Cinematheque Film Schedule

France, Spain | 2013 | Albert Serra

Refined, aging libertine Casanova meets passionate, bloodthirsty Dracula in 18th-century Switzerland in this stately clash-of-cultures costume drama from the Catalan director of Quixotic/Honor de Cavelleria and Birdsong. According to The NY Times, filmmaker Albert Serra says that “his film portrays the eclipse of Enlightenment rationality by the violent forces of Romanticism.” “A singular work…Its originality is apparent in every frame.” –Village Voice.

2014 | Greg Vander Veer

This new documentary recounts the little known story of Martha Hill (1900-1995), a visionary who fought to make contemporary and modern dance a legitimate art form in America. Archival footage and interviews with friends and intimates trace how Hill rose from a Bible Belt childhood in East Palestine, Ohio, to become the founding director of The Juilliard Dance Division (1952-1985). “Bound to enthrall dance aficionados…A marvelous primer on the rise of modern dance as an...

United States | 1956 | Robert Woodburn

This unique and indescribable regional production, made in Kansas City by Crest Productions in 1956 and co-written by Robert Altman (!), is a country western musical comedy about popcorn wars in the heartland. Funded by the Popcorn Institute, the film follows a nefarious dirty trickster working for a big city popcorn company who subverts his small-town competitor’s popular TV variety show “The Pinwhistle Popcorn Hour” in order to corner the kernel market. Corn’s-a-Poppin’, which features...

United States | 1956 | Robert Woodburn

This unique and indescribable regional production, made in Kansas City by Crest Productions in 1956 and co-written by Robert Altman (!), is a country western musical comedy about popcorn wars in the heartland. Funded by the Popcorn Institute, the film follows a nefarious dirty trickster working for a big city popcorn company who subverts his small-town competitor’s popular TV variety show “The Pinwhistle Popcorn Hour” in order to corner the kernel market. Corn’s-a-Poppin’, which features...

2014 | Greg Vander Veer

This new documentary recounts the little known story of Martha Hill (1900-1995), a visionary who fought to make contemporary and modern dance a legitimate art form in America. Archival footage and interviews with friends and intimates trace how Hill rose from a Bible Belt childhood in East Palestine, Ohio, to become the founding director of The Juilliard Dance Division (1952-1985). “Bound to enthrall dance aficionados…A marvelous primer on the rise of modern dance as an...

Japan | 2014 | Ken Ochiai

This heartfelt tribute to classic samurai films stars septuagenarian Seizō Fukumoto, the most killed stunt man (kirare-yaku or “sliced actor”) in Japanese cinema history. (He has died by the sword more than 50,000 times on screen.) Fukumoto essentially plays himself in this nostalgic new movie whose title references Chaplin’s Limelight; he’s an expendable bit player who has perished spectacularly in countless period samurai films but is now old and underemployed, especially with the passing of...

Austria, Germany, Luxembourg | 2014 | Jessica Hausner

The wry new film from the director of 2009’s masterful Lourdes is set in early 1800s Berlin, where a moony, melancholy Romantic writer tries to convince his beloved cousin that they should immortalize their undying affection via a suicide pact, allowing love to transcend death. When she rejects the idea, he turns to a local businessman’s wife. She is smitten with his poetry and, conveniently, has been diagnosed with a terminal disease. This deadpan black...

Switzerland | 2012 | Stefan Haupt

This new documentary celebrates Barcelona’s iconic La Sagrada Familia basilica, designed by visionary architect Antoni Gaudí in the late 19th century and still unfinished after 125 years. “Persuades viewers to surrender to a place, to a vision, and to a scale of thinking beyond our own lives.” –Village Voice.

United States | 2014 | Mary Dore

This lively, eye-opening new documentary traces the early history of the modern women’s movement (1966-71)—from the founding of NOW by ladies in hats and gloves to the emergence of more radical (and outrageous and contentious) factions of feminism. With Cleveland native (and WRU alum) Alix Kates Shulman, among many others. “Exceptional…Its mix of archival material and new interviews [bristles] with the energy and insight of one of the most important social movements of the 20th...

