April In Theater 2024
APRIL IN THEATER
Novel Encounters: the films of lee chang-dong
opens April 5
Filmmaker, playwright, and novelist, Lee Chang-dong has been a vital force in South Korean culture since the publication of his first novel, Chonri, in 1983. After breaking into the film industry as the screenwriter (and assistant director) of Park Kwang-su’s 1993 To the Starry Island, Lee matriculated to the post of director with 1997’s Green Fish, and with that film and his five subsequent features, established himself as both a brilliantly understated delineator of character and a quietly outraged chronicler of the afflictions of South Korean society. With the US theatrical premieres of new 4K restorations available of four of Lee’s features—Green Fish, Peppermint Candy, Poetry, and Oasis—we survey the brilliant career of one of South Korea’s supreme artists… and one of its harshest critics.
Series Includes:
A Brand New Life - Burning - A Girl at My Door
Green Fish - Oasis -Peppermint Candy
Poetry - Secret Sunshine
On the Run in Paris
opens April 5
A warren of cell-like garret apartments, broad boulevards, and gently graded rooftops that one can, in a jam, run a hasty retreat across, Paris is a custom-made backdrop for films about characters clawing their way out of the corners they’ve been backed into. And you’ll see some spectacular retreats in this series, comprised of movies that follow the scent of hunted prey through the urban thickets of “Gay Paree”: casual cop-killer Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless, discombobulated visiting Yankee Harrison Ford in Frantic, and a host of other fraught fugitives seeking out a space of shadowy refuge and repose in the City of Lights.
Series Includes:
A View to a Kill - Breathless - Diva
Elevator to the Gallows - Frantic - Pierrot Le Fou
ACE Presents: Raising Arizona
April 6
The Coens’ second feature—edited by industry veteran Michael R. Miller, who would team up again with the brothers for Miller’s Crossing—introduced another aspect of their cinema, the caricatured comedies of garish colors and oversized, daffy performances. And who better to star in their first live-action cartoon than Nicolas Cage, whose jinxed ex-con H.I. “Hi” McDunnough is a flesh-and-blood Wile E. Coyote? Hi’s short-lived reform following his marriage to policewoman “Ed” (Holly Hunter) ends when he decides to kidnap the baby that infertile Edwina so desperately wants. Slapstick shenanigans ensue, but beneath the madness there’s always heart, as evident in the film’s rueful dream sequence coda, scored by frequent Coens collaborator Carter Burwell.
Q&A with Michael R. Miller, ACE, moderated by Jamie Kirkpatrick, ACE, on Saturday, April 6th
saturday afternoon cartoons: kids will be kids
April 6
Saturday Afternoon Cartoons is New York City’s prime theatrical showcase of early and classic animated cartoons, shown in vintage 16mm film prints from the personal archives of historian Tommy José Stathes. Beginning over 20 years ago as a casual effort to find and see early cartoons that were unavailable on home video, Stathes’s collection has grown to become perhaps one of the largest of its kind. It includes many titles and “orphan films” that are difficult to access or view elsewhere.
Stathes joins Metrograph in early April with Kids Will Be Kids, a selection of vintage animated shorts that highlight the trials and tribulations of being a human child in a cartoon world. Come enjoy an ornery little boy wreaking havoc with a steam shovel, bedtime stories with a surrealist flair, a little girl getting caught in the middle of a stage show magic act, a discipline lesson for parents during the child-rearing years, and more. Spanning the 1910s through to the ’50s, this assortment showcases classic characters such as Bobby Bumps, Dinky Doodle, Willie Whopper, Betty Boop, Popeye, Little Lulu, Little Audrey, and others.
Featuring an introduction from and Q&A with Tommy Stathes on Saturday, April 6th.
Somewhere Nice: Focus on Ena Sendijarević
opens April 12
Amsterdam-based Bosnian filmmaker Ena Sendijarević made a splash at the 2019 International Film Festival Rotterdam with her debut feature Take Me Somewhere Nice, a seductive drama of homecoming and sexual awakening, and with her follow-up, a surprising, slashing satire of colonial mores set in an Indonesian island in the waning years of Dutch colonialism, established herself as a young filmmaker who could be counted on for consistent verve and daring. We’ll be screening both of Sendijarević’s features to date, and also two films that provided inspiration for her work, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now: Final Cut and Juraj Herz’s The Cremator.
