CATS 2
dir. Jake Jones, Curran Foster, Coltan Foster, Colleen Fitzgerald, & Danny Natter, 2023
United States. 65 min.
In English.

ONE NIGHT ONLY!

SATURDAY, AUGUST 19 – 7:30 PM with filmmaker Q&A (This event is $10)

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“We know that a cat is a cat… but is it ever anything other than that?”

In December 2019, 5 best friends went together to see CATS at the movies in Seattle, WA. They were astounded by the bewildering film they had encountered. Keep in mind, several of these friends had starred in a small town theater production of Cats (and this theater was run by a cult) when they were growing up.

When the quarantine of 2020 hit these friends vowed to put their creative minds together to create CATS 2. The film is an experimental romp through the world of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s CATS, or as we like to call it, “CATS 1”. Through the mystery of light and form, CATS 2 chronicles the metaphysical transformation of Macavity, as told by former community theater child stars. CATS 2 is simultaneously a meta-commentary on the truths of fear and desire and a vessel of pure love carefully crafted to be the singular representation of our collective soul. It also has puppets and stuff.

You will laugh til you cry at times, be delighted, and a little scared. The CATS 2 crew invite you to enjoy this little pandemic infused masterpiece.

Seeing CATS (1) is not required.

THE PLAINS
dir. David Easteal, 2022
Australia. 180 min.
In English.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 12 – 5 PM with filmmaker Q&A (This event is $10)

SPECIAL EVENT TICKETS

FRIDAY, AUGUST 4 – 6:30 PM
THURSDAY, AUGUST 31 – 7:30 PM

GENERAL ADMISSION TICKETS

“In Easteal’s first feature, the Australian director adopts a durational model of filmmaking that arguably hit its peak around the turn of the 2010s, but he parlays the conceptual framework into a casually engrossing work free of slow cinema’s more trying aspects (e.g., long passages of silence; quasi-symbolic characters on seemingly endless quests toward enlightenment). Running 180 minutes and set almost entirely inside a car, The Plains depicts the daily commute of a middle-aged businessman from the parking lot of a Melbourne law office to his home in the city’s outer suburbs. Every day, at just after 5 p.m., Andrew (Andrew Rakowski) gets into his Hyundai, calls his wife, and checks in with his ailing mother, before listening to talk radio for the remainder of the hour-long drive. Occasionally, he offers a lift to a coworker, David (played by Easteal), who’s going through a breakup and is generally dissatisfied with his personal and professional life. Over the course of the film— told recursively, beginning at the same time and location each day—Andrew and David reveal themselves in casual, offhand conversations (apparently scripted but delivered so naturally as to evoke the feel of a documentary) that accumulate into an acute portrait of modern life—one in which otherwise unarticulated beliefs, regrets, and anxieties bring to light a shared humanity too often lost in the commotion of the world.”
—Jordan Cronk, Film Comment

Join us on Saturday, August 12th for a special screening and Q&A with director and star, David Easteal.

2551.01 – THE KID
dir. Norbert Pfaffenbichler, 2021
Austria. 65 min.
No spoken dialogue.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 10 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 14 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, AUGUST 18 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, AUGUST 22 – 10 PM

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One-hundred years lie between Chaplin’s first feature-length film and Pfaffenbichler’s very loose interpretation of it. The Kid, filmed in 1920, is a story from the realm of the “lumpenproletariat”, a tragi-comic moral tale of an abandoned child and police brutality. 2551.01 is all of that, too—and is, after all, at a distance of 100 years and all kinds of breaks in cinematic history and countless wars from Chaplin’s bittersweet patchwork comedy. The director calls his toxic genre blend a “dystopic slapstick film.” Pfaffenbichler has already shaped two of his short films from Chaplin material, and the “daemonic screen” is his passion. He devoted a film to the silent film quick-change artist Lon Chaney, and he called his 2013 Boris Karloff tribute A Masque of Madness. Now, in 2551.01, a lot more than one mask of madness can be seen. The false clown, sod, and nightmare visages, which the amateur ensemble wears, define this low-budget grotesque, which is set in the passageways of a sewer system, bunkers, and dark cellars, without windows, without daylight, without escape. Chaplin’s tramp turns into a man in a monkey mask, who takes in an abandoned child and hesitantly looks for a place for his charge in the violent and zombie world he inhabits.

