https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org An international center for the preservation, study, and exhibition of film and video with a particular focus on American independent and avant-garde cinema and its precursors found in classic European, Soviet and Japanese film. en-us Mon, 21 Sep 2026 07:02:56 -0400 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61968 <p>If Jia Zhangke’s breakout film PLATFORM (2000) was about the destruction of China’s social fabric as it transitioned from Mao to Deng Xiaoping, then Jia’s 2006 Golden Lion winner STILL LIFE focuses on the physical destruction of the built environment as the country ventures through another epochal shift. Like Ou Ning’s MEISHI STREET, STILL LIFE is firmly located during what Western observers routinely note as the era of a “rising China.” A few years after the country’s admittance to the WTO, a couple years before Beijing hosted the 2008 Olympics, and during a time of rising GDP, STILL LIFE asks, in literal terms, whether a rising tide indeed lifts all boats. Shot on location in Fengjie, a town along the Yangtze River in central China, the film centers on two people as they search for their spouses in the city, slowly being demolished to make way for the Three Gorges Dam. Slated to be flooded by the dam’s reservoir, the town is replete with hand painted red lines on the sides of buildings that indicate the imminent water levels, offering a stark warning for those below the line to get out while they can. Like Pedro Costa’s IN VANDA’S ROOM, STILL LIFE is filmed on digital video, lending it not only a documentary aesthetic (emblematic of the Urban Generation of Chinese independent filmmakers at the time), but one of uncanny immediacy. Jia, embracing the xianchang spirit of on-the-ground filmmaking, has argued that the documentarian must allow themself to be “seared” by the immediate present. The traces of the people and buildings of Fengjie, though now relocated and demolished, respectively, become irrevocably imprinted on STILL LIFE and its maker.<br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Monday, September 21 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61971 <p>The final program of the series is comprised of shorts that condense the myriad affects elucidated by the preceding works. Here, the wrecking ball and excavator become central players as humans largely exit the drama, leaving inanimate objects the task of carrying high tragedy and comedy. In Milèna Trivier’s elegiac 12 AUGUST 2002, the filmmaker frames the demolition of a brick gable from below and against the sky, a towering sentinel pummeled, its pieces sold for scrap. Conversely, in Jacob Burckhardt’s playful JawwZZZ, bright orange excavators lose their menace and become bumbling figures as they devour concrete and shift twisted metal, construction crews hosing down the creatures as zookeepers would elephants. Critique remains pointed though in Dominic Angerame’s IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVENTS, an anti-city symphony that, instead of celebrating the triumphs of urban technological progress, explores the remnants of de-industrialization in a black and white moonscape bereft of human presence.<br /><br />William Raban TIME STEPPING (1974, 19 min, 16mm-to-digital)<br />Dominic Angerame IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVENTS (1997, 23 min, 16mm)<br />Miléna Trivier 12 AUGUST 2002 (2002, 10 min, video. Voiceover by John Berger.)<br />Anna Thew LFMC DEMOLITION (2004, 9 min, 16mm-to-digital)<br />Jacob Burckhardt JawwZZZ (2024, 15 min, digital. Soundtrack by Lary 7.)<br />Louis Lumière & Auguste Lumière DEMOLITION OF A WALL / DÉMOLITION D’UN MUR (1895, 1.5 min, 35mm-to-DCP)<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 85 min.<br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Tuesday, September 22 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61990 <p>VEILED STRUGGLES: QUEERNESS, COLONIALISM, AND MEMORY<br /><br />Valentin Noujaïm<br />OCEANIA<br />2024, 24 min, digital. In French with English subtitles.<br />Sixteen-year-old Najib luxuriates in his summer days of gaming until his mother informs him of a neighbor’s passing. Taking the keys to their apartment, he quickly discovers an unexpected world of painful questions.<br /><br />“OCEANIA is an ode to tenderness. To a new generation that carries on our struggles, that seeks to remember whilst also moving forward. A tribute to love, to the dead and martyrs, and to present history being dismantled and destroyed.” –Valentin Noujaïm<br /><br />Richard Fung<br />SEA IN THE BLOOD<br />2000, 26 min, video<br />“SEA IN THE BLOOD was to be a meditation on race, sexuality and disease, but after working with the material for three years, it was the emotional story that came through. It’s hard to work with such personal material, but in the end the work takes on a life of its own. ‘Richard’ is a character. Because of the subject matter – disease and death – I wanted to avoid sentimentality. I’d like the audience to think as well as feel.” –Richard Fung<br /><br />Mohammed Soueid <br />CINEMA FOUAD<br />1994, 28 or 41 min, video. In Arabic with English subtitles.<br />A documentary on the life and ambitions of a young Lebanese trans woman, Khaled El Kurdi. The video follows her journey from soldier to cabaret dancer, in order to raise funds for her gender-affirming operation. Shot in Beirut, CINEMA FOUAD weaves a complex and multi-layered story of sexuality, identity, and desire, and paints a compelling portrait of its subject.<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 85 or 95 min.<br /><br /><strong>Followed by a conversation with writer and curator Adam HajYahia and Yasmina Price!<br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </strong></p> Tuesday, September 22 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61966 <p>Using a waist-high camera pointed at the ground and a drone that follows above, Nadav Assor’s GROUND EFFECT takes its name from the phenomenon by which drones and helicopters, in the process of mapping the environment, alter the landscape by displacing the ground’s surface. The objective visual recording thus becomes subjective in its effect on the land. Merging the camera footage into one, Assor points out the unique flaws and irreconcilability of objective and subjective ways of perceiving. Likewise, J.P. Sniadecki’s DEMOLITION / CHAIQIAN, produced in association with the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, shakes loose a firm cinematic sense of perception. Shot over the course of three weeks and following a group of migrant demolition workers and city dwellers in Chengdu, China, DEMOLITION / CHAIQIAN imbues heavy demolition equipment with awkwardness and humor and turns cameras on cameras, all while a city is disappearing underfoot amidst a sonic tank of grinding metal, bursting concrete, and electronic beeps. Conversely, in Viktoria Schmid’s W O W (KODAK), structures reappear as demolished portions of the Rochester Kodak factory emerge from towering dust clouds, rhyming with the Lumière brothers’ DEMOLITION D’UN MUR made over a century prior.<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Viktoria Schmid W O W (KODAK) 2018, 2 min, 35mm-to-DCP<br />Nadav Assor GROUND EFFECT 2016, 14 min, digital<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 85 min.<br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Tuesday, September 22 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61960 <p>Rather than engendering solidarity and empathy through the depiction of destruction of social and material Palestinian life in the present tense, Cynthia Madansky’s STILL LIFE chooses instead to take spectators on a tour of the Occupied Territories after the bulldozers have rumbled through and the bombs have fallen. Hanging its power on aftermath, STILL LIFE reaches instead for a set of festering implications and associations triggered via images, musical composition, and spoken questions. Like many of the other films in this series, NO OTHER LAND preserves in the visual archive what will likely be lost. Shot over the course of five years and by a collective of four directors from Palestine and Israel, NO OTHER LAND shocks in its immediacy and palpable danger as an SOS call from Masafer Yatta, a front line of the Palestinian struggle.<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Cynthia Madansky STILL LIFE 2004, 15 min, Super-8mm-to-digital. Sound design by Zeena Parkins.<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 110 min.<br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Wednesday, September 23 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61992 <p>RE-TELLING: OUR GRANDMOTHERS HAVE KNOWN<br /><br />Valentin Noujaïm<br />BEFORE SHE FORGETS HELIOPOLIS / AVANT D’OUBLIER HELIOPOLIS<br />2018, 23 min, digital. In French with English subtitles.<br />“My family have begun to forget their Egyptian roots and, on asking my grandmother Malo to recount the first part of her life in Cairo, I am confronted by the memories of an exiled Arabic woman, lost in a troubled sea of memories, soon to be erased by the passage of time.” –Valentin Noujaïm<br /><br />Darryl Daley<br />YOULOGY / NO GHOSTS<br />2025, 8 min, digital<br />“YOULOGY / NO GHOSTS explores cyclical motifs of arrival and departure through the artist’s grandmother’s migration to the United Kingdom and her posthumous return to Jamaica, creating a transcendental frame where memory and time merge. In this speculative space, the film navigates beyond the confines of mortality, reimagining a future where inherited stories resist linearity.” –THIRD HORIZON FILM FESTIVAL<br /><br />Barbara Hammer<br />OPTIC NERVE<br />1985, 16 min, 16mm<br />“[A] powerful personal reflection on family and aging. Hammer employs filmed footage which, through optical printing and editing, is layered and manipulated to create a compelling meditation on her visit to her grandmother in a nursing home. The sense of sight becomes a constantly evolving process of reseeing images retrieved from the past and fused into the eternal present of the projected image. Hammer has lent a new voice to the long tradition of personal meditation in the avant-garde of the American independent cinema.” –John Hanhardt, WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART<br /><br />Razan AlSalah <br />YOUR FATHER WAS BORN 100 YEARS OLD, AND SO WAS THE NAKBA<br />2017, 7 min, digital. In Arabic with English subtitles.<br />“She looks down at her virtual ghost marked with an X. ‘If I were walking, I would have found it, even if it’s not here anymore.’ Oum Amin, a Palestinian grandmother, returns to her hometown Haifa through Google Maps Streetview – today, the only way she can see Palestine. The film consists of images from Google Street View accompanied by an imaginary voiceover written by the artist, that of her grandmother who was never able to return to her hometown in Palestine. This invented memory, narrated in voiceover, is nevertheless set in a real colonial context. In this pixelated, stroboscopic landscape, archival images narrating British and Israeli colonization appear.” –Cinéma du Réel<br /><br />Caroline Monnet<br />IKWÉ<br />2009, 5 min, digital. In Cree and French with English subtitles.<br />“IKWÉ is an experimental film that weaves the narrative of one woman’s (IKWÉ) intimate thoughts with the teachings of her grandmother, the Moon, creating a surreal narrative experience that communicates the power of thoughts and personal reflection. Made by Anishinaabe artist Caroline Monnet, the film reflects the intergenerational transmission of Indigenous knowledge.” –WINNIPEG FILM GROUP / NATIONAL BOARD OF CANADA <br /><br />Jean-Pierre Bekolo<br />GRANDMA’S GRAMMAR / LA GRAMMAIRE DE MA GRAND’MERE<br />1996, 8 min, digital. In French with English subtitles.<br />“An inherited lesson from Djibril Diop Mambéty’s grandmother is transmitted through Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s chronicle of their conversation. Creating a Pan-African exchange, the Cameroonian Bekolo listens to the Senegalese Mambéty root his cinema in his grandmother’s storytelling – a narrative form of returns and repetitions, of continuation and reinvention.” –Yasmina Price<br /><br />Shenny De Los Ángeles & Amanda Morell (iiritu)<br />FLORINDA’S DAUGHTER / HIJA DE FLORINDA<br />2024, 12 min, digital. In English and Spanish with English subtitles.<br />“Through a series of black-and-white tableaux, this poetry film follows the journey of Young Naomi in Everglades, Florida. She learns from Florinda, her grandmother, about the ancestral practices of caring for the land and nurturing grief in the face of environmental challenges. As the story unfolds, we grow to understand Florinda’s indigenous teachings of controlled burns and the importance of embracing fire rather than suppressing it. As the prescribed burns ignite from Florinda’s hands, an archival portal is birthed.” –BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 85 min.<br /><br /><strong>Followed by a conversation between Yasmina Price and writer, editor, and critic Jessica Lynne!