Films at the Whitney Archive
Spring 2025
The Brutalist
Brady Corbet (2024)
Join us for a special screening of THE BRUTALIST—winner of Golden Globe awards for best drama, best director, and best actor—followed by a post-screening conversation with Yale professors Elihu Rubin (Urban Studies, Architecture, and American Studies) and Maurice Samuels (French).
Brady Corbet, THE BRUTALIST (2024, 215 minutes, English, Hungarian, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Italian with English subtitles)
Farha
Darin J. Sallam (2021)
Darin J. Sallam, FARHA (2021, 92 min., Arabic, Hebrew, and English with English subtitles)
Return to Haifa
Kassem Hawal (1982)
Kassem Hawal, RETURN TO HAIFA (1982, 74 min., Arabic, English, and German with English and Arabic subtitles)
Short films of resistance
Mustafa Abu Ali (1973); Mohammad Malas (1987)
Palestine through Film chronicles key moments in Palestinian history—from the Nakba of 1948 to the present occupation. These weekly screenings of documentaries, historical dramas, and shorts open a window onto the mosaic of life in Palestine. In this installment of the series, graduate students Nadine Fattalleh (NYU) and Kaleem Hawa (Columbia) present three short films of resistance, followed by a Q&A.
A Fidai Film
Kamal Aljafari (2024)
Kamal Aljafari, A FIDAI FILM (2024, 78 min., Arabic, Hebrew, and English with English subtitles)
Fertile Memory
Michel Khleifi (1980)
Michel Khleifi, FERTILE MEMORY (1980, 99 min., Arabic with English subtitles)
A Stone’s Throw and other shorts
Razan AlSalah (2017; 2020; 2024)
This special installment of the Palestine through Film series presents three short films directed by Palestinian filmmaker, artist, and teacher Razan AlSalah, who will join us for a post-screening Q&A.
The Wanted 18
Amer Shomali and Paul Cowan (2014)
Amer Shomali and Paul Cowan, THE WANTED 18 (2014, 75 min., Arabic, English, and Hebrew with English subtitles)
Come Back, Africa (shown on 35mm)
Lionel Rogosin (1959)
Lionel Rogosin, COME BACK, AFRICA (1959, 95 min. shown on 35mm)
Mayor
David Osit (2020)
David Osit, MAYOR (2020, 89 min., Arabic and English, with English subtitles)
Ernest Cole: Lost and Found
Raoul Peck (2024)
Raoul Peck, ERNEST COLE: LOST AND FOUND (2024, 95 min.)
Legacy: The De-Colonized History of South Africa
Tara Moore (2024)
Tara Moore, LEGACY: THE DECOLONIZED HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA, (2024, 99 min.)
Fall 2024
The Mother of All Lies
Asmae El Moudir (2024)
Join us for the first installment of Films at the Whitney’s Fall 2024 screening series, World Documentaries Today, featuring director Asmae El Moudir in person!
Ramona
Victoria Linares Villegas (2023)
Join us for the second installment of Films at the Whitney’s Fall 2024 screening series, World Documentaries Today!
Iron Butterflies
Roman Liubyi (2023)
Join us for the third installment of Films at the Whitney’s Fall 2024 screening series, World Documentaries Today!
Man in Black
Wang Bing (2023)
Join us for the fourth installment of Films at the Whitney’s Fall 2024 screening series, World Documentaries Today!
Onlookers
Kimi Takesue (2023)
Join us for the fifth and final installment of Films at the Whitney’s Fall 2024 screening series, World Documentaries Today, featuring director Kimi Takesue in person!
Trans Dudes with Lady Cancer
Yee Won Chong and Brooks Nelson (2018)
What are the chances that two transmasculine people living under the same roof would be diagnosed with “lady cancer” in the same month—one with breast cancer and the other with ovarian cancer?
TRANS DUDES WITH LADY CANCER is a courageous short film documenting the personal journey of two transmasculine people, their family, and their community as they navigate a medical system that is scrambling to figure out how to provide affirming care for transgender people.
