we are introduced to Andre (cult actor Bill Rice), a professor of romantic literature who is slowly surrendering to grief. When he meets psychiatric nurse Lois (Rosemary Moore), and then her new husband Bob (photographer Allen Frame), the inexplicable occurs: life seems like it can begin to go on again. An irresolvable romantic triangle forms, irresolvable precisely because of the unselfish and uncanny love these characters find they have for one another.

This star-crossed universe is adjacent to the No Wave cut-ups of Amos Poe or Eric Mitchell and the minimalist expressionism of Robert Wilson, but Horn and his remarkable assemblage of collaborators end up crafting a work altogether singular in its delicately melancholic tone, catching humor and sensory immediacy. Legendary downtown playwright Jim Neu plays a small role and provides looping, hypnotic dialogue; artists Amy Sillman and Pamela Wilson’s hand-paint the bizarrely evocative monochromatic sets, assembled in the studio of New York’s Millennium Film Workshop. Interspersed throughout are songs by Lenny Pickett and a score by Lounge Lizard Evan Lurie (with an assist from his brother, John Lurie), activating Horn and cinematographer’s Carl Teitelbaum’s iconographic but tactile compositions.

Andrew Horn is a filmmaker and graphic artist whose work has also extended into film criticism and dance. In his early career in New York he was a member of the legendary theater group Byrd Hoffman’s School of Byrds, and his first film works include Elaine: A Story of Lost Love  (1978). His The Big Blue (1988) reconvened much of the cast and crew of Doomed Love and also screened in the Forum section of the Berlinale. He is the director of two acclaimed music documentaries, The Nomi Song (2004) and We Are Twisted Fucking Sister! (2014) and a producer and writer of a documentary on East German musicals (East Side Story, 1997). He now lives and works in Berlin, and was recently the subject of a partial retrospective at New York’s Spectacle theater.
Directed by: Andrew Horn - 1984 - USA - 74 min WITH: With Bill Rice, Rosemary Moore, Allen Frame & Jim Neu - WRITER: Andrew Horn & Jim Neu - PRODUCER: Andrew Horn - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Carl Teitelbaum - MUSIC: Evan Lurie - EDITOR: Steve Brown & Charlie Beesley - PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Amy Sillman & Pamela Wilson - COSTUME DESIGNER: Fred Lambert & Jeffrey Geiger Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week Le CiNéMa Club screens Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, Matt Wolf’s richly textured and endlessly revealing feature documentary on the life and work of one of pop and experimental music’s most enigmatic and heartbreaking figures. A runaway from the farmland of Iowa who left his mark on New York’s countercultures in innumerable forms – profound and transitory, approachable and radical – Russell was a cult figure in his own time, and neglected after his passing in 1992 from AIDS. Wolf’s empathetic and insightful film was key to the widespread rediscovery of Russell’s work upon its initial release in 2008, and we screen it now upon the occasion of its 10th anniversary and Oscilloscope’s release of the film on deluxe Blu-ray and DVD accompanied by rare and exclusive Russell footage and a commentary by Wolf.

The film adopts a patchwork approach to an diverse oftentimes contradictory personality, a style that “accepts the fragmentation of the person”, as interviewee David Toop describes Russell’s frequent use of pseudonyms. Wolf chooses to focuses his interviews on just a handful of Russell’s close friends, family and collaborators, including his parents, Philip Glass, and longtime partner Tom Lee, lending the film remarkable intimacy. Through photographs, Russell’s recordings and archival footage we move from the composer’s early encounters with Alan Ginsberg and the Modern Lovers to his late disco productions, catching hitherto unseen glimpses of the artist every step along the way. Wolf, who came from an experimental film background, also makes the daring move of incorporating original footage, with actors playing Russell in his habitual haunts and wearing his actual clothes, shot in Super 8 and DV by cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes.

"In the process of making the movie, I learned things from Arthur about being an artist and pursuing it at all costs. Arthur struggled: he created obstacles for himself and he frustrated his collaborators and loved ones. But I think, unlike many other people, Arthur was able to connect to a primal place of childlike innocence and fun. I love going there with him."
— Matt Wolf

Tom Wolf is a New York based filmmaker. His 2013 film Teenage investigated the mid-century rise of youth culture, world-premiered at Tribeca and screened at CPH:DOX and the London Film Festival. In 2015 he made the HBO documentary It’s Me, Hilary on Eloise Illustrator Hilary Knight, with executive producers Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, and currently in post-production on Recorder, a documentary on Marion Stokes, an activist who secretly recorded television 24 hours a day for 30 years. Directed by: Matt Wolf - 2008 - USA - 71 min WITH: With Philip Glass, Bob Blank, Ernie Brooks, Jens Lekman - WRITER: Matt Wolf - PRODUCER: Ben Howe, Kyle Martin & Matt Wolf - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Jody Lee Lipes - MUSIC: Arthur Russell - PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Phil Buccellato - COSTUME DESIGNER: Janicza Bravo Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, Le CiNéMa Club presents Quartet for the End of Time, a 1983 short by the great Alfonso Cuarón. Made when the director of Gravity and Children of Men was just 22 and still enrolled in film school at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos of UNAM in Mexico City, this is an intriguing, exploratory early work, studded with expressive flourishes and telling glimpses of the marvels to come. We’re very happy to be screening the film in a new transfer from UNAM’s archives on the occasion of Cuarón’s return to Mexico and to black and white with Roma, his monumentally intimate new drama now in theaters and streaming on Netflix.

Quartet for the End of Time is the story of a loner, a young man who – whether in his Mexico City apartment or aimlessly wandering the streets – can’t seem to find his footing in the world. Like the works of art it references (Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener”, Modigliani’s paintings), the film illuminates this sometimes gloomy subject with flashes of insight, stylistic daring, or humor, often in mobile long takes that hint at Cuarón’s mature style. In one telling moment, the protagonist plays the Messiaen quartet that gives the film its title on his oboe – but as a solo. Looking back on the making of this short, Cuarón has said:

"It was an emotion rather than an idea that drove the process, it was about improvising and trying different things every day, trying to blend the character and the location with this emotion."
— Alfonso Cuarón

Alfonso Cuarón is one of world cinema’s most accomplished and recognized auteurs, a technical innovator with a profound interest in everyday human drama. After starting his career in Mexico with 1991’s vivacious social-satire Sólo con tu pareja, Cuarón’s talents were quickly recognized by Hollywood, where he made the remarkably atmospheric Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) and the landmark science-fiction films Children of Men (2006) and Gravity (2013). Cuarón’s most recent work is a return to his homeland and a more modest scale of filmmaking: this year’s Roma, his masterful evocation of the Mexico City of his childhood and the winner of  the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Directed by: Alfonso Cuarón - 1983 - Mexico - 23 min WITH: With Angel Torralba & Ramón Barragán - WRITER: Alfonso Cuarón - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Ariel Velázquez - MUSIC: Olivier Messiaen - EDITOR: Alfonso Cuarón & Ariel Velázquez Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

We enter the winter months with German filmmakers Ulrich Köhler and Jochen Dehn and their 1998 miniature Palü. In this blackly comic and brilliantly concise short, a man wanders at the foot of the Swiss Alps—until, like Alice, his attention is attracted by a white rabbit. The film that results has all the symmetry and precision of a snowball aimed carefully into the void, and anticipates Kohler and sometime production designer Dehn’s most recent adventure in a startling landscape, In My Room, which premiered in Un Certain Regard at this year’s Cannes, and will be released in the US by Grasshopper Films in early 2019.

Utilizing just a few constituent elements (a place, two people and an animal), six minutes and the barest wisp of a plot, Palü builds up a strangely evocative world, where secrets can be uncovered around any corner and even the most commonplace interaction hide profundities and paradoxes. That this can happen under a blue sky, with friendly smiles and good intentions, makes it all the more remarkable. This re-activation of the everyday also comes through in Dehn’s remarks to us about the project’s conception:

"We had both read a book by Arthur Danto, that starts with the description of an exhibition of a couple of red pictures but then goes on to a passage citing someone else, Lev Vygotsky, who stated that a peasant—confronted with the discovery of new distant galaxies—was not surprised that humans had been able to build these new kind of telescopes, but was amazed or wondering at how they had found out the names of these stars."
Ulrich Köhler is one of the foremost figures within the so-called Berlin School, the informal network of filmmakers and collaborators with which Christian Petzold, Valeska Grisebach and Maren Ade are also often associated. His first three features all premiered at the Berlinale, where Sleeping Sickness (2011) won the Silver Bear. His most recent film In My Room is a moving pastoral riff on the post-apocalyptic genre produced by Komplizen Films (Valeska Grisebach’s Western, Sebastiàn Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman, Miguel Gomes’ Arabian Nights),  the wonderful Berlin-based production company co-founded by his wife, filmmaker Maren Ade (Toni Erdmann) and Janine Jackowski.

Jochen Dehn is best-known as a contemporary artist whose work in sculpture, performance and installation playfully deconstructs common sense, and has been exhibited in numerous international institutions, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Volksbühne in Berlin, the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg and the 11th Biennial of Contemporary Art Lyon. As a production designer for film, he has worked with Maren Ade and Angela Schanelec, and several times with Köhler, most recently on In My Room. Directed by: Jochen Dehn & Ulrich Köhler - 1998 - Germany, Switzerland - 6 min WITH: With Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, Eric Lamparter Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, Le CiNéMa Club investigates the work of two filmmakers and friends: Mario Ruspoli and Chaval. Ruspoli’s insatiable curiosity trained his camera on everything and everyone from cave paintings and mental institutions to fisherman and jazz musicians, and his largely unheralded work forms a secret history of documentary in parallel to (and often close collaboration with) figures like Chris Marker, Jean Rouch and Michel Brault.

One of his most delightful films, the sardonic and affectionate 1971 short Chaval, takes as its subject the French cartoonist well-known in his time for the mordant and merciless humor of his drawings, filled with the pratfalls of foolish men and the oversized beaks of strange birds. However, Chaval had a semi-secret second life as a tireless amateur filmmaker, shooting shorts constantly, for his friends’ enjoyment or even just his own. Ruspoli’s short, screening now in as an online premiere and in a new restoration, is a remarkable revelation of this hidden side of his friend, and of what both men shared – their laughter, attentiveness and insight.

We show Chaval in anticipation of the December 6th-9th series on Ruspoli’s work at New York’s Metrograph theater. Packed with long-lost treasures, new restorations and English-language premieres, it includes his winsome collaboration with Chris Marker, Three Cheers for the Whale (1972), his second, darker film about Chaval, Le Chavalanthrope (1972), and the U.S. premiere of Florence Dauman’s portrait Mario Ruspoli, Prince of the Whales and other Rarities (2011) with Dauman in person. Jake Perlin of the Metrograph, who organized the retrospective which will travel the US in 2019, says:

"So many roads of my early cinephilia led to Argos Films and Anatole Dauman.  The 'hibou' of the Argos logo became a patron creature of French cinema, appearing before work by Rouch, Resnais, Godard, Bresson and Marker and one of the earliest Varda films, 'Du Côté de la Côte' (one of the most beautiful color films ever made). That led to Borowcyzk, Baratier, Ivens, Labarthe and Comolli. But who was this Mario Ruspoli, whose name appeared with Marker’s on 'Vive la baleine'?  Thankfully Florence Dauman, keeper of the Argos flame, was ready to provide Ruspoli’s films, many in new restorations, and with the help of Craig Keller, create new translations for the first time in English.  Florence herself has also made a loving portrait to her dear friend Ruspoli, Mario Ruspoli - 'Prince of the Whales and other rarities', which is part of the retrospective, and the crucial document of what will certainly be the belated US recognition of one of the greatest figures of cinéma-verité and essay films, the Prince, Mario Ruspoli."
Jake Perlin, Programming Director of the Metrograph

When Ruspoli made Chaval, his friend had already passed away a few years before, so he worked entirely from found material: footage of the man at work or recordings of his voice, his drawings (expertly edited into sequences), and Chaval’s own astounding short films, both live-action and animated, and often shown in their entirety. The perceptive narration was written by another cartoonist, Georges Wolinski, a victim in 2015 of the tragic shootings at the Charlie Hebdo offices. There is something of a eulogy about the film – it ends in a cathedral, one populated by Chaval’s beloved bird-men – but even more, the tenderness and complicity of a shared joke.

Mario Ruspoli was born in Rome in 1925, and worked and filmed around the world from his base in Paris. His innumerable interests included gastronomy, etymology, pataphysics and amending Catholic law to allow motorcycles into churches. His work as a director encompassed shorts, features and series on a multitude of subjects, many of them under the aegis of Argos Films, the legendary production company with which Anatole Dauman supported Bresson, Godard, Varda and Resnais. Ruspoli died in 1986, shortly after completing a massive project to film, photograph and write about the cave paintings of Lascaux. Directed by: Mario Ruspoli - 1971 - France - 16 min WITH: Yann Le Louarn, Pascal Mazzotti - WRITER: Wolinski - PRODUCER: Anatole Dauman - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Michel Boschet - MUSIC: Memphis Slim - EDITOR: Françoise Duez Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, Le CiNéMa Club is thrilled to present Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt’s seductive, mischievous A History of Mutual Respect. These young provocateurs began their continuing collaboration with this 16mm short, a teasingly self-reflexive tale of two tourists – young, provocative, and played by the filmmakers – adrift in an unspecified Latin American country. They’re searching for love, for the other, and when they find it in the same girl (Joana Nascimento), it means trouble in their paradise. The short first screened in 2010 at the Rotterdam, Melbourne and IndieLisboa film festivals and won the Golden Pardino at Locarno. We show it now on the exciting occasion of the French release of the pair’s most recent emission into the unknown, their gorgeous and bizarre soccer satire Diamantino, winner of this year’s Grand Prize at the Cannes Semaine de la Critique.

What emerges is a parable of friendship and colonialism as acute and aesthetic as it is goofy and outrageous, both a dick drawing and a heartfelt declaration of love. The film revels in the over-the-top splendor of its locations, from the utopian architecture of Brasilia, to the other-worldly Iguazu Falls at the border of Brazil and Argentina, to the aristocratic parks of Sintra in Abrantes’ native Portugal – while at the same time interrogating the filmmaker’s role in this touristic exoticism. This flirtatious mix of the pop and the political, of dandyism and self-parody, remains key to the work of these remarkable directors, and the strange alchemy of their collaborations.

In addition to the three films Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt have made together (2010’s A History of Mutual Respect, 2011’s Palaces of Pity and 2018’s Diamantino), both directors have made numerous other films and artistic projects, whether solo or with others in their diverse and far-flung network of friends and collaborators. Abrantes has made over twenty short films that have been widely screened acclaimed at numerous international film festivals, including Visionary Iraq (2008, co-directed with Benjamin Crotty), A Brief History of Princess X (2016, previously screened on Le CiNéMa Club) and The Hunchback (2016, co-directed with Ben Rivers). With Alexander Carver, Schmidt directed the 2013 feature The Unity of All Things, the 2015 short and multi-screen installation The Isle Is Enchanted with You, and a 2016 music video for Anohni. In 2016, Abrantes, Schmidt, Carver and Crotty were the subject of a joint retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
Directed by: Gabriel Abrantes & Daniel Schmidt - 2010 - Portugal - 23 min WITH: With Gabriel Abrantes, Daniel Schmidt & Joana Nascimento - WRITER: Gabriel Abrantes & Daniel Schmidt - PRODUCER: Gabriel Abrantes & Daniel Schmidt - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Natxo Checa - MUSIC: Daniel Gdula - EDITOR: Gabriel Abrantes & Daniel Schmidt Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, Le CiNéMa Club screens French director Mikhaël Hers’ 2007 film Primrose Hill. It’s an album-length drama of friendship and disappearance, youth and responsibility, backed by a soundtrack of overlooked indie-rock classics and Hers’ subtle and flowing direction. We screen this deeply felt and strangely timeless film on the occasion of the French release of Hers’ critically acclaimed third feature, Amanda.

As Primrose Hill begins, four friends finish band practice and head off on a long walk. They’re enjoying their too infrequent reunion, the beginning of fall, and the memories that come to mind as they wander. But they’re also all marked by an absence, the fifth friend who went missing a few months before, and whose voice we hear on the soundtrack, describing a dream that’s eerily similar to the images we see.

Many films aspire to the simplicity and purity of a good pop song. What Primrose Hill arrives at is the simplicity of a great pop album. Each of the extended conversations that structure it acts as a new track, has its own melody, arrangement – while also resonating with the whole.  It helps that Hers obviously shares his characters’ love of the indie rock of the ’80s, ’90s and early oughts, and that his film is littered with the hard-earned treasure of a lifelong crate-digger: shout-outs to Prefab Sprout and Ben Watt, brilliant needle-drops of Felt and Boards of Canada, even a track especially written and performed for the film by the Cleaners from Venus’ Martin Newell.

Mikhaël Hers studied at La Fémis before embarking on a series of ambitiously structured medium-length films, of which Primrose Hill was the second. The brilliant New Wave filmmaker and critic Luc Moullet became an early champion of Hers, recognizing him as “the greatest French filmmaker of tomorrow” [“le plus grand cinéaste français de demain”]. Hers premiered his first feature, Memory Lane, at Locarno in 2010, and in 2015 he released This Summer Feeling, starring Marie Rivière, Josh Safdie and Mac DeMarco. His most recent film, Amanda, premiered in the Orrizonti competition at the Venice Film Festival, and is now opening in French theaters.
Directed by: Mikhaël Hers - 2007 - France - 57 min WITH: With Hubert Benhamdine, Stéphanie Daub-Laurent, Thibault Vinçon & Jeanne Candel - WRITER: Mikhaël Hers - PRODUCER: Florence Auffret - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Sébastien Buchmann - EDITOR: Isabelle Manquillet - PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Camille Barbier - COSTUME DESIGNER: Natacha Braun Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

Each year during Paris Photo, the international photography fair that takes place in the Grand Palais of the French capital, we honor the medium by showcasing films made by or about photographers.

This week we’re thrilled to present Models: The Film, directed by Peter Lindbergh, one of the great contemporary photographers. Known for his iconic black and white series and portraits, Lindbergh redefined the standards of fashion photography in the nineties with new realism, prioritizing the authenticity and natural beauty of the women who posed for his camera.

Models: The Film is an enchanting, beautiful portrait of five of Lindbergh’s muses during the supermodel era: Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, Tatjana Patitz, and Stephanie Seymour. Intertwined with footage from Lindbergh’s photoshoots, the models reveal their spirits and speak about their personal relationship to their work, liberated for the camera of Peter Lindbergh, their close creative collaborator and friend. The film both illustrates the the supermodel era and gives a backstage pass to Lindbergh’s iconic photoshoots.

Shot in New York in 1991, Lindbergh also created a love letter to the city, from its industrial landscapes to its vibrant locations, from downtown Manhattan to Coney Island, each time capturing the soul of the people and the decor and offering a wonderful document of New York in one of its most glamorous eras. The film absorbs you into this world through its visually stunning and cinematic images, shot on both 35mm and 16mm. Lindbergh worked here with a close collaborator, the cinematographer Darius Khondji.

“Darius and I met at the end of the eighties. When I decided to make this film about the supermodel phenomena, it was only natural to ask him to be the director of photography. Since then, we've become close friends and have worked together on more or less all of my film projects.”
— Peter Lindbergh

Darius Khondji’s revered work is the subject of an upcoming retrospective at Metrograph in New York, where films such as David Fincher’s Seven, James Gray’s The Lost City of Z and Bong Joon-Ho’s Okja will screen. Khondji’s work is also celebrated in a new book edited by Jordan Mintzer, devoted to fifty years of his career, and featuring in-depth interviews with him and some of the directors and artists he has worked with, including Woody Allen, Bernardo Bertolucci and Philippe Parreno.

Regarded as one of the most influential photographers of the last forty years, Peter Lindbergh was born in Germany and studied painting at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1960s. He began his career in 1978, and gathered international acclaim in the late eighties with pictures of the new generation of models, all dressed in white shirts. A year later Lindbergh would photograph these models in this style together (Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington and Tatjana Patitz) for the now legendary British Vogue January 1990 cover.

Peter Lindbergh’s work is part of permanent collections in many fine arts museums and has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. Among these are the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), with solo exhibitions at Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin), Bunkamura Museum of Art (Tokyo), the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts (Moscow) and the Kunsthal (Rotterdam). Lindbergh has directed a number of films and documentaries: Models, The Film (1991); Inner Voices (1999) which won the Best Documentary Prize at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in 2000; Pina Bausch, der Fensterputzer (2001) and Everywhere At Once (2007), which was narrated by Jeanne Moreau and presented at the Cannes and Tribeca film festivals. Directed by: Peter Lindbergh - 1991 - USA - 52 min WITH: With Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz & Stephanie Seymour - PRODUCER: Ivanka Hahnenberger - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Darius Khondji - MUSIC: Marc Deschamps - EDITOR: Jean-Pierre Baiesi - COSTUME DESIGNER: Elisabeth Djian Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, Le CiNéMa Club steers its course toward the Zona inquinata. It’s a deceptive, illusory place, a wasteland where all lives are on the line, where phantoms wander and discarded genres burst into flame. It’s also one of the first films of French filmmaker F.J. Ossang, a punk futurist always looking to the past, but in order to imagine worlds to come. We present this audacious, lyrical and cinema-saturated early work on the occasion of the US release of Ossang’s new film 9 Fingers (this year’s winner of the Best Director award at Locarno), opening November 2 at New York’s Anthology Film Archives alongside a complete retrospective.

“Zona inquinata” means “polluted area” in Italian. This pollution is partly that of disparate languages and cultures into each other, and the incendiary compounds that result. This is a film in which a French-speaking gang with a motley of accents plot to kill an American cowboy with the name of German car. The cowboy watches an English punk on TV, and the punk looks back with murder in his eyes… or is it recognition? We’re in Europe, or America, or perhaps some confusion of the two, a non-place that only exists within television or its viewers’ imaginations. But the Polluted Zone is also the world, and like the Zone in Tarkovsky’s Stalker, a place both sick, deranged, and teeming with life and strange possibility, including that of a new conception of “the international”, one political and poetic.

In his debut short, 1982’s The Last Enigma, Ossang proposed a history of cinema: Méliès, Caligari, Clair, Eisenstein, Buñuel, Chaplin, Debord and… himself. Zona inquinata (1983) is the first fulfillment of that promise. It was made with the close collaboration of other filmmakers and artists, including Pascale Ferran (who shot it), Robert Cordier (who acts), and Ossang’s band MKB (who provide the propulsive title track).

"After 'The Last Enigma', my ‘tract’ film from 1982, I shot in 3 days and in 16mm 'Zona Inquinata'. It’s a 21-minute fiction — a compression of film noir in 3 acts. It was selected in Cannes in 1983, in the Perspectives du Cinéma Français section.”
— F.J. Ossang

F.J. Ossang was born in 1956 in the Cantal region of France, The film critic Nicole Brenez has described him as a practitioner of “poetry in all its forms… if poetry means a violent outburst of vitality.” He is prolific novelist and poet. His band MKB (Messageros Killers Boys) has been active since the early ’80s. He is the director of five feature films and five shorts, including Treasure of the Bitch Islands (1990, Grand Jury Prize winner at Entrevues Belfort) and Doctor Chance (1997, nominated for the Golden Leopard at Locarno). Directed by: F.J. Ossang - 1983 - France - 21 min WITH: With Robert Cordier, Philippe Sfez, Leslie Stiles & Lionel Tua - WRITER: F.J. Ossang - PRODUCER: MKB Fraction Provisoire - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Pascale Ferran & Serge Ellenstein - MUSIC: MKB Provisoire, Cabaret Voltaire & Tuxedomoon - EDITOR: F.J. Ossang Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, to celebrate the U.S. release of Jonah Hill’s amazing directorial debut Mid90s, we’re presenting Skaterdater — the winner of the Best Short Film award at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival, and now considered the first skate movie ever made. Skaterdater is an exquisite trip back to the very early days of skateboarding, Southern California in the ’60s and the naive charm of adolescence, its timeless story activated by innovative, acrobatic camerawork.

A surf-rock soundtrack leads you through the tale of a young boy and his suntanned skating gang, all wearing matching navy windbreakers and sliding and zigzagging barefoot on small wooden planks. They show off daring tricks, clown and drink shakes at burger stands—until one of them gets lovestruck for a freckled blonde, and a skating duel is organized to determine leadership in the boys’ group.

Skaterdater is also a notable directorial debut, by cult American filmmaker Noel Black, who would follow up the short with 1968’s now legendary black comedy Pretty Poison, in which ex-con arsonist Anthony Perkins (Psycho) and sweet but murderous psychopath Tuesday Weld (Thief) fall head-over-heels in love.

We’re pairing Skaterdater with a list by Jonah Hill of five films (all documentaries, and a few references for Mid90s), with his in-depth commentary on each. Also a portrait of teenage years, Mid90s tells of a 13-year-old’s summer spent seeking his own place away from a troubled home and among a cool group of skaters in LA in the ’90s. Jonah Hill’s directorial debut is thrillingly fun, raw, moving, and beautifully captured on 16mm — with a wonderful ensemble of both first-time (led by Sunni S..) and professional actors (Lucas Hedges, Katherine Waterston). Mid90s opens in New York and LA today, and will be released nationwide on October 26th.
Directed by: Noel Black - 1966 - USA - 17 min WITH: With Michael Mel, Melissa Mallory & Gregg Carroll - WRITER: Noel Black - PRODUCER: Marshall Backlar & Noel Black - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Michael D. Murphy - MUSIC: Mike Curb & Nick Venet Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, Le CiNéMa Club is screening John Magary’s The Second Line, a narrative short set and shot in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The film focuses on cousins MacArthur and Natt, young men displaced by the storm and now reliant on dangerous odd jobs to support their families. Employed by another victim to gut his wrecked house, they find themselves up against old divisions of race and class left newly exposed by the storm. Invested with gracenotes of mystery and humor by confident performances and Magary’s bold, searching direction (seen again in his 2014 debut feature The Mend), The Second Line played in the Sundance, Tribeca, SXSW and Clermont-Ferrand film festivals.

The film’s title is a reference to second lining, a New Orleans parade tradition that has been described as “a jazz funeral without a body”. MacArthur and Natt’s story seems to take some of its odd, swaying rhythm from the movement of the second line, as well as its strange mixture of joy and melancholy. Magary told us more about the film’s relationship to the city and the storm that devastated it:

"In December 2005, I went to New Orleans for the first time with my brother and my girlfriend. Hurricane Katrina had devastated the city just three months before, and we wanted to help out in some small way. We volunteered with a group called Common Ground Collective, gutting a flooded house outside the city in Plaquemines Parish. Gutting is what it sounds like: emptying the contents of a house and stripping it down to its bones, so that the owner can start the painfully complex process of bringing it back to life. The experience stuck with me. When I got back to New York, I was determined to somehow set my film school thesis film there. A year later, we were shooting The Second Line.”
— John Magary

John Magary is a writer, director, and editor who grew up in Dallas, Texas. His most recent film as director is The Mend, which premiered at SXSW and played the BAMcinemaFest, Athens and Entrevues Belfort film festivals, among others. It was nominated for both a Gotham and an Independent Spirit Award. Magary’s film criticism has appeared in Film Comment and Filmmaker Magazine and his feature script Go Down, Antoinette went through the Sundance Directors and Screenwriters Labs. Magary was also chosen as one of “25 New Faces of Independent Film” by Filmmaker Magazine. His work as a film editor includes Nathan Silver’s Thirst Street and Russell Harbaugh’s Love After Love. He is currently developing a variety of feature-length projects, as well as a profane TV series set on a cruise ship. Directed by: John Magary - 2007 - USA - 20 min WITH: With Al Thompson, J.D. Williams & Dane Rhodes - WRITER: John Magary - PRODUCER: Geoffrey Quan, Myna Joseph & Nelson Kim - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Chris Teague - MUSIC: Kai Gross - EDITOR: John Magary - PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Mara LePere-Schloop - COSTUME DESIGNER: Ashley Martin Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, Le CiNéMa Club is pleased to present the keen, glimmering Maison du bonheur, a feature documentary portrait of a Parisian astrologer shot, directed and edited by Canadian filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz. In her ’70s and recently widowed, Juliane Sellam is the animating spirit of the Montmartre apartment building that gives the film its title (“Home of Happiness”). Bohdanowicz captures her routines with singular precision, economy and tenderness, in perfectly self-enclosed vignettes that together form a picture of a woman, her world, and the mutual affection that brings them into harmony. Following screenings at the Vancouver, BAFICI and Hot Docs film festivals, Maison du bonheur received a theatrical release at Metrograph and was a New York Times Critics’ Pick. We present Maison du bonheur on the occasion of the New York Film Festival premiere of a new fiction short by Bohdanowicz, Veslemøy’s Song, screening on October 10th and 11th as part of “International Shorts Program II”.

Vivacious, joking, an unabashed coquette, Juliane Sellam is delighted with her work and with the daily tasks of baking, gardening, and remembering that carry her through each day and into the next. She reveals herself slowly but generously, with a strange complicity that makes her inner world seem both completely open and an intimation of the universe’s most well-guarded secrets. Bohdanowicz at first resists this intimacy, insisting to her subject that, as the filmmaker, her own voice will not appear in the film—but then surrenders and revels in it, in the friendship that her camera’s patient gaze allows us to see grow before our eyes. Bohdanowicz told us a little more about how this collaboration came to be:

"I shot this film on a hand wound 16mm Bolex camera in the summer of 2015 when a colleague of mine suggested that I make a documentary about her mother, Juliane, an octogenarian astrologer who had lived in the same apartment in Montmartre for over 50 years. The opportunity to shoot the film was offered two months before my departure and so I funded the film with a line of credit. I left from Toronto to Paris armed with thirty 100 ft. rolls of 16mm film not knowing much about Juliane and anxious about what I would find. When I arrived at her apartment I was about to knock on the door, but then felt something beneath my feet, it was a doormat that said, "Maison du bonheur". An overwhelming sense of comfort came over me and when a beautiful woman in a long blue dress opened the door, with her hair pinned up in a stunning updo, her warm and inviting smile made me feel at ease. Within 20 minutes of our meeting we began collaborating and scheming on a film which I believe captures a life well-lived."
— Sofia Bohdanowicz

Sofia Bohdanowicz is a Toronto-based filmmaker working. She won the Emerging Canadian Director award at the 2016 Vancouver International Film Festival for her first feature, Never Eat Alone, and was the subject of a retrospective at BAFICI in 2017. She won the 2017 Jay Scott Prize from the Toronto Film Critics Association and Best Canadian Documentary for Maison du bonheur from the Vancouver Critics Circle. A Berlinale Talents alumni, she is currently in post-production on her third feature, MS Slavic 7, which was co-directed with actor Deragh Campbell. She is currently pursuing her MFA in film production at York University, and you can read more about her work on her website. Directed by: Sofia Bohdanowicz - 2017 - Canada - 62 min WITH: With Juliane Sellam - PRODUCER: Sofia Bohdanowicz & Calvin Thomas - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Sofia Bohdanowicz - EDITOR: Sofia Bohdanowicz Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

Our double bill on Olivier Assayas continues this week with the online premiere of the rarely seen documentary Aware, Anywhere – Olivier Assayas, a documentary about Assayas directed by Benoît Bourreau as part of the legendary Cinéma, de notre temps series.  Previously broadcast in an abbreviated version on Ciné+ and TV5 Monde, this is the first time the full cut will be shown since it premiered at the International Film Festival of Geneva (GIFF) in 2017.

Formerly titled Cinéastes, de notre temps, this collection was created by Janine Bazin (wife of Cahiers du cinéma founder André Bazin) and another important cinephile and cinema guru, André S. Labarthe, who sadly passed away earlier this year.  This documentary series  comprises over 100 unforgettable episodes featuring masters talking about their work, such as Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Bresson, François Truffaut, Paolo Pasolini, Samuel Fuller, Jerry Lewis, John Cassavetes, Carl Theodor Dreyer (directed by Eric Rohmer), and Jean Renoir (by Jacques Rivette). Olivier Assayas himself directed an entry in the series about Hou Hou Hsiao-Hsien twenty years before he became the subject of Aware, Anywhere.

Aware, Anywhere is an intimate portrait of Assayas that cleverly blends Assayas’ thoughts – on his films, his approach to cinema, and the place of cinema today – with clips from his filmography and behind the scenes from the making of Personal Shopper, including footage of Assayas preparing scenes with Kristen Stewart.

The documentary is centered around a conversation between Assayas and his longtime friend Kent Jones, the filmmaker and director of the New York Film Festival who helped bring exposure to Assayas’ work in the U.S. Jones has directed documentaries such as Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015) and A Letter to Elia (2010), he also co-wrote Arnaud Desplechin’s Jimmy P. (2013), and IFC Films will release his narrative feature debut, Diane, in 2019.  New York Film Festival opens today with a stellar lineup, including Assayas’ Non-Fiction, which screens on October 2nd and 3rd.

"I think the film reveals a lot about Olivier. One reads different things depending on one’s knowledge of his work. You definitely understand that he is someone who thinks about cinema incredibly well, and who works within a film legacy, who has a clear notion of film history, of the present and future of cinema. You also get that Olivier is someone who always questions and challenges himself, who works constantly."
— Benoît Bourreau

Pour ce portrait, Benoît Bourreau souhaitait placer Assayas dans un récit, pour permettre de faire exister son personnage. C’est ainsi qu’il choisit trois trames de narration: celle de re-parcourir sa filmographie, celui d’un moment actuel de la vie du cinéaste — rebondissant d’un projet avorté (Idol’s Eye) au tournage d’un autre (Personal Shopper) — et “l’après-réalisation”, en le retrouvant au moment de la première nord-américaine de son film. Aware, Anywhere fut tourné en 2016, exactement trente ans après la sortie du premier long-métrage d’Olivier Assayas Désordre dont la fin du film se termine à New York. L’occasion de revenir sur trois décennies de son oeuvre, dans cette même ville.

Benoît Bourreau started by studying art, including at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, and pursued his studies at Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains. Artist, author, and filmmaker, Benoît directed the mid-length documentary Mieux partagés que nous ne sommes (2006), which screened at the Locarno International Film Festival and the Montreal International Festival of Films on Art.  His short film Le Chant des particules (2011) was selected at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival. His first feature-length documentary, Making Heretics (2016), premiered at the IndieLisboa International Film Festival. He is currently developing two narrative feature projects. Directed by: Benoît Bourreau - 2017 - France - 75 min WITH: With Olivier Assayas, Kent Jones & Kristen Stewart - PRODUCER: Bastien Ehouzan, Charles Gillibert & Sylvie Barthet - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Pascal Auffray & Sean Price Williams - EDITOR: Sanabel Cherqaoui & Mathilde Van de Moortel Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

We’re excited to be hosting an Olivier Assayas double bill, beginning this week with Assayas’ early short Laissé inachevé à Tokyo, screening on Le CiNéMa Club in a new restoration.  The series continues next week with the 2017 documentary Aware, Anywhere (part of the cult French series Cinéma, de notre temps), which sees Assayas discussing thirty years of filmmaking, shot when he was presenting Personal Shopper at the New York Film Festival.  The program will also include a list of five films the director loves, with his commentary on each.!

Assayas shot Laissé inachevé à Tokyo in 1982, when he was working as a journalist at Cahiers du Cinéma.  With graphic, stylized frames and a peculiar narrative structure blending elements of film noir, the short tells the mysterious journey of a young woman who travels to Japan to write an adventure novel and gets drawn into an espionage plot. The eclectic cast features Assayas’ longtime friend, the singer Elli Medeiros (from electropop band Elli & Jacno), László Szabó (known for his various roles in French New Wave films), singer and actress Arielle Dombasle, and actor-director Pascal Aubier.

We were honored to receive Assayas’ personal commentary on this early short:

“I’ve always considered Laissé inachevé à Tokyo as a kind of film school short. I mean these films that one makes to get rid of bad ideas before confronting the real questions of cinema. It’s the film of a cinephile as you can clearly see, in that my references are drawn from the classic Hollywood era, from its iconic imagery. I strangely made in my early days a postmodern film when we didn’t think yet in those terms.  But when we started to, I automatically rejected them.  The end result is that I’ve kept a certain guilt towards my actors who trusted me, because I didn’t know how to direct and was imposing on them abstract, lifeless dialogue.

Laissé inachevé à Tokyo has nevertheless been an important film for me. I got to work for the first time with Denis Lenoir, who became the cinematographer for all of my early features, and with Luc Barnier, who edited them. Elli Medeiros was the superstar — in a Warholian way — of all of my short films and she is still one of my best friends.  And because it’s a short film that people have loved, and it won awards, and also because, artistically speaking, I had a lot of fun making it.  It’s the film of a graphic designer, of a visual artist if you want to be generous, influenced by the post-punk style of the times – Bazooka, for example – more than it’s a draft of my films to come. Yet, when I wrote Désordre, my first feature, it is thanks to this “successful stylistic exercise” that I was able to gain the trust of my producers and his partners. Hence I should appreciate it more.”

Laissé inachevé à Tokyo was shot entirely in France. The crew staged the Tokyo decors between an abandoned warehouse in Paris and on docks in Normandy. It was financed thanks to a grant from the French government, which Assayas had finally obtained after applying multiple times.

While the short reflects the taste of a fervent cinephile, referencing the classic film noirs, and the graphic eye of a recent visual arts graduate, it at least suggests some precursors that will be found again in some of Assayas’ future and important films, such as stories set between Europe and Asia, and stories lead by a sensual and enigmatic feminine lead.

One of the most distinguished, prolific and international French filmmakers today, Olivier Assayas began his career in the early 1980s after studying at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris. Laissé Inachevé à Tokyo was his first entry into the Cannes Film Festival in 1983. His first feature Désordre was released in 1986, and from there, his work was quickly acclaimed, with important successes such as Cold Water (1994), Irma Vep (1996), Clean (2004), Carlos (2010) and most recently Clouds of Sils Maria (2014). In 2016, he was awarded the Best Director Prize at Cannes for Personal Shopper. Assayas’ latest feature Non-Fiction, starring Juliette Binoche and Guillaume Cannet, had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in August and will be screening at the New York Film Festival 2018. He is currently prepping his next feature Wasp Network, a spy drama based on Fernando Morais’ book The Last Soldier of the Cold War, following the story of Cuban spies infiltrating an anti-Castro military group in the U.S. during the 1990s.
Directed by: Olivier Assayas - 1982 - France - 22 min WITH: With Elli Medeiros, Arielle Dombasle, László Szabó, Benoît Ferreux & Pascal Aubier - WRITER: Olivier Assayas - PRODUCER: Palo Alto Productions - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Denis Lenoir - EDITOR: Luc Barnier & Sofi Verchain - PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Jean-Paul Ginet & Agnès Bracquemond - COSTUME DESIGNER: Jézabel Carpi Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, we’re thrilled to present the fascinating debut feature of French filmmaker Nicolas Peduzzi. With Southern Belle, Peduzzi brings us a raw, empathic cinematic portrait of real-life 26 year-old Texan Taelor Ranzau, whose inheritance after the sudden death of her oil tycoon father brings many evils into her life.

After receiving the Grand Jury Prize at the well-respected FIDMarseille in 2017, Southern Belle was welcomed by critics during its French release in April. We are honored to show it, for the first time outside of France, on the site.

Capturing Ranzau’s Houston surroundings, the film is also a bone-chilling look into a gun-friendly, racist, Trump-supporting segment of deep America. Shining a light on issues afflicting the country such as prescription drug abuse, Southern Belle is nevertheless a work of dark poetry, led by the movement and voice of its tragic heroine.