<br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </strong></p> Wednesday, September 23 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61969 <p>If Jia Zhangke’s breakout film PLATFORM (2000) was about the destruction of China’s social fabric as it transitioned from Mao to Deng Xiaoping, then Jia’s 2006 Golden Lion winner STILL LIFE focuses on the physical destruction of the built environment as the country ventures through another epochal shift. Like Ou Ning’s MEISHI STREET, STILL LIFE is firmly located during what Western observers routinely note as the era of a “rising China.” A few years after the country’s admittance to the WTO, a couple years before Beijing hosted the 2008 Olympics, and during a time of rising GDP, STILL LIFE asks, in literal terms, whether a rising tide indeed lifts all boats. Shot on location in Fengjie, a town along the Yangtze River in central China, the film centers on two people as they search for their spouses in the city, slowly being demolished to make way for the Three Gorges Dam. Slated to be flooded by the dam’s reservoir, the town is replete with hand painted red lines on the sides of buildings that indicate the imminent water levels, offering a stark warning for those below the line to get out while they can. Like Pedro Costa’s IN VANDA’S ROOM, STILL LIFE is filmed on digital video, lending it not only a documentary aesthetic (emblematic of the Urban Generation of Chinese independent filmmakers at the time), but one of uncanny immediacy. Jia, embracing the xianchang spirit of on-the-ground filmmaking, has argued that the documentarian must allow themself to be “seared” by the immediate present. The traces of the people and buildings of Fengjie, though now relocated and demolished, respectively, become irrevocably imprinted on STILL LIFE and its maker.<br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Wednesday, September 23 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61963 <p>The second in his Fontainhas trilogy, IN VANDA’S ROOM follows heroin addict Vanda Duarte and a group of struggling slum dwellers as they try to make a life amid the demolition of their Lisbon neighborhood. Between Vanda’s raucous coughing fits and the clicks of her butane lighter, Costa’s extreme long takes, filmed in austere digital video, capture the sound of her built environs collapsing around her. Unlike the Barcelona neighborhood in EN CONSTRUCCIÓN, though, Fontainhas was wiped from the map by city officials, irredeemable in the eyes of the state, its inhabitants moved elsewhere. Today, it no longer stands, but remains embalmed in the images of Costa’s film.<br /><br />IN VANDA’S ROOM probes the limit of what cinema is and is capable of, not only in its content, which is bleak and harrowing to be sure, but in its form. Like many films in this series, it is uninterested in the distinction between fiction and documentary, choosing instead to capture life in its essence by whatever means necessary. André Bazin wrote that photography, and by extension cinema, satisfied the deep need that man had for an image that was not an approximation, but was the object itself, “freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it.” Sometimes, truth must be freed from the conditions of the objectively real: Costa proclaimed that he filmed some scenes multiple times until they “became fluidly represented and detached of any melodramatic tone.” Often, truth requires some coaxing.<br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Thursday, September 24 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61973 <p>In a San Francisco apartment, in 1985, Bert is just about to fall asleep when a stranger named J.R. calls. “You hard?” he asks Bert, and the two begin a hot and heavy phone sex session that soon turns into a nightly routine. Over the span of a year, we watch as Bert (Tom Wagner) and J.R. (Joseph Stachura) explore their fantasies, get each other off, and forge a deeper connection that allows them to open up to each other about their fears and sorrows surrounding the AIDS epidemic, all without ever meeting face to face. Playwright Robert Chesley wryly called his groundbreaking 1986 play JERKER “a pornographic elegy with redeeming social value and a hymn to the queer men of San Francisco,” which perhaps sought to preempt the inevitable criticism and censorship of the play’s unabashedly sex-positive dialogue. Hugh Harrison’s smart, rarely seen 1991 adaptation combines the rich, raunchy text of Chesley’s play with the shot-on-video aesthetics of late 1980s gay adult films, making us feel as if we’re watching an especially well-written Jeff Stryker or Joey Stefano movie. Help us celebrate the 40th anniversary of JERKER’s theatrical premiere with this very special screening.<br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Thursday, September 24 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61927 <p>PSYCHODRAMAS: MASKED FIGURES / MULTIPLE IDENTITIES</p> <p>WHAT’S THIS? (1973, 1.5 min, 16mm-to-digital, silent)<br />A KISS OF DEATH (1974, 9 min, 16mm)<br />6 TO 8AM (1975, 30 min, 16mm-to-digital)<br />EMBRACABLE YOU (1979, 5 min, 16mm-to-digital)<br />ASIAM (1982, 5 min, 16mm, silent)<br />WELCOME TO THE HOUSE OF RAVEN (1997, 3 min, 16mm)<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 60 min.<br /><br /><strong>Merritt will be here in person for both screenings, with the Q&As moderated by filmmakers Peggy Ahwesh (Fri, Sept 25) and David Sherman (Sun, Sept 27).</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Friday, September 25 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61878 <p>Edgar Allan (Rufus B. Seder) is an aspiring screenwriter who has just come to Hollywood to make it in the movies…only to wind up working as the janitor at a fleabag apartment complex run by the greasy ex-boxer Martin (played by underground film legend George Kuchar). When Edgar begins channeling his frustrations with his kooky neighbors into fodder for his latest screenplay, the vivid murder scenes he writes begin to happen for real. As the bodies begin to pile up and the line between reality and fiction become increasingly blurred, Edgar, who is convinced that the only way to be a real writer is to suffer, is slowly driven mad.<br /><br />SCREAMPLAY is a marvel of campy charm, gothic horror tropes, and astonishingly inventive set design and special effects. Wearing its low-budget resourcefulness on its sleeve, but also genuinely atmospheric and transporting, the spell it casts is all the more remarkable given that it was filmed almost entirely within the confines of the 3,200-square-foot South End Boston loft where director Rufus Butler Seder and his Boston Black and White Movie Company (comprised of fellow students from the city’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts) had previously made a bevy of similarly inspired 16mm short films. Conjured from some of the earliest and still-most-effective cinematic techniques – matte paintings, scale models, ingeniously adaptable sets, animation, highly expressionistic lighting, and the good old-fashioned magic provided by charismatic performers (above all, Seder himself in the central role, and of course the irreplaceable George Kuchar, who broke his ankle during filming of the final fight scene) – SCREAMPLAY is a deliriously entertaining demonstration of the power of low budget invention, and a singularly charming (Boston) salute to Old Hollywood.<br /><br />Premiered (alongside BLOOD SIMPLE) at the 1985 New York Independent Film Festival, initially distributed by Troma (click here for details about our upcoming Troma series), but rarely screened in recent decades, SCREAMPLAY has been newly restored in 4K – scanned from Seder’s personal 16mm print – and is now back in circulation, where it’s poised to charm, delight, and frighten a whole new audience.<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Rufus Butler Seder<br />IN THE CITY: A TRILOGY (LIVE IN FEAR; SUN RUN; PHANTOM SUBWAYS)<br />1977, 6 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br /><br /><strong>Writer, director, and star Rufus Butler Seder and producer and cinematographer Dennis M. Piana will be here in person on Fri & Sat for Q&As following the evening screenings; they’ll be joined on Fri evening by star Katy Bolger!</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Friday, September 25 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61930 <p>FINE FRENCH PHRASES AND OTHER FABLES (1976, 4 min, 16mm-to-digital)<br />FALL WORKS (1978, 3.5 min, 16mm-to-digital, silent)<br />GREEN MOUNTAIN (1978, 1.5 min, 16mm-to-digital)<br />EF (1979, 4 min, 16mm, silent)<br />LONESOME COWBOY (1979, 30 sec, 16mm)<br />NOTES (1979, 1 min, 16mm-to-digital, silent)<br />THREE MASKED PIECES (1979, 1 min, 16mm-to-digital, silent)<br />SMALL EVENTS (1979, 2 min, 16mm-to-digital)<br />BY THE SEA (1982, 1.5 min, 16mm, silent)<br />CONQUEST PIECE (1982, 6 min, 16mm)<br />NOT A MUSIC VIDEO (1987, 7 min, 16mm)<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 40 min.<br /><br /><strong>Merritt will be here in person for both screenings, with the Q&As moderated by filmmaker Lynne Sachs (Fri, Sept 25) and writer and film programmer Yasmina Price (Sat, Sept 26).</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Friday, September 25 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61879 <p>Edgar Allan (Rufus B. Seder) is an aspiring screenwriter who has just come to Hollywood to make it in the movies…only to wind up working as the janitor at a fleabag apartment complex run by the greasy ex-boxer Martin (played by underground film legend George Kuchar). When Edgar begins channeling his frustrations with his kooky neighbors into fodder for his latest screenplay, the vivid murder scenes he writes begin to happen for real. As the bodies begin to pile up and the line between reality and fiction become increasingly blurred, Edgar, who is convinced that the only way to be a real writer is to suffer, is slowly driven mad.<br /><br />SCREAMPLAY is a marvel of campy charm, gothic horror tropes, and astonishingly inventive set design and special effects. Wearing its low-budget resourcefulness on its sleeve, but also genuinely atmospheric and transporting, the spell it casts is all the more remarkable given that it was filmed almost entirely within the confines of the 3,200-square-foot South End Boston loft where director Rufus Butler Seder and his Boston Black and White Movie Company (comprised of fellow students from the city’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts) had previously made a bevy of similarly inspired 16mm short films. Conjured from some of the earliest and still-most-effective cinematic techniques – matte paintings, scale models, ingeniously adaptable sets, animation, highly expressionistic lighting, and the good old-fashioned magic provided by charismatic performers (above all, Seder himself in the central role, and of course the irreplaceable George Kuchar, who broke his ankle during filming of the final fight scene) – SCREAMPLAY is a deliriously entertaining demonstration of the power of low budget invention, and a singularly charming (Boston) salute to Old Hollywood.<br /><br />Premiered (alongside BLOOD SIMPLE) at the 1985 New York Independent Film Festival, initially distributed by Troma (click here for details about our upcoming Troma series), but rarely screened in recent decades, SCREAMPLAY has been newly restored in 4K – scanned from Seder’s personal 16mm print – and is now back in circulation, where it’s poised to charm, delight, and frighten a whole new audience.<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Rufus Butler Seder<br />IN THE CITY: A TRILOGY (LIVE IN FEAR; SUN RUN; PHANTOM SUBWAYS)<br />1977, 6 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br /><br /><strong>Writer, director, and star Rufus Butler Seder and producer and cinematographer Dennis M. Piana will be here in person on Fri & Sat for Q&As following the evening screenings; they’ll be joined on Fri evening by star Katy Bolger!</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Friday, September 25 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61933 <p>VISION QUESTS (2009, 15 min, digital)<br />AT EDEN’S HEART (2021, 3 min, digital)<br />BLACK OAK FALLEN (2021, 9 min, digital)<br />A FIRE’S POEM (2022, 4 min, digital)<br />APART – A PART (2024, 6.5 min, digital)<br />THE BIRDS AND THE BEASTS (2025, 4 min, digital)<br />SOUL – WHAT LIES WITHIN (2026, 5 min, digital)<br />FRAGMENT #9 – ON THE ASYMMETRY OF BROKEN BRANCHES (2026, 1.5 min, digital)<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 55 min.<br /><br /><strong>Merritt will be here in person for a Q&A moderated by curator and scholar Maya Cade.</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Saturday, September 26 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61882 <p>Edgar Allan (Rufus B. Seder) is an aspiring screenwriter who has just come to Hollywood to make it in the movies…only to wind up working as the janitor at a fleabag apartment complex run by the greasy ex-boxer Martin (played by underground film legend George Kuchar). When Edgar begins channeling his frustrations with his kooky neighbors into fodder for his latest screenplay, the vivid murder scenes he writes begin to happen for real. As the bodies begin to pile up and the line between reality and fiction become increasingly blurred, Edgar, who is convinced that the only way to be a real writer is to suffer, is slowly driven mad.