In 1973, movie maniac and future leader of North Korea Kim Jong-il penned On the Art of the Cinema, the complete guide for all things film in the DPRK. Decades later, the big green book is still used by filmmakers intra- and inter-nationally to create effective and stirring pieces of Juche art, the socialist ideological core of North Korea society.

In the beginning years of the Third Kim Dynasty – amidst a sea of cultural change – a few select Western filmmakers would get a chance to make 21st Century Juche Art of their own. Spectacle is proud to present COMRADE KIM GOES FLYING and AIM HIGH IN CREATION!, two movies that display the full fruits of international cooperation, cultural brotherhood, and the joyous, revolutionary power of Cinema.

COMRADE KIM GOES FLYING
dirs. Gwang Hun Kim, Anja Daelemans, Nicholas Bonner, 2012.
North Korea/Belgium/UK. 77 min.
In Korean with English subtitles.

TICKETS HERE
SATURDAY, JUNE 3 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, JUNE 23 – 10 PM

SPECIAL EVENT TICKETS
SUNDAY, JUNE 11 – 5 PM with remote filmmaker Q+A!
(This event is $10.)

Endlessly sunny and hard-working, countryside coal miner Kim Yong Mi daydreams of becoming a high-flying trapeze star. A beneficial work transfer to Pyongyang and a fortuitous encounter with her idol Ri Su Yon lead her to the chance of a lifetime: an audition with the national circus.

A joint venture between North Korea, Belgium, and the UK. COMRADE KIM GOES FLYING is the first of its kind to be shot entirely with Korean locations and cast.

AIM HIGH IN CREATION!
dir. Anna Broinowski, 2013.
North Korea/Australia. 96 min.
In Korean and English with English subtitles.

TICKETS HERE
THURSDAY, JUNE 8 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 14 – 10 PM

SPECIAL EVENT TICKETS
FRIDAY, JUNE 30 – 7:30 PM with filmmaker Anna Broinowski in person for Q+A!
(This event is $10.)

After initially being given a copy of On the Art of the Cinema as a joke, Australian director Anna Broinowski determines Kim Jong-il’s six principles of film are the exact tools she needs in her battle against the noxious mine being built near her home in Sydney. A first for a Western woman director, Anna is granted a 3 week apprenticeship in North Korea, where she will learn to wield the true tools of effective Juche Propaganda and end up making a quirky Australian docu-comedy in the process.

SUNDAY, APRIL 30 – 7:30 PM

ONE NIGHT ONLY!

Suggested donation $10

The year was not quite 1968, and Chris Marker went to record the strike that had occupied a French textile factory in Besançon. His eventual documentary BE SEEING YOU dissatisfied some of the unionists involved, so Marker organized workshops in filmmaking basics, loaning out equipment to workers. The response-movie CLASS OF STRUGGLE shows them collectively making itself, editing footage beneath this banner: Cinema is not magic; it is a technique and a science, a technique born from science and put in service of a will: the will of workers to liberate themselves.

Few films get assembled by hand any longer. The spectacle of Hollywood is mostly the drudgery of visual-effects shops, and thousands of the unionized projectionists who once screened such movies have been replaced by encrypted DCP files. The Freelance Solidarity Project was founded in 2018 by digital media workers, another industry that lives off exploiting precarious labor. Now a division of the National Writers Union, it campaigns alongside editorial staff and street vendors alike to raise wages for all.

In Michèle Rosier’s 1976 film MON COEUR EST ROUGE, a Parisian marketer starts interviewing other women about makeup, but “drop the skincare routine” eventually segues to feminist sociology, the way solidarity can emerge through a meaningful glance. Following this screening of MON COEUR EST ROUGE, writer Chris Randle, a member of FSP’s steering committee, will discuss the cinematic labor movement with projectionists Benji and Lily Sarosi. You can’t eat prestige, yet some venerable arthouse theaters in New York City pay their staff as little as $15 per hour. If there is a future for that public cinema experience, how can we make it a truly collective one? “What is beautiful is not what is written in the tabloids,” one of the Besançon strikers said. “It’s what the working class does. Isn’t that culture?”

MON CŒUR EST ROUGE
(MY HEART IS RED)
dir. Michèle Rosier, 1976
110 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

MON CŒUR EST ROUGE stars Françoise Lebrun as Clara, a market research analyst hired by a big cosmetics company to interview women from different walks of life about their makeup-purchasing habits. (Rosier’s original treatment for the film put it like this: “What began as research for better ways to lie to women becomes a quest for truths only women can reveal.”) The process sees her probing questions of femininity in a Paris that’s modernizing at a rapid rate; while Clara strikes up a spur-of-the-moment romance along the way, much of the film concerns people’s embrace of (and resistance to) the new freedoms of the Sixties and Seventies. MON CŒUR EST ROUGE is a bruisingly funny cross-examination of second wave feminism and its discontents – ending in an extraordinary finale at a “Women’s Fair”, with a murderer’s row of Rosier’s collaborators playing luminaries such as Freud, Sartre, Aristotle, Marx and Shakespeare in drag – provoking dreams of an alternative history away from masculine supremacy. Screening with brand-new English subtitles translated by Claudia Eve Beauchesne.

Following our 2019 presentation of his films RENDEZVOUS IN CHICAGO and MERCURY IN RETROGRADE, Spectacle is thrilled to welcome the acclaimed maverick filmmaker from the Windy City Michael Glover Smith back to 124 S. 3rd Street for the NYC premiere of his new feature RELATIVE, ahead of a wider roll-out in June.

RELATIVE
dir. Michael Glover Smith, 2022
97 mins. United States.
In English.

ONE NIGHT ONLY!

SUNDAY, APRIL 2 – 5PM with filmmaker Michael Glover Smith in person for Q+A moderated by Brian Ratigan (This event is $10)

GET YOUR TICKETS!

RELATIVE is a comedy/drama about three days in the life of a modern American family. Karen Frank (Wendy Robie) and her husband David (Francis Guinan) are retirement-age progressive activists who have lived in the same Victorian home in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood for 30 years. It’s the house in which their four children grew up and where two of their children, adult sons Benji (Cameron Scott Roberts) and Rod (Keith D. Gallagher), still live. On the eve of Benji’s graduation from college, daughters Evonne (Clare Cooney) and Norma (Emily Lape) return home from out-of-state for a weekend celebration. Evonne brings her daughter, Emma (Arielle Gonzalez), and newly separated wife, Lucia (Melissa DuPrey); Norma arrives alone, with thoughts of wasted potential as she reconsiders her suburban life; Rod, an unemployed burnout, pines for Sarah (Heather Chrisler), the “cam girl” ex who left him years ago; and all Benji wants to do is escape the party to rendezvous with Hekla (Elizabeth Stam), a free-spirited actress he met the night prior. As David and Karen announce the potential sale of their home, each member of the Frank family finds their bonds with the others being tested – and strengthened – in surprising ways.

“RELATIVE asks what it means to be a parent, a child, a brother, a sister. While my previous three films deal with romantic relationships between characters in their 20s and 30s, RELATIVE primarily examines parent-child relationships and sibling bonds across three generations of the same family. I strove to stretch myself as a writer/director by creating characters of diverse ages and tried to mine each of their lives for emotional and psychological truth. Thanks to the best ensemble cast with whom I have ever had the pleasure of working, I believe the end result shows, in a manner that I hope is universal and timeless, both the difficulties and the rewards that come with being a relative.” – Michael Glover Smith

“Featuring a brilliant and eclectic cast of talented veterans and relative newcomers, this is a wickedly funny, occasionally poignant and authentic-to-its-core drama/comedy about three eventful days in the life of a totally relatable extended family.” – Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times

