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PMA Films Specialist Chris Gray dives into our upcoming screenings for december 8-17
Subscribe to our films email and keep up to date on screenings, trailers, streaming recommendations, news, and more!Screening Times & Tickets:
Thursday, December 28 at 12 p.m.
Thursday, December 28 at 3 p.m.
Fallen Leaves
List-making season has begun, and I am absolutely stoked that we’ll be showing two of my very favorite films of 2023 for two weeks over the holiday season. (I’ll send out an official list in this space in January.) While they could not be more distinct in length and ambition, both of them are perfect films to watch with family, friends, or even a date. Fallen Leaves is the latest and perhaps greatest film from the Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki, whose aesthetic (deadpan, funny, cynical about the state of the world world but deeply empathetic towards its characters) has remained consistent over the decades. He has rarely, though, devised a film as succinct and perfect as this one, which follows a supermarket worker (Alma Pöysti, who earned a surprising but richly deserved Golden Globe nomination for her performance here) and an alcoholic tradesman (Jussi Vatanen) as they fumble towards love. The backdrop is vintage Kaurismäki: radio broadcasts about the war in Ukraine populate many scenes but otherwise the film, sumptuously lit and fastidiously designed, feels as though it was beamed in from the 1960s.
Energized by oscillating currents of hope and despair, Fallen Leaves is blunt about the indignities of wage labor and its emotional consequences, but it’s just as keen to luxuriate in coping mechanisms: karaoke nights, cinema, and a drink or two or three. Kaurismäki slips classical rom-com tropes in between moments of disappointment, and these flourishes land beautifully because his characters so richly deserve them. I’ve always absorbed Kaurismäki’s films with a kind of neutral pleasure, but Fallen Leaves is just exceptionally lovely, and about as perfect a movie as I’ve seen all year.
Screening Times & Tickets:
Thursday, December 21 at 6 p.m.
The Muppet Christmas Carol (free Third Thursday screening)
As part of this month’s Third Thursday festivities, I’m delighted to screen a movie that I, a childless, basically middle-aged man, still watch almost every holiday season! The Muppet Christmas Carol is probably the last truly excellent Muppet movie, capturing that mix of earnestness, fidelity to the source material, and irreverence that we come to our felted friends for. Michael Caine makes for a terrific Scrooge, but it’s really the overwhelming population of puppet creations that continue to thrill me about this one. We’ve got vegetables, we’ve got figure skating animals, extremely cool ghosts, and clever casting for all of your stalwart Muppet favorites. Join us!
Screening Times & Tickets:
Saturday, December 23 at 1 p.m.
Wednesday, December 27 at 1 p.m.
Saturday, December 30 at 1 p.m.
Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros
Our greatest documentarian, the incomparable Frederick Wiseman is best known as a chronicler of institutions and municipalities ranging from the British Museum (National Museum) to Belfast, Maine (Belfast, Maine). Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros, which was recently awarded Best Documentary of the year honors by both the New York and Los Angeles film critic societies, proves that Wiseman is still able to find unique byways into his work into his 90s. A film about the functioning of a French restaurant that has held three Michelin stars for 50 years, the family that has sustained that consistency for decades, and the process of bringing great food and memorable experiences to life, Menus-Plaisirs conjoins its themes with nearly impossible elegance. Just as, for instance, one element of a dish can overpower the rest, the Troisgros family seems acutely sensitive to the harmony of a restaurant, both in the dining room and in the kitchen.
Even more than other Wiseman films, the magic here is in the editing. We’ll spend a few minutes with a baker, mixing chocolate into the base of a cake or other dessert, not quite sure what the dish will turn into. Much, much later, the film will return to the dish. We don’t miss a step, but we don’t see it all at once. This sense of curiosity (“Wait, what’s going on over there”) permeates the film and proves quite infectious. I have a quite intense allergy to listening to people (especially chefs) discuss food as though it is art, but Menus-Plaisirs is not about putting food on a pedestal: it’s about how making great food requires hard work, attention to detail, and intelligence. Though filled with gorgeous images of both works-in-process and final products, Wiseman ensures that the overwhelming feeling of his documentary is of a job (mostly, aside from a few amusing instances) well done and the harmony necessary to do your best work. What’s more, Wiseman’s interest in how the multi-generational family that owns the restaurant align and diverge in their philosophies culminates in a climactic monologue that is tremendously moving. Often when taking in a work of such mammoth length as Menus-Plaisirs, which runs a positively breezy four hours, you can’t help but wonder when you’ve arrived at the final moments, and here that realization hits you with a great force.
PAST SCREENINGS
Nice People (with filmmakers Jeff Griecci and Ian Carlsen)
The first feature film made by local industry stalwarts Jeff Griecci and Ian Carlsen, Nice People is a funny, bittersweet, and ambitious collection of interlocking tales set in Portland and elsewhere in Maine. Touching on issues of gentrification and loneliness by way of clever and deadpan storytelling, the stories in Nice People wisely comment on morality and its consequences. It’s been a long journey to the big screen for Nice People, which was a years-long labor of love for Griecci and Carlsen (who, in the interest of full disclosure, I am friendly with). I first watched a cut of the film in 2020 (!), but it officially premiered at the Maine International Film Festival this summer, and boasted a trio of sold-out screenings at SPACE Gallery last month. Griecci and Carlsen will be in-person at this screening, which will conclude with a discussion with the duo. Initial pre-sales for this event have been brisk, so it may be smart to purchase tickets in advance.
