The Traverse Area District Library presents Cinema Curiosa!
Cinema Curiosa is a film series dedicated to experimental, archival and uncompromising documentary titles that challenge and enrich.
Friday, February 3rd, 2012, 8:00 pm @ TADL Woodmere, Doors open at 7:30 pm
The Exiles
"The Exiles" chronicles one night in the lives of young Native American men and women living in the Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles. Based entirely on interviews with the participants and their friends, the film follows a group of exiles — transplants from Southwest reservations — as they flirt, drink, party, fight, and dance.
Selected for the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival.
"MIRACULOUS... THE EXILES has an epic grandeur and a monumental intimacy ... the night photography alone would make the film immortal."
- Richard Brody, The New Yorker
"This is just about the most gorgeous restoration of an American independent film I've ever seen."
- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Cinema Scope
"BEST FILM OF THE YEAR! … This 50-year-old film … stands as the freshest movie in theaters... The movie walks a nightworld so crackling with unfocused energy—so alive with threat, promise, and raw honking rock 'n' roll, yet so limited in any sense of a future—that to enter it is to feel your blood surge."
- Jim Ridley, Village Voice
Friday, January 6th, 2012, 8:00 pm @ TADL Woodmere, Doors open 7:30 pm
I Am Cuba
An unabashed exercise in cinema stylistics, I Am Cuba is pro-Castro/anti-Batista rhetoric dressed up in the finest clothes. The film's four dramatic stories take place in the final days of the Batista regime. Director Mikhail Kalazatov turned his cinematographer, Sergei Urusevsky, loose, and the result is a procession of dazzling black-and-white images, shot with a camera that is almost always moving and soaring over the sugar fields, swooping in and out of urban buildings, following characters down narrow streets. Unreleasable to American theaters during the Cold War, I Am Cuba, through the auspices of filmmakers Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, got a belated U.S. release in 1995 and has proved to be both a time capsule of a fading political movement and a timeless work of cinematic art.
[Directed by Mikhail Kalatozov - 141min - NR - 1998]
(IMDB | Wikipedia)
Friday, April 2nd, 2010, 8:00 pm @ TADL Woodmere, Doors open 7:30 pm
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
A wildly imaginative film adaptation of the classic pop culture novel by Hunter S. Thompson. Writer Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp), and Dr. Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro) embark on a savagely funny journey down a road that runs a not-so-straight-and-narrow path into the heart of the American Dream.
[Directed by Terry Gilliam - 128min - R - 1998]
(IMDB | Wikipedia)
Friday, March 5th, 2010, 8:00 pm @ TADL Woodmere, Doors open 7:30 pm
Wattstax
WATTSTAX is an amazing musical and cultural artifact. The film's main focus is the Watts Summer Festival's 1972 concert, featuring performances by Isaac Hayes, Rufus Thomas, The Staple Singers, The Bar-Kays, Luther Ingram, and a host of other legendary soul singers. Wattstax is highly entertaining, enlightening, engaging—hinging together a crucial and turbulent time in American history. Dig it!
[Directed by Mel Stuart - 98min - R - US 1973]
(IMDB | Wikipedia)
"A candid, colorful and deeply meaningful socio-cultural time capsule."
- Washington Post
Friday, February 5th, 2010, 8:00 pm @ TADL Woodmere
Two-Lane Blacktop
Two-Lane Blacktop is a 1971 road movie starring the wayward Driver (singer/songwriter James Taylor) and the Mechanic (Beach Boys' Dennis Wilson, in their only acting roles,) maverick director Monte Hellman's stripped-down existential narrative, gorgeous widescreen compositions and a sophisticated look at American Muscle Car obsession. All culminate to make this one of the artistic high points of 1970s cinema and possibly the greatest road movie ever made. Esquire magazine declared the film its movie of the year for 1971 and even published the entire screenplay in its April 1971 issue.
[Directed by Monte Hellman - 102min - R - US 1971]
(IMDB | Wikipedia)
"This minimalist masterpiece is one of the greatest American films to come out of the 1970s"
- Ron Wells, Film Threat
Monday December 7th, 2009, 8:30 pm @ The State Theatre
RiP! A Remix Manifesto
RiP! A Remix Manifesto explores the complexities of intellectual property in the era of peer-to-peer file sharing. Director Brett Gaylor interviews key figures in the debate, including central protagonist Girl Talk, a mash-up artist rearranging the pop charts' DNA with his incongruous, entirely sample-based songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power of the Pied Piper of piracy? A mash-up in itself, RiP shatters the wall between users and producers, and the challenges the thresholds of "fair use."
[Directed by Brett Gaylor - 86min - NR - CA 2006]
(IMDB | Website)
"...has style, spunk and relevance..."
- Film Ink
"a movie about fair use, intellectual property and copyright that you could dance to."
- Film Maker
"as edgy and fascinating a glimpse you'll get into one of the more pressing issues of our Internet Age."
- Montreal Gazette
Monday November 2nd, 2009, 8:30 pm @ The State Theatre
The Wicker Man
The Wicker Man is a highly unusual film, originally released in 1973, starring Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee, and Britt Eckland. This British thriller tells the story of a devout Christian policeman who is called out to a remote Scottish island by a worried resident regarding the disappearance of a missing child. The bizarre "old-world" residents are under investigation regarding the missing child, Rowan Morrison.
[Directed by Robin Hardy - 100min - R - UK 1973]
(IMDB)
"Pure, brilliant, spine-tingling fun. A knockout!"
- Bruce McCabe, The Boston Globe
Monday October 5th, 2009, 8:30 p.m. @ The State Theatre
Surfwise
The inspiring and tumultuous story of 85-year old surfer, health advocate and sex guru, Dr. Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz, his wife Juliette, and their nine children who were all home-schooled and raised in a small camper on the beach, where they surfed and had to adhere to the strict diet and lifestyle of animals in the wild.
[Directed by Doug Pray - 93min - R - USA 2007]
(IMDB | Website)
"A Family That Surfs to a Beat: Its Own."
- New York Times
"Absorbing"
- New York Daily News
Past Seasons
2002-03 | 2003-04 | 2004-05 | 2005-06 | 2008-09
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Presented by the Traverse Area District Library, Sight & Sound Department
Contact: Aaron Olson, Sight & Sound Dept. Head
610 Woodmere Ave. - Traverse City, MI 49686 - 231.932.8505
Made possible with the support of: The Traverse Area District Library, the Traverse City Film Festival and the State Theatre