Introductions from Ena Sendijarević April 12 & 13
Series Includes:
Apocalypse Now: Final Cut - The Cremator - Sweet Dreams
Take Me Somewhere Nice
Sweet Dreams
Opens April 12
Set on an Indonesian island in the waning years of Dutch colonialism, Sendijarević’s sophomore feature is a stingingly sardonic satire observing decadence and moral decay on a sugar plantation, which is thrown into turmoil when, following the decease of its patriarch, it’s revealed that he willed the estate to his illegitimate son with his Indigenous housekeeper. A gorgeously shot study of truly ugly human behavior. “[Sendijarević] has established herself as a formidable talent with… a feel for the manicured, placid surfaces that contain rot and rebellion.”—Variety
Introduction and Q&A with filmmaker Ena Sendijarević, moderated by founder of The Future of Film is Female Caryn Coleman, on Friday, April 12th
Filmcraft: Frederick Elmes
Opens April 13
The MVP cinematographer in American independent cinema for more than 40 years running, Elmes is behind some of the most transcendent images in the films of such luminaries as David Lynch—an AFI Conservatory classmate—Jim Jarmusch, Ang Lee, and others. We bring together here six of Elmes’s most ravishing works, together with two of his chosen inspirations, Cries and Whispers (1972) and Tess (1979). An intuitive and endlessly resourceful artist, Elmes describes his approach thusly: “I don’t really have a filmmaking philosophy I live by, but in my favorite scene in Wild At Heart, Lula and Sailor, broke, on the run, and with only bad news on the radio, leave their car on the side of the road, dance wildly and embrace, silhouetted by the setting sun. In that fleeting moment, we relinquished control, relied on instinct, and captured the ineffable.”
Introductions and Q&As with Frederick Elmes April 13 & 14
Series Includes:
Blue Velvet - Cries and Whispers - The Ice Storm
The Namesake - Night on Earth - River’s Edge
Tess - Wild at Heart
Liu Jian x2
Opens April 26
In a contemporary cinematic landscape clogged with mawkish lookalike, high-sheen CGI animations, Chinese filmmaker Liu Jian’s meticulously hand-drawn, searchingly intelligent works are a bracing gust of fresh air. To watch Liu’s films—we’ll be screening his noir odyssey Have a Nice Day and his playful, philosophical period piece Art College 1994—is to be in the presence of a master craftsman, a first-rate mind, and a shot in the arm for any lover of animation suffering from Pixar fatigue.
Series Includes:
Art College 1994 - Have a Nice Day
art college 1994
Opens April 26
Based on its director’s own experiences on the campus of the Chinese Southern Academy of Arts in the mid-1990s, Art College 1994, which returns to the meticulous hand-drawn 2D animation style of predecessor Have a Nice Day, is Liu’s affectionate, bittersweet group portrait of a pack of would-be geniuses preparing to revolutionize the arts when not locked into impassioned conversations about grunge and Van Gogh, its ensemble cast of characters voiced by a line-up of talent that includes directors Bi Gan and Jia Zhangke, as well as Metrograph retrospective subject Wang Hongwei. A shaggy, Slacker-ish tale from the pre-millennium Middle Kingdom.
garrett bradley: devotion
April 27 & 28
To mark MIT Press’s publication of Devotion, an extensively illustrated new book-length study of the socially engaged, formally trailblazing, beautifully nuanced docufiction cinema and installation art of Garrett Bradley, Metrograph welcomes Bradley—and a host of special guest filmmakers and artists who will join her for a panel discussion—for a retrospective of her potent body of work, including several little-screened early shorts and her revelatory, Academy Award-nominated Time—which made her the first Black woman to win Best Director in Sundance’s US documentary category.
Introductions from Garrett Bradley April 27
Pre-screening panel discussion with Garrett Bradley, Sky Hopinka, Linda Goode Bryant, Alexandra Bell and Samora Pinderhughes April 28
Series Includes:
Alone - America - Negro A-Limo
Devi + Conversation with Garrett Bradley & Friends - Time