A series of genuinely obscene images makes the pulse quicken: nauseating meals are served at a decadent candlelight dinner in the wreckage, disturbing rituals are carried out in a nursery school of horrors, and on the hero’s path through the underground hell, we witness Abu-Ghraib-like torture. Along with the complex textures of silent films, Pfaffenbichler also uses elements of splatter and exploitation films and sitcoms—and an extremely eclectic soundtrack of music. In this way, this episodic drama leads us to the peripheries of punk and shock comedy, to territories that are practically non-existent in Austrian cinema. For that reason, with all luck, the Orgy of the Damned, which is announced at the end as Episode 2 of this wicked tale, will soon become a reality. (Stefan Grissemann)

2551.02 – THE ORGY OF THE DAMNED
dir. Norbert Pfaffenbichler, 2023
Austria. 82 min.
No spoken dialogue.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 10 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, AUGUST 15 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, AUGUST 18 – MIDNIGHT
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 23 – 10 PM

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The mad saga about the man in a monkey mask wandering through the torture garden of deviant delights continues. The second part of an intended trilogy, Norbert Pfaffenbichler’s 2551.02 – Orgy of the Damned picks up exactly where 2551.01 left the stunned viewer craving continuation, and as with all great sequels you needn’t have seen the previous film to be thrilled by this one. Especially if you like slapstick violence, sick sex and pitch-black humour. The opening image of a faceless sitting nude whose penis surprisingly retracts into a vagina announces that you’re entering a fantastic world where conventional constraints have no meaning: There are no taboos in the grotesque underground realm of Pfaffenbichler’s 2551 movies, which cross all borders, especially those of good taste.

Reviving the original punk spirit of true independent filmmaking, Pfaffenbichler and his ingenious collaborators have concocted another marvel of no-budget ingenuity, in which all characters wear crazy masks and society has regressed into subterranean caverns filled with resplendently obscene details. No words are needed to express the pain felt by the unnamed protagonist as he traverses this wacky wasteland, hunted by a police corps headed by a plague doctor and repeatedly crossing paths with a seductive mystery woman, while he is looking for an abandoned child (their relationship a loose perversion of Chaplin’s silent classic The Kid), which is literally trapped in a school of hard knocks. Awesome music and enthusiastically exaggerated performances propel the hapless (anti-)hero forward, as he drunkenly stumbles on, only to be knocked out repeatedly, especially by the lady of his dreams.

The lovingly staged set pieces include an “ultimate fighting contest” with wrestlers from hell (staged as a slap dance to electro beats), a brawl in a barroom that serves cut-off fingers as snacks, and a tour de force of the universal meat market to which no act of sexual transgression is alien. When a dreamy interlude (scored to Henry Purcell’s “Cold Song”) finally allows a vision of sexual healing you can bet that it ends with a money shot of the limp ejaculation of maggots. This Orgy of the Damned finally delivers on the age-old promise that you will witness things no man has ever seen before. Even your own vomit may stare back at you. Probably because it also can’t wait for 2551.03. (Christoph Huber)

Special thanks to Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer, Jonida Laçi, and sixpackfilm.

For the past 20 years El Pampero Cine has been redefining what it means to be an independent filmmaker in a transnational system of production and distribution. Refusing outside funding and working solely with their own equipment, they have created an aesthetic and intellectual sensibility that feels distinctly their own. With the recent release of Laura Citarella’s TRENQUE LAUQUEN, following on the heels of 2018’s LA FLOR, they have cemented themselves as one of the most original voices of contemporary cinema.