Monster
The latest drama from Shoplifters director Hirokazu Kore-eda is a typically complex, empathetic, and stirring drama. Monster, which won the Best Screenplay prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, concerns an 11 year-old boy who is perceived as troubled and bullying by authorities at his school. Kore-eda complicates this material by presenting it from three different perspectives: those of the child, his mother (played by Sakura Ando, so extraordinary in Shoplifters), and his teacher. Each point of view proves fractured and incomplete in its own way, but the film’s final hour proves to be an unexpected and rather extraordinary piece of generous, expressionistic filmmaking. A victim of the rather baroque manner in which the Academy Award nominees for Best International Feature are determined (Japan’s submission this year is directed by the German filmmaker Wim Wenders!), Monster is proving to be an under-the-radar release for an esteemed filmmaker with a track record of successful, audience-pleasing films. This is his most widely acclaimed film in years, hitting Rotten Tomatoes’ 10 best-reviewed films of the year list, and it also boasts some of the final work of the late composer Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Strange Way of Life + The Human Voice
While we haven’t seen a new Pedro Almodóvar film since 2019’s great Pain and Glory, the iconic and singular Spanish filmmaker has been at work on his first English-language films, both of which run for about 30 minutes. Presented together this weekend, we’ll be showing much buzzed-about new gay cowboy drama Strange Way of Life, starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, alongside 2020’s lavishly acclaimed The Human Voice, starring Tilda Swinton. Both films stem from a unique collaboration with the fashion house Saint Laurent, who have set up a new production arm, with these two films being the first two releases of Saint Laurent Productions. At our screenings, the two shorts will be followed by a half-hour, pre-recorded Q&A with Almodóvar himself.
We Are the Warriors (with filmmakers David Camlin and Megan Grumbling)
Winner of the Tourmaline Prize for Best Feature Made in Maine at this year’s Maine International Film Festival, David Camlin and Megan Grumbling’s We Are the Warriors addresses an issue many schools and sports teams have confronted in recent years. What does a mascot that invokes Native American culture represent, and does it honor or injure those from that culture? This debate became a conflagration after a Wells High School football game in 2017, as an Abegweit Mi’kmaq spectator from a visiting team observed the offensive ways in which students mocked and exploited Native culture. This incident led to widespread news coverage, but it also yielded a more measured debate about the past and future of the WHS mascot. Camlin and Grumbling’s film encompasses hundreds of years of Indigenous and colonial history as it also gives time and thought to the many nuanced sides of this discussion, and they’ll be here to talk about the film after it screens this Saturday.
Four Daughters
A unique and moving hybrid documentary, Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters explores generational trauma through a fascinating, therapeutic method. Ben Hania’s film is about Olfa Hamrouni, a Tunisian woman, and her four daughters. Two of them, Eya and Tayssir, appear in the film; the others left the family and joined ISIS. Four Daughters is comprised of a deft mix of interviews and stage reenactments: Actors portray Olfa’s two eldest daughters, Eya and Tayssir play themselves, and the actress Hend Sabri fills in for Olfa during scenes that may be traumatic. Sabri, like Ben Hania, is driven to blur these lines and get closer to the film’s subjects. Through this transparent but multifaceted process, Ben Hania unearths stunning moments of defiance, grace, humor, and vulnerability. If the film cannot explain why these two young women were driven to extremism, it has immense value as an exploration of womanhood, identity, and the ties and tensions between mothers and daughters.
The Delinquents
Some of the most inventive films of the past ten years or so have been coming out of Argentina. From the concise but elusive Shakespeare-inspired fare of Matías Piñeiro to epic, difficult-to-screen fare like this year’s Trenque Lauquen (250 minutes), by Laura Citarella, or Mariano Llinás’s massive 2018 opus La Flor (a worthwhile 808 minutes!), this crop of youngish filmmakers share a game troupe of performers and are preoccupied with exploring (and bursting) ideas about storytelling and narrative form. The Delinquents, which comes in at a positively breezy three hours, is perhaps the best and certainly the most acclaimed film yet to emerge from this loose collective. Rodrigo Moreno’s film, a 2023 Cannes Film Festival prizewinner which will be Argentina’s submission for the Best International Feature Oscar next year, sticks close to two characters: Morán (Daniel Elías), a bank teller fed up with his workaday life, and Román (Esteban Bigliardi), a co-worker who becomes wrapped up in Morán’s scheme to rob the bank.
The names of these twin protagonists are the first hint that The Delinquents is up to more than a simple heist fable (there are more anagrams where that came from), and indeed after its taut opening hour Moreno’s film sprawls into something a lot more expansive, asking why we buy into the mundanities of our lives and what we might do to find a taste of transcendence. It’s a funny, surprising, and wonderfully modest epic, certainly one of my favorites of this year.
Mary and Molly (Free screening and panel discussion with filmmaker Donna Loring)
We are thrilled to welcome Penobscot Nation Tribal Elder Donna Loring for the premiere screening of Mary and Molly, a new animated short film adaptation of her 2016 play of the same name. The film concerns a young African-American woman living in Bangor who learns of her Penobscot heritage by way of a letter from her mother on her 21st birthday, and follows her as she explores her heritage. After the film, Loring will be joined by a number of guests for a group discussion. Mary and Molly artists and illustrators Ann Pollard Ranco and Shannon Sockalexis will appear along with Maulian (Dana) Bryant, Tribal Ambassador for the Penobscot Nation, and Maria Girouard, Executive Director of Wabanaki REACH. This is a free event, though registration is appreciated.
Maine Jewish Film Festival
PMA Films hosts the Maine Jewish Film Festival the first two weekends of November for the reboot of their vital and popular in-person festival from November 4-11. We have posted individual films screening in our auditorium on the PMA Films page, but you can visit their official site for a full schedule and ticketing information.
