IndependentFilm.com

Monday, May 11
 

6:00pm           6:00PM Incense (Xiang Huo) 2003. China. Written and directed by Ning Hao. With Li Qiang. An unassuming monk in a tiny rural village is devastated to discover that his modest temple’s only Buddha statue is broken. When the world seems to conspire against restoring his treasure, desperation causes him to try anything to get some cash, even if it means abandoning the principles he holds dearest. With an authentic feeling for the tragicomic everyday struggles of people living on the margins of China’s fast-paced economic and social transformation, Incense’s darkly comic morality tale surprises at every turn. In Mandarin, English subtitles. 98 min.
 

Flower in the Pocket 2007. Malaysia. Written and directed by Liew Seng Tat. With Wong Zi Jiang, Lim Ming Wei, and James Lee. Already roundly considered one of the finest movies to come out of Malaysia, Liew's debut is deceptively light: a puckish coming-of-age comedy about two young brothers and a neglectful father. Using long, naturalistic takes that recall the work of Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami, Liew captures the everyday lives of the young rovers on their own, flunking school, cooking dinner, and meeting friends (and a puppy). Yet Liew uses his wry observational style not only to offer a portrait of two mischievous kids, but also to ground his increasingly surreal touches in the dramatic context of an ever-evolving modern-day Malaysia. In Mandarin/Malay; English subtitles. 97 min.
Part of the ContemporAsian film exhibition
 

 
7:00pm            An Evening with Aernout Mik
On the occasion of the MoMA exhibition Aernout Mik, the first U.S. museum survey of the artist's work, Modern Mondays presents a virtual tour of the eight works spread throughout the Museum. Mik designs, sculpts, and builds constructions that both contain his moving images and engage the body of the spectator, creating a kinesthetic relationship between viewer and viewed. These moving-image installations uniquely meld filmmaking, sculpture, and architecture into an experience that is at once compelling, unsettling, and original. Following a presentation by Laurence Kardish, organizer of the exhibition, Mik will participate in a conversation with MoMA Director Glenn Lowry.
                              Part of MoMA’s Modern Mondays

8:00pm            La Vie miraculeuse de Thérèse Martin 1929. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Julien Duvivier, Thérèse de Lisieux. With Simone Bourday, André Marnay. "The most authentic of Duvivier's religious films, this is a stark and striking biographical account of the late-nineteenth-century Carmelite nun who died at age twenty-four and was canonized. Bourday has genuine adolescent fervor as Theresa and Marnay is pathetically fine as her father. The sequence of the taking of the veil has extraordinary documentary force. The same material inspired Alain Cavalier's 1986 masterpiece Thérèse" (Lenny Borger). Silent, with piano accompaniment. Approx. 113 min.
Part of the Julien Duvivier film exhibition
 

Wednesday, May 13
 

1:30pm            Sunset 1967. USA. Directed by Andy Warhol. Warhol was commissioned by Texas art patrons Jean and Dominique de Menil to produce a series of filmed sunsets for a chapel at the 1968 San Antonio Hemisfair. Although the project was never completed, Warhol included the footage, shot in California, in **** (Four Stars). 33 min.
 

Imitation of Christ 1967–69. USA. Directed by Andy Warhol. With Brigid Polk, Ondine, Patrick Tilden. This unmitigated Warholian adventure of a prodigal son and a hobo on a pilgrimage in San Francisco, filmed in New York City and California, was inspired by Thomas à Kempis’s fifteenth-century religious tome Imitatione Christi. 85 min.
Part of The West: Myth, Character, and Reinvention by Andy Warhol film exhibition
 

 
4:00pm            Runaway 2001. Great Britain. Directed by Kim Longinotto, Ziba Mir-Hosseini. This powerful, heartbreaking documentary focuses on young runaway girls who find temporary refuge in a women’s shelter in Tehran. “The sisterly feelings of the girls towards each other, their spiritual strength, their courage to rebel, and their wit are shown with a great degree of compassion and empathy.... The filmmakers have beautifully criticized the patriarchal system of family and the destructive power of male family members over the lives of their daughters and sisters" (Mehrnaz Saeed, Colombia College). In Farsi; English subtitles. 87 min.
Part of the Kim Longinotto Retrospective
 

