EEK ORK ORK VOL. II: A SHOWCASE OF COSMIC ANIMATION

This Fall, Spectacle Theater is proud to present two films by Beny Tchaicovsky. Experience a groundbreaking visual journey into the origins of 3D animation. Rather than traditional narratives, Tchaicovsky’s feature animations build immersive, breathing worlds where archaic symbols meet digital technology. His pioneering works explore the intersections of technology, consciousness, and art. “Cyberscape” and “Caught Between Worlds” merge futuristic digital architecture, surreal non-linear landscapes, and deeply atmospheric soundscapes.

 

CYBERSCAPE: A COMPUTER ANIMATION VISION
Dir. Beny Tchaicovsky, 1997.
United States. 60 min.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 4 – 10PM
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 – 7:30PM

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A surreal historical chronicle of human evolution, moving from the primordial “Garden of Eden” to quantum mechanics.

CAUGHT BETWEEN WORLDS
Dir. Beny Tchaicovsky, 2001.
United States. 50 min.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 10 – 10PM
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25 – 12PM

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A visual and sonic meditation on navigating the spaces between ordinary reality and metaphysical realms.

 

Michael Glawogger’s 2014 death, from malaria, at age 54 cut off one of the most singular and accomplished voices in world documentary cinema at the height of its powers. Glawogger categorized his filmmaking as “the opposite of direct cinema,” roundly rejecting the idea that any sort of objective reality could be captured under the observation of a camera. Instead, working closely with cinematographer Wolfgang Thaler and editor Monika Willi, he reenacted and staged events with his subjects, creating an elevated reality in a unique cinematic language that anticipated the work of later filmmakers like Joshua Oppenheimer.

A protege of fellow Austrian Ulrich Seidl, Glawogger was occasionally painted with the brush of “provocateur,” but his deep empathy, humor, and relentless curiosity guides his films even through the most challenging subject matter. His “Globalization Trilogy” is a triptych of documentaries loosely dealing with the effects of shifting economic markets and modernization on some of the world’s most disenfranchised workers — though Glawogger disliked the “Globalization” framing, eschewing academic detachment to emphasize his audience and subjects’ shared humanity. In each of these films, Glawogger avoids ethnographic trappings by placing his protagonists center stage, never trivializing or overtly romanticizing them even as they experience some of the harshest conditions imaginable.

Glawogger contracted his fatal illness in Liberia, where he was shooting what would be his final film. He kept a production diary, in which, three days before his untimely death, he wrote what would turn out to be a fitting eulogy:

“When he was still a child, he used to think: But the world is so big. – He could not imagine how, for example, a wanted criminal should not be able to hide anywhere where he could not be found. … It was not for he himself had committed a crime nor did he intend to. But the possibility of disappearing was alluring and comforting in its abstractness. Then he would lead his life somewhere else, with a different routine, different trouble, and a different sense of time. With some venturous pain and lots of unimagined luck.”

Notes on intros: Lucy Zentgraf is a Brooklyn-based writer, anthropologist, former sex worker, and feminist organizer fighting for the liberation of queer women. 

Dennis Lim is a film critic, author, and artistic director of the New York Film Festival.

MEGACITIES

dir. Michael Glawogger, 1998
Austria and Switzerland
In English, Hindi, Russian, and Spanish.

Fri September 11th at 10PM.
Wednesday September 16th at 7:30PM.
Tuesday September 22nd at 10PM.

TICKETS

Glawogger’s first major feature documentary, in which his style is already fully crystalized, almost seems like the anti-KOYAANIQATSI. MEGACITIES explores twelve separate narratives throughout four of the world’s largest cities: Mumbai, Mexico City, New York City, and Moscow.

From a man sewing film strips together by hand, to teen pickpockets, to a street hustler caught in the middle of the Giuliani-fication of Times Square, MEGACITIES documents how human beings improvise to survive in the face of urban poverty, providing a fascinating portrait of global ecosystems at the turn of the century.

WORKINGMAN’S DEATH

dir. Michael Glawogger, 2005
122 mins. Austria and Germany.
In English, Pashto, Yoruba, German, Igbo, Indonesian, Mandarin, Russian.