France | 1976 | Walerian Borowczyk

Walerian Borowczyk (1923-2006) was an award-winning Polish-born graphic artist, animator, and Surrealist who, mid-career, turned to making sensuous, stylish, live-action erotic films. Immoral Tales, perhaps the most taboo-breaking and successful of these, tells four different stories (of masturbation, incest, bloodlust, etc.) set in four different historical periods. With Paloma Picasso and Fabrice Luchini. “Displays the most sustained erotic content yet seen publicly in this country.” –Time Out Film Guide.

Taiwan | 1980 | Hou Hsiao-hsien

The first feature by future Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien is a lightweight, music-filled romantic comedy featuring two Chinese pop stars (Hong Kong’s Kenny Bee and Taiwan’s Feng Fei-fei). It tells of factory owner’s daughter, betrothed to an exchange student she's never met, who visits a rural village and falls in love with a surveyor there. Hou’s love of the Taiwanese countryside is easily seen in this commercial confection in color and scope.

Switzerland | 2012 | Stefan Haupt

This new documentary celebrates Barcelona’s iconic La Sagrada Familia basilica, designed by visionary architect Antoni Gaudí in the late 19th century and still unfinished after 125 years. “Persuades viewers to surrender to a place, to a vision, and to a scale of thinking beyond our own lives.” –Village Voice.

Austria, Germany, Luxembourg | 2014 | Jessica Hausner

The wry new film from the director of 2009’s masterful Lourdes is set in early 1800s Berlin, where a moony, melancholy Romantic writer tries to convince his beloved cousin that they should immortalize their undying affection via a suicide pact, allowing love to transcend death. When she rejects the idea, he turns to a local businessman’s wife. She is smitten with his poetry and, conveniently, has been diagnosed with a terminal disease. This deadpan black...

United States | 2014 | Mary Dore

This lively, eye-opening new documentary traces the early history of the modern women’s movement (1966-71)—from the founding of NOW by ladies in hats and gloves to the emergence of more radical (and outrageous and contentious) factions of feminism. With Cleveland native (and WRU alum) Alix Kates Shulman, among many others. “Exceptional…Its mix of archival material and new interviews [bristles] with the energy and insight of one of the most important social movements of the 20th...

Taiwan | 1983 | Kun Hao Chen

Hou Hsiao-hsien co-wrote this nostalgic and socially observant New Taiwanese Cinema classic that won Taiwan’s “Oscars” for best film and best director. Set in the 1950s, at a time of tension between native Taiwanese and newcomers from Mainland China, the movie chronicles a young boy’s experiences with first love, youthful rebellion, and his mother’s remarriage. Shot and directed by Hou’s mentor and frequent cinematographer Kun Hao Chen, the film marked Hou’s first collaboration with writer...

France | 1976 | Walerian Borowczyk

Walerian Borowczyk (1923-2006) was an award-winning Polish-born graphic artist, animator, and Surrealist who, mid-career, turned to making sensuous, stylish, live-action erotic films. Immoral Tales, perhaps the most taboo-breaking and successful of these, tells four different stories (of masturbation, incest, bloodlust, etc.) set in four different historical periods. With Paloma Picasso and Fabrice Luchini. “Displays the most sustained erotic content yet seen publicly in this country.” –Time Out Film Guide.

Russia | 2013 | Aleksei German

The final assault on small-minded, middlebrow cinema by the recently deceased Russian master and rebel Aleksei German (My Friend Ivan Lapshin; Khrustalyov, My Car!) was a 30-year dream project 14 years in the actual making. It’s a visionary, Boschian sci-fi spectacle based on a novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. (Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Sokurov’s Days of Eclipse were also based on Strugatsky novels.) Hard To Be a God tells of a scientist from Earth who...