 
4:30pm            David Golder 1930. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Julien Duvivier, based on the novel by Irène Némirovsky. With Harry Baur, Jackie Monnier, Paule Andral. Duvivier's first sound film catapulted him to world renown. Duvivier’s first sound film catapulted him to world renown. In this operatic adaptation of the controversial novel by Némirovsky, Baur gives a wrenching performance as an immigrant Jewish tycoon who makes money the ruthless and vengeful way, but ends up bitterly betrayed by his scheming wife and daughter. Exposing man’s rank instincts for hatred, duplicity, and greed, Duvivier shows an unflinching pessimism that would also distinguish later films like La Fin du jour and Panique. The Nazi murders of Némirovsky and Baur—she in Auschwitz in 1942, and he by the Gestapo in Paris a year later—deepen the film's tragic dimensions. In French; English subtitles. 86 min.
Part of the Julien Duvivier film exhibition
 

 
7:00pm            Gaea Girls 2000. Great Britain/Japan. Directed by Kim Longinotto, Jano Williams. “This fascinating film follows the physically grueling and mentally exhausting training regimen of several young wannabe Gaea Girls, a group of Japanese women wrestlers. The idea of them may seem like a total oxymoron in a country where women are usually regarded as docile and subservient. However, in training and in the arena, the female wrestlers depicted in this film are just as violent as any member of the World Wrestling Federation, and the blood that’s drawn is very real indeed.” (Chicago Film Festival). In Japanese; English subtitles. 106 min.
Part of the Kim Longinotto Retrospective
 

 
8:00pm            Au bonheur des dames 1930. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Noël Renard, based on the novel by Émile Zola. With Dita Parlo, Pierre de Guingand, Armand Bour. Duvivier's final silent film is a modern retelling of Zola's panoramic chronicle of mid-nineteenth-century Parisian society, centering on a small fabric shop struggling to survive in the shadow of a luxury department store. With expressionistic shades of Erich von Stroheim and G. W. Pabst (Duvivier worked for a time in the German film industry),Au bonheur captures the rhythms of urban life—and the pleasures of bourgeois consumer culture, with its obsessions with fashion and image—while also creating a stinging portrait of capitalist ruthlessness, class tensions, and sexual competition. In French; English subtitles. Approx. 85 min.
Part of the Julien Duvivier film exhibition
 

Thursday, May 14
 

1:30pm            Bike Boy 1967. USA. Directed by Andy Warhol. Cinematography by Paul Morrissey. With Joe Spencer, Ingrid Superstar. A hunky motorcyclist has just arrived in New York City from a long ride beginning in California. The women he encounters are attracted to the fetishism of his cycle gear and his staggering physical beauty. 109 min.
Part of The West: Myth, Character, and Reinvention by Andy Warhol film exhibition
 

 
4:00pm            Dream Girls 1993. Great Britain. Directed by Kim Longinotto, Jano Williams. The Takarazuka Revue is a wildly popular musical theater company in Japan in which young women are trained to play all the male and female roles. Thousands of girls apply each year to enter the male-run Takarazuka Music School; the few who are accepted endure years of a reclusive and highly disciplined existence before they can join the Revue. Dream Girls offers compelling insight into gender, sexual identity, and the cultural contradictions experienced by Japanese women today. In Japanese; English subtitles. 50 min.
 

Shinjuku Boys 1995. Great Britain. Directed by Kim Longinotto, Jano Williams. This remarkable documentary about female sexuality in Japan follows the lives of three onnabe—Japanese women who live as men and have girlfriends—who work as hosts at the New Marilyn Club in Tokyo. As the film follows them at home and on the job, all three talk frankly about their gender-bending lives, revealing their views about women, sex, transvestitism, and lesbianism. Alternating with these illuminating interviews are fabulous sequences shot inside the club, which is patronized almost exclusively by heterosexual women who have become disenchanted with biological males. In Japanese; English subtitles. 53 min.
Part of the Kim Longinotto Retrospective
 