Spring 2024
W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism
Dušan Makavejev (1971)
“A human being averages 4,000 orgasms per lifetime—do not turn off this pulsating motor of joy and life energy,” says controversial psychologist Wilhelm Reich in Dušan Makavejev’s W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism. This astounding 1971 docufiction film pays homage to the work of Reich, who believed in the radical power of sexual discharge. Makavejev’s kaleidoscopic montage envisions sexual liberation as a world revolution, stretching all the way from Reich’s laboratory in Maine and Tuli Kupferberg’s New York City to socialist Yugoslavia.
The World Like a Jewel in the Hand—Unlearning Imperial Plunder II
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (2022)
THE WORLD LIKE A JEWEL IN THE HAND—UNLEARNING IMPERIAL PLUNDER II travels over open books, looted objects, and postcards to look for the imperial foundations of the world in which we live. Within this wide landscape it focuses on the destruction of the Jewish Muslim world that existed in North Africa, making it imaginable and inhabitable again. Narrated in the first person, by an Algerian Jew and a Palestinian Jew, the film refuses imperial histories of those places.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Robert Wiene (Germany, 1920, 75 min., silent with English intertitles, DCP)
A twisted story of hypnosis, somnambulism, murder, and mystery set in a distorted world of shadows. Termed the “first true horror film,” Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is both the definitive work of German Expressionism and a landmark of cinema history at large. This stellar 4k restoration recreates the tinting of the original, adding to the feverish atmosphere of the film.
Showing Up
Kelly Reichardt (2022, DCP)
Nominated for a Palme d’Or at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, Kelly Reichardt’s vibrant and funny portrait of a sculptor’s daily work and struggles in an artists’ enclave in Portland stars Michelle Williams and Hong Chau. The film follows Lizzy (Williams), an experienced female artist and part-time administrative worker who’s trying to establish her place in the professional art world while tending to the emotional well-being of her increasingly fragmented family and dealing with the neglect of her well-meaning landlord (Chau)—a successful conceptual artist in her own right.
Saint Omer
Alice Diop (2022)
Saint Omer is an emotionally complex courtroom drama: Rama, a literature professor and novelist, travels north from Paris to Saint-Omer to observe the trial of Senegalese immigrant Laurence Coly, who is accused of leaving her 15-month-old daughter on a beach to be swept away by the tide. Writer-director Alice Diop’s first narrative feature interweaves “complex themes of mother-daughter bonds, immigrant alienation, and postcolonial trauma into a piercing portrait of two mysteriously connected women” (Criterion).
How to Save a Dead Friend
Marusya Syroechkovskaya (2022, DCP)
It’s 2005. Russia’s leaders eagerly work to realize the authoritarian state. Young people commit suicide far too often as a last act of self-will among a generation in crisis, stuck in endless cycles of violence, addiction, and depression. At age 16, Marusya decides to join them. Then, to her surprise, she meets Kimi—her soulmate—who stops her from this final act of destruction and helps her discover her artistic voice.
CANCELED – The Hands of Orlac
Robert Wiene (Austria, 1924, 93 min., silent with English intertitles, DCP)
EVENT CANCELED DUE TO UNFORESEEN ILLNESS
We are working to reschedule this event and will update our website as soon as the new date is confirmed. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this postponement may cause.
Thank you for your understanding. We look forward to welcoming you to the rescheduled screening!
THE HANDS OF ORLAC
Robert Wiene, (Austria, 1924, 93 min., silent with English intertitles, DCP)
Internationally renowned silent-film musicians Donald Sosin and Joanna Seaton perform live score!
After a train crash, a renowned pianist wakes up in horror: his hands have been amputated and replaced with the hands of an executed murderer. Depicting an artist’s continuous descent into paranoia and madness, The Hands of Orlac is a haunting example of German Expressionism that reunites Dr. Caligari director Robert Wiene and actor Conrad Veidt in another spellbinding performance.
