France/Italy/Germany/2022—directed by Pietro Marcello  | 103 minutes

Pietro Marcello, one of contemporary cinema’s most versatile directorial talents, follows his 2019 breakthrough Martin Eden (shown virtually by the DFT during the 2020 lockdown) with this entertaining period fable based on a beloved 1923 novel by Russian author Alexander Grin. Beginning as the tale of a sensitive brute (Räphael Terry) who returns from World War I to his rural French village, only to discover that his wife has died and left him to care for their baby daughter, Juliette. The movie soon blossoms into a pastoral portrait of Juliette as a smart young woman (newcomer Juliette Jouan) falling for a modern man (Louis Garrel) who literally drops from the sky, while at the same time reckoning with a local witch’s prophecy about her future.

In his first French film, Marcello proves he is as comfortable spinning yarns in the realm of folklore as he is in creative nonfiction, deftly interweaving realism, romance, and even musical flights of fancy into the unexpected delight that is Scarlet. Cannes and New York Film Festivals. In French with English subtitles.

“Lovely! This charming fable — which hails from the celebrated Italian doc maker whose epic narrative debut, Martin Eden, was a critical success on the festival circuit just pre-COVID — is smaller, sweeter and more sensitive than Marcello’s earlier work.” –Peter Debruge, Variety

Hong Kong/2002-2003—directed by Andrew Lau Wai-keung and Alan Mak

The Hong Kong crime drama was jolted to new life with the Infernal Affairs trilogy, a bracing, explosively stylish triumph that introduced a dazzling level of narrative and thematic complexity to the genre with its saga of two rival moles—played by superstars Tony Leung Chiu-wai (In the Mood for Love) and Andy Lau Tak-wah (House of Flying Daggers)—who navigate slippery moral choices as they move between the intersecting territories of Hong Kong’s police force and its criminal underworld.

Set during the city-state’s handover from Britain to China and steeped in Buddhist philosophy, these ingeniously crafted tales of self-deception and betrayal mirror Hong Kong’s own fractured identity in a post-colonial purgatory.

Each film in the trilogy will be shown separately over the course of the weekend.

Martin Scorsese’s 2006 remake, The Departed, won four Academy Awards® including Best Picture, Director and Screenplay – the first time in cinema history that Hollywood remade a Hong Kong film. Don’t miss this opportunity to see the fully restored, original Infernal Affairs trilogy on the big screen. In Cantonese with English subtitles.

“Combines exhilarating action with liquid-nitrogen existential cool.” –Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (UK)

France/Italy/West Germany/1962—directed by Orson Welles | 119 minutes

“Say what you like, but The Trial is the best film I ever made.”   – Orson Welles

In the aftermath of his indelible performance as a shy motel owner in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Anthony Perkins became so associated with the persona of Norman Bates that traditional Hollywood work was hard to come by. Orson Welles, however, believed that Perkins’ vulnerability as Norman might make him the perfect embodiment of Joseph K in his film adaptation of The Trial, Franz Kafka’s classic tale of meaningless legal and social persecution in an authoritarian state, and the paranoia it inspires.

In Welles’ controversial interpretation, the great director has orchestrated Kafka’s tragic yet often comic fable as an overwhelming visual experience – a landscape in which an individual seems to grow ever smaller as he protests his fate. Never one to obey the rules, Welles tinkers with Kafka, changing and rearranging the plot, yet he remains faithful to the novel’s essence. Welles called it his first movie since Citizen Kane to be edited exactly as he intended, and now it’s been restored to the visual splendor he envisioned. With Welles, Romy Schneider and Jeanne Moreau. In English.

“A frenzy of expressionistic images bursts through the screen to evoke an oppressively incomprehensible system of edicts and constraints. Who better to reveal the system’s evil genius than Orson Welles?”  – Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Philippines/2022—directed by Martika Ramirez Escobar | 99 minutes

Once a groundbreaking figure in the Filipino film industry during its action movie glory days, Leonor (the wonderful Sheila Francisco) now struggles with mounting bills, the untimely loss of her son, and the general indignities of old age. While revisiting an unfinished script about a fearless protagonist trying to avenge his brother’s murder, the cinema-obsessed and irresistibly cranky Leonor suffers one more test of her endurance when she’s struck on the head by a falling television set.

As she lays unconscious in the hospital, fantasy and reality blur when Leonor finds herself awake inside of her own script, becoming – not surprisingly – the hero of her own improbable tale. An innovative blend of pulpy action homages, playful comedy, and touching family drama, Leonor Will Never Die is an imaginative, witty tribute to the art of moviemaking – and the joy of movie-watching.

Winner, Special Jury Prize for Innovative Spirit, 2022 Sundance Film Festival; Best Narrative Feature Award, Center for Asian American Media (CAAMFEST 2022). In Filipino with English subtitles. 

“Wonderfully unclassifiable! Martika Ramirez Escobar’s heartfelt, zany tribute to the magic of movies and the power of love.”  – A.O. Scott, The New York Times
 

South Korea/2022—directed by Hong Sangsoo | 92 minutes

For his playful and gently thought-provoking 27th feature, Hong Sangsoo holds a mirror up to his own artistic process and asks what exactly it is we’re looking for from a work of art. To achieve this, his film takes on the perspective of a middle-aged novelist, Junhee (Lee Hyeyoung, the magnetic star of Hong’s In Front of Your Face), who's grown disenchanted with her own writing.

After visiting an old friend who now runs a bookshop outside of Seoul, she embarks on a restorative journey that leads her to a chance encounter with a famous actress and former movie star (Kim Minhee) who’s also questioning her role as an artist.