 
4:30pm            La Fin du jour 1938. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Julien Duvivier, Charles Spaak. With Victor Francen, Michael Simon, Louis Jouvet. One of French cinema’s most poignant, and caustic, portraits of the world of theater. Duvivier, who attempted (with little success) to be an actor on the French stage in the 1910s, collaborated with longtime screenwriting partner Spaak on this story of an old-age home for destitute, forgotten actors who wistfully relive their past triumphs and defeats. Giving credence to Jean-Luc Godard's claim that in the theater there is life, and in life, theater, Duvivier masterfully contrasts the illusory world of the stage with the cold reality of life—and death—off it. In keeping with the film's elegiac tone, Simon, Jouvet, Francen and other great French actors performing at the peak of their careers, show astonishing subtlety, intelligence, and pathos. In French; English subtitles. 100 min.
Part of the Julien Duvivier film exhibition
 

 
7:00pm            The Good Wife of Tokyo 1992. Great Britain. Directed by Kim Longinotto, Claire Hunt. Kazuko Hohki returns to Tokyo with her punk band, the Frank Chickens, after living in England for fifteen years. She brings along her English boyfriend to appease her marriage-obsessed mother, a priest in The House of Development, a Japanese religious sect popular among women. The film juxtaposes Kazuko’s vibrant lifestyle with that of other women living with older, more traditional values. In Japanese; English subtitles. 52 min.
 

Eat the Kimono 1989. Great Britain. Directed by Kim Longinotto, Claire Hunt. Hanayagi Genshu, a Japanese feminist and avant-garde dancer and performer, has spent her life defying her conservative culture’s contempt for independence and unconventionality. She dismissed death threats made against her by right-wing groups, and she denounced Emperor Hirohito, during his lifetime, as a war criminal. "You mustn’t be eaten by the kimono," says Genshu, referring to the traditional Japanese dress designed to restrict women's movements, "You must eat the kimono, and gobble it up." In Japanese; English subtitles. 60 min.
Part of the Kim Longinotto Retrospective
 

 
8:00pm            Un Carnet de bal 1937. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Julien Duvivier, Henri Jeanson, Yves Mirande, Jean Sarment, Pierre Wolff, Bernard Zimmer. With Françoise Rosay, Harry Baur, Louis Jouvet, Raimu, Fernandel, Pierre Blanchar, Pierre Richard-Willm. In the first and greatest of all Duvivier's sketch films, a rich widow seeks to discover the fates of the suitors she danced with as a young woman at her first ball. As Graham Greene marveled in his 1937 review, the mood of melancholy nostalgia gives way to farce, tragedy, menace, and then pure annihilating misery as she reunites with a village mayor, a gangster, a priest, the mother of a suicide victim, and an epileptic abortionist: "The padded and opulent emotions wither before the evil detail: the camera shoots at a slant so that the [abortionist’s] dingy flat rears like a sinking ship…. Genuine poverty is in Duvivier's Marseilles flat—the tin surgical basin, the antiseptic soap, the mechanical illegality and the complete degradation." In French; English subtitles. 130 min.
Part of the Julien Duvivier film exhibition
 

Friday, May 15
 

1:30pm            Sunset 1967. USA. Directed by Andy Warhol. Warhol was commissioned by Texas art patrons Jean and Dominique de Menil to produce a series of filmed sunsets for a chapel at the 1968 San Antonio Hemisfair. Although the project was never completed, Warhol included the footage, shot in California, in **** (Four Stars). 33 min.
 

Imitation of Christ 1967–69. USA. Directed by Andy Warhol. With Brigid Polk, Ondine, Patrick Tilden. This unmitigated Warholian adventure of a prodigal son and a hobo on a pilgrimage in San Francisco, filmed in New York City and California, was inspired by Thomas à Kempis’s fifteenth-century religious tome Imitatione Christi. 85 min.
Part of The West: Myth, Character, and Reinvention by Andy Warhol film exhibition
 

 
4:00pm            Hidden Faces 1990. Great Britain. Directed by Kim Longinotto, Clare Hunt. With Safaa Fathay. Fathay, a young Egyptian woman living in Paris, returns to her homeland to interview the famed feminist writer and activist Nawal El Saadawi and to explore the role of women in Egyptian society. Passages from El Saadawi’s writings mirror and expand upon what Fathay discovers during her journey from El Saadawi’s compound to her own family home. This absorbing reflection of women’s lives in Egypt reveals a complex and often contradictory reading of religious principles, societal expectations, and male and female realities and desire. 52 min.
 

