MARCH AT HOME

Women’s Work: Essential Films By Female Filmmakers
now streaming

The ongoing struggle for a more equitable cinema of the future, in which male filmmakers don’t overwhelmingly dominate director’s chair assignments, can draw inspiration from the existence of a rich history of work by woman directors-a cross-section of which is on offer in this series. Here you’ll find a Weimar-era lesbian drama (Mädchen in Uniform), one of first feature-length dramas directed by an African American woman (Losing Ground), a tribute from Claire Denis to another towering female artist (Towards Mathilde), and many, many other landmark works drawn from the long alternative history of women’s cinema.

Series Includes:

2 Friends, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, All is Forgiven, Araya, Bridges Go Round, The Competition, Duet for Cannibals, Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami, Hannah Arendt, Home, It Felt Like Love, Losing Ground, Madchen in Uniform, Milla, Red Road, Songs My Brother Taught Me, Sweet Bean, Swept Away, Towards Mathilde, Unrelated, Variety

Two by Yorgos Lanthimos
now streaming

Before he started making English-language films-and became a name-brand arthouse auteur in the process-Yorgos Lanthimos was a charter member of the so-called “Greek Weird Wave.” Here you can see two films with interconnected motifs from his early, surly years: Kinetta, Lanthimos’s first solo directorial effort, about a trio of homicide recreators in the eponymous seaside town, and Alps, in which a group offer to perform the roles of the recently deceased to bereaved friends and relations.

Series Includes:

Alps, Kinetta

Three By Michael Almereyda
Now Streaming

A trio of lesser-seen works by the stubbornly independent, boundlessly curious, and always radically experimental Almereyda (Twister, Nadja, Tesla): William Eggleston in the Real World, a portrait of pioneer color art photographer and Memphis legend; Paradise, a sketchbook film made up of vignettes captured over the course of a decade of travel; and Escapes, Almereyda’s film on flamenco dancer, actor, Blade Runner screenwriter, and nonpareil raconteur Hampton Fancher.

Series Includes:

Escapes, Paradise, William Eggleston in the Real World

navigators
streaming march 8

Teichner’s tragicomic essay film describes the unlikely voyage of the ship dubbed the “Soviet Ark” which, five years after being used by the United States government to deport 249 radicals and anarchists, would become part of Buster Keaton’s 1924 comedy The Navigators.

Streaming Premiere!

influenza
now streaming

Completed by South Korean director Bong between Memories of Murder (2003) and The Host (2006) but never before released, Influenza captures the downward spiral of an unemployed 31-year-old man through Seoul’s omnipresent CCTVs and observation cameras.

Three By Lav Diaz
now streaming

Three meditative epics ruminating on the interconnection of past and present by Lav Diaz, “perhaps the world’s most celebrated Filipino filmmaker” (SlashFilm), in the director’s native Philippines. Featuring 2014’s From What is Before, a ravishingly gorgeous period piece set in a remote town during the days of the Marcos dictatorship that took home the prestigious Golden Leopard at Locarno; 2014’s Storm Children, Diaz’s observational documentary looking at the devastation wrought on one coastal town by typhoon Yolanda; and 2016’s The Day Before the End, an apocalyptic vision of climate catastrophe set in the year 2050.

Series Includes:

The Day Before the End, From What Is Before, Storm Children: Book One

a dog’s life
now streaming

Man’s best friend has been a pretty good pal to movies since at least the days of Rescued by Rover (1905), and in honor of all of our canine companions-good boys and girls, all-we’re bringing together two real life studies that honor them: Buddy, a poignant study of the bonds between service dogs and their owners, and Los Reyes, which observes life at a skate park in Santiago as seen by the eyes of Chola and Football, two mutts who live on its grounds.

Series Includes:

Buddy, Los Reyes

fireworks wednesday
now streaming

Rouhi (Taraneh Alidoosti), a young bride-to-be, is hired as a maid for an affluent family in Tehran. Upon arriving she is suddenly thrust into an explosive domestic conflict, in which the wife is convinced her husband is having an affair with a neighbor, and enlists Rouhi as a spy.

Paulo Rocha Restored
now streaming

Little known outside of his native Portugal, Paulo Rocha was one of the foremost figures of the Cinema Novo movement that blossomed in the nation at the beginning of the 1960s, a time that found Portuguese filmmakers absorbing the lessons of Italian Neorealism and the French Nouvelle Vague, and exploring new subjects and styles of storytelling. While Rocha died in 2012, his influence continues to be felt across Portuguese cinema, not least in the work of Pedro Costa, who oversaw the two restorations grouped together here.

Series Includes:

Change of Life, The Green Years

all the world’s a stage
now streaming

Writer/performer Okwui Okpokwasili offers intimate insight into her one-woman show about coming of age in the 1980s Bronx. A hill town in Tuscany prepares to perform its annual theatrical recreation of the life of the village. Residents of contemporary Bisbee, Arizona, re-enact the infamous, labor dispute-related “Bisbee Deportation” on its centennial. Three rigorously intelligent, thought-provoking films-Bronx Gothic, Spettacolo, and Bisbee ’17-that have as their subjects the performance of everyday life… and performance in everyday life.

Series Includes:

Bisbee ’17, Bronx Gothic, Spettacolo

Anna May Wong
now streaming

Born in Los Angeles in 1905 to second-generation Chinese American parents, Wong, facing the ingrained racism of Hollywood studios that preferred using white actors in “yellowface” to casting Asian talent, nevertheless managed to become a marquee star in the US and around the world. A sampling of standout films by this seductive and stylish diva, including early color production The Toll of the Sea (1922) and the flamboyantly shot, UK-made Piccadilly (1929), with introductions from Katie Gee Salisbury, author of the biography Not Your China Doll: The Wild and Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong.

Series Includes:

Chu Chin Chow, Piccadilly, The Toll of the Sea

Fireflies Press Presents
La Captive + Vertigo
March 30

Join Metrograph on Saturday, March 30 for the NYC launch of author and critic Christine Smallwood’s La Captive. Her lyrical monograph on Chantal Akerman’s film of the same name-an icy, absorbing study of monomaniacal erotic fixation, adapting the fifth volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time-is the latest title in Fireflies Press’ Decadent Editions series. Smallwood joins Metrograph for one night only, participating in a Q&A following a screening of Akerman’s newly restored film, and a Lobby Bar reception, where books will be available to be signed, before she introduces Alfred Hitchock’s Vertigo, a film which, in Smallwood’s words, “haunts every frame” of Akerman’s drama.