Halina Dyrschka
Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint
2019, 94 min., DCP
Metrograph, May 19-25 (also streaming at metrograph.com)
Swedish painter and mystic Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was nearly forgotten after her death till she was “rediscovered” in her blockbuster 2018 Guggenheim exhibition. Dyrschka’s “dazzling" and "assured debut" does "the crucial work of placing af Klint in her rightful place in the story of abstract art. " (Metrograph)
Introduction from contributing author to "Hilma af Klint: Tree of Knowledge" Max Rosenberg, Sunday, May 21, 3pm
Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar
9to5: The Story of a Movement
2019, 89 min., DCP
MoMA, May 19
Part of series, “Julia Reichert: The People, United,” May 18-21
"In the early 1970s, a group of women office workers in Boston decided that they had suffered in silence long enough and created an organization to force changes in their workplaces. Largely unknown today, the movement was a unique convergence of those fighting for both women’s and labor rights. Still relevant issues such as sexual harassment, equal pay for equal work, the Family and Medical Leave Act, and the “glass ceiling” were, in many cases, first brought to the national stage.” (MoMA)
Joie Lee
Shorts and CROOKLYN
1993-2023, 122 min., DCP and 35 mm
MoMA, May 19, part of series, “Carte Blanche: Amy Taubin.”
A program highlighting Joie Lee as filmmaker and scriptwriter: includes two shorts directed by Joie Lee focused on her mother: UNTITLED (2022, 3 min) and VITAPOISE (2023, 1 min.) and CROOKLYN, directed by brother, Spike Lee, scripted by siblings Joie and Cinqué. “Its inspiration was a request made by her mother that she collect the games and songs which she, her brothers, and other kids in their Brooklyn neighborhood played and sang. [...] A rare and indelible depiction of girlhood.” (Amy Taubin)
Paula Kehoe
DEARGDHÚIL:
ANATOMY OF PASSION
2015, Ireland, 60 min., DCP, in Irish with English subtitles
Irish Arts Center, May 13
“Deargdhúil explores the life, work and sensual poetic imagination of the revolutionary Irish poet Máire Mhac an tSaoi. Born in 1922, her story is set against a backdrop of a tumultuous century in Irish history in which she and her family (her father Seán MacEntee, her husband Conor Cruise O’Brien) were centrally involved.”
(Irish Arts Center)
Lisa Rovner
SISTERS WITH TRANSISTORS
2021, 84 min., DCP
Metrograph, May 13
“Narrated by Laurie Anderson, Rovner’s superb documentary showcases the music of and rare interviews with female electronic pioneers, such as Clara Rockmore, Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, and demonstrates that these women relished the freedom of electronic music, even as they were discriminated against because of their gender and their chosen medium.” (Metrograph)
Kasi Lemmons
EVE'S BAYOU
1997, 84 min., DCP
Brooklyn Academy of Music, Rose Cinemas, May 12—May 18
New 4K restoration of director's cut
“One of the most distinctive directorial debuts of the 1990s--a richly atmospheric, Southern Gothic stew of sex, lies, and voodoo in which a young girl witnesses secrets, and deceptions tear her wealthy Louisiana family apart. A hothouse blend of Creole folklore, magic, and mysticism, Eve’s Bayou provides a scintillating showcase for a powerhouse ensemble of Black actresses.” (BAM)
Helena Třeštíková
“The Time-Lapse Portraits
of Helena Třeštíková”
Anthology Film Archives, May 5—May 11
Director in-person May 6 & 7!
Very rare opportunity to view works by Helena Třeštíková— a central figure in Czech cinema who has created nearly 50 films over the past half century in a style she calls “time-lapse”—which involves tracking her subjects, usually for decades, in a cumulative, observational style. The select program includes two of her “solo” studies KATKA (2010) and RENÉ (2008) / RENÉ, THE PRISONER OF FREEDOM (2021)—as well as two couples from her "Marriage Stories"—IVANA AND VACLAV (1987/2006/2017), and ZUZANA AND STANISLAV (1987/2006).