Fall 2023
Black Girl / Borom Sarret
Yale Film Archive and Whitney Humanities Center
Post-screening discussion! Sembène’s first short and first feature—both shot in black and white—explore pressures on labor in postcolonial Senegal’s early years, as seen through BOROM SARRET’s wagon tour of Dakar and BLACK GIRL’s stifling sojourn to France. “Essential viewing for the well-rounded film lover” (Jordan Hoffman). In French with English subtitles.
Presented by Yale Film Archive and Whitney Humanities Center
Mandabi / Tauw
Yale Film Archive and Whitney Humanities Center
Beset by family expectations and modern bureaucratic nightmares, young Tauw looks for work and older Ibrahima tries to cash a life-changing money order. MANDABI “swaggers with a keen awareness of street-level economy and survival, hard on the game and wryly empathetic toward the players” (Guy Lodge). In Wolof and French with English subtitles.
Presented by Yale Film Archive and Whitney Humanities Center
John Boswell's Life and Legacy
Whitney Humanities Center
Not a Tame Lion | A screening and discussion in honor of John Boswell
I Am Cuba
Mikhail Kalatozov (1964)
Known for its acrobatic camera stunts and unique visuals, Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1964 film I Am Cuba explores prerevolutionary Cuba through four moving vignettes about the country’s people and culture. Kalatozov began filming only a week after the Cuban missile crisis—in fact, more than 1,000 Cuban soldiers were moved to a remote location to shoot one scene. A Cuban-Soviet co-production, with Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos and Mosfilm, I Am Cuba is a unique celebration of Communist iconography. Its U.S.
Emitaï
Ousmane Sembène (1971)
When the men are conscripted into World War II, the women of a Diola village hide the rice crop in revolt, blocking French taxation. Named for the god of thunder, EMITAÏ emphasizes the collective in both its politics and its camerawork—and features one of cinema’s most defiant death scenes. In Diola and French with English subtitles.
Presented by Yale Film Archive and Whitney Humanities Center
A Night of Knowing Nothing
Payal Kapadia (2021)
A Night of Knowing Nothing. Winner of the Golden Eye award at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, director Payal Kapadia’s 2021 debut film weaves reality with fiction to tell a story through love letters found in a cupboard at the Film and Television Institute of India. The words of the letters written to an estranged lover mingle with archival footage and student protest videos of the widespread religious and caste-based discrimination intensifying under Narendra Modi.
Xala
Ousmane Sembène (1975)
In a fiery critique of the new African bourgeoisie, a corrupt local bigshot falls prey to an inconvenient xala (curse) on his wedding night. “The jokes and details are delightful, yet there’s real anger behind them, and it bursts spectacularly into view in the concluding frames” (Geoff Andrew). In Wolof and French with English subtitles.
Presented by Yale Film Archive and Whitney Humanities Center
The Cinema Travellers
Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya (2016)
This 2016 documentary follows the touring troupes—on lorries hauling movie reels, projectors, and tents—who bring the wonder of the movies to fairs and festivals in rural villages throughout India. As their projectors crumble, film reels become scarce, and their patrons are lured by slick digital technology, the men continue working to keep the last traveling cinemas of the world running. Shot over five years, this gentle film celebrates the magic of film in a changing world.
Ceddo
Ousmane Sembène (1975)
Forced conversions, a kidnapped princess, and an encroaching slave trade converge in an ambitious portrayal of West Africa’s past. “A masterclass in political philosophy and African constitutionalism” that “underscores Sembène’s faith in African humanism” (Aboubakar Sanogo). In Wolof with English subtitles.
Presented by Yale Film Archive and Whitney Humanities Center
Spring 2023
(Les demoiselles de Rochefort, 1967). Liked La La Land? You’ll love this! Jacques Demy followed up his international smash hit The Umbrellas of Cherbourg with another musical about missed connections and second chances, this one a more effervescent, less melancholic confection. Or is it? Twins Delphine and Solange, a dance instructor and a music teacher (played by real-life sisters Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac), long for big-city life; when a fair comes through their quiet port town, so does the possibility of escape.
