Film series: Visiting Filmmakers
Over Cornell Cinema’s 50+ year history, hundreds of filmmakers have visited to present their work and enrich the viewing experience for patrons, and this Fall we’ll offer a mix of both in-person and virtual filmmaker presentations, with the Zoom discussions taking place in the theatre, our visitors projected on the big screen, and audience members on hand to ask their questions in person.
Director Justin Lerner ’02 will join us remotely on September 21 for a post-screening discussion following a screening of his latest film Cadejo Blanco. Winner of 3 ÍCARO awards including Best Cinematography, Cadejo Blanco follows the story of Sarita, a young woman on a desperate search for her sister who disappeared during a night out in Guatemala City. Screen Daily calls it “a nail-biting, evocative and utterly persuasive crime drama that is very much a part of the country’s burgeoning film output.”
On September 23, Whit Stillman will be in person to present a belated 30th anniversary screening of his Oscar-nominated debut film Metropolitan. An ironically comic look at Manhattan’s endangered debutante scene, Metropolitan chronicles the rise and ultimate decline of a group of young Park Avenue socialites who gather nightly to discuss love, honor, and the impending downward mobility of their class status. Nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Academy Award and winner of Best First Feature by the Independent Spirit Awards.
Marcela Arteaga visits Cornell Cinema on October 4 for a free screening of her documentary The Guardian of Memory, about the Juarez Valley, the tragedies that have taken place there, and the Mexicans seeking to escape its violence. Marcela Arteaga’s visit is sponsored by the Latin American and Caribbean Studies and will feature a panel discussion with Arteaga, moderated by Cecelia Lawless (Romance Studies).
On October 5, filmmaker Lori Felker presents a program pairing several of her short films with the works of other filmmakers, centering around motherhood and miscarriage, part of our Abortion & Bodily Autonomy series. Felker works in a variety of mediums and has shown her work internationally at festivals across the globe. Her short film Spontaneous documents her spontaneous abortion while attending a film festival, and the private anxieties in public venues that follow such an event.
The clandestine network of anonymous women abetting safe, illegal abortions in pre-Roe Chicago is the subject of Tia Lessin ’86 and Emma Pildes’ new documentary The Janes, and they will present their film in a special screening here at Cornell Cinema on October 13. The following night, we present a double-feature of films selected by Tia Lessin that made an impact on her as an undergraduate student at Cornell. Those films, Born in Flames and A Question of Silence, both are tales of feminist resistance against the patriarchy.
French filmmaker Emmanuel Lefrant makes all his work exclusively on celluloid and will present his oeuvre at Cornell Cinema on October 24. Lefrant is the Director of Light Cone, a distributor of artist-made films based in Paris, and he was involved in the artist-run film laboratory L’Abominable. Lefrant’s films “lie on the idea of representing, of revealing an invisible world (the secret forms of emulsion), a nature that one does not see.” Several of his films reveal the literal world, owing to Lefrant’s burying lengths of film in the earth.
Finally, Dan Geller ’82 will join us remotely on November 11 to discuss his latest documentary, Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song. Leonard Cohen spent the greater portion of his career writing and perfecting one of the music world’s most beloved hymns, “Hallelujah.” This documentary by Dan Geller ’82 and Dayna Goldfine chronicles the spiritual journey of the artist and his painstaking commitment to the craft of song writing.
