Events
Past Events › Screenings
February 2019
The Milan Protocol (Das Milan-Protokoll)
In Peter Ott’s 2017 film The Milan Protocol (Das Milan-Protokoll), Martina (Catrin Striebeck), a German doctor working and living in Iraqi Kurdistan, is kidnapped while traveling through ISIS-controlled territory in Syria. When news of her capture breaks, a range of global players try to take advantage of the hostage situation, including intelligence agencies in Germany, Turkey, and Iraq. Unsure of whom to trust, Martina starts to lose her ability to distinguish friend from foe. Director Peter Ott will join moderator…
Find out more »Upstream
Upstream (1927) strays far from director John Ford’s classic Western landscapes. Centered on an eclectic mix of stage actors, knife-throwers, and vaudevillians, Upstream is a backstage comedy set in a busy New York boardinghouse. Tensions arise after a member of the household, a pretentious thespian named Eric Brashingham (Earle Fox), is summoned to London to perform Hamlet. Upon his return, he meets with rejection from his former friends. Less than twenty percent of Ford’s silents survive, and for decades Upstream…
Find out more »Across the Universe
With the hallucinatory visual style of Revolver, the poppy sentiment of A Hard Day’s Night, and a songbook that spans the Beatles’ discography, Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe (2007) reimagines the Beatles music as the soundscape for art, revolution, and love in the 1960s. British dockworker Jude (Jim Sturgess) travels from Liverpool to the US in search of his father, but ends up falling in love with a young upper-class American, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood). The film pays tribute to…
Find out more »March 2019
Beatles Revolutions: Yellow Submarine
Set in the psychedelic paradise of Pepperland, Yellow Submarine (1968) pits Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band against the Blue Meanies, enemies of fun and music. Director George Dunning and art director Heinz Eidelmann employ a constantly-shifting array of ’60s pop art settings in this revolutionary animated feature, which has inspired directors ranging from Terry Gilliam to John Lasseter. On its 50th anniversary, the film retains its ability to dazzle from its opening scene to the sing-a-long final credits. Artist…
Find out more »Floyd Norman: An Animated Life
Invoking the energetic and defiant spirit of its main subject, Floyd Norman: An Animated Life offers a captivating tour of the sixty-year career of its eponymous animator and writer. Dubbed by peers as “animation’s Forrest Gump,” Norman had a remarkable professional journey that included time at Disney (from Sleeping Beauty to Mulan), Hanna-Barbera (The Smurfs), and Pixar (Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc.). Floyd Norman will join moderator Vilna Bashi Treitler (Black Studies, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion.
Find out more »April 2019
Shakedown
Leilah Weinraub’s Shakedown (2018) chronicles the “high-femme performances” in the Los Angeles-based underground black-lesbian strip club Shakedown. The New Yorker claims that “Shakedown is neither an experimental art film nor an anthropology of gay, black femme performance in L.A. Rather, Weinraub sought to capture a moment and turn it into cinema.”The film chronicles the explicit performances and personal relationships of the party’s dancers and organizers in the early 2000s, revealing that Shakedown was more than a strip club; as one…
Find out more »Script to Screen: Game of Thrones
Based on George R.R. Martin’s best-selling fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, HBO’s epic Game of Thrones is notable for its high production values, expansive cast and engaging backstory. The story of a succession war between powerful families is set against a genre-subverting backdrop of gritty realism. Created by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, Game of Thrones has become a widespread cultural phenomenon. In anticipation of the start of the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones (which begins on Sunday, April…
Find out more »Short Films from the Viet Film Fest: Diaspora, Family, Memory
Presented in conjunction with UCSB Reads 2019, this program of six shorts by filmmakers from the Vietnamese diaspora includes documentary, narrative, and experimental films. Like this year’s UCSB Reads text The Best We Could Do, these short films take up questions of Vietnamese heritage, family, and memory. This selection of films was curated in cooperation with the Viet Film Fest. Filmmakers Kady Le, Lan Nguyen, and Quyên Nguyen-Le will join moderator erin Khuê Ninh (Asian American Studies, UCSB) for a…
Find out more »New Waves: Rome, Open City
The production of Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (Roma città aperta, 1945) began only months after the end of the Nazi occupation of Rome and the arrival of Allied forces during the Italian campaign of World War II. The film triangulates the tension of the German occupation through a rich cast of characters: children, landlords, clergy, military men, unwed mothers, cabaret girls, collaborators, resistance fighters, and subversives of all kinds, and of course the city itself. Filmed with both professional and non-professional…
Find out more »New Waves: Hiroshima Mon Amour
Past and present, trauma and eros, the personal and the collective all intermingle in this groundbreaking film from French New Wave director Alain Resnais and visionary novelist Marguerite Duras. Centering on a short, intense affair between a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada), Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) unfolds in a rebuilt and modernized Hiroshima. As the central couple explore their powerful attraction, their trysts are interrupted by memories of the war and the surrounding traces of atomic mass…
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