The gentle lens applied to Taelor, as well as the intimate access granted to her life, can be explained by the fact that Peduzzi knew his subject well.  They dated a decade before the shoot and remained friends. The filmmaker had always been moved by Taelor’s personality, her way of speaking, and her personal story.  She reminded him of a character from the American Southern literature, “a contemporary version of a character out of a story by Faulkner, or Tennessee Williams, full of contradictions.”

Peduzzi encouraged Taelor to tell her story in her own words and to write her voice over herself: “She needed to tell her story, and she tells it very well.” Peduzzi credits Taelor’s generosity and energy for greatly contributing to the film, encouraging him and his crew to have access to as much possible of her life.  Peduzzi shot the film during two separate trips to Houston, Texas, accompanied by one or two people. From the size of the crew to the camera work, every decision was meant to allow as much intimacy as possible to enter the film. To prepare the shoot, Peduzzi rewatched many films with his crew including films by the Maysles, Cassavetes, and also Laura Poitras. He also showed A Woman Under the Influence, among other films, to Taelor: “I think it unconsciously influenced her as it would have if she were an actress.”

“I didn’t want it to be a documentary, nor a fiction. But a film where reality appears crazier than fiction, depicting these lives without judging them, by showing a dark side of the United States that also reflect contemporary societies elsewhere in the world. I was stunned by how the individuals in the film were true performers, their use of alcohol or drugs surely helping this, but still they play with reality, and act the reality of their own lives.”
After studying at NYU, and at various acting studios in New York and Rome, including Susan Bateman’s studio, Nicolas Peduzzi returned to Paris to act in important plays such as Luc Bondy’s Ivano and Sebastian Galves’ Julius Caesar. He also directed fashion shorts for Pigalle and LT-180. His first short film Death on the Basketball Court (2015) was previously screened on Le CiNéMa Club.  Peduzzi is currently prepping his new film, also non-fiction and based on another fascinating female character he met in Houston, Texas while shooting Southern Belle.   Directed by: Nicolas Peduzzi - 2017 - France - 84 min WITH: With Taelor Ranzau - WRITER: Nicolas Peduzzi - PRODUCER: Elsa Klughertz, Frédéric de Belloy - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Aurore Vullierme & Francesco di Pierro - MUSIC: Maud Geffray - EDITOR: Basile Belkhiri Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, Le CiNéMa Club is proud to be hosting the online premiere of List, a rarely screened short by one of our great contemporary directors, the mischievous, protean and dazzlingly original Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo. Over a slice of chocolate cake, a mother (Yuh Jung Youn) and daughter (Jung Yu-mi) tensely discuss the good-for-nothing relative whose money troubles have brought them to the seaside town of Mohang. For now they have nothing to do but wait, so the younger woman, Mihye, composes a list of goals for her involuntary vacation — a list which she seems to fulfill almost accidentally, as she and her mother wander, eat, drink, and meet with fate, here in the form of a clumsily flirtatious film director (Joon-Sang Yoo).

If this premise sounds familiar, it’s because List’s repetitions and mirrorings reflect past its own frame, extending to Hong’s 2012 feature In Another Country. The longer film begins in the exact same moment, with Minhe and her mother stranded in Mohang, before branching out into a series of three explicitly fictional narratives starring Isabelle Huppert that each echo an unseen exterior reality in contradictory ways. List’s refraction of this is one of Hong’s most effortlessly radical formal gestures, an affirmation of pure narrative possibility as absurdly funny as it is profound.

We asked the director how this unique and fortuitous production came to be. He explained:

"When we finished shooting In Another Country, from the day after Isabelle had left for France, we spent two days shooting List - with the same crew and some of the same actors from In Another Country. Previously I had made a promise with a certain company to deliver a short film for their exhibition, in order to raise some of the budget for In Another Country. I was given total freedom to make any film that I wished to make."
— Hong Sang-soo

Hong Sang-soo is one of world cinema’s most fiendish and prolific imaginations, an inventor of impossible structures and an increasingly acute observer of the human heart. His debut feature, 1996’s The Day a Pig Fell into the Well, was immediately heralded as a landmark in Korean independent and art cinema. In Another Country played in competition at Cannes in 2012 and inaugurated a cycle of films largely in English and often starring French actress Isabelle Huppert. In 2015, his Right Now, Wrong Then won Locarno’s Golden Leopard, as well as Best Actor for Jung Jae-young, and introduced a strain of spirituality that now seems inseparable from his universe. We look forward to the U.S. premiere of his two most recent films Grass and Hotel by the River (for which Ki Joo-bong won Locarno’s Best Actor award) at the 2018 New York Film Festival. Directed by: Hong Sang-soo - 2011 - South Korea - 29 min WITH: Jung Yu-mi, Yoo Joon-Sang, and Youn Yuh-jung - WRITER: Hong Sang-soo - PRODUCER: Jeonwonsa Film Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, Le CiNéMa Club is proud to host the rarely screened 35-minute film Malika is Gone by the great French director and cinephile Jean-Paul Civeyrac, on the occasion of the release of his latest feature A Paris Education at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York.

Marc (Laurent Lacotte) leads an idle existence in the Northwestern Parisian suburb of Gennevilliers. Among his few attachments is his more ambitious friend Nicolas (Renan Cartaux), who finds their relaxed, unquestioning companionship invaluable and is more than happy to subsidize Marc’s inertia. When Marc crosses paths with Malika (Mounia Raoui), the young woman’s presence exerts an almost supernatural pull on him — even as her precarious status as an illegal immigrant threatens to drag her from his life at any moment.

As with many of Civeyrac’s films, Malika is Gone appears to arise from a daydream, a few scattered and confused thoughts held for a moment while sitting in a café, but deepens and darkens as it goes on, here into a meditation on loss, the deportation of undocumented immigrants, and the alternate histories that slip or are torn from our grasp. Looking back on the film, Civeyrac says:

"In Malika is Gone, I approached for the first time a political subject (one that I would fully develop later in my feature My Friend Victoria). For the first time as well, I tried to capture a friendship (a theme that I later explored, in various forms, in Young Girls in Black, My Friend Victoria and A Paris Education). Finally, it was also the first time that I used jazz, rock and pop music — my personal taste usually prompts me to use classical music ( although there is still a bit of John Cage at the end of the film). All these first times have made Malika is Gone an important film for me; by enabling other films, it has been a path that led me somewhere — which is not so often the case."
— Jean-Paul Civeyrac

Jean-Paul Civeyrac is one of French contemporary cinema’s most uncompromising auteurs. His 1996 debut feature Neither Eve nor Adam was described as the meeting point of Robert Bresson and of Nicholas Ray, and his 2003 film All the Fine Promises, an adaption of a novel by the iconic French New Wave actress Anne Wiazemsky, was awarded the Jean Vigo Prize. A retrospective of Civeyrac’s work was presented at La Cinémathèque Française earlier this year. His latest film, A Paris Education, a coming-of-age story set among students and cinephiles, had its world premiere at this year’s Berlin Film Festival Panorama section, was applauded by French critics at its April release in France, and is now playing at New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center. Directed by: Jean-Paul Civeyrac - 2008 - France - 35 min WITH: With Mounia Raoui, Laurent Lacotte, and Renan Carteaux - WRITER: Jean-Paul Civeyrac - PRODUCER: Justin Taurand - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Céline Bozon - EDITOR: Louise Narboni Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, on the occasion of the release of his latest film Support the Girls, we are very proud to be screening Andrew Bujalski’s wry, affectionate, and sneakily profound third feature, Beeswax. It is the tale of two sisters, roommates and close friends who have helped to shoulder each others burdens for as long as they can remember, and played by real-life siblings Tilly and Maggie Hatcher with tenderness and infectious humor. Framing the two young women within a detailed and lively depiction of a small Austin community’s complex network of lovers, coworkers and acquaintances, Beeswax is a continually surprising and insightful revelation of the everyday.

As the film begins, Jeannie (Tilly Hatcher), co-owner of a vintage clothing store in Austin, Texas, finds herself assailed by anxieties that her business partner (Ann Dodge) might be considering legal action against her. She turns to her unemployed sister (Maggie Hatcher) and law student ex-boyfriend (Alex Karpovsky) for guidance, and as the knots of her quandary tighten and elaborate, Bujalski inaugurates an investigation into the economic lives of ordinary Americans that would continue into his most recent films, Results and Support the Girls. At the same time, this main narrative is densely interwoven with dozens of sideplots and relationships, all drawn with meticulous, subtle detail, and featuring some of the best performances of “mumblecore” stalwarts like Karpovsky, the Zellner brothers and Bob Byington. Looking back on the film now, Bujalski told us:

"I feel profoundly lucky to have made 6 feature films so far. Of these, Beeswax seems to be the one that was seen by the fewest people, and received the least enthusiastic response. Probably not coincidentally, I continue to suspect that it is my best."
— Andrew Bujalski

One of the key filmmakers of recent American independent cinema, Andrew Bujalski is a humanist with a playful sense of form. His films have consistently found insight in unexpected places, pushing back the boundaries of the “mumblecore” movement of which he’s considered a leading figure. A student at Harvard University, he was mentored by Chantal Akerman and remained close with the Belgian director until her passing in 2015. His first films, Funny Ha Ha (2002) and Mutual Appreciation (2005), have been enormously influential for their attention to character and lo-fi but considered aesthetic. In 2013 Computer Chess, an eccentrically philosophical period piece shot on analog video cameras, premiered at Sundance. His newest film Support the Girls stars Regina Hall as the overwhelmed manager of a ”sports bar with curves” and is now opening in theaters, following premieres at SXSW and BAMcinemaFest.

Le CiNéMa Club would like to thank Andrew Bujalski, The Cinema Guild, and Contre-Allée for making this program available on the site. Directed by: Andrew Bujalski - 2009 - USA - 124 min WITH: With Tilly Hatcher, Maggie Hatcher, Alex Karpovsky, David Zellner & Nathan Zellner - WRITER: Andrew Bujalski - PRODUCER: Ethan Vogt, Dia Sokol Savage, Peggy Chen - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Matthias Grunsky Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, we’re excited to show Gina Telaroli’s Silk Tatters, a deeply sensual experimental montage composited from original footage and images drawn from film and art history. In addition to her filmmaking practice, Telaroli is an accomplished curator, archivist and critic, and we find in Silk Tatters a movie made by a compulsive, perceptive watcher of the world. Her characters are borrowed from other films, but they too are people who gaze at what they see in a mixture of rapturous love and wild fear. They also dance and sing and dream, until nature reasserts itself in a flower or a field. Silk Tatters premiered in 2015 at the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look Festival, before playing in several other festivals and gallery contexts.

Gina described the film’s creation in the following way:

In the Fall of 2011 I was introduced to Vincente Minnelli’s Brigadoon, a movie that contends with the complicated nature of progress, the improbability of remaining in the past, and how the battle between the two can sometimes leave you heartbroken. The movie screened on 35mm at BAM, and in-between the two evening screenings programmer Jake Perlin spoke about the transition that was happening from 35mm projection to digital projection. That Fall also marked the beginning of a relationship that would take me to new highs and new lows. A few years later Brigadoon, and the entire Minnelli retrospective, was still at the forefront of my consciousness. At the same time my relationship, one built on the rocky foundation of loving and living movies, had reached a breaking point after slowly turning abusive. I understood this was bad even if I couldn’t feel it, if I could only feel devastation at the impending loss and a futile desire to communicate, to somehow make the bad things stop in order to continue on with the good. The result of it all is Silk Tatters, a movie born of movies and an attempt to solve a problem through them, to inexplicably move forward through looking back. The montage, a strict combination of found and newly shot footage and layering different varieties and shades of light (ie: there’s no direct color manipulation) attempts to build something new by chipping away at the old. To combine the very alive present, flowers and plants captured in Central Park, with the gasping for breath past, our constantly evolving cinematic history. To find a new context for something (someone) once loved.

Raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Gina Telaroli is a NYC-based filmmaker, and the video archivist at Martin Scorsese’s Sikelia Productions. Her feature and short film work has been screened at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Anthology Film Archives, the Cinemateca Portuguesa, Chicago Filmmakers, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of the Moving Image, and elsewhere. Her most recent film, This Castle Keep, premiered at the New York Film Festival in 2016. She has also edited and contributed to comprehensive anthologies on the work of William A. Wellman, Allan Dwan, and Tony Scott, and has curated or consulted on film series devoted to their work at MoMA, Il Cinema Ritrovato, the George Eastman Museum, and more. Recently, she consulted on Martin Scorsese Presents: Republic Rediscovered, a 30-film series at MoMA celebrating the poverty row studio, in addition to creating the series trailer and publishing a selection of image essays to accompany the show.
Directed by: Gina Telaroli - 2015 - USA - 17 min Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, we’re presenting Easy Pizza Riderz, a very cool early short by French filmmaker Romain Gavras produced with his highly influential DIY collective Kourtrajmé, a group of friends who wanted to shoot as much and as freely as they could in the late 90s and early 2000s.

Gavras’ wonderful sophomore feature, The World Is Yours — a great pop heist comedy that takes place between the French suburbs and Benidorm in Spain, with exciting performances from Isabel Adjani and Vincent Cassel, and new talents Karim Leklou and Oulaya Amanra — opens August 15^thin France. The film premiered this year at Directors’ Fortnights in Cannes, and features beautiful cinematography by André Chemetoff, along with a perfect soundtrack mixing rap and classic French songs with an original score by Jamie XX.

In Easy Pizza Riders, an urban spoof western where people would kill for a pair of silver Reebok, the beloved French youth culture of the time is on full display: sneakers, pizza delivery, fish eye lenses, funk music. Shot when Gavras was only 21 years old, with a modest video camera, the short announces his unique talent for crafting imaginative, stylish, thrilling film sequences and for capturing era-defining moments.

“I was barely 20 when I did that short. It was a time when a friend working in a pizza delivery shop, and another friend owning a rifle and Mexican hats was enough to shoot a little film. The chase scene with scooters was probably the stupidest thing we did. Middle of Paris, no helmets, no permission, and a live working real riffle… Those were delicious times. Now I’m sad when I don’t get 5 helicopters.”
Romain Gavras

Gavras co-founded Kourtrajmé in 1994 with French filmmaker Kim Chapiron (Sheitan, Dogpound) when the two were only teenagers.  Kourtrajmé is the inverse (French slang) of  “court-métrage,” which means short film. Their aim was to shoot raw, funny films quickly with their friends, without becoming preoccupied with any intellectual or moral meaning : “I swear not to give any sense to my films, but to make films for the senses,” declares their manifesto.

Kourtrajmé made dozens of shorts and music videos, including L’Arabe Strait 2, (Je n’arrive pas) à Danser by French rap group TTC (led by Tekilatex, who stars in Easy Pizza Riderz), and Ladj Ly’s short documentary on the 2005 riots 365 jours à Clichy-Montfermeil. The team and group of friends also included Matthieu Kassovitz (who had just made La Haine), French rapper Oxmo Puccino, French TV host and journalist Mouloud Achour, and Vincent Cassel, who can find in most of their shorts (Les Frères Wanted II: La Barbichette).

Romain Gavras quickly rose to fame as a visionary music video director, providing incredible, highly original, sometimes controversial imagery for Justice’s Stress, MIA’s Born Free and Bad Girls, Jay-Z and Kanye West’ No Church For The Wild, or Jamie XX’s Gosh. Gavras, the son of Greek filmmaker Costa Gavras, made his debut feature Our Day Will Come in 2010 and confirms with The World is Yours that he is one of France’s most exciting filmmakers. Directed by: Romain Gavras - 2002 - France - 9 min WITH: With Dimitriu Bulatovic, Ladj Ly, Kim Chapiron, Butch Award, Tekilatex & Nazem - WRITER: Romain Gavras - PRODUCER: Kourtrajmé Productions - MUSIC: Marco Casanova, Jérôme Gontier Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, Le CiNéMa Club is presenting Univitellin, a refreshing and playful take on the genre of doomed love stories by the American artist Terence Nance. Set in Marseille today, the short film follows a young pair who first lock eyes on the bus to work. Over the course of 84 hours together, they wander the city with a fresh perspective, sharing their interests, distastes, and life stories until a tragic event suddenly brings them closer.  The film is mostly in French – “univitellin” being a French word for identical twins, from the same egg.

The story bends poetically between narrative and essay.  We see romance in the Marseille cityscapes and intimate studies of the lovers’ faces. Nance plays with form and the result is both fluid and effective.

"This film is an improvised prequel about the past lives of one person, it's about the two people they were before they karmically merged."
Terence Nance

Terence Nance is a filmmaker and artist born in Dallas and based in Brooklyn, New York. His debut feature, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012, launched him as an exciting new talent. Nance’s approach to filmmaking breeds a unique and complex layering of diary, film, music, and unconventional storytelling. Nance earned a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014, and he has directed numerous short films and music videos, some of which you can see on his website.

Univitellin premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in 2016 and was selected in festivals around the world including the New York Film Festival and the San Francisco Film Festival where it won the Golden Gate Award for best narrative short. Nance’s new, kaleidoscopic late-night series Random Acts of Flyness, “a stream-of-consciousness response to the contemporary American mediascape”, is currently premiering on HBO. Directed by: Terence Nance - 2016 - France - 15 min WITH: With Aminata M'Bathie, Badara N'Gom, Naky Sy Savané and Maman Faso - WRITER: Terence Nance - PRODUCER: Yohann Cornu, Avi Amar - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Shawn Peters - MUSIC: Akua Naru, Dany Levital - EDITOR: Theo Lichtenberger - PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Alexandre Marcault - COSTUME DESIGNER: Julia Didier Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, Le CiNéMa Club is screening Antes de irme, a sweet, sly debut short by Argentine filmmaker Mariana Sanguinetti. A young woman (Agostina Luz López) enters an apartment. She has the keys and knows her way around. As expected, she finds her books, her ficus plant, her old habits. But Jimena is an infiltrator in her own home, assuming her role as burglar with curiosity and clumsiness. She has found a way to enter the past through a side door – and then to hang out for a while, enjoying a glass of cold water and the sun of a summer afternoon. A world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2017, Sanguinetti’s elegant, ingenious short went on to play the New York Film Festival and Habana Film Festival.

The construction is deceptively simple – one actor, one location. However, Sanguinetti and López fully exploit this spare setup, patiently working their way up through a Buenos Aires apartment building from lobby to rooftop, and finding new sources of humor and insight at every turn. The film wittily deploys technologies against each other (the feedback loop of a cellphone and an answering machine provides a perfect sound gag) and observes its protagonist’s vulnerabilities and daydreams without judgement or cynicism. We were reminded of the effortless anarchism of Chantal Akerman (who Sanguinetti has acknowledged as an influence), especially her shorts Saute ma ville and J’ai faim, j’ai froid, and of Faye Wong’s weirdly affectionate home invasion in Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express.

Marianna Sanguinetti is a filmmaker and actress from Argentina. She is an alumnus of the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires, where she completed Antes de irme as a student, and has worked on a number of other short films as an actress and assistant director. She is currently writing her first feature in collaboration with Renzo Cozza, an actor and filmmaker who appeared in Dear Renzo and La novia de Frankenstein (both previously screened on Le CiNéMa Club).
Directed by: Mariana Sanguinetti - 2017 - Argentina - 10 min WITH: With Agostina Luz López and Daniel Surasky - WRITER: Mariana Sanguinetti - PRODUCER: Sonia Stigliano - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Diego Esparza Jimenez - MUSIC: Tomás Azcárate - EDITOR: Sonia Stigliano - PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Luz Quevedo Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, we’re premiering a tender, witty short film co-directed by American cinematographer Ashley Connor and director-editor Joe Stankus. A selection from the 2017 New York Film Festival, The Layover captures the intimate life of two flight attendants, during the one-year anniversary of the passing of a loved one.

Partners in real life, Connor and Stankus have been making a series of short films starring their family members. The Layover is the second film they’re releasing, and it focuses on Connor’s uncles. The idea for the series originally came from their desire to work on a project together, without necessarily needing an expensive budget or asking for infinite favors from friends in the industry. Their crew consists of the two of them.

The filmmakers wanted to avoid making straightforward documentaries about their relatives, and instead create short, engaging narratives.  Stankus further explains their self-imposed challenge: “How do we make not just a documentary, but actually a story?  How do we incorporate the narrative elements that we like about movies into a project that’s utilizing real people?”  Connor and Stankus’ process is to create a tight structure, the skeleton for a story in which their relatives can fill out the film with their real personalities and natural charisma.



"It is a look into small moments in people’s lives, the little moments that people never talk about but that define us the most."
— Joe Stankus

This thoughtful structure, along with Connor’s experience and great talent as a cinematographer in covering a scene and allowing for multiple viewpoints, engages the viewer in a film that feels like a documentary but isn’t one. For Connor, it is also a way to approach her work differently: “I now work with big crews, nice cameras and lights. I have that part of my work that is very stylized and planned, and this gets a bit more towards direct cinema. For me, it is about stripping everything away and having it be almost plain. It has no bells and whistles and that’s what interests me. I’m not trying to heighten it stylistically, and getting back to shooting with a stripped down package is really freeing.”

Ashley Connor and Joe Stankus are filmmakers based in NYC. Connor is one of the most exciting new American cinematographers. Her recent credits include with Dustin Guy Defa’s Person to Person, Josephine Decker’s Madelines’ Madeline, Adam Leon’s Tramps and Desiree Akhavan’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post, which won the Grand Jury Prize in Sundance this year. Joe Stankus is a director and editor who also works as a film projectionist at the IFC Center. His short films have been selected at various festivals including the New York Film Festival, The Maryland Film Festival, The New York Jewish Film Festival, and the Independent Film Festival Boston.

You can see more of their respective work on their websites: ashleyconnor.net and joestankus.com. The first short film in the series, The Backseat, focuses on Stankus’ grandparents, and the pair has now shot two upcoming films, one film revolving around Stankus’ father and his brother, and the other film made during a cruise with Connor’s family. Directed by: Ashley Connor & Joe Stankus - 2017 - USA - 10 min WITH: With Mike Adams and Ed O'Brien - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Ashley Connor - EDITOR: Joe Stankus Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

To mark the U.S. release of Gus Van Sant’s splendid latest feature Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, Le CiNéMa Club is thrilled to present this week Four Boys in a Volvo, a beautiful and rarely seen short film directed by the great American filmmaker, in a restored version by the Academy Film Archive. In a couple of minutes and sequences, Gus Van Sant kidnaps our eyes, bringing us along the journey of four teens driving through the open road of an American desert landscape.

The short film was made from material shot for a Levi’s commercial on which Gus Van Sant was given complete freedom. Van Sant delivered the ad, and separately made his own short film; one that feels complete in and unto itself. The stunning, natural-lit frames are the result of what might be the filmmaker’s first collaboration with his long-time collaborator, the much revered, and sadly passed, cinematographer Harris Savides. The pair later worked together on all of Van Sant’s features from Gerry (2002) to Restless (2011). In Four Boys in a Volvo, repeating images of a car driving through a desert road remind us of Van Sant’s later films Gerry or Last Days (2005). This elliptical film conveys one of the filmmaker’s most beloved themes; a portrait of youth in search of meaning and escape.

Gus Van Sant’s latest feature Don’t Worry He Won’t Get Far on Foot is a moving and uplifting film based on the memoir of the same title by artist and cartoonist John Callahan — with wonderful performances by Joaquim Phoenix, Jonah Hill, Jack Black, Rooney Mara, Kim Gordon, Udo Kier and Beth Ditto. It is released in select theaters in the U.S. this Friday, July 13th 2018.

Le CiNéMa Club would like to thank Gus Van Sant and the Academy Film Archive for making Four Boys in a Volvo available on the site.
Directed by: Gus Van Sant - 1996 - USA - 4 min WITH: With Lucien, Danny, Joe, and Mark - WRITER: Ken Woodard - PRODUCER: Steve Nealy - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Harris Savides - MUSIC: Bill Frisell and Wayne Horvitz - EDITOR: Wade Evans Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, we’re happy to present an ingenious, enchanting short film made by the young New York filmmaker Anna Pollack. In this five-minute video, we’re introduced to a young man cycling through the night, talking about his ardent teenage love for a girl, remembering and recounting small details about her, such as her chameleon-like quality. The film plays as an evening romantic confession.

Pollack began with a real-life voicemail that her French friend Clovis had once left her and that she had saved. She created a fictional narrative around it, blending photographs and footage of Clovis and other friends from when they had first met during time abroad in London, along with archival images and a video she had asked him to shoot of himself recording that message (shot in Paris). Pollack then edited all of this material together, playing with the textures and associations of the different formats and mediums. We love the simplicity, contemporaneity and sensibility of the result.

"It’s a collage, a mixture of different formats and mediums, different people, places and spaces, from a same, familiar period of my life, that I threw and mushed together and tried to work into a story. I like that it’s layered; the voicemail and the footage are each true on their own, but put together they’re not."
— Anna Pollack

Anna Pollack grew up in Queens, New York. She remembers watching films from an early age and finding through them “a way to escape things,” including high school. She recently graduated from NYU Tisch School of the Arts and is now interning for the Safdie brothers’ production company Elara Films, as well as logging and taking notes on footage for the documentarian Udi Aloni. She’s currently finishing both a photobook and a film on a recent trip she made to Jamaica, where her mother is from. Pollack enjoy working with, and mixing, both mediums. You can find more of her work on her Vimeo page, including earlier films such as A Family Portrait or Juan. Pollack adds; “I’d like to make a feature-length narrative one day, maybe when I’m older, but my thing now is rather to capture real people and real things. I want to experience more before sitting down and writing.”  Directed by: Anna Pollack - 2018 - USA - 5 min WITH: With Clovis Bataille - WRITER: Anna Pollack Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

Our spotlight on Brooklyn’s BAMcinemaFest continues with a special presentation of Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn’s sun-kissed L for Leisure. A US premiere at the festival in 2014, this mischievous study of vacationing American academics finds its sprawling ensemble of characters popping up across the country and around the world over the course of 1992 and 1993, their hair down, mood mellow and Snapples close at hand. It is at once a nostalgic, freely imagined snapshot of a past that perhaps never was, and a psychedelic speculation about futures yet to come. Le CiNéMa Club screens the feature to celebrate Kalman and Horn’s return to BAMcinemaFest on June 28th with the world premiere of their supernatural western Two Plains & a Fancy.

L for Leisure is the weirdly cohesive result of four years of production and a precarious, fragmented shooting schedule. The non-professional cast was drawn from friends and acquaintances, including filmmakers Benjamin Crotty and Mati Diop (whose work has previously screened on Le CiNéMa Club). Horn doubles as the film’s cinematographer and fills her 16mm, 4:3 frames with fascinating architectural details and bold, richly colored swathes of sea and sky, blissfully rhyming with the lush synths and samples of John Atkinson’s score. If Whit Stillman’s Barcelona and Andy Warhol’s My Hustler were to go on an ayahuasca retreat, meet on a higher plane of spiritual/cinematic existence, and fuse their consciousnesses, chances are they’d return as L for Leisure.

"The distance between history and present-tense, and what the passage of time means, is an ongoing project of ours. But L for Leisure was a sustained moment of our considering the middle distance – a past that is still accessible to us through memories, and directly through all sorts of everyday artifacts, but still feels somehow irretrievable."
— Whitney Horn & Lev Kalman

Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn grew up in the suburbs of New York. They began their 15-year collaboration while students at Columbia University, embarking on a series of shorts with which they developed their signature style. Kalman is currently based in San Diego and Horn in San Francisco.  Their debut feature, 2014’s L for Leisure, had its world-premiere at Rotterdam, its US premiere at BAMcinemaFest, was called “brazenly original” by Filmmaker Magazine, and “some mysterious alchemy of deep irony and deeper beauty” by BOMB Magazine. We are excited to discover their “Spa Western” Two Plains & a Fancy at BAMcinemaFest, and a new serialized project entitled Dream Team, currently in development. Directed by: Whitney Horn & Lev Kalman - 2014 - USA - 74 min WITH: With Marianna McClellan, Kyle Williams, Bro Estes, Libby Gery, Benjamin Crotty, Benjamin Coopersmith, Trevor Haav, & André Frechette III - WRITER: Whitney Horn & Lev Kalman - PRODUCER: Whitney Horn & Lev Kalman - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Whitney Horn - MUSIC: John Atkinson - EDITOR: Whitney Horn & Lev Kalman - COSTUME DESIGNER: Catherine Czacki Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

As the first part of a spotlight on BAMcinemaFest, Brooklyn’s essential annual celebration of American independent film, Le CiNéMa Club is proud to present Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold’s We Demand, a portrait in miniature of radical African American activist James Roebuck and his participation in the Vietnam War protest movement. By blurring the line between historical recreation and fiction filmmaking at its most artificial, We Demand becomes a woozy, wandering road trip of the mind, a journey toward political action set against a back-projected sky. The short world-premiered in the Berlinale’s Forum section in 2016, and will be making its New York premiere at BAMcinemaFest on June 24th—part of a special program dedicated to Everson’s films that includes several products of his vital ongoing collaboration with Harold (find more details here).

In the short, Ricky Goldman plays James Roebuck, the University of Virginia’s Student Council’s first African-American president and a galvanizing force behind the school’s historic 1970 Vietnam War protests. Everson and Harold choose to depict Roebuck during a few precisely rendered moments of reflection and preparation. He composes his list of demands for the university’s administration, and reminisces about the political role models of his youth, while the film’s rich, 16mm-shot colors give way to the stark black and white of archival footage. As Everson has said of his style and formal preoccupations:  

"Instead of standard realism I favor a strategy that abstracts everyday actions and statements into theatrical gestures, in which archival footage is re- edited or re-staged, real people perform fictional scenarios based on their own lives and historical observations intermesh with contemporary narratives. The films suggest the relentlessness of everyday life—along with its beauty—but also present oblique metaphors for art-making."
Kevin Jerome Everson is the director of nine feature films, including The Island of St. Mathews (2013) and Tonsler Park (2017), and over 135 shorts. He has been the subject of mid-career retrospectives at the Harvard Film Archives, the Tate Modern and the Whitney Museum, and the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and Harvard University. With critic and writer Greg DeCuir he will co-curate the 2018 Flaherty Seminar, running June 16th to 22nd.

Claudrena N. Harold is a Professor of history and African American studies at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, where she specializes in African American history, black cultural politics, and labor history. Her books include the The Rise and Fall of the Marcus Garvey Movement in the Urban South (2007) and New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South (2016). She has co-directed and produced six films with Everson, most recently How Can I Ever Be Late (2017), which also screens in BAMcinemaFest’s June 24th program.

Le CiNéMa Club would like to thank the filmmakers and Madeleine Molyneaux from Picture Palace Pictures, for making this program available on the site. Directed by: Kevin Jerome Everson & Claudrena N. Harold - 2016 - USA - 10 min WITH: with Ricky Goldman, Richard Warner & Ryan Leach - WRITER: Kevin Jerome Everson & Claudrena N. Harold - PRODUCER: Claudrena N. Harold & Madeleine Molyneaux - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Kevin Jerome Everson - EDITOR: Kevin Jerome Everson Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

To coincide with the highly anticipated release of Hereditary, Ari Aster’s masterfully frightening debut feature, we are thrilled to present two of his early short films: Basically and Munchausen.

Since its highly acclaimed launch earlier this year in Sundance and SXSW, Hereditary has been hailed as one of the most distinctive, chilling horror films in recent years — announcing the arrival of an exciting American filmmaker. Hereditary takes you into the nightmarish story of a family who is haunted and terrorized by an ominous presence after the passing of a grandmother (watch the trailer below!).  The film, which is being released this week in the U.S. by the great A24, includes magnificent performances by Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, Gabriel Byrne and Ann Dowd.

Experimenting with two very different styles, the shorts are a testament to Aster’s already daring and ambitious voice.  Similar themes can be found running through Hereditary: family trauma, unsettling characters, and the use of domestic space as a location for uncanny morbidity.

Basically is the first episode of a once planned series Aster described as “an idiosyncratic collection of monologue-driven character profiles” of Los Angeles residents. It stars the hypnotic Rachel Brosnahan as a self-involved, spoiled aspiring actress who shares with us her personal issues, including those about her mother and ex-boyfriend. This darkly funny satire unfolds in a series of ingeniously framed vignettes, contributing to the eerie atmosphere that Aster brings to the screen. The film premiered at the New York Film Festival in 2014.

Munchausen is a silent montage about a mother (Bonnie Bedelia) who will take dangerous risks to avoid the heartbreak of her son’s departure to college.  Aster challenged himself to make a short based on the aesthetics and tropes of Pixar movies. The result is full of rainbow colors, with sweeping camera movement, transforming the perfect American suburban life into a perverse, macabre place. Munchausen premiered at Fantastic Fest in 2013.

Before writing and directing his brilliant, widely praised debut feature Hereditary — and after receiving his MFA in Directing from the AFI Conservatory – Ari Aster had already made a strong impression with his short films.  The filmmaker doesn’t consider himself tied to the horror genre, but his next project is another highly anticipated horror movie with A24.  We cannot wait to see what Ari Aster does next.
Directed by: Ari Aster - 2013-2014 - USA - 15 - 17 min WITH: With Rachel Brosnahan, and with Liam Aiken & Bonnie Bedelia - WRITER: Ari Aster - PRODUCER: Ahsen Nadeem & Alejandro De Leon - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Pawel Pogorzelski - MUSIC: Brendan Eder & Daniel Walter - EDITOR: Arndt-Wulf Peemöller - PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Bonnie Bacevich - COSTUME DESIGNER: Dakota Keller Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, we’re excited to present the streaming premiere of Manodopera, a short film by Greek-French director Loukianos Moshonas. In it, the director himself plays a young man renovating his Athens flat with the help of an assured, older Albanian neighbor (Altino Katro). By day, the two almost wordlessly go about their work – demolishing, pulverizing, and carefully rebuilding – and then the younger spends his nights on a rooftop overlooking the city, where friends gather to discourse on subjects both immediate and arcane, from the Greek state to their own supposed godhood. Premiering in the Pardi Di Domani competition at the Locarno Film Festival in 2016, Manodopera went on to play the New Directors/New Films, Athens, Anger and numerous other film festivals, and has become the basis for Moshonas’ first feature film, currently in development.

The film’s non-professional actors play versions of themselves, and the events shown are simultaneously orchestrated fictions and documentary material, recording the real renovation of Moshonas’ apartment and the changing thoughts and feelings of a few intimate friends. But his direction is electrifying and attentive, always actively engaging and rooting out some greater sense of personality and identity in the quotidian incidents depicted. Carefully planned camera pans and pushes catch and hold fleeting gestures until they vibrate with strange intensity, and a profound sensitivity to space dynamicizes the staircases, windows and walls around which the characters work and lounge – even as they crumble under the blows of a hammer. Manodopera is an exhilarating film about work and thought, about how they weave in and out of one another, both in individuals and the camaraderie of a shared task or a summer night. Speaking to the film’s tensions between action and stillness, speech and silence, Moshonas notes:

"My previous work grew out of a desire to film speech as action, or a risk someone has to take. Manodopera prolongs this, while attempting to bring in speechless relationships, of smashing and building actions, that emphasize class relations."
Born in 1985 in Athens, he attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon and Le Fresnoy in Lille. His shorts films have been screened and awarded in numerous festivals – New Directors/New Films in NY, Angers, Documenta Madrid, Janela, Olhar de Cinema, Vila do Conde, Mar de Plata – while his last two, Manodopera, and Young Men At the Window, premiered at Locarno Film Festival in 2016 and 2017, where the latter won the EFA Award for Best European Short Film. Based on Manodopera, he’s preparing his first feature No God, No Master, a twisted, class-related film noir of endless demolition and renovation work, between reality and fantasy in an Athens basement flat. Directed by: Loukianos Moshonas - 2016 - Greece & France - 30 min WITH: With Loukianos Moshonas, Panagiotis Oikonomopoulos, Altino Katro, Nikolas Dervenoulias & Anastasis Roubakos - WRITER: Arthur Harari & Loukianos Moshonas - PRODUCER: Paul Conquet - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Paul Guilhaume & Boris Munger - EDITOR: Leonidas Papafotiou Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, we’re premiering Palenque, a musical portrait of San Basilio de Palenque: a small Colombian town who was the first one in the Americas to free itself from colonization, and that was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005. Directed by  the Colombian, Chicago-based young filmmaker Sebastián Pinzón Silva, the short premiered at the Locarno Film Festival, before being screened at this year’s New Directors/New Films festival.

Palenque was Pinzon’s thesis project at Northwestern University. The inspiration for its musical narrative came from the local, funerary tradition of Lumbalú, a syncretism between Catholic and Western African traditions brought by the men and women who were enslaved during colonial times. During this ritual, chants and drum beats are performed for nine days and nights to wish the souls of the dead a prompt return to their ancestral home in Africa. Pinzón Silva spent an entire summer immersing himself within the community of the town, and shot the film with a very small crew and budget.

"I had no pre-conceived plan or script before getting there. Much of my time in Palenque was spent in development of the idea. It was important for me to be there to do so within the community. I worked closely with Kuchá Suto, the local youth media collective. They introduced me to the main performers of the film. Our main premise for the actual production of the film was to find musicality in the rhythms of day-to-day life."
— Sebastián Pinzón Silva

Sebastián Pinzón Silva is a Colombian director interested in exploring the collective conscience of his country through his films. He holds a degree in Film and Television from the Savannah College of Art and Design and an MFA in Documentary Media from Northwestern University. His work has screened at festivals including Locarno, True/False, SFFILM Fest, Cinélatino, Camden International, and at venues including the MoMA, MACBA Buenos Aires, and the Museum of the Moving Image. He is based in Chicago where he is part of the Mirror Stage Film Collective. He’s currently developing a feature project based on a short he directed for National Geographic about a community that was displaced by paramilitary forces in Colombia in 2001. The feature follows a woman who returns alone to the remains of her old village La Bonga, as she tries to convince friends and neighbours to rebuild the town. Directed by: Sebastián Pinzón Silva - 2017 - Colombia - 26 min WITH: With Emelina Reyes Salgado, José Valdez Teherán, Rosalina Cañate Pardo & Joaquín Valdez Hernández - EDITOR: Sebastián Pinzón Silva Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, on the occasion of his feature Asako I & II screening in competition at Cannes, we’re excited to present the online premiere of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Heaven Is Still Far Away, a ghostly tale of contemporary Japan from one of its most talented young directors.

Yuzo (Nao Okabe) and Mitsuki (Anne Ogawa) live together in Yuzo’s small apartment, their constant companionship tender and indifferent in turn. Then Yuzo receives a call from Satsuki (Hyunri), a documentarian resolved to make a film about a now-distant family tragedy, and the three meet, to search for some way to account for their relationship to one another, the memories they share and those they’ve kept to themselves.

Remarkably productive since his first film in 2007, Ryusuke Hamaguchi has now completed two shorts, three documentary features, and six fiction features. Among the latter are Happy Hour, a sprawling, 5-hour-long epic of female friendship that premiered at Locarno in 2015 and first brought him to the attention of Western critics and cinephiles, as well as the highly anticipated Asako I & II. Made between these two features, Heaven Is Still Far Away is dramatically spare and modest in comparison, but again proves his remarkable ability to make the familiar strange again, to bring emotions long buried in the routine of modern living ecstatically back to its calm surface. As the melancholy and yet hopeful title suggests, whole worlds of feeling, memory, and experience lie within these characters, where they might at first appear just past the camera’s reach. However, Hamaguchi and his actors find ways to trace these inner landscapes in phantom form, as gestures and gazes, stories and confessions. Much like the censorship mosaics we see Yuzu earning his living applying to “S&M-ish” pornographic videos at the short’s start, Heaven Is Still Far Away blurs the boundaries between one person and another — between the spaces they inhabit, their genders, their ages, even their thoughts and emotions. The unexpected result is a love story in five dimensions, like Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir or Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Journey to the Shore, and a film as mysterious as it is affecting. Hamaguchi notes of the film:

"HEAVEN IS STILL FAR AWAY is a short piece originally made only for supporters of the crowdfunding of HAPPY HOUR. Courtesy of them, we can now show it to the public — my first ghost story."