<br /><br />SCREAMPLAY is a marvel of campy charm, gothic horror tropes, and astonishingly inventive set design and special effects. Wearing its low-budget resourcefulness on its sleeve, but also genuinely atmospheric and transporting, the spell it casts is all the more remarkable given that it was filmed almost entirely within the confines of the 3,200-square-foot South End Boston loft where director Rufus Butler Seder and his Boston Black and White Movie Company (comprised of fellow students from the city’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts) had previously made a bevy of similarly inspired 16mm short films. Conjured from some of the earliest and still-most-effective cinematic techniques – matte paintings, scale models, ingeniously adaptable sets, animation, highly expressionistic lighting, and the good old-fashioned magic provided by charismatic performers (above all, Seder himself in the central role, and of course the irreplaceable George Kuchar, who broke his ankle during filming of the final fight scene) – SCREAMPLAY is a deliriously entertaining demonstration of the power of low budget invention, and a singularly charming (Boston) salute to Old Hollywood.<br /><br />Premiered (alongside BLOOD SIMPLE) at the 1985 New York Independent Film Festival, initially distributed by Troma (click here for details about our upcoming Troma series), but rarely screened in recent decades, SCREAMPLAY has been newly restored in 4K – scanned from Seder’s personal 16mm print – and is now back in circulation, where it’s poised to charm, delight, and frighten a whole new audience.<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Rufus Butler Seder<br />IN THE CITY: A TRILOGY (LIVE IN FEAR; SUN RUN; PHANTOM SUBWAYS)<br />1977, 6 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br /><br /><strong>Writer, director, and star Rufus Butler Seder and producer and cinematographer Dennis M. Piana will be here in person on Fri & Sat for Q&As following the evening screenings; they’ll be joined on Fri evening by star Katy Bolger!</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Saturday, September 26 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61931 <p>FINE FRENCH PHRASES AND OTHER FABLES (1976, 4 min, 16mm-to-digital)<br />FALL WORKS (1978, 3.5 min, 16mm-to-digital, silent)<br />GREEN MOUNTAIN (1978, 1.5 min, 16mm-to-digital)<br />EF (1979, 4 min, 16mm, silent)<br />LONESOME COWBOY (1979, 30 sec, 16mm)<br />NOTES (1979, 1 min, 16mm-to-digital, silent)<br />THREE MASKED PIECES (1979, 1 min, 16mm-to-digital, silent)<br />SMALL EVENTS (1979, 2 min, 16mm-to-digital)<br />BY THE SEA (1982, 1.5 min, 16mm, silent)<br />CONQUEST PIECE (1982, 6 min, 16mm)<br />NOT A MUSIC VIDEO (1987, 7 min, 16mm)<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 40 min.<br /><br /><strong>Merritt will be here in person for both screenings, with the Q&As moderated by filmmaker Lynne Sachs (Fri, Sept 25) and writer and film programmer Yasmina Price (Sat, Sept 26).</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Saturday, September 26 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61880 <p>Edgar Allan (Rufus B. Seder) is an aspiring screenwriter who has just come to Hollywood to make it in the movies…only to wind up working as the janitor at a fleabag apartment complex run by the greasy ex-boxer Martin (played by underground film legend George Kuchar). When Edgar begins channeling his frustrations with his kooky neighbors into fodder for his latest screenplay, the vivid murder scenes he writes begin to happen for real. As the bodies begin to pile up and the line between reality and fiction become increasingly blurred, Edgar, who is convinced that the only way to be a real writer is to suffer, is slowly driven mad.<br /><br />SCREAMPLAY is a marvel of campy charm, gothic horror tropes, and astonishingly inventive set design and special effects. Wearing its low-budget resourcefulness on its sleeve, but also genuinely atmospheric and transporting, the spell it casts is all the more remarkable given that it was filmed almost entirely within the confines of the 3,200-square-foot South End Boston loft where director Rufus Butler Seder and his Boston Black and White Movie Company (comprised of fellow students from the city’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts) had previously made a bevy of similarly inspired 16mm short films. Conjured from some of the earliest and still-most-effective cinematic techniques – matte paintings, scale models, ingeniously adaptable sets, animation, highly expressionistic lighting, and the good old-fashioned magic provided by charismatic performers (above all, Seder himself in the central role, and of course the irreplaceable George Kuchar, who broke his ankle during filming of the final fight scene) – SCREAMPLAY is a deliriously entertaining demonstration of the power of low budget invention, and a singularly charming (Boston) salute to Old Hollywood.<br /><br />Premiered (alongside BLOOD SIMPLE) at the 1985 New York Independent Film Festival, initially distributed by Troma (click here for details about our upcoming Troma series), but rarely screened in recent decades, SCREAMPLAY has been newly restored in 4K – scanned from Seder’s personal 16mm print – and is now back in circulation, where it’s poised to charm, delight, and frighten a whole new audience.<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Rufus Butler Seder<br />IN THE CITY: A TRILOGY (LIVE IN FEAR; SUN RUN; PHANTOM SUBWAYS)<br />1977, 6 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br /><br /><strong>Writer, director, and star Rufus Butler Seder and producer and cinematographer Dennis M. Piana will be here in person on Fri & Sat for Q&As following the evening screenings; they’ll be joined on Fri evening by star Katy Bolger!</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Saturday, September 26 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61881 <p>Edgar Allan (Rufus B. Seder) is an aspiring screenwriter who has just come to Hollywood to make it in the movies…only to wind up working as the janitor at a fleabag apartment complex run by the greasy ex-boxer Martin (played by underground film legend George Kuchar). When Edgar begins channeling his frustrations with his kooky neighbors into fodder for his latest screenplay, the vivid murder scenes he writes begin to happen for real. As the bodies begin to pile up and the line between reality and fiction become increasingly blurred, Edgar, who is convinced that the only way to be a real writer is to suffer, is slowly driven mad.<br /><br />SCREAMPLAY is a marvel of campy charm, gothic horror tropes, and astonishingly inventive set design and special effects. Wearing its low-budget resourcefulness on its sleeve, but also genuinely atmospheric and transporting, the spell it casts is all the more remarkable given that it was filmed almost entirely within the confines of the 3,200-square-foot South End Boston loft where director Rufus Butler Seder and his Boston Black and White Movie Company (comprised of fellow students from the city’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts) had previously made a bevy of similarly inspired 16mm short films. Conjured from some of the earliest and still-most-effective cinematic techniques – matte paintings, scale models, ingeniously adaptable sets, animation, highly expressionistic lighting, and the good old-fashioned magic provided by charismatic performers (above all, Seder himself in the central role, and of course the irreplaceable George Kuchar, who broke his ankle during filming of the final fight scene) – SCREAMPLAY is a deliriously entertaining demonstration of the power of low budget invention, and a singularly charming (Boston) salute to Old Hollywood.<br /><br />Premiered (alongside BLOOD SIMPLE) at the 1985 New York Independent Film Festival, initially distributed by Troma (click here for details about our upcoming Troma series), but rarely screened in recent decades, SCREAMPLAY has been newly restored in 4K – scanned from Seder’s personal 16mm print – and is now back in circulation, where it’s poised to charm, delight, and frighten a whole new audience.<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Rufus Butler Seder<br />IN THE CITY: A TRILOGY (LIVE IN FEAR; SUN RUN; PHANTOM SUBWAYS)<br />1977, 6 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br /><br /><strong>Writer, director, and star Rufus Butler Seder and producer and cinematographer Dennis M. Piana will be here in person on Fri & Sat for Q&As following the evening screenings; they’ll be joined on Fri evening by star Katy Bolger!</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Saturday, September 26 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-62140 <p>This screening is presented on the occasion of the launch of a new LP devoted to the work of Bo Harwood (1946-2022), the composer whose music appears throughout John Cassavetes’s films and whose songs and compositions were often made with Cassavetes’s participation. The record brings together eleven recordings straight from the master tapes held by Bo during his lifetime, including music from THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE, A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE, OPENING NIGHT, and LOVE STREAMS, as well as “Bach Train” and other compositions. The LP will be available for purchase at the screening (with a discounted price for ticket-holders).<br /><br />The event is organized by Yana Foqué, who initiated the project, with the support of the estate of Bo Harwood. It is hosted by Anthology Film Archives, with support from Grazer Kunstverein, where the LP will also be presented.<br /><br />John Cassavetes<br />THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE<br />1976, 108 min (1978 re-release version), 35mm<br />Cosmo Vittelli (Ben Gazzara) owns a small Los Angeles strip club, the Crazy Horse West. After paying off a gambling debt to a group of gangsters, he finds himself in their debt once again. What begins as a night of obligation gradually pulls Cosmo into a world of violence, performance, loyalty, and survival. Cassavetes follows Cosmo through the clubs, restaurants, cars, and back rooms of Los Angeles, moving between the artificiality of the stage and the uncertain reality beyond it. With its long takes, abrupt shifts in tone, and performances that move freely between theatricality and intimacy, THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE is one of Cassavetes’s most elusive and singular films. A classic, the film is graced by a peerless performance from Ben Gazzara as Cosmo.<br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Sunday, September 27 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61883 <p>Edgar Allan (Rufus B. Seder) is an aspiring screenwriter who has just come to Hollywood to make it in the movies…only to wind up working as the janitor at a fleabag apartment complex run by the greasy ex-boxer Martin (played by underground film legend George Kuchar). When Edgar begins channeling his frustrations with his kooky neighbors into fodder for his latest screenplay, the vivid murder scenes he writes begin to happen for real. As the bodies begin to pile up and the line between reality and fiction become increasingly blurred, Edgar, who is convinced that the only way to be a real writer is to suffer, is slowly driven mad.<br /><br />SCREAMPLAY is a marvel of campy charm, gothic horror tropes, and astonishingly inventive set design and special effects. Wearing its low-budget resourcefulness on its sleeve, but also genuinely atmospheric and transporting, the spell it casts is all the more remarkable given that it was filmed almost entirely within the confines of the 3,200-square-foot South End Boston loft where director Rufus Butler Seder and his Boston Black and White Movie Company (comprised of fellow students from the city’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts) had previously made a bevy of similarly inspired 16mm short films. Conjured from some of the earliest and still-most-effective cinematic techniques – matte paintings, scale models, ingeniously adaptable sets, animation, highly expressionistic lighting, and the good old-fashioned magic provided by charismatic performers (above all, Seder himself in the central role, and of course the irreplaceable George Kuchar, who broke his ankle during filming of the final fight scene) – SCREAMPLAY is a deliriously entertaining demonstration of the power of low budget invention, and a singularly charming (Boston) salute to Old Hollywood.<br /><br />Premiered (alongside BLOOD SIMPLE) at the 1985 New York Independent Film Festival, initially distributed by Troma (click here for details about our upcoming Troma series), but rarely screened in recent decades, SCREAMPLAY has been newly restored in 4K – scanned from Seder’s personal 16mm print – and is now back in circulation, where it’s poised to charm, delight, and frighten a whole new audience.<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Rufus Butler Seder<br />IN THE CITY: A TRILOGY (LIVE IN FEAR; SUN RUN; PHANTOM SUBWAYS)<br />1977, 6 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br /><br /><strong>Writer, director, and star Rufus Butler Seder and producer and cinematographer Dennis M. Piana will be here in person on Fri & Sat for Q&As following the evening screenings; they’ll be joined on Fri evening by star Katy Bolger!</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Sunday, September 27 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61884 <p>Edgar Allan (Rufus B. Seder) is an aspiring screenwriter who has just come to Hollywood to make it in the movies…only to wind up working as the janitor at a fleabag apartment complex run by the greasy ex-boxer Martin (played by underground film legend George Kuchar). When Edgar begins channeling his frustrations with his kooky neighbors into fodder for his latest screenplay, the vivid murder scenes he writes begin to happen for real. As the bodies begin to pile up and the line between reality and fiction become increasingly blurred, Edgar, who is convinced that the only way to be a real writer is to suffer, is slowly driven mad.