The Origin of Evil
Sébastien Marnier’s new thriller The Origin of Evil isn’t exactly a horror movie, but it does hit quite a few sweet spots for spooky season, offering devious twists, juicy performances, and an atmosphere that toggles effortlessly between menace and trashy fun. Laure Calamy, who regular filmgoers may have seen earlier this year in the great film Full Time, stars as Stéphane, a sardine factory worker who finds herself without a home and decides to track down Serge (Jacques Weber) her wealthy and estranged father. Serge and what remains of his icy family live in an ostentatious seaside mansion, which Stéphane infiltrates effortlessly, to the suspicion of others in the house. Succession vibes abound: Serge boozes and rampages, but is prone to fits of weakness; his wife, daughter, and maid appear eager to take advantage of him and wrest control of his fortune. Contrary to the more didactic likes of Triangle of Sadness and The Menu, The Origin of Evil is very much at home with its barbed wit and parasitic atmosphere, embracing the innate camp of its circumstances.
Remembering Every Night
A modest portrait of modern Japanese life that I was extremely taken with, Remembering Every Night is the second acclaimed film from the young director Yui Kiyohara. With a low-key sense of drift and wonder at the mundane, Kiyohara’s new film mostly follows three women on their own distinct, yet overlapping, trips through Tama New Town, a planned residential section of Tokyo. One woman (Hyodo Kumi), seeking work in middle age, encounters figures from her past; a second (Ohba Minami), who reads gas meters for a living, is obliged to assist a man with dementia in finding his way home; and a student visits a museum and has experiences with older members of the community. The sense of individuals reckoning with the idea of community and shared responsibility is explored with such sweep and delicacy that its cumulative impact sinks in gradually. A whimsical score doesn’t press matters, nor does the gorgeous cinematography of Yukiko Iioka, who shot Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, the masterful companion piece to that director’s Drive My Car. There are too few movies about life as it’s lived, and this one is extremely charming and distinctive.
We Are the Warriors (with filmmakers David Camlin and Megan Grumbling)
Winner of the Tourmaline Prize for Best Feature Made in Maine at this year’s Maine International Film Festival, David Camlin and Megan Grumbling’s We Are the Warriors addresses an issue many schools and sports teams have confronted in recent years. What does a mascot that invokes Native American culture represent, and does it honor or injure those from that culture? This debate became a conflagration after a Wells High School football game in 2017, as an Abegweit Mi’kmaq spectator from a visiting team observed the offensive ways in which students mocked and exploited Native culture. This incident led to widespread news coverage, but it also yielded a more measured debate about the past and future of the WHS mascot. Camlin and Grumbling’s film encompasses hundreds of years of Indigenous and colonial history as it also gives time and thought to the many nuanced sides of this discussion, and they’ll be here to talk about the film after it screens this Sunday.
Remembering Every Night
A modest portrait of modern Japanese life that I was extremely taken with, Remembering Every Night is the second acclaimed film from the young director Yui Kiyohara. With a low-key sense of drift and wonder at the mundane, Kiyohara’s new film mostly follows three women on their own distinct, yet overlapping, trips through Tama New Town, a planned residential section of Tokyo. One woman (Hyodo Kumi), seeking work in middle age, encounters figures from her past; a second (Ohba Minami), who reads gas meters for a living, is obliged to assist a man with dementia in finding his way home; and a student visits a museum and has experiences with older members of the community. The sense of individuals reckoning with the idea of community and shared responsibility is explored with such sweep and delicacy that its cumulative impact sinks in gradually. A whimsical score doesn’t press matters, nor does the gorgeous cinematography of Yukiko Iioka, who shot Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, the masterful companion piece to that director’s Drive My Car. There are too few movies about life as it’s lived, and this one is extremely charming and distinctive.
Champlain Film Festival
On Friday, October 20, we’ll host the first two screenings of this year’s Champlain Film Festival, organized by Alliance Française du Maine. Both screenings are free, and you can find more information about the festival here.
Three Chaplains (Free screening with filmmakers David Washburn and Razi Jafri)
Before its November 6 premiere on PBS’s Independent Lens, we’re thrilled to offer a free sneak preview of the new documentary Three Chaplains, directed by Portland-based filmmaker David Washburn. The film examines the complex stories of three Muslim chaplains who are assist service members in living their faith, in spite of fraught domestic politics and the disapproval of peers and family members. Washburn, who has partnered with Muslim storytellers on documentary and short film work for a long time, will be joined by the film’s producer, Razi Jafri, for a panel discussion which will be moderated by Bowdoin College Visiting Assistant Professor of English, Zahir Janmohamed. Pious Ali, Portland City Councilor and founder of Portland Empowered, will introduce the screening.
Joan Baez I Am A Noise
A clear-eyed and introspective first-person account of a monumental career in music and activism, Joan Baez I Am A Noise approaches the legend’s life in the same way Baez describes her voice as a now-octogenarian performer. It’s lower and slower, more weathered but also somehow more revealing and honest. This documentary, directed by Miri Navasky, Maeve O’Boyle, Karen O’Connor, centers Baez’s exploration of her journey and legacy through prisms of memory and therapy, which are amplified through intimate archival material (Baez journaled and recorded letters to her family while on tour, and she also recorded some of her more recent therapy sessions). It’s an impressive and almost audacious balancing act, as Baez revisits complicated stories of abuse as a child and neglect as a mother while simultaneously discussing 20th century politics and her relationship with Bob Dylan. This is the kind of film where what goes unsaid can be as interesting as what is reflected upon, but the breadth and candor of Baez’s reflections are still quite remarkable.
