The final film from the late, beloved Agnès Varda is a characteristically playful, profound, and personal summation of the director’s own career.

Mati Diop’s haunting debut feature begins in Dakar with a star-crossed love affair between two teenagers, Ada and Souleiman. When he and a group of exploited young workers disappear in the night in search of a better life abroad, a mysterious fever starts to spread among the women left behind.

Bedside Manner explores doctor-patient encounters through the lens of standardized patient simulations. Accompanied by a discussion with the filmmaker, Corinne Botz, and the main subject of the documentary, Dr. Alice Flaherty, a neurologist at Harvard.

Set in the nooks and crannies of densely populated Wuhan, The Wild Goose Lake follows the desperate attempts of small-time mob boss Zhou Zenong (the charismatic Hu Ge) to stay alive after he mistakenly kills a cop and a dead-or-alive reward is put on his head.

This sly tribute to legendary Taiwanese filmmaker Liu Li-li portrays Liu as a young woman finding her narrative voice in stage and film while juggling romance with a married director.

Poor relation Dennis Price, ninth in line to the Dukedom of Chalfont, coolly narrates from prison his ascent to the peerage via serial murder, bumping off one D’Ascoyne after another, from an arrogant playboy, to a bullet-headed general, to a stiff-upperlipped Admiral, to a dotty reverend, to a formidable dowager — all, plus three more, played by Alec Guinness.

Essayist, novelist, critic, cinephile, and all-around intellectual dynamo Sontag made her directorial debut with this definition-defying, dryly funny psychological serio-comedy. 

Following the death of his father, teenage Phillip (Jakob Lassalle) runs away from home and suffers a severe foot injury in the process. His emotionally distraught mother Astrid (Maren Eggert) is inconsolable and begins lashing out in strange, inexplicable ways. Winner of the Best Director award at the Berlin Film Festival.

Vitalina Varela, 55-year-old Cape Verdean, arrives in Lisbon after a 25 year wait for her plane ticket - and three days after her husband’s funeral. With exacting, painterly cinematography, Vitalina Varela is an exquisitely crafted study of mourning and memory.

Divine, director John Waters’ larger-than-life muse, engulfs the screen with charisma as Dawn Davenport, the living embodiment of the film’s lurid mantra, “Crime is beauty,” who progresses from a teenage nightmare hell-bent on getting cha-cha heels for Christmas to a fame monster whose egomaniacal impulses land her in the electric chair.

Flying high above the clouds in her dirigible, Filibus, the mysterious cross-dressing sky pirate, is a master of disguise and the scourge of millionaires, banks, and the police. Lowered in a gondola by her henchmen, Filibus steals from the rich and then mysteriously vanishes into the clouds. Newly restored to reveal the marvelous range of Desmet tinting and toning in the original nitrate print.

Julianne Moore delivers a breakthrough performance as a Los Angeles housewife who contracts a debilitating illness. As her doctors offer no clear diagnosis, she comes to believe that she has developed frighteningly extreme environmental allergies. A profoundly unsettling work from the great American director Todd Haynes.

Celebrating the best films and essays produced in 2019 AMI classes.
View the final 66 min. program of awarded AMI Student Films (selected by our faculty jury) as an online "Stream/Society" exclusive, during its special week-long engagement!
[Note: the viewing window ended on April 19, 2020.]

Inspired by the recently published collection of essays, Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film, NCSU Film Studies Professor Marsha Gordon and Skip Elsheimer of A/V Geeks project a selection of short 16mm films from the 1960s and 1970s engaged with the topic of race. 

["Virtual Screening"  by special arrangement with Grasshopper Film -- free streaming access available on request from April 27 - May 3, 2020!]

A decade in the making, Mariano Llinás’s La Flor is an unrepeatable labor of love and madness that redefines the concept of binge viewing. The director himself shows up at the start to preview the six episodes that await, each starring the same four remarkable actresses.... Overflowing with nested subplots and whiplash digressions, La Flor shape-shifts from a B-movie to a musical to a spy thriller to a category-defying metafiction—all of them without endings—to a remake of a very well-known French classic and, finally, to an enigmatic period piece...