streaming this december

STREAMING PREMIERES
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dream team

Making films together since 2004, Kalman and Horn have developed and refined a style that’s entirely their own, an idiosyncratic blend of ethereal synth-scored reverie, deadpan absurdist humor, sly sociopolitical observation, and genre-bending play. Their latest is an outrageous, visually sumptuous, more than slightly surreal homage to the ’90s late-night cable erotic thriller-structured as seven “episodes,” with individual credit sequences and titles like “Asses to Ashes”-starring Esther Garrel and Alex Zhang Hungtai as two INTERPOL agents tasked with investigating a mysterious death in Mexico who find themselves contending with fitness freak interns, sultry scientists, a psychic network of coral reefs, and their own smoldering desires. An oddball oneiric delight.

Streaming Premiere Friday, December 6

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Spacked out

Back by Popular Demand!

Set in the massive, crumbling urban developments in Hong Kong’s New Territories with a combination of trained actors and nonprofessionals, Spacked Out depicts a few tumultuous days in the lives of four schoolgirls, filled with desultory mall outings, classroom phone sex, and the occasional box-cutter brawl. A study of the everyday hope and despair experienced by Hong Kong’s dead-end kids that stands alongside Tsui Hark’s Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind (1980) and Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong (1997), here focusing attention on young working-class women.

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once a moth

Groundbreaking in its critical depiction of the American military presence in the Philippines, Aquino-Kashiwahara’s incendiary political drama tells the story of a young lower middle-class couple (Aunor and Jay Ilagan) and their immediate families living in the vicinity of the Clark Air Base in Pampanga, the pair’s dreams of emigrating to the US shattered by experience of the unchecked arrogance and abuse of their Yankee neighbors. While any negative depiction of US presence in the country was harshly discouraged under the rule of President Ferdinand Marcos, Aunor’s star power was enough to push Once a Moth-widely regarded today as one of the greatest of Filipino films-into production.

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a trilogy by micaela durand and daniel chew

First meeting as first year film school undergraduates at NYU, Micaela Durand and Daniel Chew began to collaborate on highly unconventional narrative shorts following their individual stints in the art world, making singularly of-the-moment films about mediated desire (and rankling jealousy) in our terminally on-line world.

Series Includes:
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two by jem cohen

With an artistic sensibility nurtured on punk rock and shaped by Jean Vigo and Chris Marker, the Kabul-born, East Coast-raised filmmaker Jem Cohen is a true independent whose work, often peripatetic and implicitly diaristic, straddles the cinema and the art gallery. Both of the films in this series-Museum Hours and Counting-exude his distinctive gritty lyricism and keen sense of worldly wonder.

Series Includes:
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unmade beds

Jean-Paul Belmondo’s character in Breathless (1960) thought he was Humphrey Bogart; Duncan Hannah’s character in this proto-No Wave work-a restless poseur slash photographer named Rico-thinks he’s Jean-Paul Belmondo. Released the same year as Amos Poe’s Blank Generation, the writer-director a first feature is a provocatively ramshackle snapshot of a downtown Manhattan scene on the cusp of consolidating its own idiom.

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neo-noir x4

Avarice and lust have wrought the downfall of many a man, but never so stylishly as in film noir. This selection combines the snaking mysteries and doom-fogged ambiance of the mid-century canon with the bold style and brash sexuality of the post-New Hollywood American cinema, going from the Raymond Chandler revisionism of the ’70s up to the ’90s erotic thriller.

Series Includes:
Farewell, My Lovely, The Big Sleep, The Last Seduction, Trouble In Mind holidayshortsvimeofeatured2 copy

HOLIDAY SHORTS

The holiday season can be an overwhelming time. Why not ease into the spirit of the season via the bite-sized films in this selection? Feel the festivity of the get-togethers in The Christmas Dream and Christmas Inventory-or maybe you’d rather fall apart along with the protagonist of Beast.

Series Includes:
Beast, Carl Ruggles Christmas Breakfast 1963, Christmas Inventory, Jazz Christmas, L.A. Christmas, Some December, The Christmas Dream, Valentine’s Day Girl kucharvimeofeatured copy

george kuchar’s holiday videos

A sweet and savory journey in the company of George Kuchar traveling from Christmas to New Year’s, stopping for snacks, drinks, and pets.

Series Includes:
Dingleberry Jingles, Holidaze, Xmas 1987 New Years leonorwillneverdievimeofeatured copy

leonor will never die

A festival favorite, Escobar’s debut feature offers a surreal, self-reflexive tribute to Filipino action cinema. Retired screenwriter Leonor Reyes (Sheila Francisco) lays comatose in a hospital after a collision between her skull and a television set-but while her body doesn’t move, in her mind she’s been transported into one of her own unfinished films, confronted with the larger-than-life heroes and villains of her invention, as well as the unhappy memories of their real-life inspirations. An ingeniously layered narrative with serious insights into Pinoy pop movies, that’s also seriously funny.

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colette and justin

“How do you make a film from the oppressor’s archives?” In Kassanda’s documentary, familial bonds anchor a historical investigation: the Kinshasa-born, Paris-based director probes the colonial history of Congo and its journey to independence, interweaving commentary by his maternal grandparents-which works as illuminating counterpoint to the imagery and documentation produced by the nation’s Belgian oppressors.