Reciprocity Project Season One (Free screening)
A collection of short non-fiction films by Indigenous filmmakers, the first season of Reciprocity Project will be continuously in our auditorium from 11 am-5 pm on Indigenous People’s Day. In these films, Indigenous filmmakers interpreted encouraged how ‘reciprocity’ is embodied by their communities, with authenticity and freedom, resulting in narratively and artistically distinct films, interweaving additional themes of intergenerational realities, language preservation, land connection, and the joys and challenges of reviving traditions nearly lost to colonialism.
The Eternal Memory
An up-close look at a married couple confronting the horrors of Alzheimer’s, The Eternal Memory is as pure a document of love and devotion as you’re likely to see on film. The documentary, directed by Maite Alberdi (who made the Oscar-nominated The Mole Agent) follows Paulina Urrutia and Augusto Góngora, both prominent figures in Chile’s arts and political worlds. As the film follows them in the present—particularly through the pandemic, where Augusto’s isolation begins to exacerbate his disease—Alberdi threads in the couple’s memories of the terrifying years their nation spent under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. These two histories, of a couple fighting to know and remember one another and a nation at risk of forgetting its history, mingle in a quiet yet devastating fashion. Often serene or funny but occasionally heartbreaking, The Eternal Memory is an intimate look at epic lives.
The Red Turtle (Free Family Day screening)
A gorgeous animated fable told completely without dialogue, The Red Turtle recounts the milestones in the life of a human being through the story of a man shipwrecked on an tropical island inhabited by turtles, crabs, and birds. This is a free Family Day screening shown in conjunction with our “Passages” exhibit.
Scrapper
Equally sweet and salty, Charlotte Regan’s debut feature Scrapper is a vibrant and tender story of loss, creativity, and companionship. The young dynamo Lola Campbell stars as Charlotte, a wily 12 year-old living alone in a London apartment after the death of her mother. Stubborn and misunderstood, Charlotte gets by reselling stolen bikes and hanging out with her lone friend (Alin Uzun) until the sudden arrival of Jason (Harrison Dickinson), the father she’s never met. Charlotte is understandably reluctant to embrace an absentee parent, and Scrapper excels at acknowledging its characters flaws and misgivings while nudging them towards compromise and understanding. Dickinson, a bit of an underrated actor due to his heartthrob status (see Beach Rats or Triangle of Sadness), is quietly excellent here, helping to make familiar material feel both specific and heartrending.
Our Body
The best documentary and arguably the best film of the year so far, Claire Simon’s uncannily intimate epic Our Body examines women’s healthcare from a multiplicity of perspectives through a single setting, the gynecological ward of a public hospital in Paris. Simon’s 168-minute film mostly takes a Wisemanesque, observational approach, spending a few minutes with each patient as they receive consultations or undergo a procedure, and then allowing themes and motivating ideas to reveal themselves gradually. Though Our Body is sensitive to the fear and anxiety innate in illness, check-ups, or major life shifts, the film is oddly serene, a consequence of France’s subsidized health care system, the film’s broad definition of womanhood (we spend significant time with trans patients and those considering transition), and the camera’s unquestionable lack of judgment.
Our Body’s negotiation with intimacy comes through at every turn, from patients acknowledging the filmmakers at times to prolonged scenes of childbirth or invasive surgery, but eventually Simon herself becomes a character in the film. This startling development both brings home the impact of her project here, and it also quietly reveals the film’s sense of structure, which almost invisibly guides the viewer from youth through late life. Simultaneously mundane and sublime, Simon’s film is essential viewing.
Passages
Alongside Celine Song’s Past Lives, Ira Sachs’s Passages is the great conversation piece of the year in cinema so far, the kind of film that can spark and animate debate, philosophical discussion, maybe even a breakup. Starring a trio of the most exciting and alluring actors working today (Ben Whishaw, Franz Rogowski, Adèle Exarchopoulos), Passages considers impulsivity, lust, and loyalty through the eyes of Rogowski’s protagonist, the mercurial, Fassbinder-esque filmmaker Tomas. The artist throws his marriage (to Whishaw’s Martin) into disarray when he sleeps with a member of his crew (Exarchopoulos’s Agathe) after a wrap party. What ensues is—depending on the viewer, from what I’ve gleaned observing the discourse—trenchant and intimate or simply maddening. Tomas, clad in an array of bombastic sweaters and crop tops, is an almost willfully destructive force, acting on his whims without considering their consequences.
Sachs, a filmmaker who is equally at home with tender crowd-pleasers (Little Men) and darker, more intimate material (Keep the Lights On), takes a supremely non-judgmental approach to this thorny, difficult artist, an approach that allows the viewer to sort out where to place their allegiances. It’s clear, though, that his empathy extends to each point in this sort-of love triangle, and Passages works as well as it does because it allows you to see yourself in all of its characters.
Kokomo City
A raw and vibrant documentary shot in shimmering black and white and full to bursting with personality, surprise, and wisdom, D. Smith’s Kokomo City is an intimate look at the lives of Black transgender sex workers in Atlanta and New York City. Smith, whose own life story is remarkable (she left her home after coming out as a teen, later purchased a one-way ticket to New York City, and wound up producing music for some of the industry’s biggest stars before transitioning and being ostracized from the business), has an unwavering commitment to authenticity. Along with her four main protagonists (Daniella Carter, Liyah Mitchell, Dominique Silver, and Koko Da Doll, who was murdered earlier this year), Smith explores both the pragmatics and the danger of the profession. What’s more, Kokomo City dwells frankly on the alienation Black transgender women encounter from the broader Black community, a state of affairs touched upon by some of their clients, a number of whom were interviewed for the documentary.