Born in 1978, Ryusuke Hamaguchi studied at the Graduate School of Film and New Media at Tokyo University of the Arts, where he graduated with a Master in Film. Passion, his graduation film, was selected at San Sebastian in 2008, while The Depths (2010) was screened at TOKYO FILMeX. He then co-directed the series of documentaries Tôhoku Documentary Trilogy with Kô Sakai from 2011 to 2013. He has since completed several fiction features, including Intimacies (2012), Happy Hour (2015) and Asako I & II, which has premiered in competition at the Festival de Cannes. Directed by: Ryusuke Hamaguchi - 2016 - Japan - 38 min WITH: With Nao Okabe, Anne Ogawa & Hyunri - WRITER: Ryusuke Hamaguchi - PRODUCER: Hideyuki Okamoto & Satoshi Takada - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Yoshio Kitagawa - MUSIC: Haru Wada - EDITOR: Ryusuke Hamaguchi Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

Every year, during the Festival de Cannes, we highlight some of the directors selected in the main competition of this prestigious annual rendez-vous of international cinema.

This week, we are happy to present Those for Whom It’s Always Complicated, a mid-length film directed by French filmmaker Eva Husson, whose second feature Girls of the Sun premieres tomorrow in Cannes, and stars Golshifteh Farahani as a commander in chief of a Kurdish female battalion preparing to liberate her hometown from the hands of extremists.

Shot in five days in the Death Valley, Those for Whom It’s Always Complicated is an English-language romantic comedy. It tells the story of an LA couple, Camille and G.J., who escape the city for a weekend trying to rekindle their relationship, when G.J.’s best girlfriend crashes their road trip.

Eva Husson wrote the film in collaboration with her cast, shooting it in five days. A self-produced project made on the go, where Husson was also the cinematographer, the film is an early testimony to her directing strengths — leading her story with sincere, sensitive dialogue and a cinematic sense of her camera. The 50-minute film played the festival tour before it aired on the European TV channel Arte in 2014.

Eva Husson has lived between the U.S., France and Spain most of her adult life. After obtaining a Masters in English Literature at La Sorbonne, she completed an MFA in Directing at the American Film Institute in LA. Her first short Hope to Die screened in various festivals including Cannes, Tribeca, Deauville, and it was nominated for awards at the Student Academy Awards and the American Society of Cinematographers. Her first feature Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story), following the sexual exploits and awakenings of a group of adolescents in a small town of France in the age of social media, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. It was praised by the French critics and released theatrically in the UK and the US. We look forward to seeing her new feature Girls of the Sun.
Directed by: Eva Husson - 2013 - France | USA - 50 min WITH: With Camille Rousseau, G.J. Echternkamp & Morgan Kibby - WRITER: Eva Husson - PRODUCER: Eva Husson & Alexandre Perrier - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Eva Husson - MUSIC: Eben Smith - EDITOR: Emilie Orsini Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, to mark the 50^th anniversary of May ’68 – 20^th century France’s most important social movement, which became a cultural milestone – we are proud to present Actua 1, a remarkable early short by Philippe Garrel that the French master shot in the heat of the times.  The social movement was the most important that France has seen during the 20th century, and it felt short of political change, it remained a cultural milestone known across the world.

Shot during the peak of the events of ’68 – when student workers took to the streets and occupied universities and factories, protesting against capitalism, consumerism, traditional values and order – the 6-minute black and white short is comprised of 35mm film by Garrel and 16mm footage by film students who participated in the revolts.  We hear narration by a man and a woman: “What comes into the world to change nothing, deserves neither respect or patience…”. Garrel conceived Actua 1 as “revolutionary newsreels.”

Actua 1 is both a real-time document of the legendary political, social, and moral upheaval, and an early testimony to the prodigious talent and poetic voice of the great French filmmaker, who made film when he was only 20 years old. He was then at the beginning of his underground, experimental phase that defined the start of his career, before shifting to narrative features in the eighties. In a interview for the French public radio ‘France Culture’, Garrel remembers the time period when he was making his first short, Les Enfants Désaccordés (1964);

"I had an editing table close to my bed; I was editing all the time and I loved it. It’s really interesting to make films as a painter would work, meaning in a studio — and that’s what I was trying to do. I was asking myself what we could do following the New Wave, who had gone to shoot in real life settings, and I thought that’s what we could do; to have the life of a painter, working on the ground a bit, but having an important life in the studio, shooting films from your editing table. It’s a very solitary life, and this created a certain economy in the style of my films, which remained in some way from the moment I started being produced in the early eighties."
Philippe Garrel

There is word that Actua 1 was only screened in 1968, before getting lost, and Jean-Luc Godard still remembered the images in his foreword to the book on the work of Garrel, ‘Une camera à la place du coeur’, more than thirty years later: “I also remember these shots from ’68, the only ones that show riot police officers full-face with the dark austerity of the 35mm, when everyone was making blurry 16mm…” The film was long known as a “lost film” in Garrel’s filmography. In his feature Regular Lovers (2005), set within a group of young people following the 1968 events, Garrel even re-created the short by memory.  The print was eventually found labelled and waiting at the French Archives in 2014, and restored by the La Cinémathèque Française.

A child of May ’68 and of the French New Wave, Phillipe Garrel directed his first films at the age of 16.  He went on to become a prominent, highly-regarded voice in French cinema for over fifty years. The son of the great French actor Maurice Garrel, and a disciple of Jean-Luc Godard, Philippe Garrel has described himself as an artisan, and he once said of cinema that is is “Freud plus Lumière”. His work is characterized by two main periods: the beginning of his career with more abstract, experimental films (partly during which he lived with the singer Nico, with whom he made four films including The Inner Scar, 1972). Garrel shifted in the eighties to intimate, personal and sometimes autobiographical narrative films in which he also casts his children, the celebrated actor and filmmaker Louis Garrel (The Dreamers, Regular Lovers, Saint Laurent, Two Friends) and the rising actress Esther Garrel (Jealousy, Call My By Your Name). Philippe Garrel currently lives in Paris with his wife, the filmmaker Caroline Deruas (L’indomptée). Garrel was twice awarded the Silver Lion for Best Direction at the Venice Film Festival, for J’entends plus la guitare in 1991 and Regular Lovers in 2005. Directed by: Philippe Garrel - 1968 - France - 6 min Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, we’re excited to host the online premiere of Emily Kai Bock’s first narrative short film, A Funeral for Lightning.  The wonderfully talented Canadian filmmaker has been a director to watch since making her first music video for Grimes’ “Oblivion”, which Paul Thomas Anderson called “fucking great” after screening it as part of his masterclass at the New York Film Festival for his film, Inherent Vice.  Emily Kai Bock is one of the most notable music video and commercial directors in recent years.  She has provided stunning, award-winning visuals for other artists such as Arcade Fire, Lorde, and Grizzly Bear, along with distinctive commercials for Google, Yves Saint Laurent, and Coca-Cola, among others.

With A Funeral For Lightning, Bock delivers a beautiful, sensitive and perceptive film. The short is told from the perspective of Mandy, a woman stuck between the promises made to her by her charismatic husband and the stark reality of her situation. Her husband, Cornelius, sells her on his desire for a “free life” off-the-grid, growing his own food and singing by the firelight. In reality, Mandy, who is now seven months pregnant, is left for days in their small, dilapidated house in the middle of nowhere, without money, food, or any means to leave.

To the filmmaker, the short is a reflection on abandonment and neglect as a form of emotional and psychological abuse in relationships — how the intention of love is an illusion if not supported by action, and that illusion itself can be very toxic. Bock was inspired to write this story from fragments of personal experience, as well as hearing similar stories echoed by mainly other women. She challenged herself to create something completely different from her past work in music videos and commercials:

"I wanted to direct a film that was quiet, slow, and locked-off — sort of the antithesis of every music video I made — absent of music, cutting to the beat, and swooping steadicam. I also wanted to play with the subjective camera perspective of a protagonist who isn’t necessarily steering the story, which is something that screenwriting books tell you to avoid! But the film was about being on the other side of a loud, narcissistic and dominating character, because in real-life not everyone has a lot of agency in that situation. The protagonist is in a prison of her own submission and spends the film trying to find her strength and autonomy."
— Emily Kai Bock

The non-linear structure that cuts back and forth, from present-day to flashbacks and dreams, was an early intention in the screenplay. Bock wanted to draw us close to her protagonist’s distressed mental space, which she describes as “caught in a loop of playing back memories and dreaming, trying to understand how she ended up there and to figure out what to do about it.”

When scouting in Tennessee, Emily Kai Bock street casted her lead actors, Annie Williams and Daniel Allen Frazier Jr. — two people who had never acted before, and yet deliver authentic, lived-in performances. She credits the dedication they had to the roles, and explains that she learned, when casting for music videos, “how to find the real fictional character in the real world.”

The director’s references for the look of the film were the photographs of Joel Sternfeld and William Eggleston, as well as the paintings of Edward Hopper. Bock and her close collaborator — and real-life partner — cinematographer Evan Prosofsky, try to shoot as often as possible on film. She states, “I’m so in love with film; the colour palette and tones that you get on film is so rich that you barely need color-grading. I’m always so happy with the process and result, it just feels genuine, like the mix of human sight and oil paint…”

Prosofsky elaborates on their choices for A Funeral for Lightning: “We landed on an approach we first played with on our music video ‘Afterlife’ for Arcade Fire, where we blended 70mm dream sequences and 35mm moments of reality together to heighten certain scenes. I was blown away by the way 70mm gives each shot an emotional punch, the clarity and depth seemed almost transformative, breaking free of the romantic gaze 35mm so frequently offers.” To make this possible within their small budget, they worked with a small local crew and a lot of natural light, and shot the film with leftover short ends (the 70mm film stock was purchased left over from Interstellar!).

Emily Kai Bock was born in Toronto, Ontario and is now based in Los Angeles. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University in Vancouver in 2007, with a focus in painting and sculpture. She began making music videos for her friends in Montreal — such as Grimes’ “Oblivion”, which became a viral and critical success. Bock was able to attend Sundance two years ago, for writing, directing, and editing a short documentary on the New York underground rap scene, called Spit Gold Under An Empire, which she made in partnership with Sundance TV and Nokia Music.

A Funeral for Lightning premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it was selected by TIFF as one of Canada’s Top Ten Films. It won the Grand Jury Award for Best Short Film at the LA Film Festival, an Honorable Mention for Best U.S. Short and Best Tennessee Short at the Nashville Film Festival. In 2017, she was granted a year-long fellowship to develop her feature by Cinereach.

Emily Kai Bock is currently writing the screenplay for her first feature, which will be a new departure in genre for her.  We couldn’t be more excited.  You can see more of Emily Kai Bock’s work by visiting her website. Directed by: Emily Kai Bock - 2016 - USA/Canada - 24 min WITH: With Annie Williams and Daniel Frazier - WRITER: Emily Kai Bock - PRODUCER: Emily Kai Bock & Lora Criner - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Evan Prosofsky - EDITOR: Emily Kai Bock - PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Brit Doyle - COSTUME DESIGNER: Samantha Roe Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, we are premiering the first short film by New York-based photographer and writer Jen Steele.  Set in a small, rural Wisconsin town, Follow the Roses was inspired by Steele’s childhood memories from the 90s. The film captures, through beautiful Super 16mm images, the summer days of two young girls, Bruce and Ruby, half-aware of the jagged emotional state of their mother, who is struggling to keep control of the situation after the off-screen arrest of their father.

The mother is played by the wonderful actress Olivia Cooke (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Thoroughbreds, Ready Player One) while the young girl is played by first-time actor Mason Luna Matthias. The music is composed by Jesse Marchant, featuring tracks by Bob Dylan, and Carly Simon.

Follow the Roses initially came from a feature Jen Steele originally wrote in 2015 for her mother, who passed away the following year. Steele wanted to investigate her childhood, when she witnessed her parents suffering from heroin addiction in the 90s. “I wanted to tell a story that felt honest and true to the reality of people suffering from addiction by focusing primarily on the ripples as opposed to its primary subjects. This short is the beginning of that depiction,” explains the filmmaker, who is now working again on the feature version.

Steele chose to narrate her short through the elder sister girl, and she tried to shoot mostly from the point of view of the children.  Every location in the short is a place from Steele’s childhood.  The artist and her crew shot the film over the 4th of July, which she says “added to the exciting, bizarre American romance we encountered daily.”

Jen Steele works as a photographer and writer in New York. You can see more of her work on her website. She also founded the editorial platform Girls I Know designed to encourage growth and conversation among young women.  
Directed by: Jen Steele - 2017 - USA - 23 min WITH: With Olivia Cooke, Raye Levine, Mason Matthias & Ruby Kewitz - WRITER: Jen Steele - PRODUCER: Alex Bach & Jen Steele - CINEMATOGRAPHY: R. Aaron Webster - MUSIC: Jesse Marchant - EDITOR: Ben Sozanski - COSTUME DESIGNER: Tessa Matthias Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, we’re presenting one of the short films selected at this year’s 47th edition of the New Directors/New Films festival, programmed by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art, and closing this weekend. Directed by Franco-Iranian artist and filmmaker Arash Nassiri, City of Tales is a unique and dreamlike cinematic experience, shot in Los Angeles during the night celebrations of ‘Nowruz’, the Persian New Year. In his 20-minute film, Nassiri stages memories of Tehran in the 70s, collected from Iranian people now living abroad, through the connected minds of young residents of the City of Angels. The film gives birth to an urban, virtual territory suspended in time and place, with streets lit by neons and fireworks. The film was produced by up-and-coming Paris based production company Jonas Films.

Places are at the core of Nassiri’s work, and he uses them as ‘speculative spaces where ideologies can become visible.’ What initiated City of Tales is a reflection on the historical context of the modernisation and westernization of Tehran between the mid-60s and the 1979 Islamic revolution, and more specifically the influence of the American way of life on the city and its architecture.

The filmmaker interviewed 30 Iranians who used to live in Tehran at the time and have since moved to North America or Europe. He used these oral testimonies to create the dialogue in the film, to give shape to an ‘Iranian diaspora memory’. Nassiri chose to stage and commemorate this collected memory of 1970s Tehran in the streets of Los Angeles, the place where much of the American influence at that time came from, where an important Iranian community now resides, and shot the film during Nowruz (which in Persian means ‘New Day’).

"I like to see this film as some kind of group therapy. Staging these collected memories in the street of Los Angeles moves people intimate memories in the public space of Los Angeles streets, making it visible. Also the material space of LA and the virtual spaces described in the stories interact like two tectonic plate rubbing on each other."
Arash Nassiri

City of Tales is Arash Nassiri’s fifth short film. He was born in Tehran in 1986, and is now based in Paris. After spending time at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, taking part in a student exchange to Berlin and focusing on photography and video at Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris, he completed his studies at the post-graduate art and audiovisual research center Le Fresnoy in the North of France. City of Tales premiered at this year’s Berlinale, and his other films have screened at exhibitions and festivals in France and abroad, including at the 2015 Architecture Biennale in Venice and at the Fundació Suñol in Barcelona. Directed by: Arash Nassiri - 2017 - France - 21 min WRITER: Arash Nassiri - PRODUCER: Elsa Klughertz - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Jordane Chouzenoux - MUSIC: Raphaël Henard - EDITOR: Pierre Deschamps & Julien Soudet - PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Militza Solorio - COSTUME DESIGNER: Anne-Line Desrousseaux & Tristan Lahoz Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

We are thrilled to premiere this week the beautiful and audacious debut feature of New York filmmaker Roi Cydulkin. Caprice is a free-form film, taking the viewer through an impressionistic, cinematically trippy New York City experience.  We follow a young man (played by Cydulkin) struggling to find himself through three strained relationships — the three acts of the film — as he descends into a surreal kind of sickness.

This visually captivating, music-driven film features wonderful naturalistic performances by French DJ and actress Clara Deshayes (Clara 3000), actress and model Abbey Lee (Mad Max: Fury Road), Terrible Records founder Ethan Silverman, actress and artist India Menuez, and the film’s cinematographer Patrick Parker.  The director likes to say his film is not for everyone — but please let Caprice speak for itself!  We hope you’ll be taken by it, as we were.

Caprice presents a young couple who lock themselves into a kind of childlike fantasy, with the city as their playground.  As reality starts creeping back inside their world, the relationship begins to sour and collapse. For the remainder of the film, the young man attempts to recreate this codependent fantasy existence with whomever he can, with increasingly disturbing and failing results.

Cydulkin shot the film a few years ago, inspired by the people he was engaging with at the time: “The feeling in the air, the kind of dissatisfaction, competition, and confusion at that stage between childhood and adulthood that marks one’s mid-20s.”  The young filmmaker self-produced the film with no budget and shot the film over the course of ten days.  He cast his friends, and led the small crew of six people, with everyone helping as they could.  “It was fluid and very fun, everyone was incredibly passionate and generous. It was wild but beautiful; it truly felt like a team effort.”

"CAPRICE was about what happens when experience is suddenly placed within a frame: not the New York all New Yorkers live in, but the New York that is lived-in by the characters of the movie -- just like how the New York you might live in isn't the same New York that your neighbors see when they walk around… I wanted to make something from the gut, to trust in my taste and in my skills, trust in the people with whom I was making the film, to trust in the seed of the idea and in the process."
— Roi Cydulkin

When Cydulkin came across the term ‘caprice’, he immediately knew it would be the title of his film. He offers us the different definitions, which for him evoked both the film and the production process: “A sudden and unaccountable change of mood or behavior, a lively piece of music typically one that is short and free in form, a painting or other work of art representing a fantasy or a mixture of real and imaginary features.”

As he was working on Caprice, Cydulkin was very inspired by movies like Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969), the Warhol films, documentaries like Alan Yento’s Cracked Actor (1975) and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s Poto & Cabengo (1980), Werner Herzog’s Stroszek (1977), and Nicolas Roeg’s films, particularly The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976).

Roi Cydulkin was born and raised in New York City. He also works as an editor for photographer Harley Weir and for art director and director Fabien Baron. He was a finalist for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab and is currently completing the script of his second feature. Cydulkin was making music for most of his early 20s, and he always imagined becoming a writer. When asked about directors he most admires, he cites Pier Paolo Pasolini, Abbas Kiarostami, Dusan Makavejev, Andrzej Żuławski and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, among others. Directed by: Roi Cydulkin - 2015 - USA - 85 min WITH: With Roi Cydulkin, Clara Deshayes, Abbey Lee, Ethan Silverman, India Menuez, Patrick Parker & Christopher Landon - WRITER: Roi Cydulkin - PRODUCER: Roi Cydulkin & Kenzo Niwa - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Patrick Parker - EDITOR: Roi Cydulkin Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, in anticipation of the upcoming release of Lean on Pete, the latest film by acclaimed English director Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years), we are happy to present Five Miles Out, a short film that premiered at the Berlinale in 2009.

Five Miles Out announces Haigh’s cinematic talent for portraying and telling, with great humanity and sensitivity, moving characters and stories. This short follows a girl who is sent away on a holiday with her cousins, where she meets a boy on a secret mission. All the while, in the back of her mind, her sister is back home in a hospital bed. Haigh adapted the screenplay from a short story by Sarah Tierney.

Five Miles Out was pivotal for Andrew Haigh. Marking his first collaboration with his producer Tristian Goligher, it led them to, respectively, direct and produce the brilliant feature Weekend, which the New York Times described as “perfectly realized.”  That film also made Haigh a praised auteur overseas.

 After Weekend, Haigh directed the HBO series Looking (2014-2016) and the beautiful and highly praised 45 Years (2015), for which Charlotte Rampling was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress.  Before Weekend (2011), and his first self-produced first feature Greek Pete (2008), Haigh worked as an assistant editor on a diverse range of films from Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (2001) to Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely (2007).

Andrew Haigh’s new feature Lean on Pete is a powerful and poetic story about loneliness and the desire for love, family, and acceptance, told through the unique point of view of one boy’s connection to a very special racehorse. Starring Charlie Plummer, Steve Buscemi and Chloé Sévigny, the film will be released in the US by A24 next Friday, March 30th.
Directed by: Andrew Haigh - 2009 - United Kingdom - 18 min WITH: Dakota Blue RIchards & Thomas Malone - WRITER: Andrew Haigh - PRODUCER: Tristan Goligher - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Mátyás Erdély - MUSIC: James Edward Barker - EDITOR: Lea Morement - PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Sarah Finlay - COSTUME DESIGNER: Marianne Agertoft Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, we’re proud to present one of the lesser-known films by the late, great filmmaker Jonathan Demme. I’m Carolyn Parker: The Good, the Mad and the Beautiful is a portrait documentary about the inspiring, resilient Carolyn Parker — a woman in her sixties who was the last to leave her neighborhood when Hurricane Katrina approached New Orleans, and the first to return to her devastated community.

Jonathan Demme, along with his producer Daniel Wolfe, followed her over a period of five years, as she was determined to rebuild her house, her church and community. “Carolyn Parker is an exceptionally inspirational figure…  I feel like this film is part of the solution, because Carolyn sure is,” said Demme.

"We all know that the media goes away after the big devastation is over. I just wanted to go down and do something, so I started making seasonal visits. I didn’t really think I would get a film out of it, but the more I went, the more I became emotionally involved. You’re so impressed by all of the work being done by volunteers, and at the same time so furious about the bureaucracies."
Jonathan Demme

Venturing down to New Orleans to document the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Demme and Wolfe went to meet a community of people who refused to evacuate their area (the Lower Ninth Ward), which was scheduled to be razed. Upon their first meeting with Carolyn Parker, they were instantly drawn to her marvelous personality and tenacity, and quickly decided she had to be the leading voice of their film. They would come back every few months, and each time, she would keep revealing more about her life and current struggle, with an inspiring optimism.

“She is such a great storyteller — I had a sense that Carolyn knew the story that she wanted to tell, she knew what was important to share with the cameras.” Demme explained in a PBS interview. Carolyn Parker not only became the extraordinary subject to depict the post-Katrina crushing consequences but she also “personified a whole segment of American history”; she had grown up as a child in the segregated South and as a teenager was an active participant during the civil rights movement.

Jonathan Demme, who sadly passed away almost a year ago, was the Academy Award-winning director of acclaimed features such as Melvin and Howard (1980), Something Wild (1986), Silence of the Lambs (1991), Philadelphia (1993) and Rachel Getting Married (2008). Demme also directed performance films such as the beloved Stop Making Sense (1984), immortalizing the live performance of the Talking Heads. Demme directed many other films, including a series of documentaries, all demonstrating his understanding of humanity and his true social and political conscience. Directed by: Jonathan Demme - 2011 - United States - 91 min PRODUCER: Daniel Wolff Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

We’re showing this week a very cool short documentary capturing, in 1992, the bustling nightlife of ‘Beigel Bake, the cult bagel shop on Brick Lane in East London. Beigels Already is a wonderful example of a film portrait of a location.  The 8-minute short introduces us to the vibrant atmosphere and charismatic people both in the kitchen and in the shop, the making of the bagel, its culture, and what makes this food so loveable.

“It’s really the next best thing to a sexual fantasy when you can’t get sex!”
Young man in the film

Beigels Already was directed by British producer Debbie Shuter who at the time was working her way up in the industry as a PA. She directed and produced the short on her own, and managed to sell it to the BBC.

The short has been since been broadcast around the world. Its success can be attributed to the film’s magic, this throwback moment to a pre-gentrified East London night in the early nineties — and also because Beigels Bake’s fame has only kept growing. Today, the shop is a world famous destination for tourists, and also local night owls.  The bagel shop is still open 24 hours/day, seven days/week, and it produces 7000 bagels each day. It hasn’t changed its prices in 20 years.  A bagel is 30 pence and one with salmon £1.80. Directed by: Debbie Shuter - 1992 - United Kingdom - 9 min CINEMATOGRAPHY: Chris Middleton - EDITOR: Jonathan Morris Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

egal

"It started out slow. A whole summer to make a 4-minute short? It was our first ever animation so we made sure to break out of the studio for coffee and bike ride breaks. That really laid the groundwork for the attention-deficit driven -- yet relaxed -- attitude our animations have."
Lewie and Noah Kloster

egal Directed by: Lewie & Noah Kloster - 2016 - United States - 4 min WRITER: Christine Choy - PRODUCER: Lewie and Noah Kloster - MUSIC: Eric Heltemes Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week we’re hosting the online premiere of Across My Land, the second short film of young Franco-Chilean director Fiona Godivier, which was presented last year in the official selection of the Cannes Film Festival. Set in Arizona on the American border with Mexico, the film shows us a family whose father patrols the border as a ‘minuteman’, who one night takes his son with him.

The filmmaking is assured and the subject is timely (the short was shot before the 2016 U.S. presidential election). The cast features Summer Phoenix, who plays the mother, and French electronic musician Jackson composed the music. Across My Land was co-produced by Random Bench and Joaquin Phoenix.

As Fiona Godivier was researching walls built by governments to protect their borders — an idea the filmmaker is firmly against — she learned about the ‘Minutemen’, private militias who seek to reinforce the American border while tracking illegal immigrants.  As part of her research, Godivier spent time in Texas driving around the border in patrol trucks.  She went on trips with minutemen, but she cut those short as she didn’t always feel safe.

«The film is an intimate story that reflects on the wall, but also on education, fear and gun control.»
Fiona Godivier

Fiona Godivier was born in Paris of a Chilean mother and French father. She studied photography at the International Center of Photography in New York, 3D computer animation at Studio Mercier in Paris, and then she started directing music videos and fashion films. In 2014, she directed her first short film Deep Down, shot in LA and voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Deep Down won the Best Short Experimental Film Award at the Toronto Short Film Festival.  Godivier is currently writing her first feature.  We’re excited to see what she does next. Directed by: Fiona Godivier - 2017 - USA, France - 16 min WITH: With Summer Phoenix, Timothy V. Murphy, Preston Bailey & Gaia Peddy - WRITER: Fiona Godivier & Thymaya Payne - PRODUCER: Michael Tubbs, Adrian Salpeter, Liz Levine & Fiona Godivier - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Kenton Drew Johnson - MUSIC: Jackson - EDITOR: Giulia Rodino - PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Katie Dineen - COSTUME DESIGNER: Maggie Maceri Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, we’re presenting a short film directed by the Russian master Andrey Zvyagintsev who — with his fifth and latest feature, Loveless — is nominated for the second time for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards.  Loveless, which won Cannes’ Jury prize last year, opens this weekend in New York and Los Angeles. Zvyagintsev’s films are grand, honest, and sophisticated, both in their filmmaking and in the treatment of their subjects.  They present a gripping portrait of contemporary Russia, examining themes of family and morality, with sharp sociopolitical commentary.

Made in 2011, Mystery gives us a sneak peak into Zvyagintsev’s command of the art form.  The short depicts a woman meeting the private eye she has hired to investigate her husband, exploring the psychological questions and consequences of such an encounter.  Mystery was commissioned for Experiment 5IVE by Wrigley, for a series of five 5-minute films by Russian directors.  Zvyagintsev mastered the short exercise, bringing depth, mood, and suspense to a scene between two people.

“What I know is that I am honest about my films, and my films are honest about reality. The stories themselves dictate the way they should be told.”
Andrey Zvyagintsev

Andrey Zvyagintsev was born in Siberia. He began his studies and career in film as an actor. In 2003, he directed his debut feature The Return, a mystery-filled reunion between two teenagers and their fathers, which received several awards, including a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. He has been since hailed as the heir to Andrei Tarkovsky — an honor to which Zvyagintsev has replied, “It’s impossible for any Russian filmmaker not to be inspired by Tarkovsky.”  Every one of Zvyagintsev’s subsequent films premiered in the official selection of the Cannes Film Festival: The Banishment (2007), Elena (2011), Leviathan (2014), and Loveless (2017).  Zvyagintsev’s films have won countless awards; Leviathan won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film.  If you haven’t seen the work of Andrey Zvyagintsev, we strongly encourage you to discover his unique, brilliant voice. Directed by: Andrey Zvyagintsev - 2011 - Russia - 6 min WITH: With Irina Barinova & Igor Evseev - WRITER: Oleg Negin - PRODUCER: Karina Kabanova & Artyom Vasilev - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Mikhail Krichman - MUSIC: Andrey Dergachev Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, we’re presenting the award-winning thesis short from Japanese filmmaker Atsuko Hirayanagi. Oh Lucy! is an engaging, bittersweet comedy following Setsuko, a 55-year-old single office lady in Tokyo whose niece convinces her to sign up for English conversation lessons. The clash of cultures awakens her being.

Following the success of this short, with prizes in Cannes, Toronto and Sundance, Atsuko Hirayanagi expanded it into her first feature of the same title.  Starring Shinobu Terajima and Josh Harnett, and executive produced by Will Ferrell and Adam Mckay, Oh Lucy! premiered last year in Critics Week and will be released this March in select U.S. theaters.

Oh Lucy! was Atsuko Hirayanagi’s thesis film at NYU Tisch Asia.  Atsuko Hirayanagi had the feature in mind from the beginning, but she started by shooting this short. The original idea came from a writing exercise where students were asked to write about someone they knew:  

"In retrospect, I feel I picked a person who, in part, reminded me of other women I know and also, in part, of me and the experiences I went through when I first came to the U.S. as an exchange student. I wanted to give her a voice and make her speak through Lucy, and to give her the permission to release what she has bottled up inside..."
Atsuko Hirayanagi

Atsuko Hirayanagi was born in Nagano and raised in Chiba, Japan. She graduated from NYU Tisch School of The Arts with an MFA in Film Production. Her second year project, Mo Ikkai, won the Grand Prix at the 2012 Shorts Film Festival in Asia. The short film Oh Lucy! received a First Prize Wasserman Award and also won more than 35 awards around the globe. The feature-length version of this film, also titled Oh Lucy!, received the 2016 Sundance / NHK Award during development.

You can find on the website the list of select theaters where Oh Lucy! will be released in the U.S., starting from March 2^nd in LA and New York. Directed by: Atsuko Hirayanagi - 2014 - Japan, USA - 21 min WITH: With Kaori Momoi, Miyoko Yamaguchi, Billy Scott, Rian Nagashima, & Keiichi Tsuda - WRITER: Atsuko Hirayanagi - PRODUCER: Perry Loong, Ken Natsuhara & Masumi Soga - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Mitch Arens - EDITOR: Eric Elofson & Mun Chong Yim - COSTUME DESIGNER: Nelson Lee & Rey Lee Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

We are excited this week to present, in partnership with rag & bone, Why Can’t We Get Along, a striking visual experiment co-directed by Benjamin Millepied and Aaron Duffy & Bob Partington, and starring Ansel Elgort and Kate Mara. The cast also features an eclectic group of dancers, including members of the American Ballet Theatre, HipLet Ballerinas, and YouTube discovery Kandi Reign. The music is by Thom Yorke and cinematography is by Darius Khondji. The film was produced by rag & bone for their Spring/Summer ’18 collection.

The original idea of the short was to illustrate the friction between our different perspectives on the world. Together, this group of talent created a gorgeously choreographed film, in which the camera becomes a lead dancer and character, following and confronting the cast.  A fireworks display of physical movement and camerawork emerges, captured through the use of five different ingenious rigs.

Why Can’t We Get Along was shot in one day at Greenpoint Terminal in Brooklyn, using an Arri Alexa Team. Among the five rigs used were the Pendulum Rig and The Dolly Zoom, as well as three others created by artist and camera rig veteran Tony Hill: the Falling Over Rig (1976), The Wheel Rig (1992), and the Satellite Rig (1981).

"It was a bit of a crazy idea and seeing it come together the way it has was incredibly rewarding and maybe, above all else, a lot of fun."
Marcus Wainwright, Rag & Bone’s Founder and Creative Director

Millepied, Duffy, Partington and Khondji were invited by the Rag & Bone team to explore the film medium and the ways in which perspectives can shift for the viewer. Rag & Bone was excited to put together a group of eclectic talent to create an original work to present their collection.  Previous Rag & Bone films include Hair (2017), starring John Turturro and Bobby Cannavale and The Driver (2015), directed by Michael Pitt. Directed by: Benjamin Millepied, Aaron Duffy & Bob Partington - 2018 - United States - 6 min WITH: With Kate Mara & Ansel Elgort - PRODUCER: Candice Hernstad, Garrett Fennelly & Taryn Nagle - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Darius Khondji - MUSIC: Thom Yorke - EDITOR: Will Towne - COSTUME DESIGNER: Rag & Bone Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

We are presenting this week Martin McDonagh’s Oscar-winning debut short film Six Shooter, which in 2005 marked the acclaimed Irish playwright’s transition to cinema. Martin McDonagh’s third feature Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri recently won four Golden Globes, including Best Motion Picture Drama, and is now nominated for 7 Academy Awards.

Six Shooter is a 27-minute comic tragedy in which McDonagh’s trademarks resonate.  The film is filled with deadpan humor, twisted and despairing characters, and guns.  It also showcases the filmmaker’s considerable screenwriting talent, and his entertaining, cinematic direction.

A man (Brendan Gleeson), whose wife has just died, embarks on an increasingly bizarre and violent train ride through the Irish countryside, where he encounters a strange and possibly psychotic young oddball.  Death never lets go in this short story, but McDonagh manages to counterbalance his dark story with comedy and sincere reflections, conjuring a tragedy that gradually becomes less realistic while at the same time more emotionally wrenching.

The short is performed by a powerful cast, led by Brendan Gleeson: “He’s a great actor first and foremost. He brings a humanity to all his roles, even though he’s playing dark and dangerous characters. He helped me so much on the short, he protected and stood up for me and showed me how to do it in lots of ways.”  Six Shooter is also the acting debut of Gleeson’s son, Domhnall, playing the vendor on the train.  

"All my work shares a kind of balance between black comedy and sad and despairing melancholy."
Martin McDonagh

Martin McDonagh is an acclaimed Irish and British playwright, screenwriter and director. He started his career in the theater and has been nominated for four Tony Awards for the following plays: The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1998), The Lonesome West (1999), The Pillowman (2005), and The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2006). After making Six Shooter, McDonagh’s first feature was In Bruges (2008), which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. McDonagh has directed two more features: Seven Psychopaths (2012) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017). Directed by: Martin McDonagh - 2004 - UK, Ireland - 27 min WITH: With Brendan Gleeson, Rúaidhrí Conroy, David Wilmot, Aisling O'Sullivan, Gary Lydon, and Domhnall Gleeson - WRITER: Martin McDonagh - PRODUCER: Kenton Allen, Mia Bays, Mary McCarthy & John McDonnell - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Baz Irvine - EDITOR: Nicolas Gaster - PRODUCTION DESIGNER: David Munns - COSTUME DESIGNER: Kathy Strachan Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week we’re presenting a short, playful, and erotic comedy directed by prolific French filmmaker François Ozon (8 Women, Swimming Pool, In The House) made early in his career in 1996. With elegant and colourful frames, A Summer Dress follows Luc, a young man who escapes to the beach, seeking time away from his lover, only to encounter a spirited Spanish girl. (This film includes graphic nudity!)

We are presenting this short in partnership with MyFrenchFilmFestival, a month-long online film festival starting today with Paolo Sorrentino leading the jury. Head over to their platform to watch new features, including films by directors we have highlighted previously on Le CiNéMa Club, such as Justine Triet, Léa Mysius, Antonin Peretjako, and Olivier Babinet.

One admires the construction of the narrative in A Summer Dress, cleverly built around a love triangle and a flowery piece of clothing. Over 24 hours, the story manages to capture a tale of sexual liberation, while providing a perfect capsule of time and place. Here is Ozon in 1998, in an interview with IndieWire about A Summer Dress:

"Sexuality… This is where the challenge as a director becomes stronger, because there is always the question about where to put the camera, at what angle and where to set it. It’s actually more fun to shoot a sex scene than lovers’ dialogue."
François Ozon

François Ozon is a beloved French director who has directed seventeen features, and numerous short films featuring actors such as Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Jacqueline Bisset, and Charlotte Rampling. His films regularly travel around the world in the major film festivals, and his films Swimming Pool (2003), Young & Beautiful (2013), and Amant Double (2017) were selected in the main selection of the Cannes Film Festival. Directed by: François Ozon - 1996 - France - 15 min WITH: With Sébastien Charles, Frédéric Mangenot & Lucia Sanchez - WRITER: François Ozon - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Yorick Le Saux - EDITOR: Jeanne Moutard - PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Sandrine Cayron Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, we are excited to host the online premiere of Felix de Givry’s first short film Journée Blanche. Felix de Givry, who played the lead in Mia Hansen-Love’s beautiful Eden, shot the film in the South of France, in the house he grew up in. The short stars French newcomers Lily Taiëb and Tara-Jay Bangalter, and is produced by CG Cinema (Personal Shopper, Mustang).

In Journée Blanche, Otto and Martha are two teenagers who barely know each other when they have to spend the day together in Otto’s family house. To entertain each other, they start acting as if they are an adult couple. In turn, they overcome their shyness and fall in love.

De Givry deliberately wrote the script for the house he lived in as a child, and later as a teenager when his parents were divorcing. He based his story partly on the floor plan of the location. Around this time, he met Tara-Jay Bangalter, with whom he instantly developed an inspiring relationship, and in whom he saw the qualities of a young Jean-Pierre Léaud. De Givry originally wanted to shoot the house in the first part of the movie in a way that would make it feel like the house was observing the estranged teenagers, and in the second half, when the teenagers return to the house, the camera would have them look directly at each other – in other words, “once they would have fallen in love, and learned to look in each other’s eyes.”

On the first day of the production, the two actors fell for each other, and became a real couple by the end of the shoot. “The actual shoot took over my theoretical screenplay and project – I had to accept what was going on, and shoot from there”. Ultimately, de Givry was seeking to create a timeless cinematic moment, and test himself as a director. Two areas where he found success.

“I’m a huge fan of Truffaut. To me, he was the one was had the most profound relationship between cinema and life. I’m thinking of his relationship to childhood, to Jean-Pierre Léaud…”
Félix de Givry

Félix de Givry is a French actor and director. After graduating from the prestigious college Sciences Po in Paris, and studying abroad for a year in UCLA, de Givry was cast in Olivier Assayas’ Something in the Air (2012) and later as the lead in Mia Hansen Love’s Eden (2014). Félix de Givry also co-founded the Pain Surprises collective and music label. He has finished writing the script for his first feature, which he plans on shooting later this year. Directed by: Félix de Givry - 2017 - France - 15 mins WITH: Tara-Jay Bangalter & Lily TaÏeb - WRITER: Félix de Givry - PRODUCER: Charles Gillibert - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Raphaël Vandenbussche - EDITOR: Sanabel Cherqaoui - PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Benjamin Fanni & Florian Fournier - COSTUME DESIGNER: Isabelle Kerbec Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

We’re presenting this week the short film on which the  Strange Ones  is based. The Strange Ones  is the first feature by American directors Christopher Radcliff and Lauren Wolkstein, who was selected last year at SXSW and is being released in the US today! Line! Ligne! In the mysterious, brilliant short psychological thriller, we are introduced to two travelers, a man and a young boy, who stumble into a small roadside motel and the girl working there. As the three start talking, things become stranger and darker, and we no longer know what line! Line! Line! The story for the short was inspired by true crime cases, some involving kidnapping and murder, that Radcliff and Wolkstein had been researching. The Strange Ones not only displays admirable, assured filmmaking from the young directors, but also wonderful performances by their three actors: David Call ( James White ,  Two Gates of Sleep ,  Tiny Furniture ), Tobias Campbell and Merritt Wever ( Godless ,  Nurse Jackie ,  Birdman ,  Tiny FurnitureThey are in their final year at Columbia University’s Graduate Film School, initially seeking to collaborate on a simple filmmaking exercise, investigating a small moment to great effect, and hopefully achieving a certain quality. of simplicity and elegance. “Following the success of the script, which premiered at Sundance in 2011 and traveled in over a hundred festivals around the world, they decided to expand the short into a feature. Both through their short films and their feature, the filmmakers were excited by exploring and depicting the ambiguity of truth.