Stanley Kubrick bent the conventions of the historical drama to his own will in this dazzling vision of a pitiless aristocracy, adapted from a lesser-known novel by William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fair). In picaresque detail, Barry Lyndon chronicles the adventures of an incorrigible trickster (Ryan O’Neal) whose opportunism takes him from an Irish farm to the battlefields of the Seven Years’ War and the parlors of high society.
(Francesco, giullare di Dio, 1950)
In a series of simple and joyous vignettes, director Roberto Rossellini and co-writer Federico Fellini lovingly convey the universal teachings of the People’s Saint: humility, compassion, faith, and sacrifice. Gorgeously photographed to evoke the medieval paintings of Saint Francis’s time, and cast with monks from the Nocera Inferiore Monastery, The Flowers of St. Francis is a timeless and moving portrait of the search for spiritual enlightenment.
Recently voted the “greatest film of all time” by the Sight and Sound critics’ poll in 2022, now you get a chance to see for yourself … in the format and the setting in which the film was meant to be seen: the cinema! A singular work in film history, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow (the unforgettable Delphine Seyrig), whose chores include making the beds, cooking dinner for her son, and turning the occasional trick.
A single misstep, and reedy postman Frédéric Andréi is on the run all across Paris— including a hair-raising motorcycle-and-moped chase through the Métro—hotly pursued by a drug dealer’s hit team, ruthless Taiwanese music pirates, and the obviously outmanned flics: all because he pirated a recording of the woman of his dreams, the never-recorded opera superstar Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, singing an aria from obscure 19th-century composer Alfredo Catalani’s La Wally.
Special Mother’s Day screening! Perhaps Steven Spielberg’s greatest film, A.I. is “a collaboration between the living Steven Spielberg and the late Stanley Kubrick,” which “seems appropriate to a project that reflects profoundly on the differences between life and nonlife.
Special Graduation Weekend Presentation! One of the most beloved American films of all time, The Graduate earned Mike Nichols a best director Oscar, brought the music of Simon and Garfunkel to a wider audience, and introduced the world to a young actor named Dustin Hoffman. Benjamin Braddock (Hoffman) has just finished college and is already lost in a sea of confusion and barely contained angst when he becomes sexually involved with a friend of his parents, the indomitable Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), before turning his attention to her college-age daughter (Katharine Ross).
Fall 2022
Sofia Coppola’s sly, delectable biopic (2006) of France’s iconic but ill-fated queen, Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) before the events of the French Revolution and the fall of Versailles. Replete with songs by New Order, the Radio Dept, and the Strokes, this much-maligned film has now been recognized as “an elegy to frustration, where every color and sound evokes the longing and rapture of a girl who didn’t understand her adult responsibility” (Ed Gonzalez, Slant).
Join us for a three-part film series celebrating Nigerian cinema in honor of the special exhibition of sculptures by Nigerian artist Moshood Olúṣọmọ Bámigbóyè on view this fall in the Yale University Art Gallery. To commemorate Bámigbóyè’s 50-year career, the films focus on themes of migration, identity, and the legacy of historic artworks and tradition in Nigerian society.
To celebrate Michael Roemer’s career, Films at the Whitney and Treasures from the Yale Film Archive are teaming up to present a new 35mm print of Michael’s lesser-known, but no-less-masterful feature film The Plot Against Harry. Jonathan Rosenbaum, who listed it among his 1,000 Personal Favorite Films, writes: “Shot in black and white in 1969, but neither completed nor shown until 1989, this delightful, offbeat comedy about a sad-eyed, small-time New York numbers racketeer named Harry Plotnick (Martin Priest) who
Join us for a three-part film series celebrating Nigerian cinema in honor of the special exhibition of sculptures by Nigerian artist Moshood Olúṣọmọ Bámigbóyè on view this fall in the Yale University Art Gallery. To commemorate Bámigbóyè’s 50-year career, the films focus on themes of migration, identity, and the legacy of historic artworks and tradition in Nigerian society.
