THE MEDIATOR (POSREDNIK)
Dir. Vladimir Potapov, 1990
USSR. 219 min.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10 – 7:30 PM 
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 20 – 7:30 PM 
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 29 – 7:30 PM

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THE LAST SOVIET SCI-FI FILM

Aliens with the ability to implant their consciousnesses inside living people make first contact in a quiet Soviet town. It seems that only children, geniuses and the clinically eccentric are unaffected by the invaders’ mind control device – the mediator. Alien influence spreads through the area without restraint, and it soon becomes difficult to tell comrade from foe. Racing to stop the imposters before they can execute the final stages of their plan, the fate of the world depends on the success of three young friends on a dangerous mission.

Loosely based on the novel Main Noon by Aleksandr Mirer, THE MEDIATOR was released as a three-part TV movie in 1990. The looming dissolution of the Soviet Union hovers right near the surface of the film with outside influence driving a rift in the small industrial town. It’s a war of intellects and ideologies, but don’t think it’s short on artillery and style. Explosions, slow motion machine guns, glowing orbs and attack helicopters abound. Shot in both color and a beautifully moody sepia tone and accompanied by eery, reverb-loaded sound design, THE MEDIATOR succeeds in sending Soviet sci-fi off with a bang.

The film will be shown in its entirety with a 10 minute intermission.

Trilogía de la Revolución
(The Revolution Trilogy)

For all intents and purposes, Fernando de Fuentes is Mexican cinema. A pioneering studio filmmaker whose work includes one of the earliest examples of the ranchera comedy, as well as the seminal gothic horror film The Phantom of the Monastery, de Fuentes is a fountainhead of Mexican cinema. Not only did he inaugurate numerous popular genres at the domestic box office, but earned Mexico its first major international award at the Venice Film Festival in 1938, in addition to ushering in a national visual language that proliferated during the peak of Mexico’s Golden Age of Cinema.

Born in Veracruz in 1894, de Fuentes studied Philosophy at Tulane University and spent some time working at the Mexican Embassy in Washington, D.C. before returning to post-Revolution Mexico. In 1933, a mere decade after the end of the Mexican Revolution, he directed EL PRISIONERO 13, a satire so caustic its ending had to be re-edited after military authorities objected to its depiction of government corruption in the throes of Mexico’s long and bloody Revolutionary War. What followed were two more films, GODFATHER MENDOZA (1934) and LET’S GO WITH PANCHO VILLA! (1936), of equal ire and bite. His Revolution Trilogy, though controversial upon release, is now acknowledged as a cornerstone of classic Mexican cinema.

As Mexicans everywhere remember their nation’s Revolution this September 20, we’re proud to present de Fuentes’ landmark trilogy in New York City for the first time in 15 years.

EL PRISIONERO 13
(PRISONER 13)
dir. Fernando de Fuentes, 1933
México, 76 min
In Spanish with english subtitles

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 1 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 – 5 PM
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 22 – 10 PM

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Fernando de Fuentes’s first installment in his Revolution Trilogy concerns a drunk colonel (Chilean actor Alfredo del Diestro, in one of several wonderfully agonizing roles for de Fuentes) who takes a bribe that ends up biting him in the back. At a lean 76 minutes, de Fuentes’s scathing parable about the price of corruption folds multiple moral dilemmas into a masterclass of melodrama. Del Diestra’s Colonel Carrasco, typifying the naked corruption that seized Mexico in the wake of its revolutionary fervor, provides the Mexican silver screen with one of its slimiest and most memorable characters. With its taut editing, chilling narrative, and distinctive performances, EL PRISIONERO 13 sets the bar high for a filmmaker whose career is full of precise and potent visual storytelling.

