foreign film premieres!

legendary Spanish Surrealist Pere Portabella's newest and arguably greatest film, The Silence Before Bach is a series of vignettes that show the transformational power of great music and the magic of the moving image. Portabella notoriously refuses to allow his work to be released for home video, so this short run is likely the only chance to catch this!

hailing from the Great White North, iconoclastic Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin describes his latest film My Winnipeg as a "docu-fantasia" about his hometown, blending local and personal history with surreal images and metaphorical myths to create a truly unique cinematic experience;

the Norwegian feature Reprise follows two aspiring writers as one's success begins to overshadow the other's and their friendship begins to suffer;

deeper questions of identity concern XXY, an Argentinean film about a 15-year-old hermaphrodite living as a girl in a costal Uruguayan village, painfully searching for her gender identity;

a genre-bending French film is next, the fairy-tale-like La France, in which a woman disguises herself as a young man and heads to the WWI front line in search of her husband. Described as "Bresson meets the Beatles" by Variety, the film periodically breaks into surprising musical numbers. Ithaca is one of only nine tour stops for the film in the States!

and lastly, we invite sophisticated fans of the sick and twisted to screenings of Italian Master of Horror Dario Argento's latest creepfest, The Mother of Tears. His trademark arthouse-meets-grand-guignol style is in full effect with sadistic eviscerations, gruesome impalements, and gleefully stylish red, red blood at every turn. Even though the film hails from Italy, it is in English.