<br /><br />SCREAMPLAY is a marvel of campy charm, gothic horror tropes, and astonishingly inventive set design and special effects. Wearing its low-budget resourcefulness on its sleeve, but also genuinely atmospheric and transporting, the spell it casts is all the more remarkable given that it was filmed almost entirely within the confines of the 3,200-square-foot South End Boston loft where director Rufus Butler Seder and his Boston Black and White Movie Company (comprised of fellow students from the city’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts) had previously made a bevy of similarly inspired 16mm short films. Conjured from some of the earliest and still-most-effective cinematic techniques – matte paintings, scale models, ingeniously adaptable sets, animation, highly expressionistic lighting, and the good old-fashioned magic provided by charismatic performers (above all, Seder himself in the central role, and of course the irreplaceable George Kuchar, who broke his ankle during filming of the final fight scene) – SCREAMPLAY is a deliriously entertaining demonstration of the power of low budget invention, and a singularly charming (Boston) salute to Old Hollywood.<br /><br />Premiered (alongside BLOOD SIMPLE) at the 1985 New York Independent Film Festival, initially distributed by Troma (click here for details about our upcoming Troma series), but rarely screened in recent decades, SCREAMPLAY has been newly restored in 4K – scanned from Seder’s personal 16mm print – and is now back in circulation, where it’s poised to charm, delight, and frighten a whole new audience.<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Rufus Butler Seder<br />IN THE CITY: A TRILOGY (LIVE IN FEAR; SUN RUN; PHANTOM SUBWAYS)<br />1977, 6 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br /><br /><strong>Writer, director, and star Rufus Butler Seder and producer and cinematographer Dennis M. Piana will be here in person on Fri & Sat for Q&As following the evening screenings; they’ll be joined on Fri evening by star Katy Bolger!</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Sunday, September 27 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61928 <p>PSYCHODRAMAS: MASKED FIGURES / MULTIPLE IDENTITIES</p> <p>WHAT’S THIS? (1973, 1.5 min, 16mm-to-digital, silent)<br />A KISS OF DEATH (1974, 9 min, 16mm)<br />6 TO 8AM (1975, 30 min, 16mm-to-digital)<br />EMBRACABLE YOU (1979, 5 min, 16mm-to-digital)<br />ASIAM (1982, 5 min, 16mm, silent)<br />WELCOME TO THE HOUSE OF RAVEN (1997, 3 min, 16mm)<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 60 min.<br /><br /><strong>Merritt will be here in person for both screenings, with the Q&As moderated by filmmakers Peggy Ahwesh (Fri, Sept 25) and David Sherman (Sun, Sept 27).</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Sunday, September 27 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61885 <p>Edgar Allan (Rufus B. Seder) is an aspiring screenwriter who has just come to Hollywood to make it in the movies…only to wind up working as the janitor at a fleabag apartment complex run by the greasy ex-boxer Martin (played by underground film legend George Kuchar). When Edgar begins channeling his frustrations with his kooky neighbors into fodder for his latest screenplay, the vivid murder scenes he writes begin to happen for real. As the bodies begin to pile up and the line between reality and fiction become increasingly blurred, Edgar, who is convinced that the only way to be a real writer is to suffer, is slowly driven mad.<br /><br />SCREAMPLAY is a marvel of campy charm, gothic horror tropes, and astonishingly inventive set design and special effects. Wearing its low-budget resourcefulness on its sleeve, but also genuinely atmospheric and transporting, the spell it casts is all the more remarkable given that it was filmed almost entirely within the confines of the 3,200-square-foot South End Boston loft where director Rufus Butler Seder and his Boston Black and White Movie Company (comprised of fellow students from the city’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts) had previously made a bevy of similarly inspired 16mm short films. Conjured from some of the earliest and still-most-effective cinematic techniques – matte paintings, scale models, ingeniously adaptable sets, animation, highly expressionistic lighting, and the good old-fashioned magic provided by charismatic performers (above all, Seder himself in the central role, and of course the irreplaceable George Kuchar, who broke his ankle during filming of the final fight scene) – SCREAMPLAY is a deliriously entertaining demonstration of the power of low budget invention, and a singularly charming (Boston) salute to Old Hollywood.<br /><br />Premiered (alongside BLOOD SIMPLE) at the 1985 New York Independent Film Festival, initially distributed by Troma (click here for details about our upcoming Troma series), but rarely screened in recent decades, SCREAMPLAY has been newly restored in 4K – scanned from Seder’s personal 16mm print – and is now back in circulation, where it’s poised to charm, delight, and frighten a whole new audience.<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Rufus Butler Seder<br />IN THE CITY: A TRILOGY (LIVE IN FEAR; SUN RUN; PHANTOM SUBWAYS)<br />1977, 6 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br /><br /><strong>Writer, director, and star Rufus Butler Seder and producer and cinematographer Dennis M. Piana will be here in person on Fri & Sat for Q&As following the evening screenings; they’ll be joined on Fri evening by star Katy Bolger!</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Sunday, September 27 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61886 <p>Edgar Allan (Rufus B. Seder) is an aspiring screenwriter who has just come to Hollywood to make it in the movies…only to wind up working as the janitor at a fleabag apartment complex run by the greasy ex-boxer Martin (played by underground film legend George Kuchar). When Edgar begins channeling his frustrations with his kooky neighbors into fodder for his latest screenplay, the vivid murder scenes he writes begin to happen for real. As the bodies begin to pile up and the line between reality and fiction become increasingly blurred, Edgar, who is convinced that the only way to be a real writer is to suffer, is slowly driven mad.<br /><br />SCREAMPLAY is a marvel of campy charm, gothic horror tropes, and astonishingly inventive set design and special effects. Wearing its low-budget resourcefulness on its sleeve, but also genuinely atmospheric and transporting, the spell it casts is all the more remarkable given that it was filmed almost entirely within the confines of the 3,200-square-foot South End Boston loft where director Rufus Butler Seder and his Boston Black and White Movie Company (comprised of fellow students from the city’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts) had previously made a bevy of similarly inspired 16mm short films. Conjured from some of the earliest and still-most-effective cinematic techniques – matte paintings, scale models, ingeniously adaptable sets, animation, highly expressionistic lighting, and the good old-fashioned magic provided by charismatic performers (above all, Seder himself in the central role, and of course the irreplaceable George Kuchar, who broke his ankle during filming of the final fight scene) – SCREAMPLAY is a deliriously entertaining demonstration of the power of low budget invention, and a singularly charming (Boston) salute to Old Hollywood.<br /><br />Premiered (alongside BLOOD SIMPLE) at the 1985 New York Independent Film Festival, initially distributed by Troma (click here for details about our upcoming Troma series), but rarely screened in recent decades, SCREAMPLAY has been newly restored in 4K – scanned from Seder’s personal 16mm print – and is now back in circulation, where it’s poised to charm, delight, and frighten a whole new audience.<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Rufus Butler Seder<br />IN THE CITY: A TRILOGY (LIVE IN FEAR; SUN RUN; PHANTOM SUBWAYS)<br />1977, 6 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br /><br /><strong>Writer, director, and star Rufus Butler Seder and producer and cinematographer Dennis M. Piana will be here in person on Fri & Sat for Q&As following the evening screenings; they’ll be joined on Fri evening by star Katy Bolger!</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Monday, September 28 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61887 <p>Edgar Allan (Rufus B. Seder) is an aspiring screenwriter who has just come to Hollywood to make it in the movies…only to wind up working as the janitor at a fleabag apartment complex run by the greasy ex-boxer Martin (played by underground film legend George Kuchar). When Edgar begins channeling his frustrations with his kooky neighbors into fodder for his latest screenplay, the vivid murder scenes he writes begin to happen for real. As the bodies begin to pile up and the line between reality and fiction become increasingly blurred, Edgar, who is convinced that the only way to be a real writer is to suffer, is slowly driven mad.<br /><br />SCREAMPLAY is a marvel of campy charm, gothic horror tropes, and astonishingly inventive set design and special effects. Wearing its low-budget resourcefulness on its sleeve, but also genuinely atmospheric and transporting, the spell it casts is all the more remarkable given that it was filmed almost entirely within the confines of the 3,200-square-foot South End Boston loft where director Rufus Butler Seder and his Boston Black and White Movie Company (comprised of fellow students from the city’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts) had previously made a bevy of similarly inspired 16mm short films. Conjured from some of the earliest and still-most-effective cinematic techniques – matte paintings, scale models, ingeniously adaptable sets, animation, highly expressionistic lighting, and the good old-fashioned magic provided by charismatic performers (above all, Seder himself in the central role, and of course the irreplaceable George Kuchar, who broke his ankle during filming of the final fight scene) – SCREAMPLAY is a deliriously entertaining demonstration of the power of low budget invention, and a singularly charming (Boston) salute to Old Hollywood.<br /><br />Premiered (alongside BLOOD SIMPLE) at the 1985 New York Independent Film Festival, initially distributed by Troma (click here for details about our upcoming Troma series), but rarely screened in recent decades, SCREAMPLAY has been newly restored in 4K – scanned from Seder’s personal 16mm print – and is now back in circulation, where it’s poised to charm, delight, and frighten a whole new audience.<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Rufus Butler Seder<br />IN THE CITY: A TRILOGY (LIVE IN FEAR; SUN RUN; PHANTOM SUBWAYS)<br />1977, 6 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br /><br /><strong>Writer, director, and star Rufus Butler Seder and producer and cinematographer Dennis M. Piana will be here in person on Fri & Sat for Q&As following the evening screenings; they’ll be joined on Fri evening by star Katy Bolger!</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Monday, September 28 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61888 <p>Edgar Allan (Rufus B. Seder) is an aspiring screenwriter who has just come to Hollywood to make it in the movies…only to wind up working as the janitor at a fleabag apartment complex run by the greasy ex-boxer Martin (played by underground film legend George Kuchar). When Edgar begins channeling his frustrations with his kooky neighbors into fodder for his latest screenplay, the vivid murder scenes he writes begin to happen for real. As the bodies begin to pile up and the line between reality and fiction become increasingly blurred, Edgar, who is convinced that the only way to be a real writer is to suffer, is slowly driven mad.<br /><br />SCREAMPLAY is a marvel of campy charm, gothic horror tropes, and astonishingly inventive set design and special effects. Wearing its low-budget resourcefulness on its sleeve, but also genuinely atmospheric and transporting, the spell it casts is all the more remarkable given that it was filmed almost entirely within the confines of the 3,200-square-foot South End Boston loft where director Rufus Butler Seder and his Boston Black and White Movie Company (comprised of fellow students from the city’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts) had previously made a bevy of similarly inspired 16mm short films. Conjured from some of the earliest and still-most-effective cinematic techniques – matte paintings, scale models, ingeniously adaptable sets, animation, highly expressionistic lighting, and the good old-fashioned magic provided by charismatic performers (above all, Seder himself in the central role, and of course the irreplaceable George Kuchar, who broke his ankle during filming of the final fight scene) – SCREAMPLAY is a deliriously entertaining demonstration of the power of low budget invention, and a singularly charming (Boston) salute to Old Hollywood.<br /><br />Premiered (alongside BLOOD SIMPLE) at the 1985 New York Independent Film Festival, initially distributed by Troma (click here for details about our upcoming Troma series), but rarely screened in recent decades, SCREAMPLAY has been newly restored in 4K – scanned from Seder’s personal 16mm print – and is now back in circulation, where it’s poised to charm, delight, and frighten a whole new audience.