Cinema Studies

Hao (Mason Lee) is part of a team of young engineers called in to investigate a series of craters that have opened up on the edge of the city. As he and his team survey the subsiding area, another story is taking place in the same suburban landscape. A younger boy, also named Hao, spends long afternoons playing with friends and making mischief until one-by-one, his playmates start to disappear. As these parallel stories unfold, the connections between them proliferate and grow stranger. 

From acclaimed director Wang Xiaoshuai (Beijing Bicycle; So Long, My Son) comes a personal snapshot of contemporary China in all its diversity. Shot over the course of ten years on both film and video, the film consists of a series of carefully composed tableaus of people and environments, each one more extraordinary than the last. 

HÍBRIDOS, THE SPIRITS OF BRAZIL is an ethnomusicological journey into the sacred culture of Brazil, from Roman Catholic to Ubanda and candomblé--mixures of African traditions with Catholicism.

Pulling from real events and court documents in the wake of the 2015 Paris terror attacks, Also Known As Jihadi follows a young man's journey to radicalism not through his actions, but through his surroundings. 

Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's The Wild Pear Tree follows in the great tradition of family dramas like Death of a Salesman and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and weaves an evocative tale of creative struggle and familial responsibility with inspired performances, sumptuous imagery and surprising bursts of humor. 

I’ve Got a Little Problem chronicles internationally renowned photographer and poet Ren Hang’s struggle with Chinese censorship, painful public scrutiny, and manic depression, that eventually sent his life spiraling out of control.

2019 ACADEMY AWARD® Nominee for Best Documentary Feature. Composed of intimate and unencumbered moments of people in a community, HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING allows the viewer an emotive impression of the Historic South - trumpeting the beauty of life and consequences of the social construction of race, while simultaneously a testament to dreaming - despite the odds.

A fiction feature about a group of undocumented immigrants from Puebla, Mexico who live in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. En el Séptimo Día (On the Seventh Day) is both timely for our current immigration debate and an exciting enjoyable film to watch.

From the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University comes a postindustrial fable told in iron, rocks, and wood.  A unique look at Detroit artist Olayami Dabls’ installation “Iron Teaching Rocks How to Rust”

The Detroit-based performance ensemble, The Hinterlands, practice a form of ecstatic training which they see as a provocation towards the unknown. The “hinterlands” evokes an unknown space both physical and imaginary whose mystery is its very source of generation and from which true creativity emerges. Their practice is one of ecstatic play, of finding the edge of one’s balance, and the limits of one’s body.

On a seemingly ordinary night in Paris, Pierre takes one last look his lover Paul’s sleeping body, then steals away into the early morning light. Where he’s headed, neither of them know. Pierre’s only guide is his Grindr app, which leads him on a series of encounters with an indelible cast of characters across the French countryside. Paul sets out after him, using his own phone to track Pierre’s movements in a strange and wonderful game of Grindr cat-and-mouse. 

From master director Hong Sangsoo comes his most personal film to date, On The Beach at Night Alone.  Starring Kim Minhee (The Handmaiden, Claire's Camera)—in the role that won her the Silver Bear for best actress in Berlin.

In a remote Haitian village there is a dance with slaves and masters: the whipping zombie ritual. To trance-inducing music played by rara bands, men whip and fight until they die and are reborn in the infinite cycle.

Spirits of Rebellion: Black Cinema from UCLA documents the lives and work of a small critically acclaimed group of black filmmakers and media artists known as the Los Angeles Rebellion, the first collective of minority filmmakers that aimed to reimagine the production process to represent, reflect on, and enrich the day to day lives of people in their own communities.

Executive-produced by award-winning actor/filmmaker John Turturro, BEYOND WISEGUYS is a feature-length documentary that uses extraordinary interviews with prominent Italian American film artists such as John Turturro, Isabella Rossellini, Susan Sarandon, Martin Scorsese, Ben Gazzara, Marisa Tomei, and many others to explore the personal experiences that brought them all to the movies. 

A genre-bending portrait of globalization, we follow a Mexican Zoque shaman and his encounters with outside forces—from capitalism, to the culture of cinema, and the directors themselves.