The international breakthrough film (1988) of anime director Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke). It solidified Studio Ghibli’s position as the top animation studio in the world and served as the distilled quintessence of the Ghibli house style, which commands millions of ardent fans around the world. Two sisters move to the country with their father to be closer to their hospitalized mother, where they discover that the surrounding trees are inhabited by Totoros, magical spirits of the forest.
It’s 1982, and Taeko is 27 years old, unmarried, and has lived her whole life in Tokyo. She decides to visit her family in the countryside. As the train travels through the night, memories flood back of her younger self in 5th grade, 1966: the rock-craze sparked by the Beatles in Tokyo, the first immature stirrings of romance, the onset of menstruation, the frustrations of math and boys, the desire to act and be somebody else.
Join us for a three-part film series celebrating Nigerian cinema in honor of the special exhibition of sculptures by Nigerian artist Moshood Olúṣọmọ Bámigbóyè on view this fall in the Yale University Art Gallery. To commemorate Bámigbóyè’s 50-year career, the films focus on themes of migration, identity, and the legacy of historic artworks and tradition in Nigerian society.
In the Pacific Northwest of the 1950s, two young sisters whose mother has abandoned them wind up living with their eccentric Aunt Sylvie (Christine Lahti), whose views of the world and its ways don’t quite live up to most people’s expectations. Scottish director Bill Forsyth’s mesmerizing adaptation (1987) of the now-classic Marilynne Robinson novel (1980), his first American film, is more than just “a commercial for the book,” as Forsyth himself modestly put it.
In the fall of 1963, Anne is becoming a teenager. She lives in Paris with her mother and her older sister, Frédérique. They’re just back from summer at the beach with their father. School starts. A turbulent year awaits them both. Writer-director Diane Kurys had worked as an actress for Fellini and others before growing sick of being told what to do by male directors uninterested in the inner lives of women and deciding to become a director herself.
Summer 2023 Program
“The best film I ever made,” said Orson Welles of his 1962 freewheeling, frightening adaptation of Franz Kafka’s THE TRIAL, the now-infamous tale of a man caught in an ever-spiraling cycle of nightmarish bureaucratic alienation. And we are bound to agree with Orson. It stars a meek and baffled Anthony Perkins, fresh off his star-making role as the face of mother-derived guilt, Norman Bates, in Hitchcock’s PSYCHO (1960). Here, in the world of Welles’s baroque geometric compositions, he proves just as adept at conveying the father-derived guilt unique to Kafka.
The kid goes and goes and never stops going. Amir Naderi’s tenth film, and not only his breakthrough feature in the West but also, as Godfrey Cheshire puts it in his essential study of Iranian cinema, “Post-Revolutionary Iran’s first masterpiece and one of the most exhilarating films in cinema history,” is about going. The feral side of kids, their unquenchable desire for more, beyond the limits of the visible, the prescribed-as-legal, the spoken.
Spring 2022
After two years away, Films at the Whitney is back with a screening of François Truffaut’s Two English Girls (1971) on 35mm. This turn-of-the-twentieth-century love triangle features Jean-Pierre Léaud, who plays a young writer in love with two beautiful sisters, played by Kika Markham and Sylvia Marriott. In French with English subtitles.
After two years away, Films at the Whitney is back with a screening of François Truffaut’s Two English Girls (1971) on 35mm. This turn-of-the-twentieth-century love triangle features Jean-Pierre Léaud, who plays a young writer in love with two beautiful sisters, played by Kika Markham and Sylvia Marriott. In French with English subtitles.
Films at the Whitney and the Yale Film Archive present a very special screening of Maurice Pialat’s L’ENFANCE NUE (Naked Childhood, 1968)—a stark, lacerating study of a wayward and bitter child. A damning look at alienation, rage, and bitterness as only Pialat—often popularly regarded as “the French John Cassavetes”— could do.
Films at the Whitney and the Yale Film Archive present a very special screening of Maurice Pialat’s L’ENFANCE NUE (Naked Childhood, 1968)—a stark, lacerating study of a wayward and bitter child. A damning look at alienation, rage, and bitterness as only Pialat—often popularly regarded as “the French John Cassavetes”— could do.