FUGITIVE PIECES
starts July 4
"A fabulous life, touched by tragedy but touched also by love and luck … Podeswa has an ability to distill history into a few powerful images." –Stephen Hunter, Washington Post

Jeremy Podeswa adapts Anne Michael's acclaimed prose-poem story of a Jakob, a boy who escapes from the Nazis in Poland, first to a magical Mediterranean seaside town and then to Canada. Years later, haunted by his past, Jakob (played as a man by Stephen Dillane) begins to exorcise his personal demons through his writing. Shifting from past to present, Fugitive Pieces--the opening night movie at the Toronto Film Festival--offers a touching, precise and evocative testimony to the power of the past, and to the redemptive possibilities of love and creative expression.
(Canada, 2007, 108m, 35mm, Roadside Attractions)

PAINTERS PAINTING: NY ART SCENE - 1940-1970
6 p.m. Monday, July 7; 10a Saturday, July 12

download PDF | view PDF

In the late 1960s, the legendary documentarian Emile De Antonio began shooting what was to become the definitive documentary on the New York School painters. Since its release, however, this film has remained nearly impossible to see. This newly remastered and restored version features footage of a Who's Who of the New York art scene including Andy Warhol, Leo Castelli, Helen Frankenthaler, Henry Geldzahler, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Barnett Newman, Hans Hofmann, Jules Olitski, Philip Pavia, Larry Poons, Robert Motherwell and Kenneth Noland. The New York Times called it "a great big, cheerfully uncritical hug of a movie."
(U.S., 1973, 116m, 35mm, Arthouse Films)

WONDERS ARE MANY
starts July 11
"Probes issues of moral responsibility and scientific curiosity, and pays homage to the strange transcendence that can attend any anticipation of a thing created." –Kevin Thomas, L.A. Times

This wondrous behind-the-scenes documentary by the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Jon Else (Day After Trinity, Sing Faster) follows composer John Adams and director Peter Sellars over the course of a year as they transform the tale of J. Robert Oppenheimer into a new-form music drama. Else weaves together the intense and sometimes hilarious process of making an opera with striking newly declassified historical film of Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project and nuclear testing.
(U.S., 2006, 90m, video, Actual Films)

ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD
starts July 25
"Has the quality of a dream, at once vivid and vague, easy to grasp and somehow beyond reach."

The great Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man) confirms his standing as poet laureate of documentary film with this visually stunning exploration of the Antarctic community of McMurdo Station, headquarters of the National Science Foundation and home to 1100 people during the austral summer. Over the course of his journey, Herzog examines human nature and Mother Nature, juxtaposing breathtaking locations with the profound, surreal, and oft-absurd experiences of the marine biologists, physicists, plumbers, and truck drivers who form a society as far away from society as one can get.
(U.S., 2007, 99m, 35mm, ThinkFilm)