Safi Faye Memorial Talk
Women of African Cinema
Film at Lincoln Center, Elinor Bunin Munroe Ampitheater, May 6
Free but RSVP required
"Introduced to the world of cinema via an acting role in Jean Rouch’s PETIT À PETIT (1971), Safi Faye is best known as the first woman from Sub-Saharan Africa to direct a commercial feature film—1976’s Kaddu Beykat. She went on to create a monumental body of work that […] sought to capture the agency, subjectivity, and beauty of African women, and bring to vivid life the everyday realities of rural Senegal. In honor of Faye’s recent passing on February 22, 2023, this conversation brings together directors and scholars to reflect on Faye’s legacy and what it means for feminist African cinema today." (Film at Lincoln Center)
Joana Pimenta & Adirley Queirós
DRY GROUND BURNING
2022, Brazil, 153 min., DCP, in Portuguese with English subtitles
Brooklyn Academy of Music, Rose Cinemas, Apr 21—May 3
“Just released from prison, Léa returns home to the Brasilia favela and joins up with her half-sister Chitara, the fearless leader of an all-female gang that steals and refines oil from underground pipes and sells gasoline to a clandestine network of motorcyclists. [...] An electrifying portrait of Brazil’s dystopian contemporary moment, blending documentary with narrative fiction.” (BAM)
Chantal Akerman
JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES
1975, 201 min., DCP/35mm., in French with English titles
Museum of the Moving Image, March 31, April 9 and 16
Part of series, "Jeanne Dielman and Its Roots"
Screening on DCP 3/31; on 35mm 4/9 and 4/16
"Akerman’s magnum opus details the daily routine of a widow who cares for his teenage son, [cooks and cleans and sees] clients in her bedroom as a sex worker. Delphine Seyrig's performance is endlessly nuanced and perfectly guides us to her character’s shocking denouement. " (Museum of the Moving Image)
Agnès Varda
LE BONHEUR
1965, France, 80 min., in French with English titles
Museum of the Moving Image, April 7 and 9
Part of series, Jeanne Dielman and Its Roots
"The film’s bucolic surface contrasts with the tragic drama of a young wife and mother whose husband falls in love with another woman. According to Akerman it was, 'the most anti-romantic film there is.” (Museum of the Moving Image)
Courtney Stephens
TERRA FEMME
2021, 62 min., DCP
Lightbox Film Center (Live Event), March 24
A poetic and mesmerizing essay film comprised of amateur travelogues by women in the 1920s-1950s, presenting "a new type of traveler: no longer a male seeker of conquests, she might be a divorcee on a tour of biblical gardens, or a widow on a cruise to the North Pole." Terra Femme eloquently "weaves together questions of mobility, the gaze, and early female filmmaking." (Lightbox Film Center) Special post outside of our usual NYC radius - if you missed this film’s NYC run in 2022, here is another fleeting chance to catch it in Philadelphia, one night only, with live narration.
Su Friedrich
TODAY
2022, US, 57 mins. (plus additional short film)
DCTV Firehouse Cinema, March 17-23
NYC premiere of Friedrich’s new film documenting her Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn neighborhood over the last six years. Today headlines a mini-retrospective of this pioneering queer avant-garde filmmaker. Each screening includes one of Friedrich’s short films (plus director Q&A on March 17 and 19). READ OUR REVIEW
Jeanne Moreau
LUMIERE
THE ADOLESCENT
LILLIAN GISH
1976, France, 102 min.; 1979, France, 93 min.; 1984, France, 58 min.
Film Forum, March 17-30, new 4K restorations
Following "Jeanne Moreau, Actrice," a two-week retrospective of nineteen of the iconic star’s greatest performances, "Jeanne Moreau, Cinéaste" presents an exciting rare opportunity to see Moreau’s rarely seen work as a director, all in new restorations: LUMIÈRE (1976), THE ADOLESCENT (1979), and the documentary LILLIAN GISH (1984)...(READ MORE)
Cauleen Smith
DRYLONGSO
1998, US, 86 min.