Exhibition on Screen: Tokyo Stories
The ever-popular “Exhibition on Screen” series returns to PMA Films with a documentary based on a major exhibition at the Ashmolean in Oxford. Tokyo Stories spans 400 years of incredibly dynamic art – ranging from the delicate woodblock prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige, to Pop Art posters, contemporary photography, Manga, film, and brand-new artworks that were created on the streets.
The exhibition was a smash-hit five-star success and brought a younger and more diverse audience to the museum. The film uses the exhibition as a launchpad to travel to Tokyo itself, and explore the art and artists of the city more fully.
A beautifully illustrated and richly detailed film, looking at a city which has undergone constant destruction and renewal over its 400-year history, resulting in one of the most vibrant and interesting cities on the planet…
Anonymous Sister (Presented with Recovery in Maine and featuring filmmaker Jamie Boyle)
In partnership with Points North’s Recovery in Maine program, we’re honored to host filmmaker Jamie Boyle and her singular new documentary, Anonymous Sister. Comprised of a combination of interviews and home movie footage largely shot by Boyle herself, the film is a uniquely intimate and immersive look at the toll the opioid epidemic on one American family. Before the film, we’ll screen the Recovery in Maine short “Androscoggin County,” and the program will conclude with discussion between Boyle, Jeremy Hiltz of Recovery Connections of Maine, and Courtney Gary-Allen from the Maine Recovery Advocacy Project. Members of local harm reduction groups will be on site with resources and literature as well.
Amanda
A barbed and very funny feature debut by the Italian writer-director Carolina Cavalli, Amanda stars Benedetta Porcaroli as the title character, an aimless and spoiled twentysomething attempting to, for the first time, make friends and develop a social life. For the precious and endlessly argumentative Amanda, who only socializes with her childhood nanny, this is easier said than done. Porcaroli’s finely calibrated performance sets Amanda up as a uniquely diffident personality, but it’s always clear there is some fear and vulnerability beneath her hilariously brittle surface. Visually distinctive (Cavalli uses a striking array of architectural styles to define individual characters) and sharply written, this one is a real treat.
John and Francis Ford Film Festival
This Saturday and Sunday, we’re proud to team up with Maine Irish Heritage Center and the John and Francis Ford Film Festival, playing host to the festival’s symposium. Saturday’s events will kick off at noon with a keynote address by Ford biographer Joseph McBride, followed by a screening of his final (and, some say, greatest) film, 1966’s 7 Women, and a panel discussion with a group of visiting scholars about Ford’s relevance to and meaning in modern society. In the afternoon, we’re honored to host the world premiere screening of the silent film The Craving, directed by Francis Ford and recently restored from 35mm negatives. Kathy Fuller-Seeley and Michael Ford will offer further context on Francis’s life and career after that 3 pm screening.
On Sunday, we’ll begin with a screening of one of Ford’s most under-recognized masterpieces, My Darling Clementine (his take on the legend of Wyatt Earp), and conclude the day with the local premiere of a new documentary, The Taking. Director Alexandre O. Philippe has previously made striking visual essays about the shower scene in Psycho, and here he uses his interest in close reading to consider the representation of Monument Valley in cinema history (and, of course, in John Ford’s work), and how the iconography of the Western as a genre is an affront to indigenous histories. Between these two films, a panel of scholars will dig into the subject matter of The Taking and Ford’s prodigious use of the iconography of Monument Valley. (Ticketholders for either Sunday screening are welcome to attend the 2 pm panel discussion.)
Behind the Strings
When Mao’s Cultural Revolution ended, China’s door cracked open. Four young, classical musicians seized the opportunity to flee to the West as classical music was banned. The Shanghai Quartet began a lifetime adventure – studying with great masters, attending Juilliard, and performing at major music festivals and best classical music venues like Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and The Kennedy Center. Behind the Strings showcases their lives, how they got to the top and the price they pay. And, why China keeps inviting them back to perform their once forbidden music.
Return to Oz (Free screening in Congress Square Park)
Wrapping up our summer outdoor film series, “System Reboot” (presented with SPACE Gallery and Friends of Congress Square Park), Return to Oz is an emo kid cult classic from 1985 directed by Walter Murch, the legendary editor of the likes of The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, and The Talented Mr. Ripley as well as a collaborator on The Godfather trilogy. A dark counterpart to 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, Return to Oz is quite faithfully based on the second and third books in Frank L. Baum’s Oz series. Like the other films in this series, Return to Oz ran overbudget and was a troubled production (Murch was briefly fired until George Lucas intervened), but the film’s unquestionable style and dark themes have yielded a small army of admirers, including (fittingly) the writer Neil Gaiman.
CatVideoFest 2023
Perhaps the closest thing PMA Films has to a Barbenheimer phenomenon, the latest edition of CatVideoFest returns this weekend with the latest and greatest in home recordings of feline antics. Every year, we donate 10% of the revenue from these screenings to our friends at Animal Refuge League of Greater Portland, and some volunteers with the organization will be in attendance outside our auditorium at select screenings, so do say hello and learn how you can help them continue to thrive.
Earth Mama
A critical darling at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Earth Mama is an assured and deeply empathetic debut from filmmaker Savanah Leaf. Tia Nomore stars as Gia, a single mother with two children in the foster care system and another child on the way. In part, Leaf’s film is oriented around process and the innate hardships of being poor in America: in order to regain custody of her children, Gia is required to attend classes and see a therapist, but these demands prevent her from working full-time, a destructive loop that fundamentally impacts her health and well-being. Earth Mama lays this out clearly but without a hint of didacticism, and it treats Gia, a protagonist who makes a few destructive decisions, with a similar dignity and sensitivity. Set and shot in the Bay Area, Leaf’s film has a casually authoritative sense of place and an authenticity that sidesteps most of the familiar tropes of the debut indie feature. It’s a special film.
