Harpur Cinema
Since 1965, Harpur Cinema has been seeking to bring to campus a range of significant films that in most cases would not be available to local audiences. Our program is international in scope, emphasizing foreign and independent films, as well as important films from the historical archive. All foreign films are shown in their original language with English subtitles.
Lecture Hall 6, unless otherwise noted
7:30pm on Friday and Sunday
$4 Single Admission
*Tickets will be for sale at the door from 7:00pm on the evening of the screening.
Free admission to students currently enrolled in CINE 121.
In accordance with University public health policies, proof of COVID-19 vaccination or negative test required before entry. Face masks required of all attendees, regardless of vaccination status. All University public health policies will be enforced.
Spring 2022
Programmed by Professor Kenneth White (Cinema) and Professor Brian Wall (Cinema).
Friday, February 4 & Sunday, February 6: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.