Film at Lincoln Center
New 4K Restoration opens March 17
This "landmark in American independent cinema" follows Pica, a photography student in Oakland, as she begins photographing the young black men of her neighborhood, having witnessed so many of them fall victim to senseless murder and fearing the possibility of their becoming extinct altogether.” Drylongso, a Gullah-derived word meaning “ordinary,” “remains a resonant and visionary examination of violence (and its reverberations), friendship, and gender.” (Film at Lincoln Center)
First Look Festival 2023
Museum of the Moving Image
March 15 - 19
This year’s First Look Festival, MoMI’s annual showcase for adventurous new cinema, features an impressive number of films by female directors including...(READ MORE)
Huang Ji + Ryuji Otsuka
STONEWALLING
2022, Japan, 148 min., in Hunanese with English subtitles
Film at Lincoln Center, opens March 10
“A young flight-attendant-in-training’s plans to finish college are thrown into doubt when she discovers she’s pregnant. Wife-and-husband team Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka’s gripping, humane yet uncompromising film is an urgent critique of a modern-day social structure that has few options for women in need of care.” (Film at Lincoln Center)
Maid(s) in Manhattan...
Various theaters, March 6-19
In honor of Women’s History Month, let’s pay tribute to invisible labor which so often is female. Check out these new - and old - maids...
READ MORE
Wangechi Mutu
Sunday Screenings
2005-2021, Kenya/US, various running times
New Museum, March 2 - June 4 (select Sundays)
Part of the exhibition “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined”
The Kenyan artist’s films AMAZING GRACE (2005), EAT CAKE (2012), THE END OF EATING EVERYTHING (2013), and MY CAVE CALL (2021) are showing in the New Museum Theater on select Sundays, March 2 - June 4, 2023. Mutu's films fuse folkloric and fantastical narratives informed by feminism, Afrofuturism, and interspecies symbiosis.
Screenings every 45 minutes beginning at 12 p.m. and included with museum admission.
Friederike Pezold (Pezoldo)
TOILETTE (1979)
CANALE GRANDE (1983)
REVOLUTION OF THE EYES (2022)
Anthology Film Archives, March 10 - 16
A rare opportunity to catch key older works, and the premiere of REVOLUTION OF THE EYES, by this Austrian multimedia artist who has explored the intersection of technology, media, and the body for the past four decades.
Diane Kurys
PEPPERMINT SODA (DIABOLO MENTHE)
1977, France, 101m, DCP, in French with English subtitles
40th anniversary 2K restoration
Quad Cinema, March 15
Diane Kurys’ directorial debut of two teenage sisters, Anne and Frédérique, navigating schoolteachers, romantic pangs, and changing times in 1963 France. Championed by critics and audiences alike and hailed as a refreshing, female take on the coming-of-age story. A follow up to Quad's 2018 screening of the newly restored 4K version of Kurys' ENTRE NOUS.
Rebecca Mills
PASSING
2021, US, 98 min.
Museum of the Moving Image, March 11 and 12
The gripping film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s groundbreaking 1929 Harlem Renaissance novel about two childhood friends whose lives have taken very divergent paths. Irene Redfield’s black middle-class existence in Harlem with her physician husband is thrown into turmoil when she is reacquainted with lighter-skinned Clare Kendry, who is passing as white, unbeknownst to her racist white husband.
Jacquelyn Mills
GEOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE
2022, Canada, 103 min, DCP
Firehouse Cinema at DCTV, March 7-11
An immersion into the rich ecosystem of Sable Island, a remote sliver of land in the Northwest Atlantic, where Zoe Lucas, a naturalist and environmentalist has lived for over 40 years. This film follows Lucas, who is both guardian and guide, as she documents the cycles of marine detritus and the ecological cycles of life and death. Shot on 16mm and integrating gorgeous imagery with inventive filmmaking techniques drawn from the local flora and fauna, this film is an inspiring collaboration between artist and subject and a poetic and quietly political meditation on our place in the natural world. READ OUR REVIEW
Margaret Tait | GARDEN PIECES
Luke Fowler | BEING IN A PLACE: A PORTRAIT OF MARGARET TAIT
1998, UK, 11 min., 16mm
2022, UK, 60 min, 35mm, North American premiere
Part of "Documentary Fortnight 2023" and streaming online through March 9 at moma.org (for MoMA members)
A searching portrait of the enigmatic Scottish filmmaker, medical doctor and poet, Margaret Tait (1918–1999). Through fragments of a wide range of archival material and an unrealized film script as its nexus, the film considers Tait’s life and work and its connection to the remote and rugged landscape of Orkney where Tait was born and resided. Preceded by Tait’s GARDEN PIECES, a trilogy of hand-painted experimental shorts.
