Ukraine/ 2022-Directed By Pavlo Peleshok

The Detroit Film Theatre in partnership with the Ukrainian National Women’s League of America (UNWLA) Detroit Regional Council and the Ukrainian-American Civic Committee of Metropolitan Detroit (UACC) will host a screening of the new documentary Life to the Limit, which tells the story of Ukrainian resistance against Russia's attempts to colonize and eradicate their country and society.

From the producers of Winter on Fire, an Academy Award-nominated film for Best Documentary, Life to the Limit is the first Ukrainian documentary to address the complete history of Russia's war on Ukraine from 2013 to 2022. Director Pavlo Peleshok and producer Yurko Ivanyshyn trace the formation and evolution of Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression, beginning during the Revolution of Dignity in 2014 and leading to the full-scale war on Ukraine in 2022.

Now, both war veterans, Peleshok and Ivanyshyn joined the Ukrainian resistance at the time of Russia’s illegal and unrecognized annexation of Crimea and the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014. They defended Ukrainian soil and freedom, while simultaneously documenting the causes and consequences of the war by assembling a mosaic from more than 640 hours of archival materials.

Director Pavlo Peleshok will be present to introduce the screening.
 

Italy/1971—directed by Bernardo Bertolucci | 110 minutes

In Mussolini’s Italy of the 1930s, Marcello (the great Jean-Louis Trintignant of My Night at Maud’s and Amour) is so desperate to fit in with those around him that he’s willing not only to become a fascist and a murderer but also to deny his own desires in order to blend into the regime’s version of “normal.”

Bertolucci’s masterpiece is a visual and aural feast – it’s almost as if all the sensuality and passion the protagonist is repressing explodes onto the screen via richly the richly colorful and fluid cinematography of Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now) and the evocative, memorable musical score by the great Georges Delerue (Jules and Jim, The Last Métro).

Classically elegant while thematically subversive, The Conformist is a seminal filmgoing experience, more stunning than ever in this brand-new 4K restoration. With Dominique Sanda and Stefania Sandrelli. In Italian with English subtitles.

“A rejuvenating jolt of youthful creative energy… a time when movies were the most important art and their creative possibilities seemed endless.”   –Dave Kehr, The New York Times

The Italian Film Festival USA is the largest festival dedicated exclusively to contemporary Italian cinema in the United States. This April it returns to Metro Detroit for a new, in-person edition with the DFT hosting two screenings.

The Italian Film Festival USA presents new, feature-length comedies, dramas, documentaries and even short animated films. They all share iconic Italian locations and language that resonate with audiences worldwide, and offers Detroiters an opportunity to discover a new wave of young Italian film artists without hopping on a plane.

Screenings will include appearances by film directors and bilingual talkbacks with audiences. All films are in Italian with English subtitles.

For the complete festival schedule visit italianfilmfests.org. 

USA/2022—directed by Harold Crooks and Judd Tully | 93 min.

The Melt Goes On Forever chronicles the singular career of the elusive African-American art star David Hammons, from Watts rebellion era ’60s L.A. to global art world prominence today. Hammons’ category-defying practice–rooted in a deep critique of American society and the elite art world–is in the words of one art critic “an invitation to confront the fissures between races” as the artist seeks to go beyond the dominant culture and his own to a new one for the 21st century.

Featuring eminent artists, curators and critics, a rich trove of archival footage, animation, and an evocative soundscape, The Melt is a striking portrait of a celebrated African-American art star whose elusive, rule-breaking practice offers an essential commentary on race in America.

Black History Month programs are generously supported by the Arn and Nancy Tellem Foundation.

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