“His intimate, actor-driven dramas are set not merely in the real world, but in specific locales, with dialogue testifying to the fact that both the characters and the place have histories that still weigh on them in the present. The movies are ragged and imperfect, alternate awkward and sublime, but when they hit, they strike deep and tear you up.” – Matt Zoller Seitz, RogerEbert.com

“The screenwriting is excellent with many lines you have to quote.” – Nancy Bishop, Third Coast Review

MICHAEL GLOVER SMITH wrote and directed the feature films COOL APOCALYPSE (2015), MERCURY IN RETROGRADE (2017), RENDEZVOUS IN CHICAGO (2018), and RELATIVE (2022), all of which won awards at festivals across the U.S. and were the subject of rave reviews. The Chicago Sun-Times’ Richard Roeper wrote that “Smith has a deft touch for creating characters who look and sound like people we know” and RogerEbert.com’s Matt Fagerholm has called him “one of the Windy City’s finest filmmakers.” His films have screened at the American Cinematheque and Rooftop Cinema Club in Los Angeles, Spectacle Theater and the Regal UA Midway in NYC and the Gene Siskel Film Center and Music Box Theater in Chicago. He teaches film history at several colleges and is the author of FLICKERING EMPIRE (Columbia University Press, 2015), an acclaimed nonfiction book about film production in Chicago during the silent era.

BRIAN RATIGAN is the director and founder of Non Films, an award-winning label for ephemeral animation and experimental cinema in NYC. He is established in the film festival circuit as a programmer and juror for the Slamdance Film Festival, Atlanta Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, and the London Indie Festival, among others. Ratigan serves as Director of Animation for Kumar Pictures, co-manages Chaotic Cinema, and curates film screenings for independent artists.

THE BROKEN PITCHER
dirs. Natascha Sadr Haghighian and Marina Christodoulidou, 2022
69 mins. Cyprus/Germany/Lebanon/Spain.
In Arabic, German, Spanish, Greek and English with subtitles.

SATURDAY, MARCH 11 – 2:30pm followed by Q+A with Natascha Sadr Haghighian moderated by May Makki (This event is $10)

ONE SCREENING ONLY!

TICKETS

Tracing the effects of financialisation and austerity, THE BROKEN PITCHER by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Christodoulidou and Peter Eramian attends to a concrete case: A crucial meeting at a bank, negotiating the foreclosure of a family home in Larnaka, Cyprus in 2019. Inspired by Abbas Kiarostami’s film FIRST CASE – SECOND CASE (1979, Iran), the filmed reenactment of the bank meeting is shown to people from various backgrounds who are asked to respond to the question: “In your opinion what should the bank employees do?”. The responses encompass perspectives of people from different interest groups in Cyprus and beyond, including housing rights activists in Barcelona, Berlin and Beirut, persons who are similarly affected by these policies, public figures, lawyers, economists and artists. Foreclosure are one of the austerity measures that were imposed on the Cypriot government by the Troika (the EU Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund) after the financial crisis in 2012. THE BROKEN PITCHER situates the case in relation to the colonial history of finance, debt and property and seeks out potentials for changing the script of interacting with it.

NATASCHA SADR HAGHIGHIAN (born Budapest, 1987 or Sachsenheim, 1968 or 1976 or Australia, 1979 or Munich, 1979 or Tehran, 1967 or Iran, 1966 or 1953) is an artist who lives and works in Berlin, Germany or Kassel, Germany or Gütersloh, Germany or Santa Monica, California, USA or the Cotswolds, Great Britain. Sadr Haghighian develops installations, video and audio works, as well as performative interventions to imagine infrastructures and conditions of collectivity. Her practice is deeply invested in collaboration, sensual play and listening as modes of unraveling liberal individuality and the boundaries of cognition. Recently she has been interested in epistemic disobedience as a mode of unlearning coloniality. She co-founded various collectives and coalitions, among them the institute for incongruous translation together with Ashkan Sepahvand, and kaf together with Shahab Fotouhi and Tirdad Zolghadr. She was part of the Society of Friends of Halit and the Tribunal “Unraveling the NSU Complex”.

