On Resentment: A Film Series

Resentment defines politics today. We’ve received innumerable lessons in the sense of dispossession that characterizes the fabled white working class, courtesy of liberal and right-wing media alike. But who else has a right to be resentful? How can resentment be reclaimed by those who are used to fits of anger and bitterness being called unproductive, petty, selfish, even pathological? Can—and must—resentment be useful? This expansive screening series, a collaboration between Triple Canopy and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, engages these questions by looking at the expression of resentment in the medium of film. On Resentment features formally daring, thematically ambitious works that wrestle with identity and representation, violence and ownership, revolutions and dead ends.

March 20, 7:30 p.m.: Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine
March 21, 7 p.m.: Leigh Ledare’s The Task
March 22, 4:30 p.m. & 7 p.m.: Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool
March 22, 9:15 p.m.: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point
March 23, 2 p.m.: Liang Zhao’s Petition
March 23, 4:30 p.m.: Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña’s Who Killed Vincent Chin?
March 23, 7 p.m.: Lucretia Martel’s Zama
March 23, 9:15 p.m.: Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation
March 24, 1:30 p.m.: Lino Brocka’s Manila in the Claws of Light
March 24, 4 p.m. & 9:30 p.m.: Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
March 24, 7 p.m.: Lindsay Anderson’s If…
March 25, 4 p.m. & 9:30 p.m.: Steve McQueen’s Hunger
March 25, 7 p.m.: Brett Story’s The Prison in Twelve Landscapes
March 26, 7 p.m.: Ngozi Onwurah’s Welcome II the Terrordome and Cecile Emeke’s an entirely sincere, comprehensive and essential step by step guide to creating a film: the black london edition
March 26, 9 p.m.: John Akomfrah’s Handsworth Songs
March 27, 7 p.m.: An Evening with Sky Hopinka
March 28, 6:45 p.m.: Spike Lee’s Bamboozled

La Haine (1995)

Wednesday, March 20, 2019
7:30 p.m.
Peter Jay Sharp Building
BAM Rose Cinemas
Tickets: $15 for general admission, $7.50 for BAM members

Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz, with Vincent Cassel, Hubert Koundé, Saïd Taghmaoui
One hour and thirty-eight minutes, 35mm

This explosive tale of simmering unrest on the margins of Paris tracks twenty-four hours in the lives of three young men—the Jewish Vinz, the black Hubert, and the Arab Saïd—as their rage at an act of police brutality threatens to boil over into violence. A bravura feat of visceral filmmaking, La Haine is a still-stunning look at the deep-rooted racial and economic injustices of French society.

Post-screening discussion with writer Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Triple Canopy senior editor Emily Wang, and series programmer Ashley Clark.

The Task (2018)

Thursday, March 21, 2019
7 p.m.
Peter Jay Sharp Building
BAM Rose Cinemas
Tickets: $15 for general admission, $7.50 for BAM members

Directed by Leigh Ledare
Two hours, DCP

Confined to a nondescript room, twenty-eight strangers—spread across race, age, gender, and class lines—engage in a radical social experiment designed by taboo-breaking artist Leigh Ledare. They relentlessly analyze each and every interaction that they have, until even an act as small as changing one’s seat becomes charged with explosive tension. Provocative, at times uncomfortable, and always riveting, The Task is an unsettling reflection of our societal fault lines.

Post-screening Q&A with Leigh Ledare and series programmer Ashley Clark.

Medium Cool (1969)

Friday, March 22, 2019
4:30 p.m. & 7 p.m.
Peter Jay Sharp Building
BAM Rose Cinemas
Tickets: $15 for general admission, $7.50 for BAM members

Directed by Haskell Wexler, with Robert Forster, Verna Bloom, Peter Bonerz
One hour and fifty-one minutes, 35mm

The debut feature from acclaimed cinematographer Haskell Wexler examines the media’s role in social crisis through a groundbreaking mix of cinéma vérité and quasi-scripted narrative. While covering the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, a disenchanted news cameraman finds himself caught between political protests and the police’s violent response to them, which culminates in a virtuosic sequence that embeds the camera in the middle of a riot.

Introduced by Triple Canopy senior editor Maya Binyam.

Zabriskie Point (1970)

Friday, March 22, 2019
9:15 p.m.
Peter Jay Sharp Building
BAM Rose Cinemas
Tickets: $15 for general admission, $7.50 for BAM members

Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, with Mark Frechette, Daria Halprin, Paul Fix
One hour and fifty-three minutes, 35mm

Michelangelo Antonioni’s sole American film is an astonishing, lysergic vision of existential angst and alienation set against the student riots and free-love vibes of California’s hippie counterculture. Met with incomprehension upon its release, Zabriskie Point looks, in retrospect, like one of the most radical works of anti-capitalist art ever released by a major American movie studio.

Introduced by Triple Canopy senior editor Maya Binyam.

