Theatrical Starts January 17, 2025
2024 - BELGIUM, FRANCE, NETHERLANDS - ENGLISH, FRENCH, DUTCH, RUSSIANA FILM BY JOHAN GRIMONPREZFEATURING: LOUIS ARMSTRONG, ANDRÉE BLOUIN, JOHN COLTRANE, DIZZY GILLESPIE, ABBEY LINCOLN, PATRICE LUMUMBA, NINA SIMONE, MALCOLM X
United Nations, 1960: the Global South ignites a political earthquake, jazz musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash the Security Council, Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe, and the U.S. State Department swings into action, sending jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to Congo to deflect attention from the CIA-backed coup. Director Johan Grimonprez captures the moment when African politics and American jazz collided in this magnificent essay film, a riveting historical rollercoaster that illuminates the political machinations behind the 1961 assassination of Congo’s leader Patrice Lumumba. Richly illustrated by eyewitness accounts, official government memos, testimonies from mercenaries and CIA operatives, speeches from Lumumba himself, and a veritable canon of jazz icons, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat interrogates colonial history to tell an urgent and timely story of precedent that resonates more than ever in today’s geopolitical climate.
Theatrical Starts April 26, 2024
2023 - 262 MINUTES - NETHERLANDS/ UNITED KINGDOM
A FILM BY STEVE MCQUEEN
The past collides with our precarious present in Steve McQueen’s bravura documentary Occupied City, informed by the book Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945) written by Bianca Stigter. McQueen creates two interlocking portraits: a door-to-door excavation of the Nazi occupation that still haunts his adopted city, and a vivid journey through the last years of pandemic and protest. What emerges is both devastating and life-affirming, an expansive meditation on memory, time, and where we’re headed.
Theatrical Starts November 22, 2023
USA – 1967 – 124 MIN – BLACK & WHITE - FEATURE - IN ENGLISH
A FILM BY EMILE DE ANTONIO
BASED ON THE BOOK BY MARK LANE
Mark Lane and de Antonio, for the first time, create a vivid, frank legal brief which asks the still unanswered question: who killed John F. Kennedy?
A critique of the Warren Commission’s report on the murder of President John F. Kennedy.
*Restored to 4K for the 60th anniversary of the JFK assassination
Theatrical starts November 25, 2022
2022 - UNITED STATES - 91 MINUTES - IN ENGLISH
A FILM BY SIERRA PETTENGILL
RIOTSVILLE, USA is a poetic and furious reflection on the reaction of a nation’s citizens and institutions to the rebellions of the late 1960s. This artful, riveting documentary consists entirely of archival footage that was shot by the United States military or appeared on broadcast television.
Director Sierra Pettengill shifts our historic gaze from the rebellions in Chicago, Newark, and Detroit, focusing on unearthed military training footage of Army-built model towns called “Riotsvilles,” where military and police were trained to respond to domestic civil disorder.
Dissecting the anatomy of the Johnson administration’s Kerner Commission, which resulted in an explosive increase in federal funding for police, RIOTSVILLE, USA pulls focus on the machinations of American institutional control. Amid today’s shifting reckonings on power and identity, technology companies consolidating power, and a new generation’s coming-of-age, Pettengill delivers insight from a time similar to our own, urging us to understand how the machine of institutional power manages to rumble on.
Theatrical starts Fall 2025
NEW 4K RESTORATION
USA – 1965 – 97 MIN – BLACK & WHITE - FEATURE - IN ENGLISH
A FILM BY EMILE DE ANTONIO
DIGITAL RESTORATION BY THE WISCONSIN CENTER FOR FILM AND THEATRE RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON AND SPHINX PRODUCTIONS
The great demagogue, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, at bay before the establishment. Lawyer Welch: "Have you at long last, sir, no sense of decency?" Silence and the end of a meteoric career.