Tuesday September 7th at 7:30PM.
Thursday September 17th at 7:30PM intro w/ DENNIS LIM
Sunday September 20th at 5PM

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WORKINGMAN’S DEATH serves as both chronicle of a eulogy for modes of manual labor in the 20th century. Told in five chapters, it follows independent coal miners in Ukraine, Indonesian sulphur carriers near a volcano, Nigerian goat slaughterers at an open-air meat market (animal lovers be warned), Pakistani ship breakers, and Chinese steelworkers as they carry out their grueling duties amongst a fast evolving post-industrial landscape.

In the wake of NAFTA and the consolidation of world economic power, Glawogger considers the relationship of labor to personal worth, at a time — much like our own — when imperatives of growth dictated that human capital be measured in terms of output, and devalued through automation. Featuring an uncharacteristically restrained score from John Zorn and breathtaking Steadicam cinematography from Wolfgang Thaler, WORKINGMAN’S DEATH is one of the most accomplished and striking documentaries of the 21st century.

WHORE’S GLORY

dir. Michael Glawogger, 2011
Austria and Germany
Thai, Bengali, and Spanish.

Fri September 4th at 7:30PM Intro w/ LUCY ZENTGRAF
Tues September 15th at 7:30PM
Thurs September 24th at 10PM

TICKETS

Glawogger’s final completed film explores prostitution in three disparate semi-autonomous economic and religious zones: a brightly lit high-end brothel in Bangkok, a claustrophobic urban compound in Bangladesh, and a ghostly border-town motel in Mexico. The film vividly captures the often unseen daily rituals, transactions, and hierarchies of power that anchor these unique environments and the people who converge there.

Glawogger — who compensated his subjects financially for their participation in his film — blends his usual staged reenactments with visceral and often haunting interviews with sex workers and their clients, making for a precarious mix that seems like the natural culmination of the approach he perfected over his career. Made over the course of four years, WHORE’S GLORY raises questions about both the historic portrayal of sex work onscreen, and the inherent exploitative nature of filmmaking itself.

Rehearsal Behavior is a screening series tracing a capacious lineage of choreographic moving-image works: From the dance-for-film pioneers of the 1940s–60s, to experimental video of the late 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, to contemporary acts of self-expression through direct camera performance.

This screening presents an interrelated grouping of foundational 16mm Cinedance experiments spanning from 1941 to 1973. Featured artists inspire, reference, and collaborate with one another, evidencing the accumulative effect of intergenerational exchange on the lineage of this hybrid form.

Rehearsal Behavior takes its title from a phrase of Rainer’s own coining as a choreographer in the early ‘70s. The phrase juxtaposed the generative looseness of the rehearsal space with the staunch hierarchy of directed live performance, as dancers’ spontaneous responses deliberately reshaped the work and, in the process, pushed toward a more democratic social structure.

Rehearsal Behavior runs from September 18-21. This screening at Spectacle, guest programmed by Charlotte Strange and Andrea Torres, is complemented by two screenings at e-flux (9/17, 7:00pm and 9/19, 3:00pm), and other venues to be announced.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 20 – 7:30 PM

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INTROSPECTION
Dir. Sara Kathryn Arledge, 1941-46
United States. 6 min.
16mm

Commonly described as the first abstract dance film made in the United States, Introspection depicts layered fragments of dancers’ bodies as they move in a void-like, black performance space. Arledge was a talented abstract painter and illustrator as well as filmmaker; the artist uses her camera, production techniques including color gels, and editing to abstract the dancers’ figures, treating them as compositional elements within the moving frame. Of her approach to filmmaking, Arledge said: “My plan was to extend the nature of painting to include time.” Production on Introspection paused while most of the crew was drafted during World War II, finally completed after the war’s formal conclusion. 

NINE VARIATIONS ON A DANCE THEME
Dir. Hilary Harris, 1967
United States. 13 min.
16mm

Harris deftly wields his camera to depict dancer Bettie de Jong, a longtime member of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, repeatedly performing a single dance movement. Slow pan shots encircle de Jong’s body as she spins from a standing position to the floor and back, generating an intimate view of her performance accessible by camera alone. Harris and de Jong shot the piece across twenty-five filming sessions over the course of one year, reflective of Harris’s expertise as an early innovator of time-lapse photography. A documentary filmmaker by trade, Harris collaborated with Amy Greenfield as a cinematographer on numerous pieces including Element (1973) and Tides (1982). 

