Houston Premieres
Enjoy these critically acclaimed, award-winning international films as they make their Houston debut!
Back by popular demand after drawing capacity crowds at the MFAH in February, this documentary chronicles the unique methodology of the brilliant and audacious Spanish chef, Ferran Adrià. His restaurant, El Bulli (which closed in July 2011) was a Michelin three-star restaurant in Roses, Spain that nightly served a tasting menu of 30 courses to a single seating of up to 50 guests. Chef Adrià took over the restaurant in 1987 and became a leading inspiration for avant-garde cuisine worldwide, ... more info
Showtimes
German artist Gerhard Richter (born 1932), one of the world's greatest living painters, has spent over half a century experimenting with a tremendous range of techniques and ideas, addressing historical crises and mass-media representation alongside explorations of chance procedures. Infamously media-shy, he agreed to appear on camera for the first time in 15 years for a 2007 short by filmmaker Corinna Belz called "Gerhard Richter's Window." Her feature-length follow-up, Gerhard Richter Painting, is exactly that: a thrilling document of Richter's creative process, juxtaposed ... more info
Showtimes
Margaret Atwood regaled Houston audiences in January with her spirited reading and repartee at the Inprint Brown Reading Series. Her visionary work Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth is the basis for this riveting and poetic documentary on “debt” in its various forms—societal, personal, environmental, spiritual, criminal, and of course, economic. Filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal (Manufactured Landscapes) strikingly interweaves these (sometimes surprising) debtor/creditor relationships: two families in a years-long Albanian blood feud; the BP oil spill vs. the environment; ... more info
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
Bir zamanlar Anadolu’da
2011, in Turkish with English subtitles
Nuri Bilge Ceylon
Showtimes
The new film from leading Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Distant; Climates) follows a group of men – including a police commissioner, a prosecutor, a doctor, and a murder suspect – as they drive through the dark Anatolian countryside. They are searching for a corpse, the victim of a brutal murder. The suspect, who claims he was drunk, cannot remember where he buried the body. As night wears on, details about the murder emerge and the investigators’ own secrets come ... more info
Showtimes
In 1889, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche witnessed the whipping of a horse while traveling in Turin, Italy. He tossed his arms around the horse's neck to protect it and then collapsed to the ground. In less than a month, Nietzsche would be diagnosed with a serious mental illness that would render him bedridden and speechless until his death eleven years later. But whatever happened to the horse? This film – which the great Hungarian director Béla Tarr (whose Sátántangó screened at the ... more info
Past Films in This Series
Mesrine: Killer Instinct
(L'instinct de mort)
2008 (French with subtitles)
Directed by Jean-François Richet
Similar to Olivier Assayas’s Golden Globe Award-winning Carlos, this docudrama focuses on another legendary gangster: France’s Jacques Mesrine (Vincent Cassel). The two-part Mesrine charts the outlaw’s odyssey during the 1960s and 1970s. This film, Mesrine: Killer Instinct (part one) concentrates on the years 1956 to 1969, when Mesrine begins his criminal career by meeting a crime boss (Gérard Depardieu) and an equally reckless girlfriend (Cécile de France). Mesrine: Public Enemy #1 (part two) details the years 1972 to 1979. “A French Goodfellas. ... more info
Mesrine: Public Enemy #1
(L'ennemi public n° 1)
2008 (French with subtitles)
Directed by Jean-François Richet
Similar to Olivier Assayas’s Golden Globe Award-winning Carlos, this docudrama focuses on another legendary gangster: France’s Jacques Mesrine (Vincent Cassel). The two-part Mesrine charts the outlaw’s odyssey during the 1960s and 1970s. Mesrine: Killer Instinct (part one) concentrates on the years 1956 to 1969. This film, Mesrine: Public Enemy #1 (part two) details the years 1972 to 1979. The infamous mobster continues his incredible life of crime while manipulating the media, the government, and the police. He plans his last and greatest ... more info
Juliette Binoche won the Best Actress prize at Cannes for her performance in this playful and provocative romantic drama. It is the first feature by legendary auteur Abbas Kiarostami (The Wind Will Carry Us) made outside of Iran. Binoche plays a gallery owner in a Tuscan village. She attends a lecture by a British author (opera star William Shimell) on authenticity and fakery in art and afterward invites him on a tour of the countryside, during which he is mistaken ... more info
During WWII, soldiers of the 442nd Infantry Regiment, composed mainly of Japanese Americans, fought not only the enemy, but also prejudice, as they faced severe racial discrimination in their homeland. Despite these challenges, the 442nd became one of the most decorated regiments for its size and length of service in the history of the United States military. A Q&A with Floyd Mori, president of the National Japanese American Citizens League and one of the film’s participants, follows the screening. Presented ... more info