“As filmmakers, we are most interested in stories that leave a strong impression but somehow stop short of surrendering to a tidy explanation, and in characters that have secrets that may or may not ever be fully revealed. There is something more satisfying in this for us - as if the truth, by virtue of remaining unseen, can expand upon speculation and become something larger, more profound, and more fascinating than a straightforward answer.  Perhaps we find also that this is a more accurate reflection of real life­­­.”
Christopher Radcliff & Lauren Wolkstein

Christopher Radcliff and Lauren Wolkstein are NYC-based filmmakers best known for their award-winning short films which have screened at film festivals worldwide including Sundance, SXSW, Rotterdam, Clermont-Ferrand, AFI Fest, and more. Directed by: Christopher Radcliff & Lauren Wolkstein - 2011 - USA - 14 mins WITH: With David Call, Tobias Campbell & Merritt Wever - WRITER: Christopher Radcliff & Lauren Wolkstein - PRODUCER: Loring Charpentier, Dominic Graziani, Joonhan Lee & Elisa Lleras - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Drew Innis - MUSIC: Danny Bensi & Saunder Jurriaans - EDITOR: Christopher Radcliff & Lauren Wolkstein Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

To end this year and begin the next, this week we are presenting Under Twilight, a mesmerizing six-minute short film by French filmmaker Jean-Gabriel Périot, which repurposes aerial shots from WWII American planes and turns them into a visual spectacle. Périot, an expert in editing found footage to shed a fresh eye on history, describes the film as “beauty and/or destruction.”  

“I make films because I don’t know. I seek. I try to see things more clearly, pushing myself to at least know how to express questions. It’s a way for me to open a place for thought.”
Jean-Gabriel Périot

Jean-Gabriel Périot is known for his work with archival footage to interrogate the relationship between history, memory and images – both still and moving. We previously presented the Devil (2012) about The Black Panthers. Peri recently transitioned into directing features with A German Youth (2015), a documentary about the Baader-Meinhof Gang and Summer Lights (2017), his first fiction film, set in Hiroshima 70 years after the bombing. Directed by: Jean-Gabriel Périot - 2006 - 5 mins MUSIC: Patten Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, we are presenting The Sleepwalker, Mona Fastvold’s beautiful debut feature starring Chris Abbott, Brady Corbet, Stephanie Ellis and Gitte Witte. The film, which premiered in U.S. competition in Sundance in 2014, is a mysterious psychodrama set in a house in the woods, with a distinct cinematic aesthetic, gorgeously realised by Fastvold.

In The Sleepwalker, which Fastvold co-wrote with Corbet, Kaia and Andrew are a young, new couple renovating a secluded family estate in Massachusetts. The sudden and unexpected arrival of Kaia’s sister and her fiancé disrupts their lives, awaking repressed memories and odd behavior.

Mona Fastvold co-wrote the film with director-writer-actor Brady Corbet (The Childhood of a Leader). She was first inspired by her dance background, and her own experience as a sleepwalker: “I was always fascinated by how your body takes over and starts controlling with your consciousness be aware of it.”

The filmmaker started exploring the physicality of these themes with her two actresses in an experimental short, and during that process she found the location for The Sleepwalker. Fastvold wrote her script with the Le Corbusier-inspired house in mind – enjoying later the creative challenge of shooting her film within and around the house: “The exciting thing about having the constraint of shooting in one location is that you can be really specific with how you plan your shots and blocking.”

Fastvold impressively shot the film in nineteen days, surrounding herself with actors and collaborators she knew well. She worked with her cinematographer Zachary Galler — The Sleepwalker was his first feature — on how to create dreamlike night sequences that would capture slightly more than what the human eye can see. They imagined the light and color temperature of their daytime exteriors as a kind of permanent twilight. Working on the end of the movie, Fastvold wanted to recreate the frustrating, haunting experience of the sudden, inexplicable disappearance of someone — “one that leaves you with an open wound”.

“Fastvold has painted a resonant tableau of dysfunction”
The New York Times

Mona Fastvold is a Norwegian director living in New York City. She moved to New York to pursue her film studies in her early 20s. She had already started her career as an actor in television and film in Norway. In 2011, she started directing music videos and a year later she received a grant from the Norwegian Film Fund for The Sleepwalker. She co-wrote The Childhood of a Leader, the first feature by Brady Corbet, who is also her partner. The film, which stars Bérénice Béjo, Liam Cunningham, Stacy Martin and Robert Pattinson, won Best Debut Film and Best Director at its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 2015. Mona Fastvold co-wrote Mustang, Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s debut feature, which recently finished shooting and will be released by Focus Features, with a cast including Matthias Schoenaerts and Bruce Dern. Mona Fastvold is currently working on her second feature, The Bleaching Yard, which she plans to shoot in 2018. Directed by: Mona Fastvold - 2014 - Norway, USA - 91 min WITH: With Christopher Abbott, Brady Corbet, Stephanie Ellis & Gitte Witt - WRITER: Brady Corbet & Mona Fastvold - PRODUCER: Julie Christeas, Tim Duff, Karin Julsrud, Schuyler Weiss & Turid Øversveen - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Zack Galler - MUSIC: Sondre Lerche & Kato Ådland - EDITOR: Mike Mazzotta & Jon Endre Mørk - PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Lucio Seixas - COSTUME DESIGNER: Keri Langerman Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, we are presenting the online premiere of New York filmmaker and writer Ricky D’Ambrose’s latest short film Spiral Jetty, selected earlier this year at the New Directors/New Films festival. D’Ambrose demonstrates his distinctive style, in which a methodical aesthetic and form develop a story of deeply intellectual characters.

Spiral Jetty focuses on a young archivist who is hired by a lauded American critic to whitewash her late psychologist father’s reputation. The film is comprised of composed single shots, close-ups of faces on backdrops, inserts of newspaper clippings, and VHS home video clips.

Since he began writing his first feature Notes on An Appearance six years ago – which D’Ambrose recently shot – the filmmaker has been exploring in his shorts how to solve certain aesthetic and conceptual questions. His shorts, including this one, are a reflection on building a certain visual language to bring his stories to screen.

The concept for Spiral Jetty came from a cutaway from an actor’s face to a newspaper clipping that exists in D’Ambrose’s previous short Six Cents In The Pocket (2015). D’Ambrose wanted to make a short based on this organizing principle. The character of the deceased psychologist is inspired by both, according to D’Ambrose, “psychologist Albert Ellis, who helped popularize cognitive therapy in the United States, and the American artist Carl Andre, whose role in his wife’s death is still unclear.”

"I also think the film originated from wanting to pair close-ups of faces, shot head-on in front of red walls, with The Rite of Spring."
Ricky D’Ambrose

Ricky D’Ambrose is a filmmaker based in Brooklyn who graduated from Columbia. He started shooting films of some sort after being struck by The Shining at 9. Starting in 2013, Ricky D’Ambrose made a series of documentary shorts on filmmakers such as Chantal Akerman and Bruno Dumont, and contemporary New York directors such as Alex Ross Perry, Dustin Guy Defa or Nathan Silver — which can be viewed on his Vimeo Page. His short Six Cents In The Pocket, which Richard Brody wrote about for The New Yorker, premiered in 2016 at the Berlinale. He also works as a journalist for publications including weekly journal The Nation, online magazine n+1, film portal Mubi, and industry journal Film Quarterly, published by the University of CaliforniaPress in Berkeley.

Ricky D’Ambrose has just finished his debut feature Notes on An Appearance.  It tells the story of  “a young man who disappears amid talk of violence and demagoguery, leaving behind an obscure cache of letters, postcards, and notebooks.”  The film stars Tallie Medel, Keith Poulson, and Bingham Bryant. Directed by: Ricky D'Ambrose - 2017 - United States - 15 min WITH: With Bingham Bryant, Stephen F. Cohen, A.S. Hamrah, Caroline Luft, Jessica Pinfield and the voice of Stephen F. Cohen, Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

We are happy to present one of this year’s most acclaimed short documentaries, directed by American filmmaker and visual artist Patrick Bresnan. Set in the Everglades of South Florida, The Rabbit Hunt introduces us to a family hunting rabbits in the fields of the largest industrial sugar farm in the U.S. The practice is both an old rite of passage for young men, and for 17 year-old Chris and his siblings, a way to bring food to the table and save money. Through a cinematic, honest and clever lens, Bresnan brings us an American story foreign to most.

The family introduced in The Rabbit Hunt lives in a town called Pahokee, on the border of Lake Okeechobee in Florida. Patrick Bresnan has been driving through and photographing the area and its surroundings for the past 20 years, since his father moved to West Palm Beach. Bresnan, and his filmmaking and life partner Ivete Lucas, are familiar with the town and close to its people; their previous short The Send-Off follows the same community on the night of a glitzy high school prom, contrasting with their rural and industrial environment. It is interesting to note that the town is only a few hours west of Donald Trump’s mansion in Mar-a-Lago.

“I had been photographing the burning sugar fields for many years. The main young man in our film 'The Send-Off' had rabbit hunted to pay for most of his prom expenses. We had such a good relationship with his family that it was a natural progression from the previous film to record them hunting. The rabbit hunting also showed how entrepreneurial the kids in Pahokee are. They have no access to jobs except the jobs they create for themselves. I have always found it quite heroic-running through a burning field to put food on the table and save money.”
Patrick Bresnan

Patrick Bresnan and Ivete Lucas have been making films together for the past eight years, and they have since become exciting talents in the independent documentary world, regularly invited by the great film festivals. The Send-Off (2016) premiered in Sundance and won jury awards at SXSW, AFI Fest, and San Francisco Film Festival. Their new short Roadside Attraction premiered this year at the Toronto Film Festival. The Rabbit Hunt screened in Berlin and SXSW and won nineteen awards in festivals around the world. Bresnan and Lucas are currently working on the post-production of their new feature documentary Pahokee.

We would like to thank Topic, a new entertainment and storytelling studio from First Look Media dedicated to working with creators at the forefront of culture on stories of consequence, for making this program available on Le CiNéMa Club. Directed by: Patrick Bresnan - 2017 - United States - 12 min WITH: With Christopher Burgess, Ta’Questa Browning, Chris Felton, Deante Burgess, Crystal Burgess, Kevis Burgess, Da’Tavious Burgess and Ka’Nia Jackson - WRITER: Ivete Lucas - PRODUCER: Ivete Lucas, Maida Brankman and Patrick Bresnan - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Patrick Bresnan - EDITOR: Ivete Lucas Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

To close our series ‘On Photography’, we are presenting this week Preston Bus Station by the great, young, influential British photographer Jamie Hawkesworth to coincide with the release of his first monograph Preston Bus Station — which was recently published by Dashwood Books.

The eight-minute film is an homage to the bus station where Hawkesworth shot a series of portraits of people passing through. He first took photographs there when he was only a student collaborating with his tutor.  Together, they printed the portraits in a newspaper that one could flip through on a bus. This series would help lead Hawkesworth to the first jobs that started his career.

A few years later, when Hawkesworth heard that the bus station, characterized by its Brutalist architecture, was set to be demolished, he decided to return to Preston and spend a month documenting the people there. “It was never about the building, but the people inside it.” To complete the project, Hawkesworth wanted to record a living document of the place before its imminent (but later cancelled) demolition. He asked a youth brass orchestra to play a tune and walk in loops around the station. Hawkesworth places the camera in a low-angle as the young musicians pass in front of the camera, the sounds of their voices and instruments reverberating throughout the bus station. The result is melancholic and reverential.

“I’d like to think my aesthetic is a very honest one. An image works for me when I can feel the photographer’s presence and it feels authentic. Even if it’s the most contrived thing in the world, if there’s an honesty about that, it can still be fantastic.”
Jamie Hawkesworth

Jamie Hawkesworth, who is only 30 years old, has distinguished himself with subtle, poetic, and playful images rooted in the tradition of British documentary photography. He first started studying forensic science at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, in the North of England. He held a camera for the first time to photograph a reconstructed crime scene and decided soon after to switch to the photography department at the same university.  Today he is widely regarded by the fashion industry as one of the most talented photographers, having shot distinctive campaigns for Alexander McQueen, J.W.Anderson, Loewe, and Miu Miu, and distinctive editorial commissions for Vogue, The New York Times Style Magazine, and the WSJ Magazine. His work has been the subject of solo shows at galleries in New York, London, Paris, and Amsterdam. Hawkesworth doesn’t isolate his commercial and editorial photography from his personal photography. He approaches both sides with an equal level of commitment, wishing for all of his photographs to form a complete body of work.   Directed by: Jamie Hawkesworth - 2013 - United Kingdom - 8 min WITH: With Will Grey, Kayleigh Eastaugh, and the students of All Hallows - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Martin Radich - EDITOR: Tom Chick Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

The third selection in our series ‘On Photography’ is a short film by William Wegman, the wonderful artist and photographer well known for his photographs of his Weimaraners dogs in various costumes and poses. We are happy to present this week a newly restored copy of Wegman’s 1995 film The Hardly Boys in Hardly Gold – his take on the detective book series The Hardy Boys, which he loved as kid in the 1950s. Who better to play detectives on film than hunting dogs? Along with striking frames and great production design, Bill Wegman impressively achieves a 30-minutes film with an entire cast of dogs who, as in his pictures, appear surreally human.

“I grew up reading The Hardy Boys stories from the early 50's. Never as good as the covers, the books with numbingly memorable heroes and villains were a staple of every adolescent boy's reading in that era. My favorite cover, and because of that, my favorite book, was The Missing Chums. I related to The Hardy Boys because of the danger the boys found themselves in -- which was not much, but enough to be fun. Reading the series as a kid, I never imagined that I might one day create my own version of The Hardy Boys. In 1994, with my cast of four weimaraner stars, I set my mind to work on stories set in Rangeley Maine. The Hardy Boys become The Hardly Boys in my film Hardly Gold, starring sisters Batty and Crooky. Hardly boys, they are girls and dogs.”
William Wegman

The Hardly family arrives at an inn in Maine to participate in leisure activities: golfing, fishing, and canoeing. The trip takes a puzzling turn when the daughters set off to solve the mysterious disappearance of their aunt Gladiola. Wegman further explains the concept: “The premise of the Hardly boys is that the dogs Crooky and Batty, not unlike Frank and Joe Hardy (the characters they parody), are amateur detectives sniffing out clues using their super dog powers to track down criminals. When these powers are called upon they lose their human elements, hands, uprightness, clothing and turn into dogs.”

William Wegman began his career as a painter.  In 1970, he started working on art videos and photographs featuring his first dog Man Ray, who quickly became a star in the art world. Wegman’s work, which includes photography, video, painting and drawing, has been exhibited around the world and is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Centre Pompidou among others. Wegman has created numerous videos, including videos for Saturday Night Live and Sesame Street, which are now available through his YouTube channel. The artist has been commissioned to create images for a wide range of projects including a fashion campaign for Acne, banners for the Metropolitan Opera, and covers for numerous publications such as The New Yorker and Wallpaper. Wegman has appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, The Tonight Show With Jay Leno, The David Letterman Show, and The Colbert Report. His new book William Wegman: Being Human, featuring a collection of 300 images from the artist’s personal archives, was published in October. Directed by: William Wegman - 1995 - United States - 25 mins WRITER: William Wegman - PRODUCER: Claire Best - MUSIC: Marc De Gli Antoni - EDITOR: Steve Hamilton Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

Continuing our series On Photography, we are pleased to present a feature-length documentary on one of the most important living photographers: Robert Frank. Directed by his longtime friend and film editor Laura Israel, Don’t Blink – Robert Frank unfolds as a lively scrapbook of the work and life of the legendary artist.

The film, which premiered at the 2015 New York Film Festival and was a New York Times Critic’s Pick, features a soundtrack with songs by Tom Waits, The Velvet Underground, Yo La Tengo, Bob Dylan, and Patti Smith.

An icon behind the camera, it is rare to see the lens turned on Robert Frank.  The photographer is known for disliking interviews and for his reluctance to embrace celebrity status. Thanks to their friendship, Israel gives us an unprecedented access to Robert Franks, bringing us inside intimate moments and conversations, revealing his charming, sharp, nonconformist personality and mind.

Robert Frank discusses his life in New York and the making of his revolutionary book The Americans, which is considered to be one of the most influential and important collection of photographs of all time. The film also contains clips of Frank’s film work including Cocksucker Blues, the film commissioned by The Rolling Stones to capture their 1972 North American tour.  The film was famously never released. As Mick Jagger said, “It’s a fucking good film, Robert, but if it shows in America we’ll never be allowed in the country again.” Other films by Robert Frank include the famous Pull My Daisy (1959), written and narrated by Jack Kerouac, along with many great, lesser known films that Frank has been made over the last forty years. Films that this documentary leaves us with the urge to know better.

Laura Israel began her career editing music videos for an impressive list of artists including John Lurie, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Keith Richards, Sonic Youth, New Order, Ziggy Marley, David Byrne, and Laurie Simmons. She has been working on Robert Frank’s films since the nineties. Windfall, her award-winning debut documentary, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and won top prize at Doc NYC.

We would like to thank Laura Israel, and Grasshoper Films for making this program available on Le CiNéMa Club.
Directed by: Laura Israel - 2015 - United States - 82 min WITH: With Robert Frank - WRITER: Laura Israel - PRODUCER: Melinda Shopsin, Laura Israel - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Lisa Rinzler & Edward Lachman - EDITOR: Alex Bingham Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

On the occasion of today’s opening of Paris Photo, the world’s largest international photography fair, we’re starting our annual On Photography series – a series which features films on or by photographers. Showing this week is the 2013 Sundance Jury Prize winning short Skinningrove by Michael Almereyda on British photographer Chris Killip. In an intimate sit down with the renowned photographer, Killip guides us through his Skinningrove series: beautiful, striking black & white photographs of a small fishing community in Northern England.

Fans of Killip will love watching him talk over these mostly unpublished photographs. For those not yet familiar with his work, this is a perfect introduction to one of the great living photographers. Killip recalls and describes the town and the subjects of his pictures with great admiration and affection, fully immersing the viewer into the world of these extraordinary images.

Michael Almereyda’s collaboration with Killip on this short began in 2012, when both men were teaching at Harvard University. In preparation for an interview for Aperture magazine, a career-spanning lecture, and the filmmaker was impressed enough to ask Killip to repeat the lecture with cameras running. “In the course of editing the piece, I realized that the Skinningrove section was the heart of it, self-contained, self-sufficient,” explains the filmmaker on how the short took its final form.

A native of the Isle of Man, Chris Killip is a photographer whose work has been exhibited around the world, featured in the permanent collections of New York’s Museum of Modern of Art, the Getty Museum in California, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, to name a few. In 1989, he received the Henri Cartier Bresson Award. Killip’s work has also been recognised and praised for chronicling the slow decline of industrial Britain. You can find a list of his publications on his website.

Michael Almereyda is a prolific director, screenwriter, and producer. He has directed over 20 shorts and features, including Hamlet (2000) starring Ethan Hawke, Kyle MacLachlan, Liev Schreiber, and Sam Shepard. He also directed the documentary William Eggleston in the Real World (2005). His latest feature, Marjorie Prime (2017), is based on the play by Jordan Harrison, and stars Jon Hamm, Geena Davis, Lois Smith, and Tim Robbins. The film received the Alfred P. Sloan prize at Sundance 2017.
Directed by: Michael Almereyda - 2013 - United States - 15 min WITH: With Chris Killip - PRODUCER: Michael Almereyda & Chris Killip - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Pacho Velez - EDITOR: Yossera Bouchtia & Andrew Coffman Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, Le CiNéMa Club premieres new short films by three talented, emerging filmmakers: Mati Diop, Eduardo Williams and Baptist Penetticobra. Selected for their singular, multicultural visions of the world, the filmmakers were commissioned by Kenzo to illustrate the theme “Inhabit the Earth”. Each filmmaker interpreted this theme freely and differently.

In Olympus, the French and senegalese director Mati Diop captures the youth of Paris on the night of a heat wave, through the eyes and movements of her brother, the model Gard Diop. A dreamy trap score soundtracks the film, turning an ordinary night into a moment suspended in time. In 2016, Mati Diop received the Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award for her films including A Thousand Suns, previously presented on Le CiNéMa Club. She is also known as an actress for her roles in films such as Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum (2008) and Antonio Campos’ Simon Killer (2012). Mati Diop is currently preparing her first feature in Dakar, co-produced by Les Films du Bal and Arte France Cinema.

“In the 13th arrondissement, right after shooting a few takes with Gard. [The group of friends] were sitting over the esplanade of the BNF (the National Library of France), talking and listening to music. Right away, I wanted to film them. Not only because they were “young and beautiful”. They are more than that in my eyes. They immediately accepted to be filmed and Gard mingled with the group quite naturally and graciously.That’s how Olympus was born. From this coincidence, this encounter, this mix.” — Mati Diop

In Argentinian filmmaker Eduardo Williams’ TZZD, an Elf falls asleep in the metro of Buenos Aires. His dreams transport us to beautiful, surreal scenes and poetic landscapes — we are there introduced to a young Bolivian man in La Paz (Esteban Quispe, an artist who creates robots out of recycled trash, and whom Williams admires), and later to voguing dancers in the forest of Fontainebleau, located near Paris. Eduardo ‘Teddy’ Williams is known for his feature The Human Surge, selected at the New York Film Festival in 2016, and winner of the Golden Leopard in the Filmmakers of the Present section of the Locarno Film Festival.

 “I’m interested in the relation between the sensation of reality and fantasy, the normal and the unfamiliar. I think that everyday places and situations can be shown in a way by which this sensation of reality can be questioned.”— Eduardo Williams

In UNTITLED (Juice), the young French filmmaker Baptist Penetticobra directs two American non-actors, choosing orange juice as a transcontinental, universal subject to continue the work he has developed so far. His short films and music videos often feature monologues and characters inspired by those he finds on YouTube channels and TV shows, recalling stereotypical Americana landscapes.

“I wanted to talk about something trivial — like the orange juice from McDonald’s —and pull the thread as far as I could until it became almost abstract.” — Baptist Penetticobra
Directed by: Mati Diop, Eduardo Williams & Baptist Penetticobra - 2017 - France - 15 min Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, we are introducing a short film by new British director Francis Lee on the occasion of the U.S. release of his debut feature God’s Own Country, for which the filmmaker won Best Director in the World Cinema Competition this year in Sundance. Shot in one single take, with one camera position, Francis Lee’s 2013 short Bradford Halifax London takes us onto an emotionally charged train ride where a mother and father bicker loudly while their teenager daughter is mute with embarrassment. The film puts the viewer in the familiar position of an onlooker who can’t quite look away.

"I wanted to experiment and push myself to see if I could make a film with only one camera position and no edit. I love 'rules' or restrictions in work to push myself creatively. For example in my feature film God's Own Country, each department had strict rules we worked to — the costumes could only be bought in shops the characters would actually have geographical access to, the camera could only be positioned in certain ways, etc."
Francis Lee

Lee aimed to put the viewer in the disconcerting position of being a train passenger who can’t quite look away. “I think I wanted to push the idea of observing people. How uncomfortable this can be, how we ‘secretly’ want to watch people and their behaviour hoping not to be caught staring.” The filmmaker and actors shot only one take, and the authentic performances were the results of extensive rehearsals from a detailed script.

Francis Lee is a writer and director from Yorkshire in Northern England. He started his career as an actor, and wrote and directed three short films: The Farmer’s Wife (2012), this week’s short Bradford Halifax London (2013), and The Last Smallholder (2014). In his acclaimed debut feature God’s Own Country, the love story between a young farmer and a Romanian migrant worker unfolds in the harsh, breathtaking hills of rural Northern England. Francis Lee is currently working on his second feature which he hopes to shoot next year. Directed by: Francis Lee - 2013 - United Kingdom - 9 min WITH: Kirsty Armstrong, Paul Barnhill, Katy Cavanagh, Josh Hall Brown & Martin Preston - WRITER: Francis Lee - PRODUCER: Grace Welch - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Stuart Bentley - EDITOR: Marianne Kuopanportti Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

To celebrate the theatrical release of this year’s Palme d’or, Ruben Östlund’s ambitious and impressive The Square, we are presenting the Swedish filmmaker’s 2005 short film Autobiographical Scene Number 6882. One of the remarkable qualities in Östlund’s films, and a constant hallmark of his work, is the filmmaker’s ability to translate on screen the subtleties of awkward moments in everyday human interactions and relationships, depicting them with both humour and suspense.

 Comprised of three long takes, Autobiographical Scene Number 6882 follows a group of Swedish tourists watching and debating as one of them wants to jumps off a high bridge into the river. The film is a great, early example of how the Swedish filmmaker achieves his singular sense of social tension in a quasi-ordinary scene.

The Square — Ruben Östlund’s follow-up to the brilliant Force Majeure — stars Claes Bang and Elisabeth Moss in a cinematic social satire that explores the contemporary art world through the existential crisis of the respected curator of a museum.  The film was released this week in France, and it will be released next week in the U.S.

“If I reach my goal with a film today, then it should be a combination of social commentary, stand-up comedy and horrifying awkward moments.”
Ruben Östlund

Autobiographical Scene Number 6882 was written by Östlund and his long-time producer Erik Hemmendorff.  The founded their production company Plattform Produktion in 2002.  During the three-day shoot of the short film — a day for each of its single takes — Östlund himself had to take a metaphorical leap of faith, as he explains in his Criterion DVD picks, which he describes as an “extremely important experience as a director.” Östlund had his crew spend half a day building a tower to get one of the film’s angles only to realize that he didn’t like the angle. He struggled over the decision to tell his crew, fearing that he could lose their trust – or not telling them, and having to reshoot it later. The filmmaker took the risk and admitted his mistake, and ironically his accomplished sound designer came to him to say, “Now I seriously trust you.” Östlund further develops the significance of the anecdote: “I think that’s what filmmaking is about. When you are a director and when you are on set, you have a lot of pressure on yourself. And if you are leading your own instrument, if you’re looking at something and the image isn’t exactly how you want it, then you have to be very, very sensitive to your instrument. You have to follow that instrument. And as soon as you’re leaving your own instrument, then you are just doing things to avoid struggle during the shooting – then you’re also leaving the reason why you’re a director.”

The Square is Ruben Östlund fifth feature, and the first to compete in the official competition of the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the festival’s most prestigious prize.  Östlund’s films had been invited in other sections before: Involuntary (2008) and Force Majeure (2014) were both selected in Un Certain Regard, and Play (2011) premiered at Director’s Fortnight.  The filmmaker, who initially studied graphic design, directed skiing films in the 90s — before enrolling in film school in Göteborg, where he met his longtime collaborator and producer Erik Hemmendorff. Directed by: Ruben Östlund - 2005 - Sweden - 8 min WITH: With Anette Andersson, Ingela Borgström, Martin Byström, Elin Gradin, Mats Lekander, Gunnar Nyström & Martin Zetterlund - WRITER: Ruben Östlund & Erik Hemmendorff - PRODUCER: Erik Hemmendorff - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Ruben Östlund - MUSIC: Franz Schubert - COSTUME DESIGNER: Karolina Kling Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, we are proud to present the online premiere of Annabelle Dexter-Jones’ wonderful directorial debut, Cecile on the Phone.  The actress-writer-director draws us into her tense, funny New York story, in which she stars as Cecile, a young woman who obsesses over her ex-boyfriend’s return to the city.  Cecile distracts herself with a series of anxious, delusional telephone conversations, rife with over-analysis, with everyone she knows — as a giant sore develops on her mouth.  Shot on 16mm, the short is a tribute to the city that Dexter-Jones grew up in, as well as her love of seventies cinema and horror films.  Cecile On The Phone reveals Dexter-Jones to be an exciting new voice in cinema.

Selected at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, Cecile On The Phone‘s ensemble includes Art Garfunkel, Brandon Micheal Hall, Colby Minifie, Joséphine de La Baume, Noah Le Gros, JD Samson, and Tara Summers.  The original music was composed by Mark Ronson, Alexander Dexter-Jones and Bryan de Graw.  The film which looks great, and has a great sense of detail, was produced by Alldayeveryday.

Annabelle Dexter-Jones, who co-wrote the script with her friend Ellen Greenberg, initially conceived of an obsessive, delusional character, inspired by her personal experiences: “I was trying to explore a part of my growing up.  We all hopefully go through this to some extent: fall off the beam, act insane on impulse, and lose perspective.  As I got older, I started to be able to watch it happen, witness it and tell myself, ‘Oh that’s the crazy-me’… and watch it like a movie.  So I made a movie about it!”In developing the lead character, Dexter-Jones began to think of the telephone as a driving dramatic device, and she was able to write the story:

“It’s about obsession and fixation. This lack of self-awareness where you’re just talking to yourself.  The telephone also represents this.  There’s something really indulgent about being at home and on the phone. I also have a nostalgia about this object that doesn’t really exist anymore, and some vivid memories of my mother in bed on the telephone with all her newspapers. It’s also so physical, almost like a body part, an extension of yourself, like a leash or like holding someone’s hand.”
Annabelle Dexter-Jones

Annabelle Dexter-Jones grew up spending much of her time watching movies, and she always knew she wanted to work in film.  At the age of 13, she became interested in acting, taking courses at Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler in New York. She later graduated from Bard College, where she majored in literature and also pursued drama.  It was during her time in college that she started seriously considering becoming a director.  Dexter-Jones holds a dear place in her heart for the movies of the 1970s.  The films of Mike Nichols are among the filmmaker’s favorites, and Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman is one of the classics she discovered while working on Cecile On The Phone.  Dexter-Jones’ film is indeed a superb ode to the movies of that era.

Annabelle has acted in a number of shorts and features.  She appeared in Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, Jake Hoffman’s Asthma, Jordan Galland’s Ava’s Possession, and Tara Subkoff’s #Horror. She recently finished shooting Swing Low, a horror film by first-time director Teddy Grennan in which she has the lead role. Annabelle Dexter-Jones is now writing her second short, which she plans to shoot this winter as a study for a longer feature. Cecile On The Phone clearly reveals Annabelle Dexter-Jones as a talented, exciting new filmmaker and we cannot wait to see more of her films. Directed by: Annabelle Dexter-Jones - 2017 - United States - 11 min WITH: With Art Garfunkel, Brandon Micheal Hall, Colby Minifie, Joséphine de La Baume, Noah Le Gros, JD Samson, and Tara Summers - WRITER: Annabelle Dexter-Jones & Ellen Greenberg - PRODUCER: Andrew Runkle - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Deering Regan - MUSIC: Ryan Price - EDITOR: Sophie Corra - PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Happy Massee & Costanza Theodoli Braschi - COSTUME DESIGNER: Stevie Dance Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

As of this week, we’re changing our weekly release day!  Films will now begin showing on Fridays — for one week, for free.

 This week, we couldn’t be more thrilled to present three short films by the brilliant, one of a kind artist and filmmaker Harmony Korine on the occasion of his month-long Paris exhibition and retrospective, which opens today at Le Centre Pompidou, showcasing Korine’s full body of work for the first time in France.We selected these three shorts, made between 2010 and 2011 in different contexts, as they together create a wonderful triptych of the edgy poetry and singular personality found in Korine’s work.

Act da Fool was made for Proenza Schouler’s 2010 fashion line. As Korine introduces it, the film is “about girls who sleep in abandoned cars and set things on fire. It’s about the great things in life. The stars in the sky and lots of malt liquor.” Shot on Super 8, the short follows a group of girls stuck in an impoverished Nashville community. Korine captures the anger of youth in transition to adulthood, where the future holds nothing much but also everything.

Blood of Havana was shot as a short companion piece to Korine’s 2009 experimental black comedy-drama horror film about elderly deviant creatures, Trash Humpers. The short takes one of the protagonists from that feature to the streets of Havana, following him as he wanders, ponders, and interacts with the inhabitants of a country that feels strangely out of time. The short was shot in between Korine’s time in Cuba making commercials. “If an opportunity presents itself in any form it’s nice to do something with it, life goes by so quickly, so I always want to make everything entertaining, never letting the moments go.”

Curb Dance sees Korine tap dancing in the streets. The short combines the absurd visuals of the filmmaker in a pink dress “curb dancing” with an honest account of his love for the art of dance. Curb Dance is dedicated to the legendary Jonas Mekas.

"If I see something that’s morally ambiguous or ambiguously beautiful or has some pull in some way, I won’t censor myself; I always run towards the light."
Harmony Korine

Korine stormed onto the filmmaking scene early in his life, writing the script for Larry Clark’s 1995 Kids at the age of 19. In 1997, he directed his first feature Gummo. The filmmaker later wrote and directed Julien Donkey-Boy, Mister Lonely, Trash Humpers, and Spring Breakers. Korine also directed numerous commercials and music videos for Sonic Youth, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Cat Power, the Black Keys and Rihanna. Korine, who is also a painter and photographer, has published a number of books and fanzines, and his work has been exhibited around the world. We couldn’t be more excited for his new film, which is currently in production. The Beach Bum will star Matthew McConaughey as the titular character. Directed by: Harmony Korine - 2010-2011 - United States - 9 min Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, we present the work of young British artists Raf Fellner, a photographer, and Tegen Williams, a painter. Their CSI project, comprised of three short films, takes on the concept of a pretend investigation, wonderfully mixing film and photography, reality and fiction. The film and its title were not conceived without a touch of humor. CSI 5 Boroughs (2015) sees the filmmakers become detectives as they investigate the case of a missing boy in Chinatown, tracking down real characters and real life characters around the five boroughs of New York City. The two other shorts were made in and around London. The very short CSI Landor House (2014) looks like a real murder that took place in a council estate. The black and white CSI 1 (2012), the first in the series, follows detectives Cooke and Shickle – by Fellner and Williams – as they search for a young boy in London, from Wormwood Scrubs to a greasy spoon cafe and a dog racetrack.        

“Inspired by photography's magical way of saying a lot with not a lot at all — these short films use pictures and moving image to construct a narrative in search of truth. Using true events from news or personal experience, we, as photographer and director, took on the roles of detective to retell the story the way we saw it. The process of making each film became a performance in and of itself that I sort of regret not getting on film ...”
Tegen Williams

The films are rooted in reality, but Fellner and Williams imagine their own investigations. The genesis of CSI 5 Boroughs was a real missing person poster. The duo took the poster about the missing boy. We meet real people who become fake witnesses in the duo’s fictional investigation – this fake / real impression gives the film a great, offbeat energy. CSI Landor House pairs a recording of the filmmakers’ friend telling the story of a murder he witnessed in a council estate in West London with photographs and other images recreating the murder scene. The inspiration for CSI 1 , the short that started the project, came from the bookA Criminal Investigation by the Japanese photographer Watabe Yukichi. Fellner recalls how the photographs struck them both: “They looked so staged and cinematic, kind of hyper real and almost silly. . Fellner studied anthropology at Goldsmiths, and Williams studied painting at Camberwell College of Arts. They have been working together for five years, taking photographs and painting, and they have directed a number of music videos, including the recent blue train lines by Mount Kimbie and King Krule, as well as videos for the English brand Babeheaven. Their CSIproject is ongoing, and it includes sculpture pieces of prison shanks. The Moroccan Berber music.       Directed by: Raf Fellner & Tegen Williams - 2012-2015 - England - 29 min Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

The fourth and final selection in Josh and Benny Safdie’s takeover of Le CiNéMa Club is a short comedy by the brilliant and beloved British auteur Mike Leigh. Shot in the North of London in 1987, The Short & Curlies follows a series of vignettes of four characters in their everyday lives. There’s the gossipy hairdresser Betty and her timid daughter Charlene, and one of Betty’s customers Joy, who works at the pharmacy and is being chased by the gangly Clive who is never short of a joke. The film wonderfully demonstrates Mike Leigh’s famous voice and talent for depicting ordinary people with love, truth and humour, as well as his great attention to detail. Benny Safdie, a great admirer of Mike Leigh, introduces the short:  

"The Short & Curlies is what short films should be: SHORT MOVIES. This film explores so many topics and ideas with such speed and precision — without giving up on character — that it boggles my mind. The time he spans, the topics he tackles and the cinematography and music are all in sync. Leigh is firing on all cylinders here in this rare short film, and David Thewlis gives a powerhouse performance and Alison Steadman transforms into something inexplicable. If you are gonna watch this film for one reason it should the constant stream of one liners spewing out of Thewlis’ mouth. Disclaimer: I believe Mike Leigh is the king of characters and nuance and his early feature films are so good they should be illegal! This short somehow captures the feeling and essence of all of that in 17 minutes… Also I’ve watched the movie 3 times while writing this.”
Benny Safdie

Mike Leigh was commissioned by the then young Channel 4 to direct The Short & Curlies as part of a series of short films. The success of the short put Leigh’s career back on track to make movies for the big screen. At the time, he had only made his first feature Bleak Moments (1973) and since had written and directed numerous plays, as well as shorts and films for television now considered part of his most celebrated work. The cast, including Leigh’s frequent collaborators Alison Steadman and David Thewlis, rehearsed for three weeks with Mike Leigh before shooting the film. Mike Leigh is famous for his long rehearsal process, which he later described in an interview: “We don’t rehearse in the sense that we don’t build scenes. Later, during the period of shooting, I actually do rehearse. I bring into existence each sequence, structuring and writing all through rehearsal. The preliminary period, the four months previous to shooting, is the period in which the characters, their relationship and their whole world, come into existence through a lot of research, improvisation and discussion.”

Mike Leigh is one of the most revered British filmmakers in the history of cinema. He won Best Director in Cannes for Naked (1993) and the Palme d’or for Secrets & Lies (1996), and he has been nominated for seven Academy Awards. Leigh is currently in production on his next feature Peterloo, about the 1819 Peterloo massacre where British forces attacked a peaceful pro-democracy rally in Manchester.

We would like to thank Mike Leigh, Helen Grearson, Protagonist Pictures, Shorts TV, StudioCanal, Cameo and Diaphana for making this program possible on Le CiNéMa Club. Directed by: Mike Leigh - 1987 - United Kingdom - 18 min WITH: Alison Steadman, David Thewlis, Sylvestra Le Touzel & Wendy Nottingham - WRITER: Mike Leigh - PRODUCER: Victor Glynn - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Roger Pratt - MUSIC: Rachel Portman - EDITOR: Jon Gregory - PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Diana Charnley - COSTUME DESIGNER: Lindy Hemming Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, Josh & Benny Safdie have selected Fowl Play, a short film by young American filmmaker Owen Kline. Set in Flushing, Queens, the story follows Sammy, Little Jimmy and Ernie — three small time crooks trying to find a chicken to cockfight. Fowl Play amusingly turns real life characters, the filmmaker’s friends, into lousy hustlers, and takes us to cool locations on the outskirts of NYC — the ensemble offering us a slice of the city we rarely get a taste of.  

"I met Owen Kline after he asked to take me out for a coffee when he was 15 years old. I was 23. He's always yearned for an interaction with a world beyond him, carefully sculpting a life falling out of the comics he obsesses over. FOWL PLAY blew our minds when we saw it. It's a portrait of a type of legend. Plus Juan Wauters is the biggest star. We can't wait till Owen's obsessive vision grows to feature lengths."
Josh Safdie

Directed while Owen Kline was in his junior year of film school, the short was triggered by an old acquaintance of his: “This incredibly shady DVD bootlegger who was a little bit involved in an honest-to-god cockfighting ring in Flushing, Queens.  I started to get a lot of info about how these things were run by these Chinese thugs and the whole operation sounded pretty out there!” Kline also knew he wanted to shoot with his Queens-based friends — Rob M. Anderson, Frank Avila, and Juan Wauters (who also appears in the Safdies’ short John’s Gone) — as actors.