Pratibha Parmar
MY NAME IS ANDREA
2022, US, 94 min.
Barnard College, Held Auditorium
March 4 (followed by panel discussion)
Part of Athena Film Festival, March 2-5
A hybrid documentary about one of the most controversial figures of the 20th century, combining riveting performances by actresses with rare, electrifying archival footage. Dworkin was a fearless fighter who demanded that women be seen as fully human and offered a revolutionary analysis of male supremacy with a singular urgency and iconoclastic flair, decades before #MeToo.
“Briskly sketched but deeply moving.” (Richard Brody)
“A film like no other — lyrical and journalistic, placed in time and also timeless.” (Gloria Steinem)
Claire Simon
NOTRE CORPS (OUR BODY)
2023, France, 173 min, North American premiere
in French with English subtitles
Part of "Documentary Fortnight 2023"
Museum of Modern Art, March 2
Immersed in a public hospital in Paris’ multicultural 20th arrondissement, Simon takes the best of the Wiseman-esque technique and creates a breathtaking work of observational cinema. Filming the singularity, diversity, vulnerability and beauty of women’s bodies, she presents a panoramic portrait that is, by turns moving and nuanced and, given the historical marginalization of women’s health issues, rousingly political.
Shirin Neshat
THE FURY
2022, 16 min., two-channel installation, HD video monochrome
Gladstone Gallery, January 26 – March 4
An exhibition of new works by Neshat including a two-channel video installation and a series of black and white photographs with hand-drawn calligraphy of poems by the renowned Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad. Addressing the sexual exploitation of female political prisoners in Iran, these multiformat works continue Neshat’s focus “on the female body as both a battleground for ideology and a source of strength." (Gladstone Gallery)
Yvonne Rainer
A RETROSPECTIVE
Metrograph
In theater February 17 - March 2. (Rainer in attendance for an introduction and Q&A on February 26th.)
“Yvonne Rainer: A Retrospective” is a rare chance to see seven newly-restored films — including KRISTINA TALKING PICTURES, THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN and PRIVILEGE — by the pioneering lesbian feminist choreographer and filmmaker, still active and creating new dance work at age 88.
Mia Hansen-Løve
ONE FINE MORNING
2022, France, 112 min., in French with English subtitles
Film at Lincoln Center, new release in theaters
Sandra, a professional translator and single mother at a crossroads, is torn between romantic desire and familial tragedy in a complicated portrait that is a marvel of emotional and formal economy.
Davy Chou
RETURN TO SEOUL
2022, France / Belgium / Germany / Cambodia, 116 min.
in French, Korean and English with English subtitles
New release, in theaters
On an impulse to reconnect with her origins, Freddie, a 25 year old French adoptee, returns to her birth country South Korea for the first time. The headstrong young woman's search for her biological parents turns into a headlong journey into the unknown.
READ OUR REVIEW
Dorothy Arzner
WORKING GIRLS
1931, 77 min, 35mm
Anthology Film Archives
Part of "Working Girl(s)" series, February 25 – March 2
“[Arzner] was in the 1930s and 1940s the only woman directing in Hollywood, and her films offer a distinctively lesbian feminist view of American society. WORKING GIRLS is a brutally honest film, coming as it does at the height of the Depression, […] Arzner creates a fresh, compact, and decidedly female centered tale, which remains shockingly relevant even today.” (Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, SENSES OF CINEMA)
Maryam Touzani
THE BLUE CAFTAN
2022, 122 min., in Arabic with English subtitles
Film Forum, through March 2
Set in one of the oldest medinas in Salé, Morocco, this exquisite and deeply moving film illuminates the delicate craft of caftan-making, the profound love between a tailor and his wife, and the passionate attraction to a new assistant — in a country that criminalizes same-sex relationships.