Harpur Cinema

Programmed by Professor Kenneth White (Cinema) and Professor Brian Wall (Cinema).

EYIMOFE (THIS IS MY DESIRE)
Arie and Chuko Esiri, Nigeria, 2020, 116 min
A triumph at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival, the revelatory debut feature from co-directors (and twin brothers) Arie and Chuko Esiri is a heartrending and hopeful portrait of everyday human endurance in Lagos, Nigeria. Shot on richly textured 16 mm film and infused with the spirit of neorealism, Eyimofe traces the journeys of two distantly connected strangers—Mofe (Jude Akuwudike), an electrician dealing with the fallout of a family tragedy, and Rosa (Temi Ami-Williams), a hairdresser supporting her pregnant teenage sister—as they each pursue their dream of starting a new life in Europe while bumping up against the harsh economic realities of a world in which every interaction is a transaction. From these intimate stories emerges a vivid snapshot of life in contemporary Lagos, whose social fabric is captured in all its vibrancy and complexity.

Friday, February 11 & Sunday, February 13:
CHESS OF THE WIND
Mohammad Reza Aslani, Iran, 1976, 93 min
Screened publicly just once before it was banned and then lost for decades, this rediscovered jewel of Iranian cinema reemerges to take its place as one of the most singular and astonishing works of the country’s pre-revolution New Wave. A hypnotically stylized murder mystery awash in shivery period atmosphere, Chess of the Wind unfolds in an ornate, candlelit mansion where a web of greed, violence, and betrayal ensnares the heirs to a family fortune as they vie for control of their recently-deceased matriarch’s estate. Melding the influences of European modernism, gothic horror, and classical Persian art, director Mohammad Reza Aslani crafts an exquisitely controlled mood piece that erupts in a stunningly subversive final act in which class conventions, gender roles, and even time itself are upended with shocking ferocity. Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Image Retrouvée laboratory (Paris) in collaboration with Mohammad Reza Aslani and Gita Aslani Shahrestani. Restoration funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

Friday, February 18 & Sunday, February 20:
59th ANN ARBOR FILM FESTIVAL TRAVELING TOUR—PROGRAM A
Total running time: 80 min
Established in 1963, the Ann Arbor Film Festival is the longest-running independent and experimental film festival in North America. The six-day festival presents 40 programs with more than 200 films from over 20 countries of all lengths and genres, including experimental, animation, documentary, narrative, hybrid and performance based works. The Ann Arbor Film Festival is a pioneer of the traveling film festival concept, having launched an annual tour program in 1964. The AAFF selects films from the past year’s festival: Harpur Cinema is pleased to present Program A of the 59th AAFF Traveling Tour!

MAD MIETER by M+M (Marc Weis and Martin de Mattia)
KKUM by Kang Min Kim
PIZ REGOLITH by Yannick Mosimann
13 by Shinya Isobe
BREATH CONTROL by Carson Parish
DISPLACEMENT by Maxime Corbiel-Perron
DANNI THE CHAMPION by Laura Camera-Lewis
QUEEN OF DOTS by Michael Lyons
PRIMAVERA by Adrian Garcia Gomez

Friday, February 25 & Sunday, February 27:
59th ANN ARBOR FILM FESTIVAL TRAVELING TOUR—PROGRAM B
Total running time: 94 min
Established in 1963, the Ann Arbor Film Festival is the longest-running independent and experimental film festival in North America. The six-day festival presents 40 programs with more than 200 films from over 20 countries of all lengths and genres, including experimental, animation, documentary, narrative, hybrid and performance based works. The Ann Arbor Film Festival is a pioneer of the traveling film festival concept, having launched an annual tour program in 1964. The AAFF selects films from the past year’s festival: Harpur Cinema is pleased to present Program B of the 59th AAFF Traveling Tour!