The filmmaker didn’t want any chicken carnage, for moral reasons: “My co-writer Alex Curtin and I thought it would only be natural to write them as these low-rent criminals trying to break into the Flushing cockfighting circuit but aren’t bright enough to tell the difference between a rooster and a hen.”

The film was shot in Flushing with bits in Brooklyn and New Jersey.  The only expense was going to be a real movie chicken before they realized that “chickens were all untrainable and pretty much the same,” so they borrowed one (by the name of Shyla) from their friend’s farm: “Letting that chicken loose into the streets for that one scene in Flushing Chinatown was the single most chaotic day of my adult life.”

As a kid, Owen Kline was making movies with a Tyco video camera for children.  He wanted to become a cartoonist or a magician: “Film is kind of a combination of both those things in a funny way now that I think about it!”  Even though he grew up around film sets (his father is the great actor Kevin Kline), Owen became convinced that he wanted to be a filmmaker when he was 13, after playing Frank Berkman, the young boy in Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale: “Doing a smaller independent film made it feel so much more accessible and not so daunting”. After watching the wonderful, funny Fowl Play, we are eager to see what’s next for Owen Kline. Directed by: Owen Kline - 2013 - United States - 12 min WITH: Hilary Duncanson, Rob M. Anderson, Frank Avila, Juan Wauters & Steve Dalachinsky - WRITER: Alex Curtin & Owen Kline - PRODUCER: Johann Carlo - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Alex Curtin - EDITOR: Owen Kline & peter Brensinger - PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Madeline Quinn Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

The Safdie Brothers’ takeover of the CiNéMa Club continues with a short film where cultures collide in a New York bodega, written and directed by American director James Cox. Let us have Josh Safdie this week’s pick:

"The nineties were jagged and boxy. The nineties in NYC saw the last days of what a lot of people call 'old new york' now, when Guiliani came in and 'cleaned it up.' I remember going to Legs Diamond as a 16 year old, who looked like a 12 year old and I remember the bouncer not giving a shit. ATOMIC TABASCO is a late 90s display of old new york. Written and directed by James Cox who has gone on to have a long career in Hollywood. The nineties loved a non-linear film, thanks in part to of course the pop-changer Tarantino. You can clearly see his influence on this film school short. The film stars a great and electric teenage Eleonore Hendricks (who we’ve worked with as an actress and as a casting director and a young Josh Ralph (who’s been nominated for an Oscar three times for best original song) who with the director and another friend play proto-post-Y2K hipster nihilist music enthusiasts. Ralph is hilarious and this ethnic pot-boiler, which takes place in a Bodega, is a fun reminder of what independent movies were doing then.”
Josh Safdie

Atomic Tabasco is the NYU short film that launched James Cox’s career in Hollywood. Cox had the original idea when a McDonald’s, at the corner of 1 ^st Avenue, in the East Village: “I was watching groups of people interacting in different languages, and I had this idea of a set of characters, where no one understood anyone, even though everyone was essentially saying the same thing, as time kept revolving and starting over and over again “recalls the filmmaker. Cox dropped out of school for a year and left to Korea to write and work as cinematographer. He made the most of what he had missed most of the time in New York was “How the city was so damn vibrant and alive, even in a bodega on C & 10th at 2am on any given night of the week.” Korean hip-hop: Denki Groove’s  Volcanic Beats This video is translated from French to English and is not translated to English. Versace is a bangin ‘girlfriend on his arm … And the lightning struck. “! ligne! ligne! Academy Awards – The Best of Hollywood Movies James Cox is always here: “Never underestimate the power of have dope shorts. “   Directed by: James Cox - 1999 - United States - 12 min WITH: Sameer Butt, James Cox, Eleonore Hendricks and J. Ralph - WRITER: James Cox - PRODUCER: Bill Bymel, James Cox & J. Ralph - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Michael Grady - COSTUME DESIGNER: Mila Radulovic Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

We couldn’t be happier to announce that the Safdie brothers are taking over programming on Le CiNéMa Club for the month of September! The great New York filmmakers have chosen four eclectic picks, from classics to works by new talents and rare gems.

Josh and Benny Safdie’s latest feature, a nocturnal chase thriller set in Queens and starring Robert Pattinson, confirms that the filmmakers are two of the most exciting American directors working today. Good Time is now playing nationwide in the US, and it will be released in France later this month.

The Safdies’ program begins this week with The ‘High Sign’, a 1921 black and white short film by one of the very first legends of American comedy, Buster Keaton. Keaton plays a drifter who cons his way into working at an amusement park shooting gallery and ends up being hired by both the murderous gang the Blinking Buzzards and by the man they want to kill. The film ends with a must-see wild chase in a house filled with secret passages.

“From the newspaper gag on, this short film by Buster Keaton is a nonstop ride of laughs and ingenuity. The alliteration in the title cards is one thing but the climax with the split level set and endless sight gags and movement is so beautiful and funny it reaches levels of filmmaking and humor still ahead of the times. This is one of Keaton’s best shorts because it follows no rules and has a joke every millisecond, all while preserving its humanity! Long live Keaton!"
Benny Safdie

The ‘High Sign’ was Keaton’s first work ever produced. It wasn’t the silent filmmaker’s favorite, but his contemporaries and audiences didn’t agree. Indeed, this very early work of his is already masterful. His talent can be admired both in the efficiency and modernity of the screenplay and in the inventiveness of the gags, which are at times surreal and at others extremely physical. The final act is brilliantly staged and orchestrated on a multi-levelled set – like a dollhouse cut in two – in which Keaton perform impressive acrobatics. Directed by: Buster Keaton - 1921 - United States - 21 min WITH: With Buster Keaton, Joe Roberts and Bartine Burkett - WRITER: Buster Keaton, Edward F. Cline Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, we are excited to present the thesis movie of new American director Eliza Hittman, whose second feature, the powerful and sensual Beach Rats –  for which Hittman won Best Director in Sundance this year – was released this weekend. Beach Rats deftly and beautifully tells the story of a teenage boy dealing with his sexuality, while hanging out with his friends and coping with the imminent death of his father! Line! Line! In Forever’s Gonna Start  Tonight, published in 2011, Hittman’s talents for subtly and sensitively exploring the emotional, sexual life of a teenager in deep Brooklyn are already on display. Set in Brighton Beach, the film tells the story of Sonya, a 17-year-old Russian immigrant who faces the challenge of the claustrophobic apartment in which she lives with her dad and his rapidly growing pack of cats. When Sonya meets a friend to escape on a sleepless night out, she is confronted with a series of desires and choices, triggered by the night.  

"I’ve always been a little bit fascinated with those neighborhoods [Brooklyn’s coastal area] and I’d spend a lot of the summer just flopping around those beaches. It’s a part of Brooklyn that feels caught between past and present. Those areas have a history of violence of all kinds -- and, unlike other parts of the City, change has come very slowly."
Eliza Hittman

Eliza Hittman grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Her acclaimed debut feature It Felt Like Love  premiered in Sundance in 2013, and was nominated for the John Cassavetes Award at the Independent Spirit Awards. As with  Beach Rats , it was a New York Times’ Critics Pick. Hittman is currently directing episodes of Netflix’s  13 Reasons Why . Directed by: Eliza Hittman - 2011 - United States - 16 min WITH: With Viktoria Vinyarska, Nina Medvinskaya, Fedor Filonov and Andrey Drozdov - WRITER: Eliza Hittman - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Smokey Nelson - EDITOR: Scott Cummings - PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Andrew Boyce - COSTUME DESIGNER: Sarah Maiorino Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

Continuing our 16mm summer holidays, we are honoured to present Sean’s Beach, an unseen short made by the American cinematographer Sean Price Williams.  Sean Price Williams, a true believer in film, has been a constant figure in New York’s independent cinema over the past seven years.  His contributions to the wonderful looks of films by some of the most interesting new directors working in the city – including Robert Greene, Alex Ross Perry, and Josh & Benny Safdie – are remarkable.  It is a pleasure to present Sean’s Beach to coincide with the theatrical release of the Safdie Brothers’ brilliant nocturnal chase thriller Good Time, in which you can admire Sean Price Williams’ beautiful, dark and electric photography.

Although Sean initially wanted to randomly name the film 12 Spoons – he was talked out of it – Sean’s Beach is a title that defines film.  The filmmaker takes us to a beach in the Hamptons, where he improvises with his entourage – and with Sean leading the camera, the result is a cinematic, colorful, madcap world in 16mm filled with slightly oddball characters hanging by the sea, poetically framed and cut together. One might define a great filmmaker by saying that with almost nothing, the filmmaker can magically make of moment of cinema happen.  Here is a great example of that, by the seaside.

“I have an abiding love for film and love watching films shot on film. It’s a flexible, versatile recording medium that you can use to create very nostalgic or naturalistic aesthetics. But I also like to electrify the filmed image and colors, especially strong colors, look great on film. Combined with its grain structure, film is made for a stimulating picture that is easier to create on set and more interesting to watch than a digital interpretation. Film sees what is in front of you on set; it’s alive.”
Sean Price Williams

Sean Price Williams made the film on an impulse in 2004 after his girlfriend left him – he decided he would be less shy, both with making films and with girls. At the time, Sean was working at Kim’s Video, the cult video and record store in downtown New York that closed in 2014.  He took a group of his friends to the beach, mostly employees and customers of the store, with a nice Aaton camera but a student-level camera package.  They shot the film over two days, on the go, overcoming small hurdles like bailing a French actor, who had been mistakenly arrested at a political convention the day before, out of jail – or finding a light pole to charge their empty batteries. They couldn’t get a full charge in time, but Sean Price Williams astutely realized that the camera could still shoot 18 frames per second, even if it wouldn’t shoot 24 fps.  The group caught magic hour on different speed than the rest of the movie.  Sean wanted all the music in the film to be diegetic; they went around with a small portable record player playing Herbie Mann, Basil Kirchin, The Mamas & The Papas, and some music by the experimental Turkish musician Ilhan Mimaroglu.  These elements all contributed to the singular charm of the film.

After learning how to use a camera, Sean Price Williams quickly left film school in Baltimore to move to New York.  In addition to working at Kim’s Video, he was shooting content for websites and worked for a while as an archivist for Maysles Films, the production company of the legendary American documentarians.  He shot Albert Maysles’ last documentary Iris (2014).  His first works include Frownland by Ronnie Bronstein, the co-writer and editor of Good Time, who also appears in Sean’s Beach, and Alex Ross Perry’s first feature Impolex.  Williams has worked on every Alex Ross Perry film since (Listen Up Phillip, Queen of Earth, and Golden Exits). Prior to shooting Good Time, he shot the Safdies’ Heaven Knows What and their short The Black Balloon.  Recent credits also include Michael Almereyda’s Marjorie Prime and Nathan Silver’s Thirst Street.

Sean Price Williams would like to thanks Jason at Metropolis Post in New York for the color grade of the film. Directed by: Sean Price Williams - 2004 - United States - 15 min WITH: Avec Alex, Justin, Matt, Dominique, Sarah, Jolie, Ronald, Dore, Leslie, Jeff, et Chris Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

During the month of August, we’re taking things a bit slower — each film will screen for two weeks instead of one. The two shorts selected this month both take you on a 16mm holiday. The first was made by French filmmaker Antonin Peretjako. The second is by American filmmaker and cinematographer Sean Price Williams.

This week is You Want A Story?, written and directed by the talented comedic French filmmaker Antonin Peretjako. The film unfolds as a travel diary in which we are guided through beautiful footage, taken all over the world, with the director’s witty and personal narration connecting images and ideas, oscillating between imagination and reality. The film takes us on a trip, out of the ordinary, and invites you to do the same ­— if you are looking for a new story.

Commissioned by the young, tasteful French production company Le Septième Continent for their collection of short films entitled Undead, Peretjako shot the travel images on different trips, without a script but with an aesthetic in mind.  He used a hand crank 16mm camera, a camera where he wouldn’t face the issue of recharging batteries.  The filmmaker shot additional sexy shots of women that thread through story — jumping from one country to another, from a memory to a thought, from one girl to another.  We admire the scenes as if flipping through postcards.  We smile at his voiceover, as if having a conversation with the director.

Antonin Peretjako is one of the great new French directors revealed in recent years.  His distinct style is refreshing the French comedy landscape — twisting and subverting the collective imagery of the Nouvelle Vague, charging films with physical gags and interesting social and political perspectives. Peretjako has directed two features, both starring the great French actor Vincent Macaigne.  The Rendez-Vous of Déjà-Vu was presented at the Director’s Fortnight in Cannes in 2013, and was nominated for Best First Film at the Césars, and Struggle for Life was released in 2016. Peretjako also made a series of excellent short films, from which we presented French Kiss last year. He is currently editing his latest short film, Panic at the Senate.
Directed by: Antonin Peretjatko - 2014 - France - 10 min WITH: With Pauline Ghersi, Lucie Borleteau & Laura Giappiconi - WRITER: Antonin Peretjatko - PRODUCER: Alix Pennequin & Lola Norda - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Antonin Peretjatko - EDITOR: Antonin Peretjatko Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, we are presenting the second film in our double bill from the documentary pioneers Albert and David Maysles (The Salesman, Gimme Shelter, Grey Gardens). The 29-minute film Meet Marlon Brando is a close-up look at the spellbinding personality of one of the greatest actors of all time. During a press junket in New York in 1965, we witness Brando countering, posturing, mocking — with all his wits and charm — the predictable questions of the reporters…  When he isn’t flirting with the pretty journalists.  Brando was incredibly charismatic, and in this must-see film where he is simply himself, he delivers one of his most absorbing performances.

In the short documentary, Brando is interviewed about his latest film Morituri. Without ever interrogating him directly, the Maysles naturally capture the star, creating a collage of moments that, together, create a candid and intimate portrait.  That was one of the documentarians’ great strengths: selecting unguarded moments and finding drama in the edit. Here we see the complexity of Brando’s character: intelligent, funny, charming, political, and also vulnerable, and impulsive at times.  We also learn that he speaks German and French. As Howard Thompson wrote in a New York Times review: “The actor was never more appealing than in this candid-camera cameo, his best performance.”

''We have labored in each of our films to get as close to the truth as we could.''
Albert Maysles

Albert and David Maysles have had a major, lasting influence on cinema.  The brothers revolutionized documentary filmmaking in the late 60s and 70s.  They were among the first cinéma vérité directors in America, along with Richard Leacock and Donn Alan Pennebaker – inventing lighter versions of cameras to go into the streets, to capture life as it is, as they observed it. They broke with conventions of documentaries by neither interviewing their films’ subjects nor using voice-over narration.

The directors were known for seeking the truth, working without scripts or predetermined plots. Albert Maysles would often say: “I’m a person whose only point of view is not to have a point of view.” The dramatic power in their films comes from the intimacy of their hand-held camera, and a preternatural gift for finding and capturing spontaneous, revealing moments. Jean-Luc Godard would call Albert Maysles the best American cameraman. Martin Scorsese wrote, in a foreword to A Maysles Scrapbook: “When Al is behind the camera, there’s a sensitivity to mood, to space and light, to the energy between the people in the room.”

The Maysles’ first classic was Salesman (1966), which chronicled vividly the life of four door-to-door bible salesmen. Two of their other best known masterworks are Gimme Shelter (1970), featuring the Rolling Stones 1969 American tour, and Grey Gardens (1975), the fascinating film about Edith and Edie Bouvier Beale in their decaying Long Island mansion. The Maysles made dozens of other beautiful films, including documentaries on figures such as Truman Capote, The Beatles, and Muhammad Ali. After his brother’s death in 1987, Albert continued making remarkable documentaries. Iris, about the 94-year old New York fashion icon Iris Apfel, was released in 2014.

We would like to thank Rebekah Maysles, Laura Coxson, and Jake Perlin for making this program possible on Le CiNéMa Club. Directed by: Albert and David Maysles - 1966 - United States - 29 min Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

For the next two weeks, we are honored to present two wonderful short films by legendary American documentarians Albert and David Maysles, pioneers of direct cinema and, as for many, some of our favourite filmmakers of all time.  Dali’s Fantastic Dream and Meet Marlon Brando were shot in New York City in 1966. Both films demonstrate the Maysles’ historic talent for drawing intuitive, honest, and intimate portraits ­— here about two giant figures, captured simply while working and interacting with others.

This week is a rarely seen six-minute film following Salvador Dalì in New York as he creates a portrait of the actress Raquel Welch, in a bikini. The film was commissioned by 20^th Century Fox to help promote the release of their recent production Fantastic Voyage, starring Welch, for which Dalì was artistic consultant.  We accompany the artist to his room at the St. Regis Hotel, where we witness his exuberant creative process.  As Albert Maysles said about the film, “Dali is so funny because he was so strange.”  

''We have labored in each of our films to get as close to the truth as we could.''
Albert Maysles

Albert and David Maysles have had a major, lasting influence on cinema.  The brothers revolutionized documentary filmmaking in the late 60s and 70s.  They were among the first cinéma vérité directors in America, along with Richard Leacock and Donn Alan Pennebaker – inventing lighter versions of cameras to go into the streets, to capture life as it is, as they observed it. They broke with conventions of documentaries by neither interviewing their films’ subjects nor using voice-over narration.

The directors were known for seeking the truth, working without scripts or predetermined plots. Albert Maysles would often say: “I’m a person whose only point of view is not to have a point of view.” The dramatic power in their films comes from the intimacy of their hand-held camera, and a preternatural gift for finding and capturing spontaneous, revealing moments. Jean-Luc Godard would call Albert Maysles the best American cameraman. Martin Scorsese wrote, in a foreword to A Maysles Scrapbook: “When Al is behind the camera, there’s a sensitivity to mood, to space and light, to the energy between the people in the room.”

The Maysles’ first classic was Salesman (1966), which chronicled vividly the life of four door-to-door bible salesmen. Two of their other best known masterworks are Gimme Shelter (1970), featuring the Rolling Stones 1969 American tour, and Grey Gardens (1975), the fascinating film about Edith and Edie Bouvier Beale in their decaying Long Island mansion. The Maysles made dozens of other beautiful films, including documentaries on figures such as Truman Capote, The Beatles, and Muhammad Ali. After his brother’s death in 1987, Albert continued making remarkable documentaries. Iris, about the 94-year old New York fashion icon Iris Apfel, was released in 2014.

We would like to thank Rebekah Maysles, Laura Coxson, and Jake Perlin for making this program possible on Le CiNéMa Club.     Directed by: Albert and David Maysles - 1966 - United States - 6 min WITH: With Salvador Dalì & Raquel Welch Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, we are honoured to present a selection of three early short films by American director David Lowery, on the occasion of the release of his daring and poetic new film A Ghost Story, starring Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck. Lowery creates a new, unique and personal entry in the genre of ghost stories that examines the existence of a ghost, simply draped in a bedsheet, lingering throughout time, in pain over the love he has just left and the house they shared.  It is wonderful to go back to Lowery’s first homemade works and dive into the themes that occupied his mind as a young filmmaker – especially as one of them begins with precious footage from the very first film he made, at the age of seven, entitled A Ghost Story.

The three short films are presented here from the most recent to the oldest. My Daily Routine (2011), a three-minute hand-drawn animation about the quotidian habits of a young and striving filmmaker, is narrated by Lowery. A Catalog of Anticipations (2008) is a beautiful, simple five-minute film constructed out of stills – following a young girl (Lowery’s sister) collecting strange bones and creatures from the ground. Finally, also narrated by Lowery, Some Analog Lines (2006) features the director discussing his early filmmaking endeavors, and his reflections on the importance of a director’s signature, as he ponders the arrival of CGI versus the value of stop-motion.

There’s no better introduction to these films than the one Lowery kindly sent to Le CiNéMa Club:

“The three short films presented here this week were made between 2006 and 2011. Within that half-decade, I found my voice as a filmmaker; later on I lost it again and had to re-find it - but there’s nothing like the first time, which is why I want to offer these particular efforts in concert with one another. These aren’t the only films I made during this period, but they fit together particularly well. They’re all very brief. They are all amateurish in the truest and most positive sense of the word. Two are narrated by me. Two are made up almost entirely of still images; the third is essentially about the way in which the others were made. Of particular note, two contain whispy connective strands to A GHOST STORY, the film of mine that is currently out in theaters, and which is itself pitched in the same tone and key as these three films; hopefully I've gotten better at holding it.”
David Lowery

David Lowery is director, screenwriter and editor born in Wisconsin and later raised in Irving, Texas. His first feature St Nicks (2011) followed a brother and a sister on the run and was made for $12,000.  His second feature Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, starring Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck, premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival where it was awarded the Best Cinematography award for a then still upcoming Bradford Young.  After Saints, Lowery was hired to co-write and direct Disney’s Pete’s Dragon (2016). He recently finished shooting his new film The Old Man and the Gun, based on a New Yorker piece by David Grann (The Lost City of Z).  The film’s magnificent cast includes Robert Redford, Casey Affleck, Sissy Spacek, Danny Glover, Tika Sumpter, Tom Waits and Elisabeth Moss.  Fox Searchlight plans to release the film next year.     Directed by: David Lowery - 2006-2011 - United States - 14 min Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week is the online premiere of Approaching a Breakthrough, a short New York comedy directed by New York-based filmmaker Noah Pritzker, starring Kieran Culkin and Mae Whitman. Realism gives way to a strange dreamlike sequence in this selection from the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival.

As Norman and his girlfriend storm into Central Park, bickering, Norman is cornered by a string of characters from his past, appearing from all sides of the park — from two of his former therapists to his Mormon ex-girlfriend. Despite his best efforts to run away from his problems, Norman, who has recently returned from LA, can’t seem to escape them.

The film begins very much rooted in the tradition of New York romantic comedies — a couple quarrels in Central Park — but it takes an odd, funny twist as other people from Norman’s life suddenly emerge in the Park, one after another to analyze Norman, as if justifying his girlfriend’s arguments.  

“I wanted to make something that felt like a fever dream but happening in a very ordinary place, like the park, and coming out of the blue in the midst of an ordinary argument Norman and his girlfriend are having.”
Noah Pritzker

The director cites the influence of Woody Allen on his work. In addition to the famous films, Pritzker describes Oedipus Wrecks from New York Stories asa perfect short. He also loves Louis Malle — the intro/outro music in Approaching a Breakthrough is Charlie Parker’s “My Old Flame”, from Murmur of the Heart (1971). He also mentions the Israeli writer Etgar Keret: “He writes these wonderful tragicomic and phantasmagorical short stories that I always loved and think influenced me as a writer. Keret and his wife Shira Geffen directed a film called Jellyfish, which Shira wrote. In addition to the writing, I loved the simplicity and elegance of the camera and production design.”

Noah Pritzker is a filmmaker living in New York City. His debut feature, Quitters, premiered in competition at SXSW in 2015. He is currently casting his upcoming feature Men of Divorce, which follows a man who, after being left by his wife, inadvertently crashes his son’s bachelor party in Mexico   Directed by: Noah Pritzker - 2017 - United States - 10 min WITH: With Kieran Culkin & Mae Whitman - WRITER: Noah Pritzker - PRODUCER: Brendan McHugh & Wyatt Angelo - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Andrew Ellmaker - EDITOR: David Massachi - PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Meredith Lippincott - COSTUME DESIGNER: Hannah LaCava Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, we are presenting a beautiful short film directed by Léa Mysius, who was one of the revelations at this year’s Cannes Film Festival with her debut feature Ava, which was highly praised in Critics’ Week. The 28 year-old filmmaker co-directed The Yellow Island with Ava’s talented cinematographer and co-screenwriter Paul Guilhaume.

The Yellow Island is a thirty-minute film about adolescence and first summer loves that stands somewhere between a coming-of-age drama and a tale. In the film, Ena, an 11 year-old girl, asks her strange and solitary sailing classmate to take her to his remote island, secretly hoping to meet again a young fisherman.

Mysius co-directed the short with Paul Guilhaume, Ava’s talented cinematographer and co-screenwriter. They wanted to make an adventure movie based on their teenage memories — both grew up on the French Atlantic coast. They shot the short film on 16mm with anamorphic lenses as they looked to soften the exterior light as well as the texture of the skin of their actors. The final song is the theme from Maurice Pialat’s A Nos Amours (1983) – a funny nod to the great French movie, after the editor highlighted some existing parallels between the two films.

Raised in a family of cinephiles, Mysius initially imagined becoming a novelist. She later joined the screenwriting section of the prestigious French film school La Fémis, where she wrote the screenplay for Ava during her final year. The film follows a young teenager who gradually looses her sight one summer. While on holidays with her mother, she decides to live that summer fully, enchanting the world around her and befriending a wandering young outcast. Mysius was also credited as a co-writer of Arnaud Depleschin’s new film Ismael’s Ghosts which opened the Festival de Cannes and stars Mathieu Amalric, Marion Cotillard and Charlotte Gainsbourg. More recently, another great French filmmaker, André Téchiné, has asked her to co-write his next feature. The great young talent Lea Mysius is clearly at the beginning of a long and interesting career, and we’re excited to see what she does in the years to come.
Directed by: Léa Mysius & Paul Guilhaume - 2015 - France - 29 min WITH: With Ena Letourneux & Alexandre Branco - WRITER: Léa Mysius & Paul Guilhaume - PRODUCER: Fanny Yvonnet - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Paul Guilhaume - EDITOR: Pierre Deschamps - PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Esther Mysius, Camille Rouaud Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

For our second week spotlighting New Orleans, in partnership with the Champs-Elysées Film Festival in Paris, we are honoured to present Bill and Turner Ross’ second feature-length documentary Tchoupitoulas. The film takes us on a nighttime journey into the French Quarter, guided by three teenage brothers who wander and explore the vibrant streets of New Orleans. We encounter local dancers, musicians, hustlers and drag queens. Through the eyes of its characters, the film becomes an urban dream, bringing us into the almost fantastical reality of the city. The film, which premiered at the SXSW Film festival in 2012, was a New York Times Critics Pick.

Tchoupitoulas that takes place during one night was shot over the course of nine months in a cinema verite style. It focuses on documenting the experience of the three young characters discovering the city of New Orleans at night. As with most of their other films, it is the process and experience that first interested the two filmmakers. As kids, the Ross Brothers spent a lot of time in the carnival streets of the city. The film was a way for them to go back to these old memories and feelings. But the best introduction to the film comes from Bill Ross’ own words:

“I was just in Cannes for the past festival and was reminded of the first time I was there when I was 20 and saw 'The 400 Blows' for the first time on the beach. Like so many before me it knocked me out and became my favorite film. Turner and I were pretty wild kids and that film spoke to that. We were determined to make a film that would speak to trouble-making and the quest for adventure. We also wanted the landscape to be our adopted hometown of New Orleans. We had spent a lot of time there as kids, sneaking out at night and trying to see adult things. We succeeded quite a bit! But we also wanted the film and the experience to be authentic. We needed to see the city through the kids who were out causing the trouble in real-time. For seven long and worrisome months we were up til dawn looking. Finally one evening William walked past us and we heard his banter and that was it. We asked him if we could follow he and his brothers around and make a movie and it was all of a sudden that simple. Me and T hope you dig 'Tchoup' and then go out and cause some trouble of your own. We would be right there with you if we could.”
Bill Ross

Born and raised in Ohio, Bill and Turner Ross are graduates of the Savannah College of Art and Design. Their first feature 45365, which refers to a specific zip code in their hometown, won the 2009 Grand Jury Prize at SXSW for Best Documentary Feature. Following Tchoupitoulas, the brothers directed two other documentaries: Western (2015), which documents two Texan border towns separated by the Rio Grande, won the Special Jury Prize in Sundance, and Contemporary Color (2016), which follows David Byrne through his event at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, also won the Best Documentary award at the Tribeca Film Festival. They are currently working on their next project Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, which will portray the lives of a disparate group of patrons and employees at an American dive bar. They are currently raising money for it. You can donate money by visiting their website or clicking here. Directed by: Turner Ross & Bill Ross IV - 2012 - United States - 82 min WITH: With Bryan Zanders, William Zanders & Kentrell Zanders - PRODUCER: Michael Gottwald, Dan Janvey, Josh Penn, Turner Ross & Bill Ross IV - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Turner Ross & Bill Ross IV - EDITOR: Turner Ross & Bill Ross IV Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

During the next two weeks, in partnership with the Champs-Élysées Film Festival — where seven films will screen in a special section dedicated to New Orleans — Le CiNéMa Club honors New Orleans by showcasing two different portraits of the city and its surroundings. The Champs-Élysées Film Festival, which was created six years ago by French producer and distributor Sophie Dulac, presents French and American films in some of Paris’ finest movie houses on one of the most famous avenues in the world. This year, the festival opens with Sean Baker’s The Florida Project, and features much anticipated films such as Jeune Femme by Léonor Serraille (this year’s Caméra d’or in Cannes) and festival darling Rat Film by Theo Anthony. You can find the full line-up on the festival’s website.

This week, Le CiNéMa Club presents The Boatman, a touching short documentary made by Louisiana-based independent filmmaker Zack Godshall that tells the story of Joseph and Selina Gonzales, a couple approaching their 71^st wedding anniversary who lives on Louisiana’s vanishing coast, close to New Orleans. As they reflect on endurance, love and fortitude, we are invited to visit the 60-foot boat that Joseph has been building — one of the few things that resisted and survived Hurricane Katrina. The short was made for the six-part series New Orleans, Here & Now for Time Magazine.  Godshall initially found out about Joseph and his mythical endeavor to build a 60-foot long boat while filming God’s Architects, another documentary by the filmmaker that presents marginalized artist-architects and their divinely inspired structures and installations.

" THE BOATMAN is a tribute to all people who live along Louisiana's endangered coastline, and in particular, it's a tribute to Joseph and Selina Gonzales, whose marriage of 71 years has endured far more than hurricanes and floods and produced more than an entire fleet of oyster boats could ever hope to haul."
Zack Godshall

Zack Godshall makes films about overlooked people and places that exist on the fringes of culture.  His work often combines documentary and narrative forms, and his first two narrative features, Low and Behold and Lord Byron, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.  Godshall’s documentaries have garnered awards at film festivals around the country.  His most recent project Hogwash is a web miniseries of eight 10-minute episodes featuring slices of life in the fictional city of Oubliette, Louisiana. The filmmaker describes them as “blend of realism and absurd, outrageous comedy.”  You can watch the first season here, and the second season will be out soon.  Zack Godshall is also an assistant professor at Louisiana State University.

The Boatman was produced by Noah Stahl, Brad Becker-Parton, and Dan Janvey, and is presented on Le CiNéMa Club courtesy of Janvey and Stahl’s Court 13, the filmmaking collective behind Beasts of the Southern Wild. Directed by: Zack Godshall - 2015 - United States - 14 min WITH: With Joseph & Selina Gonzales - WRITER: Zack Godshall - PRODUCER: Noah Stahl, Brad Becker-Parton & Dan Janvey - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Zack Godshall - EDITOR: Zack Godshall Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, to coincide with the release of It Comes at Night, the second feature from exciting new American auteur Trey Shults, we are honoured to present an online exclusive: Krisha, the short on which Shults’ acclaimed feature debut of the same name is based. Made in the filmmaker’s family home in Texas, and starring his real life family members, the short is a beautiful and intense portrait of addiction and chaotic family reunions, and the announcement of a new voice in American cinema. In both the short and the feature, the filmmaker demonstrates his talent for telling personal stories through a unique and fresh lens.  The visually arresting short features the great early work of cinematographer Drew Daniels and composer Brian McOmber, collaborators Shults has been working with ever since.

The making of the short film Krisha has its own emotional and personal story. It was born from the remains of Schults’ first attempt at making his debut feature. In 2012, Shults began making and producing his first film on his own, but he quickly realized that he didn’t have the resources — from cast to camera equipment — to make the movie he had written and wanted to make. Frustrated, he eventually edited the rushes he had shot, which became the version of Krisha presented here this week. Following the success of the short, which won the Special Jury Award at SXSW in 2014, Shults was encouraged to return to the material and make the feature. The filmmaker directed Krisha, which was ultimately released by A24, under what were still very independent conditions with only nine shooting days and a shoestring budget. This time, Shults was more prepared, and he had a full crew that slept at the film’s unique shooting location: his family home.

The character of Krisha, an alcoholic and an addict woman in her sixties who returns home after a long absence, is based on a combination of fiction and Trey’s family members’ real life stories.  Shults wanted everything in the film to “echo Krisha’s subjective mindset, the whole film to be through her point of view, from the score to the film grammar.” Krisha is brilliantly played by the filmmaker’s aunt, someone he had always wanted to put in a movie.

" I put a lot of my own demons into KRISHA. I’ve struggled with anger and rage my whole life. It all led to this story I wanted to tell about a women confronting her demons. From there, it went on to the fact that I love this woman and character and I wanted to give her the most respect that I can. I’m a film nerd who obsesses over film grammar, so I thought that making her story cinematic and putting the audience in her headspace was the most honest way to tell this story. My new film IT COMES AT NIGHT is equally as personal, although it’s a totally fictional narrative. It was about putting the emotions and things I was grappling with into a fictional story… I think it starts with an emotion or a theme that is very personal to me and then I figure out the right story to tell and the right film grammar to tell that story. I get really excited about the themes, the emotions, the characters, and the technique used to convey all of this. When I sent the short for KRISHA, I decided to re-watch the film for the first time in forever. It was a trip. It was like looking at old art work you made as a kid or something. I can remember where my head was at and how I was trying to find my voice. Having now finished two feature films and writing a new one, I can see a natural progression or evolution that started with this short film. I’m very happy to be sharing it.”
Trey Edward Shults

Trey Shults always wanted to make films, but he did not go to film school. His parents wanted him to attend business school, which he dropped out of after a year to focus on film. The filmmaker credits his parents: “My mother and step-father are therapists and I think I would be a mess without them. A large part of their occupation is confronting things about yourself and bringing them to the light.” Shults got a job with the crew shooting images around the world for Terrence Malick’s documentary Voyage Of Time, footage that ended up in the birth of the universe sequence in Tree of Life. He later worked on Malick’s Austin based projects, as well as Jeff Nichols’ Midnight Special. His debut feature Krisha garnered universal acclaim. It won numerous prizes on the festival circuit including the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience prize at SXSW in 2015 and the Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award in 2016. Shults’ new film It Comes at Night stars Joel Edgerton, Chris Abbott, Carmen Ejogo and Riley Keough. A24 is releasing it this Friday, June 9th. Check out the chilling and exciting trailer below! Directed by: Trey Edward Shults - 2015 - United States - 15 min WITH: With Krisha Fairchild, Robyn Fairchild, Victoria Fairchild, Chase Joliet, Bryan Casserly, Billie Fairchild & Trey Edward Shults - WRITER: Trey Edward Shults - PRODUCER: Trey Edward Shults - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Drew Daniels - MUSIC: Brian McOmber - EDITOR: Trey Edward Shults Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, we present the online premiere of Vincent Tricon’s first short Burning Heart. The young French filmmaker and film editor introduces his movie as a “mini-drama” revising the codes of the teen movie. In Burning Heart, three best friends live in a place lost in the wheat fields. Their friendship is challenged when they meet the prettiest girl in the village, who works at the gas station and participates in local beauty queen contests.

Vincent Tricon wanted to make an anti-teen movie, avoiding the classic tropes of the genre, such as stereotypical arguments with parents… He focused instead on the innocence of his young characters — unafraid to make them sweet and naïve in the film. In Burning Heart, adolescence, the passage to adulthood, is depicted as a loss of innocence following a conflict, ordinary as it might be. Vincent Tricon first brought the script to his producer Saïd Hamich, with whom he worked on many rewrites, and they obtained subventions subsidies both from the CNC and the French region Languedoc-Roussillon, where they shot. The filmmaker allowed himself to prep the film over a long period of time, rehearsing frequently with actors he cast locally outside schools and in the streets. He wanted to give the movie a specific tone, reflecting the ingenuity of his characters but also suggesting the slightly strange and almost burlesque. He quotes the following movies as references for this film: Mes Petites Amoureuses by Jean Eustache, De Bruit et de fureur by Jean-Claude Brisseau, The Outsiders by Francis Ford Coppola, and A Swedish Love Story by Roy Andersson. He also had in mind the work of the painter Giotto, giving different proportions to his characters relative to their importance in the frame.  Tricon and his cinematographer tried to alter the perspective using scope objectives with a zoomed format (1.85).  While editing the film, Tricon sought a particular rhythm, one that could follow the film energetically while also allowing time to show the slow and monotonous life of the region.  

« I didn’t want to fall into stereotypes of the teen movie, even if they can make a film more spectacular. I wanted to film with a certain coyness and reserve, with a singular tone both innocent and slightly burlesque. »
Vincent Tricon

Vincent Tricon studied Cinema at the University of Montpellier before joining the prestigious Femis school in Paris as an editing student. What interests him today is creating “objects” of cinema, researching new images in filmmaking, whether he is working as a director or film editor. That is also why he picks to work with young and rising directors Caroline Poggi et Jonathan Vinel – he edited their famous short, As Long As Shotguns Remain, and will be editing their upcoming debut feature. He just finished shooting his second short Glister, a sci-fi minimalistic melodrama shot in black and white. Directed by: Vincent Tricon - 2015 - France - 25 min WITH: With Victor Bruge, Sarah Esperandieu, Antony Gil & Mateo Diaz - WRITER: Vincent Tricon - PRODUCER: Saïd Hamich - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Raphaël Vandenbussche - EDITOR: Raphaëlle Martin-Holger, Vincent Tricon - PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Edwige Le Carquet - COSTUME DESIGNER: Laëtitia Carré Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

The third selection in our Cannes series celebrates the premiere of Josh and Benny Safdie’s much anticipated feature Good Time, screening in the main competition of the Festival de Cannes this coming Thursday. We’ve showcased the Safdie brothers many times since the start of Le CiNéMa Club, and we couldn’t be more excited to see their new feature in Cannes’ Grand Théâtre Lumière.

On this occasion, we present TROPHY HUNTER, a short, fake documentary about illegal wildlife trade that Josh and Benny made for the Turtle Conservancy in 2012.  It features the late great New York icon Glenn O’Brien visiting an eccentric Chinese collector.

Once again, the Safdie brothers bring us into the underworld of New York City creating characters that are both cinematic and authentic — successfully using, as they often do, a casting of non-actors. Glenn O’Brien, who regrettably passed away last month, was an influential writer and editor who started his career when Andy Warhol hired him to edit the magazine Interview in 1971. A few years later, he launched TV Party, a public access television show with guests such as Debbie Harry, David Byrne, Iggy Pop and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

In Trophy Hunter, Glenn O’Brien knocks on a door, followed by his cameraman and boom operator Josh and Benny Safdie. They take us to a secret apartment full of wild treasures, each presented by the Chinese collector, the trophy hunter, who delivers a wonderful performance. He would have indeed fooled us if we didn’t know this was a fake doc.

Josh and Benny Safdie began their careers shooting films with virtually no budgets in the streets of New York. In a few years, they have established themselves as two of the most exciting and original voices in American cinema. Their last feature, the critically acclaimed Heaven Knows What, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2015.

In the brothers’ latest film Good Time (watch the trailer below!), the lead character played by Robert Pattinson embarks on a mad odyssey through New York’s underworld in a dangerous and desperate attempt to get his brother out of jail after a botched robbery. The cast also features Benny Safdie, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Barkhad Abdi, Buddy Duress, and Taliah Webster. The film will be released by A24 on August 11^th in the U.S. The Safdie brothers recently announced that Jonah Hill will star as the central character in their next feature Uncut Gems, set in the diamond district.
Directed by: Josh & Benny Safdie - 2012 - United States - 4 min WITH: With Glenn O'Brien - PRODUCER: Turtle Conservancy Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

We are continuing our Cannes series this week by celebrating the selection of Korean master Bong Joon-Ho’s new feature Okja, premiering this coming Friday in the main competition of the festival.

