Silent Tuesdays | Schweigen! Following Nosferatu and The Last Laugh, master expressionist F.W. Murnau hit a crest with his rendering of Goethe’s classic Faust. Emil Jannings plays the diabolical Mephistopheles, who tempts an aging alchemist with the promise of eternal youth for a small price — his everlasting soul.
Distaff Noir From German director Fritz Lang's (M, Metropolis) American period, this noir melodrama, adapted from the Clifford Odets play, opens with Barbara Stanwyck as a fallen woman returning to a seaside hamlet to find unstable domesticity with a simpleminded fisherman (Paul Douglas).
Polish Film Festival Wajda’s first bona fide masterpiece and the conclusion of his informal “war trilogy,” Ashes and Diamonds bravely depicts the uneasy Polish political realities in the immediate aftermath of World War II.
Labor Film Series With a warm smile and positive attitude, Floria (Leonie Beneach) arrives at the surgical ward of the Swiss hospital where she works as a nurse on the overnight shift. With one colleague out sick and no replacement on deck, just two nurses and a nervous trainee will have to cover more than two dozen patients.
Halloween Bela Lugosi is Dracula, determined to pick Lou Costello's brain - literally. The vampire wants to put Lou's brain in Frankenstein's monster (Glenn Strange), but werewolf Lon Chaney Jr. is busy trying to tip Abbott and Costello off about the plot.
Lovecraftian Not adapted directly from Lovecraft’s work, but heavily inspired by it, the final film in director John Carpenter’s loose “Apocalypse Trilogy” finds Sam Neill as John Trent, an insurance agent on the trail of missing author Sutter Cane.
Polish Film Festival This black comedy-thriller directed by Jan Komasa and produced by legendary Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski stars Stephen Graham, Andrea Riseborough, Anson Boon, and Kit Rakusen, and tells the story of a married couple who abduct a 19-year-old criminal and attempt various methods to rehabilitate him.
Native American Cinematic Heritage As important to the history of independent filmmaking as to Indigenous cinematic voices, when first released, this film was promoted as the first feature written, directed, produced, and acted by Native Americans.
Rochester Premiere Tsai Ming-liang’s cinema of loneliness and isolation (Rebels of the Neon God, Goodbye, Dragon Inn) was identified by the French miniseries 2000 Seen by…, which told stories of the approaching millennium from ten different directors in ten different countries.
Labor Film Series For four days in late 1999, ministers of 135 countries convened in Seattle Washington for multilateral trade negotiations of the World Trade Organization. Across those same four days, more than 40,000 people converged on the downtown site in an effort to protest the WTO and its impacts on the environment, human rights, and labor in what became the largest protests against economic globalization the U.S. had ever seen.
Filmi Fest 2000 Based on the life of the ancient warrior king, Shah Rukh Khan teams with Kareena Kapoor for the first time in this historical action epic.
Native American Cinematic Heritage Selected as the best Canadian film of all time by critics and filmmakers in 2015, this adventure epic adapts an Inuit legend to the big screen, earning the Camera d’Or at Cannes for the best first feature film.
Silent Tuesdays Director Herbert Brenon and star Betty Bronson reunite after Peter Pan for another adaptation of a J.M. Barrie play. Jane (Bronson) is a house slave who dreams of a Prince Charming and is nicknamed Cinderella by an artist whose studio she cleans because she always talks of the wonderful things that will one day befall her.
Special Program While many films require a landscape to set the scene, most simply leave it at that, as the drama plays out in front of the backdrop. It is the rare film that considers the landscape itself, urban or rural, and how the camera lens mediates being in that environment.
Anomaly Film Festival The inspiration for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, this classic early 80s swordplay fantasy epic is what started it all. During a Chinese civil war in the 1740s, forces of good and evil face off in the Zu Mountains and, with no short supply of magic, battle through the air and across mountains.
Native American Cinematic Heritage Before creating Reservation Dogs and The Lowdown, Sterlin Harjo wrote and directed this drama of post-incarcertation reintegration.
Special Events John Barrymore delivers spectacular and chilling performances as both title characters in this superb adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel.
Silent Tuesdays Many silent filmmakers turned to Shakespeare for source material, transforming the Bard’s verbal poetry and drama into visual equivalents, but none more unusually than this project spearheaded by the legendary Danish actress Asta Nielsen.
Native American Cinematic Heritage Powwow People is a vérité-style documentary grounded in the rhythms, relationships, and lived experience of a contemporary Native gathering. Rather than entering as outside observers, the filmmakers organized the powwow itself, inviting dancers, singers, vendors, and community members to participate in the making of this film.
Rochester Premiere While writing a monograph on historical theories of memory, Béatrice (Anne-Laure Sellier), a respected academic, becomes beguiled by the allegedly true story of the Chronovisor, an occult device said to reproduce visuals from any point in history on a TV screen.