MAY MAKKI is a curator and cultural worker. She works and lives in New York City. Her research focuses on economies of artistic production. She is currently a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Media and Performance at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

This February, Spectacle is thrilled to host two consecutive evenings with Lithuanian filmmaker ROMAS ZABARAUSKAS, self-described enfant terrible of the burgeoning scene of Baltic LGBTQ cinema and longtime friend of 124 S. 3rd Street.

THE LAWYER
(ADVOKATAS)
dir. Romas Zabarauskas, 2020
97 mins. Lithuania.
In Lithuanian with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 1 – 7:30PM with filmmaker Q+A
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

GET YOUR TICKETS!

Zabarauskas’ most recent feature THE LAWYER follows a corporate attorney in Belgrade named Marius (Eimutis Kvosciauskas) who becomes obsessed with a Syrian refugee (and sex-cam worker) named Ali (Dogac Yildiz). But what initially seems like an exoticized (if not predatory) fixation gives way to a muted and complex rumination on inequality within inequalities. Ali refuses to become a martyr of bourgeois respectability politics for Marius, and their encounter forces the more bourgeois man to confront the limitations of his own privileged bubble – building to a surprising third act that manages to refuse both miserablism and “love conquers all” sentimentality. Evenly sensual and unsentimental, THE LAWYER is a shrewd depiction of the contradictions inherent in a time of “human rights” for some but not all, and the hypocrisy that comes when mores around homosexuality – at least, in major urban areas – are allegedly shifting for the better.

YOU CAN’T ESCAPE LITHUANIA
(NUO LIETUVOS NEPABEGSI)
dir. Romas Zabarauskas, 2016
80 mins. Lithuania.
In Lithuanian with English subtitles.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 2 – 7:30PM with filmmaker Q+A
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

GET YOUR TICKETS!

Romas Zabarauskas’ YOU CAN’T ESCAPE LITHUANIA is a shapeshifting, whiplash-inducing road movie which may seem initially autobiographical (the main character is an enfant terrible LGBTQ filmmaker from Lithuania named Romas) but soon gives way to a metaphysical nesting doll of narratives and counternarratives. Critically feted but not yet a financial success, Romas (Denisas Kolomyckis) agrees to help his star actress Indre (Irina Lavrinovic) escape Lithuania after she kills her mother (in what appears to be self-defense) following an argument over her inheritance. Romas’ boyfriend Carlos (Adrian Escobar) is opposed to the plan, but doesn’t speak the language shared by Romas and Indre, and so tensions mount – worsened by the emergence of what appears to be a sexuality-crossing love triangle. Deadpan and hilarious, YOU CAN’T ESCAPE LITHUANIA evokes Godard’s anti-cinema of the late 1960s, Chuck Jones’ DUCK AMUCK or Wojciech Has’ classic THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT.

screens with

PORNO MELODRAMA
dir. Romas Zabarauskas, 2011
32 mins. Lithuania.
In Lithuania with English subtitles.

Akvilė and Jonas were a couple until Jonas fell in love with a man. But Akvilė cannot forget her lover and continues to appear in porn films, even without him. She begs her childhood sweetheart to make one more film with her. Jonas agrees – but only so that he can leave the country with his lover.

ROMAS ZABARAUSKAS is an inspiring queer success from the New East, from the Berlinale debut of his short PORNO MELODRAMA (2011) to his third feature THE LAWYER (2020) – selected for 30+ festivals, including 7 opening, centerpiece or closing ceremonies. These films introduced diversity to Lithuanian screens, delivering genre-bending films and reflecting on the (im)possibility of meaningful political action. Based in Vilnius with his fiancé Kornelijus, Romas gives back to the LGBT+ community through his activism, recognized with the Harvey Milk Foundation’s LGBTQ Champion Award in 2021. He is currently mid-production on his fourth feature, slated for release in 2024.

Special thanks to TLA Releasing and Dekkoo.