Focused on pivotal moments in the lives of women, the films of trailblazing feminist director Joyce Chopra were among the first in American cinema to give authentic expression to the intimate experiences of female adolescence, sexual awakening, and motherhood. Presented in conjunction with the re...

One of the most revelatory voices to emerge from the postwar explosion of international art-house cinema, Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman was a master storyteller who startled the world with his stark intensity and naked pursuit of the most profound metaphysical and spiritual questions. The struggl...

With her brilliant feature debut, NANNY—winner of the 2022 Sundance Grand Jury Prize—garnering acclaim, now is the perfect time to discover the smartly stylish short films of writer-director Nikyatu Jusu. By turns irreverent, provocative, powerful, and unsettling, these films—all centered on comp...

One of contemporary cinema’s most singular and captivating voices, Jane Campion brings a piercing psychological insight and radiantly expressive visual style to her intense, revelatory explorations of female subjectivity and desire. After winning critical acclaim for her first two theatrical feat...

A lifelong cinephile, François Truffaut first made his mark as a fiery, contentious critic for “Cahiers du cinéma” in the 1950s, denouncing the French film industry’s bloated “tradition of quality” and calling for the director to be redefined as the individual author of their films. It wasn’t lon...

Director, writer, composer, actor, and one-man creative revolutionary Melvin Van Peebles jolted American independent cinema to new life with his explosive stylistic energy and unfiltered expression of Black consciousness. Though he undeniably altered the course of film history with the anarchic S...

Described by Alain Resnais as “the prototype of the twenty-first-century man,” French cine-essayist and multimedia visionary Chris Marker always seemed prophetically ahead of his time—so much so that even now, one hundred years after his birth, his playful, philosophical, and deeply personal rumi...

Portuguese cinematic poet Pedro Costa makes uncompromising, seemingly daunting works that, on the surface, appear rigorously spare. Look closer, however, and they reveal untold depths of human feeling and some of the most sublime images in contemporary cinema. Frequently working with nonprofessio...

No one makes movies like Claire Denis, one of contemporary cinema’s foremost masters. Raised in colonial West Africa, Denis apprenticed as an assistant to Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders before striking out on her own in the late eighties in an entirely original cinematic language shaped by her outs...

The greatest directorial partnership in film history, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger gave a much-needed jolt of expressionistic exuberance to the British cinema. While the quintessentially English Powell and the European sophisticate Pressburger may have made an unlikely duo, their contras...

Startling, subversive, and explosively controversial, the films of Ethiopian-born Greek iconoclast Nico Papatakis have long been frustratingly hard to see, but they constitute one of the most radical and neglected bodies of work in all of European cinema. A man of the world who rubbed shoulders w...

Toronto-based filmmaker Sophy Romvari’s intimate, essayistic shorts muse on family, grief, femininity, and humans’ relationships with animals, often with exquisitely touching vulnerability. Deeply personal—she frequently appears in her own films and incorporates her own family’s history and photo...

Maverick director Juzo Itami didn’t direct his first feature—the alternately bawdy and bittersweet satire THE FUNERAL—until the age of fifty, but it announced the arrival of a fully formed sensibility unafraid of skewering the most sensitive aspects of Japanese society. Though his follow-up, the ...

The most celebrated Japanese filmmaker of all time, Akira Kurosawa produced a staggering body of work that stands as a monument of artistic achievement. Though best known for samurai epics like SEVEN SAMURAI and YOJIMBO, his intimate, contemporary-set dramas, such as IKIRU and HIGH AND LOW, are j...

A founder of the French New Wave who became an international art-house icon, Agnès Varda was a fiercely independent, restlessly curious visionary whose work was at once personal and passionately committed to the world around her. In an abundant career in which she never stopped expanding the noti...

Though Michelangelo Antonioni worked throughout the forties (on short documentaries like N.U., about street cleaners in Rome) and fifties (directing his first fiction features, including the penetrating study of bourgeois Italian life LE AMICHE), it was in the 1960s that he became a major force i...

One of the most acclaimed Japanese directors of all time, Hiroshi Teshigahara distinguished himself in the 1960s with a series of sinuous, atmospheric, and daring films. With enigmatic art-house touchstones like the existential ghost story PITFALL, the shocking erotic fable WOMAN IN THE DUNES, an...

Trailblazing independent filmmaker Kathleen Collins was just forty-six at the time of her sudden death, but she left behind a rich legacy as a writer, academic, and filmmaker. This program presents her masterpiece LOSING GROUND, a perceptive portrait of a marriage at a crossroads, alongside the s...

The formally adventurous and psychologically intricate films of renowned Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan unfold according to complex, time-scrambling structures that heighten their searing emotional impact. Exploring issues of identity (including his own Armenian heritage), loss, alienation, and tech...

Poised delicately between fiction and documentary, the poignant, self-reflexive films of Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami illuminate complex human truths with elegant and playfully deceptive simplicity. Beginning his career at the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults...

In the wake of the Spanish Civil War, Luis García Berlanga revitalized his country’s film industry by puncturing the sanctimony of Franco-era culture. Though less well-known internationally than his iconoclastic compatriot Luis Buñuel or his filmmaking disciple Pedro Almodóvar, Berlanga—who would...

Overlooked for too long, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (1925–1987) should be seen as one of the most important and influential figures in the development of African cinema. Born in Benin and later based in Senegal, Vieyra was one of the first Black Africans to direct a film, AFRICA ON THE SEINE, a movin...

One of cinema’s great iconoclasts and mischief makers, Spanish master Luis Buñuel combined surrealist non sequiturs with taboo-shattering attacks on the bourgeoisie, the church, and social hypocrisy to create some of the most incendiary films of the twentieth century. Perpetually on the cutting e...

The boy wonder who became the great, wandering titan of international cinema, writer-director-actor and all-around force of nature Orson Welles began his filmmaking career with some of the most dazzling and innovative opuses ever made within the Hollywood studio system—but his vision was always t...