Cinema Studies

Winner of the Grand Prix at the first Tokyo International Film Festival in 1985, Typhoon Club is widely regarded as the seminal film of director Shinji Somai’s career. A work of raw, elemental power, it follows an ensemble of junior high students in a provincial town, beset by a summer-y malaise as a typhoon looms. The 10th best Japanese film of all time, according to Japan’s Kinema Junpo poll.

From acclaimed Japanese filmmaker Shinji Sômai comes an exuberant farce tinted with deep shades of melancholy and real violence, P.P. Rider is an ode to the dreams of youth against authority. Adapted from a comic strip-like scenario by Leonard and Chieko Schrader, it’s a film of unparalleled freedom, and a testament to Somai’s ability to inject his work with the potent marrow of life.

Within the human struggle to live and work on a changing planet, questions of value, extraction, and adaptation echo across seemingly disparate worlds. A Common Sequence examines shifts of life and labor through a critically-endangered salamander and plant patents in the apple industry. Weaving the stories of Dominican nuns running a conservation lab, a group of fisherman attempting to live off of a depleting lake, engineers developing AI-driven harvesting machines, and an indigenous biomedical researcher resisting the commodification of human DNA, the film becomes a meditation on the shifting border between the natural and unnatural world, and the dynamics of power at play.

A documentary immersion into all things Umberto Eco, Davide Ferrario’s film takes us on a tour of Eco’s private library, guided by the author himself. Combining new footage with material he shot with Eco in 2015

A selection of the New York Film Festival, director Laura Citarella directs a labyrinthine tale of obsessive pursuit and the quest for personal freedom.

In his ninth film for Hong Sangsoo, Kwon Haehyo plays Byungsoo, a film director who goes with his daughter  to a building owned by an old friend, Hong fills the building spaces with a profusion of everyday details spanning art, love, career, religion, dietary decisions and home renovations.

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival. For his 27th feature, Hong Sangsoo holds a mirror up to his own artistic process and asks what exactly it is we’re looking for from a work of art. 

The film follows Ida, who, after a stirring encounter with the French Foreign Legion, sets sail with her own corps of five men, none of whom speak the same language, to trace the route of this fabled troop.

In her dynamic and entrancing directorial debut, Helena Wittmann takes us on a transatlantic voyage unlike any other, scrambling our senses and inviting us to surrender to the ocean's ever-undulating surface.

 The Strange Little Cat assembles seemingly unspectacular details into an exciting choreography of everyday life, a carefully staged chain reaction of actions and conversations, turning an apartment into a universe.

Critic's Pick!  One of the most awarded films of 2022, Geographies of Solitude is a playful and reverent collaboration with the natural world filled with arresting images and made with an activist spirit. The film follows Zoe, a naturalist and environmentalist who has lived Sable Island, on a remote sliver of land in the Northwest Atlantic with a rich ecosystem, for over 40 years.

A vibrant portrait of a friendship navigating immigration and the depths of the criminal justice system and pushing the boundaries of cinematic imagination to rescue a young migrant's story from oblivion.

Winner of a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, Dos Estaciones follows iron-willed businesswoman María García (Teresa Sánchez), the owner of Dos Estaciones, a once-majestic tequila factory now struggling to stay afloat. 

The community of Provincetown, which has been clinging to a distinctly American - and yet increasingly rare - way of life. In his immersive documentary debut, Mischa Richter, whose artist family has been living there for nearly a century, explores his home through shared moments and conversations with locals, pilgrims, outcasts, fishermen, drag queens and spirit guides in an exploration of what freedom and community mean in America today.

In her first role for Hong, Lee Hyeyoung, a prominent theater and screen actress in South Korea, makes a captivating return to the big screen. With In Front of Your Face, Hong suggests that perhaps the most important things in this life are also the most immediate.

As her roommate Lisa prepares to move out of their apartment, Mara contemplates the end of an era.  In The Girl and the Spider, the Zürcher brothers compose a poetic panopticon of forms of human relationships that is at once a study of everyday life, a fairytale and a psychological portrait of a brittle world. 

An official selection of the Cannes Film Festival, The Day After begins as a darkly hilarious story of a man embroiled in extramarital entanglements but soon shifts—in a way only Hong can manage—into a heartfelt portrayal of a young woman on a quest for spiritual fulfillment.

 A refreshingly sunny performance from Isabelle Huppert (The Piano Teacher, Elle) is at the center of this comic charmer from South Korean Master Hong Sangsoo. Intricately plotted with wit and charm to spare, CLAIRE'S CAMERA explores the power of images to transform us. 

THE WOMAN WHO RAN is a subtle, powerful look at dramas small and large faced by women everywhere. With characteristic humor and grace, Hong takes a simple premise and spins a web of interconnecting philosophies and coincidences. Winner of the  Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival.