Welcome to Week Two!
Cornell Cinema is still screening The 21st Annual Animation Show of Shows, so if you haven’t yet watched this delightful program, consider this your reminder! Be sure to RSVP with us for a discount code that will not only knock a few dollars off the cost (bringing the rental to $10), but will also ensure that 50% of the rental fee comes back to Cornell Cinema to help offset the rest of our season.
We’re opening two new films this week, M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity and Ikarie XB 1, but both have already sold out of their free tickets! How? Why?? Well, we take reservations for our free tickets starting one week in advance of a film’s virtual “opening” so that folks have the full length of the film’s “run” to find the time in their busy lives to watch the film. For a variety of reasons, we’re hand-processing these reservations, and we don’t want our delays to affect how long you have to watch a film, but it does mean that we will often run out of tickets before a film even starts its run.
Hopefully the reason why we only have a limited amount of tickets is obvious (we can’t give away the farm if we don’t own it, after all), but if someone wants to buy a ticket for a film that we’ve “sold out,” why can’t they? Well they usually can, but not from us. Unfortunately, a variety of technical and governance reasons prevent us from being able to switch to a pay-per-view system after all our free tickets have been disbursed. Our system is imperfect, but we had to weigh our priorities; and for us, providing a zero-cost means to watch films during the pandemic was the priority. If you really want to catch a movie we've sold out, your search engine of choice can likely direct you to another platform to rent it from. We encourage you to support independent cinemas elsewhere in the country, all of which are hurting during the pandemic. If you’d like to support our endeavor, and you have the means, you can always send us a contribution via our Donation page.
That said! We are opening reservations for a slew of new films this week! Romanian documentary Acasa, My Home (pictured), winner of the Special Jury Award for Cinematography at last year's Sundance Film Festival; Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love, offered in a new restoration; and French med school dramedy The Freshmen!
Plus, you can register to attend a free discussion about the silent “race film” The Scar of Shame with Samantha Sheppard, assistant professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Cornell; Ken Fox, director of library and archives at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester; and Barbara Lupack, a film scholar who has written and lectured on race films. That talk takes place Feb 25 at 7:15pm, but you can watch The Scar of Shame right now, screening as part of the Finger Lakes Film Trail series Race Films/Race Matters.