<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Rufus Butler Seder<br />IN THE CITY: A TRILOGY (LIVE IN FEAR; SUN RUN; PHANTOM SUBWAYS)<br />1977, 6 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br /><br /><strong>Writer, director, and star Rufus Butler Seder and producer and cinematographer Dennis M. Piana will be here in person on Fri & Sat for Q&As following the evening screenings; they’ll be joined on Fri evening by star Katy Bolger!</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Tuesday, September 29 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61889 <p>Edgar Allan (Rufus B. Seder) is an aspiring screenwriter who has just come to Hollywood to make it in the movies…only to wind up working as the janitor at a fleabag apartment complex run by the greasy ex-boxer Martin (played by underground film legend George Kuchar). When Edgar begins channeling his frustrations with his kooky neighbors into fodder for his latest screenplay, the vivid murder scenes he writes begin to happen for real. As the bodies begin to pile up and the line between reality and fiction become increasingly blurred, Edgar, who is convinced that the only way to be a real writer is to suffer, is slowly driven mad.<br /><br />SCREAMPLAY is a marvel of campy charm, gothic horror tropes, and astonishingly inventive set design and special effects. Wearing its low-budget resourcefulness on its sleeve, but also genuinely atmospheric and transporting, the spell it casts is all the more remarkable given that it was filmed almost entirely within the confines of the 3,200-square-foot South End Boston loft where director Rufus Butler Seder and his Boston Black and White Movie Company (comprised of fellow students from the city’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts) had previously made a bevy of similarly inspired 16mm short films. Conjured from some of the earliest and still-most-effective cinematic techniques – matte paintings, scale models, ingeniously adaptable sets, animation, highly expressionistic lighting, and the good old-fashioned magic provided by charismatic performers (above all, Seder himself in the central role, and of course the irreplaceable George Kuchar, who broke his ankle during filming of the final fight scene) – SCREAMPLAY is a deliriously entertaining demonstration of the power of low budget invention, and a singularly charming (Boston) salute to Old Hollywood.<br /><br />Premiered (alongside BLOOD SIMPLE) at the 1985 New York Independent Film Festival, initially distributed by Troma (click here for details about our upcoming Troma series), but rarely screened in recent decades, SCREAMPLAY has been newly restored in 4K – scanned from Seder’s personal 16mm print – and is now back in circulation, where it’s poised to charm, delight, and frighten a whole new audience.<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Rufus Butler Seder<br />IN THE CITY: A TRILOGY (LIVE IN FEAR; SUN RUN; PHANTOM SUBWAYS)<br />1977, 6 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br /><br /><strong>Writer, director, and star Rufus Butler Seder and producer and cinematographer Dennis M. Piana will be here in person on Fri & Sat for Q&As following the evening screenings; they’ll be joined on Fri evening by star Katy Bolger!</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Tuesday, September 29 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61890 <p>Edgar Allan (Rufus B. Seder) is an aspiring screenwriter who has just come to Hollywood to make it in the movies…only to wind up working as the janitor at a fleabag apartment complex run by the greasy ex-boxer Martin (played by underground film legend George Kuchar). When Edgar begins channeling his frustrations with his kooky neighbors into fodder for his latest screenplay, the vivid murder scenes he writes begin to happen for real. As the bodies begin to pile up and the line between reality and fiction become increasingly blurred, Edgar, who is convinced that the only way to be a real writer is to suffer, is slowly driven mad.<br /><br />SCREAMPLAY is a marvel of campy charm, gothic horror tropes, and astonishingly inventive set design and special effects. Wearing its low-budget resourcefulness on its sleeve, but also genuinely atmospheric and transporting, the spell it casts is all the more remarkable given that it was filmed almost entirely within the confines of the 3,200-square-foot South End Boston loft where director Rufus Butler Seder and his Boston Black and White Movie Company (comprised of fellow students from the city’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts) had previously made a bevy of similarly inspired 16mm short films. Conjured from some of the earliest and still-most-effective cinematic techniques – matte paintings, scale models, ingeniously adaptable sets, animation, highly expressionistic lighting, and the good old-fashioned magic provided by charismatic performers (above all, Seder himself in the central role, and of course the irreplaceable George Kuchar, who broke his ankle during filming of the final fight scene) – SCREAMPLAY is a deliriously entertaining demonstration of the power of low budget invention, and a singularly charming (Boston) salute to Old Hollywood.<br /><br />Premiered (alongside BLOOD SIMPLE) at the 1985 New York Independent Film Festival, initially distributed by Troma (click here for details about our upcoming Troma series), but rarely screened in recent decades, SCREAMPLAY has been newly restored in 4K – scanned from Seder’s personal 16mm print – and is now back in circulation, where it’s poised to charm, delight, and frighten a whole new audience.<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Rufus Butler Seder<br />IN THE CITY: A TRILOGY (LIVE IN FEAR; SUN RUN; PHANTOM SUBWAYS)<br />1977, 6 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br /><br /><strong>Writer, director, and star Rufus Butler Seder and producer and cinematographer Dennis M. Piana will be here in person on Fri & Sat for Q&As following the evening screenings; they’ll be joined on Fri evening by star Katy Bolger!</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Wednesday, September 30 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61977 <p>Nieves runs a modest inn with her son in the Chilean countryside, leading a quiet life shaped by routine and deferred dreams. When a wandering motorcyclist arrives and falls for her, the prospect of a late-blooming romance offers an unexpected glimpse of happiness – yet their relationship seems destined to falter. Everything changes with the arrival of a filmmaker who casts them in her adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, drawing them into the creative process and gradually blurring the boundaries between performance and reality. As fiction begins to reshape their everyday lives, new emotional possibilities emerge in this playful and deeply human meditation on love, aging, cinema, and the mysterious ways stories transform those who inhabit them.<br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Wednesday, September 30 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=09&year=2026#showing-61891 <p>Edgar Allan (Rufus B. Seder) is an aspiring screenwriter who has just come to Hollywood to make it in the movies…only to wind up working as the janitor at a fleabag apartment complex run by the greasy ex-boxer Martin (played by underground film legend George Kuchar). When Edgar begins channeling his frustrations with his kooky neighbors into fodder for his latest screenplay, the vivid murder scenes he writes begin to happen for real. As the bodies begin to pile up and the line between reality and fiction become increasingly blurred, Edgar, who is convinced that the only way to be a real writer is to suffer, is slowly driven mad.<br /><br />SCREAMPLAY is a marvel of campy charm, gothic horror tropes, and astonishingly inventive set design and special effects. Wearing its low-budget resourcefulness on its sleeve, but also genuinely atmospheric and transporting, the spell it casts is all the more remarkable given that it was filmed almost entirely within the confines of the 3,200-square-foot South End Boston loft where director Rufus Butler Seder and his Boston Black and White Movie Company (comprised of fellow students from the city’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts) had previously made a bevy of similarly inspired 16mm short films. Conjured from some of the earliest and still-most-effective cinematic techniques – matte paintings, scale models, ingeniously adaptable sets, animation, highly expressionistic lighting, and the good old-fashioned magic provided by charismatic performers (above all, Seder himself in the central role, and of course the irreplaceable George Kuchar, who broke his ankle during filming of the final fight scene) – SCREAMPLAY is a deliriously entertaining demonstration of the power of low budget invention, and a singularly charming (Boston) salute to Old Hollywood.<br /><br />Premiered (alongside BLOOD SIMPLE) at the 1985 New York Independent Film Festival, initially distributed by Troma (click here for details about our upcoming Troma series), but rarely screened in recent decades, SCREAMPLAY has been newly restored in 4K – scanned from Seder’s personal 16mm print – and is now back in circulation, where it’s poised to charm, delight, and frighten a whole new audience.<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Rufus Butler Seder<br />IN THE CITY: A TRILOGY (LIVE IN FEAR; SUN RUN; PHANTOM SUBWAYS)<br />1977, 6 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br /><br /><strong>Writer, director, and star Rufus Butler Seder and producer and cinematographer Dennis M. Piana will be here in person on Fri & Sat for Q&As following the evening screenings; they’ll be joined on Fri evening by star Katy Bolger!</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Wednesday, September 30 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=10&year=2026#showing-62105 <p>Marking the opening of “Combat Breathing Vol. II”, this film program brings together contemporary artworks that emerge from commitments to or embeddedness within political struggles and streams of anti-imperialist thought. Here, moving images function as social productions made for collective engagement, transforming mere viewership into situated modes of cinematic “spect-actor-ship,” to borrow from theorist Augusto Boal. Taken together, these films, informed by various experimental and militant traditions of image-making, model the inseparability of and dynamic correspondences between form and content. Titled “Insurgent Poiesis”, the program simultaneously proposes the moving image as a means for agitational ideological dissemination and a space for poetic invention: a form capable of circulating ideas while remaining open to a multiplicity of meanings, unexpected encounters, and unbounded experimentation. Refusing the fiction of aesthetic autonomy, the film program begins with the recognition that all artistic and cultural productions are ideologically conditioned. The selected films by Tony Cokes, Filipa César, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Shiva Addanki, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, and Camila Galaz figure the political and philosophical entwinement of poiesis and revolutionary activity: bringing something into existence that did not exist before, producing “a world where many worlds fit – un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos” by any means necessary.<br /><br />Tony Cokes EVIL.35: CARLIN / OWNERS (2012, 8 min, DCP)<br />EVIL.35: CARLIN / OWNERS, like many of Tony Cokes’s recent works, is structured by a simple formal operation: the pairing of found text and found music. These audiovisual combinations, attuned to the historical and ideological convergences and divergences of their source materials, generate further meanings. In this work, Cokes pairs an excerpt from a characteristically cantankerous screed by the late stand-up comedian George Carlin with two songs by the British agit-prop post-punk group Gang of Four. Carlin’s words directly confront the contradictions of liberal capitalist democracy – the absurd state of affairs whereby a small ruling class owns and controls everything, from government officials to the workforce, despite the juridical pretense of universal political equality – while Gang of Four’s rebellious songs allude to the Irish anti-colonial struggle and the commodification of pleasure. Taken together, and aided by Cokes’s cinematic choreography of sound, background color, and text graphics, audiences are engaged as critical readers capable of piercing through neoliberal capitalism’s false naturalizations.<br /><br />Filipa César TRANSMISSION FROM THE LIBERATED ZONES (2015, 30 min, DCP)<br />TRANSMISSION FROM THE LIBERATED ZONES belongs to a body of work by Filipa César concerned with the conditions and aftermaths of the anti-colonial struggle of the PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) against the Portuguese between 1963-74. Departing from the concept of the “Liberated Zones” – used to describe areas freed from colonial domination, and organized and managed by PAIGC guerrilla militants – the film partially reconstructs the memory of these autonomous spaces via archival documents and the contemporary testimonies of four Swedes (diplomat Folke Löfgren, filmmaker Lennart Malmer, filmmaker and psychologist Ingela Romare, and politician Birgitta Dahl), all of whom visited Guinea in the early 1970s. Deeply reflexive of the aesthetic and technological mediation of these insurgent histories, the documents and statements are performatively presented by and visually projected onto a young character in a dark room whose image is, in turn, multiplied as an infinite regression through César’s use of experimental optical effects. Through these inventive means, César’s work opens up struggles as contradictory sites of antagonism and solidarity while projecting the radioactive remnants of liberationist practice into the present and future.