This film is recommended for mature audiences. A suburban family is torn apart when 14-year-old Annie (Galveston native Liana Liberato) befriends "16-year-old" Charlie (Chris Henry Coffey) online. After months of communicating via chat and phone, Annie discovers that her new boyfriend is not who he originally claimed to be. Her parents (Clive Owen and Catherine Keener) are shattered by their daughter's actions and struggle to support her as she comes to terms with what has happened to her once-innocent life. Trust is ... more info
Space, Land and Time: Underground Adventures with Ant Farm
2010
Directed by Laura Harrison and Elizabeth Federici
This is the first independent video documentary to delve into the work of the renegade 1970s art/architecture collective Ant Farm, best known for its iconic land-art piece Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo. The Ant Farmers—radical architects, video pioneers, and mordantly funny cultural commentators—created a body of deeply subversive work that questioned everything by posing a set of creative and comedic alternatives. In addition to the MFAH screenings May 24–27, a free screening with filmmakers in attendance is offered Sunday evening, May 22, at ... more info
Introduced by Robert Fleming and director Jacqueline Harlow Robert Fleming traveled to Uganda and became aware of the urgent needs of ill and abandoned children. An unlikely activist, he was inspired to found Malayaka House, an orphanage that offers the children a home, healthcare, and education. Inspiring and eye-opening, this documentary reveals how Malayaka House serves as a community center that employs local women to care for the children. The film also shows how Malayaka House has become a model for ... more info
Best of the 2010 Ottawa International Animation Festival
2010
Directed by Various Directors
FOR MATURE AUDIENCES
The Best of Ottawa delivers the top animated shorts “for grown-ups” every year, celebrating stylistic and technical innovation with gems that inspire, entertain, and provoke. The 2010 line-up includes David O’Reilly’s grand-prize winner The External World; the pulsating metamorphic madness of Andreas Hykade’s Love & Theft; Dustin Grella’s deeply moving and brilliantly executed award-winning film Prayers for Peace; the mesmerizing crowd favorite Sinna Mann (Angry Man) by Anita Killi; the snap-crackling goodness of Masaki Okuda's Kuchao (A Gum Boy); and ... more info
Our Beloved Month of August
Aquele querido mês de Agosto
2008 (Portuguese with subtitles)
Directed by Miguel Gomes
In rural Portugal, the month of August is languid and buzzing, with crowds of people enjoying an annual music festival. In this film-within-a-film, a documentary director (director Miguel Gomes) and his crew wait to shoot the activity. The narrative takes a left turn midway through, as people who have played background roles unexpectedly become characters in a complex family drama, enriched by a lively musical soundtrack. “Transparently a movie about a group of filmmakers who attempt to possess a particular location, ... more info
Mija (veteran actress Yun Jung-hee) is a woman in her sixties who moves through life with elegance and a dash of eccentricity. She takes care of her insolent grandson and cleans for an elderly man. On a whim, Mija enrolls in a poetry class and begins a personal quest to find the perfect words to describe her feelings. However, she’s plagued by the onset of Alzheimer’s, and struggles with the challenges of the creative process. When her world is turned ... more info
Over the course of a meteoric music career that spanned the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, Phil Ochs sought the bright lights of fame and social justice in equal measure—a contradiction that eventually tore him apart. From youthful idealism to rage to pessimism, the arch of Ochs’s life paralleled that of the times, and the anger, satire and righteous indignation that drove his music also drove him to dark despair. In this brilliantly constructed film, interview and performance footage of Ochs ... more info
Additional screening scheduled! For decades, Bill Cunningham, an 80-something New York Times photographer and Schwinn-riding cultural anthropologist, has been obsessively and inventively chronicling fashion trends and high-society charity soirées for the Times Style section in his columns “On the Street” and “Evening Hours.” Documenting uptown fixtures, downtown eccentrics, and everyone in between, Cunningham’s enormous body of work is more reliable than any catwalk as an expression of time, place, and individual flair. In turn, Bill Cunningham New York is a ... more info
Hailed by the Associated Press as “Kelly Reichardt’s (Wendy and Lucy) most powerful film yet,” and as “a meticulously constructed piece of art” by Pop Matters, Meek’s Cutoff is “as much a functional Western as it is a feminine or feminist one, using realistic detail to reorient or extend the genre” (Film Comment). The epic story takes place in 1845 and concerns three families who hire a mountain man (Bruce Greenwood) to guide their wagon train across the Cascade Mountains ... more info