To mark this occasion we’re proud to present two other recent films by El Pampero Cine that match that achievement, but have not received the same attention. Both made during covid lockdown and using their closed-quarters arrangements as a jumping off point for all sorts of wild fantasy and mystery, Alejo Moguillansky’s LA EDAD MEDIA and Agustín Mendilaharzu’s CLEMENTINA are two works that show the range and depth of what El Pampero can do with the most limited of means.

THE MIDDLE AGES
(LA EDAD MEDIA)
dir. Alejo Moguillansky & Luciana Acuña, 2022
89 min. Argentina.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, MAY 6 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, MAY 16 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, MAY 21 – 5 PM
WEDNESDAY, MAY 31 – 7:30 PM

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“In this comedy of economics and isolation, partners Moguillansky and Acuña play themselves—a director and choreographer—stuck in their flat during a pandemic lockdown in Argentina. They contend not just with a sense of self upon losing opportunities to do their work— to create their art— but upon losing their finances, too. While Moguillansky awkwardly tries to direct Beckett via Zoom and Acuña takes and gives split-screen classes to little success, the couple’s daughter, Cleo, begins secretly selling her parents belongings out their front door to fund a much-desired telescope. In this funny and clever snapshot of fiction that feels 99% based in reality, Moguillansky and Acuña, who share directing credits, find in their household microcosm the humorous absurdity but also underlying shadows of the financial and existential crises […] incubating in so many homes, communities, and nations. ”
— Daniel Kasman, Mubi Notebook

“A comedy in times of shelter-in-place? Probably so. A portrait of a girl and her family in times of shelter-in-place? Apparently so. An absurd Beckettian musical shot in times of shelter-in place? Exactly so.”
— Director’s statement

CLEMENTINA
dir. Agustín Mendilaharzu & Costanza Feldman, 2023
109 min. Argentina.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 3 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, MAY 16 – 7:30 PM with Q&A (This event is $10)
SUNDAY, MAY 21 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, MAY 26 – 10 PM

SPECIAL EVENT TICKETS (5/16)

GENERAL ADMISSION TICKETS

“In 2020, in an apartment in Buenos Aires, a dancer-actress and a cameraman-playwright look for a way to occupy their days of confinement. They have a camera and they start filming. At first they are documentary images. Then her face and her body appear and Fiction, timidly, begins to appear. They work with what reality provides and then transmute it. They believe they are making a short film, then another, and then plenty others. The game grows and completely takes over their lives. With infinite innocence first, with infinite responsibility later, they begin to understand that they are making a film. This film.”
— Director’s statement

“The sudden cleaning of an extremely cluttered domestic space; the habits of an idiosyncratic couple living between home-made meals and online classes; the slow devastation of an apartment as every basic service seems to crack up; the exterior world asking for favours or coming to the rescue. These are some of the elements that constitute Clementina, scripted, performed and directed – in a superb tour de force – by Constanza Feldman and Agustín Mendilaharzu.

This offbeat comedy builds a narrative of stagnation and isolation, punctuated by sudden detours and surprising turning points. The intervention of secondary characters brings infectious warmth, fun and disequilibrium. The film resonates with echoes of Chantal Akerman, Raúl Ruiz, the Zürcher brothers and Mariano Llinás: the absurdism of quotidian situations; the performances that mix slapstick, dance and pantomime; the emotional undercurrents that slowly come to the surface; the repetitive patterns broken by imaginative flights; and its impeccable, gracious timing.

Shot with refreshing formal inventiveness, paying special attention to the humorous qualities of sound, Clementina is a delightful cinematic experience about the lives of two eccentrics – not to mention their improbable collection of handmade objects, toys, books, souvenirs, records and leaves – during pandemic times.”
— Cristina Álvarez López

Like all nations, Mexico surfaces from myth. Its most popular myth remains branded on its flag, an iconographic depiction of an eagle eating a snake atop a nopal that dates back to the Aztec decision to settle in Teotihuacán (present-day Mexico City). This symbol of antiquity, woven into the popular imagination of a once-colony, oft-imperialized territory has come to represent everything from indigenous culture to neoliberal threat. This, like the many phantasmic myths that make up Mexico’s character, speak to its syncretic soul — living, deadened, relatable and innominable.

