Events

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…

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…

Ghana’s Electric Dreams presents the planning and wide-ranging impact of the Akosombo Dam, Ghana’s most ambitious development project. The film visits sites affected by the hydroelectric dam and by the broader vision of modernization that it represents. Historical footage and interviews with Ghanaians reveal the complexity and contradictions, unintended consequences, social inequities, rural/urban divides, and gender differences that underlie this confluence of energy, power, and creativity in the West African country. Rudo Sanyanga (International Rivers Network, Africa Program Director), R. Lane Clark (director/producer),…

Gulabi Gang (2012) is set in the badlands of Bundelkhand in central India, a place of dust, oppression, and resistance. This film follows the Gulabi Gang, an unusual group of rural women led by the energetic and charismatic Sampat Pal. They travel long distances to fight for the rights of women and Dalits. Often they encounter apathy, corruption, and even ridicule. Sometimes whole villages connive against them to protect the perpetrators of violence. While we see Gulabi Gang members struggling against gender violence and state corruption,…

Directed by celebrated Chinese auteur Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern, Hero) and based on Nobel Prize-winning author Mo Yan’s novel, Red Sorghum is a landmark in contemporary Chinese cinema and culture. The film blends the stories of three generations of a family with their region’s journey through feudalism, war, and revolution. After several years as a cinematographer, Zhang Yimou chose Mo Yan’s novel for his directorial debut. In the film, he crafts an evocative rural landscape, and lead actors…

Based on Edmundo Desnoes’ novel and presented here in a new 4k restoration, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) is a fictional meditation on disillusionment in post-revolutionary Cuba. Left behind by his wife and family, the protagonist Sergio elects to remain in Havana following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, an historical moment that the film chooses to reflect on through Sergio’s unmoored, flâneur-like lifestyle and anomie. The Cuban capital engulfs Sergio and simmers beneath the social and political…