ELEMENT
Dir. Amy Greenfield, 1973
United States. 12 min.
16mm

In Element, dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Amy Greenfield performs undulating movements in a bed of clay-like mud. The piece represents an early iteration of Greenfield’s filmic and choreographic investigations into the entanglements between womanhood, the human form, and nature, which would develop throughout her career. The mud at once highlights the contours of Greenfield’s figure as protruding areas glisten in the sun, and at other points makes her body indistinguishable from its surroundings. Greenfield’s choreography accentuates the physicality of the mud, displaying a powerful sensuality while treating the landscape as an animate dance partner. Avoiding purely romantic notions of the power of nature, Element hints at the capacity of ecological forces to enact violence while taking up the mantle of representing a woman’s body in pleasure and struggle. Element is the cinematic counterpart of Greenfield’s later work Tides (1982), also filmed by Hilary Harris, which draws from Maya Deren’s script for the unfilmed passages of Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946). 

RITUAL IN TRANSFIGURED TIME
Dir. Maya Deren, 1946
United States. 15 min.
16mm

Like much of Deren’s work, Ritual in Transfigured Time meditates on the temporality of movement. Dancer Rita Christiani drifts into an apartment where Maya Deren winds wool around her hands as the film’s innovative editing slows the gesture into something incantatory. While Anaïs Nin looks on from the doorway, Christiani gathers the yarn into a ball, until, with a gust of wind, Deren vanishes. At a crowded party, frames freeze and shots recur in hypnotic repetition as Christiani, veiled in black, threads her way past a beckoning crowd until she embraces Frank Westbrook. Outdoors, amongst a garden’s Greco-Roman ruins and statues and blue skies, they dance. He begins chasing her in leaping strides, then her as Deren, until he catches her. Deren wades into the sea as the film dissolves into negative, transfiguring the black mourning veil into bridal white.

For Deren, ritual and dance were one and the same, each seeking the realization of its purpose through the exercise of form. Dreamlike and foreboding, Deren stages a meditation on control and surrender, on what she called the “deference of personality in possessed states of being.”

What was 9/11? It depends who you ask. A news anchor would tell you it was a national tragedy; a conspiracist, an inside job; a leftist, an empire’s comeuppance; a film critic, the year’s biggest blockbuster; and your cousin, a meme. In his typically blasé fashion, Baudrillard called it “the absolute event,” while the renowned German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen controversially called the attacks “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos.” A pattern emerges: from the moment American Airlines Flight 11 was piloted into the North Tower, it has been remarkably difficult to comprehensively define 9/11.

The attacks were encoded in the national memory over seemingly endless minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months of media coverage. A quarter of a century later, it is tempting to think of 9/11 as a media event announcing material reality’s final, total subordination to the image—as Baudrillard said, “They did it. We wished it.” Yet to conceive of 9/11 in only these terms would be to overlook the lived horrors of the day and the insidious reverberations of a nationwide psychic trauma. From our historical vantage, the events of September 11 seem as fundamental to our current reality as the air we breathe. In recognition of the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11, 2001, Spectacle presents a selection of films that confront the phenomenal and psychic impact of the attacks, and the indelible scar they left on the world. There was before, and this is after.

Program 1: REICHSTAG 9/11 & DISINEGRATION LOOP 1.1

REICHSTAG 9/11
Dir. Ken Jacobs, 2016.
United States. 38 min.
Silent.

“The Eternalism is a method of making images more real. … Time and space are monumentalized.”
—Ken Jacobs

“I fear cruelty, despise it, and it exists. It exists. It’s often called patriotism.”
—Ken Jacobs

With Reichstag 9/11, Jacobs applies his Eternalism method to heavily distorted witness-recorded footage of the September 11 attacks. Here, the metaphysical qualities of the method assume a mournful tone—as we watch the towers repeatedly collapse, we simultaneously watch them rebuild themselves. It is as if Jacobs still sees them and their occupants there, as if the space itself wore a scar. The title alludes to the burning of the Reichstag in 1933, suggesting a similar exploitation of a population’s fear and anger by an imperial power seeking to expand its reach.

