FILM SERIES
Recent Restorations
Fourteen masterpieces arrive on the big screen this summer for our annual festival of new restorations yet to play BAM. This year’s program brings together breakthrough triumphs by Claire Denis and Peter Greenaway, well-known favorites by Bernardo Bertolucci, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, and Wim Wenders, pathbreaking works by Yvonne Rainer and Cauleen Smith, and Krzysztof Kieślowski’s full Three Colors trilogy.
In Claire Denis’ stunning and deeply personal debut feature, the eight-year-old daughter of a French bureaucrat gradually awakens to the racial, social, and sexual tensions that surround her in 1950s Cameroon.
Irène Jacob won Best Actress at Cannes for her mesmerizing dual performances in Kieślowski’s enigmatic, existential drama about two unrelated, physically- identical women living separate lives in Poland and France.
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s neon-splashed reverie is a dreamlike drift through the night world of early 2000s Taipei as a wayward bar hostess is caught between a jealously possessive boyfriend and a kindly gangster.
A drug-dealing dropout decides to live in a flourishing garden located in an abandoned industrial site in this anticapitalist rejoinder to the “economic bubble” culture of the 1980s.
Orson Welles inventively adapts Franz Kafka’s classic novel about Josef K. (Anthony Perkins), a lowly office worker who is relentlessly pursued for an unspecified crime until even he is unsure of his innocence.
Juliette Binoche delivers one of her most revelatory performances as a woman attempting to start a new life unencumbered by emotional attachments in the first film of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s landmark trilogy.
Krzysztof Kieślowski’s swan song is the grand conclusion to his historic Three Colors trilogy and an iridescent, life-affirming meditation on fate and the whims of human nature.
In the lone comedy of his famed Three Colors trilogy, Krzysztof Kieślowski creates a caustic allegory of post-communist Poland, centered around a hapless Polish immigrant determined to get back to his homeland.
In one of her most complex works, Yvonne Rainer concocts a genre-busting, autobiographical meta-film that interrogates memory, gender dynamics, and the reductive manner in which women’s stories are too often told.
Upon his release from prison, a small-time crook happens upon a go-go dancer who bears an uncanny resemblance to the long-lost love who mysteriously vanished years before.
Wim Wenders’ sublime, Palme d’Or-winning road movie traverses the mythic landscapes of the American Southwest as Harry Dean Stanton’s amnesiac desert drifter searches for his estranged wife (Nastassja Kinski).
One of the most visually ravishing films ever made, Bernardo Bertolucci’s international breakthrough was this landmark political thriller starring Jean-Louis Trintignant as a tormented assassin.
The remarkable debut feature from multimedia artist Cauleen Smith is a feminist murder mystery-buddy movie-romance in which a young photographer (Toby Smith) sets out to document her community’s Black men.
In Peter Greenaway’s gleefully perverse breakthrough feature, an aristocratic wife commissions a young draughtsman to sketch 12 drawings of her husband’s property in exchange for one sexual favor per picture.