Notes From The Program Director | Week of March 7th, 2025

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Notes From The Program Director

Week of March 7, 2025

Melissa Tamminga

Rich Text

March 7-14, 2025

Hello, friends!

I don’t know about you, but I’m still positively buzzing after the Oscars ceremony this past week, which brought us so many pleasant surprises: indie-writer-director Sean Baker taking home four(!!) Oscars for Anora (Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing, Best Director, Best Picture) and giving a beautifully passionate speech in support of theatrical exhibition and of independent cinemas like the Pickford; No Other Land, a Doctober 2024 selection, winning Best Documentary and the filmmakers giving their own powerful speech and plea for human rights; I’m Still Here winning Best International Feature (watch some of the reactions from Brazil if you want a quick jolt of joy in your day); and an indie film like Flow, beloved at the Pickford and made for just $3.7 million, winning Best Animated Feature over the big budget powerhouses like Inside Out 2 ( $200 million budget) and The Wild Robot ($78 million budget). There were the usual disappointments, of course; I would have loved to see Demi and Timmy win for their roles in The Substance and A Complete Unknown, respectively, but it’s also hard to grudge Mikey Madison and Adrien Brody their well-deserved prizes. All in all, a great night in celebration of the movies we all love so much.

This week at Pickford we’ll be celebrating No Other Land’s win with a handful of showtimes. If you did not have a chance to see it while it was here for Doctober back in October last year, seize the chance to watch it. It’s unlike anything else you’ll see this year, and, shamefully, the film still does not have U.S. distribution, so opportunities to see it are limited to isolated selected showings like ours at independent cinemas.

In addition to Oscar winner No Other Land, we’ve also got a few selected showings of the extraordinary Oscar nominee (Best International Feature) The Seed of a Sacred Fig, which was filmed entirely in secret in Iran and made by the dissident director Mohammad Rasoulof, whose bold, unapologetic films have put him in constant conflict with the Iranian government for many years. Leading up to The Seed of a Sacred Fig, Rasoulof had already been arrested multiple times, but with the announcement of Seed being included in the 2024 Cannes competition, he was sentenced to 8 years in prison, a flogging, and a fine.

He managed to flee Iran, turning up on the red carpet at Cannes, much to the shock and delight of everyone there. The New York Times has described his unbelievable escape and journey in a riveting article here, and Justin Chang, who writes for The New Yorker, noted in his review that Rasoulof’s presence in Cannes was an overwhelmingly emotional moment.

The film itself is utterly engrossing, and it is no wonder it made the Iranian government so angry: it follows the story of a family in modern day Tehran – a mother, father, and two daughters – where the father has just been promoted within the government and he becomes involved in increasingly morally dubious decisions, choosing governmental power over truth and human rights. The daughters of the family, however, are much more progressive, using their phones and social media to follow protests in the streets of Tehran and seeing, increasingly, that the official narrative the government tells (and which their father serves) is in conflict with what they're seeing on the streets. The mother is caught between father and daughters, wanting to protect her daughters, while also being unwilling to anger her husband and upset the patriarchal order.

Provocatively and ingeniously, Rasoulof also seamlessly uses real footage of street protests from the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, which was sparked by the death of Mahsa (Jina) Amini in police custody in 2022 after she was arrested for not wearing her headscarf properly, and the inclusion of such footage beautifully enhances the realism and the urgency of the story Rasoulof tells.

Besides the use of real footage, one of the most brilliant things about the film is the way it slowly develops the story: the family, at the beginning, is happy and harmonious. The father does not seem particularly dictatorial or overbearing; the mother and daughters seem happy. But the first half of the film, set almost entirely within the domestic space, slowly ratchets up the tension, the father becoming more immersed in his job, the daughters becoming more engaged in the protests they are seeing, the mother more caught in the middle. And then the final half of the film is a downright thriller, where the taut tension of the first half explodes into heart-pounding action.

A truly incredible film that speaks not only to the political situation in Iran, but also to what we're experiencing here on some profound levels, where religious fundamentalism meets nationalism and patriarchy. Don’t miss it.

For a one-week-only engagement, we’ve also got Universal Language, a comedy-drama and the second feature film from the remarkable Canadian filmmaker Matthew Rankin.

How do I describe this unique gem of a film, which won the Directors' Fortnight Audience Award at Cannes and was shortlisted for the Oscars?

Think Jacques Tati (Playtime, Mr. Hulot’s Holiday) meets Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums, Moonrise Kingdom) meets Aki Kaurismäki (Fallen Leaves) meets Abbas Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry, Close-up).

The dry deadpan humor; the eccentric costumes (one man is wearing a Christmas tree but no one comments on it); the exquisite, symmetrical long-shot framings that carry multiple jokes; the voluptuous turkeys (you'll have to watch it to find out what that means); the inexplicable setting (a Winnipeg in some liminal space where everyone meets at Tim Hortons but drinks tea from samovars and speaks Persian); the outdoor shops selling only typewriters, or only doughnuts, or only birthday cakes.

It's absurdist, it's wonderful -- and somehow also deeply poignant, a commentary on work and family and community and the strange places we call home and the longings for emotional connections in the cold, blandly-beige worlds we often find ourselves in. It’s one of my very favorite films of 2025 so far, and it’s hard to see anything else beating it.

And, at long last, Bong Joon-ho’s newest film, Mickey 17, eagerly anticipated by so many Bong fans, has finally arrived on our screens. Mickey 17, delightfully and satisfyingly, is the kind of film that only Bong Joon ho could make -- and while some critics have noted some unevenness in the film, I'd rather watch Bong's films, any single one of them, more than anything else from just about any other working director.

