Synopsis

Fiercely independent eighty-year-old Spaniard María is a vibrant lifelong member of her beloved Tangier community, but her stability is threatened when daughter Clara arrives for a long-overdue visit. In dire financial straits after a divorce, Clara intends to sell the family home, left to her by her late father, and even begins liquidating the property’s antiques to hasten the proceedings. But María won’t go so easily. Determined to find the financial means to keep her apartment and win back her belongings, María sets out on a surprising, romance-fueled late-in-life adventure.

Screen legend Carmen Maura (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Volver) delivers an unforgettable performance suffused with warmth, humor, and gentle defiance in this crowd-pleasing story of a woman refusing to relinquish neither her independence nor her dignity. Making her Spanish-language debut, Moroccan director and Festival alum Maryam Touzani (The Blue Caftan) brings a palpable sense of place to the screen. She renders María’s colorful coastal enclave in bright hues and her winning ensemble of neighbors with affection, richness, and complexity.

Synopsis

“There’s Potemkin, Citizen Kane, and this…Godard’s first film,” film critic J. Hoberman once wrote about the French New Wave classic. In his audacious debut feature, the filmmaking infant terrible broke the rules of cinema to create something that remains just as fresh, funny, and innovative today. Influenced by American noir and Hollywood gangster films, the plot goes something like this: Small-time crook Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo, doing his best Bogart) steals a car and murders a policeman. While on the run, he reconnects with old flame newspaper-seller Patricia (Jean Seberg, in classic pixie-girl mode) and tries to convince her to go on the lam with him.

But what is it really about? Truth, lies, love, desire, masculinity, ennui, existentialism. Along with Miles Davis and the Beats, Breathless helped bring about the birth of cool, breaking open film form with its revolutionary use of jump-cuts and improvisational energy and influencing generations of filmmakers from Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino and Richard Linklater.

Screening in 35mm.

Synopsis

Award-winning Swiss Albanian filmmaker Dea Gjinovci (2020’s Wake Up on Mars) returns to the bucolic Kosovo town of her father’s youth—a place he hasn’t seen in 60 years—for this lyrical journey into the past at once wistful and tragic. Together, they recreate his childhood memories, making sets that resemble his former home and with scenes acted out by the local villagers. Through this collective creative project, 1950s Kosovo springs to life in a series of beautifully realized vignettes that prompt Gjinovci’s father to reflect on times of innocence, of violence (when the country persecuted the Albanian population), and of loss, enabling him to finally reckon with the disappearance of his mother decades before.

This evocative mix of memory and reenactment allows father and daughter to uncover shocking truths about their family history and to come to terms with a legacy of oppression. A touching narrative of resilience and catharsis, The Beauty of the Donkey is also a sensitive and bittersweet testament to the power of stories to bring back people and places that history and political strife have tried to erase.

Synopsis

After falling from the sky and accidentally landing in 2075, adolescent time traveler Arco is shocked to find a world in peril and seemingly on the brink of collapse. Soon after, he encounters 10-year-old Iris, a lonely and isolated girl being raised by her trusted robot caretaker Mikki. Buoyed by her newfound friendship with the mysterious boy in the rainbow suit, Iris’s outlook begins to change. Banding together, the unlikely duo, with Mikki in tow, sets out to help return Arco to his peaceful, idyllic future—and to save Iris’ environmentally ravaged home.

With his charming full-length debut, French illustrator, graphic novelist, and animator Ugo Bienvenu crafts a warm, uplifting tale that possesses an undeniable visual splendor recalling the great work of Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki. An engaging sci-fi inflected fantasy and a love letter to the power of the imagination, Arco offers an uplifting look at the power of kinship and camaraderie to affect change, both on a personal level and in the larger world.

Synopsis

Daphne and boyfriend François escape to the idyllic French countryside where they are joined by his lovelorn cousin Maxime. François has to rush back to Paris on business, leaving Daphne and Maxime on their own. The two form an instant, intimate connection, and the first of many overlapping love triangles takes form in this quintessential French comedy-romance.