Cinema Studies

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.