Sink & Rise is an exquisite and rare gem ­— a short film that can be seen as a prologue to Bong’s magnificent feature The Host. Set in the same location, the waterfront of the Han River, the short film introduces a father and his daughter who argue with a food stand vendor about whether boiled eggs can float or not. The film showcases the director’s distinct talent for mixing tones and genres (here drama, comedy, and fantasy) and, as in The Host, addresses an ecological issue ­through the lens of science fiction.

Bong directed Sink & Rise for Twentidentity, a 20-part omnibus film composed of works by alumni of the Korean Academy of Film Arts, to celebrate the film school’s 20th anniversary. “As a teenager, I was living near the Han River. I was full of imagination, and one day, I really thought seeing a monster appear out of it” explains the director in an interview to the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles. The desire of directing a movie revolving around this idea stayed with him until he started writing The Host. He waited to gain more experience and more notoriety in order to find appropriate funding for a movie of that scale.

Bong is one of the most important Asian filmmaker, and one of our favorites, working today. Bong dreamed of making movies as a child. He later joined the Korean Academy of Film Arts where he started making short films on 16mm. As young cinephile, he admired the films of Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Shohei Imamura. With his three first features — the social satire Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), the beautiful thriller Memories of Murder (2003), and his sensational The Host (2006), breaking box-office records in Korea — Bong quickly rose to great international critical and commercial recognition. Bong later directed a segment of Tokyo! (2008) along with Michel Gondry and Leos Carax. His fourth feature Mother (2009) premiered at Un Certain Regard in Cannes. Snowpiercer (2013) was his first English language film, based on the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige.

We couldn’t be more excited to discover his upcoming film Okja. The film tells the story of Mija, a young girl who risks everything to prevent a powerful, multi-national company from kidnapping her best friend — a massive animal named Okja. Produced by Brad Pitt’s production company Plan B (Twelve Years a Slave, Moonlight, The Lost City of Z), the film stars Tilda Swinton, Paul Dano, Seo-Hyun Ahn and Jake Gyllenhaal. Okja will be released by Netflix on their global platform in June.
Directed by: Bong Joon-Ho - 2004 - South Korea - 6 min WITH: With Byun Hee-bong, Yoon Jae-moon & Chung In-sun. - PRODUCER: Korean Academy of Film Arts Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

Beginning this week is our month-long series celebrating the 70^th edition of the Festival de Cannes! We will showcase three short films by directors we love whose new features are selected in this year’s main competition: Lynne Ramsay, Bong Joon-Ho, and Josh and Benny Safdie. Stay tuned and enjoy!

This week we present Gasman, Lynne Ramsay’s graceful, moving, and cinematic portrayal of the Scottish working class in the late 70s. This well-known short, which captures the unique perceptiveness of children, brought a 29 year-old Ramsay international attention, winning the Jury Prize in Cannes and the Scottish BAFTA in 1998. Gasman follows a young girl and her brothers accompanying their father to a Christmas holiday party in a pub where they’re forced to make the awkward realization of the double life he’s been living.

Lynne Ramsay’s fourth feature You Were Never Really Here, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a war veteran trying to save a young girl from a sex trafficking ring, will be presented this year in Cannes in the main competition.

Gasman’s opening shots are a series of close-up details: someone polishing shoes, a little boy playing with a miniature car, a little girl slipping on yellow tights. Ramsay puts an emphasis on detail — which may come in part from the fact that she was a photographer before her films studies. Within a few shots, without having seen any faces, but hearing the voices of people, we are thrown into the atmosphere of a home getting prepared for a celebration. One of the most remarkable aspects of the short is how subtly the story is told through the children’s perspective. Ramsay depicts a bleak world with an elegant and cinematic eye, and she highlights the beauty of the setting and atmosphere with artistry and integrity. Ramsay comes from the world depicted in the film: “There’s a real coldness in Scotland, and it can be quite dark. It can be beautiful, but it’s also very oppressive.”Gasman is based on a short story the filmmaker wrote, as were her other first two shorts. Most people around Ramsay at film school were trying to write scripts to serve the industry. She wanted to experiment more, and decided to write her own stories.

“I like short stories. They're sometimes stronger than novels. I don't think that because you can make a good feature you can make a good short, or vice versa. (…) I try to keep very simple ideas and keep them as emotionally powerful as possible.”
Lynne Ramsay

Lynne Ramsay was born and raised in Glasgow. She studied photography in Edinburgh, before focusing on cinematography and direction at the Scottish National Film School. Her debut feature Ratcatcher (1999) won critical acclaim after being presented in the Un Certain Regard section in Cannes and awarded the Newcomer in British Film award at the BAFTAs. Morvern Callar (2002), starring Samantha Morton, was also presented in Cannes at Directors Fortnight and nominated for seven British Independent Film Awards. We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011), starring Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly and Ezra Miller, was presented in Cannes main competition and nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Golden Globes. Ramsay is one of the most exciting directors working today and we couldn’t be more excited to see her new feature in Cannes.       Directed by: Lynne Ramsay - 1998 - Scotland - 14 min WITH: With Lynne Ramsay Jr., James Ramsay, Lisa Taylor, Jackie Quinn, Martin Anderson, Denise Flannagan & Robert McEwan - WRITER: Lynne Ramsay - PRODUCER: Gavin Emerson - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Alwin H. Küchler - EDITOR: Lucia Zucchetti Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

On the occasion of the upcoming first North American retrospective of Nigerien filmmaker Moustapha Alassane at The Museum of Modern Art, we are presenting Kokoa, a rare animated short made by one of the pioneers in African Cinema.  The exclusive series of 16 and 35mm prints entitled “Moustapha Alassane, Pioneer of the Golden Age of Nigerien Cinema” takes place May 12-15.  The program was co-organized with the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the U.S. and La Cinémathèque Afrique de l’Institut Français. The retrospective will travel later to additional North American venues.

Amélie Garin-Davet of Cultural Services of the French Embassy, who co-curated the series along with MoMA Film Curator Joshua Siegel, penned below the below short introduction to Kokoa:

In Kokoa, you are the spectator of a cheerful wrestling match between a toad, a chameleon, a bird, and an iguana — refereed by a crab. This colorful puppet-motion short film, made in 2001, is one the last creations of Moustapha Alassane (1942-2015), a pioneer of cinema from Niger and the first African director to make animated movies (with La Mort de Gandji, 1963). Directing a championship of Niger’s traditional game, Kokoa sums up well the tone of Alassane’s filmmaking: humorous, inventive, witty, and subtly ironic. Alassane was a true autodidact, reinventing cinema at a young age:

“I was, at school, excellent at drawing, and I ended up one day making shadow theatre. I could show my classmates lions, elephants… Neither my friends nor me knew at the time about cinema, nor had we heard about it. I had an assistant to help me, who’s now a marabou in Togo. When he noticed that what I was doing attracted people, and that he was the only one to know the technique, he started doing the same thing on his own. We were then two in the village and I had to improve my own technique. That’s how I thought of organizing a show in colors. To do so, I increased the light power and worked with a material that could let the light through: the transparent packaging of cigarettes packs! Later, I was able to go see movies, and I even ended up making on my own a film camera that worked!”
Moustapha Alassane

Alassane would later meet and collaborate closely with French anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch, and Canadian pioneer animator Norman MacLaren. He was part of the first wave of filmmakers after Niger’s independence in 1960.  Not only did he animate toads and puppets, but he also directed a wonderful parody of a cowboy movie, Le retour d’un aventurier (The Return of an Adventurer, 1966), as well as a satire of Nigerien materialistic society in F.V.V.A. (1972), and several other films and documentaries.

Looking at his very eclectic filmography and singular artistry, one can say that Alassane kept a curious mind throughout his life, tirelessly inventing new techniques and exploring for each film new territories like a trailblazer — deservedly getting the nickname of the “African Méliès”.

To enquire of about rights on Moustapha Alassane’s filmography, contact La Traverse. Directed by: Moustapha Alassane - 2001 - Niger - 13 min WRITER: Moustapha Alassane - PRODUCER: Freddy Denaës, Gaël Teicher - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Moustapha Alassane - EDITOR: Erwan Le Gall, Rodolphe Molla, Gwénola Heaulme Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, we present a surreal melodrama, the first short film made by twenty-seven year-old filmmaker Albert Moya while he was in film school. In American Autumn, New York socialites in their 40s are played by young kids. Two couples are having an intimate dinner, but when an uninvited friend shows up, the evening takes a sour turn. The early work of a rising talent embraces the genre of family dinner dramas and captures the absurdity and comedy of the small everyday catastrophes that threaten the way of life of the bourgeoisie.

Watching films like Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie or Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration, Moya always thought the situations had such foolish and childish aspects that it would be fun to portray a similar scene with children playing the parts. He wrote the screenplay with his friend Silvia González Laá, developing the narrative by following the structure of a tasting menu. Moya produced the short on his own with the help of his cinematographer Rob Leitzell (who also shot Benh Zeitlin’s short Glory At Sea); “I had no experience and Rob came on board putting in so much energy, attention and time,” Moya explains. He found the different kids by posting ads around the block where he lived at the time in downtown Manhattan.

“I’m moved when I remember shooting the project. I would probably shoot it differently today, focusing less on the aesthetics and more on the performances and tension of the characters. I had no film experience at all. When you lack knowledge, you’re forced to work only by following your instincts, the things you love and common sense. I enjoy the experimental factor while executing an idea, because uncertainty makes me work much more passionately.”
Albert Moya

Albert Moya grew up in Catalonia, Spain in an independent community. One of his favorite films is Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding as it reminds him of his childhood and the charismatic women that raised him. When asked about filmmakers that inspired him, Moya cites Fassbinder, the Dogme 95 movement, Carlos Reygadas, Terrence Malick, David Lynch, abd Peter Greenaway. “I admire movies that have a very strong point of view, films that can tell you a story you might already know but that show it to you through a different, new and distinct perspective.” Albert Moya has directed a new short film entitled Baton that he wrote with Efthymis Filippou (Dogtooth, The Lobster) ­— more radical and experimental than American Autumn, and with political reflection. The short film will come out later this year. Moya has also directed numerous branded films for clients such as Dries Van Noten, Mulberry, Gucci, Derek Lam, and short documentaries about creative personalities such as Ricardo Bofill, Linda Rodin, Marie-Louise Sciò, Kiko Mizuhara and Peter Marino. He is represented by The Collective Shift. Moya is currently working on his first feature in which a woman and a son live on a secluded island where moral values don’t apply — this island will be Mies Van Der Rohe Pavillion in Barcelona. Directed by: Albert Moya - 2012 - United States - 20 min WITH: With Ivan Tomic, Cleo Cohen, Kyle Connery, Madeline Lupi & Zeljko Tomic - WRITER: Sylvia Gonzalez Laa & Albert Moya - PRODUCER: Rob Leitzell & Albert Moya - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Rob Leitzell - EDITOR: Andrew Hafitz Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This week, we present an adaptation of an Italo Calvino tale by American filmmaker Michael Almereyda. The Man Who Came Out Only At Night is based on a short story of the same title from Calvino’s Italian folktales, a collection of 200 stories from medieval times. Almereyda’s black-and-white short film skilfully blends a modern New York with the surreal tale of a woman who needs to remain faithful to her husband in order to free him from an odd spell. The short film premiered at the New York Film Festival in 2013.

This is Michael Almereyda’s second adaptation of the Italian writer’s folktales, after The Ogre’s Feathers (2012). The filmmaker intends to make more, describing the stories as “short, sharp, funny, and poignant, touching on primary aspects of human experience.” Almereyda completed The Man Who Came Out Only At Night over the course of a year between the East Village, where he resides, and Dumbo, Brooklyn.

One of the great aspects of this short is how we become lost in time and genre. The medieval story clashes with a New York City that feels both current and old – the bakery is more than 40 years old, the arch is from 1800s, and the costumes recall different decades. The film is directed in a very compelling, classical way, with magical elements continually appearing as low-key special effects. There are, however, no special effects regarding the animal – Gertrude the tortoise was found at Petco. She lives in Brooklyn and, according to Almereyda, is available for other acting gigs.

“I wanted to keep things matter-of-fact, to play against the story’s preposterousness and reliance on magic. The tone, actually, is something Calvino adheres to with great skill. In Calvino’s world, mundane reality can become magical, mysterious, surreal – and extraordinary things happen without fuss.”
Michael Almereyda

Michael Almereyda is a prolific director, screenwriter, and producer. He has directed over 20 shorts and features, including Hamlet (2000), which he adapted for a contemporary New York setting and shot on Super 16mm, starring Ethan Hawke, Bill Murray, Kyle MacLachlan, Julia Stiles, Liev Schreiber, and Sam Shepard. Almereyda received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Film/Video in 2005 and a Creative Capital Award for Moving Image in 2015. Almereyda’s work is not only tied to literature but also to photography. He directed the documentary William Eggleston in the Real World (2005) and the short Skinningrove (2012) with Chris Killip. Almereyda has also edited two books: Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and About Mayakovsky in 2008, and William Eggleston: For Now in 2010.

Almereyda is currently working on his next feature about 19^th Century visionary inventor Nikola Tesla, and collaborating with John Ashbery on a short piece about how Ashbery’s poetry has been influenced by movies. Almereyda is also writing an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, White Noise, setting it in the immediate present. Directed by: Michael Almereyda - 2014 - United States - 15 min WITH: With India Kotis, James Ransone, Lauren Bakst, Rachel Rossin & Diego Cortez - WRITER: Michael Almereyda - PRODUCER: Blake Ashman-Kipervaser, Michael Almereyda - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Pablo Tapia-Pla - EDITOR: Joshua Brown Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

Le CiNéMa Club presents In Chris Marker’s Studio by Agnès Varda, a rare and beautiful moment in cinema where two friends — who happen to be pioneering, legendary filmmakers from the French New Wave — meet in real life and in a virtual world.

In the film, which was shot at two points between 2009-2011, Agnès Varda visits Chris Marker in his studio, a few years before his passing. She admires his magnificent mess, snooping around for details that reveal “the hidden side of Marker’s work”: a labyrinth of wires and computer equipment, a collection of images, magazines and books, and — of course — cats. The film takes on a wonderful surrealist turn when Varda creates an avatar to meet Marker’s avatar in the online virtual world of Second Life.

We are showing this rare short on the occasion of the last days of Varda’s beautiful first New York solo show at the Blum & Poe gallery. The show comprises works from 1949 to the present, from Varda’s early work as a photographer, to her career as a radical and poetic filmmaker, to the present where she now describes herself as “a young visual artist.”

The show starts with her first photography exhibition, a series of stunning silver prints mounted on hardboard that she had organized in 1954 at her home in Paris — where she lived with her husband Jacques Demy — and it ends with her recent art installations, such as the great Bord de Mer (2009), in which Varda brings the viewer, as if by magic, to the seaside.

Chris Marker was an enigmatic person and artist who would rather have his work speak for itself. Camera shy, he created a larger-than-life cardboard cat named Guillaume to hide behind. Varda and Marker met in 1954, as Marker was a friend of Alain Resnais, who at the time was editing Varda’s first feature La Pointe Courte. It was because they knew each other for so long that Marker allowed Varda to enter his private workspace with her camera.

In the film, Marker remains shy and unsure about Varda’s idea of shooting his studio: “Why are you filming my mess? You are going to dishonor me.” To which Varda replies, with her usual enthusiasm: “I find it beautiful that one is surrounded by what he does!” It is wonderful to see the workplace of great minds. We do not see Marker, but we hear his voice — and what a treat it is to hear him, speaking of how he hates waiting in lines, and how happy he is to be able to read a poem by Apollinaire while doing so, because he has poetry saved on his phone. Varda’s camera follows her eye, jumping from one detail to another, discovering a new treasure in every corner. We feel as if we are right by her shoulder.

"His intelligence, toughness and tenderness have been one of my joys throughout our long friendship."
Agnès Varda

Agnès Varda is the only female director associated with the Nouvelle Vague, and the only woman thus far to receive an honorary Palme d’or. She is a feminine and feminist pioneer, an artist who would argue that making films wasn’t difficult because of her gender but rather because of the radical nature of her movies. Varda is an unstoppable force: her infinite curiosity and energy, still strong at 88, has driven her to create works that always feels sincere, generous and free-spirited, from Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) to her installation Patatutopia (2003), presented at the Venice Biennale. A.O. Scott describes Varda perfectly in his New York Times review of The Beaches of Agnès (2009): “[Agnès Varda has] a kind of thrifty, skeptical anarchism of the spirit, a liberating willingness to find inspiration and even beauty in what might conventionally be dismissed as rough, ugly or commonplace.” Directed by: Agnès Varda - 2011 - France - 9 min Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

We are presenting the latest short film by the wonderful Brooklyn-based filmmaker John Wilson, known for his lo-fi street documentaries with his astute and funny narrations. The Spiritual Life of Wholesale Goods begins with Wilson discovering surprising philosophical messages printed on the packaging of dollar store products.  He decides to visit the company, which leads him to a Las Vegas trade show where he becomes acquainted with a foreign world of salesmen offering all kinds of products.

Wilson is constantly shooting in the streets, often with a rough idea in mind for a film — either rooted in his personal life or something he has read about — that reveals itself once he has enough material to assemble the footage. He defines his films as collages of these street videos, layered with personal narration and interviews with other people.

“I really love being able to interview someone and penetrate this very thick armor they put on whenever they’re asked to represent a company. It speaks to the whole idea of alienation and loss of self I referenced in the film. A lot of the people I interviewed at the trade show were really happy to engage in a conversation that wasn’t directly related to their product or the company message. The monotony and repetition of convention speak and product demonstrations can begin to feel very robotic and I wanted to counter that by piercing their persona with deeply personal questions about their spiritual lives. It was crucial to show that these people had a pulse while everything else around them is automating.”
John Wilson

Wilson’s distinct style of filmmaking comes from a variety of influences. He studied at a small experimental film program at Binghamton University, where he was inspired by the diary films of George Kuchar and the works of Nick Broomfield, Louis Theroux, Les Blank, Bruce Brown and Frederick Wiseman. His first job after college was for a private investigator in Hanson, Massachusetts: “I spent that year alone in a dark room watching footage of complete strangers for eight hours a day. Ever since then I’ve been shooting from a similar distance.”

Wilson is a filmmaker who is excited by the digital age and the freedom for everyone to distribute their own content online, by the fact that a movie can be anything a filmmaker decides it to be, and by the way people experience media outside of what is dictated by the industry.

He started making small how-to videos, seduced by the idea of making something completely independently, with no money involved. His films include: How To Live With Bed Bugs, made after his flat was infected with bed bugs; How To Keep Smoking; and How To Walk to Manhattan. Wilson also made the short documentary Temporary Color, after filmmakers Bill and Turner Ross asked him to follow the production of their documentary, Contemporary Color, on David Byrne. John Wilson’s films are available to watch on johnmovies.com.

The Spiritual Life of Wholesale Goods was part of Memory’s Program No.2, a touring series of short films by emerging and award-winning filmmakers. The full program is now available to watch on VOD. Directed by: John Wilson - 2016 - United States - 16 min Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

We are thrilled to present the premiere of Sophie Savides’ beautiful first short film. The daughter of the late master of cinematography Harris Savides (The Yards, Birth, Zodiac, Last Days, Somewhere) delivers a moving, beautifully structured directorial debut. The Funeral follows a young girl giving a eulogy at her father’s passing.

The entire film is made up of three simple, compelling, elegantly framed shots. The first shot establishes the setting. The second and central shot captures the speech of the young girl remembering her father, speaking to the camera as it slowly moves closer to her. The third shot reveals the peculiarity of the situation: the girl is alone at the cemetery. The opening and closing shots mirror each other, with characters walking down winding roads within a fixed frame, allowing the viewer to gradually enter and leave this moment of reverence.

In addition to its strong formal sense, and the exciting craft and filmmaking so clearly on display, the film also provides a poignant and intimate testimony to the personality of a master of cinema who – although the film uses different names, and it is not a documentary – so many cinephiles and filmmakers admire. Perhaps, however, the most poetic detail of the film is that it gives life to the fantasy of what a teenaged girl would have liked to say at her father’s funeral.

"My attempt with this film was to show grief in a way I hadn't seen before. Most grief I've seen depicted is sad, but feels superficial or it's about remembering the happy memories like a hallmark card. I wanted to show that in order to take hold over grief, you have to go to the darkest place and be angry. I wanted to make this film so that other people in the same place could feel that freedom to go there, when there is often shame around that and pressure to just see the good despite the loss. It's uncomfortable, but from there there is freedom."
Sophie Savides

After posting in many acting schools and seeing many readings of her script, Sophie Savides was confident in casting Kristen Vaganos in the role. Her audition was perfect: “She understood the subtleties without being overdramatic,” recalls the young filmmaker. With the help of a supporting crew, they shot the film in one day at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

Sophie Savides is a twenty-two year old filmmaker living in New York. In high school, Savides wanted to be a writer. She eventually dropped out of college as she was skipping classes to work on her films. Savides has since written a new short film, but when she found her actors and saw their performances, she decided to adapt the script into a feature-length screenplay. The film is a love story, imbued with Savides’ values and ideas about our modern society. Directed by: Sophie Savides - 2016 - United States - 11 min WITH: With Kristen Vaganos - WRITER: Sophie Savides - PRODUCER: Matt McCann & Jamie Blauvelt - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Kelly Jeffrey - EDITOR: Andrew Kovacic Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

In partnership with Memory and Harbers Studios, we are honoured to present the online premiere of the great American director Janicza Bravo’s eighth short film Woman In Deep. Bravo succeeds once again, brilliantly, in bringing us into her singular world. Starring the excellent Alison Pill, the film follows a woman who misplaces her cell phone and struggles to make it in one piece on her birthday.

Janicza Bravo’s wonderful debut feature Lemon, which played SXSW and was recently acquired by Magnolia Pictures, premiered at 2017 Sundance and opened the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Lemon, co-written with Brett Gelman, who plays the lead and is also Bravo’s partner in real life, focuses on a struggling actor in a time of crisis.

Woman in Deep — which was produced by Harbers Studios, a foundation that aims to give voices to important ideas and causes of our time, and Killer Films (Boys Don’t Cry, I’m Not There, Carol) — is part of Memory’s Program No.2, a touring collection of short films by award-winning and emerging directors, which Le CiNéMa partnered with this year.

One of the moments of inception for Woman in Deep came when Bravo was invited, along with five other documentarians, to attend The Harbers Storytelling Project, a program with live conferences organised by The Nantucket Project and Harbers Foundation. The filmmakers each had to make a film based on one aspect of the weekend. Bravo was struck by a talk given by Nancy Lublin, founder of Crisis Text Line, a suicide prevention hotline available 24/7 via text. She remembers Nancy telling a story about a man who was put on hold for 45 minutes after calling the national suicide prevention line. From there, Bravo built a story and a character that fit in with her previous works – twisted and absurd but never sinister. The filmmaker describes her main character Birdie as a sensitive woman: “She feels unheard. She feels like she has no purpose. She spends a lot of time alone and a lot of time in her head.”

“Piece to piece I am exorcising demons. Giving a stage to the things I like and don’t like about myself and people in general. I’m just trying to be more okay with what I was given and not given.”
Janicza Bravo

Janicza Bravo was born in New York and raised in Panama until she was 13. She studied direction and set design at NYU, and began her career as a stylist working in music videos, film, fashion and theater. She decided to focus on directing, and has since made eight short films, including Gregory Go Boom, starring Michael Cera, which won the Jury Prize in Sundance in 2014, and Pauline Alone, starring Gaby Hoffman, also in 2014. Bravo also directed the “Juneteenth” episode of Atlanta, created by and starring Donald Glover. Directed by: Janicza Bravo - 2016 - United States - 14 min WITH: With Alison Pill, Joshua Leonard & Anthony Carrigan - WRITER: Janicza Bravo - PRODUCER: John Baker, Gretchen Huizinga, Han West & Janicza Bravo - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Christian Sprenger - MUSIC: Heather Christian - EDITOR: Cyrk - PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Rachael Ferrara Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

To coincide with La Cinémathèque Française’s retrospective of the work of the cinematographer Darius Khondji, Le CiNéMa Club is proud to present the online premiere of Marie-Louise ou la permission. A hidden gem from 1995, Manuel Flèche’s debut feature has never been released outside of France.

The film — which reveals the stunning cinematography of a young Darius Khondji (whose next films were The City of Lost Children and Se7en) — features the work of a number of important talents at the beginning of their careers: the wonderful score is by the great, acclaimed composer Alexandre Desplat (over ten years before his first Academy Award nomination for The Queen), Kate Beckinsale stars in the film in her first leading role, and a young Jean-Philippe Delhomme designed the poster.

Paris shines in this brilliant, madcap romantic comedy. When Marie-Louise goes to meet her lover Jean-Paul, who is arriving in Paris on his military leave, she goes to the wrong train station. Marie-Louise and Jean-Paul spend the next 24 hours running around the city looking for each other.

Manuel Flèche wrote the screenplay in two weeks after struggling for too long to get a darker film made, and hearing his producer say that comedies work better. If the writer-director was ready to compromise on the genre of the film, there was no question that he would make a film that was anything but cinematic, intelligent and ambitious. He wrote a love story that was also a love letter to Paris, revealing different aspects of the city — from the “postcard” view of Paris, as seen through the eyes of the young American (Flèche’s gesture to Minelli’s An American in Paris), to the sketchier northerns areas of Paris where the train stations are located, to the young boys coming to Paris from out of town, and the typical characters from old Paris (parents, the cops, the concierge)… The film is about frustration: “a military leave is pure frustration as you know from the start it’s going to end” explains the director. It also reflects a time where the conversation around AIDS was very present, and one can notice there is no sex in the film, and the lovers end up kissing through a glass window.

"I did this film to put a sparkle in people’s eyes! And for everyone to scream: Marie-Louise! Marie-Louise! Marie-Louuuise!”
Manuel Flèche

The film, which looks rich and sounds lush, was — quite surprisingly — made with barely no budget. This was only possible because the filmmakers stole every shot, without authorization. Shooting guerrilla style, Manuel and his crew were resourceful and creative. They made aerial shots from construction cranes, wet the streets by plugging hoses in the city water pumps, and convinced Sony to produce the score and record it with an orchestra. Khondji remembers: “The lack of a real budget pushed us to be creative.  It was exciting. We rarely added proper movie lights. Outside in the streets at night, we were using the headlights of cars and a few fluorescent tubes we had made. There was always a great energy on the set, which all came from Manuel. Besides being a great director for actors, he also has a natural talent with the camera.”

Manuel Flèche had directed five beautiful short films before making Marie-Louise, including Une femme pour l’hiver, which was awarded in Cannes in 1988. He later directed a black and white film for the French television Bella, la guerre et le soldat Rousseau, which again featured a star early in his career: French actor Vincent Rottiers. Directed by: Manuel Flèche - 1995 - France - 85 min WITH: With Kate Beckinsale, Eric Ruf, Marie Caries, Pascal Ternisien & Yann Collette - WRITER: Manuel Flèche - PRODUCER: Eric Atlan, André Farwagi & Gérard Louvin - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Darius Khondji & Florent Montcouquiol - MUSIC: Alexandre Desplat - EDITOR: Nathalie LeGuay Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

Here is a selection of short film portraits made by Marian Lacombe for The Female Lead. Released in February 2017, the publication highlights sixty women from around the world who lead in their fields of endeavour, with the aim of inspiring the next generation. Each woman was photographed by Brigitte Lacombe, one of the world’s leading photographers, with wonderful accompanying short film interviews made by her sister, the documentarian Marian Lacombe.

Le CiNéMa Club selected ten of these powerful, intimate interviews with amazing women working in the arts, politics and science. The series includes, in order of appearance: filmmaker Ava DuVernay, the actress and editor-in-chief of Rookie Magazine Tavi Gevinson, the youngest ever Member of Parliament for the Scottish National Party Mhairi Black, Chief International Correspondent for CNN Christiane Amanpour, neuroscientist and President of Chan Zuckerberg Science Dr Cori Bargmann, Ballet Dancer Michaela DePrince, Pulitzer Prize Winner and former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, the ambitious Mulberry School Students, Actress Meryl Streep, and Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe from Uganda.

“What struck me is that almost all of these women have succeeded while taking unconventional paths. They seize the most diverse opportunities. What they all have in common is their willpower, energy, determination, passion and curiosity.”
Marian Lacombe

The interviews show these extraordinary women sharing their diverse journeys, personal stories and perspectives, and the effect is both inspiring and empowering. The Female Lead is a non-profit initiative founded by data and loyalty entrepreneur Edwina Dunn to make women’s stories more visible, offering positive and alternative role models with the goal of fostering ambition and self-belief in young women. The Female Lead book will be distributed to schoolchildren in the U.K. and the U.S.

The Lacombe sisters began working on the project two years ago, shooting the portraits between London, New York, Washington and Palo Alto. They would shoot the women in natural daylight, with Marian interviewing them after Brigitte had taken their photo portraits – as, according to Marian, “Brigitte knows better than anyone how to put one at ease.” She would focus on getting the women to tell their personal stories, sometimes inquiring about guidance for younger generations. From the creators of the project to the subjects, the women were convinced that this initiative was both necessary and timely.

Marian Lacombe is a French independent documentary filmmaker. She has worked as a reporter, anchorwoman and editor-in-chief on daily news and magazines for the private French television channel M6 in Paris, as well as opened and ran their correspondent headquarters in Lyon and Marseille. She also directed documentaries on filmmakers, choreographers and designers such as Mira Nair, Agnès Varda, Robert Altman, Philippe Decouflé and Christian Lacroix.
 In 2012, for the London Olympic Games, Marian and Brigitte Lacombe collaborated on HEY’YA, a book and exhibition about Arab Women in Sport.

Many other incredible portraits and interviews are available on the website of The Female Lead. You can nominate a U.K school to receive a free copy of the book and teaching resources here. Directed by: Marian Lacombe - 2017 - United Kingdom - 41 min WITH: With Ava DuVernay, Tavi Gevinson, Mhairi Black, Christiane Amanpour, Dr Cori Bargmann, Michaela DePrince, Samantha Power, the Mulberry School Students, Meryl Streep, and Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe. Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

We are honored to present Frank Film, winner of the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 1974, in a newly restored version courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.

Frank Mouris had been collecting images from magazines for five years when he made the short with more than 11,000 images. The short film feels simultaneously personal, historical and universal. While telling the personal journey of Mouris, from his birth to becoming an artist, and making this film, Frank Film also draws a panorama of the iconography of the early seventies. The chosen images, assembled by theme, speak to our collective consciousness. If the mundanity of the images suggests the familiar, the effect of the collage and the associations created within the film turn it into a hypnotic, virtuosic masterwork.

“I only made Frank Film because I was forced to write my first script. I prefer to just make collages until an idea reveals itself to me. So, film classes can sometimes make us filmmakers. Of course, if I didn’t have my wife and partner Caroline producing, editing, and criticizing, I would still be working on too many collages now, 46 years later. Thank you, Caroline!”
Frank Mouris

Caroline and Frank Mouris have been married and working together since the sixties. They made an animated short Frankly Caroline in 2000, where Caroline narrates her own life and Frank interjects. Their career has found a balance between commissioned works for Sesame Street, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, MTV and the Cartoon Network, and independent shorts such as Coney (1975), Tennesse Sample (1977), Impasse (1978), LA LA, Making it in L.A. (1979) and Beginner’s Luck (1986).

Courtesy of Frank Mouris and the Academy Film Archive. Directed by: Frank Mouris & Caroline Mouris - 1973 - United States - 8 min WITH: With the voice of Frank Mouris - WRITER: Tony Schwartz & Frank Mouris - PRODUCER: Caroline Mouris - EDITOR: Frank & Caroline Mouris Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

Le CiNéMa Club presents a tragicomedy co-directed by two young Argentinian filmmakers: Francisco Lezama and Agostina Gálvez. Set in Buenos Aires, the short follows Ivana, a young woman who works for a company that rents properties to tourists, as she suddenly begins to steal, invent fake exchange rates, and mistranslate. La Novia de Frankenstein (Frankenstein’s Bride) was selected at the Locarno Film Festival and the New York Film Festival in 2015.

The story for the short came from Francisco Lezama and Agostina Gálvez’ fascination with the strange attitude they felt Argentinians had in response to the financial crisis in their country and the fluctuating currency that came along with it. There was a general obsession with the American dollar, as well as a tendency for some Argentinians to turn to unconventional methods — like palm readers and psychics — to predict their finances. The actress Miel Bargman was also a starting point for the filmmakers, as the directors and the actress wanted to make a film together. Francisco Lezama and Agostina Gálvez didn’t want to be tied to a screenplay, and they infused the short with real details and observations from the lives and personalities of their actors. The filmmakers were keen to mix fiction and reality, and they encouraged the actors to follow this method.

“We try to create some sort of ‘cubist effect’ that allows ambiguity or uncertainty. We strongly believe in not knowing what we are doing until we finish the whole process. I once heard something beautiful: ‘modernity appears when the adventure prevails over the results’. We don't think beforehand about the results because we get bored when we know where we are going.”
Francisco Lezama

Francisco Lezama and Agostina Gálvez studied and met at the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires where Francisco currently teaches film history. He also works as a projectionist at MALBA and the Museum of Moving Image in Buenos Aires. Agostina Gálvez is based in New York and represented by Radical Media, for whom she directs editorial content. The filmmakers were both influenced by the ideas of realism developed by the post-war French critics, and they are both admirers of Eric Rohmer and Hong Sang-soo. They have since made another short film together entitled Dear Renzo, and they are editing a new one titled La Vuelta de Saturno (Saturn’s Return). Directed by: Agostina Gálvez & Francisco Lezama - 2015 - Argentina - 12 min WITH: With Miel Bargman, Claudia Cantero & Renzo Cozza - WRITER: Agostina Gálvez & Francisco Lezama - PRODUCER: Agostina Gálvez & Francisco Lezama - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Jerónimo Quevedo, Agostina Gálvez & Francisco Lezama - EDITOR: Francisco Lezama Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

To lovers! Le CiNéMa Club is presenting a romantic comedy directed by Oscar Boyson. In Ciao Lola, Peter joins his girlfriend Lola in Venice, but the romantic get-together turns into a chase as Peter tries to keep up with Lola, who clearly has adjusted too well to the city. The filmmaker was looking to create a short that harkened back to the genre of screwball comedies while capturing a city he loves.

Oscar Boyson co-wrote the script with Ben Collins — imagining the story of an American actress working in Venice who becomes very comfortable in the city, which makes her American boyfriend feel rather out of place when he comes to visit. The filmmaker who had previously shot in the city explains: “It’s one of those cities where every corner that you turn, there’s something different.”

Oscar offered the parts to the actors Jane Levy and Thomas McDonell, a real-life couple. The authentic chemistry of the two actors worked beautifully in the film. Boyson also wanted to revive a kind of spatial and physical comedy that he feels “we rarely see anymore,” and in which “the camera moves and blocking is deliberate to maximize the comedy.” He imagined the actress as a Katherine Hepburn type of character, wearing a bow-tie – which led to the central joke of the short.

“If you have a small crew, know the city and plan it out right, it can be very cheap to shoot in one of the most expensive sets in the world.”
Oscar Boyson

Oscar Boyson is a director and producer based in New York City whose other short Done Dirty we presented last year. His credits as a producer include Josh and Benny Safdie’s Heaven Knows What, Noah Baumbach’s Mistress America and Frances Ha, and The Neistat Brothers television series. He has also written and directed a number of short videos and documentaries, some of which he calls pop video essays.

Boyson has made two great fashion films for the brand Sleepy Jones that take place in Italy and have a similar playfulness: One Morning In Italy and L’Isola di Sleepy Jones. “I grew up in Maine which is ‘vacation-land’ and there’s something comfortable to me about celebrating these touristy destinations and finding their little fantasies, while acknowledging that I’m a outsider”. He is currently finishing post-production as a producer on Josh and Benny Safdie’s upcoming film Good Time and has started developing a documentary series expanding his most recent short documentary The Future of Cities.

The film was produced by M2M, a platform that curates and streams a great collection of fashion film and documentaries. Directed by: Oscar Boyson - 2016 - United States - 6 min WITH: With Jane Levy & Thomas McDonell - WRITER: Oscar Boyson & Benjamin Collins - PRODUCER: Alessia Gatti, Sean Barth, Richard Peete - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Brett Jutkiewicz - EDITOR: Nate DeYoung Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

We are presenting the first short by Barry Jenkins, the acclaimed director of Moonlight. In this eight-minute student film, a young man named Aadid, working the night shift at a Florida laundromat, confesses in voiceover his love for his co-worker Adela, a woman with whom he washes American flags for free. He compares her to Napoleon’s first wife, Josephine. The short was written and directed in the uncertain times following 9/11, and it feels, in the current climate, especially moving. My Josephine remains a personal favorite for the director.  In a recent tweet, Jenkins mentioned the short film as a reminder to himself to “channel this energy, to create.”

The early work already demonstrates some of Jenkins’s distinctive directorial style, from the poetic and intimate voices of the characters (and the first person narration), to the formal aesthetic of his cinema. The short was made with Jenkins’ longtime cinematographer James Laxton. The two met at university and have been collaborating since. When Barry Jenkins noticed a sign in a laundromat window saying “American Flags Cleaned Free,” the idea for the film was born.

“My first short film, photography by James Laxton, as always. Still my favorite. Written shortly after 9/11, wasn't actually made for another year because of the way things shook out in school. Inspired by three things: the marquee of a Tallahassee laundromat shortly after 9/11 reading "American Flags Cleaned Free," an image in my head of two people sitting atop folding tables, and my housemate at the time being obsessed with Napoleon. We were very young men when we made this film.”
Barry Jenkins

After studying film at Florida State University, Jenkins directed Medicine For Melancholy, an independent film about a 24-hour romance between two people in their twenties discussing gentrification and identity while walking through San Francisco. The film was made on a budget of $15,000 and was recognized as a breakthrough by critics. It took eight years for Barry Jenkins to make another movie: the universally praised Moonlight, which won, among many other prizes, Best Picture (Drama) at the Golden Globes. Moonlight is nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Directed by: Barry Jenkins - 2003 - United States - 8 min WITH: With Basel Hamdan, Saba Shariat & Marc Levi - WRITER: Barry Jenkins - PRODUCER: Jasmin L. Tiggett - CINEMATOGRAPHY: James Laxton - EDITOR: Meghan Robertson Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

Here is a short film by Damien Manivel, whose second feature Le Parc was released in France in January 2017 to much critical acclaim. Damien Manivel’s cinema is characterised by striking, mostly fixed camera set-ups — tableaus the characters move through. A Critics’ Week selection at the Cannes Festival in 2012, where it was awarded the Nikon Discovery Award, A Sunday Morning follows a man walking his dog in the Paris suburbs – his Sunday morning routine. The film, which has no dialogue, invites the audience to join the man on his melancholic stroll.

Manivel’s initial desire was to shoot a dog alone in the city, although he quickly realized after his first tests that the idea didn’t work. He therefore added a man to the equation, imagining a mundane couple with an almost burlesque tendency: the man is heavy and clumsy, the dog skinny and old. Another defining characteristic of Manivel’s cinema is the importance of the location, which is often one of the director’s starting points for his films. Here the location is the Paris suburbs where Manivel grew up, a place that he found very ugly at the time. But returning to the suburbs with a director’s eye, he noticed how photogenic the urban landscapes were. The film was shot in different suburbs around Paris, and the script was mostly a shot list that considered directional movement: the man and the dog walking down, then up, then wandering, and losing track of their place, and finally walking back up.  

“There was first the shock of Bresson. Today still, I struggle to understand how he did it. Then the Asian directors. I was spellbound by Tsai Ming-Liang, but also Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Ozu.”
Damien Manivel

Damien Manivel first studied at a circus school and became an acrobat and a dancer. He went on to study film at Le Fresnoy in the north of France. Prior to A Sunday Morning, Manivel directed the short The Lady with the Dog (2010), which was nominated for a Tiger Award for Short Films in Rotterdam. Before Le Parc, his first feature A Young Poet was awarded a Special Mention at the Locarno Film Festival. He is currently shooting a film in Japan.   Directed by: Damien Manivel - 2012 - France - 18 min WITH: With Ivan Borin - WRITER: Damien Manivel - PRODUCER: Marie-Anne Campos, Alice Beckmann - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Julien Guillery - EDITOR: Suzana Pedro Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

Ecce films and Flipp’s cereals presents Respect, a short film directed by Benoît Forgeard in 2010. The story is simply set around a couple fighting at the breakfast table. All is well, nothing out of the ordinary. Steph announces to his life partner Flippy, the mascot bear for Flipp’s cereals, that he wishes to go to Japan to fulfill his childhood’s dream: study at a Ninja school.

"Walking through the cereal isle at the supermarket, I was suddenly stunned by the violence of the images. The bursting colors, the milk splashing ouf of the bowls. The creatures representing the brands show hypocrite smiles. The violence is at its peak at breakfast time. I wanted to direct one of these creatures, Flippy, the rival of Frosty the tiger, while putting him in the role of the oppressor, that his boyfriend Steph will attempt to overthrow.”
Benoît Forgeard

How does one explain Benoît Forgeard’s cinema to someone who has never heard of it? It is indisputably tricky since there may not be words sufficient enough to describe his work. Once familiar with his work, even in the smallest of details, the viewer finds himself charmed by Forgeard’s unique and absurd funniness. In Respect, while it starts with a picture of Flippy the bear with former French President Jacques Chirac on the fridge’s door, it continues on to Flippy violently throwing some cereals at his partner’s face and shouting “Not while I’m fucking eating!” just because he was lighting up a cigarette.

To attempt at explaining, we could start by saying that Benoit Forgeard studied contemporary arts at Les Beaux Arts de Rouen before experimenting more at Studio National des Arts Contemporains du Fresnoy. We could also tell you a bit more about his production design. Clearly not shot in a studio, but very clearly not in a natural setting either, the environment of Benoît Forgeard’s films can be described by some sort of post Ikea world, where everything appears to be in only two dimensions, made badly, but on purpose. The other warning we might want to give you is that Benoît Forgeard’s French dialogues are exquisitely well written. Very well directed actors often execute these dialogues to his very peculiar perfection. This is the case in Respect, as it is in his short movies and his first feature Gaz de France, which came out in 2015. The movie imagined France in 2020 with a President called Bird going through some really tough scores in the polls. Let yourself go and you may die of laughter. Directed by: Benoît Forgeard - 2011 - France - 14 min WITH: With Thibault Sauvaige & Anne Steffens - WRITER: Benoît Forgeard - PRODUCER: Emmanuel Chaumet - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Hervé Lode - MUSIC: Dimitri Haulet - EDITOR: Benoît Forgeard Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

The Fire, the Blood and the Stars, a short film by Caroline Deruas made in 2007, is based on her immediate response following the defeat of the left in the French presidential elections. The cast consists of Deruas, her daughter Léna Garrel, and the great, late French actor Maurice Garrel (her daughter’s grandfather), along with a handful of close actor friends of Deruas, including Lolita Chammah (Isabelle Huppert’s daughter). Le CiNéMa Club also presented another of Deruas’ great short films, The Children of The Night, starring Adèle Haenel.

In The Fire, the Blood and the Stars, the newspaper announces the left’s defeat in the presidential election. A distressed mother finds strength for the sake of her child. Puzzled teens react in all kinds of extreme ways. A young girl asks her grandfather what “dream killer” is. The film was a way for Deruas to express her disappointment and rejection of a France where the far right was gaining ground, a country that seemed to be turning away from its democratic motto “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity). Deruas chose to shoot the film with her daughter, to include her as part of this healing project. She decided to direct a film in which the political discourse is deliberately not well thought out, but rather immediate —some kind of way to record their unprocessed reactions and emotions.

“I wanted it to be a film that literally shouts, and above all something impulsive and immediate in its form. I wrote it very quickly and freely, in one day, letting all of my impulsions out. I told myself that I needed to shoot everything I had written, without turning the end-product into something too polished. Not going through the traditional production route allowed us that. If we had waited to find money to shoot the film, the project would have failed. I think short films are also a ground for experimentation.”
Caroline Deruas

Caroline Deruas was born in Cannes, where she attended screenings at the festival from the time she was six years old. Early in her life, cinema became a necessity for her and as an teenager, she already wanted to write and make films. When she arrived in Paris, she worked as an assistant director, script supervisor  and a screenwriter. Deruas worked with a number of directors, including Yann Gonzalez, Romain Goupil, Valéria Bruni-Tedeschi and Philippe Garrel (with whom she co-wrote A Burning Hot Summer, Jealousy and In the Shadow of Women). She directed two other short films: The Starfish, selected at Cannes’ Directors Fortnight, and The Children of The Night, which was awarded the Silver Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival. Deruas was also a resident at the Villa Medici in Rome, where is set her upcoming and debut feature L’indomptée. Directed by: Caroline Deruas - 2008 - France - 15 min WITH: With Léna Garrel, Caroline Deruas, Lolita Chammah, Arthur Igual, Kim Pearce, Laurent Charpentier, Adrien Lamande, Eric Rulliat & Maurice Garrel - WRITER: Caroline Deruas - PRODUCER: Ludovic Henry, Olivier Berlemont - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Pascale Marin - EDITOR: Pascale Allier Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

Keeping the focus on emerging directors and new voices in French cinema we turn to a mid-length feature from Houda Benyamina. She made this film before her debut feature, Divines, for which she was awarded the Caméra d’Or prize at Cannes last year. Divines, which was also nominated for Best Film in a Foreign Language at the Golden Globes, tells the story of two teenage girls, best friends from a tough suburb of Paris who, dreaming of making money, start working for the local dealer.

In The Road to Paradise, Benyamina focuses on another marginalised community: the ones of the illegal migrants and romanis. The film follows Leila, a mother of two living illegally in France, trying to raise her kids while failing to connect with her husband who has crossed the border into England. To make this film, Benyamina immersed herself in a camp of illegal migrants for a couple of months. She wished to communicate the dread of expulsion and the constant feeling of urgency that she witnessed there. Her film pulls you into the difficult lives of the characters, and doesn’t let you go. It is without doubt Benyamina’s sincerity as an engaged filmmaker that makes the film so compelling.

“I am an outraged person… I’m interested by the poor and disgraced people, the ones on the margins of society.”
Houda Benyamina

Benyamina grew up in an underprivileged suburb of Paris. On her way to train as a hairdresser, a teacher saw her reading Jean-Ferdinand Céline and encouraged her to pursue her studies. She later graduated in acting from the ERAC in Cannes, and went on to study acting in Minsk and New York. Acting didn’t fully satisfy her, and she starting directing a number of shorts culminating with this film. It was produced by Marc-Benoît Créancier, who also produced Divines. Benyamina is the founder of 1000 Visages, an association that aims to promote cinema and provide a better access to it in difficult areas in France. Directed by: Houda Benyamina - 2011 - France - 43 min WITH: Madjouline Idrissi, Sanna Marouk, Yanis Siraj & Mounir Margoum - WRITER: Houda Benyamina & Malik Rumeau - PRODUCER: Marc-Benoît Créancier - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Michaël Capron - EDITOR: Julie Dupré Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

Le CiNéMa Club highlights emerging directors and new voices in French cinema. Here is More Like Johnny Walker…, a short by Olivier Babinet whose last documentary film Swagger, released in November 2016 in France and presented at the ACID in Cannes, received a warm response by both critics and audiences. Swagger draws a moving pop portrait of teenagers attending college in an underprivileged suburb of Paris. The documentary mixes genres, shifting from musical to sci-fi, giving a voice to the funny and powerful words of these teenagers. Directed in 2008, More Like Johnny Walker… is a further testament to the style and cinematic universe of Olivier Babinet.

More Like Johnny Walker… introduces us to Etienne, a young man whose girlfriend Solveig asks him to spend the night away from her apartment. He meets with his friend Bip, and the pair takes a strange pill ordered online that throws them into a repetitive time loop. Shot on 35mm, the film delivers a strong imagery and an eccentric storyline. The short was financed thanks to a fund from an association based in the Saint-Denis suburb of Paris. Through this same association, Babinet presented the short in local schools and prisons. It was then that he met a professor who invited him to teach a workshop at a high school in the same area. After working closely on different projects for two years with the school and its students, Babinet was inspired to direct a film with and for the students, and from there Swagger was born.

Olivier Babinet was born in the northern French town of Strasbourg. His first recognized work was a series called Le Bidule for Canal +. After More Like Johnny Walker…, Babinet made Robert Mitchum is Dead, which he co-directed with photographer Fred Kihn, and which stars the same lead actor who appears in this short, Pablos Nicomédes. Babinet also directs music videos, including videos for French bands Zombie Zombie, Tomorrow’s World, Rita Mitsouko and Mathieu Boggaerts.
Directed by: Olivier Babinet - 2008 - France - 28 min WITH: Arly Jover, Cosme Castro & Vincent Pateaux - WRITER: Olivier Babinet - PRODUCER: Guillaume De Bary & Igor Wojtowicz - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Javier Ruiz Gomez - EDITOR: Isabelle Devinck Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

This is the fourth and final film in our series curated by Jake Perlin from The Metrograph. In Jingle Bells, the legendary American documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker follows Robert F. Kennedy, his family and Sammy Davis Jr. visiting New York City schools and celebrating Christmas in 1964 when RFK was the new senator-elect of New York. D.A. Pennebaker is one of the pioneers of cinema verité filmmaking and was awarded a lifetime Oscar for his groundbreaking body of work ranging from political to music subjects. He is the filmmaker behind one of the best music documentaries of all time, Don’t Look Back, in which he followed Bob Dylan during his 1965 tour in England.  The opening sequence of that film — to Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” —  is widely considered to be a precursor to modern music videos.

In the early sixties, Pennebaker developed with his colleague Richard Leacock one of the first fully portable 16mm cameras with synchronized sound recording, which fostered an immediate style of shooting that you can witness in Jingle Bells. Jake Perlin commissioned his friend Michael Chaiken to write an essay about the film, which we are pleased to present below. This showing was made possible as a happy holidays present from Pennebaker Hegedus Films.  

RFK '64
Haunted by enemies both real and imagined, Robert Kennedy was a patrician without a court in 1964. Communist dictators, bosses of crime syndicates, power hungry bureaucrats, even the newly elected President, were all part, or so it seemed, of some nefarious, barely discernible plot to wrestle power and influence away from him and his family, the closest thing to royalty Americans have ever known.
D.A. Pennebaker filmed RFK once prior to Jingle Bells, at the height of his power as United States Attorney General, during a tense two days in June 1963. The resulting film, Crisis, an early piece of political vérité, captured the moment John F. Kennedy federalized National Guard troops and deployed them to the University of Alabama to force its desegregation. On screen, the Kennedys were a double-act of progressive idealism and cold political calculation. Months later, bitter circumstance forced Robert into self-exile, re-emerging as a reluctant agent of history to fulfill the promise of his brother’s shattered legacy.
At sea in the luminous bustle of Christmas in New York City, Jingle Bells catches Kennedy racing at vertiginous speed to retake the political capital he lost after the collapse of Camelot. Now the Senator-elect of New York, he affects an affable, distant, countenance. Who were his enemies? Who were his allies? Was he unwittingly complicit in the absurd tragedy that wracked his family and, by extension, the nation? These would all prove unanswerable, fruitless, questions, yet ones his political future held some large purchase in.
Surrounded by his children, his wife Ethel, Sammy Davis, Jr. (a jester without a court), as he visits schoolchildren around the city, RFK is every bit the good patriarch and dutiful public servant. But it’s the films’ fleeting, in-between, moments where Pennebaker most precisely hits the mark, offering reflection on the possibilities that Robert Kennedy’s all too brief life foreclosed. Set against the pageantry of a long ago Christmas, the film speaks to tragic contingencies of history lying far beyond the ken of politics that continue to circumscribe the tortured destiny of our country. Directed by: D.A. Pennebaker - 1964 - United States - 16 min WITH: Robert F. Kennedy - PRODUCER: D.A. Pennebaker - CINEMATOGRAPHY: D.A. Pennebaker & Michael Balckwood - EDITOR: D.A. Pennebaker Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

Here is the third film in the Gee Whiz It’s Christmas series, curated by Jake Perlin, Artistic and Programming Director of The Metrograph — the Lower East Side movie theatre that has, since its opening in March, become the new essential destination for New York’s cinephile and film community.

Happy-End is a film by Austrian avant-garde filmmaker and found footage master Peter Tscherkassky. He started making films in 1979 and earned his PhD in philosophy with a dissertation entitled ‘Film as Art’. His films have been honored with more than 50 awards including Best Short Film – for Coming Attractions – at the Venice Film Festival, and his installations have been exhibited all over the world including at the Louvre in Paris.

Peter Tscherkassky describes his  film for us:

“Happy-End was part of the celebration of the centennial of cinema, as a contribution to a 90-minute found footage film reel with works by eight specialists in the field. The material is the (presumably complete) film legacy of an anonymous (and obviously childless) couple. Elfriede and Rudolf filmed themselves not only on holiday by the sea and in the mountains, but also exchanging Christmas presents, celebrating parties with friends and eating and drinking at home by themselves, just the two of them – or rather the three of them, since it was taken for granted that the camera was included. The most recent shots were dated 1980, the oldest were from the early 1960s.

I wanted to give the two of them a proper resurrection and arranged the material in reverse (in terms of time). In the course of the film Elfriede and Rudolf thus not only become younger and younger, but this also takes us back to the ‘time before the tripod’, when there was not yet a remote control cable to operate the camera, and Rudolf and Elfriede alternately captured one another on film with a hand-held camera, sipping eggnog and enjoying cream cakes. They even indulged in pralines before sex (which made a slight, very reserved, almost invisible appearance in Happy-End). Following the introduction, which still belonged to the calm tripod shots, the hand-held shots were interwoven using double projection: a rush of images accompanying the blissful ecstasy of the two actors, all the way to the finale, an exuberant dance by Elfriede leading into a freeze frame of her face, its expression conveying both joy and deep pain at the same time.”

You can visit Peter Tscherkassky’s website here.
Directed by: Peter Tscherkassky - 1996 - Austria - 11 min WRITER: Peter Tscherkassky - EDITOR: Peter Tscherkassky Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

Gee Whiz It’s Christmas! And for that reason, Jake Perlin, Artistic and Programming Director of The Metrograph, every cinephile’s favourite new theatre in downtown New York City, is taking over the programming of Le CiNéMa Club with weekly Christmas-themed shorts and rarities. The series is entitled Gee Whiz It’s Christmas, after Jake’s favourite Christmas song by Carla Thomas.

Last week’s intimate family gathering gives way to a modern experimental retelling of the journey of Mary and Joseph with Merry Christmas, a three-minute short film by American artist and filmmaker Jerome Hill. Mary and Joseph wander the streets of New York with their donkey. Seeking refuge and shelter, they are turned away at the Algonquin Hotel. They continue their journey through the busy streets of New York, ignored by passersby who remain unaware of their existence.

Made in 1969, Merry Christmas sees Hill apply his experimental painting technique on documentary-like images of the bustling New York streets during Christmastime. He hand-painted the entire short, the characters Mary, Joseph and the donkey drawn onto the film. The technique was an intensive process for the filmmaker that included drawing, painting and gluing objects directly onto the film. The resulting atmosphere is both surreal and grounded. Three ghostly figures, indefinite colored shapes, move through the day-to-day life of Times Square in the 60s near the Algonquin Hotel where Hill used to live.

“His work got younger and younger every year. His cinema began at Warner Brothers, and it ended in the lines of avant-garde film. His progress was slow and painful. He had to free himself from many society, family and commerce traditions.”
Jonas Mekas

Jerome Hill was the he grandson of railroad builder James Jerome Hill. After majoring in music at Yale, he studied painting at the British Academy in Rome and at the Academie Scandinave in Paris. After World War II, during which he served in Army film units and as a liaison officer with French forces, Hill directed a short, Grandma Moses, which was nominated for an Academy Award, and a feature length documentary, Albert Schweitzer, that received an Oscar in 1957. Frustrated by the narrow confines of documentaries, Hill started experimenting with film. The director hand-colored a number of his films, including his best-known full-length autobiographical film, Film Portrait, made in 1972, and added in 2003 to the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.

Jerome Hill was also a great philanthropist. Jonas Mekas thanks him in his tribute to the artist: “The whole movement of the American avant-garde film of the ‘60s would have taken a completely different turn, much slower and thinner, without the help of Jerome.” In 1964, Hill created the Avon Foundation, now the Jerome Foundation, to support the creation, development, and production of new works by emerging artists. All of his films can be watched for free on the Jerome Fondation’s website.  Directed by: Jerome Hill - 1969 - United States - 3 min WRITER: Jerome Hill - PRODUCER: Jerome Hill - EDITOR: Jerome Hill Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

Gee Whiz It’s Christmas! And for that reason, Jake Perlin, Artistic and Programming Director of The Metrograph, is taking over the programming of Le CiNéMa Club with weekly Christmas-themed shorts and rarities! The Metrograph, the recently opened independent movie theater in the Lower East Side of New York City that screens films on 35 and 16mm projectors, was received as a dream come true for the city’s cinephiles and filmmaker community when it opened in March. To get a better sense of the vibrant and modern approach of its programming, one can look to the opening series “Welcome to Metrograph A to Z” – ranging in wonderful picks from Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluie de Cherbourg to John Boorman’s Point Blank, from Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men to John Woo’s Hard Boiled, an eclectic series that can include both Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance.

Jake Perlin has selected four unique and diverse short films that will each show for a week on Le CiNéMa Club, and which will then be showcased alongside other short films at The Metrograph. The series is entitled Gee Whiz It’s Christmas, after Jake’s favourite christmas song by Carla Thomas. We couldn’t more excited to welcome Jake Perlin as our first ever guest curator.

Jake Perlin begins the series this week on Le CiNéMa Club with L.A. Christmas, a film by American Artist and performer Kip Fulbeck that invites to you into the intimacy of his Chinese-American family Christmas in Southern California. Shot with a Fisher Price PixelVision camera, L.A Christmas captures with tenderness and humour the quirkiness of Fulbeck’s family members; his Chinese godmother feeding too much the cat, his American father bummed about not receiving a Snoopy Dog CD, his nine-year old black belt nephew, and his other nephew reciting the pi 200 digits.

The film is also a testimony of the bizarre universality of family gatherings. Through voice-over, we hear a loving conversation between Fulbeck and his mother commentating the images and other things his thirty-year old filmmaker son should do. If the film can be a bit hard to fit in the first minutes, like when you get to a dinner party at which everyone knows each other and talks on top of each other, stick with and you’ll soon feel right at home.

Fulbeck realized that if his family Christmas included muslims, jews, atheists, buddhists but no Christians and yet everyone was celebrating the birth of Jesus, it made him want to capture the moments. The filmmaker wanted to put the viewer in the first person point of view, and to obtain this feeling, he knew his family had to interact with the camera while he was filming it. The Fisher Price camera, which looks like small children’s toy, enabled him to film without breaking his family’s natural behavior. He cut it analog, and realized there was something missing. He then brought back his mother to watch the rough cut while recording live their conversation. He added captions as guides to help locate the viewer through his film that he admits can be complex to follow at first.

“I started to shoot with my regular camera and my family got really self-conscious and so I took out my Fisher Price camera and everyone thought it was a joke and clowned around and was very open to it. It allowed me to make this home movie about home movies”
Kip Fulbeck

L.A Christmas is a personal favorite for the filmmaker. Much of Fulbeck’s work across a variety of mediums, is autobiographical, combining personal stories with political activism, pop culture and stand-up comedy. Fulbeck teaches as a Professor of Art at the University of California in Santa Barbara. He has been featured on on CNN, MTV, The Today Show, and PBS and his work has been included in shows at the Whitney Museum or the Getty Museum among other institutions. His best known work is his Hapa Project in which he photographed volonteer subjects of Asian/Pacific islander descent to give voice to an overseen ethnic culture. The project embodies a range of mediums from a published book, to a photographic exhibition, online communities. The Japanese American National museum will host a show in 2018 of his new photographs taken of the same subjects 15 years later. Directed by: Kip Fulbeck - 1996 - United States - 13 min WRITER: Kip Fulbeck - EDITOR: Kip Fulbeck Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

Here is a mesmerizing short by one of the most exciting filmmakers of her generation: Amy Seimetz. The director-writer-actress-producer-editor is the essence of the true filmmaker: an autodidact who places collaboration at the core of developing her talents, driven by the impulse to make good movies at any price, whose career bridges her early experimental cinema to contemporary television shows and movies.

When We lived in Miami was commissioned by The Borscht Corp., a local non-profit meant to redefine cinema in Miami, initiated by filmmakers Lucas Leyva and Jillian Mayer to develop local directors and bring others to make films in the state. They have produced a great series of shorts, including films by Barry Jenkins, Sebastian Silva and Terence Nance. They are currently developing features.

Filmed in Miami during Hurricane Isaac, When We Lived in Miami focuses on the emotional journey of a young mother as she struggles to deal with her marriage falling apart while keeping up appearances for her daughter. Seimetz cast herself in the film specifically to be able to direct the little girl, as she said to Filmmaker Magazine: “To maintain trust and fluidity of performance, so she didn’t have to take what I was saying and apply it to another person. My decision to act in it was more of a directing decision.” She also really wanted to smash a car, which her character gets to do in the film.

The short is a montage of moments superimposed on each other, drowning us through the beauty of the images, into the melancholy, nostalgia and distress of this woman trying to figure out the departure of her husband. Seimetz executes a cinematic narrative that feels poetic and modern. The short was shot on 16mm with her cinematographer and longtime collaborator Jay Keitel.

“As in her feature [Sun Don’t Shine], Seimetz achieves images of a dense and inward atmosphere, a visual mood of tangle and haze that fuses with the fierce performances to provide a richly textured and specific sense of place."
Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Seimetz grew up in Florida, in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area. She began making films at home at the age of 18, leaving film school to move to Los Angeles where she first lived on small jobs babysitting, waiting tables or sewing. She started directing, producing and acting in her own experimental short films and quickly started getting roles as an actress.

If acting was first a learning experience in filmmaking, it became a way “to be around people who were making things and collaborating.” To her, it’s all part of filmmaking and she wouldn’t see herself acting if she wasn’t directing. Her acting credits include Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color, Christopher Guest’s Family Tree, and Veena Sud’s The Killing: “Television has gotten really good. Going back to the love of the slow burn, a character doesn’t have to explain herself everytime she walks onto the scene.”

Moving back to her home state, Seimetz wrote, directed and produced her first feature Sun Don’t Shine, a mystery and crime road trip, starring Kate Lyn Sheil and Kentucker Audley. The film premiered in SXSW in 2012 to much critical acclaim. She directed When We Lived In Miami right after this. She was recently brought in by Steven Soderbergh to write and direct, along with Lodge Kerrigan, the Starz series The Girlfriend Experience and As Matt Zoller Seitz from the New York Magazine says “it’s easily one of the best shows of the year, and a major work by everyone involved.” Directed by: Amy Seimetz - 2013 - United States - 13 min WITH: With Fiona D'Avis, Amy Seimetz & AJ Boden - WRITER: Amy Seimetz - PRODUCER: Andrew Hevia, Jonathan David Kane & Lucas Leyva - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Jay Keitel - MUSIC: Ben Lovett - EDITOR: Amy Seimetz Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

Le CiNéMa Club is presenting a short film by the up-and-coming French director Nicolas Peduzzi. Set in Pigalle, an area in the North of Paris where Peduzzi grew up and lives today, Death on the Basketball Court tells a doomed love story between a young teenager and a young woman, with thriller elements and a touch of local crime.

Peduzzi wanted to make a short with the group of young teenagers boys that plays basketball on the court near where he lives. The boys are close friends who were born and still live in the same building across the court. “There was a strong uniting bond between them that moved me” recalls Peduzzi. He thought of the boys as the Goonies of Pigalle.

The director grew up in Paris, but he spent most of the last decade between Rome and New York — a rich cultural heritage that comes through brilliantly in this short. His home area of Pigalle feels authentic, and the film gracefully mixes hints of classic Italian and American cinema with his unique perspective of contemporary Paris. The filmmaker admits to having stolen a few things from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Roma to create the lead female role. He also rewatched films by Martin Scorsese for the thriller storyline. The latter came to Peduzzi when a friend of his who worked at a restaurant in Rome told him the terrible story. The friend found a dead man in the restaurant and, not knowing what to do, he left him in the restaurant’s courtyard, a story which quickly made it into local papers. The image stuck with Peduzzi, and after meeting the group of boys, he joined the two stories together in a script.

Pigalle, which is now one of the trendier areas of Paris, used to be a much rougher neighborhood, when Peduzzi was a kid. He wrote the script quickly, but he spent a lot of time with the young boys in order to find the right and most natural tone – somewhere between the boys sticking to the script and leaving room for improvisation.

The short was co-produced by Hugo Sélignac (Blood Ties) and the famous brand Pigalle, owned by Stephane Ashpool, one of Peduzzi’s childhood friends. Ashpool also coaches the basketball team of the teenagers who star in the film, and he had commissioned Paris-based Ill studio to art direct the current decoration of the court when it was threatened to be closed, making it now a cult place in the area.

“It is a film also inspired by our teenager days in this area. We used to hang in the streets and fool around, before going to play basketball. Including the darker element of the story was, in a way, going back to that period of time where those stories would happen much more often."
Nicolas Peduzzi

Nicolas Peduzzi sees this short as his film school, as he didn’t go to one. He started off focusing on acting, studying in various studios in New York and Rome, including Susan Batson. Although he always knew that acting wouldn’t fulfill him on its own, his best roles yet were in the plays Ivanov and then Othello, both directed by the great late Luc Bondy, who sadly passed away before the latter premiered.

For the past years, Peduzzi has directed short videos for his sister Antonine’s bag label TL-180, and a more experimental short film Mikado, for Pigalle, starring their other childhood friend, the brilliant French actor Paul Hamy. The film was projected as part of Pigalle’s 2014 fashion show in the Bouffes du Nord Theatre, and at the end the actors would come out from behind the curtains, wearing the clothes. The group of friends likes mixing film, fashion and theater, and they are planning more films together. Mostly, Peduzzi is currently editing his first feature: a docu-drama focused on a young woman who was born into the rich white oil society of Texas that shows the dark and tragic decadence of her life there. The project has the working title Southern Belle, and is produced by Jonas Films and Imago — and we cannot wait to see it. Directed by: Nicolas Peduzzi - 2015 - France - 20 min WITH: With Théo Ech Cheikh, Alexia Elkailm, Jonathan tarquin, Mamadou Coulibali, Ichaka Coulibali, Bouba Siby, Paul Brun, Titouan Lahmar-Daiwa, Ibrahim Coulibali - WRITER: Nicolas Peduzzi - PRODUCER: Hugo Séligniac & Stéphane Ashpool - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Francesco Di Pierro - EDITOR: Francesco Galli Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

Le CiNéMa Club is presenting a short made by Josh Safdie, one of our favorite American directors, while he was still a film student in Boston. Safdie, who grew up and lives in New York, has co-directed with his brother Benny a great series of short films and four critically acclaimed features including their latest Heaven Knows What (2015).

In the past ten years, they have established themselves as two of the most interesting voices in new American cinema, developing a personal style that blends their love for New York City and its eclectic characters with a true passion for the art of cinema. They recently finished shooting Good Time, starring Robert Pattinson as a bank robber on the run, which will be released by A24 next year. They have announced their next project Uncut Gems, set in Manhattan’s diamond district, and executive produced by Martin Scorsese among others. We cannot wait to see both.

Josh Safdie talked to us about one of his first films: We’re Going To The Zoo.

How would you describe the story?

It’s about a woman driving her younger brother to a zoo and how they accidentally picked up a hitchhiker.

How attached are you to this early short of yours?

Zoo was monumental for me. I can only liken it to Lacan’s mirror stage as pretentious as that sounds. It was THE moment when I figured out how to speak “film.” Kind of like that moment when hearing your own voice played back for you is no longer dreadful. In the process of making the film, I learned how I wanted to shoot a close up, how to use real life to the film’s advantage, how to find that balance between the real and the “real”…

I became obsessed with reifying impossible moments between Mickey and Giocomo (real life siblings who play brother and sister in the film), and my immediate collaborators. I tapped into something for myself. Some sort of personal aesthetic guide, a philosophy that was built upon contradictions. A dirty whimsy. Sloppy yet totally controlled. It was exciting.

I had been in school, and up to that moment in 2004, I had made plenty of short films with my brother and friends, but none of which really spoke to me as something eternally “mine.” In the years leading up to it, I had been digging into the films of Cassavetes, Kieslowski and the God Jean Vigo. Jean Vigo was huge for me, so huge that when I met Luce Vigo at a French film festival, I grabbed her and kissed her!

How did you come up with the story?

After the characters were realized, I brought a bunch of disparate ideas to the table that all felt the same to me, like they were all part of a single story. Working on the story with Sam Lisenco, Brett Jutkiewicz, Dan Samiljan and of course Mickey Sumner, forced a discourse that reified the ideas and cemented them together as something fluid. Something wasn’t in the script unless we could justify it emotionally, that was always the barometer… Sometimes one of us would speak on behalf of story, but the beauty of a road film is that the narrative writes (or rights) itself.

I was obsessed with this concept of forcing yourself to embrace change and interact with a stranger, i.e. a hitchhiker. Simple, stupid, but open enough to express ourselves within. I had done this super short film with Mickey Sumner wherein her character’s car disappears at a gas station and we went around filming her with cameras hidden far away as she insisted that her car just vanished as she was in the midst of filling it with gas. Seeing real life people latch onto her persistence and unknowingly take part in a written narrative was life changing.

Where and how did you shoot it?

We shot in and around Boston. Mostly the northeast. We shot on 16mm color reversal (no longer available) and recorded sound on luscious 1/4” tape on a Nagara sound recorder (you could roll out on sound! but the heartiness was always worth it).

Do you remember what you learned from that early experience?

Shooting the highway stuff was certainly a lesson in child safety. I was also forced to cast myself in the film, a decision I was at first against but soon realized that in order to fully find the right tone for this movie I had to be IN it experiencing it myself first hand. I don’t like to act for myself anymore, but I find knowing what it’s like “in the shit” to be extremely educating. When I do act for friends or a project that interests me, I look at it as education. It’s always good to know what it’s like on the other side.

What kind of cinema were you interested in making back then? Has is evolved since?

I think as I’ve gotten older, this was shot 13 years ago, I’ve become harder. Lost some friends and family, been fucked over a few times, the recession of 2008/2009 was nightmarish and saw us directing some things I hope to never even have think about again… but these things hardened me and that has absolutely shown itself in what we’ve been making and the worlds we’ve been attracted to. I’ve always been obsessed with characters, so that hasn’t changed, but their worlds have.

What projects are you working on right now?

It’s a blessing to have something to get lost in at every waking moment. We’re working a lot and keeping sane somehow. We’re currently finishing Good Time, this fugitive film charged by a warped perspective of brotherly love, which is going to be released sometime in 2017. We just finished writing the final draft of this pilot episode for a show called Monger which we’re doing with Showtime and it’s been a comedic breath of fresh air. We’re also gearing up to enter pre-production on a project we’ve spent many years writing, a thriller that takes place in New York City’s diamond district called Uncut Gems, which is being produced by Emma Tillinger Koskoff and the ultimate film God Martin Scorsese.  
Directed by: Josh Safdie - 2005 - United States - 14 min WITH: With Josh Safdie, Giacomo Summer, Mickey Summer & Abdellah Belachguer - WRITER: Brett Jutkiewicz, Sam Lisenco, Josh Safdie & Dan Samiljan - PRODUCER: Brett Jutkiewicz, Sam Lisenco, Josh Safdie & Dan Samiljan - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Brett Jutkiewicz - MUSIC: Stephen Valand & Carson Werner - EDITOR: Brett Jutkiewicz & Dan Samiljan Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

Le CiNéMa Club is presenting a rare documentary in which two of the best American women photographers meet. Through this half-hour film shot on 16mm, Tina Barney explores the work of Jan Groover, a photographer that had a great influence on her and who is widely recognised as one of the preeminent fine arts photographers. Jan Groover was a post-modernist still life photographer known for her unique perspective on space, light and forms — merging the worlds of painting and photography.

Born in New Jersey, Groover started studying painting at the Pratt Institute where she was inspired by the works of Cézanne, Morandi, De Chirico and Fra Angelico. She turned to photography in the seventies and in 1987 she was the subject of a mid-career retrospective at MoMa. “I think she’s one of the most interesting, accomplished and original photographers working today — anywhere!” explains then MoMA Director of Photography John Szarkowski in the film. Jan Groover: Tilting at Space is a beautiful lesson on photography, and a portrait of a photographer we should all know more about.

Tina Barney co-directed the film with Mark Trottenberg, with whom she made a previous documentary on photographer Horst P. Horst. The film follows Groover from her studio in New York and lets us observe her as she arranges objects for her still life and shows us how she develops and works on her photographs. We also see her in her apartment at the Bowery where she lived with her husband, the painter and art critic Bruce Bois. Through his interview, Bois gives us great insight about her work: “Objects do in her work what people expected them to do in paintings, which is they don’t usually let you know exactly where they are.” The film later gives you a peek at what a wonderful photography teacher she was. Groover tells her student: “Once you have the content, you don’t have to think about the content anymore, you have to think about the picture — once you’re in the woods, you don’t have to think about the trees anymore, you have to think about the picture!” She develops how formalism was everything to her. The documentary ends in her home in the Southwest of France where she moved and stayed until the end of her life.

Groover had her cameras and films made to measure at Kodak, and in France she changed her 8×10 camera to an 18×20 camera. It is Groover who inspired Tina Barney to use an 8×10 camera.

"She taught me to look and really understand space. She is probably the one and only great teacher I had, even though I never took a class. It’s through making the movie that I learned from her.”
Tina Barney

Born in New York City, Tina Barney is an American photographer who has been making work since the seventies — large-scale photographs of friends and families in beautiful color prints and tableaus often portraying the life of the social elite. Her work is included in the permanent collections of major institutions such as MoMA and The Withney. Since finishing her last series The Europeans, Barney has been working on completing her first monograph, which will be published next fall by Rizzoli. She has also completed two new portrait series, one covering a broad genre of sports and athletes called Athletic Rituals — where Barney, for the first time, uses a digital camera — and one on teenagers entitled Youth. Directed by: Tina Barney & Mark Trottenberg - 1994 - United States - 28 min WRITER: Tina Barney & Mark Trottenberg - PRODUCER: Tina Barney, Edgar B. Howard - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Mark Trottenberg - MUSIC: Haze Greenfield - EDITOR: Mark Trottenberg Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

How does it feel to play a woman’s dead body? For Halloween week, Le CiNéMa Club presents the online premiere of What Happened to Her, directed by Kristy Guevara-Flanagan and selected this year at the New York Film Festival.

The short is a beautifully gruesome montage exploring the use of female corpses on screen, cut with audio from a woman recalling the experience of playing the dead body in 80s cult classic River’s Edge. What Happened to Her was also awarded an Honorable Mention at the HotDocs Festival in Toronto.

Gender has always been central to Guevara-Flanagan’s work. Watching movies, the director began noticing and becoming increasingly aware of dead female bodies presented on screen. From there she started interviewing women who had played dead bodies and finally came upon Danyi Deats’ story. She started gathering images, expanding her research to television shows, and created categories to organize the kinds of images shown on screen: river bodies, earth bodies, aerial shots — eventually culminating in the more disturbing sequences of morgue scenes.

According to Guevara-Flanagan, the dead female body is used as a plot device in male-driven narratives, revealing a cultural obsession with murders of women in entertainment, and is aesthetically fetishized.

“The dead female body becomes a narrative device through which the men get to be active and detective-like and the woman is just the most passive representation... she’s dead.”
Kristy Guevara-Flanagan

Kristy Guevara-Flanagan is a documentary filmmaker as well as a documentary teacher at UCLA. What Happened to Her is part of her ongoing interest in female representation and roles in popular media. Her previous documentary Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines explores the issue by following the history of the popular superhero Wonder Woman in order to shed light on contemporary issues of women’s liberation. She is also planning further investigations with projects examining representations of pregnant women in popular culture and the roles of sex body doubles in movies. She has worked on numerous other documentary projects, both as director and producer. Directed by: Kristy Guevara-Flanagan - 2016 - United States - 15 min WITH: With the voice of Danyi Deats - WRITER: Kristy Guevara-Flanagan - PRODUCER: Kristy Guevara-Flanagan - CINEMATOGRAPHY: -- - EDITOR: Kristy Guevara-Flanagan Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

We are introducing two short films by new French director Adrien Beau, whose cinematic universe is both fascinating and beautifully crafted. Self-produced and shot on Super 8, The Little Mermaid tells the story of a strange little sea creature who brings trouble and madness into a bourgeois family at the beginning of the 20th century. A bigger production, his second short, Irregular Seasoning, is an amusing twist on the life of the Marquise de Brinvilliers that chronicles her crazy poisoning endeavors against the dull court that surrounds her.

If his two films are silent, they are nevertheless more expressive than many of the talking films we’ve seen. His images, the world and characters that he has put in motion are profoundly alive. They make us travel through time in a beautiful, cinematic way.  It’s for a very practical reason that Beau decided to make his first short silent: he didn’t think he was good enough at writing dialogue to include speech in his script. One can only salute a young filmmaker who knows to identify his strengths, and Beau comes up with a creative solution to overcome the constraint.

It might also be the silent quality of his films that inspires the magic that seems to emanate from them, a quality that brings the shorts closer to the past eras in which their stories take place. Adrien Beau and his actors watched a ton of silent cinema to understand better how to tell a story relying only on images and performance. The filmmaker evokes the films of Chaplin, whose talent — for telling sad or political stories while filling them with humor – Beau admires. 

Beau self-produced The Little Mermaid with less than two thousand dollars, which he inherited from his grandfather.  His talented costume designer Anne Blanchard, who he met in high school, made all of the costumes for $300. As a child, Beau had been struck by the story of The Little Mermaid — this “totally misogynistic and racist story about a girl who comes from a world below that gets punished for trying to elevate her position in the world” as he explains.

Having loved this first experience behind the camera, Beau wished to make a second film. Agnès B., the French designer and arts patron, who also produced filmmakers such as Harmony Korine, offered to produce it. Beau wanted to make something more “classical” than The Little Mermaid, and took on that desire by its literal meaning, setting the story in the 17th century. In adapting the story of Marquise de Brinvilliers, he sought to tell a story that was ultimately completely punk as “its heroin kills everyone and gets murdered at the end”.

