Festival Events

(Márta Mészáros, 1975, Hungary, 99 min, in Hungarian w/ English subtitles)

Guests: Catherine Portuges

Introduced by: Shawn Shimpach (UMass Amherst)

Kata, a widow in socialist Hungary, lives alone, plies her skills as a woodworker in a furniture factory, and keeps up for years an affair with a married co-worker. When a group of teenage girls from the orphanage stop at her home, the balance of her life is disturbed by the beautiful, self-possessed Anna. Kata discovers her desire for a child, either by birth or by adoption. With breathtaking closeups, revelatory moving frames, and lush black-and-white photography, Mészáros creates a richly layered portrait of women seeking love and freedom and learning that adoption, in all its forms demands unforeseen adaptation. Adoption is the first film directed by a woman to win the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. New 4k digital restoration.

 

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Screening: March 29th, 7:30 pm

Live conversation and Q&A: 

Short Films Program

Guest: TBA

Introduced by: Nefeli Forni Zervoudaki (UMass Amherst)

 

THE SEA ON THE DAY WHEN MAGIC RETURNS
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(2022, dir Jiwon Han, South Korea, 24 min, in Korean w/ English subtitles)

In this startlingly imaginative animation, Sejin once had the power to have anything she wanted just by wishing for it. The world was her oyster. But now, as she strives for a career in tourism, hobbled by the dysfunctional men in her life, she has lost her magic. Can she survive and find it again?

 

THE NIGHT I LEFT AMERICA
(2021, Laki Karavias, 14 min, Uganda/US)

As a small boy, Chamagello dreamed of leaving Uganda for the wonders of America. Now a teenager in a ramshackle trailer in rural Texas, he awaits the decision on his mother’s work visa renewal, confronted by memories of the life he left behind in Uganda and the prospect of returning.

 

LAMPI
(2022, Paolo Santamaria, 16 min, Italy, in Italian w/ English subtitles

A woman struggles to contain an extraordinary, electric part of herself in an effort to fit into ordinary life. An allegory of otherness? A metaphor for mental illness? Or a meditation on anxieties about women wielding power? Lampi evokes these and other questions with its fantasy.

 

 

DEEPLOVE (???????)
(2019, Mykyta Lyskov, 14 min, Ukraine)

Set in the city of Dnipro, Ukraine, this kaleidoscopic animated short brings dark humor in the absurdist tradition to reflect on the effects of modern commerce on urban life, with proliferations of plastic bags, anonymous monsters, apocalyptic mushrooms, distorted chronologies, and prescient themes of military invasion.

 

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Screening: April 5th, 7:30 pm

Live conversation and Q&A: David Siev (Director) and Rosie Walunas (Film Editor)

Bad Axe

(David Siev, 2022, USA, 100 min)

Guests: David Siev (Director) and Rosie Walunas (Film Editor)

Introducer: TBA

This award-winning documentary brings us inside the lives of an Asian American family living in a rural Michigan community as they fight to keep their American dream alive. As owners of a local prominent restaurant, they reckon with a deadly global pandemic, racial tensions, and generational scars from Cambodia’s “killing fields.” A love letter to a family, a hometown, and a country stumbling toward fulfilling its great promise, perhaps no other film captures the present cultural moment as profoundly as Bad Axe, with its intimate story told with courage, honesty, and care.

 

 

The Janes

(Emma Pildes and Tia Lesson, 2022, 101 min, USA)

Guests: Emma Pildes and Tia Lesson (discussion)

Introduced by: Laura Briggs (UMass Amherst)

In the spring of 1972, police raided an apartment on the South Side of Chicago where seven women who were part of a clandestine network were arrested. Using code names, fronts, and safe houses to protect themselves and their work, these women had built an underground service for women seeking safe, affordable, illegal abortions. They called themselves “Jane”.  Janes tells the story of a group of unlikely outlaws who deed the law, the Church, and the Mob at great personal peril to help women in need.

 

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*Five College Reproductive Health, Rights, & Justice *

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