Starring: Toshirô Mifune, Minoru Chiaki, Isuzu Yamada, Takashi Shimura, Akira Kubo

A vivid, visceral Macbeth adaptation, Throne of Blood, directed by Akira Kurosawa, sets Shakespeare’s definitive tale of ambition and duplicity in a ghostly, fog-enshrouded landscape in feudal Japan. As a hardened warrior who rises savagely to power, Toshiro Mifune gives a remarkable, animalistic performance, as does Isuzu Yamada as his ruthless wife. Throne of Blood fuses classical Western tragedy with formal elements taken from Noh theater to create an unforgettable cinematic experience.

Starring: Richard Barthelmess, Aline MacMahon, Loretta Young

Hosted by Caroline Golum and Cristina Cacioppo. Followed by an afterparty in Trees Lounge with a DJ set of pre-code era tunes (and beyond) from Owen Kline plus our signature cocktail special “Blonde in Hell.”

Like so many other young men of his generation, Tom Holmes (Richard Barthelmess) limps back from WWI broke, friendless, and addicted to morphine. Year after year he struggles to find steady employment, hoping to catch the wave of prosperity that buoyed hucksters and capitalists during the Roaring Twenties. But when the Great Depression hits, Tom finds the resolve to do battle once more – not against the German army, but against the wheels of industry! Radicalized by his hardship, he joins America’s growing labor movement to fight, at long last, for a truly just cause. Spitfire director William A. Wellman’s swift rage against the machine has it all: solidarity, showmanship, empathy and economic justice. And he gets it done in just over 70 minutes!

Shakedown is the story of Los Angeles’ black lesbian strip club scene and its genesis. Owned and operated by women, underground and illegal in nature, the club Shakedown is the darker, faster, younger iteration of this dance culture. The film is a window into this world. Shakedown emerged from a post-RIOTS, post-OJ, post-integration but still very racially divided Los Angeles. In this divided city Shakedown is an independent, all black and all female cash economy. Shakedown chronicles the explicit performances and personal relationships of the party’s dancers and organizers including Ronnie-Ron, Shakedown Productions’ creator and emcee; Mahogany, the legendary “mother” of the community; Egypt, their star performer; and Jazmine, the “Queen” of Shakedown.

Starring: Milton Gonçalves, Odete Lara, Stepan Nercessian, Nelson Xavier, Yara Cortes, Wilson Grey

4K restoration

Rio de Janeiro’s criminal underworld is run by an unexpected boss: Diaba (Milton Gonçalves), a femme queen with a taste for power and violence. When the police come after her boy toy, Diaba attempts to find a scapegoat to take the blame and a plot to dethrone Her Majesty arises! Always clad in gloriously colourful outfits and accessories inspired by Afro-Brazilian culture, Diaba runs a mob of eccentric misfits made up of drag queens, pimps, prostitutes, and queer folks of all stripes. The movie’s bold and audacious color palette and camp aesthetic evokes the early films of Pedro Almodóvar, while its stylized and over-the-top violence is giving Quentin Tarantino queer fever dream.

Starring: Suzanne Gregg Ferguson, Dudley Findlay Jr., Michael Hyatt, Jon Kit Lee, Michael Lynch, Claude E. Sloan

4K restoration

Through a campaign of fabulous surprise attacks, an underground band of radical queer HIV+ activists, addicts, and drag queens take to the streets of New York City to combat conservative politicians and government apathy towards the AIDS crisis. A frenetic debut feature from writer/director Stephen Winter, Chocolate Babies unleashes a world of anarchic camp and unapologetic Black queer power in one of the hidden gems of New Queer Cinema, ripe for rediscovery and ready to be introduced to new audiences.

For the film’s 25th anniversary, Frameline has commissioned a 4K restoration of Chocolate Babies in partnership with the National Film Preservation Foundation, the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and the Outfest Legacy Project. Following its festival run in the mid-1990s (playing at SXSW, the Berlinale, and Frameline21), Chocolate Babies struggled to secure major distribution due to its radically independent Black queer vision, but eventually found a home at Frameline Distribution who championed the film and continued to bring it to new audiences. Frameline proudly presents the world premiere of this pristine restoration in rich color and vivid detail like never before.

Starring: Dirk Bogarde, Sylvia Syms, Peter McEnery

In early 1960s London, barrister Melville Farr (Dirk Bogarde) is on the path to success. With his practice winning cases and a loving marriage to his wife (Sylvia Syms), Farr’s career and personal life are nearly idyllic. However, when blackmailers link Farr to a young gay man (Peter McEnery), everything Farr has worked for is threatened. As it turns out, Farr is a closeted homosexual — which is problematic, due to Britain’s anti-sodomy laws. But instead of giving in, Farr decides to fight.

Starring: Silas Howard, Harry Dodge, Stanya Kahn, Carina Gia

4K restoration

Groundbreaking when it was made and still fiercely innovative today, By Hook or By Crook is a trans and butch buddy film that chronicles three weeks in the life of Shy, a handsome, gender-bending, small town dreamer with a nagging messiah complex. Emotionally defeated after the death of his father, Shy heads to the big city to sink himself into a “life of crime.” He is quickly distracted by Valentine, a deliriously expressive, wise-acre adoptee on a misguided search for her birth mother. The two freaky grifters join forces and learn the true meaning of “poise under pressure” in this visually stunning and wonderfully acted, anti-authoritarian tale of friendship, trust and redemption.

Starring: Sandra Kane, Linda Gale, Diane Conti, Robin Nolan, Eileen Dietz

Shot guerilla-style in the shadows of Brooklyn, Teenage Gang Debs combines the template of Freaks with the blueprint for Hairspray to forge the most essential juvenile delinquent gutter-noir that ever was. With its cinéma vérité fight scenes, gang leaders who wear cardigan sweaters, and refreshing flip of gender roles in exploitation, this Something Weird classic feels like what would happen if The Shangri-Las stopped singing “Leader of the Pack” and started stabbing punks with switchblades.

Starring: Jack Waters, Sarah Schulman, Orran Farmer, Eamon Fahey, Mike Bailey-Gates

A radical revisitation. This updated version of Stephen Winter’s 2015 film unearths the ghosts of Jason and Shirley, restaging the volatile 12-hour shoot of the 1967 documentary Portrait of Jason—held at the Chelsea Hotel—which blurred the line between subject and storyteller.

Jason Holliday, a sharp-witted Black gay man, whose identity splits between personas–performer, hustler, muse, provocateur–is once again in the room with Shirley Clarke, the Oscar-winning filmmaker who insisted on framing his life. Now, with newly unearthed footage, the director returns 10 years later, not to resolve the contradictions, but to reopen them. What was once a document becomes a haunting, a conversation with what was left outside the frame. Time folds. Power shifts. And Jason, still impossible to contain, speaks back.

Before Jason and Shirley Revisited, we’ll be screening the short Birth of the Hive Queen, dir. Tempest Creation (8 min.)
Amina, a trans escort, gives birth from her anus.

Starring: Lamberto Maggiorani, Enzo Staiola, Lianella Carell

Hailed around the world as one of the greatest movies ever made, the Academy Award–winning Bicycle Thieves, directed by Vittorio De Sica, defined an era in cinema. In poverty-stricken postwar Rome, a man is on his first day of a new job that offers hope of salvation for his desperate family when his bicycle, which he needs for his work, is stolen. With his young son in tow, he sets off to track down the thief. Simple in construction and profoundly rich in human insight, Bicycle Thieves embodies the greatest strengths of the Italian neorealist movement: emotional clarity, social rectitude and brutal honesty.