<br /><br />Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme OH SHINING STAR TESTIFY (2016-19, 10 min, DCP)<br />OH SHINING STAR TESTIFY is an audiovisual poem that seeks to account for and speculate on the possibilities of fugitive resurgences within, under, and beyond the ruins of colonial catastrophe. It invites us to consider the relation between the destruction of bodies and the erasure of images, and the conditions under which those very bodies and images might once again reappear. The film recursively loops CCTV footage taken from an Israeli military surveillance camera. The footage – temporarily released online following a court injunction – depicts an incident from 2014 when 14-year-old Yusuf ­Shawamreh crossed the “separation fence” erected by the Israeli military, near Hebron, to pick some Akoub – an edible plant used in Palestinian cuisine, which blooms for short periods of time. After crossing the fence, Israeli forces ambushed and shot Yusuf dead. Layering poetic verses and evocative images upon one another, which are sampled from online recordings of quotidian acts of corporeal and infrastructural devastation as well as scenes of defiant social rituals and performances, Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s cine-poem critically situates the serial occurrences of such acts of state terror and their ongoing resistances. Formally guided by an accumulative logic, not unlike that which subjects Palestinian land and people to continual displacement and expropriation by a settler regime, OH SHINING STAR attunes viewers to the enduring, latent animacies of the oppressed and the ecological specter of return.<br /><br />Shiva Addanki A PERMANENT OPIUM WAR (2026, 10 min, DCP)<br />A PERMANENT OPIUM WAR grapples with the historical and geographical underpinnings of statist, imperialist, and global-market infrastructures as they are evoked through the sprawl of the Greater New York metropolitan area. The work both poses and problematizes the presumed distinctions between the Global North and Global South, or First and Third Worlds, tracing how ideological, commercial, and political exchanges materialize across networks linking states and corporations. It approaches these infrastructures from the vantage point of the militant and revolutionary struggles that traverse, contest, and resist their hardwired and concretized forms. Charting connections across disparate coordinates – including Delaney Hall, a privately managed immigrant detention facility in Newark, New Jersey; the persecution of Assata Shakur following her capture after the 1973 Turnpike Shooting; commodity exchanges between poor and developed marketplaces; women’s Naxalite training by Maoist revolutionary insurgents in India; and political spectacles of Hindutva–Zionist alliance – the work assembles a constellation in which these violent structures and liberationist histories become materially and politically entangled.<br /><br />Colectivo Los Ingrávidos FACES IN THE CROWD 2: MEMORIAL (2019, 14 min, 16mm-to-DCP)<br />Shot on expired film stock by the anonymous filmmaking collective Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, FACES IN THE CROWD 2: MEMORIAL is an experimental audiovisual meditation on memory, neoliberal and colonial state violence in Mexico, and the forms of social resistance that emerge in response to it. The film moves through politically mobilized crowds, protest ephemera, and historical traces of organized violence with an expiring breath – as if these images and the memories they carry are themselves at risk of extinction. It embraces the material qualities of analog film through grainy textures, layered images, and an unstable frame, transforming the filmic surface into an alchemical site where memory is simultaneously preserved, fractured, and regenerated.<br /><br />Centered on the fiftieth commemoration of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre and the nationwide leftist movement that led to it, the resulting work becomes a contemplation on how struggles reemerge and transform, and how protesting crowds become social bodies that carry historical memory and continually innovate practices of dissent. In the work, images and sounds fragment, overlap, and repeat, producing a dreamlike, almost trance-inducing experience rather than a linear or chronological account of events. Such formal disruptions reflect Colectivo Los Ingrávidos’s broader interest in challenging dominant audiovisual languages and resisting the ways mainstream media can organize, discipline, and control perception.<br /><br />Camila Galaz VECINO, VECINO (2022, 20 min, DCP)<br />Set against the backdrop of Chile’s 2019 social uprising, VECINO VECINO returns to a 1986 French television documentary on MAPU Lautaro, a left-wing armed organization that resisted the Pinochet dictatorship. For filmmaker Camila Galaz, the archive is at once historical record and intimate inheritance, as her father was connected to this organization, binding her personal history to the political memory embedded within the footage. Moving between archival and newly filmed material, and incorporating annotations and choreographic scores, the film unsettles the authority of the documentary image by opening a mediated space where memory can be questioned, re-performed, and reimagined. The past emerges not as a fixed record, but as something continually reconstructed through fragments, gestures, and acts of translation. In the potent aftermath of the recent national uprising, VECINO VECINO traces the echoes between generations, reflecting on social and historical questions of inheritance while asking how histories of resistance are encountered, remembered, and embodied.<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 95 min.<br /><br /><strong>Followed by a conversation between KJ Abudu, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Omar Berrada, Camila Galaz, and Adam HajYahia!</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Thursday, October 01 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=10&year=2026#showing-61892 <p>Edgar Allan (Rufus B. Seder) is an aspiring screenwriter who has just come to Hollywood to make it in the movies…only to wind up working as the janitor at a fleabag apartment complex run by the greasy ex-boxer Martin (played by underground film legend George Kuchar). When Edgar begins channeling his frustrations with his kooky neighbors into fodder for his latest screenplay, the vivid murder scenes he writes begin to happen for real. As the bodies begin to pile up and the line between reality and fiction become increasingly blurred, Edgar, who is convinced that the only way to be a real writer is to suffer, is slowly driven mad.<br /><br />SCREAMPLAY is a marvel of campy charm, gothic horror tropes, and astonishingly inventive set design and special effects. Wearing its low-budget resourcefulness on its sleeve, but also genuinely atmospheric and transporting, the spell it casts is all the more remarkable given that it was filmed almost entirely within the confines of the 3,200-square-foot South End Boston loft where director Rufus Butler Seder and his Boston Black and White Movie Company (comprised of fellow students from the city’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts) had previously made a bevy of similarly inspired 16mm short films. Conjured from some of the earliest and still-most-effective cinematic techniques – matte paintings, scale models, ingeniously adaptable sets, animation, highly expressionistic lighting, and the good old-fashioned magic provided by charismatic performers (above all, Seder himself in the central role, and of course the irreplaceable George Kuchar, who broke his ankle during filming of the final fight scene) – SCREAMPLAY is a deliriously entertaining demonstration of the power of low budget invention, and a singularly charming (Boston) salute to Old Hollywood.<br /><br />Premiered (alongside BLOOD SIMPLE) at the 1985 New York Independent Film Festival, initially distributed by Troma (click here for details about our upcoming Troma series), but rarely screened in recent decades, SCREAMPLAY has been newly restored in 4K – scanned from Seder’s personal 16mm print – and is now back in circulation, where it’s poised to charm, delight, and frighten a whole new audience.<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Rufus Butler Seder<br />IN THE CITY: A TRILOGY (LIVE IN FEAR; SUN RUN; PHANTOM SUBWAYS)<br />1977, 6 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br /><br /><strong>Writer, director, and star Rufus Butler Seder and producer and cinematographer Dennis M. Piana will be here in person on Fri & Sat for Q&As following the evening screenings; they’ll be joined on Fri evening by star Katy Bolger!</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Thursday, October 01 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=10&year=2026#showing-61893 <p>Edgar Allan (Rufus B. Seder) is an aspiring screenwriter who has just come to Hollywood to make it in the movies…only to wind up working as the janitor at a fleabag apartment complex run by the greasy ex-boxer Martin (played by underground film legend George Kuchar). When Edgar begins channeling his frustrations with his kooky neighbors into fodder for his latest screenplay, the vivid murder scenes he writes begin to happen for real. As the bodies begin to pile up and the line between reality and fiction become increasingly blurred, Edgar, who is convinced that the only way to be a real writer is to suffer, is slowly driven mad.<br /><br />SCREAMPLAY is a marvel of campy charm, gothic horror tropes, and astonishingly inventive set design and special effects. Wearing its low-budget resourcefulness on its sleeve, but also genuinely atmospheric and transporting, the spell it casts is all the more remarkable given that it was filmed almost entirely within the confines of the 3,200-square-foot South End Boston loft where director Rufus Butler Seder and his Boston Black and White Movie Company (comprised of fellow students from the city’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts) had previously made a bevy of similarly inspired 16mm short films. Conjured from some of the earliest and still-most-effective cinematic techniques – matte paintings, scale models, ingeniously adaptable sets, animation, highly expressionistic lighting, and the good old-fashioned magic provided by charismatic performers (above all, Seder himself in the central role, and of course the irreplaceable George Kuchar, who broke his ankle during filming of the final fight scene) – SCREAMPLAY is a deliriously entertaining demonstration of the power of low budget invention, and a singularly charming (Boston) salute to Old Hollywood.<br /><br />Premiered (alongside BLOOD SIMPLE) at the 1985 New York Independent Film Festival, initially distributed by Troma (click here for details about our upcoming Troma series), but rarely screened in recent decades, SCREAMPLAY has been newly restored in 4K – scanned from Seder’s personal 16mm print – and is now back in circulation, where it’s poised to charm, delight, and frighten a whole new audience.<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Rufus Butler Seder<br />IN THE CITY: A TRILOGY (LIVE IN FEAR; SUN RUN; PHANTOM SUBWAYS)<br />1977, 6 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br /><br /><strong>Writer, director, and star Rufus Butler Seder and producer and cinematographer Dennis M. Piana will be here in person on Fri & Sat for Q&As following the evening screenings; they’ll be joined on Fri evening by star Katy Bolger!</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Thursday, October 01 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=10&year=2026#showing-62082 <p>Set in Argentina, ALANIS navigates the life of a single sex working parent. Though Alanis faces a deluge of problems with clients that plague every woman selling sex, the real threat to her security and the safety of her child stems from the social workers and laws that construct obstacles under the guise of protecting “precarious” women and children.<br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Friday, October 02 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=10&year=2026#showing-62107 <p>“I’m in jail out here, I’m in jail in there.” –Hugh Masekela<br /><br />The prison is the institutionalization of a logic central to the systemic formation and reproduction of racial capitalism and colonialism. It remains the primary form in modernity through which states (either under ostensibly opposing but in truth co-constituting liberal democratic and fascistic guises) manage surplus populations, extract surplus value, break social and kinship relations, and utilize the captive body to control not only those within its walls, but also those on the outside. This film program borrows its title – and something of its poetic and conceptual grammar – from the writing of scholar Nasser Abourahme, who in his book “The Time Beneath the Concrete” brings the prison into immediate relation with the colony and the refugee camp in Palestine. Extending his analysis to the ghetto and the reservation within the U.S. context as additional sites of enclosure, this program with works by Alex Johnston, Sky Hopinka, and Larry Clark attends not only to the violence of imprisonment, but also to the ways such sites have and continue to be made into focal points of struggle by those whose lives they seek to crush and mold. What emerges is a transnational, historically grounded, and situated account of the carceral system that traces the prison’s many reinventions while insisting that the project of enclosure, however violently renewed, is never complete.