The two make an instant connection that stokes both women’s dormant creative impulses, soon providing this simple, loose-limbed tale with a deep well of emotional truth and a bounty of questions about the expectations of artmaking, culminating in an entirely unexpected, mode-shifting climax. Jury Prize Winner, 2022 Berlin Film Festival. In Korean with English subtitles.

“Exquisite! Tense, absorbing and finally enchanting.”  – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

USA/2022—directed by Frederick Wiseman | 63 minutes

Countess Sophia Behrs married Leo Tolstoy when she was 18 and he was 34. They were husband and wife for 48 years, had 13 children, and she outlived him by nine years. Yet their relationship, among the most discussed and written about in literary history, was anything but harmonious, as Sophia, an artist in her own right—a photographer, memoirist, and editor—was constantly forced to negotiate her happiness with her husband’s infidelities.

Legendary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman was inspired by Sophia’s story, and when a documentary he was scheduled to shoot was postponed due to Covid, he instead filmed this dramatic dream project based on Sophia’s letters from Leo to Sophia, structured as a series of lively monologues delivered with gathering intensity by actor and co-writer Nathalie Boutefeu, reinforced by graceful images of natural beauty inspired by the film’s bucolic French setting.

The 92-year-old Wiseman’s cinematic gamble paid off handsomely; this captivating one-woman performance offers a surprisingly contemporary rendering of a marriage. In French with English subtitles.

“Critic’s Pick! Devastating and essential. Sculpts the raw material of the diaries into an arc that works to peel back the emotional layers of the marriage. A Couple is Wiseman working to bottle a human soul.”  –Sophie Monks Kaufman, IndieWire

We’re delighted to once again present the DFT’s most popular annual program in its original format – combining all the nominees in both the short animation and short live-action categories into one spectacularly entertaining presentation, with an intermission between the two sections. Discovering the narrative surprises and visual riches of the Oscar® Shorts on the big screen provides fresh jolts of pleasure and continuous, renewed wonder at the ways in which the cinema can explore the world through fresh eyes and unbridled imaginations.

Experience some of the year’s most imaginative works of cinematic storytelling with other fans, family, and friends whose first impressions of each film are uncluttered by advance hype – then make your personal picks for the best and see the winners announced when the Oscars® are awarded on Sunday, March 12th. Advance ticket purchase is strongly recommended. The remaining seats will be available at the door prior to each performance. Running time is generally around three hours, plus a 25-minute intermission. 

The showing on March 3 @ 7 p.m. was canceled due to inclement weather. 

In the first decades of the 20th century, art collector and philanthropist Charles Lang Freer helped make Michigan—especially Detroit and Ann Arbor—into a global hub for the collecting and study of Chinese art. How did Freer, who founded the Freer Gallery of Art that is now part of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, connect Detroit with people, institutions, and artworks across both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans? And how did these cultural networks relate to and amplify the rising political and economic power of the United States in the early 20th century?

Ian Shin (Assistant Professor of History and American Culture, University of Michigan) will discuss how Charles Lang Freer’s genuine desire to learn about and care for Chinese art and antiquities positioned Michigan in the vanguard of what foreign policymakers today call “America’s Pacific Century.”

This event is co-sponsored by The Freer House/WSU and the DIA's Friends of Asian Arts and Cultures.

Iran/2022—directed by Jafar Panahi | 107 minutes

One of the world’s great filmmakers, Iranian director Jafar Panahi (The White Balloon, Taxi, 3 Faces – all screened at DFT) won the 2022 Venice Film Festival Jury Prize for this new, clandestinely-shot, brilliantly complex meta-drama about a filmmaker (Panahi) who temporarily relocates to an Iranian border town to remotely oversee the making of a new film in Turkey.

Though it begins playfully as a film-within-a-film, Panahi soon finds himself involved in a controversy with local villagers when he’s accused of taking a photograph of an unmarried couple, leading to larger clashes between tradition and progress, city and country, spiritual belief and photographic evidence, as well as the human desire to escape oppression.

No Bears is receiving worldwide theatrical release and critical praise, even as the international film community denounces Panahi’s summer 2022 arrest, resulting in a 6-year prison sentence for “collusion against the regime.” In Farsi, Azerbaijani, and Turkish with English subtitles. 

“An instantly gripping, formally ingenious drama… about the ways people weaponize fear in order to hide their own.”        – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

Iran/1984—directed by Amir Naderi | 91 minutes

An illiterate but resourceful 11-year-old orphan (Madjid Niroumand), living alone in an abandoned tanker in an Iranian port city, survives by shining shoes, selling water, and diving for deposit bottles thrown overboard by foreigners. Madjid does his best to stay focused on his daily tasks – despite the routine bullying he’s subjected to from adults and older kids – by dreaming about the destinations of the departing cargo ships and airplanes that surround him, and by the exhilarating escape provided by running – but to where?

Frequently compared to such great international works of neo-realism as Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief, Héctor Babenco’s Pixote and François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Amir Naderi’s 1984 The Runner was inspired, like Truffaut’s film, by the director’s own childhood, and was instrumental in drawing attention to the New Iranian Cinema thanks to screenings at the Venice and London Film Festivals. Seen only briefly in the U.S. since the 1990s, this excellent new restoration will change all that. In Farsi with English subtitles.  

“A landmark film of astonishing power and simplicity. Madjid Niroumand’s performance ranks among the finest ever given by a child.”  –Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times