Unexpected death, unlikely redemption, cold weather, hard liquor, and the delight of the slowest saddest joke you’ve ever heard - there is no party like a Aki Kaurismaki party. Here he boils down a romantic comedy to a series of spare and beautiful gestures, finding hope blossoming, albeit tentatively, between a lonely garbageman and hard luck supermarket cashier.

A compassionate film with unforgettable characters and performances, Never Rarely Sometimes Always foretells the harsh realities of a post-Roe v Wade world where two seventeen year old girls have to run away from small town Pennsylvania to New York City to navigate terminating a pregnancy. Dodging polemical rhetoric, grand speeches, or inflamed emotions, the film unapologetically opts to portray the delicate heroics and precariousness of young women in a world dead set on depriving them of choice.

A humanist character study in genre-film’s clothing, The Taking of Pelham 123 packs a hijacked subway car full of cops, robbers, and bystanders of every walk of life. These aren't machine-made characters, but individuals with gallows humor, paranoia, warmth and resiliency, with performances and nuances that transcend it’s action plot and paint a fascinating portrait of a time, a place, and the complexity of human beings under extreme circumstances.

This wild, joyous, magical-realist comedy made with local eccentrics and musicians in the hills of Serbia with local is profane, mythic, and most of all, not bored with life, love and the possibilities of cinema. Flying bullets, fleeing lovers, and the pounding beats of the greatest Romani orchestra ever assembled will have you dancing on those oh-so-soft Prytania cushions.

Equal parts action blockbuster and existential meditation on the American dream, this underrated masterpiece by stylist Michael Mann jumps liberally off it’s source text to create a gritty, sweaty, spiraling, cocaine binge of a ride. Brooding under the surface of Go-fast boat chases and fluorescent-lit gun battles lives a world nothing seems to make sense, happiness is just out of reach, and clean resolutions are never an option.

3 days till Halloween, so! A pyschosexual contest of lusts and jealousies where the stakes are life and death! An underseen gem of 70s horror, this Euro lesbian vampire oughta-be-cult-classic delivers 'elevated' horror before anyone had thought to devise such a distinction.

11 days till Halloween, so, 42 9th graders are sent to a deserted island. They are given a map, food, and various weapons. An explosive collar is fitted around their neck. If they break a rule, the collar explodes. Their mission: kill each other and be the last one standing. This gets messy!

A hacker explores and disrupts binaries in this Afrofuturist fantasia about the state of the world and how to resist it. It is also a musical; an intersex narrative; a technological allegory; an anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist war cry. It’s a collective dream dancing on the edge of something unrecognizable, something wholly transcendent.

Before canonizing 70’s New York with the Warriors, Walter Hill made his directorial debut with one of the most iconic and under-appreciated depictions of New Orleans. Hard Times follows the adventures of the tight-lipped Charles Bronson - a drifter turned illegal prize-fighter in depression era Big Easy.

The boozing, brawling, bad luck LA nights of Charles Bukowski are brought to life by legendary cinematographer Robby Müller and director Barbet Schroeder who allegedly secured financing by arriving in the producer’s office with a battery powered saw, threatening to cut off his own finger.

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead” - Charles Bukowski

Nothing goes right at the Fireman’s Ball! A hilarious saga of good intentions confounded packed with joy, chaos, and political satire playing out over one drunken night at a Czech beer hall. Presumed to be a commentary on the floundering Czech leadership, the film was “banned forever” in Czechoslovakia following the Russian invasion and prompted Milos Forman’s move to America.

Italian visual artist Yuri Ancarani's exquisite documentary ‘The Challenge’ enters the surreal world of wealthy Qatari sheikhs as they race SUVs up and down sand dunes, fly their prized falcons around on private jets, and take their pet cheetahs out for desert spins in their souped-up Ferraris. The result is a film jaw-dropping not only for its displays of wealth, but for its ecstatic cinematic beauty.

Screening with short film ‘Tripoli, Quiet’, directed by Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia

Lovers and big-game hunters, colonizers and revolutionaries play hide and seek in the jungles of movie history in Miguel Gomes’s century-straddling, two-part tale examining love, loneliness and the power of memory.

In Rungano Nyoni’s debut feature, a young Zambian girl accused of witchcraft is given a stark choice: to accept her supernatural branding and live an imprisoned life as a sorceress, or to eschew her traditions and be transformed into a goat that may be killed and eaten for supper. I Am Not a Witch blends cruel humor, pointed satire and empathetic anger to produce something touched by tragic transcendence.