<br /><br />Alex Johnston EVIDENCE OF THE EVIDENCE (2018, 20 min, DCP)<br />The 1971 Attica Prison Rebellion remains a defining moment of radical resistance – not only in the history of prison struggles and the American anti-racist and anti-state movement, but also for international struggles against enclosure and carcerality. The state’s retaking of the prison on the fourth and final day of the uprising, described as the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War, remains an open wound. EVIDENCE OF THE EVIDENCE examines this fraught and contested history through a granular interrogation of the archival record. Drawing on previously unseen video footage recorded by a state trooper during the four-day rebellion, the film offers a visceral, ground-level account of the events at Attica while tracing how they were simultaneously mediated and narrativized through the images being produced. Recalling Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujică’s seminal VIDEOGRAMS OF A REVOLUTION (1992), the film considers the manifold roles moving images play in producing history and memory – as well as in their erasure and destruction. At a moment of escalating racism and authoritarianism across the West, when prisons and other regimes of enclosure remain indispensable to imperial domination, EVIDENCE OF THE EVIDENCE emerges as a timely and urgent work of agitprop and media criticism.<br /><br />Sky Hopinka SUNFLOWER SIEGE ENGINE (2022, 12 min, DCP)<br />The Occupation of Alcatraz (1969-71) marked a historic moment of indigenous resistance in the United States. Led by Indians of All Tribes (IAT), eighty-nine Native activists and their supporters occupied the abandoned federal prison island, demanding self-determination, tribal sovereignty, and land rights, forcefully recentering the question of indigenous land against the settler-colonial foundations of the U.S. empire. Although the occupation also brought to the fore the many unresolved contradictions within pan-Indian political discourse and organizing, particularly around the contested meanings of sovereignty and indigeneity, its memory and legacy continue to offer a vital site of reflection and empowerment in struggles for land and decolonization. In SUNFLOWER SIEGE ENGINE, distinct moments and scales of resistance are collapsed and woven together: documentation of the Alcatraz occupation; the reclamation of Cahokia and the repatriation of ancestors; and intimate reflections on inhabiting one’s body in the present while looking back upon historical struggles and their continuities, excesses, and impasses. Through experimental visual gestures and poetry, the film meditates on the carceral origins and enduring logic of the reservation system, asking where sovereignty and belligerence converge, and where they break away.<br /><br />Larry Clark AS ABOVE, SO BELOW (1973, 52 min, 16mm-to-DCP)<br />One of the most politically radical films to emerge from the L.A. Rebellion, AS ABOVE, SO BELOW offers an uncompromising portrayal of the formation of revolutionary consciousness, the underground organization of black insurgency in the United States, and the place of these processes within the broader project of Third World liberation. The film centers on Jita-Hadi, who grows up in the structurally abandoned neighborhoods of postwar Chicago. He later joins the Marine Corps, only to become disillusioned when he is deployed across Asia and the Caribbean to suppress leftist governments and protect U.S. imperial and capitalist interests. Returning to an increasingly ghettoized United States, Jita-Hadi is discreetly recruited into a black insurrectionary group. The narrative is interwoven with archival radio broadcasts and film excerpts that evoke the carceral state’s suppression of racialized groups, as well as parodic scenes – including narcotizing church services and the monologues of a black centrist. Through these different registers, the film sharply articulates the internal and external, national and transnational obstacles confronting black liberation.<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 90 min.<br /><br /><strong>Introduced by Chris Knowles.</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Friday, October 02 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=10&year=2026#showing-62085 <p>When the woes of monogamy affect the queer sex life of Dylan and Claudia, the couple enlist the help of sex professionals to reinvigorate their passion. These professionals range from the dominatrixes of the underground nightclub dungeons in Berlin to the sex educational help of Dylan’s mom. Through these sexcapades the women learn about their self-esteem, libido, and all the ways in which they become their mothers.<br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Friday, October 02 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=10&year=2026#showing-62109 <p>What characterizes the militant image? What historical conditions produced it and what kinds of histories were, in turn, produced by it? Where might it be found today? This program brings together a selection of contemporary works that frontally engage the legacies and continuities of Third Cinema and the tricontinental geographies of leftist, anti-colonial collaboration and mobilization that were this cultural movement’s primary condition of possibility. These works, as with Third Cinema, refuse clear-cut divisions between formal acuity and socio-political signification, and ground cinema’s documentative, archival, and imaginative powers as useful tools in the ongoing decolonizing process. Such a process involves grappling with the positive and negative lessons of prior movements in order to deduce alternative pathways to liberation.<br /><br />The selected films in this program revisit various sites of unfinished and unfolding anti-colonial struggle, from Ghana and Palestine to Yugoslavia and Algeria. Orienting viewers toward critical reflections on the historical twists and turns of the capitalist world-system on macro and interpersonal scales while remaining firmly rooted in their respective presents, the works by Mila Turajlić, John Akomfrah with Black Audio Film Collective, and Reem Shilleh further articulate the persisting structures of colonialism in their intensifications and mutations following from these mid-twentieth-century decolonization movements. The continuity of said conditions into this millennium can only ever engender, as these films themselves embody, the “perpetual recurrence” of a countervailing militant image.<br /><br />Mila Turajlić<br />CINÉ-GUERRILLAS: SCENES FROM THE LABUDOVIĆ REELS<br />2022, 94 min, DCP<br />Based on resurrected 35mm footage shot by Stevan Labudović, the official cameraman of former Yugoslav President Tito, this documentary by Mila Turajlić takes viewers on an archival road trip through the insurgent historical streams and collaborative Third World networks that constituted and sustained the Algerian anti-colonial struggle from 1954-62. Turajlić follows Labudović’s work in Algeria through intimate interviews with him and Algerian revolutionary contemporaries, matching his newsreel footage – audiovisual testaments to tricontinental solidarity – with excerpts from his diary. Employing only images of the Algerian War not shown from a French perspective, CINÉ-GUERRILLAS wades through the media and propaganda battle that played out during the liberation struggle, where cinema was mobilized as a political weapon of resistance against colonialism and empire as well as a social, imaginative medium of world-making.<br /><br /><strong>The screening will be introduced by artist, filmmaker, and researcher Carmen Amengual!</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Saturday, October 03 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=10&year=2026#showing-62089 <p>In KAMA SUTRA: A TALE OF LOVE, Mira Nair examines the stigmatization of sexually promiscuous and unmarried women by the upper class in 16th-century India. The film follows Maya, a servant, who embarks on a journey of self-discovery through the art and spiritual practice of being a courtesan. Though ultimately a film about love, as signaled in the title, the film presents a rare historical fictional account of the spiritual art of working sex in the 16th-century.<br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Saturday, October 03 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=10&year=2026#showing-62111 <p>What characterizes the militant image? What historical conditions produced it and what kinds of histories were, in turn, produced by it? Where might it be found today? This program brings together a selection of contemporary works that frontally engage the legacies and continuities of Third Cinema and the tricontinental geographies of leftist, anti-colonial collaboration and mobilization that were this cultural movement’s primary condition of possibility. These works, as with Third Cinema, refuse clear-cut divisions between formal acuity and socio-political signification, and ground cinema’s documentative, archival, and imaginative powers as useful tools in the ongoing decolonizing process. Such a process involves grappling with the positive and negative lessons of prior movements in order to deduce alternative pathways to liberation.<br /><br />The selected films in this program revisit various sites of unfinished and unfolding anti-colonial struggle, from Ghana and Palestine to Yugoslavia and Algeria. Orienting viewers toward critical reflections on the historical twists and turns of the capitalist world-system on macro and interpersonal scales while remaining firmly rooted in their respective presents, the works by Mila Turajlić, John Akomfrah with Black Audio Film Collective, and Reem Shilleh further articulate the persisting structures of colonialism in their intensifications and mutations following from these mid-twentieth-century decolonization movements. The continuity of said conditions into this millennium can only ever engender, as these films themselves embody, the “perpetual recurrence” of a countervailing militant image.<br /><br />John Akomfrah & Black Audio Film Collective<br />TESTAMENT<br />1988, 80 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br />TESTAMENT is among the earliest feature-length works created by the pioneering UK-based art group, Black Audio Film Collective (of which John Akomfrah was a founding member). Synthesizing the languages of Third Cinema and avant-garde montage with the lamentational affects of postcolonial disillusionment, TESTAMENT offers a probing spectral meditation on the condition of the African postcolony. The film’s protagonist, Abena, is an exiled activist turned television reporter who returns to Ghana two decades after the 1966 coup that brought an end to President Kwame Nkrumah’s experiment in Pan-African socialism. Adrift in a “war zone of memories,” Abena is caught in the cleavage between public history and private memory. Characteristic of the collective’s now-signature blend of archival documents, fictional sequences, and layered sound scores, TESTAMENT enfolds depopulated frames, frigid tones, allegories of mourning, and a cast of enigmatic characters to evoke an emotional landscape of loss and arrested political possibility.<br /><br /><strong>Introduced by Christian Nyampeta.</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Saturday, October 03 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=10&year=2026#showing-62092 <p>Set in the alternate universe of Trashtown (but filmed in the American South), Annapurna Sriram’s debut feature film FUCKTOYS is a surrealist queer black comedy about a young woman on a mission to break a curse. Throughout a chaotic 24-hour journey, the protagonist (and her compatriots) navigate the intersecting oppressive systems of capitalism that make hustlers out of us all in pursuit of a spiritual, if not ecstatic, release of the body and soul.<br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Saturday, October 03 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=10&year=2026#showing-62113 <p>What characterizes the militant image? What historical conditions produced it and what kinds of histories were, in turn, produced by it? Where might it be found today? This program brings together a selection of contemporary works that frontally engage the legacies and continuities of Third Cinema and the tricontinental geographies of leftist, anti-colonial collaboration and mobilization that were this cultural movement’s primary condition of possibility. These works, as with Third Cinema, refuse clear-cut divisions between formal acuity and socio-political signification, and ground cinema’s documentative, archival, and imaginative powers as useful tools in the ongoing decolonizing process. Such a process involves grappling with the positive and negative lessons of prior movements in order to deduce alternative pathways to liberation.