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Loong Boonmee raleuk chat
2010 (Thai with English subtitles)
Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
FOR MATURE AUDIENCES
The recipient of the prized Palme d’Or at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, this hypnotic drama tells the haunting story of a Thai man, suffering from kidney failure, who retreats to the countryside to die in the company of his loved ones. As Uncle Boonmee nears the end of his life, the spirit of his late wife returns to guide him into the unknown, and his estranged son reappears in the form of a jungle spirit. “[Apichatpong Weerasethakul] is a ... more info
Gorgeously filmed along the back roads of rural Mexico, Circo follows the Ponce family’s hardscrabble circus as it struggles to stay together despite mounting debt, dwindling audiences, and a simmering family conflict. Tino, the ringmaster, is driven by his dream to lead his parents’ circus to success and corrals the energy of his whole family, including his four young children, toward this singular goal. But his wife Ivonne is determined to make a change. Feeling exploited by her in-laws, she ... more info
"Something akin to The Social Network for the news business, a movie uniquely capturing this moment in time." —Reuters In the tradition of great fly-on-the-wall documentaries, Page One: Inside the New York Times deftly gains unprecedented access to The New York Times newsroom and the inner workings of the Media Desk. With the Internet surpassing print as society's main news source, and newspapers all over the country going bankrupt, Page One chronicles the transformation of the media industry at its ... more info
Please note: John Turturro had been invited to attend, but because of professional obligations he will not be here for any screenings of the film. "A brilliant actor in film, theater, and television, John Turturro is a man whose talents are fueled by an unquenchable zest for life. He describes Passione as 'a musical adventure that comes directly out of the people and the volcanic land they inhabit. Conjuring ancient stories and myths that still live—of love, sex, jealousy, and ... more info
The 2011 winner of the Manhattan Short Film Festival is David and Goliath from the USA's George Zaverdas. Houstonians unite with audiences spanning six continents by voting for the film they think should become the winner of the annual Manhattan Short Film Festival. The MSFF is not only the largest short film festival, it is the first global film festival, with over 200 cities taking part in the event this week. Take this opportunity to glimpse the future filmmakers and ... more info
Shown in two parts with a 15-minute intermission between the films Part 1 = 105 minutes / Part 2 = 107 minutes (To attend on separate days, bring your ticket when you come back for Part 2) "Cinechat" on Sunday afternoon* A dystopic science-fiction epic, World on a Wire is German wunderkind Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s gloriously cracked, boundlessly inventive take on future paranoia. With dashes of Stanley Kubrick, Kurt Vonnegut, and Phillip K. Dick, Fassbinder tells the noir-spiked tale of ... more info
These screenings take place in the Freed Auditorium, located in the MFAH Glassell School of Art at 5101 Montrose. Seating is limited! Legendary director Jean-Luc Godard returns to the screen with Film Socialisme, a magisterial essay on the decline of European civilization. Presented as a symphony in three movements, a garish cruise ship (with Patti Smith among its guests) travels the Mediterranean while Godard embarks on a state of the European Union address in a vibrant collage of philosophical quotes, ... more info
David and Laura Balding (Flora’s adopters), Cristina Colissimo, and Jordana Glick-Franzheim (coproducers) in attendance. Sixteen years have passed since circus producer David Balding adopted Flora, the orphaned baby African elephant he lovingly raised as part of his family and made the star of his show. As Flora approaches adulthood, he realizes that she is not happy performing. Ultimately, David must face the difficult truth that the circus is no place for Flora. She needs to be with other elephants. The ... more info
Beloved by children of all ages around the world, Sesame Street’s Elmo is an international icon. Few people know his creator, Kevin Clash. Displaying his creativity and talent at a young age, Clash’s inventive puppet creations earned him a reputation in his native Baltimore. Initially hired for the Captain Kangaroo TV program, his abilities were tapped by Jim Henson—a master puppeteer and Clash’s idol—for whom he worked before ultimately finding a home on Sesame Street. Narrated by Whoopi Goldberg, this ... more info
