Sweden/Denmark/Georgia/Turkey/2024—directed by Levan Akin | 105 min.

Retired teacher Lia (brilliantly portrayed by Mzia Arabuli), who lives on the rocky Black Sea coast of Georgia, has made a promise to find out what happened to her long-lost niece, Tekla. A neighbor tells Lia that Tekla might be in Turkey, and they set off to find her.

In Istanbul they discover a beautiful city of connections, possibilities, and cats—but looking for someone who doesn't want to be found proves more difficult than expected.

The pair meet Evrim (Deniz Dumanli), a human rights lawyer and as the three weave their way through the city's labyrinthine backstreets, they discover Tekla may be closer than imagined. Jury Prize Winner, 2024 Berlin Film Festival. In English, Georgian and Turkish, with English subtitles.

“Elegant, stirring, emotionally affecting. A warmly humanistic new film.” —David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

France/1968—directed by Melvin Van Peebles | 87 min.

Unable to break into a segregated Hollywood, Melvin Van Peebles decamped to France, taught himself the language, and wrote novels in French, one of which would be the basis for his stylistically innovative feature debut, The Story of a Three Day Pass.

Turner (Harry Baird), an African American soldier stationed in France, is granted a three-day leave and heads to Paris, where he finds whirlwind romance with a white woman (Nicole Berger)–but what happens when his furlough is over?

Channeling the brash exuberance of the French New Wave, Van Peebles explores the psychology of a relationship while examining France’s contradictory attitudes about race, all in a film that is playful and wryly subversive; it laid the foundation for the cinematic revolution he unleashed three years later with Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Restoration supervised by Mario Van Peebles. In English and French with English subtitles.

“A New Wave classic and one of the great American films of the era.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Please join the Friends of Modern and Contemporary Art for our Annual Meeting from 5:30–6 p.m.  
At 6 p.m., guest artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons will give a lecture on her work, which is free with registration.

The lecture will be followed by an exclusive FMCA Member reception in FJC Dining Rooms A&B.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons combines and crosses diverse artistic practices, including photography, painting, sculpture, film, video, and performance. Her work addresses issues of history, memory, gender, and religion; it investigates how each one of these themes informs identity formation. Campos-Pons was born in 1959 in Cuba and resides in Nashville, Tennessee. She has served as Vanderbilt Chair Professor of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University since 2017.

Campos-Pons has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Canada. Behold, a survey of her work spanning four decades, is currently on tour at the Brooklyn Museum, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, and the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, closing May 4, 2025. She has presented over thirty solo performances commissioned by institutions that include the Guggenheim Museum and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. Her works are held in more than thirty museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Detroit Institute of Arts.

In 2023, Campos-Pons was awarded the prestigious MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship for exploring personal and collective histories across the Caribbean with a distinctive and expansive visual style. She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Campos-Pons has founded or co-founded several non-profit arts organizations including the Intermittent Rivers, a Biennial Project in Matanzas, Cuba; the Engine for Art Democracy and Justice at Vanderbilt with Vanderbilt and Fisk University; and When We Gather, a multi-faceted art project celebrating the elemental role women have played in the United States.

The Detroit Institute of Arts acquired Campos-Pons’s work Soy una Fuente (I Am a Fountain) in 2023.

Photo courtesy of the artist.  

Iran/2023—directed by Ali Asgari and Alireza Khatami | 77 min.

Through a series of stirring vignettes, often humorous and always affecting, Iranian directors Asgari and Khatami follow people from all walks of life in contemporary Tehran.

As they navigate cultural, religious, and institutional constraints, this audacious film captures the spirit and determination of people facing daily adversity, while offering a nuanced portrait of a complex society.

The sole Iranian film selected by the Cannes Film Festival in 2023, it was also a London, Chicago and AFI Film Festival selection. In Persian with English subtitles.

“One of the most brilliant and provocative films to emerge from Iran in recent years.” —Godfrey Cheshire, rogerebert.com

USA/1938—directed by Oscar Micheaux | 73 min.

An idealistic Harvard graduate returns to the segregated South to establish a grade school, and encounters opposition from both the white and Black communities. Starring Ethel Moses and a bevy of moonlighting Cotton Club dancers, Birthright was an early, brutal critique of segregation and Jim Crow laws, and was criticized for its graphic depiction of institutionalized racism.

