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MovieWinter Kept Us Warm
Movie
Directed by David Secter | 82 mins | 1965
A landmark in the Canadian film industry as the first English-language film from the country to screen at the Cannes Film Festival and a pioneering work of LGBTQ+ cinema, Secter’s keenly observed, shoestring budget drama stars John Labow and Henry Tarvain... -
2 itemsStarring Frank Ripploh
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Frank Ripploh’s attraction to the abject and the outré made him a sui generis deviant in a career which saw him befriend and collaborate with many of New German Cinema’s cynosures, among them Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Magdalena Montezuma, and Ulrike Ottinger. His most notable work remains "Taxi z...
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3 itemsTwo by Guy Maddin
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Amnesiacs, apocalyptic romances, and arcane scriptures: all the reveries of cinema’s past and future collide at breakneck speed in the films of Guy Maddin, the silver screen’s most singular surrealist and slipperiest stylist. The Canadian cult director’s oeuvre feels beamed in from an alternate d...
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4 itemsRomanian New Wave
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“There is not, not, not, not, not a Romanian New Wave,” Cristi Puiu—whose film "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" is the earliest in this collection—averred, with some exasperation, in a 2008 New York Times interview. But how else to limn the filmmakers who emerged like a rash onto the international fe...
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2 itemsTwo by Hlynur Pálmason
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Born in a fishing town in southeastern Iceland, Hlynur Pálmason trained as a visual artist before embarking on a film career. Accordingly, his work often bears a painterly quality, using the gelid tundras of his homeland as a backdrop to stage existential quarrels—between beauty and brutality, be...
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The Man With The Golden Arm
Directed by Otto Preminger | 119 mins | 1955
Incendiary at the time for its depiction of drug addiction, Otto Preminger’s noir-ish expedition through the caliginous slums and backdoor casinos of ’50s Chicago was so popular that it incited an investigation into cinema censorship—and an eventual lo... -
Buffalo Juggalos
Directed by Scott Cummings | 30 mins | 2014
Smeared in gaudy face-paint and dedicated as much to the hip-hop duo Insane Clown Posse as they are to generalized debauchery and destruction, the Juggalo remains one of fan culture’s most enduring—and most derided—outsider figures. In his experimental ... -
The Forest for the Trees
Directed by Maren Ade | 81 mins | 2003
Like her 2016 magnum opus "Toni Erdmann", Maren Ade’s devilish debut subjects its anti-heroine to a borderline sadistic ritual of ignominy. Melanie Pröschle (a fantastically game Eva Löbau), a 27-year-old schoolteacher moves to a new town, only to be assaile... -
Agent of Happiness
Directed by Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó | 93 mins | 2024
How do you measure joy? For Bhutan—a nation that conceptualized a “gross national happiness" in 1972 and has collected data on its citizens’ satisfaction for almost two decades—the answer might just be mathematical. But the truth is h... -
12:08 East of Bucharest
Directed by Corneliu Porumboiu | 89 mins | 2006
On the 16th anniversary of the collapse of Nicolae Ceausescu’s oppressive regime just before Christmas, 1989, a TV station in the provincial town of Vaslui, Romania, plans to produce a program on those events, but can only find two “revolutionaries”... -
A White, White Day
Directed by Hlynur Pálmason | 109 mins | 2019
Hlynur Pálmason’s second film opens with the Icelandic proverb that gives "A White, White Day" its title: “On such days when everything is white, and there is no longer any difference between the earth and the sky, then the dead can talk to us who are... -
Child's Pose
Directed by Peter Neter | 112 mins | 2013
Winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, "Child’s Pose" offers a scathing indictment of corruption in contemporary Romanian society in the tale of a wealthy mother willing to do anything in order to protect her wastrel son from the consequen... -
Graduation
Directed by Cristian Mungiu | 127 mins | 2016
Nine years after his Palme d’Or-winning breakout—the abortion drama "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days"—"Graduation" landed Cristian Mungiu his third major award at Cannes, this time for best director. He returns to the murky backwaters of institutional co... -
Macumba
Directed by Elfi Mikesch | 88 mins | 1982
Frank Ripploh appears as an oleaginous con man, one of a rogue’s gallery of criminals, sociopaths, and blighted romantics (others played by Heinz Emigholz, Carola Regnier, and Fritz Mikesch) that populate Mikesch’s sui generis underground underworld movie... -
Madame X: An Absolute Ruler
Directed by Ulrike Ottinger | 131 mins | 1977
The hard, merciless pirate ruler of the China Sea, Madame X sends out a missive to women, inviting them to leave domestic security behind for a life of dangerous adventure, but when a panoply of different women—including Yvonne Rainer on rollerskates... -
My Winnipeg
Directed by Guy Maddin | 80 mins | 2007
“For my entire life,” says Guy Maddin in a Metrograph Journal conversation, “I felt Winnipeg was a big donut hole in the center of the continent, that all the Hollywood films and TV shows that I grew up watching did not acknowledge its existence.” In this s... -
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
Directed by Cristi Puiu | 147 mins | 2005
Responsible more than any other film for establishing Romanian film as an international force, Puiu’s second feature is a scabrous satire of broken institutions that begins with the ailing elderly Mr. Lazarescu calling an ambulance, then follows him on an... -
The Saddest Music in the World
Directed by Guy Maddin | 100 mins | 2003
Isabella Rossellini is pure pomp and pageantry here as a Depression-era beer baronness—and double amputee—whose glass legs are filled with her own brew. Add to the concoction a sex-crazed amnesiac (Maria de Medeiros), a Broadway has-been (Mark McKinney), m... -
Winter Brothers
Directed by Hlynur Pálmason | 93 min | 2017
Winner of four awards at its Locarno premiere, Hlynur Pálmason’s debut feature introduces the traits that would come to define his future work (notably, the 2022 western "Godland")—fertile interrogations of masculinity and its entailing savagery unfoldi...