British Arrows is the new name for the British Television Advertising Awards that have been a popular offering at the MFAH for many years. From elevated pitches for household products to compelling public service announcements, these ads showcase the innovative approaches U.K. creative teams take to sales, promotion, and marketing. On this year’s winners list: T-Mobile, Volkswagen, Virgin Atlantic, Match.com, Nike, and Heineken. As described by our colleagues at the Walker Art Center, this compilation is “a feast of astounding ... more info
Renaissance painter and printmaker Pieter Bruegel (1525–1569) was renowned for his landscapes and peasant scenes. His masterpiece The Way to Calvary imagines the story of Christ’s Passion set in Flanders under brutal Spanish occupation in 1564, the very year in which Bruegel created his painting. The Mill and the Cross gives life to the painting by focusing on a dozen characters whose stories unfold and intertwine in a panoramic landscape populated by villagers and red-caped horsemen. Acclaimed Polish artist and ... more info
Sunday, February 5, 5 p.m. Talkback with artist Lynn Randolph and Jenni Sorkin, assistant professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Houston* Sunday, February 12, 5 p.m. Talkback with members of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston’s Teen Council** An entertaining and revelatory “secret history” of Feminist Art, !Women Art Revolution deftly illuminates this under-explored movement through conversations, observations, archival footage, and works of visionary artists, historians, curators, and critics. Starting from its roots in 1960s antiwar and civil rights protests, the ... more info
MFAH film faithful will remember seeing prior films by iconoclastic Finn Aki Kaurismäki, including Ariel, Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses, I Hired a Contract Killer, and The Match Factory Girl. His latest film is warmhearted portrait of the French harbor city that gives the film its name. Fate throws young African refugee Idrissa (Blondin Miguel) into the path of Marcel Marx (André Wilms), a well-spoken bohemian who works as a shoe shiner. With innate optimism and the unwavering support of his ... more info
Mysteries of Lisbon
Mistérios de Lisboa
2010 in Portuguese and French with English subtitles
Directed by Raoul Ruiz
Part I: Friday, February 24, 7:00 p.m. (120 min.) Part II: Saturday, February 25, 6:00 p.m. (147 min.) The passing last August of legendary filmmaker Raoul Ruiz was mourned by critics, programmers, and cinephiles around the world. This film, his last to receive global distribution on the festival and art-house circuit, was called “the most glorious achievement of [his] prodigious career” by Film Comment. Epic in scope, it is a masterful adaptation of the eponymous nineteenth-century Portuguese novel by Camilo ... more info
Introduced by executive producer Elizabeth Avellán Post-film discussion lead by Houston Film Commission's Alfred Cervantes with Avellán and local filmmaker Greg Carter Next-day Cinéchat* with Avellán and Carter on Saturday blacktino is a dark teen comedy about an overweight, half-black, half-Latino nerd named Stefan Daily. Raised by his black grandmother in a suburb of Austin, and struggling to find his place in a mostly white high school, Stefan finds sanctuary among the eclectic mix of social outcasts in the school's Theater Department. A coming-of-age story reflective of today's cynical times, blacktino gives an honest, and hilarious, depiction of high ... more info
Best of the Ottawa International Animation Festival
2011
Directed by various directors
FOR MATURE AUDIENCES
The Ottawa International Animation Festival is North America´s largest animation showcase. The 2011 edition received 2,005 entries from 75 countries, and their “best of” tour samples award-winning shorts created with an inventive array of techniques. This year’s showcase is populated by a unique array of humans and animals in tales ranging from delightful to foreboding. Acting legend Max von Sydow narrates one of the selections! Film buffs, art lovers, and cartoon fans won´t want to miss this year´s great line ... more info
Eighty-five-year-old Jiro Ono, considered by many to be the world’s greatest sushi chef, is the proprietor of Sukiyabashi Jiro, a 10-seat, sushi-only restaurant inauspiciously located in a Tokyo subway station. Despite its humble appearance, Sukiyabashi Jiro is the first restaurant of its kind to be awarded a prestigious three-star Michelin review—sushi lovers from around the globe make repeated pilgrimages, calling months in advance and shelling out top dollar for a coveted seat at Jiro’s sushi bar. Jiro Dreams of Sushi, a ... more info
"Stick ‘Em Up!" filmmakers are scheduled to introduce each screening. After the Saturday 6:45 p.m. screening, stay for a short discussion presented by the Teen Council of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. This gritty, Houston-made documentary explores the subculture of artists involved with wheat pasting, an inexpensive, provocative, and misunderstood technique for creating inner-city art. Stick ‘Em Up! filmmakers Alex Luster, Tony Reyes, and GONZO247 delve into the minds and motivations behind some of Houston’s most-active guerilla street artists, capturing the life span of ... more info
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