Hungary | 1965 | Miklós Jancsó

Though justly celebrated in the 1960s and early 1970s, Hungary’s Miklós Jancsó (who made over 80 films in a 60+ year career) is now a largely forgotten modernist master. Heralded for his serpentine camera movements, virtuoso blocking of actors, and breathtaking long takes in his powerful and poetic historical dramas, Jancsó was a major influence on his countryman Béla Tarr (who called him “the greatest Hungarian film director of all time”) and on Greece’s Theo...

Taiwan | 1985 | Edward Yang

In addition to Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang was the other great director to emerge from the New Taiwanese Cinema movement of the 1980s. Taipei Story, the second of his seven features and “the film that introduced Yang's prodigious talent to the West” (Time Out Film Guide), was co-written by Hou. Hou also stars in the movie, playing a failed businessman who was once a promising baseball prospect. His relationship with his longtime girlfriend, a businesswoman,...

Taiwan | 1983 | Hou Hsiao-hsien

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s third feature, the final and most sophisticated part of his “Kenny Bee” trilogy, is another musical romance starring the Cantonese pop singer. This time Bee plays a Taipei teacher working as a substitute instructor at a rural school, where his feelings for a fellow teacher upset his uppity urban girlfriend, who comes to retrieve him.

Austria, Germany, Switzerland | 2014 | Dominic Graf

Germany’s official submission for this year’s foreign film Oscar is a gorgeously mounted costume drama about an unconventional love affair. Set in late 18th-century Weimar, the movie chronicles how two aristocratic sisters both loved German poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller, carrying on a carefree ménage à trois—for a while at least. “Pushes heritage cinema in new, aesthetically bold directions. Beloved Sisters is the modern film about the German Enlightenment…Graf has created nothing less than a...

Austria, Germany, Switzerland | 2014 | Dominic Graf

Germany’s official submission for this year’s foreign film Oscar is a gorgeously mounted costume drama about an unconventional love affair. Set in late 18th-century Weimar, the movie chronicles how two aristocratic sisters both loved German poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller, carrying on a carefree ménage à trois—for a while at least. “Pushes heritage cinema in new, aesthetically bold directions. Beloved Sisters is the modern film about the German Enlightenment…Graf has created nothing less than a...

Russia | 2013 | Aleksei German

The final assault on small-minded, middlebrow cinema by the recently deceased Russian master and rebel Aleksei German (My Friend Ivan Lapshin; Khrustalyov, My Car!) was a 30-year dream project 14 years in the actual making. It’s a visionary, Boschian sci-fi spectacle based on a novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. (Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Sokurov’s Days of Eclipse were also based on Strugatsky novels.) Hard To Be a God tells of a scientist from Earth who...

Taiwan | 1981 | Hou Hsiao-hsien

The stars of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s first film Cute Girl (see 4/11), Hong Kong singer Kenny Bee and Taiwanese pop diva Feng Fei-fei, re-team for the future master’s second movie—another music-filled romantic comedy. This time Feng plays a married photographer from the city who falls for Bee, a blind ex-medic, while on a shoot in a scenic seaside village.

Taiwan | 1983 | Hou Hsiao-hsien

This three-part omnibus film, one of the heralds of the New Taiwanese Cinema, was produced by Taiwan’s Central Motion Picture Corporation as a vehicle that allowed a trio of promising young filmmakers to direct a movie free of commercial pressures. The great Hou Hsiao-hsien was one of the three, and his opening segment, “Son’s Big Doll,” about a poor man who carries an advertising sandwich board to feed his family, proved a transitional work in...

Morocco, Switzerland, United States | 2014 | Michele Josue

Winner of the audience award for Best Film at last year’s Cleveland Int’l Film Festival, this tale of loss, love, and courage reveals the Matthew Shepard behind the headlines; this young gay man was more than the victim of one of the most shocking hate crimes in U.S. history.