Mickey 17 is a science fiction story based on the novel Mickey7, which imagines a world where people can be cloned and thus used for dangerous, even mortally dangerous, experiments in the exploration of new worlds. Anyone desperate enough or poor enough to volunteer for such work as an “Expendable,” thus has the destiny of dying, over and over and over and over again, at the whim of those in power, namely, the wealthy corporate overlords.

It’s a film that has all the earmarks of Bong's unique voice and signature style: the glorious mish-mash of tones; the swings between farcical comedy and tragic violence; the wonderfully outsized performances (Mark Ruffalo, as a sort of Musk-Trumpian figure, is really bringing it here, much like Tilda Swinton did for Okja and Snowpiercer); the cheeky but earnest commitment to anti-capitalist values and the socio-political commentary on ways in which human beings get trapped in inhumane institutions, systems, and governmental operations; the utter absurdity and profound poignance of what it means to be human. It's all here in Mickey 17.

And I suspect that much like all of Bong’s other films, repeat-watches will be even more rewarding. It is, to be sure, a wildly entertaining film -- I laughed out loud several times (even in the staid and quiet trade screening venue where I saw it) -- but its themes and images are sticking with me in ways I didn't quite expect. It feels very much like a film made for this political global national moment, not just with the Ruffalo character (who is, indeed, a cartoonish politician who loves being on TV and who wants to populate a new planet in space and whose followers sport red hats). It feels like a cathartic middle finger to the whole system and to capitalistic colonizing tech bro oligarchs, who seemed to have leapt from the pages of science fiction and straight into real life.

And I'm reminded that Bong himself isn't someone who has just been sitting in some artistic enclave making films about this stuff: he's a real life badass. He spent his college years in artistic and political protest: collecting bootlegged international films on VHS (illegal under Korean censorship at the time), skipping class by day and watching those films with his fellow members of the Yellow Door Film Club (about which there was a documentary), and then going out by night to protest on the streets, getting gassed by his government. He says he still remembers the constant taste and smell of that tear gas from those days -- and you might notice that almost every single one of his films (including Mickey 17) has scenes of people getting gassed by the powers that be.

Bong’s films are often so over the top, depicting giant monsters (The Host) or giant pigs (Okja) or high speed trains that carry the world’s only survivors (Snowpiercer), or are so hilarious and farcical, that it might be easy to dismiss his films are purely entertaining. But for Bong, raucous entertainment and serious life and death themes are always fully intertwined. Life is as tragic as it is comic and as tenderly poignant as it is violent, and there’s almost no other filmmaker I can think of that shows he understands that like Bong does.

Rounding out our theatrical releases, we also have several wonderful special events that I’ll just quickly, note:

First, our Third Eye series returns this month with a brand new pick from Katie, one of our longtime Pickford volunteers: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, screening on Saturday night at 10 pm. Katie writes about this terrific film, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Michel Gondry, "Think of your greatest heartbreak. If you could erase that person entirely from your memory, would you? What would you lose? And if you met them again, would you inevitably fall in love all over again? These are the questions explored in this film. Set in the nostalgic offline atmosphere of the early 2000s, it features the copious talents of Kate Winslet, Jim Carrey, David Cross, Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Tom Wilkinson, and Elijah Wood. It is emotionally stirring, philosophical, and delightful."

Tickets are going fast, so be sure to grab yours soon!

Second, in honor of the late Gene Hackman -- one of a kind and the best actor of a generation -- we’ll be screening a new 2024 restoration of Francis Ford Coppola's magnificent film, The Conversation, with Hackman being utterly transcendent in it and helping enact one of the most iconic endings to a film, ever.

Hackman is so good in everything -- The French Connection, The Royal Tenenbaums, Unforgiven, Young Frankenstein (comedic gold), Superman(the best Lex Luthor), The Birdcage, Hoosiers, Night Moves, etc. etc. -- it's hard to choose. There really isn't a wrong choice. But, for this moment, it had to be The Conversation, a timeless film but also a film for our time as much as it was for 1974.

Tickets are moving quickly for this film, too, so be sure to grab a spot on Saturday evening (7:15 pm) or Sunday afternoon (2:00 pm).

Third, the Indie Lens Pop-up series returns this month with a screening of Home Court, detailing the story of “Ashley Chea, a Cambodian American basketball prodigy in Southern California whose life intensifies as recruitment heats up. As she overcomes injury as well as racial and class differences between her home and private school worlds, in peer groups, and against rival schools, Ashley strives to become her own person and leave a legacy behind.”

Indie Lens screenings, offered to us by PBS, are always FREE, and the film selections, including this month’s, are always terrific, bringing us some of the best the documentary world has to offer. The moving and inspiring story Home Court tells is no exception. Join us on Sunday at 10 am!

Finally, Cinema East also returns with this month’s selection, master filmmaker Edward Yang’s Mahjong, playing on Thursday at 11:00 am and 7:45 pm. After A Confucian Confusion last month, it is an incredible treat to have the chance to see not one, but two, of Yang’s films on the big screen for Cinema East this year. Both films are part of Yang’s “New Taipei Trilogy,” Yang’s final three films, which includes Yi Yi (part of the Pickford’s 2017-18 Cinema East season).

Keep an eye out for Cinema East curator Jeff Purdue’s newsletter this Sunday, where he’ll tell us more about Mahjong, and we are also pleased to welcome frequent Cinema East collaborator and WWU film professor Eren Odabasi for an introduction to Mahjong on Thursday.

See you at the movies, friends!

Melissa