“I’ll never make films in which people wear jeans, even if I wear some. That is not what I like to see on the big screen.”
Adrien Beau

Adrien Beau is a self-taught film director who grew up in Paris. After high school, he wanted badly to escape his parents’ nest and he went straight to work. He found a job as an usher at the Bouffes-du-Nord theater, where he also did set design and made puppets. After seeing his work, a friend invited him to intern for John Galliano, who was the designer for Dior at the time. This is also where The Little Mermaid was born in its first form as a sculpture that Beau made from scraps of shagreen, a leather made of fish skin. At the age of 10, Beau acted in a film and, observing the process, thought it wasn’t that hard to make movies!  At the time, his favorite film was Edward Scissorhands. Ironically, if people sometimes compare his work today with Tim Burton’s films, Beau doesn’t quite relate to any other of Burton’s films.

After seeing and admiring Irregular Seasoning, Werner Herzog invited Beau to his Rogue Film School last year. Adrien Beau is currently working on getting his first feature into production — this time including dialogue and a screenwriting collaborator. The film is based on the life of the early 20th century cult French actress Sarah Bernhardt. Beau recently also started developing a vampire story based on a story by Tolstoy. These two projects sound like perfect fits for the young director, and we cannot wait to see them on the big screen! Directed by: Adrien Beau - 2009 > 2011 - France - 40 min WITH: With Erwan Ribard, Agathe Cury, Coline Veith, Hadrien Bouvier, Anne Blanchard, Mélodie Richard - WRITER: Adrien Beau - PRODUCER: Agnès B. - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Antoine Aybes-Gille - EDITOR: Alan Jobart Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

Le Cinema Club presents the online premiere of Kevin Phillips’ Too Cool For School, which premiered at 2015 Critics’ Week in Cannes. The short follows a teenager with sex on his mind who decides to ditch school one afternoon — and becomes haunted for it. Phillips proves here to be an undeniable talent. He creates a tense and thrilling cinematic atmosphere that only makes you want to see more…

The good news is that this short was produced as a vehicle for Phillips to make his first feature, Super Dark Times, written by the screenwriting duo Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski. Along with his producers Jett Steiger and Richard Peete, Phillips decided to make a short in the same universe. Collins and Piotrowski wrote Too Cool For School, and they all went to Phillips’ hometown in Pennsylvania to make the short in the locations the director grew up in. The short was shot over the course of three days, thanks to a crew of close filmmaker friends who graciously came on board and helped, believing in Phillips’ vision. They shot the film in December 2014, the short was accepted in Cannes a couple months later, and the writing-directing-producing team went on to shoot the feature that winter.

“At best I hope to subvert genre and elevate it to something else... a conflation of genres maybe or something new altogether.”
Kevin Phillips

After graduating in Film and Photography at the Savannah College of Art & Design in Georgia, where he met Collins, Piotrowski, Steiger and Peete, Kevin Phillips worked as a cinematographer and director on numerous shorts, commercials and music videos. The filmmaker acknowledges that his parents imbued him with creativity, showing him great films at an early age. While his father introduced him to films by greats such as Wilder, Hitchcock, Kazan, Hawks and Spielberg, his mother was a fan of Ridley Scott’s Alien and she encouraged Phillips to pursue artistic studies.

During high school, Phillips got a job at Hollywood Video, where he watched everything and made small films with a camera borrowed from his Tech Ed class. It was in college that Phillips extended his taste in movies to films by Stanley Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson, the Coen Brothers, Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Wong Kar-Wai, William Friedkin, David Fincher, David Lynch and Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Kevin Phillips is signed as a director by United Talent Agency and a cinematographer at Worldwide Production Agency. He is currently working on the post-production of Super Dark Times, in which “two high school friends in the nineties get into some serious fucking trouble.”   Directed by: Kevin Phillips - 2015 - United States - 11 min WITH: Tristan Lake Leabu & Esther Zynn - WRITER: Ben Collins & Luke Piotrowski - PRODUCER: Richard Peete & Jett Steiger - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Eli Born - EDITOR: Ed Yonaitis Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

Le CiNéMa Club is presenting the online premiere of Hang Loose, a short co-directed by Sammy Harkham and Patrick Brice and shot in Cayucos, a small town on the Central Coast of California. The film chronicles a night in the life of Wade, an aimless surfer who visits his ex-girlfriend in his former hometown — she is wary of Wade trying to reconnect, and we are invited to witness why.

The short was produced by Los Angeles-based production company MEMORY, who Le CiNeMa Club is currently partnering with for their second travelling collection of short films by a new generation of filmmakers. Hang Loose was part of the first MEMORY collection, which you can enjoy for a few more weeks by clicking here.

Sammy Harkham & Patrick Brice wanted to make a project with Kyle Field – the musician behind the band Little Wings who plays the lead of the film – and his truck. It was also a chance for them to shoot in the region of the Central Coast of California, a place that was very cinematic but rarely seen on film. The directors shot the short for over a week in Cayucos, the last town before Big Sur when you head there from Los Angeles. The characters were inspired by the filmmakers reflecting on the place and its locals. Wade’s character — this charming, not so charming Californian surfer — was based on someone they knew personally.

The film is also maybe about what Sammy Harkham describes as “the tension between what we want to be, how we perceive ourselves and the distance from that to what we actual are.”

Sammy Harkham and Patrick Brice both live in Los Angeles where they met. Patrick Brice is a graduate from the Cal Arts School of Film and Video. He is the director of Creep (2014), produced by Mark Duplass and Jason Blum, and The Overnight (2016), produced by the Duplass brothers. Sammy Harkham is a cartoonist who also attended Cal Arts where he studied in the Experimental Animation program. He established the comics art anthology series Kramers Ergot, which has grown into the premier art comics anthology in the U.S. In 2006, Harkham co-founded The Cinefamily, a non-profit film repertoire house in Los Angeles, now one of the mostly highly regarded revival cinemas in the country. In 2007, he co-founded the influential bookstore, project space, and publishing outfit Family. His latest book, Everything Together, was awarded the Los Angeles Book Prize for Best Graphic Novel and was nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album.
Directed by: Sammy Harkham & Patrick Brice - 2015 - United States - 7 min WITH: Kyle Field, Sarah DeVincentis, Hayley Magnus & Carson Mell - WRITER: Sammy Harkham & Patrick Brice - PRODUCER: Sebastian Pardo & Riel Roch Decter - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Drew Bienemann - EDITOR: David Nordstrom Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

To celebrate the 54^th edition of the New York Film Festival, one of our very favourite American film festivals, we are presenting Gabriel Abrantes’ A Brief History of Princess X, which screened as part of NYFF’s Shorts Program 2: International Auteurs, curated by Dennis Lim.

Gabriel Abrantes, 32, is an American Portuguese filmmaker who has distinguished himself with a prolific series of stunning and truly original short films, showcased in prestigious art and film institutions and festivals around the world. Shot on Super 16mm, A Brief History of Princess X shows with humor and intelligence how the great Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi came to make his infamous Princess X sculpture.

Made in 1916 by one of the great artists of the XXth Century, Princess X raises questions as it grins at viewers — the bronze sculpture has a futuristic phallic shape. The work is even more surprising when one realizes that it actually represents the French princess Marie Bonaparte, great-grand niece of the emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. What a premise if someone were to make a film about an artwork! With his film, Gabriel Abrantes not only creates a gripping short that teaches us about the making of a sculpture, but he makes a wonderful and hilarious film in its own right. The film was commissioned by The Artist Cinema programme, an initiative to screen artists’ films in front of mainstream films across the United Kingdom.

Gabriel Abrantes received a BA in Cinema and Visual Arts at Cooper Union in 2006, and went on to study at L’École National des Beaux-Arts and Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains. He was born in the United States but now lives in Lisbon where his family is from. He travelled a great deal as a child — his parents were Maoists, political activists during the Portuguese revolution who later worked for international political institutions. Abrantes has since directed and co-directed seventeen short films, all beautifully shot on celluloid. His films were the subject of a retrospective earlier this year at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York, along with films of his friends and collaborators Alexander Carver, Benjamin Crotty and Daniel Schmidt.

These filmmakers have created their own school of cinema, best described in Film Society of Lincoln Cente’s introduction: “These uncompromising young visionaries share a penchant for provocation, a taste for transgression, and a host of strategies and obsessions all their own. At once lyrical and perverse, by turns hilarious and delirious, their films obliterate distinctions—between highbrow and lowbrow, between sensual and cerebral, between art cinema and the avant-garde—while remaining sharply attuned to the by-products of globalization and the fluctuations of post-Internet pop culture.”
Directed by: Gabriel Abrantes - 2016 - France, Portugal, UK - 7 min WRITER: Gabriel Abrantes - PRODUCER: Justin Taurand, Gabriel Abrantes - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Jorge Quintela - MUSIC: --- - EDITOR: Margarida Lucas Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

On the occasion of the Centre Pompidou’s film series around their exhibition Beat Generation in Paris, Le CiNéMa Club is showcasing one of the films screened in their program: the documentary about the life and work of Bob Kaufman And When I Die, I Won’t Stay Dead.

Directed by Billy Woodberry, the film brings together found footage and interviews that reconstitute, at the rhythm of poetry recitations and jazz music, the biography of this radical, ferocious and visionary Beat poet. Known in France as the “American Rimbaud”, Bob Kaufman was at war with the American culture of the cold war period. Uncompromisingly fierce and wild, he was never fully included into the Beat counterculture movement, while his skin color, his outspoken criticism of power, his uncompromising struggle for spiritual and political freedom, made him an easy prey for the racist police. Like Antonin Artaud, he was unjustly arrested, interned and subjected to electroshock therapy. A poet in the oral tradition, he also made a vow of silence for ten years. Set in the backdrop of the San Francisco of the 50’s and 60’s, Billy Woodberry’s film brilliantly documents the violent beauty of Kaufman’s life and struggle for freedom.

"A central feature of the film I made, is the presence of the poetry of Bob Kaufman, as it should be as that is how and why he is known, it was finally his way of being in the world. Poetry and the struggle to be a poet is his principal legacy."
Billy Woodberry

Billy Woodberry’s documentary does not follow a chronological path. He begins his film in the coffee shops, the bars and the streets where the Beats would gather and where the young Bob Kaufman read his first poems to the public. As if this were his real birth, his birth as a poet, a beginning that is also marked by confrontations with a racist and authoritarian police. For Billy Woodberry, this entanglement of the poet’s life with the repressive political climate of the McCarthy era and the conservatism of the 50’s and 60’s is what makes Bob Kaufman such a fascinating subject. Long forgotten or overlooked by academics and scholars who relegated him to the footnotes of history (if even that), Woodberry also wanted to show that Bob Kaufman was not only the quintessential Beat. More than this, he was also an emblem, sacred and immortal, of what it means to be a poet.

Billy Woodberry is one of the key figures of the L.A Rebellion film movement, a collective of Black filmmakers who emerged in the 1970’s from the UCLA Film school that includes Charles Burnett. His first feature length film Bless Their Little Hearts is a landmark of African American cinema. He has also directed a short film, The Pocketbook, and a a short documentary, Marseille Après la Guerre. He has been a faculty member at CalArts since 1989. His brilliant And When I Die, I Won’t Stay Dead was chosen as the opening film of MoMA’s Doc Fortnight in 2016. It was awarded Best Investigative Documentary at the Doclisboa festival in 2015.   Directed by: Billy Woodberry - 2015 - United States - 89 min WRITER: Billy Woodberry - PRODUCER: Billy Woodberry, Rui Alexandre Santos - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Billy Woodberry - MUSIC: --- - EDITOR: Amir Manesh, Luis Nunes Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

Here is a moving and funny tale about fatherhood starring the great French actor Melvil Poupaud. The Argument is the first short film by Los Angeles based director and producer Clara Aranovich that she made after film school. It premiered at the Stockholm International Film Festival in 2011.

Shot on Super 16mm and finished on 35mm, The Argument opens on a French man, played by the formidable Poupaud, who is having a massive argument over the phone with the mother of his infant child. She leaves him wallet-less with their wailing baby in New Orleans. Aranovich wanted to explore how a man becomes a father. The young filmmaker had once heard that women become mothers during pregnancy, but men become fathers once the child is born.

"I love films that don't really require an understanding of the language in order to be impactful, and miscommunication is at the heart of much of our grief; so I made the man a foreigner in the US. This is perhaps also influenced by the fact that both of my parents immigrated here with little grasp of the English language."
Clara Aranovich

Aranovich decided not to include subtitles for the French or English versions of the film – and succeeded in making a film that doesn’t need every word to be understood to deliver its emotional outcome. She approached Melvil Poupaud’s agent with the script and the actor responded to the piece. He had also worked with the filmmaker’s uncle — the Argentinian cinematographer Ricardo Aronovich who worked with directors such as Costa-Gavras, Alain Resnais, Marguerite Duras and Raoul Ruiz. She had always wanted to shoot in New Orleans, a city she longed to visit based on her love for William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson. Louisiana also happened to be a great place for filming for practical reasons due to its tax incentives and experienced film crews.

Clara Aranovich has since directed the short film Primrose that premiered at the SXSW festival in 2015. That film focuses on a love story between a woman and a one-of-a-kind creature. Aranovich was born in a cinephile family and grew up close to The Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto. From the age of seven, she knew she wanted to direct films. She studied Creative Writing at Dartmouth and Film Production at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. She has directed a number of commercials for brands including Major League Baseball (for whom she is the first woman to ever direct a commercial), Toyota, Milk, JCPenney, Microsoft, Chevrolet, and LG, among others. Aranovich was also the lead producer of James Franco’s film Yosemite (2015). She is currently writing her next short film and developing her first feature . Directed by: Clara Aranovich - 2011 - United States - 13 min WITH: Melvil Poupaud - WRITER: Clara Aranovich - PRODUCER: Clara Aranovitch & Rebecca Eskreis - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Stephen Pierce Ringer - MUSIC: --- - EDITOR: Clara Aranovich Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

Le CiNéMa Club presents The Children of the Night, French director Caroline Deruas’ third short film and recipient of the Pardino d’argento at the 2011 Locarno International Film Festival.

It tells the story of a young French woman from a resistant family who falls tragically in love with a German soldier in the French countryside at the end of World War II. The main characters are played by Adèle Haenel and Felix M. Ott. Caroline Deruas broaches the difficult and dark topic of the ‘femmes tondues’ during the French liberation — but she does this with a modern woman’s perspective, with finesse and intelligence. In little more than twenty-five minutes, the filmmaker manages to build a narrative that sheds light on a historically delicate subject, while also telling the story of forbidden love and its consequences. The film also reminds us of classical black and white films, with an economical and efficient plot that focuses on a few well developed characters.

“I absolutely had to shoot in black and white because I have a lot of trouble with historical representations of that period that are modern looking and in color. It’s essential to be able to delve into History. I also didn’t want a modern black and white look, shot on color film then converted into black and white. A wanted true black and white, with grain, almost golden.”
Caroline Deruas

The film is shot in 35mm — Caroline Deruas is a filmmaker that is still very attached to celluloid film. She is not against digital but is worried by the progressive disappearance of the earlier format, especially since she wants to use film to tell the narrative of her next projects. The lighting for The Children of the Night was done by her director of photography, Pascale Marin, whom she met on set while working on Sauvage Innocence by Philippe Garrel. Caroline Deruas was Garrel’s assistant while Pascale Marin assisted Raoul Coutard (one of the great French cinematographers, who worked on a number of films by Godard and Truffaut). Caroline Deruas was long unsure about whether or not to make the film — even though there are many films and books on the subject, the historical dimension of her project was daunting — but, as a feminist, she felt the need to talk about it. She feels like we can always shed new light on events such as those.

The documentary Tondues en 44, by Jean-Pierre Carlon was her first exposure to this historical reality. It showed the close up of a shaved woman who is walking in the streets — an image that haunted her for a long time. She also used archival videos and videos on Youtube as inspiration material for her last scene in the film. “I thought there was nothing stronger than to show these people having a good time, celebrating, with pride, facing the camera. It’s absolutely frightening”, says Caroline Deruas.

Caroline Deruas was born at Cannes, and assisted projections at the festival since the age of six. Early on, cinema became a necessity for her, and as an adolescent she already wanted to write and make films. Her love of film blossomed with friends from high school, including filmmaker Yann Gonzalez (whose brother, Anthony Gonzalez, from M83, is the music composer for Children of the Night.) She then met Philipe Garrel upon arriving in Paris, and worked with him on a number of movies. In addition to L’Étoile de mer and Children of the Night, she made a short political film to protest Sarkozy’s election in 2008: Le Feu, le sang, les étoiles. We are eager to discover her first feature length film, L’Indomptée, which will be released in French movie theaters early 2017. Directed by: Caroline Deruas - 2012 - France - 26 min WITH: Adèle Haenel, Felix M. Ott, Yves Donval & Arthur Igual - WRITER: Caroline Deruas - PRODUCER: Ludovic Henry - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Pascale Marin - MUSIC: Anthony Gonzalez - EDITOR: Floriane Allier Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

After showing new talent David Raboy’s first film The Giant, Le CiNéMa Club presents his new exciting short, Beach Week. The film is another testimony to Raboy’s directing skills and vision and is again beautifully shot by his cinematographer and close collaborator Eric Yue. The story is set in Virginia Beach, where five college friends have rented a house for the week. When Laure goes missing, Natalie becomes terribly anxious and tries to find her friend. But ominous signs are in the air and something else might be at stake… The film contains many dreamy sequences, with camera movements inhabiting each scene like a ghostly presence that is both alien and familiar. With his use of voiceover and stunning visual composition, the director conjures a poignant atmosphere of feeling and emotion. More than a clear-cut narrative, Raboy conveys a sense of nostalgia, angst, vulnerability and magic that is carefully woven into the soundscape and images of his film.

"All I want to do with movies is convey a feeling… to me that’s what they’re ultimately for (or my favorite ones at least). I do believe that cinema is the closest thing we have to communal dreaming — these places we’ve been to that don’t exist, these people we know and love but will never meet… and when the credits roll, you’re still buzzing from the experience of something that never happened."
David Raboy

When Raboy was still in high school, him and his friends would rent a house on Virginia Beach for a week in the summer. One summer his band played at a festival there. The film originated from a desire to recreate the magic of these youthful escapades, but Raboy also wanted to express the nostalgia that can underlie feelings of freedom and joy, the anguish that comes from the sense of time passing and the idea that happy moments will forever be lost or forgotten. “I’ll never forget the feeling,” recalls the director, “of coming out of the water, looking back at the ocean under a clear, black sky, and all those stars, and just getting this feeling in my gut, even despite all the giddiness that attended that moment, of some inescapable, crushing dread. It stuck with me forever. So I decided that’s what the next film would be about: the feeling of looking back at the ocean that night all those years ago, and the longing for things I knew I could never get back.”

The film was shot in 5 days on an Arri Studio with some of the last 35mm Fuji film ever made, which Raboy bought during a liquidation sale. The crew was composed of 17 people who lived in the house where the film was shot, even though it only had room for 8 — “which means our bedrooms were on the set, so we’d wake up after three hours of sleep, pack up our blow-up mattresses, dress the set, shoot all day, drink a bunch of beer and recreate the sleeping quarters out of thin air,” explains the young director. Beach Week was selected at the International Short Film Festival of Clermont-Ferrand and was awarded Best International Fiction at the 24th Curtas Vila Do Conde Film Festival in Porto. David Raboy is currently working on his first feature based on The Giant. Directed by: David Raboy - 2015 - United States - 18 min WITH: With Deragh Campbell, Patrick Foley, Jana Fredricks, Hannah Gross and Zachary Webber - WRITER: David Raboy - PRODUCER: Danny Dewes, Chloe Domont, Dustin Nakao-Haider - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Eric Yue - MUSIC: Ari Balouzian - EDITOR: David Raboy Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

To coincide with the French release of Bertrand Bonello’s new film, Nocturama, Le CiNéMa Club presents an atypical film sequence by the same director. The scene is the sketch, or skeleton, of one of his so-called “ghost movies” — movies he dreamt and conceived but which never took a finished cinematic form.

In Madeleine Among the Dead, Bonello wanted to tell Hitchcock’s Vertigo from the perspective of Madeleine (played by Kim Novak), not Scottie (James Stewart). He only filmed a scene of this project as part of another film by Antoine Barraud, Le Dos Rouge, in which Bonello plays the role of a director by the same name; a director whose films are all either invented or his “ghost-movies.” In Le Dos Rouge, the scene we’re presenting is projected as Bonello presents one of his films during a retrospective at the Pompidou Center. Bertrand would have shot the scene differently if he had directed the feature. Nonetheless, it offers a glimpse into the nature of his daring project, and contains within it both the beauty of rough drafts and the magic of unrealized works (think of Kubrick’s Napoleon, or Visconti’s In Search of Lost Time). Madeleine Among the Dead was never produced because Universal blocked the rights ­— even though “the film was neither a remake, a spin off, a prequel or a sequel, but rather a hybrid work that is undefined in contractual terms”, as Bonello explains. Initially, Bonello says he wanted to start his narrative six months before it begins in Vertigo — just at the moment when Gavin Elster, Madeleine Elster’s husband, trains Judy Barton to look and act like his wife, as part of his plan to make Scottie fall in love with her.

In this scene then, Isild Le Besco plays the role of Bonello’s Madeleine, as she walks in the streets of Paris, takes a cab and enters a hotel room. It is made of a few simple shots and minimal dialogue, as well as dramatic use of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem, which Bonello chose because, “when Madeleine walks towards this room, she is walking towards her own death.” For those who remember Vertigo, the scene will bring to mind the moment when Scottie and the audience discover Gavin’s cynical plot. Adopting Madeleine’s point of view emphasizes how terrible it is for her, a puppet tangled in her own strings. In Vertigo, we wait trepidatiously with Scottie in his room, but in Bonello’s version it is her inner turmoil that we witness. For a few minutes, Bonello transfers the dramatic implications of the original film from one character to the other.

“Vertigo is perhaps the most insane and beautiful story in the history of cinema. It also marks the shift from classical cinema to modern cinema (1958/1959), a transition which the film literally carries within itself, between its first and second part. It’s a fetish film. And cinema is about fetishism.”
Bertrand Bonello

Bertrand Bonello is one of contemporary French cinema’s most original directors. Born in 1968 in Nice, he was trained as a classical musician and has collaborated with numerous artists such as Françoise Hardy and Daniel Darc. He is the director of several shorts, including Qui Je Suis based on Pier Paolo Pasolini and Cindy: The Doll is Mine, with Asia Argento, as well as two documentaries. He directed eight feature-length films (three of which were presented in the official competition in Cannes): Something Organic (1998), The Pornographer (2001), Tiresia (2003), On War (2008), House Of Tolerance (2011) and Saint-Laurent (2013).

His last film, Nocturama, is just as daring: it stages a group of youngsters from different social backgrounds who set bombs all over Paris. The script was written and financed before the recent wave of terrorist attacks in France, and Nocturama has been released in a context that gives it new layers of meaning. Bertrand Bonello imagined the movie more as an action film with an off-screen political message. It was born of his impression of a society that is suffocating, where “silent protest gives way to the desire to blow things up.” Bonello elucidates : “Nocturama is more of a cinematic gesture than a political one, but I made it with a full political conscience.” Directed by: Bertrand Bonello - 2014 - France - 10 min WITH: Isild Le Besco & Alex Descas - WRITER: Bertrand Bonello, Stéphane Delorme - PRODUCER: Antoine Barraud - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Antoine Parouty - MUSIC: --- - EDITOR: Fabrice Rouaud Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

It’s still time to go on vacation with A World Without Women, an hour-long film that launched Guillaume Brac as a new auteur of French cinema in 2012. The story is set in Ault, a small town on the coast of Picardie where Sylvain, a young local played by Vincent Macaigne (now a favorite of French independent cinema) rents his studio to Patricia and Juliette, a mother and her daughter from the Paris region. Sylvain is shy and insecure, a local bachelor in his thirties whose touching awkwardness betrays his loneliness. The two women are charming, the mother spirited and seductive, the daughter more discrete and graceful. But their presence in Sylvain’s world is short lived. Over the course of a week, following the pattern of night and day, Brac shows his characters as they evolve at the beach, play mime games, go out on walks or to the club.

With great sensitivity, he depicts the genesis of friendship and intimacy, the contradictory pulls of desire, the ebb and flow of passion — and in the midst of it all, for Sylvain, the looming shadow of impossible love… This beautiful summer tale, halfway between the allegory and the documentary, at once funny and melancholy, evokes films by Rohmer (The Green Ray) and Rozier (Du côté d’Orouët) — two sources of inspiration for the filmmaker, along with James Gray’s Two Lovers. By anchoring his narrative within a framework familiar to French naturalist cinema, with its summer setting, its love triangles, and the encounter between city and country folk, Guillaume Brac created a film that is full of humor and whose apparent simplicity seduces and surprises.

“Film chemically transcends things, whereas digital has a tendency to flatten them.”
Guillaume Brac

Shot in 16 millimeter, the film has a soft and melancholy texture that matches the story and its landscape. Guillaume Brac discovered the town on a trip in the steps of Maurice Pialat (Naked Childhood) and Bruno Dumont (The Life of Jesus, Humanité). He was “fascinated by this little seaside resort, lost between cliff and sea,” and “seduced by the softness of the light and its melancholy atmosphere, transfigured by each sunray.” In fact, the filmmaker first used the town of Ault as the setting for Le Naufragé, a 2009 short that deals with similar themes of isolation and loneliness, also starring Vincent Macaigne – and Marie Picard, a local building caretaker, plays herself in both films. Brac was thus inspired by the place but also by encounters with the local population and certain facets of his actors’ personalities. Indeed, the magic of the film lies in its almost documentary dimension, in the details that give life to its characters and form the social background of this small coastal town.

At 24, after studying at HEC, one of France’s most prestigious business schools, Guillaume enrolled in the production department at the film school La Fémis. In order to produce and direct small budget films with more freedom, he started his own production company, Année Zero. With the money he received from the distribution of his short Le Naufragé on television, and with the help of a private investor, he shot A World Without Women with a budget of 60 000 dollars. In 2013, the film was nominated for best short film at the Césars and received great critical acclaim. Guillaume Brac then directed his debut feature Tonnerre (also with Vincent Macaigne). He recently completed a documentary about a group of cyclists in the Great Alps, and is finishing the script for his next feature, which will be shot next summer in Geneva, Switzerland. Directed by: Guillaume Brac - 2012 - France - 56 min WITH: Laure Calamy, Vincent Macaigne & Constance Rousseau - WRITER: Guillaume Brac, Hélène Ruault - PRODUCER: Guillaume Brac, Stéphane Demoustier, Maya Haffar, Nicholas Nonon - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Tom Harari - MUSIC: Tom Harari - EDITOR: Damien Maestraggi Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

Le CiNéMa Club presents the work of a young talent, Zia Anger. Her haunting short, I Remember Nothing, plunges us into the chaos of a mind assailed by epilepsy. Neatly divided into five chapters, the film follows Joan, a college student who plays on the softball team, as she undergoes the successive stages of a seizure. Set over the course of twenty-four hours, the film is built as a cycle defined by the mental states induced by Joan’s disorder.

Although Anger gives her narrative the clean formal structure of a clinical diagnosis, the first person point of view she adopts throughout the film depicts the progressive dissolution of Joan’s sense of self and reality. At the heart of this tension between form and content, I Remember Nothing blurs the boundaries between sanity and madness, truth and illusion, but also touches upon universal themes about identity and its transformations, alienation, sexuality, death and poetry. The intimate relationship the director establishes with her hallucinating subject gives rise to surreal scenes, original camerawork and powerful use of sound. Perhaps most originally, Anger enlists five different actresses to play the role of Joan (who is nonetheless recognizable by her auburn hair, red cap and softball outfit) — a compelling move by which we are reminded of the fragility of her fractured psyche.

The idea for Zia Anger’s film was born of her experience with an epileptic family member. She was struck by how little we know about the disorder, and fascinated by the “dream space” that is reportedly induced by it. She wanted her film to be an opening to talk about a difficult and slippery topic, not scientifically but as a piece that explores the subjective experiences that may be associated with this widespread condition.

The unscripted film, which was selected at the New Directors/New Films Festival in New York, the Locarno International Film Festival and the AFI Fest, was shot over the course of just a few days, with a budget of only 3000 dollars. The money was initially given by a family member to buy a computer, at a time when she was struggling financially and mostly made music videos, but she saw it as her last opportunity to make a film and decided to use it for that purpose. In the end, Zia Anger’s limited means resulted in her wonderful decision to cast several actresses for the same role, which she says allowed her to better manage her time and resources.

“In some places people with epilepsy are shamans, in others they are treated like lepers.”
Zia Anger

Zia Anger was born in Ithaca and studied film and drama at Ithaca College. She went on to review her MFA in studio at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. As a student she was always very athletic and particularly loved playing on competitive teams. Today, she sees filmmaking as a natural extension of this love for team play and collaboration. She is director of three other short films titled Thanks For Calling, Baby, Lover Boy, and My Last Film, and a feature length film. You can find her shorts, music videos, and performance art on her website. Directed by: Zia Anger - 2015 - United States - 23 min WITH: With Audrey Turner, Eve Alpert, India Menuez, Adinah Dacynger, Lola Kirke, Robert Kelly, Michael Cavadias & Cait Roempler - WRITER: Zia Anger - PRODUCER: Zia Anger, Miles Joris-Peyrafitte - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Miranda Rhyne - MUSIC: Julianna Barwick, Jenny Hval - EDITOR: Zia Anger Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

Marguerite Duras was one of the most important French women of the second half of the XXth century. She was a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist and filmmaker who marked French literature with novels such as The Sea Wall, The Little Horses of Tarquinia and The Lover. She earned a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards in 1959 for Hiroshima mon amour. The film was directed by Alain Resnais and is considered as one of the most important first films of the Nouvelle Vague.

Marguerite Telle Qu’en Elle-Même (Marguerite As In Herself) is a personal portrait of the extraordinary woman behind the monumental body of work, directed by one of her editors and close friends Dominique Auvray.  This is in an intimate film that invites the viewer into the singular life, intense personality and political and moral values of the great Marguerite Duras. Auvray met Duras in 1974 when Duras was looking for someone to help her modify the edit of her film India Song. This meeting led the pair to collaborate for a period of more than ten years. The film opens on a shot panning over a bulletin board of photographs and newspaper clippings, pinned by Auvray.  The opening shot illuminates the tone and intention of the film — this is how Auvray remembers Duras from their years of friendship and collaboration.    

"A portrait to approach her, as she was ; cheerful and serious, true and provocative, considerate and categorical, but above all young and free."
Dominique Auvray

The film is composed of pictures and films from family archives and extracts from television interviews.  We first hear the voice of Auvray, followed by the voice of Jeanne Balibar — who sings, and then reads along the film excerpts from Duras’ novels — but it is the voice of Duras that dominates the film as she tells us about herself in cleverly selected moments from a number of interviews. Duras recounts her childhood in Vietnam, the importance of her mother in her life, and how she settled in Paris and became part of the club of Rue Saint-Benoît with other French intellectuals who were rethinking the world after World War II.  If Marguerite grew up in challenging situations, those formative situations were decisive in the shaping of her character and mind — the brilliant mind that would find expression though many artistic forms.  The film focuses on Duras’ incredible personality, paying attention to details as intimate as her relationship to her various homes — the details that made her into a great artist and thinker.

Dominique Auvray worked as an editor for many great directors such as Claire Denis, Benoît Jacquot, Philippe Garrel (Liberté la nuit), Barbet Shroeder, Bertrand Bonello and Wim Wenders among others.  She directed a second documentary about Duras and her relationship to cinema in 2014. Directed by: Dominique Auvray - 2002 - France - 60 min WITH: Marguerite Duras and the voice of Jeanne Balibar - WRITER: Dominique Auvray - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Pascal Marti, André Chemetoff - MUSIC: Carlos D'Alessio, Jean-Christophe Marti - EDITOR: Dominique Auvray, Pascale Chavance Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

It’s the beginning of the summer, time to go on vacations, which shouldn’t be so difficult. Except for Julius, Roadtrip’s main character, who is absolutely incapable of doing so. He is bored out of his mind in Berlin, depressed even, since he cannot sleep at all. He starts thinking about going on a road trip on his red motorcycle. But he never leaves. Nothing goes according to the plan and the terrible insomnia continues.

Xaver Xylophon, the young German artist who made Roadtrip as his final project to get his diploma at The Berlin Weissensee School of Art, felt like he didn’t have a real life experience from which to draw inspiration for the project – or at least an experience good enough to make for the plot of a movie — so he came up with what he thought was the most boring idea ever: to go on a road trip and come back with tons of stories. To travel in style, Xylophon – a filmmaker, animator, and illustrator – bought an East German motorbike, built in 1968.  The problem for Xylophon was that he could never get the motorbike to run.  He spent an entire summer in Berlin trying to get it fixed, trying and failing to finally leave for an adventure… Thus this wonderful, beautiful film was born.  Delicately and elegantly drawn by Xylophon, the film was animated entirely by hand – with crayons on cardboard (everything that is static, mostly the backgrounds) and a Wacom tablet with Photoshop (everything that moves).  The pure animation took Xylophon about eight months, while the total production lasted two years.    

"Almost all of the places in the film are inspired by real places in Berlin, but because it's animation and also because it's more about my feeling for a place than an accurate depiction of architecture and such, I took the liberty to portray the city ‘seen through my eyes,’ and left things out or combined locations or added details to make the atmosphere thicker and like I experienced it, and not how it actually looks."
Xaver Xylophon

Nominated for the German Short Film Award, Roadtrip was selected for numerous international festivals such as Clermont-Ferrand, SXSW and Annecy, where it won the Junior Jury Award.   Xylophon has done freelance work for The New York Times and NPR among many others. In between commercial projects, Xylophon develops his own films. He is currently planning a live action feature. Directed by: Xaver Xylophon - 2014 - Germany - 20 min WITH: the voices of Sven Scheele, Elmar Gutmann & Daniela Schulz - WRITER: Ariana Berndl, Xaver Xylophon - PRODUCER: Xaver Xylophon - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Xaver Xylophon - MUSIC: Xaver Xylophon - EDITOR: Xaver Xylophon Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

On the occasion of the U.S. theatrical release of The Childhood of A Leader — filmmaker Brady Corbet’s debut feature — Le CiNéMa Club presents Corbet’s short Protect You + Me. The Childhood of A Leader chronicles the rise of megalomania and evil in a child and future dictator in the aftermath of World War I, in France, and stars Liam Cunningham, Bérénice Béjo, Robert Pattinson and Stacy Martin. The film premiered last year in Venice in competition (Horizon section) and won two awards: Best Debut Film and Best Director. Brady Corbet is a singular and very exciting voice in cinema today. Made ten years ago when Corbet was seventeen, Protect You + Me sees the young filmmaker exploring a style and language that he would pursue further in his debut feature as a director.

In Protect You + Me, the reminder of a long-forgotten event, combined with a challenging situation, provokes a man to extreme action while at a dinner with his mother. Corbet investigates how one’s character is shaped by things one doesn’t recall. The filmmaker explains how his feature and his early short share not only formal characteristics, but also themes: “This notion of exploring the elusiveness of our formative memories is the main theme of Childhood.”

The subject of Protect You + Me, according to Corbet, is representational rather than presentational: “I always want something, even the style of the performance, to be elevated to a place that’s a little extra agitated, a little more like performance art.” The man’s reactions here are more operatic than realistic, and the ending seeks a transcendental moment. When asked about what excites him in cinema, Corbet tells us that from a young age he’s always loved extremes. His early music tastes varied from punk rock to opera and noise music: “I like the big gesture.” This is also what narratively interests Corbet, who sees the movies that he makes as odyssey films — he is interested in “going deep into the unknown, even if that is a frightening place to be for a filmmaker.”

"I am really tired of very traditional narratives. Also because I grew up reading screenplays so I know how manipulative they are. It’s really transparent to me that on p. 12 a problem is introduced, enemies will become friends, friends will become enemies…that kind of thing. I find that to be so pedestrian. And I feel like people still do it because it’s so safe. Especially if you’re a very competent filmmaker, which is to say if you’re technically accomplished, and you apply those skills to a straightforward narrative, chances are you’re going to have a very good movie. Not a great one, but a very good one. I just don’t really care about good movies. I would rather watch a hundred bad Pasolini movies — he made masterpieces, but he definitely made bad movies — than watch a million competently crafted wartime thrillers. I think if someone wants to be very good, they have to dare to suck a little bit. To be passionate about something — like an operatic gesture — it’s always going to walk the line of being a little bit silly. When you’re doing something very grandiose, it feels like somebody just stood up on a chair in the middle of class screaming to sort of upset the peace. And I understand how that can be intensely irritating for the others, but I think it’s an important part of our evolution, as viewers, as consumers, as artists, as everything."
Brady Corbet

Brady Corbet is definitely exploring new horizons in cinema today, and doing so with a great knowledge of film and very precise intentions. Born in Arizona, Brady Corbet started in film as an actor when he was twelve (Thirteen, Mysterious Skin, Funny Games). He has co-written a number of screenplays including Simon Killer with Antonio Campos and The Sleepwalker with his wife Mona Fastvold. He surrounds himself with impressive collaborators. Protect You + Me was shot by Darius Khondji. The credits of Childhood include the compositor Scott Walker, the production designer Jean-Vincent Puzos and the editor Dávid Jancsó. The 27 year-old filmmaker is already prepping his second feature Vox Lux: A 21st Century Portrait about the rise of a pop star from 1999 to the present. The film will be produced by Killer Films and shot in 65 mm. We already can’t wait to see it! Directed by: Brady Corbet - 2008 - United States - 10 min WITH: Daniel London & Patricia Conolly - WRITER: Brady Corbet - PRODUCER: Erin Wile, Chris Coen & Cassandra Kulukundis - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Darius Khondji - MUSIC: Silke Matzpohl - EDITOR: Marc Thomas Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL

Here is another early work from the great Josh and Benny Safdie. Co-directed by both brothers, John’s Gone is a follow-up to Benny Safdie’s The Acquaintances of A Lonely John. John’s Gone finds the solitary title character, as Benny Safdie explains, “when life no longer treats him as nicely as he thought it would.”

In the filmmakers’ words: “John’s Gone is a fever dream comedy about John’s World soon after his mother passes away. He sells things online, cheats off dollar stores, needs friends but settles for strangers, has roaches. He is surrounded by people who don’t speak his language. He is punch drunk (not with love) but something far more strange and lost. One can only say John’s Gone.”

The Safdie brothers, who were born and raised in New York City, shot John’s Gone on video in Benny’s apartment in Queens, NY shortly after making their first feature Daddy Longlegs. Their father, a cinephile who introduced his sons to cinema early, bought a video camera in 1988 that produced images the brothers always loved. In preparing to shoot John’s Gone, Josh and Benny tried to find that same camera. They went looking for an elusive pro version of the camera, which they could never find, but the search led them to a version that had been modified for a security camera — which they were able to outfit with 16mm Bolex lenses. The script was co-written with Ronald Bronstein, their close collaborator on a number of films, who co-wrote and co-edited their last two features and who also plays the role of the father in Daddy Longlegs.

"Who knows where our sadness comes from. One day your happiness is here and the next day it's gone."
Josh Safdie

John’s Gone premiered at the 2010 Venice Biennale. Josh and Benny Safdie have since directed the critically acclaimed feature Heaven Knows What, as well as their first full-length documentary Lenny Cooke. The filmmakers’ rich body of work has established the brothers as two of the most original voices in young American cinema. They recently finished shooting Good Time, starring Robert Pattinson, and have announced their upcoming feature Uncut Gems, which will be executive produced by Martin Scorsese.   Directed by: Josh & Benny Safdie - 2010 - United States - 23 min WITH: Benny Safdie, Owen Kline & Dakota Goldhor - WRITER: Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie, Ronald Bronstein - PRODUCER: Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie - CINEMATOGRAPHY: Josh Safdie - MUSIC: Paul Grimstad, Abner Jay - EDITOR: Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie Share on TWITTER, FACEBOOK or EMAIL