Argentina, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Mexico, Netherlands, United States | 2014 | Lisandro Alonso

Viggo Mortensen plays a 19th-century Danish army officer in the remote wilds of Patagonia in this handsome, hallucinatory new “Western” from Lisandro Alonso, the acclaimed Argentinean director of Liverpool and Los Muertos. When his 15-year-old daughter runs off with a soldier, the military man must venture further into the South American wilderness to find her. Jauja, which was rapturously received at Cannes last year, is both an existential odyssey and a meditation on colonialism, cultural...

France | 1940 | Max Ophuls

Never before shown at the Cinematheque (or any place else in Cleveland for at least the past 30 years), this rarity by the great Max Ophüls (Madame de…, Lola Montes) was the last film the exiled German director made in France before emigrating to the U.S. during WWII. The movie chronicles the love affair between Archduke Franz Ferdinand (John Lodge), reluctant heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and the Czech Countess Sophie Chotek (Edwige Feuillère), whom...

United States | 2008-2014 | various directors

In addition to writing his syndicated sex and relationship advice column “Savage Love,” author and activist Dan Savage curates Hump!, a self-described “Dirty Film Festival” consisting of explicit short films made by ordinary people to celebrate the varied flavors of human sexuality. Now ten years old, Hump! makes its Cleveland debut tonight, and Savage will be present to introduce each screening. 18 of the best movies from previous festivals will be shown, including Cyclust, Art...

United States | 2008-2014 | various directors

In addition to writing his syndicated sex and relationship advice column “Savage Love,” author and activist Dan Savage curates Hump!, a self-described “Dirty Film Festival” consisting of explicit short films made by ordinary people to celebrate the varied flavors of human sexuality. Now ten years old, Hump! makes its Cleveland debut tonight, and Savage will be present to introduce each screening. 18 of the best movies from previous festivals will be shown, including Cyclust, Art...

France | 1940 | Max Ophuls

Never before shown at the Cinematheque (or any place else in Cleveland for at least the past 30 years), this rarity by the great Max Ophüls (Madame de…, Lola Montes) was the last film the exiled German director made in France before emigrating to the U.S. during WWII. The movie chronicles the love affair between Archduke Franz Ferdinand (John Lodge), reluctant heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and the Czech Countess Sophie Chotek (Edwige Feuillère), whom...

Argentina, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Mexico, Netherlands, United States | 2014 | Lisandro Alonso

Viggo Mortensen plays a 19th-century Danish army officer in the remote wilds of Patagonia in this handsome, hallucinatory new “Western” from Lisandro Alonso, the acclaimed Argentinean director of Liverpool and Los Muertos. When his 15-year-old daughter runs off with a soldier, the military man must venture further into the South American wilderness to find her. Jauja, which was rapturously received at Cannes last year, is both an existential odyssey and a meditation on colonialism, cultural...

Morocco, Switzerland, United States | 2014 | Michele Josue

Winner of the audience award for Best Film at last year’s Cleveland Int’l Film Festival, this tale of loss, love, and courage reveals the Matthew Shepard behind the headlines; this young gay man was more than the victim of one of the most shocking hate crimes in U.S. history.

United States | 2015 | Kirby Dick

The provocative new documentary from the director of This Film Is Not Yet Rated and The Invisible War is an exposé of the epidemic of sexual assaults and rape on U.S. college campuses. It also delves into the institutional cover-up of many of these crimes. “Heartbreaking, infuriating, and unmissable.” –Entertainment Weekly

France, Iran | 2009 | Asghar Farhadi

The multiple prize winner that Iranian master Asghar Farhadi made just before his Oscar-winning A Separation (2011) was never released in the U.S. Golshifteh Farahani stars in this taut tale of a fateful seaside holiday that is spoiled when one of the vacationers, a young woman, mysteriously disappears. Best Narrative Feature, 2009 Tribeca Film Festival. “A milestone in Iranian cinema.” –Int’l Film Guild 2010.