Micheaux responded to the criticism by publishing a declaration of his intentions as a filmmaker, reflecting the ideals of his lead character:

“I have always tried to make my photoplays present the truth, to lay before the race a cross section of its own life… It is only by presenting those portions of the race portrayed in my pictures, in light and background of their true state, that we can raise our people to greater heights.”
 

Senegal/Mali/France/2024—directed by Ramata-Toulaye Sy | 87 min.

Set in northern Senegal, this extraordinary directorial feature debut tells the story of Banel and Adama, a young couple very much in love who want to live their own lives. But for the rest of their tight-knit village, duty dictates that Adama accept the role of chief. Nature intervenes: the rains do not come; the cattle succumb to illness; the men leave.

The film is a lush, lyrical fable that soars to heights of longing and descends into the realm of myth, sending its protagonists' love on a possible collision course with their community’s long-held customs.

Banel & Adama is one of the rare Senegalese films to have premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival and was Senegal's official submission to the 2024 Academy Awards®. In Pulaar with English subtitles.

"A striking debut that puts Sy on the map as a purveyor of deceptively gorgeous visions, evoking our cinema’s philosophical high priest, Terence Malick.” –Sophie Monks Kaufman, IndieWire

The 11-time Detroit Music Award–winning swing band Planet D Nonet has teamed up with drummer/composer/arranger/vocalist Dr. Leonard King in a tribute to jazz singer Joe Williams. Williams was born in Georgia in 1918, and he grew up on the South Side of Chicago. He sang with big bands, most famously with the Count Basie Orchestra.

After his tenure with the Basie band, Williams had a successful career as a soloist at festivals, in clubs, and on TV. Williams recorded more than 40 albums under his own name as well. This is a unique performance: a tribute to a true original that brings together two top Detroit entities: Dr. / Professor Leonard King and the Planet D Nonet, led by RJ Spangler.

France/1923-28 - Directed by Man Ray | 76 min.

The wildly improvisational and fragmentary Return to Reason is Man Ray's first film, where the artist explodes and reconstructs the cinematic medium as a vehicle for accessing the essence of things by rhythmic accumulation of visual details.

What emerges from this program - which combines Return to Reason with three other newly restored Ray films is set to hypnotic new music by SQURL (Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan) - is the sense of Ray as a modern artist par excellence, an experimentalist committed to delving into the space between consciousness and unconsciousness, sense and nonsense, wakefulness and dreaming.

The meticulous restoration of all four films was led by Womanray and Cinenovo, in partnership with La Cinematheque francais, the Library of Congress, and Cineeteca di Bologna.

Japan/1954—directed by Akira Kurosawa | 207 minutes, with one intermission

In 16th century Japan, a small village is regularly plundered by bandits until a group of unemployed samurai agree to train the defenseless farmers into a dedicated army of resistance. Kurosawa’s masterpiece—newly restored in high-resolution 4K for its 70th anniversary celebration—is one of the most brilliant and immersive battle epics ever filmed, and a timeless fable about responsibility, bravery, and character.

Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura head the mammoth cast, and Kurosawa’s unfailing eye brings out the distinctive traits of each character. It’s an electrifying experience, restored at last to its original visual splendor.

In Japanese with English subtitles.

“Akira Kurosawa’s epic masterpiece has been widely imitated, but no one has come near it.” —Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

USA/2023—directed by Ryan Martin Brown | 78 min.

Drew (Colin Burgess) is approaching the end of his 20s and, with it, his relative youth. Anxious to make a positive change, he quits his cushy desk job to discover the way to “embrace life.” — but after cycling through friends, hobbies, and goals, Drew finds he’s confused about his newfound freedom.

Shot in just 10 days on the streets of New York and featuring an ensemble of the city's young comedy vanguard, Brown's debut feature is a sparkling and risky little comic surprise, set in the midst of America's "Great Resignation," about the search for purpose and joy in the modern world.

“Eloquent and beautifully articulated. Free Time feels like the promising beginnings of a new era in NYC indie filmmaking.”  —Jordan Raup, The Film Stage