Divorce Iranian Style 1998. Great Britain. Directed by Kim Longinotto, Ziba Mir-Hosseini. Along with Mir-Hosseini, author ofMarriage on Trial: A Study of Islamic Family Law, Longinotto was granted permission to film in one Tehran divorce court over several weeks. Their camera provides a transparent window into the customs surrounding Iranian divorce—an outcome that is discouraged by the court no matter the circumstances. Alternately humorous, tragic, and emotionally stirring, the film follows couples and their extended families as they strive to arrive at a solution amid biased laws, contradictory administrative policies, and harsh cultural restrictions. 80 min.
Part of the Kim Longinotto Retrospective
 

 
4:30pm            Pot-Bouille 1957. France/Italy. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Julien Duvivier, Léo Joannon, Henri Jeanson. With Gérard Philipe, Danielle Darrieux, Dany Carrel, Anouk Aimée. "A scintillating satire of the discrete charms of the French bourgeoisie under the Second Empire. Returning nearly thirty years later to Zola for his inspiration, Duvivier fashions a sardonic comedy that often whirs like a Feydeau farce. The sterling cast is headed by Gérard Philipe as a young provincial on the make in Paris, and Danielle Darrieux as the owner of the drapery shop where he finds employment. Arguably Duvivier’s last major artistic success" (Lenny Borger). In French; English subtitles. 115 min.
Part of the Julien Duvivier film exhibition
 

 
8:00pm            La Fin du jour 1938. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Julien Duvivier, Charles Spaak. With Victor Francen, Michael Simon, Louis Jouvet. One of French cinema’s most poignant, and caustic, portraits of the world of theater. Duvivier, who attempted (with little success) to be an actor on the French stage in the 1910s, collaborated with longtime screenwriting partner Spaak on this story of an old-age home for destitute, forgotten actors who wistfully relive their past triumphs and defeats. Giving credence to Jean-Luc Godard's claim that in the theater there is life, and in life, theater, Duvivier masterfully contrasts the illusory world of the stage with the cold reality of life—and death—off it. In keeping with the film's elegiac tone, Simon, Jouvet, Francen and other great French actors performing at the peak of their careers, show astonishing subtlety, intelligence, and pathos. In French; English subtitles. 100 min.
Part of the Julien Duvivier film exhibition
 

Saturday, May 16
 

1:30pm            Pépé le Moko 1937. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Henri La Barthe, Julien Duvivier. With Jean Gabin, Mireille Balin, Marcel Dalio. Duvivier’s most influential film stars Gabin as a suave Parisian jewel thief who eludes capture by taking refuge in the Casbah—the mysterious, labyrinthine quarter of Algiers that embodies the exotic, and erotic, Arabian nights of our colonialist imagination. Graham Greene rhapsodized, "I cannot remember [a picture] which has succeeded so admirably in raising the thriller to a poetic level," and French film critic André Bazin observed, "With Gabin…death is, after all, at the end of the adventure, implacably awaiting its appointment. The fate of Gabin is precisely to be duped by life." In French; English subtitles. 94 min.
Part of the Julien Duvivier film exhibition
 

 
4:00pm            Divorce Iranian Style 1998. Great Britain. Directed by Kim Longinotto, Ziba Mir-Hosseini. Along with Mir-Hosseini, author of Marriage on Trial: A Study of Islamic Family Law, Longinotto was granted permission to film in one Tehran divorce court over several weeks. Their camera provides a transparent window into the customs surrounding Iranian divorce—an outcome that is discouraged by the court no matter the circumstances. Alternately humorous, tragic, and emotionally stirring, the film follows couples and their extended families as they strive to arrive at a solution amid biased laws, contradictory administrative policies, and harsh cultural restrictions. 80 min.
Part of the Kim Longinotto Retrospective
 

