Internationally-acclaimed and exiled Iranian director Jafar Panahi (This is Not a Film) drives a yellow cab through the vibrant streets of Tehran, picking up a diverse (and yet representative) group of passengers in a single day. Each man, woman, and child candidly expresses his or her own view of the world, while being interviewed by the curious and gracious driver/director.
His camera, placed on the dashboard of his mobile film studio, captures a spirited slice of Iranian society while also brilliantly redefining the borders of comedy, drama and cinema. Taxi is a gently rebellious film, a blend of documentary and narrative that riffs on the contentious life of the artist in modern Iran.
Winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, Taxi is another modern classic from master director Jafar Panahi.
Morning Edition discusses Taxi: http://www.npr.org/2015/10/08/446833267/jafar-panahi-s-latest-film-taxi-is-shot-where-iranians-can-talk-freely
Filmed over 211 shoot days in nine countries and five continents over four years, This Changes Everything is an epic attempt to re-imagine the vast challenge of climate change. Inspired by Naomi Klein’s international non-fiction bestseller This Changes Everything, the film presents seven powerful portraits of communities on the front lines, from Montana’s Powder River Basin to the Alberta Tar Sands, from the coast of South India to Beijing and beyond. Interwoven with these stories of struggle is Klein’s narration, connecting the carbon in the air with the economic system that put it there. Throughout the film, Klein builds to her most controversial and exciting idea: that we can seize the existential crisis of climate change to transform our failed economic system into something radically better.
Recovering addict and amputee John Wood finds himself in a stranger-than-fiction battle to reclaim his mummified leg from Southern entrepreneur Shannon Whisnant, who found it in a grill he bought at an auction and believes it to therefore be his rightful property.
**The Skype Q&A with Director Bryan Carberry has been cancelled due to Election Night.
Francois Ozon’s humorous psychological drama The New Girlfriend stars Anais Demoustier as Claire, a young woman whose closest friend since childhood, Laura, passes away leaving behind a husband, David (Romain Duris) and a newborn baby. One day she drops by David’s house unexpectedly, and finds him dressed in his dead wife’s clothes and feeding their baby with a bottle, which leads to confusing and conflicting feelings in Claire, and causes a rift between Claire and her husband (Raphael Personnaz). The New Girlfriend screened at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival.
Plot: Captured French Resistance fighter Andre Devigny awaits a certain death sentence for espionage in a stark Nazi prison. Facing malnourishment and paralyzing fear, he must engineer an extraordinary escape, complicated by the questions of whom to trust, and in the absence of options, how to kill.
Conversation: Crime stories make for great soundscapes: the need for silence, the sudden breakage of glass, the “close-up” mic on professionals at work. Here, Robert Bresson uses sound textures and rhythms to build remarkable tension—to create a world just outside the locked door. We’ll discuss “realism” and “rendered” soundscapes, the idea of “extension,” and more.
Peace Officer is a feature documentary about the increasingly militarized state of American police as told through the story of William “Dub” Lawrence, a former sheriff who established and trained his rural state’s first SWAT team only to see that same unit kill his son-in-law in a controversial standoff 30 years later. Driven by an obsessed sense of mission, Dub uses his own investigative skills to uncover the truth in this and other recent officer involved shootings in his community while tackling larger questions about the changing face of peace officers nationwide.
Meet the Patels is a laugh-out-loud real life romantic comedy about Ravi Patel, an almost-30-year-old Indian-American who enters a love triangle between the woman of his dreams … and his parents. Filmed by Ravi’s sister in what started as a family vacation video, this hilarious and heartbreaking film reveals how love is a family affair.
Fresh out of a breakup with his secret white girlfriend, who his parents knew nothing about, and freaked out that he’s almost 30 and single, Ravi goes on a family vacation to India with his head and heart spinning.
Ravi is willing to do whatever it takes to find love—but there’s one tricky detail to consider: In his family, everyone has the last name Patel. Patels marry other Patels. It’s not incest, it means they are from the same 50-square mile radius in India. Struck with how overwhelmingly happy the marriages are of his Patel family and friends, Ravi enters a fool-proof Patel matchmaking system and embarks on a worldwide search for another American Patel just like him.
Change was coming to America and the fault lines could no longer be ignored— cities were burning, Vietnam was exploding, and disputes raged over equality and civil rights. A new revolutionary culture was emerging and it sought to drastically transform the system. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense would, for a short time, put itself at the vanguard of that change.
The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution is the first feature length documentary to explore the Black Panther Party, its significance to the broader American culture, its cultural and political awakening for black people, and the painful lessons wrought when a movement derails. Master documentarian Stanley Nelson goes straight to the source, weaving a treasure trove of rare archival footage with the voices of the people who were there: police, FBI informants, journalists, white supporters and detractors, and Black Panthers who remained loyal to the party and those who left it.
**Stay after the 5:20 PM screening on Monday, October 12 for a talk with Director Stanley Nelson!