<br /><br />The selected films in this program revisit various sites of unfinished and unfolding anti-colonial struggle, from Ghana and Palestine to Yugoslavia and Algeria. Orienting viewers toward critical reflections on the historical twists and turns of the capitalist world-system on macro and interpersonal scales while remaining firmly rooted in their respective presents, the works by Mila Turajlić, John Akomfrah with Black Audio Film Collective, and Reem Shilleh further articulate the persisting structures of colonialism in their intensifications and mutations following from these mid-twentieth-century decolonization movements. The continuity of said conditions into this millennium can only ever engender, as these films themselves embody, the “perpetual recurrence” of a countervailing militant image.<br /><br />Reem Shilleh<br />PERPETUAL RECURRENCES<br />2016, 60 min, DCP<br />A meta-reflection on the militant image and its contemporary reappearances, PERPETUAL RECURRENCES montages scenes extracted from numerous films and videos created over the last four decades by Palestinians and about Palestine, tracking thematic, gestural, and compositional repetitions between works produced during the Palestinian revolutionary period of 1968-82, the period following the 1993 Oslo Accords, and the volatile twenty-first century. Through Reem Shilleh’s methodical stitching together of repeating filmic occurrences – with respect to location, political discourse, mise-en-scene, objects, and so on – various scenes become unfixed from their narrative contexts and historical conditions, inviting expansive associations and haunting correspondences. Meandering in a seemingly improvised fashion between cinematic fragments of classroom instruction and conversing militants gathered under trees to handheld camera shots of refugee camps and moving car shots of streets, checkpoints, and landscapes, Shilleh’s vast media traversal materializes an equally lyrical and deconstructive reimagination of exercises in film programming.<br /><br /><strong>Introduced by Tiffany Malakooti.</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Saturday, October 03 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=10&year=2026#showing-62094 <p>Taking the avatar of the dominatrix as its starting point, this short film program gathers together various films made – across a 40-year period – by or in collaboration with those who have experience in the leathersex scene. As an avatar of working sex, the figure of the dominatrix is elusive in so far as she uses the theater of the scene of “violation” to both pursue and obfuscate her desires. Though cinema longs to unmask the dominatrix to witness her “true” self, this program instead finds pleasure in the artifice of the scene wherein various characters find themselves at the mercy of the seductive and controlling gaze of the dominatrix. The shorts here range from documentary exercises of sadism, like Ione Wang’s WHEN I LOOK AT YOU, I SEE ME, to the electric pop-music video work of Beth B’s THE DOMINATRIX SLEEPS TONIGHT, made for the band Dominatrix. Shorts by Azian Nurudin and Michelle Handelman from the late 1980s and early 1990s invite a reconsideration of race, power, and aesthetics through their respectively overlooked and censored films, while M.M. Serra and Maria Beatty’s work demonstrates the aesthetic bliss that emerges from submitting to the fantasies of a powerful woman.<br /><br />Azian Nurudin NANCY’S NIGHTMARE (1988, 5 min, digital)<br />Michelle Handelman CATSCAN (1989, 6 min, Super-8mm-to-digital. Made with with Monte Cazazza.)<br />M.M. Serra & Jennifer Reeves DARLING INTERNATIONAL (1999, 22 min, 16mm-to-digital)<br />Maria Beatty THE BLACK GLOVE (1996, 30 min, digital)<br />Beth B THE DOMINATRIX SLEEPS TONIGHT (1984, 4 min, video)<br />Ione Wang WHEN I LOOK AT YOU, I SEE ME (2024, 7 min, digital)<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 80 min.<br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Sunday, October 04 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=10&year=2026#showing-62115 <p>POSTSCRIPTS OF MODERNITY, PART 1<br />The promises and outcomes of modernity – nation-states and capitalist economies, along with their alienating and extractivist logics and infrastructures – have produced immeasurable catastrophic damage to peoples and living environments across racial and class lines. Throughout their reign, these violent systems have not simply been justified by the values of universality, individual freedom, and liberal secular democracy; they have been produced through them, eliminating and exploiting all that does not measure up or conform to their suffocating parameters.<br /><br />Central to modernity, and to modern discourse more broadly, is the capture of technology as a transhistorical practice and its transformation into a supposedly modern conception governed by the logic of progress. “Postscripts of Modernity” is a film program that engages these catastrophic and violent legacies while demonstrating how film, itself a modern technology, might visualize and facilitate other social relations – in other words, how existing at-hand technologies, currently governed by the reign of capital, might be appropriated and subverted to achieve ends nonsynchronous with their intended uses. The works by Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers, Bahar Noorizadeh, and Nadir Bouhmouch disavow modernity’s violence not by returning to an imagined precolonial or precapitalist past, but by insisting on a kind of crude presentism. Their diverse aesthetic interventions within the political contexts they respectively work in embrace whatever tools are currently available within modernity as material for the struggle against it.<br /><br />Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers<br />TAKING BACK THE LEGISLATURE<br />2020, 45 min, DCP<br />July 1, 2019 – the 22nd anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover to China after the end of British Imperial Rule – marks a critical moment in the region, considered, on the one hand, as a celebration of the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and, on the other, as an occasion of mourning, anger, and mounting political frustration for pro-democracy groups, eventually culminating in an unprecedented act of social upheaval. As protesters question the effectiveness of months of non-violent demonstrations against the proposed extradition law, a group begins to contemplate a more radical course of action: storming the Legislative Council. Filmed from within the movement by anonymous filmmakers on handheld cameras, TAKING BACK THE LEGISLATURE follows the protesters through the escalating hours of confrontation. The camera captures heated debates among demonstrators over the risks of occupying the building, as well as their encounters with pro-democracy legislators who urge them to reconsider their actions. As frustration gives way to determination, protesters equipped with helmets, masks, and makeshift tools eventually break through the Legislative Council’s defenses and enter the chamber.<br /><br />Bahar Noorizadeh<br />AFTER SCARCITY<br />2018, 30 min, DCP<br />Can computational utopias offer a way out of the techno-capitalist monopolization of the present? In the Soviet Union of the 1960s, cyberneticians imagined computers as machines of communism, and cybernetics as a way to address the mounting difficulties of the planned economy. AFTER SCARCITY follows cyberneticians such as Viktor Glushkov, among others, who proposed that networked computers could overcome the vast bureaucratic inefficiencies of central planning and make possible a fully automated planned economy. If history, at its best, is a blueprint for science fiction, then revisiting these contingent histories of economic technology might open a path to the future beyond the speculative binds of the capitalist order.<br /><br />The work reconstructs this socialist cybernetic history through a deliberately futuristic visual language. Digitally generated landscapes, partly built from LiDAR scans, move through swarms of floating points that trace monasteries and city streets, compressing decades of history into a speculative space. These contingent pasts become prototypes for fictive futures, suggesting that digital socialism was not alien to the communist project, and that computation need not condemn us to the techno-capitalist present. The result is less a conventional historical documentary than a simulation of an alternative technological history with the past appearing as a prototype for a future that never arrived.<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 80 min.<br /><br /><strong>Introduced by Harris Chowdhary.</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Sunday, October 04 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=10&year=2026#showing-62097 <p>Positioned as a rebuke to the colonial fantasy of THE WORLD OF SUZIE WONG (1960), MY NAME AIN’T SUZIE spans three decades of the life of a girl from a poor fishing village who makes a name for herself as a courtesan in the Wan Chai red light district in Hong Kong. Over the course of the film, MY NAME AIN’T SUZIE confronts and redresses the occidental fantasies of the East through the protagonists’ interactions with her clients.<br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Sunday, October 04 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=10&year=2026#showing-62117 <p>The promises and outcomes of modernity – nation-states and capitalist economies, along with their alienating and extractivist logics and infrastructures – have produced immeasurable catastrophic damage to peoples and living environments across racial and class lines. Throughout their reign, these violent systems have not simply been justified by the values of universality, individual freedom, and liberal secular democracy; they have been produced through them, eliminating and exploiting all that does not measure up or conform to their suffocating parameters.<br /><br />Central to modernity, and to modern discourse more broadly, is the capture of technology as a transhistorical practice and its transformation into a supposedly modern conception governed by the logic of progress. “Postscripts of Modernity” is a film program that engages these catastrophic and violent legacies while demonstrating how film, itself a modern technology, might visualize and facilitate other social relations – in other words, how existing at-hand technologies, currently governed by the reign of capital, might be appropriated and subverted to achieve ends nonsynchronous with their intended uses. The works by Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers, Bahar Noorizadeh, and Nadir Bouhmouch disavow modernity’s violence not by returning to an imagined precolonial or precapitalist past, but by insisting on a kind of crude presentism. Their diverse aesthetic interventions within the political contexts they respectively work in embrace whatever tools are currently available within modernity as material for the struggle against it.<br /><br />Nadir Bouhmouch<br />AMUSSU<br />2019, 100 min, DCP<br />The people of the Moroccan village of Imider may live alongside the largest silver mine in Africa, but they have reaped few of its benefits. The mine’s encroachment upon their communal life has rendered their existence increasingly precarious, contributing to water scarcity and threatening the community’s almond orchards, oasis, and traditional ways of life. In 2011, the villagers responded by shutting down a pipeline supplying water to the mine and establishing a protest camp around it, inaugurating a struggle that would last to this day. Rather than centering scenes of confrontation, arrest, intimidation, and police violence, which are all part of the fight against the infrastructures of this pipeline, AMUSSU turns its attention to the everyday life, resilience, and creativity of those who sustain the struggle. Conceived as a participatory filmic project, AMUSSU was produced through collective decision-making guided by the community’s Agraw protocol, while community members not only learned to operate film equipment but also participated directly in filming. In this sense, the film constitutes both a formal and methodological intervention into the practice of radical independent cinema. Years after the initial uprising, the protest camp has evolved into a small, largely self-sufficient community, where music, theater, poetry, and other artistic practices have emerged as a revolutionary vernacular. These forms of expression do more than accompany the struggle, as they become part of its infrastructure, sustaining collective memory, solidarity, and an ongoing demand for land, water, and a life lived with dignity.<br /><br /><strong>Introduced by Alma Chaouachi.</strong><br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Sunday, October 04 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=10&year=2026#showing-62100 <p>In SEDUCTION: THE CRUEL WOMAN, Wanda is a dominatrix and gallerist who invites patrons to witness her scenes with her submissives. Inspired by the Marquis de Sade’s “Venus in Furs”, writer-directors Monika Treut and Elfi Mikesch spin Sade’s tale of power, apathy, and pleasure to foreground the role the spectator (both imagined and real) plays in enabling these violating acts to occur.<br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Sunday, October 04