Starring: Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam

The light, the lives, and the textures of contemporary, working-class Mumbai are explored and celebrated by writer/director Payal Kapadia, who won the Grand Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for her revelatory fiction feature debut.

Centering on two roommates who also work together in a city hospital–head nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and recent hire Anu (Divya Prabha)–plus their coworker, cook Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), Kapadia’s film alights on moments of connection and heartache, hope and disappointment. Prabha, her husband from an arranged marriage living in faraway Germany, is courted by a doctor at her hospital; Anu carries on a romance with a Muslim man, which she must keep a secret from her strict Hindu family; Parvaty finds herself dealing with a sudden eviction from her apartment.

Kapadia captures the bustle of the metropolis and the open-air tranquility of a seaside village with equal radiance, articulated by her superb actresses and by the camera with a lyrical naturalism that occasionally drifts into dreamlike incandescence. All We Imagine as Light is a soulful study of the transformative power of friendship and sisterhood, in all its complexities and richness.

Starring: Abdullah Miniawy, Souhir Ben Amara, Khaled Ben Aissa

S is a young soldier in the Tunisian desert. When his mother dies, he gets a week’s leave and goes back home. But he never returns to the barracks and becomes the target of a manhunt through the backstreets of his working-class neighborhood, before vanishing into the mountains. Several years later, F, a young woman married to a rich businessman finds out that she’s pregnant. One morning, she leaves her luxurious villa and disappears into the forest.

A night of psychedelic graffiti featuring the trippy short films of tape delay, and a screening of the lesser known classic forbidden rebels. With a conversation to follow with Mike Delmar and style master Sharp & Bob Harris via Zoom. Hosted by Sacha Jenkins.

Magic Bluebird (2024)
35 min
A journey back into the shadowy heart of early 70’s New York City, pure 70’s madness from the depths of Fear City. Through a hallucinatory blend of raw archival footage and vibrant animation, the viewer is pulled into a kaleidoscopic descent where gangs rule the night, neon signs flicker on the streets, and reality blurs into a fever dream of subway writing, music, and surreal visions.

Forbidden Rebels (1983)
29 min
by Rii Kanzaki with Bob Harris 1983
A lyric, impressionistic portrait of five New York City graffiti artist/writers in 1983. Filmed in the subways, streets and parks of New York, G-Man, Delta II, Sharp, Spin, and DEZ tell stories of their lives as young Black men, about their creative community, about style, about gaining respect, getting up, about survival, and about their aspirations and their dreams. Imagery combines documentary street realism with Image-Processed video’s painterly analog of a Krylon color spray. Video image processing by Rii Kanzaki at the Experimental Television Center/Owego, NY.

Starring: Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, Pearl Bailey

The tale of the cigarette-maker Carmen and the Spanish cavalry soldier Don Jose is translated into a modern-day story of a parachute factory worker and a stalwart GI named Joe who is about to go to flying school. Conflict arises when a prize-ring champ captures the heart of Carmen after she has seduced Joe and caused him to go AWOL. Carmen remains a flamboyant flirt and ends up being strangled by the soldier.

In 1965, the iconic troubadour Bob Dylan toured the United Kingdom at the age of 23, and director D.A. Pennebaker was allowed behind the scenes to provide one of the most intimate glimpses of the private and frequently cantankerous songwriter. The film chronicles Dylan’s concert appearances, hotel room conversations, and transportation downtime, pulling back the curtain on the folk messiah at the end of his relationship with Joan Baez and on the cusp of his creative shift toward rock music.

Starring: Linnea Quigley, Dino Tripodis, Nick Baldasare, Shanna Thomas

In the small town of Copperton, Ohio, Paul Henson, a former big-city journalist, buys a small local newspaper. He quickly falls into a wide-reaching conspiracy of ritualistic murder and cult mind control when he discovers that the entire town may be under the spell of a Satanic reverend and his flock. As the clues and corpses pile up, Henson and his family are thrust into a life-or-death struggle to expose the truth and stop the demonic cabal’s reign of evil.

This never-before-seen “Satanic Panic” opus from the late 1980s is often cited as the ‘lost’ Linnea Quigley movie and boasts several impressive feats as a low budget regional feature, including gruesome effects, kinetic action set pieces, effective score and a memorable lineup of eccentric Midwest characters. Heartland of Darkness (sometimes also referred to as Blood Church) was shot in 1989 by director Eric Swelstad on 16mm but had been lost in obscurity and distribution false starts for over 30 years.

Starring: Mark Redfield, Gage Sheridan, Doug Brown, Frank Smith, Mark Hyde

After losing his job and his wife, Gordon crashes his car and lands in Purgatory, where he’s attacked by fanatics and enslaved souls. He’s soon saved by a quirky band of freedom fighters from different historical eras, all of whom died in noble sacrifice. Reluctantly joining their cause, Gordon embarks on a wild adventure through surreal, hellish landscapes to battle the Despiser, the malevolent ruler of the realm. Facing shifting realities, monstrous creatures, and intense car chases over lava oceans, their journey leads to the ultimate showdown to save all of humanity.

Philip Cook’s eccentric, non-stop menagerie of machine gun battles, early CGI masterwork and endless array of monsters makes it one of the most unique direct to video features of the VHS and early DVD era. Cook painstakingly crafts a green screen netherworld steeped in brutal violence, religious mythology and action movie tropes, all filtered through a dream-like, hallucinogenic lens that never once takes its foot off the gas and manages to outdo itself at every turn.

Starring: Mina Sundwall, Alex Hibbert, Yasmeen Fletcher, Ewan Manley, John Cho, Maria Dizzia, Kelly O’Sullivan

A powerful and sharply introspective coming-of-age drama, The Graduates follows a young woman, Genevieve (Mina Sundwall), as she prepares to graduate high school after a tragic event. As she navigates an uncertain future alongside a community searching for ways to heal, they turn to each other to find hope and a way forward. A Future of Film is Female release.

before The Graduates, we’ll be screening Celine Sutter’s short Eli, Briefly
ELI, BRIEFLY
Directed by Celine Sutter, 2023 (14 minutes)
Newly successful actor Eli loses their keys after blacking out at a party. Told in an invasive structure, Eli must reckon with their messy night to get a spare set.