February In Theater
FEBRUARY IN THEATER
Filmcraft: Bradford Young, ASC
opens February 3
One of today’s most sought after cinematographers, Louisville-born Bradford Young, ASC comes to 7 Ludlow, presenting three films that showcase his sensitive, striking lens work together with three of his personal filmic inspirations.
Series Includes:
Mother of George - Babylon - Ain’t Them Bodies Saints
Kes - The Yards- A Most Violent Year
Arrival
Strange Fruit
opens February 5
“To commemorate Black History Month, Strange Fruit collects a handful of unusual, eclectic and incendiary movies—one from each decade, starting roughly at the end of the silent era through to the end of the Vietnam War—that, for one reason or several, hardly feel like they should exist. From Depression-era Christianist propaganda as high camp to a forgotten blackface-ridden comedic re-imagining of the first abolitionist lit classic to a Midwestern American Negro’s paean to Second City alienation as translated by a Frenchman in Argentina, these are movies that normally don’t make the Black Exceptionalist highlight reel but should.”—Brandon Harris, author of Making Rent in Bed-Stuy, Amazon Studios refugee, producer of things at I’d Watch That.
Series Includes:
Is That Black Enough For You?!? - The Learning Tree - Passing Through
Native Son - Hellbound Train / The Blood of Jesus - Topsy and Eva
Handmade Horror
OPENS February 10
Obsession is at the heart of horror cinema, a cinema of monomaniacal maniacs, recurring nightmares, and slumbering ancient evils awakened thanks to insatiable curiosity. It only stands to reason, then, that certain horror films would themselves be the product of obsession: Anna Biller involved herself in every step of the elaborate production design of The Love Witch, and because of this you can almost feel her fingerprints on every frame of the film, which appears every bit as painstakingly fussed over and meticulously designed as the Quay Brothers’ dark, atmospheric stop-motion productions. A series celebrating horror films born of the pursuit of an all-consuming vision and made with a hands-on attention to the smallest detail that’s downright… horrifying!
Series Includes:
The Quay Brothers in 35mm - The Love Witch
The Wolf House - Eraserhead - Dr. Caligari
Valentine’s Day At Metrograph
opens February 14
With the Capulet and Montague kids rendered in high ’90s pop style by Baz Luhrmann, an absurdist look at coupling in a dystopic near-future from Yorgos Lanthimos, and two lush, ravishing romances from Wong Kar-wai—the amour fou of Happy Together and the muted longing of In the Mood for Love—we’ve got just about every kind of star-crossed affair you could ask for lined up for Valentine’s Day at Metrograph. A perfect date for a special someone, someones, or just your own special self, with the intimate confines of the Commissary and a cozy date with cocktails just a few steps away once the movie’s over.
Series Includes:
The Lobster - Happy Together
Romeo + Juliet - In the Mood For Love
LIVES OF PERFORMERS: THE FILMS OF YVONNE RAINER
February 17
With her boundary-pushing, de-glamorized, stripped-down approach to modern dance, Rainer was already established as one of the most innovative forces in choreography before she’d started to make her first standalone films in 1972, bringing the same spirit of invention to this new medium. Inspired by developments in contemporary feminist film theory and her own developing lesbian identity, Rainer would create a cinematic oeuvre that revolutionized the depiction of dance onscreen, while also posing a challenge to traditional filmic representations of the female body. This retrospective provides a chance to sample the transformative motion picture works of this remarkable multi-hyphenate artist, still active in the world of dance today at age 88.
Series Includes:
Lives of Performers - Film About a Woman Who
Journeys From Berlin - The Man Who Envied Women
Privilege - Murder and Murder
MEMORIA
opens February 17
Few filmmakers have so closely tied their work to one region as Apichatpong has to the rural northeast of his native Thailand, but in Memoria, the writer-director plunges into new territory, filming in Columbia’s city streets and mountain-top villages and working for the first time with professional actors, among them Tilda Swinton and Jeanne Balibar. Swinton’s Scottish botanist, visiting her ailing sister in Bogatá, is awakened one night by a loud “bang” that no one else can hear, and recurring visitations by this maddening noise propel her into a mesmerizing, occasionally hilarious, and ultimately moving journey in search of its origins.
KIM KI-YOUNG X2
Opens February 24
After two decades of increasing popular and critical success, South Korean cinema today seems to have conquered the world—but those breakthroughs of recent years didn’t just come out of nowhere, and there’s a long winding road lined with excellent films that leads to Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook. One period especially ripe for rediscovery is the golden age of 1960s South Korean cinema, when Pyongyang-born Kim Ki-young was among the most consistently inventive, stylistically sophisticated, and psychologically acute working directors, turning out intense psychodramas like the sultry, noir-inflected The Housemaid—one of Bong’s inspirations for Parasite—and Goryoejang, the devastating tale of a peasant farmer’s rebellion against tradition. Both will be at Metrograph, and offer a perfect introduction to the filmmaker that Cahiers du cinéma’s Jean-Michel Frodon called “a truly extraordinary image maker.”
Series Includes:
The Housemaid - Goryeojang
