Believe it or not, it’s Oscars season once again! We are proud to (virtually) open our annual showcase of the Oscar-nominated short films today! For many people, these popular programs (Animation, Live Action, and Documentary) are the only way to watch all of the shorts nominated for Academy Awards. These programs are $12 each, or $30 for all three. While you do have to pay for them, 50% of proceeds will come back to Cornell Cinema to help cover the costs of our free programming this year.
Don’t worry: we still have plenty of free films! Opening today is Varda by Agnès, the final film by our beloved, dearly departed Agnès Varda, a titan of French cinema. This film is a personal tour through her oeuvre and is perfect for those new to her work as well as lifelong fans. We're close to selling out of this title, so don't delay in requesting your view!
We are also opening Sing Me a Song, a new documentary about a Bhutanese monk in a remote monastery, whose access to a cellphone and WeChat has allowed him greater access to the world than monks have ever had before; heck, he’s even flirting with a singer who lives in Bhutan’s capital, Thimphu! It’s a fascinating portal into a less familiar culture, and a document of changing times.
Reservations are opening up for three films, including a late addition to our calendar: Kalira Atita (Yesterday’s Past). The film follows Gunu, a disillusioned young man from Satavaya village, part of a cluster of seven villages on India’s east coast that have been engulfed by the sea as a result of climate change and rising sea levels, as a cyclone heads toward the area. The South Asia Program will host a Zoom webinar Q & A on Friday, April 16 at 10:30am ET with director Nila Madhab Panda that will be moderated by Professor Neema Kudva (CRP). You can register for that discussion here. The event, which is limited to those with a CU NetID, is additionally cosponsored with the Tata-Cornell Institute.
Reservations are also available for Nadav Lapid’s Synonyms (pictured), featuring an introduction by Laurent Dubreuil, Professor of Comparative Literature, Romance Studies & Cognitive Science, and Director of French Studies at Cornell. Wild Relatives is the final film in our Migration Stories series, and is about an event that sparked worldwide interest: in 2012, an international agricultural research center was forced to relocate from Aleppo to Lebanon due to the Syrian civil war, beginning a laborious process of planting their seed collection from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault back-ups. A panel discussion on the film will take place on Tuesday, April 13 at noon. You can register for the discussion here.
