Cast: John Earl Jelks, Michelle A. Banks, Nirvana Cobb, Kevin L. Davis, Christopher Smith
4K restoration
The Future of Film is Female continues its year-long celebration of 90s cinema with a screening of the newly-restored COMPENSATION. To make an additional $10 donation to The Future of Film is Female, select the “Event + Donation” ticket on the checkout screen.
“As a word, Compensation evokes labor. In the director Zeinabu irene Davis’s beautifully woven drama of the same name, work does get its close-ups. But it is the loves, labors and vulnerabilities two couples in two different eras experience that make this black-and-white film from 1999 such an elegant and presciently inventive work. … Davis pays homage to the work of at least two of her predecessors from the University of California, Los Angeles: Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust. The U.C.L.A. movement was tagged the “L.A. Rebellion.” The arrival of this restored beauty — which was entered into the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry last year) proves that Davis knows how to rebel in her own distinctive way.” — Lisa Kennedy, The New York Times, Feb. 20, 2025
Starring: Radhika Apte, Ashok Pathak, Chhaya Kadam, Smita Tambe
The Future of Film is Female presents a special screening of director Karan Kandhari’s SISTER MIDNIGHT, winner of Best Picture: Next Wave at Fantastic Fest 2024, with a pre-recorded intro by actor Radhika Apte. To make an additional $10 donation to The Future of Film is Female, select the “Event + Donation” ticket on the checkout screen.
In SISTER MIDNIGHT, the audacious debut feature from London based Indian artist and filmmaker Karan Kandhari, rebellious small-town misfit Uma (acclaimed Indian actress Radhika Apte) arrives in Mumbai to find herself totally unsuited to life as a housewife. At odds with her prying neighbors and under the constant oppressive noise and heat of the city, she decides to break free from the shackles of domesticity and follow her own path in this bold, unpredictable, and darkly funny debut. Featuring an eclectic soundtrack (Interpol frontman Paul Banks makes his debut as composer) and singular visual aesthetic, the film world-premiered in Cannes’ Directors Fortnight and won the award for Best Film in the Next Wave section at Fantastic Fest.
Sweeping scenes of New York City contrasted to the letters from the director’s mother in Brussels.
In 2003, eight Rhode Islanders created a secret apartment inside a busy mall and lived there for four years, filming everything along the way. Far more than a wild prank, the secret apartment became a deeply meaningful place for all involved.
Starring: Margit Carstensen, Hanna Schygulla, Irm Hermann, Eva Mattes, Gisela Fackeldey, Katrin Schaake
The 1970s began with what may be the most intoxicatingly stylized love story of the decade—if love, in this case, means obsession, control, and couture. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is a fever dream of desire, built on the sharp lines of emotional cruelty and the lush textures of a single, decadent room.
A successful fashion designer, Petra (Margit Carstensen), spirals into heartache when she falls hard for the enigmatic Karin (Hanna Schygulla), a young aspiring model. Their entanglement unfolds like a warped runway show—full of longing, power plays, and razor-sharp dialogue. A queer cinema classic draped in fur, chiffon, and despair, Petra von Kant remains a devastating portrait of love as performance. Let’s be clear—no one suffers in style quite like Petra.
Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning helped turn Toronto into an indie-rock mecca in the mid 2000s. Not unlike the story of Seattle’s grunge explosion: Cobain in flannel. Or the New York revival led by The Strokes. The movement they created marked the apex of Toronto’s metamorphosis from a sleepy metropolis to a beacon of hipster cool largely driven by the city’s endlessly inventive music scene. “It wasn’t so hard to be an artist around 2000 in Toronto,” says Broken Social Scene’s Jason Colette in It’s All Gonna Break, a new documentary about the band in this era. “Rent was cheap. The creativity was on fire.”
One of the band’s friends, Stephen Chung, had a camera. He wasn’t setting out to make a documentary—he was a participant, immersed in the expansive Broken Social Scene family of wildly talented artists. Before the iPhone era, Chung captured the raw, unguarded chemistry of the band: late-night jams in cramped apartments before soaring rents, the boundless creative energy of the time, and the beautiful chaos of something none of them saw coming—Lollapalooza, Letterman, film soundtracks, critical acclaim, and global success.
For years, the footage sat unseen, tucked away until the moment was right. Now, with fresh interviews from Kevin Drew, Brendan Canning, Leslie Feist, Emily Haines, and band members, It’s All Gonna Break opens the time capsule of never-before-seen footage that captures the intimacy and magic of the era. This isn’t just a retrospective—it’s a front-row seat to Broken Social Scene’s rise, their reckoning with fame, their defiance of convention, and how they came to define a generation of indie rock. Chung’s kaleidoscopic visual diary is a remarkable coming-of-age story of friends and artists forging their path, growing up together, and creating something unforgettable on their own terms.
Kenny Scharf: When Worlds Collide was made over 11 years and features interviews and rare archival footage with Kenny Scharf, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Ed Ruscha, Dennis Hopper, Yoko Ono, Kaws, Marilyn Minter and Jeffrey Deitch. The documentary shows Scharf’s New York City arrival in the early 1980s where he quickly befriended Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. This trio, amongst the fervent creative bustle of a depressed downtown scene, would soon take the art world by storm.
While Basquiat and Haring both died tragically young, Scharf lived through cataclysmic shifts in New York City and the art world. Despite setbacks along the way, Scharf continues to follow his particular high-tone, technicolor artistic vision while growing public and critical appreciation for his earlier work has cemented his place as a pop art icon.
Starring: Virginie Efira, Alexis Tonetti, Félix Lefebvre, Mathieu Demy
The Future of Film is Female presents ALL TO PLAY FOR, the feature debut by director Delphine Deloget, and the short film MIA, INDETERMINATE by Lili Peper. To make an additional $10 donation to The Future of Film is Female, select the “Event + Donation” ticket on the checkout screen.
Single mother Sylvie (Cesar winner Virginie Efira, Benedetta) lives with her two young sons, Sofiane and Jean-Jacques. One night, Sofiane is injured while alone and child services removes him from their home. Sylvie is determined to bring her son back home, against the full weight of the French legal system in this searing Cannes official selection and winner at the 2024 Belgian Oscars. A Hope Runs High Release.
Preceded by:
MIA, INDETERMINATE
Lili Peper, 2023, 20 min
written by Shahira Kudsi, starring Suzanne Cryer, Olivia Scott Welch
Mia has recently taken in her mother, Bird, a charming but at times infuriating woman with a mental illness. A day in their life together reveals the importance of letting go of control and enjoying the time you have.
In the mid-‘70s, filmmaker James Szalapski documented the then-nascent country music movement that would become known as “outlaw country.” Inspired, in part, by newly-long-haired Willie Nelson’s embrace of hippie attitudes and audiences, a younger generation of artists including Townes Van Zandt, David Alan Coe, Steve Earle and Guy Clark popularized and developed the outlaw sound.
Starring: Maureen O’Hara, Louis Hayward, Lucille Ball, Virginia Field, Ralph Bellamy
Years before her comedic mugging in I Love Lucy, Lucille Ball shook her stuff as Bubbles in Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance. Co-star Maureen O’Hara is Judy, a talented dancer with artistic ambitions who clashes with the flashy, fame-hungry Bubbles. Tensions rise as they not only compete for the spotlight, but also the affections of a wealthy suitor. But this isn’t a cat fight – instead the friendship of the two women is treated with complexity, and the film highlights the divide of commercially popular but artistically compromised performances versus work that forgoes the splashy in favor of creative integrity, while not judging the choices of either character.
