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. 

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

USA/1998—directed by Cauleen Smith | 86 minutes

A lost treasure of 1990s independent filmmaking, Afrofuturist artist Cauleen Smith’s UCLA thesis film embeds an incisive look at racial injustice within a lovingly handmade buddy movie-murder-mystery-romance. Observing the alarming rate at which the young Black men around her are dying—indeed, “becoming extinct,” as she sees it—brash California art student Pica (Toby Smith) begins preserving their existence in Polaroid snapshots, along the way forging a friendship with a gender nonconforming young woman (April Barnett), experiencing love and loss, and being drawn into the search for a serial killer at large in the city.

Capturing the vibrant community spirit of Oakland in the nineties, Smith crafts both a rare cinematic celebration of Black female creativity and a moving elegy for a generation of lost African American men. This superb new 4K restoration, undertaken by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, was supervised by Cauleen Smith and premiered at the 2022 New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center.

The DFT presents this special preview screening in advance of the film’s national release. 2000 Independent Spirit Award Winner; Grand Jury Prize for Best Film, Urbanworld Film Festival.
 

Black stories take the spotlight to highlight short films that share the joy, determination, resilience, and complexity of being Black and young. Explore a range of genres and styles in a program that spans the globe. These amazing short films were audience favorites and award-winners at the 2022 New York International Children’s Film Festival and are sure to inspire curiosity and conversation for viewers big and small.  

Recommended for families with children ages 9 and up. In English, Portuguese, and Luganda with English subtitles. (76min)  

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

Comic Escape

• United States, Live Action, Alphonso McAuley, 2021, 15 min.  

A young boy unexpectedly finds a comic book that changes his reality. 

Cupids

• United States, Live Action, Zoey Martinson, 2021, 10 min.      

This whimsical comedy love letter to New York's essential workers follows a whole class on the last day of school as they scheme to find the perfect partner for their adored bus driver, Ms. Cheryl, and save her from a lonely summer without them. 

Generation Impact: The Coder

• United States, Documentary, Samantha Knowles, 2021, 7 min.  

Jay Jay Patton was only 13 when she designed and built an app to help kids connect with their incarcerated parents, inspired by her own experience. Now she is creating a coding academy to help other kids do the same. 

My Name is Maluum 

• Brazil, Animation, Luísa Copetti, 2021, 8 min.  

Maalum comes from a home surrounded by love and Afro-centered references. When her classmates tease her about her name, Maluum discovers the lovely legacy of her name and ancestry. 
 

The Night I Left America

• Uganda, United States, Live Action, Laki Karavias, 2021, 14 min. 

While anxiously awaiting the results of his mother’s visa renewal request, a teenage boy living in Texas conjures memories of his life in Uganda. 

Room Rodeo

• United States, Live Action, Daniel Kayamba, 2021, 14 min.  

Grounded and with a last-minute school project due, Jamil takes matters into his own hands in order to prove he is the great-grandson of a legendary Black cowboy. 
 

Wolf and Cub

• United States, Animation, Marvin Bynoe, 2021, 8 min.  

A father and son cross a world of imagination in order to return their mother’s forgotten lunch. 

Presented in partnership with New York International Children’s Film Festival 

USA/2022—directed by  Johanna Hamilton and Yoruba Richen | 96 min.

Join us for a screening of The Rebellious Life Of Mrs. Rosa Parks, followed by a special conversation moderated by the film’s executive producer Soledad O’Brien, and joined by Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Secretary of State, Randi Weingarten, President, American Federation of Teachers, the film’s directors Yoruba Richen and Johanna Hamilton, Dr. Jeanne Theoharis and Lonnie McCauley, Rosa Parks’ grandnephew.

The Rebellious Life Of Mrs. Rosa Parks corrects the record on Parks’ often-overlooked accomplishments and the erasure of her radical politics. In short, what we are taught in school about Rosa Parks is a mere fraction of the full story about who she truly was.

This special evening is co-presented by SO’B Productions, American Federation of Teachers, The League, Freep Film Festival and Friends of Detroit Film Theatre.

“Perhaps foremost, Mrs. Rosa Parks highlights the selflessness of its subject and seeks to provide a detailed portrait of a woman who, through the vagaries of history, was frequently reduced to a symbol." –Brian Lowry, CNN.com

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

Norway/2018—directed by Mats Grorud | 74 min.

Based on interviews with Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, The Tower follows Wardi, an eleven-year-old Palestinian girl, who lives with her whole family in the refugee camp where she was born. Her beloved great-grandfather Sidi was one of the first people to settle in the camp after being chased from his home back in 1948.

The day Sidi gives her the key to his old house back in Galilee, she fears he may have lost hope of someday going home. As she searches for Sidi’s lost hope around the camp, she collects her family’s testimonies, from one generation to the next.

Mixing stop-motion animation and 2D techniques, The Tower portrays the Middle Eastern crisis in a manner that all generations can understand. For ages 14 and up.

As in years past, we’re honored to present a program of all of the Academy Award® nominated short documentary films (in addition to the short animation and live-action films, which are playing in a program of their own – see the DFT brochure or DIA website for details).

Feature-length documentaries have for several years enjoyed a higher profile than ever among moviegoers, but just as with the live-action and animated short film categories, short documentaries – which are often every bit as powerful as each year’s nominated feature-length docs – have enjoyed a rapidly growing base of enthusiasts who love to experience their expansive, enlightening exploration of the world on the big screen.

Advance ticket purchase is recommended, but remaining seats will be available at the door prior to each performance. The documentary program generally runs a bit over three hours, including one 25-minute intermission. 

USA/1970—directed by Richard Kaplan | 185 min.

Constructed from a wealth of archival footage, the Oscar® nominated King: A Filmed Record... Montgomery To Memphis is a monumental documentary that follows Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from 1955 to 1968, in his rise from regional activist to world-renowned leader of the Civil Rights movement.

Rare footage of Dr. King's speeches, protests, and arrests are interspersed with scenes of high-profile supporters and opponents of the cause. Restored to full-length by the Library of Congress, the complete version of King is a cinematic national treasure that gives viewers an appreciation of the personal challenges he endured and the cultural legacy he left behind. 

“Perhaps the most important documentary ever made.” -The Philadelphia Bulletin

The Detroit Film Theatre is supported by your tri-county millage investment.
 

France/2022—directed by Alice Diop | 122 minutes

Rama (Kayije Kagame), a successful Parisian journalist, has come to the small French town of Saint Omer to attend the trial of a young Senegalese woman charged with killing her baby daughter. Although she admits to the act, Laurence (Guslagie Malanda) cannot or will not describe her motivation, claiming it was out of her control and adding, “I don’t know. I hope this trial can help me understand.”

The complex mysteries at the heart of this absorbing, wholly original take on both the courtroom drama and the African immigrant experience unfold like a Russian nesting doll. Is the accused a liar, a victim, a sorceress, or all of the above?  

In her remarkable fiction feature debut, Senegalese-French documentarian Alice Diop constructs a captivating, sensitive, superbly acted drama of continuously revealing layers. At once a modern suspense classic, a work of psychological portraiture and a provocative examination of the limits of cross-cultural knowledge, Saint Omer is France’s official submission for Best International Feature to the 2023 Academy Awards®. Silver Lion Winner, Venice Film Festival.

“Extraordinary from beginning to end. Compelling and finely wrought, Saint Omer tears the heart and boggles the mind.” —Amy Taubin, Artforum