“Elizabeth Colomba Selects”: Gosford Park
Concluding a set of films by Elizabeth Colomba, I’m really looking forward to taking another look at Robert Altman’s late masterpiece Gosford Park, from 2001. An upstairs/downstairs murder mystery that takes its cues from The Rules of the Game and whose influence is clearly felt in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out films, Gosford Park is a tremendously effective confluence of stylistic impulses, one where Altman’s penchant for huge casts and overlapping dialogue functions seamlessly with the themes and content of Julian Fellowes’s exquisitely written and structured screenplay.
Afire
One of my absolute favorite working filmmakers, Christian Petzold has recently transitioned from a trilogy of films (Barbara, Phoenix, the incredible Transit) that situate melodramas within the circumstances of World War II toward warmer, modern considerations of love, work, and ego. Afire is a perfect summer film, particularly in 2023, where Petzold has made a comedy of manners that is set, with productive unease, in a seaside town distantly threatened by wildfires. Thomas Schubert stars as Leon, a writer finishing his latest novel on a working vacation with his friend, Felix (Langston Uibel). Their intentions are thwarted when it turns out Leon’s family home has been rented to Nadja (Petzold regular Paula Beer). Leon, a brittle creation I find horribly relatable, uses Nadja’s presence and any form of interruption as an excuse to brood and avoid his writing project in a manner that is simultaneously funny, annoying, relatable, and cringeworthy. As usual, Petzold builds out his characters with a remarkable acuity and dramatic efficiency. Afire is ostensibly a film about clashing personalities and culture, but it is also rather subtly a film about why we still behave the way we do in the face of cataclysmic environmental and societal problems.
“Elizabeth Colomba Selects”: The Wiz
Next in our series of films chosen by Elizabeth Colomba to accompany her exhibit, “Mythologies,” 1978’s The Wiz came together with a collection of talent that seems absolutely incredible in retrospect. The legendary Diana Ross practically willed the film, an adaptation of a then-recent Broadway musical, into existence, though her casting as a young teacher caused the film’s initial director to leave the project in favor of the reliable but musically untested Sidney Lumet. An advocate for the then-faddish est movement, Ross’s influence persuaded a young writer named Joel Schumacher to try the therapy, and its tenets bled into the film. Quincy Jones, The Wiz’s music supervisor (and a piano player in the film), was dubious of the casting of a young Michael Jackson, but his presence, along with that of Nipsey Russell, Lena Horne, Mabel King, and Richard Pryor, have helped what was once a critical and box office flop become an immensely popular and enduring film, particularly with Black audiences. This is the sort of epic production, immensely tactile and labored over in every aspect, that is unlikely to be replicated by Hollywood anytime soon.
Umberto Eco: A Library of the World
Davide Ferrario’s new documentary about the late Italian author and semiotician and his library began as, of all things, a video installation created for the Venice Art Biennale. Extraneous footage from Ferrario’s shoot, depicting Eco offering the filmmaker a tour of his library, went viral after Eco’s death in 2016. With the involvement of Eco’s family, the concept for Umberto Eco: A Library of the World was born. A fitting tribute to the writer, the film considers Eco’s beautiful library and book collection as both a statement on the author and on his belief in knowledge and information as living, mutable things that evolve along with the whims of history. Ferrario, a novelist as well as a filmmaker, also has actors recite excerpts from Eco’s voluminous essays on the written word to bring further life to his great love.
“System Reboot”: Super Mario Bros. (Free screening in Congress Square Park)
A memorable critical and box office flop of the 1990s now rather fondly remembered as a curio of its era, Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel’s 1993 take on the Super Mario Bros. franchise continues a free program we’re co-presenting with SPACE Gallery and Friends of Congress Square park this summer. The series, “System Reboot,” considers some of the highways and byways of film franchises derived from other sources that persist to this day. While shows like HBO’s The Last of Us and the recent The Super Mario Bros. Movie suggest we may have entered an era where video games can further stoke the flames of Hollywood’s desire for replicable intellectual property, the 1993 film hearkens back to the perhaps lovably clunky origins of this strain of adaptation.
“Elizabeth Colomba Selects”: Howard’s End
Another choice selection from Elizabeth Colomba is James Ivory’s justly beloved adaptation of E.M. Forster’s novel Howard’s End, which alongside Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence is perhaps the great statement on the onset of 20th century capitalism and modernism. I did not dabble in Merchant-Ivory’s prestigious 1980s and 1990s productions as a youngster, and have only caught a couple in the meantime, so I was extremely pleasantly surprised that their Howard’s End skirted most every cliché of the stodgy literary adaptation I’d absorbed in my head over the years. Thanks in large part to tremendous performances by Emma Thompson and a young Helena Bonham Carter, Ivory’s film positively bristles with life and curiosity as it traces an eventful period in the lives of the Schlegel family, whose interactions with the new-money, real estate-hoarding Wilcoxes enrich and morally compromise their comfortable but more modest lives.