 
5:00pm            Au bonheur des dames 1930. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Noël Renard, based on the novel by Émile Zola. With Dita Parlo, Pierre de Guingand, Armand Bour. Duvivier's final silent film is a modern retelling of Zola's panoramic chronicle of mid-nineteenth-century Parisian society, centering on a small fabric shop struggling to survive in the shadow of a luxury department store. With expressionistic shades of Erich von Stroheim and G. W. Pabst (Duvivier worked for a time in the German film industry),Au bonheur captures the rhythms of urban life—and the pleasures of bourgeois consumer culture, with its obsessions with fashion and image—while also creating a stinging portrait of capitalist ruthlessness, class tensions, and sexual competition. In French; English subtitles. Approx. 85 min.
Part of the Julien Duvivier film exhibition
 

 
7:30pm            Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go 2007. Great Britain. Directed by Kim Longinotto. A look inside Oxfordshire’s Mulberry Bush School, founded by psychologist Barbara Dockar-Drysdale to care for children suffering through severe emotional trauma. “Longinotto spent a year filming these children, who are prone to sudden, violent outbursts, and their teachers, who display enormous restraint and sensitivity. The children’s problems are real, deep, and stubborn—but the long arc of recovery is clear, with hope for these troubled children just over the horizon. ... [Longinotto] and her steady, unobtrusive camera capture an intimate and unforgettable tale of the human capacity to hurt and to heal” (Jason Silverman, True/False Film Festival). 100 min.
Part of the Kim Longinotto Retrospective
 

 
8:00pm            Pot-Bouille 1957. France/Italy. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Julien Duvivier, Léo Joannon, Henri Jeanson. With Gérard Philipe, Danielle Darrieux, Dany Carrel, Anouk Aimée. "A scintillating satire of the discrete charms of the French bourgeoisie under the Second Empire. Returning nearly thirty years later to Zola for his inspiration, Duvivier fashions a sardonic comedy that often whirs like a Feydeau farce. The sterling cast is headed by Gérard Philipe as a young provincial on the make in Paris, and Danielle Darrieux as the owner of the drapery shop where he finds employment. Arguably Duvivier’s last major artistic success" (Lenny Borger). In French; English subtitles. 115 min.
Part of the Julien Duvivier film exhibition
 

Sunday, May 17
 

2:00pm            Pride of Place 1976. Great Britain. Codirected by Dorothea Gazidis, Kim Longinotto. At the age of seventeen, Longinotto ran away from a girls’ boarding school in an isolated castle in Buckinghamshire. In this dark and expressive documentary, the director depicts her former school from the students’ perspective, following their daily routines and exposing the severe punishments of the school’s headmistress. One year after the release of the film, the school was closed down. With Pride of Place, Longinotto set the tone for a long career of films in which individuals revolt against oppressive authorities and stifling traditions. New York premiere. 60 min.
 

Theatre Girls 1978. Great Britain. Directed by Kim Longinotto, Claire Pollak. This cinéma vérité documentary captures the gritty daily life of destitute women at the Theatre Girls Club in Soho, London—the only shelter in London that takes in homeless women at any time of day or night. Drinking binges, severe withdrawal, mental breakdowns, and skirmishes are everyday realities for the women who live there. The filmmakers lived in the hostel for several months, capturing the daily rounds of explosive meals, conversations, and encounters with the staff. 56 min.
Part of the Kim Longinotto Retrospective
 

 
2:30pm            The Great Waltz 1938. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Samuel Hoffenstein, Walter Reisch. With Luise Rainer, Fernand Gravet, Miliza Korjus. Duvivier made his Hollywood debut with this opulent MGM musical about the romantic early years of composer Johann Strauss II[, written by the émigrés Gottfried Reinhardt and Samuel Hoffenstein and gorgeously photographed by the Oscar-winning Joseph Ruttenberg. Attempting to capture the lilting rhythms and charms of Strauss's waltzes and operas (set here to lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and performed by the Viennese-born soprano diva Miliza Korjus), Duvivier moved from lavish set piece to lavish set piece, in the café, the garden, the palace, and the opera house—leading one critic to call the film "a symphony in soft focus"—before Josef von Sternberg stepped in to direct the wonderfully kitschy final sequence, the carriage ride through the Viennese woods during which Strauss was inspired by birdsong to write The Blue Danube. Incidentally, The Great Waltzis said to have been a favorite of Stalin's. In French; English subtitles. 103 min.
Part of the Julien Duvivier film exhibition
 