EL COMPADRE MENDOZA
(GODFATHER MENDOZA)
dir. Fernando de Fuentes, 1934
Mexico, 85 min
In Spanish with english subtitles

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 7 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 17 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 – 10 PM

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The second installment in Fernando de Fuentes’s Revolution Trilogy revolves around Rosalio Mendoza (Alfredo del Diestro, in a weary-eyed performance), a rich landowner whose estate serves both Zapatista revolutionaries and Huertista army men. A rich parable about Janus-faced desperation, EL COMPADRE MENDOZA sees Fuentes double down on his critique of government corruption. The country setting also lets him build upon his cinematic technique, making ample use of landscapes and crowds, as well as optical effects and music, to heighten the drama on the screen.

¡VÁMONOS CON PANCHO VILLA!
(LET’S GO WITH PANCHO VILLA!)
dir. Fernando de Fuentes, 1936
Mexico, 92 min
In Spanish with english subtitles

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 – 5 PM
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24 – 10 PM

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The last chapter in Fernando de Fuentes’s Revolution Trilogy follows the “Lions of San Pablo,” six brave men who join Pancho Villa’s Army. Where Fuentes’ previous two films focus on the rotten rituals of Mexico’s old guard (its government functionaries and rich landowners), ¡VÁMONOS CON PANCHO VILLA! skewers the false promises of its revolutionary class. An early epic of Mexican cinema, de Fuentes’s film shows the Revolution as it was, as no more and no less than a bloody conflict.

Special thanks to ACERVO-FILMOTECA UNAM.

This September, in honor of the Harvest Moon, Spectacle is proud to bring you three underseen gems of werewolf-dom.

LYCAN COLONY
dir. Rob Roy, 2006
United States. 92 min.
In English.

TICKETS

TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 2nd – 10PM
SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 6th – 7:30PM
MONDAY SEPTEMBER 15th – 7:30PM
FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 19TH – MIDNIGHT

WELCOME TO NEW HAMPSHIRE …. LIVE FREE OR DIE!

Some small towns hold many secrets. Two siblings and a newly settled doctor’s family are about to find out this town’s darkest secret…the hard way. The town folk are good and evil werewolves! And all things are not as they appear.

While you can probably count the werewolf features from the early aughts on one hand, the best of them for this programmers money is LYCAN COLONY.

It’s clearly a labor of love, and though it may have gotten the RiffTrax treatment in 2020, I would respectfully argue that it makes enough baffling and unique choices that it circles around past bad into something totally singular, dirt cheap digital (and practical) effects and all.

Director Rob Roy has had a strong connection to wolves his entire life. It started after he first saw Balto (1995) and it inspired him to create his own wolf film which eventually became Lycan Colony. He even attempted to contact Kevin Bacon for a cameo but was chased off the actor’s property, ironically by dogs in 2003. – Imdb Trivia

MOM
dir. Patrick Rand, 1990.
United States. 95 min.
In English.

TICKETS

TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 2ND – 7:30PM
FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 5TH – MIDNIGHT
MONDAY SEPTEMBER 15TH – 10PM
FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 19TH – 10PM

A string of ferocious animal attacks terrorizes Los Angeles, and when a kind elderly woman is bitten by the creature, she begins a terrifying transformation. Now, her son Clay must stop his mother from harming anyone else and find a way to reverse her horrifying condition.

Starring horror legend Brion James (HOUSE 3, BLADE RUNNER) and Jeanne Bates (ERASERHEAD, MULHOLLAND DRIVE), MOM presents as a typical comedy-horror flick but quickly evolves into something much darker that will stay with you long after the credits roll. Using the werewolf as an analogy for a degenerative disease, Rand masterfully guides the audience through the emotional tolls of watching a loved one lose themselves and become something unrecognisably monstrous.

LONE WOLF
dir. John Callas, 1988
United States. 97 min.
In English.

TICKETS

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 5TH – 10PM
TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 9TH – 10PM
WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 17TH – 10PM
MONDAY SEPTEMBER 22ND – 7:30PM

The quiet town of Fairview, Colorado is rocked by a rash of gruesome killings that the locals blame on packs of wild dogs. Meanwhile, recent Chicago transplant and heavy metal frontman, Eddie and his fellow students learn that they must take matters into their own hands to end the madness, when the token nerd among them discovers an eerie moon-related coincidence between the killings.