Petition (2009)

Saturday, March 23, 2019
2 p.m.
Peter Jay Sharp Building
BAM Rose Cinemas
Tickets: $15 for general admission, $7.50 for BAM members

Directed by Liang Zhao
Two hours, Digital

Liang Zhao’s courageous and devastating work of cinematic activism documents the plight of “petitioners”: Chinese citizens who travel to Beijing to report abuses by local authorities, only to find themselves caught in a Kafkaesque limbo of bureaucratic corruption and intimidation. Shot, often secretly, over the course of twelve years, Petition gives voice to those fighting for justice in the face of a system intent on silencing them.

Introduced by Triple Canopy senior editor Emily Wang.

Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1987)

Saturday, March 23, 2019
4:30 p.m.
Peter Jay Sharp Building
BAM Rose Cinemas
Tickets: $15 for general admission, $7.50 for BAM members

Directed by Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña
One hour and twenty-seven minutes, 16 mm

Detroit, 1982: Chinese-American engineer Vincent Chin is beaten to death by two white auto workers who, despite confessing to the crime, go free. Shining a light on anti-Asian racism in America, this wrenching, Academy Award-nominated documentary examines the case from all sides, touching on everything from the history of Chinese immigration to Detroit’s socioeconomic struggles to the failings of the justice system.

Introduced by Christine Choy.

Zama (2017)

Saturday, March 23, 2019
7 p.m.
Peter Jay Sharp Building
BAM Rose Cinemas
Tickets: $15 for general admission, $7.50 for BAM members

Directed by Lucretia Martel, with Daniel Giménez Cacho, Lola Dueñas, Matheus Nachtergaele
One hour and forty-five minutes, DCP

The newest film from iconoclastic auteur Lucrecia Martel is an audacious, hallucinatory vision of colonialism’s corrosive effects. Somewhere in a remote corner of eighteenth-century South America, Zama, an officer of the Spanish crown, endures a litany of degradations as he awaits a promotion that never seems to come—a tragicomic situation that slowly spirals into cosmic absurdity.

Introduced by Triple Canopy senior editor Maya Binyam.

A Separation (2011)

Saturday, March 23, 2019
9:15 p.m.
Peter Jay Sharp Building
BAM Rose Cinemas
Tickets: $15 for general admission, $7.50 for BAM members

Directed by Asghar Farhadi, with Payman Maadi, Leila Hatami, Sareh Bayat
Two hours and three minutes, DCP

A couple’s unraveling marriage becomes a window into religious, gender, and economic tensions within Iranian society in Asghar Farhadi’s masterful, tautly constructed Oscar winner. Unable to procure a divorce, an unhappy wife moves out of the home she shares with her husband and his ailing father. But a chain of events soon precipitates a moral and legal crisis that lays bare the fraught realities of life in a theocratic state.

Manila in the Claws of Light (1975)

Sunday, March 24, 2019
1:30 p.m.
Peter Jay Sharp Building
BAM Rose Cinemas
Tickets: $15 for general admission, $7.50 for BAM members

Directed by Lino Brocka, with Hilda Koronel, Bembol Roco, Lou Salvador Jr.
Two hours and five minutes, DCP

This masterpiece of Filipino cinema from Lino Brocka—an openly gay, outspoken critic of the Marcos regime—traces the journey of a naive fisherman who travels to Manila in search of his lost love. Once there, he finds only vice, degradation, and poverty, with violence seemingly the only way out. A furious blend of hard-hitting social realism and lurid melodrama, Manila in the Claws of Light boils over with rage at societal injustice.

Introduced by Paul Nadal.

Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

Sunday, March 24, 2019
4 p.m. & 9:30 p.m.
Peter Jay Sharp Building
BAM Rose Cinemas
Tickets: $15 for general admission, $7.50 for BAM members

Directed by Stanley Kubrick, with Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden
One hour and thirty-five minutes, DCP

There’s no fighting in the War Room in Stanley Kubrick’s savage satire of Cold War paranoia. A crazed general with his finger on the doomsday button threatens to plunge the world into nuclear annihilation—unless all the president’s men can stop him. Chameleonic genius Peter Sellers outdoes himself in not one or two but three iconic roles in this apocalyptic vision of the chilling endgame of right-wing resentment.

If… (1968)

Sunday, March 24, 2019
7 p.m.
Peter Jay Sharp Building
BAM Rose Cinemas
Tickets: $15 for general admission, $7.50 for BAM members

Directed by Lindsay Anderson, with Malcolm McDowell, David Wood, Richard Warwick
One hour and fifty-one minutes, DCP

British New Wave leader Lindsay Anderson channeled the anti-authoritarian spirit of 1968 into this incendiary, X-rated allegory of repression and revolution. Starring Malcolm McDowell in his first film role, If… charts growing discontent at an all-boys boarding school as it gradually descends into anarchy—a delirious spectacle of guerrilla violence that makes Lord of the Flies look like child’s play.