 
5:00pm            Sisters in Law 2005. Cameroon/Great Britain. Codirected by Kim Longinotto, Florence Ayisi. In the small town of Kumba, Cameroon, there has not been a conviction in a spousal abuse case in seventeen years. But State Prosecutor Vera Ngassa and Court President Beatrice Ntuba are determined to better their community—and perhaps change their country in the process. A real-life cross between TV’s Judge Judy and The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, this fascinating, sometimes hilarious documentary follows the two women as they help victims fight difficult cases of abuse despite pressures from family and their community to remain silent. Winner of the Prix Art et Essai at the Cannes Film Festival. In Pidgin English; English subtitles. 104 min
Part of the Kim Longinotto Retrospective
 

 
5:30pm            Anna Karenina 1948. Great Britain. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Jean Anouilh, Julien Duvivier, Guy Morgan. With Vivien Leigh, Ralph Richardson, Kieron Moore. "The multiplicity of pronunciations of Karenina by various people is a trifle distracting," a Variety reviewer observed in 1948, in one of many critical drubbings of the film. And yet Duvivier's screen adaptation of Tolstoy's novel, one of British producer Alexander Korda's most lavish postwar productions (and biggest flops), has its irresistible pleasures: the great Henri Alekan's moodily atmospheric cinematography, Russian designer Andrej Andrejew's set designs, Cecil Beaton's costumes, Richardson's magisterial Karenin, and Leigh’s desperate performance as the doomed heroine. 139 min.
Part of the Julien Duvivier film exhibition
 

Monday, May 18
 

7:00pm            An Evening with Gulnara Kasmalieva and Murtabek Djumaliev
 

Based in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and trained in both film and visual art, Gulnara Kasmalieva and Murtabek Djumaliev produce video installations that encapsulate everyday life in Central Asia, and their work has been exhibited at The Art Institute of Chicago (2007), the Venice and Singapore biennials, and Winkleman Gallery, New York. Shot along the ancient Silk Road connecting China and Kyrgyzstan with Western markets, the artists' videos portray the resourcefulness that defines this mountainous, poverty-stricken region. In conjunction with Asia Art Week, this program includes their Algorithm of Survival and Hope (2005), along with other recent work.
Part of MoMA’s Modern Mondays

8:00pm            Pépé le Moko 1937. France. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Henri La Barthe, Julien Duvivier. With Jean Gabin, Mireille Balin, Marcel Dalio. Duvivier’s most influential film stars Gabin as a suave Parisian jewel thief who eludes capture by taking refuge in the Casbah—the mysterious, labyrinthine quarter of Algiers that embodies the exotic, and erotic, Arabian nights of our colonialist imagination. Graham Greene rhapsodized, "I cannot remember [a picture] which has succeeded so admirably in raising the thriller to a poetic level," and French film critic André Bazin observed, "With Gabin…death is, after all, at the end of the adventure, implacably awaiting its appointment. The fate of Gabin is precisely to be duped by life." In French; English subtitles. 94 min.
Part of the Julien Duvivier film exhibition
 

 
Public Information:     The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019
 

Hours:                         Films are screened Wednesday-Monday. For screening schedules, please visit www.moma.org.
 

Film Admission:          $10 adults; $8 seniors, 65 years and over with I.D. $6 full-time students with current I.D. (For admittance to film programs only.) The price of a film ticket may be applied toward the price of a Museum admission ticket when a film ticket stub is presented at the Lobby Information Desk within 30 days of the date on the stub (does not apply during Target Free Friday Nights, 4:00–8:00 p.m.). Admission is free for Museum members and for Museum ticketholders.

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Please note that all times are subject to change.