Written by the late experimental horror maven, Michael Krueger (NIGHT VISION, MINDKILLER), LONE WOLF is an underseen and underrated gem among the 80s bumper crop of werewolf movies. A grisly DTV creature feature featuring some of the oldest looking “teenagers” ever put to film, and enough hair— human and lycanthrope— to flesh out at least a dozen other werewolf features.

A series of inside out devices that function by turning back in on themselves, perpetually setting the score back to “0”, and eventually hitting the reset button. Scientific rationales, legal policies, national ideologies and landscape designs are all agents in the production of our shared reality. We have entered a perpetual state of re-invention, with a high speed and a seemingly unstoppable momentum. Re-invention also involves re-production, but as our accepted logical systems and infrastructures re-produce, they are reshaped and reformed. After reaching their functioning capacity, what is stable turns to liquid. All that is solid melts into air. This a film program full of illogical ends, nazi soil scientists and former air force pilots defying the limits of humanity. Films that bend and the history of scientific research, national identity formation, state policy and how they intertwine to hold our fragile world together.

Program 1: Reset

THURSDAY, AUGUST 14 – 7:30
Intro with Filmmaker Mary Helena Clark
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The Enlightenment
Dir. Stephanie Barber
2023 | 12 minutes | 16mm to HD | Color | sound

Yon and Payola find themselves in a Victorian conservatory. They are companionable, disoriented and petulant––they whip wildly through these disembodied states. Payola reads an excerpt of their considerable time on the age of enlightenment to Yon. Payola’s research, and presentation of this research, is a purposeful affront to empirical data, the scientific method and other enlightenment ideals, while reveling in the desire for the revolution and intellectual expansion those thinkers championed. The concepts are undermined by the form and register of their delivery OR the concepts are strengthened by the poetry through which they are presented.

A Common Sequence
Dir. Mary Helena Clark and Mike Gibisser
2023 | 78 minutes | 2K | Color | 5.1

Within the human struggle to live and work on a changing planet, questions of value, extraction, and adaptation echo across seemingly disparate worlds. A Common Sequence examines shifts of life and labor through a critically-endangered salamander and plant patents in the apple industry. Weaving the stories of Dominican nuns running a conservation lab, a group of fisherman attempting to live off of a depleting lake, engineers developing AI-driven harvesting machines, and an indigenous biomedical researcher resisting the commodification of human DNA, the film becomes a meditation on the shifting border between the natural and unnatural world, and the dynamics of power at play.

Program 2: Eject

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 20 – 7:30 PM 
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Sick Landscapes
Dir. Zach Hart
2025 | 24 minutes | Germany | English | B&W and Color | Stereo | 4:3 | 16mm film and
HD Video

Sick Landscapes.2
Dir. Zach Hart
2025 | 17 minutes | Germany | English and German | English Subtitles |
Color | Stereo | 1.896:1 | 4K

