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
 

South Korea/2022—directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda | 129 minutes

Five years after winning the Cannes Film Festival’s highest award for Shoplifters (DFT 2017), the Oscar® nominated Hirokazu Kore-eda returns with Broker, the tale of two men who – under the radar of the legal system – accept custody of unwanted infants which they then sell to affluent childless couples.

Circumventing the bureaucracy – and accountability – of legal adoption, these “brokers” try in their limited way to act morally by matching the children with responsible families. But after one infant’s mother surprises the duo by demanding to supervise her baby’s placement, the three unlikely partners embark on a search for the perfect couple, while unintentionally building an unlikely “family” of their own. Thoughtful, powerful, surprisingly witty, and deeply, generously humane, Broker is the gift of a master storyteller at the height of his powers.

Parasite’s Song Kang Ho won the Best Actor Prize at Cannes for Broker, the first South Korean actor to receive the honor. In Korean with English subtitles.

“Five Stars! Big-hearted and directed with impeccable skill, delicacy and compassion as secret motives are revealed, sympathies shift, and dangers multiply.” – Nicholas Barber, BBC Culture 

Poland/Italy/2022—directed by Jerzy Skolimowski | 86 minutes

After leaving a traveling circus – the only life he’s ever known – EO, a grey donkey with melancholic and expressive eyes, begins a journey across the Polish and Italian countryside, encountering the unfathomable chasms between cruelty and kindness, captivity and freedom. Legendary 84-year-old master director Jerzy Skolimowski (The Shout) imagines EO’s mesmerizing journey as an ever-shifting interior landscape, marked by absurdity and warmth in equal measure, and always putting the viewer in the relatable perspective of the movie’s four-legged protagonist.

With EO, one of the most visually inventive films of his long career, Skolimowski the artist has constructed a bold, avant-garde vision of the follies and wonders of human nature as seen from the ultimate outsider’s perspective – not even for a moment does this wondrous character lose his innocence.

Recommended for audiences 16 and up. Jury Prize Winner, 2022 Cannes Film Festival; Poland’s official submission to the 2023 Academy Awards® for Best International Feature. In Polish, Italian, English and French with English subtitles.

“A flamboyant, visionary work. The wildest, youngest film in the Cannes lineup was made by an 84-year-old director up for anything.” – Jonathan Romney, Film Comment 

François Truffaut’s celebrated, autobiographical “Antoine Doinel” films span 20 years in the life of the late director and his great star, Jean-Pierre Léaud, not to mention the character that Léaud so brilliantly incarnates on screen. Rarely screened together, these five masterworks will be shown at the Detroit Film Theatre Auditorium on one weekend, in chronological order, and in newly restored versions.

The 400 Blows (1959) chronicles the development of the rebellious, delinquent, 14-year-old character of Antoine who then becomes the independent, determined adolescent in Antoine and Colette (1962), the romantic, would-be professional in Stolen Kissses (1968), and then ultimately the resilient but never-satisfied thirty-something in Bed and Board (1970) and Love on the Run (1979). 

Tickets to each film are available separately, but for those who want the full experience, a pass to all five films to this once-only “Antoine-a-Thon” is available for just $20. 

The DFT’s popular annual screenings of the British Arrows—those uniquely creative “adverts” of British television assembled into a feature-length program screened in select cinemas worldwide—were forced to pause during COVID. Now the Arrows are back on the big screen, in a program that combines the best of 2022’s winners with the highlights we missed in 2021.

The compact storytelling that’s possible in films of only a minute or two provides endless surprises—some of the winners are sharp and effective public service messages, others extol the virtues of beloved brands of tea, ale and chocolate (not to mention certain inexplicably popular British breakfast foods).

Regardless of the product being sold, it’s hard to not be bowled over by the inventiveness and playfulness on display in these British advertisements, all designed to deliver a message while also providing an engaging cinematic kick. (80 min.)

France/1972—directed by Luis Buñuel | 102 min. 

Six well-to-do, sophisticated friends gather regularly to enjoy their privileged trappings of conspicuous consumption—barely giving a thought to the varying degrees of amoral behavior they casually live by daily. Without warning, their untroubled sense of security is intruded upon by a series of frustrating coincidences, plausible at first but then increasingly hilarious; no matter how well-planned their dinner parties, these folks just can’t seem to complete a meal.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, one of the indisputable masterpieces of the cinema’s wittiest surrealist, we’re delighted to present this new 4K restoration that confirms it's as astute and laugh-out-loud funny as it was half a century ago—perhaps even more so. With Delphine Seyrig, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Stéphane Audran, and the great Fernando Rey. In French with English subtitles.  

“Boasts one of the best titles in movie history and a cast to match... It’s mildly amazing that this movie won an Oscar. Typically, the filmmaker told a credulous journalist that his producers had bribed the Academy.” –J. Hoberman, The Village Voice