WARNING: This film contains sequences of intense strobing effects.

Special thanks to Azazel Jacobs.

screening with

DISINTEGRATION LOOP 1.1
Dir. William Basinski, 2001.
United States. 62 min.

“All of a sudden the world had changed. It had taken on new meaning. As the days and months went by, people just cascaded into their own disintegration loops of fear, terror and anxiety. But also there was a rethinking going on about what had value. There was a lot of compassion in the public sphere amongst New Yorkers.”
—William Basinski

August of 2001 found William Basinski, uninspired and unemployed, at a personal nadir. Rummaging through his old work for inspiration, he rediscovered some loops of slowed-down muzak he had recorded on tape in the 1980s. He began digitizing the recordings, intending to use them for a new piece. In the process of rerecording the loops, the ferric oxide coating the tapes began to flake away, the fidelity of the recordings decreasing with each loop. The Disintegration Loops are thus a record of Basinski’s real-time capture of information disappearing into nothingness. Basinski completed his rerecording process on the morning of September 11, 2001, a few hours before he was scheduled to interview for a job at the World Trade Center.

That evening, from the rooftop of his Williamsburg loft on North 11th Street, Basinski played the loops and watched the smoke plumes from lower Manhattan billow out over the Upper Bay. He borrowed a friend’s video camera and recorded the last hour of the day’s light, until the black plume of smoke was indistinguishable from the night sky. He later set the loops to this footage. A landmark of twenty-first century avant-garde process music, The Disintegration Loops are considered one of the most significant works of art related to 9/11.

We will be time-syncing our September 11, 2026 screening to play exactly 25 years later as the sun sets over Spectacle, blocks from where Basinski made the loops.

Special thanks to William Basinski and Jeremy deVine.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 11 – 7:10PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 – 5PM
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16 – 10PM

TICKETS

Program 2: THE UNRECOVERED

THE UNRECOVERED
Dir. Roger Copeland, 2007.
United States. 130 min.
In English.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 – 7PM; w Q&A (This event will be $10.)
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13 – 7PM; w Q&A (This event will be $10.)
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 – 5PM
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 – 10PM

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“Were there two towers because there was too much meaning on September 11th to be contained in just one tower?”

So asks the Artist, one of three intertwined paranoiacs in Roger Copeland’s sprawling post-9/11, DIY, Brechtian fever dream. Proposing a twist on the axiom that the urge to destroy is also a creative urge, Copeland’s film suggests that all creativity is paranoid, and all paranoia is creative. It depicts a world that exists in “a state of semiotic arousal, a horniness for meaning.” Taking place in October of 2001, the film cuts between the story of a young girl who thinks the father that walked out on her family might be among the unrecovered dead at Ground Zero; the self-proclaimed BioEvangelist, who, in between compulsively consuming media coverage of the attacks’ aftermath in his basement chemistry lab, plans his own epistolary reckoning; and the aforementioned Artist, who monologues (livestreams?) from his studio about the ways the “death artists” have put art on the defensive.

To an audience in 2026, its diagnoses might seem rather obvious, its degree of sincerity inscrutable; but to an audience in 2007, The Unrecovered offered a proto-experience of a world that would not fully mature for nearly two more decades. Guided by an overtly didactic montage, it recalls the works of Sergei Eisenstein and Adam Curtis, while its Spalding Gray–like monologues of semiotic analysis-paralysis and its sometimes clunky, low-fidelity computer graphics presage more ironic, contemporary aesthetics as seen in media by personalities like Brad Troemel and Conner O’Malley (try to keep track of the number of times Fight Club is mentioned—you can’t). Truth be told, The Unrecovered might be well described as “What if Godard directed Loose Change?”

“Copeland knows how to tease the maximum meaning out  of images and juxtapose them  to achieve magic realism. He turns the instructional video of a flight attendant demonstrating safety  procedures into a ribbon of grief, and gets tone poems out of a backyard swing, construction cranes (and) skeins of branches against a winter sky….Haunting, gut-punching, brainy, and gutsy…”
—James Walcott, Vanity Fair

“I was knocked out. Really gets under your skin… A grand tour of some very difficult stuff.”
—Eric Bogosian

Special thanks to Roger Copeland.