Hunger (2008)

Monday, March 25, 2019
4 p.m. & 9:30 p.m.
Peter Jay Sharp Building
BAM Rose Cinemas
Tickets: $15 for general admission, $7.50 for BAM members

Directed by Steve McQueen, with Michael Fassbender, Stuart Graham, Laine Megaw, Brian Milligan
One hour and thirty-six minutes, 35mm

The gut-punching debut feature from Steve McQueen features a wrenchingly physical performance from Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands: a member of the Irish Republican Army who, in 1981, led a grueling prison hunger strike to protest his treatment by the British government. Filmed in a startlingly visceral style, Hunger is an unflinching portrayal of self-sacrifice as a form of resistance for those who have no other weapon.

The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016)

Monday, March 25, 2019
7 p.m.
Peter Jay Sharp Building
BAM Rose Cinemas
Tickets: $15 for general admission, $7.50 for BAM members

Directed by Brett Story
One hour and thirty minutes, DCP

Without setting foot inside a penitentiary, this eye-opening documentary illuminates the often-invisible ways in which the federal prison system and the American culture of mass incarceration touches nearly every aspect of modern life. Traveling from California, where female inmates fight forest fires, to a Kentucky town dependent on prison jobs, director Brett Story creates a complex, ruminative portrait of a carceral state.

Skype Q&A with director Brett Story and Triple Canopy senior editor Emily Wang.

Welcome II The Terrordome (1995) & an entirely sincere, comprehensive and essential step by step guide to creating a film: the black london edition (2018)

Tuesday, March 26, 2019
7 p.m.
Peter Jay Sharp Building
BAM Rose Cinemas
Tickets: $15 for general admission, $7.50 for BAM members

Welcome II the Terrordome (1995)
Directed by Ngozi Onwurah, with Suzette Llewellyn, Saffron Burrows, Felix Joseph
One hour and thirty minutes, 35mm

The first film by a black woman to receive a theatrical release in the UK, this unsung Afrofuturist jolt imagines a sci-fi dystopia where black people have been confined to the slums of the Terrordome—a hotbed of racial unrest where the killing of a black boy by the police sets off an explosion of further violence. On a DIY budget, the Nigerian-born director Ngozi Onwurah creates a centuries-spanning cosmology and conjures a searing, strikingly original vision.

an entirely sincere, comprehensive and essential step by step guide to creating a film: the black london edition (2018)
Directed by Cecile Emeke
Four minutes, Digital

A scathingly satirical how-to guide for black directors trying to get films produced in a white-dominated industry.

Introduced by Triple Canopy contributor Derica Shields.

Handsworth Songs (1986)

Tuesday, March 26, 2019
9 p.m.
Peter Jay Sharp Building
BAM Rose Cinemas
Tickets: $15 for general admission, $7.50 for BAM members

Directed by John Akomfrah
One hour, DCP

One of the definitive works of the trailblazing Black Audio Film Collective, this freeform documentary mosaic explores racial tensions in Britain through the lens of the 1985 Handsworth riots that rocked Birmingham, England. Through an impressionistic mélange of newsreel footage, photographs, and interviews, Handsworth Songs arrives at a powerful, allusive, and deeply personal statement about the black British experience.

Introduced by series programmer Ashley Clark.

An Evening with Sky Hopinka

Wednesday, March 27, 2019
7 p.m.
Peter Jay Sharp Building
BAM Rose Cinemas
Tickets: $15 for general admission, $7.50 for BAM members

A series of excerpts presented and directed by Sky Hopinka.

Sky Hopinka, a Ho-Chunk Nation national and descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, has emerged as a vital voice in contemporary Native American filmmaking. According to Filmmaker, he is responsible for some of “the most striking, thought-provoking and intricately assembled video works of recent years.” Awash in majestic, mysterious images of landscape and nature, his self-described “ethnopoetic” films combine documentary and experimental practices to movingly interrogate ideas of language, heritage, homeland, and displacement. Films to be screened include Dislocation Blues (2017) and Fainting Spells (2018).

Q&A with the artist and Triple Canopy senior editor Matthew Shen Goodman.

Bamboozled (2000)

Thursday, March 28, 2019
6:45 p.m.
Peter Jay Sharp Building
BAM Rose Cinemas
Tickets: $15 for general admission, $7.50 for BAM members

Directed by Spike Lee, with Damon Wayans, Savion Glover, Jada Pinkett Smith
Two hours and fifteen minutes, 35mm

A fed-up black television writer proposes an impossibly offensive “new millennium minstrel show,” complete with performers in blackface, in the hope of getting fired. But not only does the show get picked up, it becomes a runaway hit. Spike Lee’s funny, ferocious, and frightening satire deploys centuries of racist imagery to confront the media’s role in perpetuating stereotypes of African Americans.