The Mother and the Whore
Continuing a string of flat-out masterpieces, I am thrilled to offer a couple of screenings of a film rarely screened in the United States until now. Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore, from 1973, was long prevented from being released on physical media by Eustache’s estate, but his titanic relationship drama has now been restored in 4k and will see a home release in the coming months. I think this is one of the greatest films ever made. It is a bold and diffident reaction to the attitude and politics of the films of the French New Wave, using Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) as an autobiographical analog for Eustache. Léaud’s Alexandre is the model of what is today considered a toxic man: he is counterintuitive, relentlessly opinionated, and determined to win every argument, of which there are a great many in this 220-minute epic, which explores its central love triangle to a thrilling point of exhaustion. Alexandre surrounds himself with women who are more progressive and sensitive than he is, one of many ways in which Eustache’s film reveals its conservative but fraught and deeply self-immolating concerns. In its personal and cultural politics, The Mother and the Whore is a startling reaction to the romance and idealism of the New Wave and its leftist filmmakers, but Eustache’s discomfiting concerns remain both striking and relevant today. There’s lots of great recent writing about this restoration, but I’ll point you to Richard Brody’s trenchant piece at the New Yorker as a good place to start.
“Elizabeth Colomba Selects”: The Leopard
Each Saturday for the remainder of July, we’ll be featuring a film hand-picked by Elizabeth Colomba to accompany her wonderful show, “Mythologies.” Every film in this series is a banger, but I’m especially pleased to begin with Luchino Visconti’s sumptuous, luxurious portrait of an aristocratic regime losing its grip on the power and cultural consciousness of 19th-century Italy. The Leopard was a triumph in its time, winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1963, but Visconti has maintained a surprisingly strong foothold in film culture, with a retrospective that did blockbuster numbers at Lincoln Center in recent years. I think this is because it can be fairly argued that the director’s films benefit from the theatrical environment like few others, juxtaposing opulence and futility with unmatched grandeur. (If you want to continue your Visconti studies, I have recently been blown away by both 1969’s The Damned, about a family of munitions manufacturers confronting the rise of Nazism, and 1973’s Ludwig, starring the late Helmut Berger as an aesthete ruler of Bavaria in the mid-1800s.)
The Night of the 12th
Winner of a whopping 7 trophies at this year’s César Awards (France’s national film awards), Dominik Moll’s downbeat drama begins like a standard crime procedural before its tentacles spread to some unexpected places. After a young woman is gruesomely murdered on her walk home from a night with friends, a group of Grenoble police investigators pounce on the case’s many leads and red herrings. In a manner somewhat akin to David Fincher’s Zodiac, the passage of time weighs heavily on the investigation, yielding fresh theories and a more profound sense of hopelessness and exhaustion. The Night of the 12th lacks the grandeur of Zodiac and another similar masterpiece, Bong Joon-Ho’s Memories of Murder, but the earthy nature of Moll’s film gradually gets its claws in you by persistently examining the ways in which age, masculinity, and other forms of bias can impede criminal proceedings. Moll explores these issues with a really impressive subtlety, allowing changes in the police department over time to do much of the thematic heavy lifting.
“System Reboot”: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) (Free screening in Congress Square Park)
After getting washed out last months, our outdoor summer film series “System Reboot” reboots itself on Wednesday. (Looks like a nice day!) The series, programmed with our friends at SPACE Gallery and Friends of Congress Square Park, examines early franchise films from the 1980s and 1990s that continue to be reimagined by an industry increasingly focused on intellectual property. Steve Barron’s 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is best remembered for its iconic turtle costumes, created by the Jim Henson Creature Shop and enhanced with animatronic facial muscles, a nifty form of puppetry that’s difficult to imagine being utilized in 2023. Like most of the new IP of its day, Barron’s film was met with a mix of critical vitriol and indifference, but it was an immediate sensation with young audiences, leading to a trilogy of ‘90s films and a few recent reboots of the franchise. An animated installment written by Seth Rogen (among others) will hit theaters in August.
Close to Vermeer
After the remarkable turnout for our screenings of the “Exhibition on Screen” documentary about the recent Vermeer exhibit at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, I couldn’t fairly resist offering you a quite different glimpse into the same show. Close to Vermeer offers a behind the scenes look at the work that goes into pulling off such a major show, sticking with the Rijksmuseum’s curators and other workers as they travel the world negotiating the terms of sharing all of these paintings at one site. More dramatically, director Suzanne Raes gets into the subjectivity of authentication, as conservators and experts debate the authorship of a number of the artist’s paintings. It’s a compelling and intimate look at a blockbuster exhibit.
End of the Century (Free screening)
Wrapping up a weekend of free screenings marking the end of PRIDE month, I am absolutely thrilled to show one of my favorite films of the past five years. Sexy, funny, beautifully constructed, and sneakily profound, Lucio Castro’s End of the Century is a slight stunner that I tend to describe as “a lightly metaphysical gay Before Sunrise,” about an Argentine poet and a Berlin-based Spaniard who eventually meet after a series of missed connections in Barcelona. The film’s first act traces their hookup in a manner that’s simultaneously mundane and filled with lust and longing, and from here Castro gently sends these two men through time in a manner I’m loathe to spoil. Suffice it to say that in this stunningly assured debut film, Castro is investigating the idea of fate in a manner that’s at once playful and a bit of a head trip. End of the Century also boasts one of the all-time great jump scares, revealing its most pivotal twist with an unexpected burst of noise. Released to great reviews in 2019, End of the Century never traveled too far and as far as I’m aware it’s never been available to subscribers of any major screening service, which in the present day might as well condemn a film to obscurity. It deserves to join the queer canon.
The Queen (Free screening)
A landmark film that predates the Stonewall rebellion and establishes an observational, process-based documentary rhythm that many associate with Frederick Wiseman, Frank Simon’s documentary The Queen was released to polite notices in 1968 (the author and then-film critic Renata Adler raved about it in the New York Times) and then broadly forgotten until about a decade ago, when successful repertory screenings paved the way to Kino Lorber’s recent restoration of the film. Shot a generation before Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning, The Queen is a surprising document of a moment where drag performances were technically criminal acts yet seemingly uncontroversial. The show depicted here is a benefit held in a Manhattan hotel, but the lack of glitz in its setting suits Simon’s purposes (building rich characters through practical scenes) perfectly.