Theatrical Premiere of two works developed as a multi-channel installation work. Alwin Seifert said it most directly, “in a sick landscape, there cannot be a healthy people.” He saw landscape design as a means to push forward the German folkish-nationalistic blood and soil agenda. Through his work, landscape became part of an overall concept of racial health and beauty. Reinhold Lingner, a prominent GDR landscape planner, would go on to describe the landscape in similar terms, but with an ecological instead of an ideological intention. He would anthropomorphize the landscape and describe it as an organism, as though the body of the landscape were part of the German people’s body. Lingner was also an advocate for landscape preservation after the second world war; a movement which had started many years earlier and was supported by Nazi soil scientists like Seifert. Lingner designed Berlin’s rubble mountains, hills made from rubble strewn about after WWII. The rubble was sorted by the Trümmerfrauen (rubble women), who were frequently photographed by Berliner Zeitung’s photographer, Eva Kemlein. She was a holocaust survivor who had gone underground during the second world war. Kemlein also photographed the demolition of the Berlin City Palace in 1951. The Palace’s demolition was hotly debated amongst architectural historians, landscape planners and ideologically driven conservationists that wanted to preserve German cultural heritage during the time of denazification. Communists ultimately thought the Palace stood for Prussian Imperialism, so it was destroyed as part of the GDR Ministry of Reconstruction’s effort to rebuild upon only the healthy aspects of German culture. Kemlein, who had trained as a forensic photographer, would survive the second world war and then go on to photograph the sick body of a building. Its spirit was strong enough to survive its initial demolition. Using Kemlein’s scientific documentation, the Palace was rebuilt. It now houses the highly controversial Humboldt Forum.

Unhealthy spirits infest the German landscape, through architecture, language and their accidental reproduction of Nazi ideology. Perhaps they would be most likely to haunt those who continue to work with the land itself. Still today, there are countless actors who unknowingly re-establish the language and behaviors of fascism, and the buildings which stand as monuments to imperialism. What a perfect moment to aestheticize ourselves to the materials which build our surrounding environment and those who oversee it. Whether it be the countless images that we ingest daily, the parks where we can sit on a bench and enjoy the sun, or the institutions we choose to cooperate with.

Germany is still the Israeli army’s second largest arms dealer. As we watch the Israeli government commit genocide in Palestine, it seems that the fascist architecture and the cultural landscape which the Nazi’s left behind was too deeply embedded into the Nation’s spirit to teach German politicians how to truly say “never again means now.”

Another Horizon
Dir. Stephanie Barber
2020 | 9 minutes | 16mm | Color | sound

the horizon, where the sky and the earth meet, is always elsewhere, is a promised place where these two elements come together. a metaphor, an orienting, a promise of transition, change, transcendence. a place where the corporeal and spiritual meet, or are cleaved apart.

here, the space between narrative and documentary, fact and fiction, is literally scratched between two voices, also cleaved apart or brought beside. jayne love reads a text i wrote for her — short sentences on the concept of the horizon and the briefest suggestion of narrative collide with pieces of richard (oswan) williams’ beautiful, rum-fueled living room sermons to me.

i lived, for a few months, in richard, and his wife mary’s, apartment, the site of their voodoo spiritual temple in new orleans. of course, as priests and priestesses Richard and Mary spoke often of death, transcendence, ethics and health. our days were slow and filled with philosophical rumination, richard, a brilliant old man schooling a young wandering wonderer. i recorded most everything on cassette tapes back then and some of those have made it here to the present. to this horizon we’re at now.

O’er the Land
Dir. Deborah Stratman
2009 | 51 minutes | United States | English | B&W and Color | Stereo | 4:3 | 16mm film to
HD video

A meditation on the milieu of elevated threat addressing national identity, gun culture, wilderness, consumption, patriotism and the possibility of personal transcendence. Of particular interest are the ways Americans have come to understand freedom and the increasingly technological reiterations of manifest destiny.

While channeling our national psyche, the film is interrupted by the story of Col. William Rankin who in 1959, was forced to eject from his F8U fighter jet at 48,000 feet without a pressure suit, only to get trapped for 45 minutes in the up and down drafts of a massive thunderstorm. Remarkably, he survived. Rankin’s story represents a non-material, metaphysical kind of freedom. He was vomited up by his own jet, that American icon of progress and strength, but violent purging does not necessarily lead to reassessment or redirection.This film is concerned with the sudden, simple, thorough ways that events can separate us from the system of things, and place us in a kind of limbo. Like when we fall. Or cross a border. Or get shot. Or saved. The film forces together culturally acceptable icons of heroic national tradition with the suggestion of unacceptable historical consequences, so that seemingly benign locations become zones of moral angst.