Program 3: CIRCLING ZERO

CIRCLING ZERO: WE SEE ABSENCE
Dir. Ken Jacobs, 2002.
United States. 110 min.
In English.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 7 – 10PM
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 14 – 7:30PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 – 5PM

TICKETS

The primary image of Circling Zero is of lower Manhattan’s disfigured skyline. A slowly dissipating column of smoke indicates where the towers once stood, looming over the city like a ghost. The film is a verité documentary of the few weeks following September 11; Jacobs himself described it as “not so much a work as a sampling of the ongoing actuality.” His camera captures the élan vital of the city as it adapts to a changed environment, steadfastly incorporating this new reality into the familiar routines of daily life.

Special thanks to Azazel Jacobs.

Program 4: THE TIME WE KILLED

THE TIME WE KILLED
Dir. Jennifer Reeves, 2004.
United States. 94 mins.
In English.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5 – 7:30PM (This event is $10.)
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25 – 7:30PM (This event is $10.)

TICKETS

Soon, I realized the citizens are as vicious and self-involved as ever. And me, I wondered if I could perform such a spectacular suicide.

Like The Unrecovered, Jennifer Reeves’s The Time We Killed is concerned, above all, with the psychic fallout of the attacks. While The Unrecovered pursues a manic immediacy, Reeves numbly and associatively follows the reverberations of the day’s events as they lead into the Bush administration’s echo chamber of lies and jingoism conceived to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Robin is an agoraphobic writer, unable to leave her apartment for three years following the September 11 attacks. The film is a poetic, black-and-white collage of high-contrast images and similarly binary thinking; in constant voiceover Robin either ponders death or laments a past lust for life, evinced by her recollection of once-passionate but long since ended love affairs. In what could be considered a spiritual forebear to the anhedonic monologuing of Ottessa Moshgfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Reeves condenses a certain posture of the post-9/11 national psyche into an amnesiac individual, one who is trying to remember—yet also willing to forget—how things might once have been.

16mm print courtesy of The Film-Makers’ Cooperative.

screening with
THE SKY IS CLEAR AND BLUE TODAY
Dir. Ricky D’Ambrose, 2019.
United States. 16 mins.
In English and German with English subtitles.

Ricky D’Ambrose’s short film centers on a German filmmaker who has been hired to recreate the infamous photograph taken by Thomas Hoepker of five young, hip New Yorkers posed on the Brooklyn waterfront, seemingly relaxed and unbothered by the wreckage of the Twin Towers smoldering across the river. D’Ambrose’s typically dispassionate, Bressonian approach uses the image as a jumping-off point to investigate the (f)utility of the sort of interpretive gamesmanship that surrounded this and other images of the attacks.

 

 

 

While the brutal dictatorship and resulting censorship of the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos regime ought to have smothered the country’s film industry throughout the 1970s and 80s, it wound up producing what is now referred to as The Second Golden Age of Philippines Cinema. The country was lucky enough to have a libertarian-inclined censorship office head, and most of the boundary-pushing films of that era did well enough financially and critically to allow for the Marcos regime to accept a certain amount of cinematic criticism. Nevertheless, it still wouldn’t have been called a Golden Age without directors such as Lino Brocka, Kidlat Tahimik, and Mike De Leon all managing to push boundaries via their own forms of melodrama, docufiction, social realism, and more.

Despite being considered the second-most important Filipino director after Brocka in his home country, the work of Second Golden Age director Ishmael Bernal has not been screened as often abroad in recent years, in part due to print scarcity. Notorious for his sharp wit, the openly gay Bernal was a subversive ironist and a committed feminist. His films frequently used the roles of women to skewer what he saw as a sick society under the Marcos regime, best summed up by a line from his provocatively-titled essay Why The Martial Law Will Affect Your Sex Life: “Here we are, being practically ruled by a stranger who shall parade the chills and fevers of his ego and what are we going to do about it? We are going to be gripped by hysteria, that’s what.” This attitude culminated in the consensus pick for his masterpiece, Himala (1982), a study of the blind faith of the Philippines and the grip of hysteria that comes with it – it has only been vindicated with the country’s election of another Ferdinand Marcos to the Presidency. Bernal has subsequently remained a touchstone for the two key figures from the subsequent Third Golden Age: Spectacle favorites Lav Diaz and Raya Martin.