Light Attaching to a Girl (with filmmaker Laina Barakat)
New Hampshire-based filmmaker Laina Barakat joins us this Friday to wrap up a tour of her striking and sensitive medium-length coming of age film, Light Attaching to a Girl. Filmed with non-actors and essentially an outline of a script, allowing the actors to add their own feelings and experience to the process, the film is keenly attuned to the suffocations of small-town life and the weight of the decision to strike out on one’s own. Barakat’s own sister, Clare, gives a lovely lead performance in the film, shining once her character sets out to Iceland to discover how she interacts with the wider world.
The Watermelon Woman (Free screening)
Playing in repertory with Losing Ground throughout the weekend is The Watermelon Woman, Cheryl Dunye’s groundbreaking, spry, and intellectually curious mock documentary. As a version of herself, Dunye portrays a video store clerk and spiring filmmaker working on a documentary about the titular Watermelon Woman, an actress credited as such in early Hollywood films, where she typically played so-called “mammy” roles. (The actress is fictitious, but Dunye so effectively frames the actress in a historical and academic reality that you wouldn’t know it to watch the film.) Simultaneously, Dunye gets involved with a white customer frequenting her video store. The Watermelon Woman oscillates beautifully between moments of romance and humor and a more earnest examination of historical oppression, resulting in a film that sometimes exists on the wavelength of 1990s slacker comedies but has the rigor and boldness of other gems from the New Queer Cinema.
Losing Ground (Free screening)
In commemoration of Juneteenth, we’re hosting the second installment of an annual film series, “Connection and Collaboration.” Programmed in partnership with Charles Nero, Benjamin E. Mays ’20 Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric, Film and Screen Studies and Africana at Bates College, films in this series examine and celebrate the ways African Americans collaborate across their differences for their survival. 1982’s Losing Ground, one of just two films by the late, celebrated poet, playwright, and activist Kathleen Collins, explores the tensions between an ambitious professor of philosophy (Seret Scott) and her more sybaritic artist husband, played by Bill Gunn (director of Ganja & Hess and the great recent rediscovery Personal Problems). I last saw Losing Ground in the first wave of its recent canonization as a film print toured repertory houses around 2016, and remain struck by its striking editing rhythms and singular exploration of personal pleasure and partnership. We’ll be showing Kino Lorber’s recent restoration of the film.
Maine Mayhem Film Festival
After a sold-out premiere at the Nickelodeon last month, we’re happy to bring the Maine Mayhem Film Festival to PMA Films for a free encore presentation. This is an annual showcase of short films (both animated and not) by second year students in Southern Maine Community College’s Communications and New Media program. Some of this year’s filmmakers will be in attendance for the program, and we’ll have a Q&A with them after we screen the program, which will run for two hours.
Chile ‘76
A tense political thriller about a well-heeled, accidental revolutionary, Chile ‘76 is an intimate and striking period piece. Aline Kuppenheim stars as Carmen, the wife of a hospital director on a prolonged winter vacation on the Chilean coast. While monitoring the renovation of her home and taking time outs to host her grandchildren and perform service for her church, Carmen finds herself acquainted with a young leftist in need, engaging in small gestures of empathy and charity that can be interpreted as risky political acts. With her debut directorial feature, Manuel Martelli acquits herself beautifully. Aesthetically, the filmmaker has a real way with visual motifs and quietly symbolic colors, costumes, and settings. It’s one of the more fully realized debuts I’ve seen in quite some time.
The Eight Mountains
A film of epic sweep and panoramic vistas, Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeesch’s The Eight Mountains is the rare work that focuses its attention on the oscillations of a friendship across the decades. For a medium built around conflict and juxtaposition, friendship has always felt to me like one of the most underexplored subjects in cinema, and it’s extremely gratifying to see it conveyed with the realism and complexity van Groeningen and Vandermeesch deploy here. The Eight Mountains spans four decades, beginning in the childhood of Pietro and Bruno, portrayed as children by Lupo Barbiero and Cristiano Sassella and as adults by Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi. At first, the two drum up a companionship wrought by proximity, as Pietro spends his summers in a dazzling small town in the Italian Alps. In adulthood, the film examines the two at varying crossroads, in every instance trying to recapture the freedom they felt as children. Based on a book of the same name by Paolo Cognetti, The Eight Mountains is highly attuned to the obligations, responsibilities, and emotional ups and downs that invisibly carve the trajectory of our most important relationships. Both Borghi (a big-hearted force of nature) and Marinelli (a cerebral, searching presence delivering another great performance after his titanic work in 2020’s Martin Eden) are entirely in tune with their characters; you get the sense that they both always know what is unsaid between them, and this lends the film a gentle but considerable tension. If the massive, screen-swallowing landscapes of The Eight Mountains are enough to recommend the film, its unexpectedly trenchant examination of masculinity is a welcome bonus.
Honest Vision: A Portrait of Todd Webb (with Director Huey)
This award-winning documentary chronicles the life and career of Todd Webb (1905-2000), one of America’s important 20th century photographers. The photographer’s life is told through the wit and stories of Webb himself. Featured are Webb’s elegant black and white photographs of Paris and New York in the 1940s and 1950s, and his photographs of the American West taken from 1955-65 when he retraced the Gold Rush Trails by foot, by bicycle, and by motor scooter. Honest Vision also is the love story of Todd and Lucille Webb. An inseparable team, the interviews with Lucille Webb give an insight to the infl