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War, Marriage, & More at New York Baltic Film Festival

Mariupolis 2


Now in it’s fifth year. the New York Baltic Film Festival (NYBFF), presented by Scandinavia House: The Nordic Center in America, will be running November 2-13, 2022 as a hybrid festival featuring Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian cinema. The in-person portion of the fest takes place at New York’s Scandinavia House (58 Park Ave, New York, NY) from November 2nd to the 6th and virtually November 4th to the 13th.

The theme for this year’s festival is  Past or Present, inspired by the intense emotional response felt in the Baltic countries following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Jūle Rozīte, the festival's Head of Programs, states: “When the war started, Eastern Europeans and many of us globally experienced the dissonance of seeing both past and present play out simultaneously. Suddenly, family traumas and collective memories were forced to the surface, as the inherited stories of occupation we have grown up hearing were playing out in real-time in Ukraine. Cinema from the Baltics can remind us of what was, act as a warning, elicit communal resistance and instill hope for a better tomorrow.”

The festival opens on Wednesday, November 2 with  the animated feature My Love Affair With Marriage, directed by Latvian-born and Brooklyn-based Signe Baumane.The film is a wild semi-autobiographical musical journey, exploring the notions of love, sex, and romance through the lens of neurochemistry. Baumane’s fiercely original and visually arresting work was recognized with the Jury Distinction for Feature Film at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival this year.

The documentary Mariupolis 2 is a harrowing look at Russia’s brutal siege of Mariupol in Ukraine this year. The director, Mantas Kvedaravičius, was tragically killed during filming. Mariupolis 2 was recognized with a Golden Eye Special Mention at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The festival will also screen the film’s predecessor, Mariupolis, in which Kvedaravičius documented the lives of people during Russia’s attacks on Mariupol back in 2014.

Burial, directed by Emilija Škarnulytė, is a hypnotizing meditation on the power and danger of nuclear energy, presenting the paradox of scientific advancement coupled with environmental destruction with a meticulously crafted, eerie soundscape. Škarnulytė will be joined for a discussion with MoMA curator Sophie Cavoulacos following the screening.

To learn more, go to: https://www.scandinaviahouse.org/

New York Baltic Film Festival
November 2 - 13, 2022

Scandinavia House
58 Park Ave
New York, NY 10016

10th Annual Nyack Film Festival Features Works From Around the World


Now in its tenth year, the Nyack Film Festival returns with five nights of cinematic goodness August 14th to the 18th. Held at Hotel Nyack the festival features 64 films from artists around the world. Films include This Too Shall Pass, a short contemplating the fraught emotions and isolation caused by the pandemic. Inspired by true events, The Recess explores gender oppression in Iranian society as a young girl is caught trying to disguise herself as a man in order to see a soccer game. The Brink Of is a musical romance film about an indie pop duo, navigating their tumultuous relationship as partners on the brink of mainstream success. Glooscap And Noogami  is an animated short loosely based on the Wabanaki creation story. Marijuana Minutes follows an unambitious stoner as she finds her easy-going life turned upside down thanks to a vape pen that allows her to travel through time.

After the festival closes there will be a free outdoor film screening of VIRGIN BLACKTOP: A New York Skate Odyssey in Nyack Memorial Park, next to the river and under the stars, on Friday, August 19, starting at 8pm.

To learn more, go to: https://nyackfilmfestival.com/


10th Annual Nyack Film Festival 2022
August 14 - 18, 2022

Hotel Nyack JdV by Hyatt
400 High Ave
Nyack, NY 10960

See It Big: 70MM!: Cinema Classics Larger Than Life

Brainstorm

Movies feel truly larger than life on the big screen, and in 70mm they feel even bigger. The Museum of the Moving Image (36-01 35th Ave, Queens, NY) presents See It Big: 70MM, a special series of classic and contemporary films. The films will be shown at MoMI’s Sumner M. Redstone Theater from August 5 to September 4th.

Among the highlights this year are two titles from Disney long unavailable in 70mm: Sleeping Beauty (1959), the first feature animation to be released in the Super Technirama 70 format, and Tron (1982), the groundbreaking sci-fi thriller featuring innovative early CGI, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. The series also includes Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza (2021) and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)—two retro Hollywood works by filmmakers who continue to shoot on celluloid. The series opens with Brainstorm (1983), one of only two films directed by the brilliant visual-effects master Douglas Trumbull, who died earlier this year, and closes with Top Gun (1986).

The Saturday, August 20 screening of Sleeping Beauty will be introduced by John Canemaker, the Academy Award–, Emmy Award–, and Peabody Award–winning animation filmmaker, historian, and NYU professor. He has authored twelve books on film animation history—with subjects including Winsor McCay, Felix the Cat, Tex Avery, and numerous Disney artists. He is professor emeritus of Animation Studies at New York University Tisch School of the Arts, where he headed the animation program from 1988–2022.

To learn more, go to: https://movingimage.us/series/see-it-big-70mm-6/

See It Big: 70MM!
August 5–September 4, 2022

Museum of the Moving Image
36-01 35th Ave
Queens, NY 11106

Aliens, Romance, & Thrills at the 2022 NY Asian Film Festival

Angry Son, Photo: © LesPros entertainment

Kaiju, drama, horror, romance, and more are in store for you at the 2022 New York Asian Film Festival. Running July 15 to the 31st at venues across NYC, the NYAFF is committed to increasing exposure of Asian representation on screen and providing opportunities for audiences of all communities to experience the diversity and brilliance of Asian and Asian American cinema. New films from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and throughout South East Asia will delight, inspire and terrify audiences.

Films include the US premiere of Shin Ultraman, from director Shinji Higuchi and writer/producer Hideaki Anno, the duo behind Shin Godzilla, as they reinvent another classic icon of Japanese tokusatsu cinema. In the Hong Kong thriller Overheard, Sean Lau Ching Wan, Louis Koo and Daniel Wu star as high-tech criminal intelligence officers investigating a devious executive suspected of monumental insider trading. When two of the cops get wind of an extremely lucrative secret, they go turncoat and try to cash in. Their altruistic boss intervenes but it proves too late, corruption spins the once-straight path to justice into violent chaos, with devastating repercussions for all. The Japanese film Angry Son, follows Jungo, a gay, biracial high schooler who was raised by his feisty single mom, a Filipina bar hostess, Enduring rampant xenophobia, homophobia bullying, and parental abandonment Jungo finds sollace in his loving boyfriend. The closing film of the fest, Alienoid, is a Korean sci-fi fantasy romp where rogue aliens have been trapped as prisoners inside human brains for years and when they try to break free, a lone keeper of intergalactic peace known as “the guard” (Kim Woo-bin) opens a rift in time to prevent them from escaping. This is but a small sampling of the cinematic onslaught on display at NYAFF.

The festival will also feature masterclasses and talks from actors, producers, and directors such as Takashi Shimizu (The Grudge), Doris Yeung (founder of CinemAsia Film Festival in the Netherlands), Dennis Liu (creator of the Netflix series Raising Dion), and Josie Ho (Dream Home), among others.

 

To learn more, go to: https://www.nyaff.org/

New York Asian Film Festival 2022
July 15 - 31, 2022

Various Locations

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