Spectacle is pleased to announce a partial retrospective of some of Bernal’s best-known work from the heart of the Second Golden Age, showing in rarely-screened 2K/4K restorations to allow for a new appreciation of why Bernal’s contributions to Filipino cinema are considered some of the country’s boldest and best.

Special thanks to Thellie Castro-Palanisamy & Cathrina Lim-Achacoso (ABS-CBN).

A SPECK IN THE WATER
(NUNAL SA TUBIG)
Dir. Ishmael Bernal, 1976.
Philippines. 118 min.
In Tagalog with English subtitles.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 3 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25 – 5 PM

TICKETS

This film has hardcoded Japanese subtitles due to the 2K restoration being based off the sole extant 35mm print.

In the impoverished village of Santa Fe, some investors capitalize on fish pens growing bangus (milkfish) under the care of Mang Pedro (Ruben Rustia). But for some mysterious reason, the fish are dying. To save the situation, they decide to salt the fish and dry them under the sun. Benjamin (George Estregan), who owns a boat that shuttles passengers to town, has a regular passenger Chedeng (Daria Ramirez), who is going to be a midwife soon. Chedeng has a close friend and neighbor, Maria (Elizabeth Oropesa), but unknown to each other, they are both having an affair with Benjamin. When Maria becomes pregnant, she becomes Chedeng’s first patient and a disastrous situation that ends in tragedy ensues.

“A Speck in the Water reappears as one of the most personal early works by Bernal, when he was most assured and daring in his innovative style. Today, it looks like a forgotten masterpiece, but at the time of release, the film was very unevenly received by local film critics. Some of them said it was ‘un-Filipino,’ and even [that it looked] ‘French!’ However, as one sharp critic, Hernando, wrote: ‘Nunal sa Tubig is so well crafted, complex, sharp, and to a certain degree, abstruse, that the film requires complete concentration and openness to a new film concept, and, whenever necessary, a willingness to see it again.’” – Max Tessier

TISOY!
Dir. Ishmael Bernal, 1977.
Philippines. 120 min.
In Tagalog with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 4 – MIDNIGHT
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 – 7:30 PM

TICKETS

Based on a popular comic strip by Nonoy Marcelo, Tisoy (Christopher de Leon) is a bohemian balikbayan [Filipino term for repatriate] searching for his father. He gets help from his friends as they scour the immaculately clean Metro Manila as well as reunite him with his high-school sweetheart.

“Bernal, taking a momentary step away from the melodramas he specialized in, used [the comics] to create a story full of gags, hidden social metaphors, and meta-jokes. To say that Tisoy! is as straightforward narratively as the synopsis makes it seem would be a lie. It’s a mosaic of stories and characters which, despite being connected to one another, would be able to stand strongly on their own. Above all, Tisoy! is a satire made during the time of martial law. When cinema served as a tool against the government, Bernal used it to not only criticize the situation – fancy menu items while most of the country was impoverished due to the rapid urbanization, or streets that apparently weren’t as clean as he portrayed them – but also to mock other films made during that time.” – Magdalena Nieświec

HIMALA
(MIRACLE)
Dir. Ishmael Bernal, 1982.
Philippines. 124 min.
In Tagalog with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 – 5 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22 – 7:30 PM

TICKETS

When plain orphan Elsa (Nora Aunor) begins having visions of the Virgin Mary, the rest of the residents of her isolated village find themselves questioning their own beliefs and values. Soon, Elsa is healing people with a variety of ailments. As word of this phenomenon spreads, tourists, pilgrims, patients and a documentary filmmaker all arrive on a quest to partake in the miracle.

“Bernal himself described the film as ‘…not just the story of a couple of characters. It is also the story of a society. And that is Himala. What I show in Himala is the picture of a society that is ill. A society which has no recourse but to cling to apparitions and miracles. It is not important if there really was a miracle or not. What is important is the need of a people to believe.’” – ABS-CBN

“Web site users voted to award the late Filipino director Ishmael Bernal’s film the top prize in the CNN APSA Viewers Choice Award for Best Asia-Pacific Film of All Time, edging Akira Kurosawa’s acknowledged classic Seven Samurai into second place.” – Fei Phoon