Taking the American carnival of representation edified in Cinco de Mayo as a jumping off point, Spectacle Theater presents a series spotlighting a few, little seen, Mexican films dealing with the mythic, mystic and shamanistic traditions much of the nation’s allure has been constructed around. Both released in 1975, Rolando Klein’s CHAC: THE RAIN GOD and François Reichenbach’s DO YOU HEAR THE DOGS BARKING? stand out as cavalier works of ethno-fiction, refracting indigenous stories through the prism of greater cultural narratives. CHAC concerns a village’s attempts to solve a drought after their local shaman fails them, forcing them to seek assistance with an enigmatic mountain-dwelling diviner. Based on a story by celebrated Mexican author Juan Rulfo, DO YOU HEAR THE DOGS BARKING? tells the parallel stories of a Chamula man seeking medical assistance for his ailing son and the condition of native-peoples in Mexico circa 1960s. A few years later, filmmaker Nicolás Echevarría interviewed internationally acclaimed magic mushroom savant Maria Sabina. The resultant documentary, MARÍA SABINA, MUJER ESPÍRITU collects her wisdom in a series of vignettes. Charles Fairbanks and Saul Kak’s THE MODERN JUNGLE brings a closer examination to the state of shamans today, offering a biting critique of extractive documentary practices and government neglect of indigenous communities in present-day Mexico.

¿NO OYES LADRAR LOS PERROS?
(DO YOU HEAR THE DOGS BARKING?)
dir. François Reichenbach, 1975
82 min. Mexico/France.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, MAY 5 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, MAY 10 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, MAY 20 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, MAY 26 – 7:30 PM

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This Mexican-French co-production premiered at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival, where director François Reichenbach received praise for his adaptation of Juan Rulfo’s original story. Adapted with the help of Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes alongside two French screenwriters, the film intercuts between a father seeking help for his ailing son and the imagined future of a young indigenous man looking for work in Mexico City. In weaving these parallel stories together, Reichenbach appeals to allegory, fusing religious visions, surrealist skits and dreams into the lives of its characters.

Reichenbach’s late-career devotion to fiction filmmaking is often overshadowed by his earlier work as a biting documentarian. AMERICA AS SEEN BY A FRENCHMAN (1960) sees him interrogate the eponymous nation’s power structures as he drives across the country in Tocquevillian fashion and his collaboration with Chris Marker, THE SIXTH SIDE OF THE PENTAGON (1968), records the largest anti-Vietnam protest in the U.S. up until that point. His attention to the absurdity inherent to government with capitalist tenets would become a staple of his filmmaking, influencing his approach at representing the perils of the downtrodden wherever his camera took him.

CHAC: DIOS DE LA LLUVIA
(CHAC: THE RAIN GOD)
dir. Rolando Klein, 1975
95 min. Mexico.
In Tzeltal & Spanish with English subtitles.

MONDAY, MAY 8 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, MAY 12 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, MAY 18 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, MAY 30 – 7:30 PM

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After their shaman turns to liquor and they experience a sustained drought, a village is forced to rely on a mountain-dwelling diviner to keep them from starvation. The sole directorial effort by Chilean filmmaker Rolando Klein takes as much inspiration from the Mayan creation story documented in the Popul Vuh, as it does from real-life. The surreal blend of ethno-fiction reveals a perspective on life rooted in otherworldly logic. Although Klein would not direct again, CHAC endures as a unique calling-card from another world.