Flirting with the conventions of blaxploitation and horror, Bill Gunn’s revolutionary independent film Ganja & Hess is a highly stylized and utterly original treatise on sex, religion, and the duhka of guilt.

Terrence Davies casts an unapologetically myth-making eye over his own adolescence in working class wartime Liverpool. We glide through tangles of family memories to recover joys and horrors, with the singing of pop tunes and shanties in homes and bars standing in for unspeakable intimacies. Arguably the under-recognized high point of British art cinema, this masterpiece stands as one of the most unprecedented and never-repeated films ever made, and a testament to what we have lost cinematically ever since.

Shocking, moving, unprecedented and unforgettable, this black-comedy from Australia tells the tale of Bubby, whose entire knowledge of the universe stops at the walls of the two-room slum he has been confined to for the thirty-five years since his birth. Themes of incest, brutality, god-rejection, animal cruelty, beautiful music, and pizzas twist through this epic cult-classic that will leave you asking everyone you know “have you seen Bad Boy Bubby?”

Based on true events, this sprawling epic follows an indigenous Wayuu family who becomes embroiled in the booming Colombian drug trade of the 1970s. The ensuing fratricidal war puts their lives, their culture and their ancestral traditions at risk in this visually stunning saga of souls undone by ambition and greed.

Mesmerizingly strange and willfully perverse, Holy Motors follows the magical, anarchic, hurricane of physical energy Denis Lavant as he unlocks a series of surreal worlds. It’s an episodic work of great visual invention packed with beautifully whirling gyrating bodies; anguished songs, laughter, horror, rapture and the steady heartbeat beat of lament.

One of the treasures of African cinema, Senegalese master Djibril Diop Mambéty’s long-delayed follow-up to his canonical Touki Bouki is a hallucinatory comic story of a rich woman returning to her poor desert hometown to propose a deal to the populace: her fortune, in exchange for the death of the her child’s father. Hyenas is a film of sinister, mocking laughter, and a biting satire of post-colonial Senegal.

A loving ode to the lyrical promise and reckless excess of the classic, wild hot American Summer. WILDWOOD paints a vivid portrait of the generations of women growing up in the non-stop carnival of the Jersey shore.

With opening act DRY WOOD — Les Blank’s dance-off, cook-off, Zydeco-charged portrait of creole life in the Louisiana delta.

Eroticism and pyromania dance hand-in-hand through “Ema,” a reggeaton fever dream from the Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín about an unscrupulous mother on anarchic mission to recover her adopted son.

One of the great missing links of cinema, connecting the Czech New Wave to the Hollywood 70's. A beguiling comedy about counterculture and the generation gap set against Forman's favorite backdrop, an audition, Thought to be unreleasable on home video because of its unclearable music, which is somehow both haunting and hilarious. Hard to describe, unforgettable to witness.

Set in a remote dreamscape of mystery and foreboding, a police commissioner, a prosecutor, a doctor and a murder suspect drive search the tenebrous Anatolian countryside for a long buried corpse and deeper human mysteries in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Cannes Grand Jury Prize winning masterwork.

A visceral take on class, nature, sexuality, and the ways that political turmoil and social stagnation can manifest in human relationships. Lucrecia Martel turns her tale of a dissolute bourgeois extended family, whiling away the hours of one sweaty, sticky summer, into a cinematic marvel.

This sensory onslaught from post-revolutionary Cuba vibrates between between immediacy and reflection, fantasy and honesty, lyricism and horror as it swirls through the operatic and contradictory universe of 1960s Havana. An experiential masterwork unlike anything before or since.

Pialat’s Van Gogh explores the last 67 days of the painter’s life through his relationships and his work. It is the story of an artist being human, carrying canvases out or lugging them back in - their famous images intentionally out of sight.

An emotionally raw, lushly stylized portrait of a relationship in breakdown, Happy Together follows a couple travelling through Argentina locked in a turbulent cycle of infatuation and destructive jealousy as they break up, make up, and fall apart again and again.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with writer/director John Cameron Mitchell, moderated by Subtextual Pod.

A magical realist fable from acclaimed director Alice Rohrwacher follows the adventures of Lazzaro, a true-hearted peasant navigating forces of wickedness and deception.

In this picaresque fantasy-drama, the disaffected young lovers Anta and Mory, fed up with Dakar, long to escape to the glamour and comforts they imagine France has to offer, but their plan is confounded by obstacles both practical and mystical.

Alternately manic and meditative, Touki bouki has an avant-garde sensibility characterized by vivid imagery, bleak humor, unconventional editing, and jagged soundscapes, and it demonstrates Mambéty’s commitment to telling African stories in new ways.