DREAM OF EMMA AND TONY by Natalia Rocafuerte
VALPI by Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie
REVOLYKUS by Victor Orozco Ramirez
CAUSE OF DEATH by Jyoti Mistry
ICI by Sylvie Denet
((((/*\)))) AKA ECHOES OF THE VOLCANO by Charles Fairbanks and Saul Kak
SILVER FEMME by Nico Reano and Jimena Lucero
-FORCE- by Jennie MaryTai Liu and Simon Liu
STUNTING CUNTS by Gina Kamentsky

Friday, March 4 & Sunday, March 6:
WORKING GIRLS
Lizzie Borden, United States, 1986, 93 min
Sex work is portrayed with radical nonjudgment in Lizzie Borden’s immersive, richly detailed look at the rhythms and rituals of society’s most stigmatized profession. Inspired by the experiences of the sex workers Borden met while making her underground feminist landmark Born in Flames, Working Girls reveals the textures of a day in the life of Molly (Louise Smith), a photographer working part-time in a Manhattan brothel, as she juggles a steady stream of clients, balances relationships with her coworkers with the demands of an ambitious madam, and above all fights to maintain her sense of self in a business in which the line between the personal and the professional is all too easily blurred. In viewing prostitution through the lens of labor, Borden boldly desensationalizes the subject, offering an empathetic, humanizing, often humorous depiction of women for whom this work is just another day at the office. New 4K restoration by the Criterion Collection and UCLA Film & Television Archive in conjunction with Sundance Institute.

Friday, March 25 & Sunday, March 27
A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING
Payal Kapadia, India and France, 2021, 96 min
One of the year’s most electrifying debuts—and winner of the best documentary award at Cannes—Payal Kapadia’s hybrid feature A Night of Knowing Nothing is a fever dream of impossible love tied to a broader reflection on contemporary India. Structured around letters from an unseen protagonist, L, directed to her estranged lover, K, Kapadia’s film is at once grand and contained, weaving fragments of a romance and moments of domestic life with handheld documentary footage captured around the country over several years. In this fervent cinétract on love and revolt, which doubles as a love letter to cinema itself, essayistic and epistolary forms suffuse the burnished, chiaroscuro images with both yearning and introspection. Utilizing a variety of formats and formal approaches in service of an entrancing, cohesive whole, the film offers a rich and sensual interplay between sound and image that heightens its atmospheric textures. The dialectic of presence and absence fuels the paradoxical conundrum of capturing the flow of history, while the fitting leitmotif of dancing courses through the film with unbridled energy. A film of unexpected urgency, A Night of Knowing Nothing announces the arrival of an audacious cinematic talent.

Friday, April 1 & Sunday, April 3:
FAYA DAYI
Jessica Beshir, Ethiopia, 2021, 120 min
In her hypnotic documentary feature, Ethiopian-Mexican filmmaker Jessica Beshir explores the coexistence of everyday life and its mythical undercurrents. Though a deeply personal project—Beshir was forced to leave her hometown of Harar with her family as a teenager due to growing political strife—the film she returned to make about the city, its rural Oromo community of farmers, and the harvesting of the country’s most sought-after export (the euphoria-inducing khat plant) is neither a straightforward work of nostalgia nor an issue-oriented doc about a particular drug culture. Rather, she has constructed something dreamlike: a film that uses light, texture, and sound to illuminate the spiritual lives of people whose experiences often become fodder for ripped-from-the-headlines tales of migration.

Friday, April 8 & Sunday, April 10
EXPEDITION CONTENT
Ernst Karel & Veronika Kusumaryati, United States, 2020, 78 min
An immersive marvel of sonic ethnography, Expedition Content draws on audio recordings made by recent college graduate and Standard Oil heir Michael Rockefeller as part of the 1961 Harvard-Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea that set up tents among the indigenous Hubula (also known as Dani) people. In their nearly imageless film, Karel and Kusumaryati document the strange encounter between the expedition and the Hubula people. The work explores and upends the power dynamics between anthropologist and subject, between image and sound, and turns the whole ethnographic project on its head.

Friday, April 22 & Sunday, April 24:
ROCK BOTTOM RISER
Fern Silva, United States, 2021, 70 min
From the earliest voyagers who navigated by starlight, to present-day astronomers scanning the cosmos for habitable planets, explorers have long made Hawaii the hub for their searching. Today—as lava continues to flow on the island—another crisis mounts as scientists plan to build the world’s largest telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii’s most sacred and revered mountain. In his dynamic feature debut, Fern Silva examines myriad encounters with an island world at sea. Drawing from subjects as seemingly disparate as the arrival of Christian missionaries and the controversial casting of Dwayne Johnson as King Kamehameha, the film weaves a vital tapestry of post-colonialism and pop culture with cinematic brio and a wry wit. Rock Bottom Riser is an essential document and an exhilarating tour-de-force, a palimpsest that traverses geology, ethnography and astronomy.