“Chac” is a relic of its mid-’70s period. The film operates with the spare-but-exaggerated flourishes of Bertolucci, Polanski, Herzog and Kubrick, protracting minimalism until it alludes to opulence. But the film is not an artistic study in atmospherics, nor is it an interrogative piece of anthropological bricolage. “Chac’s” simplicity has the mythological matter-of-factness of a fable, blessed with something celestial.”
— Wesley Morris, San Francisco Examiner

MARÍA SABINA, MUJER ESPÍRITU
(MARIA SABINA, SPIRIT WOMAN)
dir. Nicolás Echevarría, 1979
81 min. Mexico.
In Mazatec & Spanish with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, MAY 5 – 5 PM
WEDNESDAY, MAY 17 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, MAY 23 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, MAY 29 – 10 PM

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Poet-healer María Sabina is rumored to have provided John Lennon, Keith Richards and Bob Dylan, all with the power of magic mushrooms. Her knowledge of psilocybin healing techniques reached international acclaim in the ‘60s and ‘70s as American hippies sought altered states of consciousness. Yet, the excess attention brought Sabina under scrutiny of the law and damaged what she considered to be a sacred tradition. Nicolás Echevarría interviews Sabina about all of this and more in MARÍA SABINA, MUJER ESPÍRITU. Edited around the rhythms of Sabina’s daily practices, the film stands out as one of the few filmic documents of the famed healer.

Throughout the film, María Sabina curses the recreational use of psilocybin. Echevarría’s proclivity for evaluating Mexico’s strained relationship with alternative modes of healing became a pet theme throughout his career, reaching its apogee in 1991’s CABEZA DE VACA, a melodramatic retelling of the Spanish conquistador turned shaman who got stranded during an expedition in Florida. Always attune to the poetic flourishes of his country, Echevarría captures the mountainous Oaxaca where Sabina settled in warmly, offering a sincere counter-image to the fabled imaginary that has long surrounded the poet-healer.

LA SELVA NEGRA
(THE MODERN JUNGLE)
dir. Charles Fairbanks & Saul Kak, 2016
72 min. Mexico.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 10 – 7:30 PM with Q&A (This event is $10)
FRIDAY, MAY 19 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, MAY 25 – 10 PM

SPECIAL EVENT TICKETS (5/10)

GENERAL ADMISSION TICKETS

A shaman in Southern Mexico develops a hernia. As his condition worsens, Charles Fairbanks and Saul Kak follow him as he seeks medical assistance from a myriad of sources — the government, local healers and quacks — to varying degrees of failure. Self-interrogating their own documentation of main subject Don Juan, THE MODERN JUNGLE evolves from a portrait of a man and his misery into both an intervention on the documentary form as well as a critique of globalization. As they film, Fairbanks and Kak reveal the saddening ways in which capitalist schemes have devastated local communities and their traditions.

“On the one hand, to interfere alters the reality on screen; on the other hand, to do nothing requires the absence of a heart. And while this film does not definitively answer the question, it foregrounds it in a highly unique manner that makes The Modern Jungle a film to see and ponder, for filmmakers and film lovers, alike.”
— Christopher Llewellyn Reed, Hammer and Nail

Screens with:

( ( ( ( ( /*\ ) ) ) ) ) ECOS DEL VOLCÁN
(ECHOES OF THE VOLCANO)
dir. Charles Fairbanks & Saul Kak, 2019
18 min. Mexico.
In Spanish & Zoque with English subtitles.

The Chichonal volcano in the northwest region of Chiapas, MX erupted in 1982. The local Zoque community was consequently evicted. Although the issues surrounding this shift were never explicitly addressed by the government, they ossified in Zoque culture and continue echoing through its practices. Kak and Fairbanks sensorially trace these echoes, piecing together a visual account of where Zoque culture stands now. Recipient of Best Documentary Short at FIC Morelia and Best International Film at Ann Arbor Film Festival.

“A tatiesque and exhilarating sonic and architectural tour of a Mexican village that was founded by displaced people fleeing a volcanic eruption. Pure cinema.”
— André Dudemaine, Présence Autochtone

Special thanks to the team at IMCINE comprised of Jannike Mikaela Curuchet Palazuelos, Monica Martinez Orihuela, Ismael Espindola Avendaño, Maria Lorena Solis Vargas, Maria Dolores Díaz González García, Isabel Moncada Kerlow, and Marianna Ruiz Durán; George Schmalz at Kino Lorber; Tom Sveen at Cinema Guild; Joshua Bogatin, Steve Macfarlane, Charles Fairbanks, and Saul Kak.