Nine years after his wife left him for his best friend, journalist Abel (Louis Garrel) gets back together with his recently widowed old flame Marianne (Laetitia Casta), who, if her morbid young son is to be believed, has a thing for poisoning men. A beguiling bedroom farce and Nouvelle Vague sendup.

The miraculous María Félix plays a stormy artist’s model who leads the ever-hapless Arturo de Córdova away from the arms of his innocent wife and down, down, down into the ecstatic depths of degradation.

In a career-high performance, Zhao Tao stars as the fiercely loyal girlfriend of a local gangster played by Liao Fan. Enduring a prison sentence on his behalf, she emerges to find a changed China.

New Orleans-based performance activist Jose Torres-Tama has a dream to create a revolutionary Taco Truck Theatre with a simple message: “No guacamole for immigrant haters”.-- Rodrigo Dorfman in attendance

The jaw-dropping set pieces fly fast and furious in Jackie Chan’s breathtakingly inventive martial-arts comedy. Packed wall-to-wall with charmingly goofball slapstick and astoundingly acrobatic fight choreography, Police Story set a new standard for mayhem that would influence a generation of filmmakers from Hong Kong to Hollywood.

Olivier Assayas’s live-wire international breakthrough stars a magnetic Maggie Cheung as a version of herself: a Hong Kong action movie star who arrives in Paris to play the latex-clad lead in a remake of Louis Feuillade’s classic 1915 crime serial Les vampires.

Kristen Stewart plays the personal—perhaps too personal—assistant to a famous actress (Juliet Binoche) undergoing a crisis as she comes to terms with the fact that she has aged out of the ingénue roles that made her a star.

The Craft has re-emerged as a defining cult movie of female empowerment, survival in the modern world, and excellent mid-90s fashion. 

The eighth film in Zhang Mengqi’s monumental 47km series follows an 85-year-old man reflecting on his revolutionary history in pursuit of Mao’s “New China” and the 15-year-old woman whose portrait painting practice elicits his memories.-- Zhang Mengqi in attendance

“My birth was accompanied by many struggles for my mother. Those “struggles” include: during pregnancy, “should this child be kept,” to the painful struggles in the delivery process. Struggles have also accompanied since I was born, becoming part of my life.” (WW) -- Wu Wenguang in attendance

A real life story of undocumented youth – Dreamers – deliberately getting themselves detained by Border Patrol in order to infiltrate a shadowy, for-profit detention center.

-- Co-producer Sarah Garrahan (Duke MFA '14) in attendance

Curated festival of notable student films produced in Spring 2019 AMI Courses at Duke University.

Bright-eyed aspiring actress Betty (Naomi Watts) arrives in LA with dreams of stardom, but soon finds herself sucked into the nightmarish underbelly of Hollywood’s Dream Factory as she becomes entangled with an amnesiac femme fatale (Laura Harring) -- Best Film of the Decade, Film Comment 

My First Film (Zia Anger, 2019, 90 min)
In this feature-length multimedia performance, filmmaker Zia Anger interacts with media on screen and the audience using real-time text, spontaneous Google searches, audience directives and AirDrops. -- Zia Anger in attendance

Film student Arlene Bowman (Navajo) travels to the Reservation to document the traditional ways of her grandmother. The filmmaker persists despite her grandmother's forceful objections to this invasion of her privacy. A thought-provoking work which abruptly calls into question issues of "insider/outsider" status...