Trailers Schmailers

Saved by Language

Can a language save your life? Yes it can, even an ancient one from the 15th century. Saved by Language tells the story of Moris Albahari, a Sephardic Jew from Sarajevo (born 1930), who spoke Ladino/Judeo-Spanish, his mother tongue, to survive the Holocaust. Moris used Ladino to communicate with an Italian Colonel who helped him escape to a Partizan refuge after he ran away from the train taking Yugoslavian Jews to Nazi death camps. By speaking in Ladino to a Spanish-speaking US pilot in 1944 he was able to survive and lead the pilot, along with his American and British colleagues, to a safe Partizan airport.

Afro Promo

Co-curated by Jenni Olson and the late Black gay activist Karl Knapper, this entertaining showcase of vintage movie trailers traces the evolution of African American cinema through its most crucial period, 1952-1976. Filled with insights on race and social dynamics, this fascinating compendium of coming attractions explores an extensive range of stylistic approaches—Blaxploitation, Comedy, Music Bio, Plantation Drama and more—offering an outrageous joyride through motion picture history. Beyond mere camp, these marvelously condensed gems crystallize a range of African American identities and personalities, tracking the meteoric careers of Sidney Poitier, James Earl Jones, Billy Dee Williams, Richard Pryor, Pam Grier and others through their bold performances in movies both hugely popular and practically forgotten. Afro Promo provides a compact glimpse at the representation of African Americans through twenty-five dynamic years of American cinema history.

42nd Street Forever, Volume 5: Alamo Drafthouse Cinema

WELCOME TO THE ALAMO DRAFTHOUSE CINEMA, the most awesome post-modern hot spot for exploitation movie revival, deep in the heart of Texas! Home to world-famous events such as The Quentin Tarantino Film Fest, Fantastic Fest and Butt-Numb-A-Thon, the Alamo is one of the last places on earth where you can still see grindhouse classics such as THE DEVIL WITHIN HER and MAD MONKEY KUNG FU. Now, the Alamo has opened their vaults for a peek at some of the most outrageous cinematic gems from several golden ages of sleaze cinema. Digitally re-mastered in high-definition from the actual reels that show every week at the Alamo, this exciting edition of the 42ND STREET FOREVER series is the most bizarre, the most terrifying and the most hilarious one yet!

Security Treaty

An early experimental film by Toshio Matsumoto. Produced as part of the student riots in Japan at the start of the 1960s, Matsumoto uses collage, archival footage, and impassioned narration to create an expressive, visceral criticism of the US-Japan Security Treaty.

300 Ton Trailer

A short documentary about a trailer weighing over 300 tons that carries material for the construction of a dam toward Tokyo.

Our Aotearoa

An animated documentary that speaks to immigrants' personal experiences living in Aotearoa, exploring themes of racism, discrimination, loss, loneliness, and maintaining cultural ties while living in another country.

Trailer Camp

Film archivist and former director of the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Film Festival Jenni Olson created this fast-paced and often funny, campy 75-minute film comprised entirely of spliced together movie trailers. Some of the segments have themes such as a breezy look back at John Travolta's career that includes trailers from such films as Saturday Night Fever, Staying Alive, Grease, Perfect, and Moment by Moment. Other trailers include Mae West in Sextette, the disco camper Thank God It's Friday, Raquel Welch in Kansas City Bomber, Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew and the rarely seen Chastity, the serious acting debut of Cher.

Divan

Pearl Gluck travels to Hungary to retrieve a turn-of-the-century family heirloom: a couch upon which esteemed rabbis once slept. En route for the ancestral divan, Pearl encounters a colorful cast of characters who provide guidance and inspiration.

Sick & Nasty Classic Porn Previews

A compilation of 32 trailers from the golden age of cinema roughies.

That's Action

Actor Robert Culp introduces trailers for and scenes from movies from Action International Pictures.

Bloodlines

A moving meditation on guilt and reconciliation, Bloodlines explores the unwritten cost of war and genocide on future generations - of both victims and perpetrators. As Bettina Goering, grandniece of Nazi war criminal Herman Goering, searches for a way to come to terms with her heritage, she meets Ruth Rich, a painter and daughter of Holocaust survivors. At a time when seemingly irreconcilable divisions between groups are tearing the world apart, this deeply hopeful film is a beautiful testament to the power of dialogue and post-conflict reconciliation.

Phantasia

X-ray images were invented in 1895, the same year in which the Lumière brothers presented their respective invention in what today is considered to be the first cinema screening. Thus, both cinema and radiography fall within the scopic regime inaugurated by modernity. The use of X-rays on two sculptures from the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum generates images that reveal certain elements of them that would otherwise be invisible to our eyes. These images, despite being generally created for technical or scientific purposes, seem to produce a certain form of 'photogénie': they lend the radiographed objects a new appearance that lies somewhere between the material and the ethereal, endowing them with a vaporous and spectral quality. It is not by chance that physics and phantasmagoria share the term 'spectrum' in their vocabulary.

Secret Courage: The Walter Suskind Story

We Were the Scenery

In 1975, soon after the end of the Vietnam War, Hoa Thi Le and Hue Nguyen Che fled the country on a small boat. After nine days at sea, they docked in the Philippines, where they were utilized as background extras for “Apocalypse Now.”

Bullets And Blueberries

The Holocaust began with the indiscriminate mass shootings by the Einsatzgruppen in the bloodlands of Eastern Europe and was perfected in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. “Bullets And Blueberries” explores the motives, methods and madness of the perpetrators, using never-before-seen images captured by the killers themselves — images that fully capture the banality of evil.

Going Attractions: The Definitive Story of the Movie Palace

Celebrating the splendor and grandeur of the great cinemas of the United States, built when movies were the acme of entertainment and the stories were larger than life, as were the venues designed to show them. The film also tracks the eventual decline of the palaces, through to today’s current preservation efforts. A tribute to America’s great art form and the great monuments created for audiences to enjoy them in.

Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas

An offbeat, irreverent musical documentary that tells the story of a group of Jewish songwriters, including Irving Berlin, Mel Tormé, Jay Livingston, Ray Evans, Gloria Shayne Baker and Johnny Marks, who wrote the soundtrack to Christianity’s most musical holiday. It’s an amazing tale of immigrant outsiders who became irreplaceable players in pop culture’s mainstream – a generation of songwriters who found in Christmas the perfect holiday in which to imagine a better world, and for at least one day a year, make us believe.

We Exist Triply

A sock puppet explores a family history told from the perspective of a mother and father.

Time Keeps Marching On

An undocumented immigrant explores his and his family's immigration trauma while grasping hope through a voicemail.

Dear Thirteen

A nuanced portrait of a new generation, Dear Thirteen is a cinematic time capsule of coming of age in today’s world. Through the eyes of nine thirteen-year-olds, we see how pressing social, geographical and political challenges are shaping, and being shaped by, young people: rising anti-Semitism in Europe, guns in America, gender identity and racial divisions across Australia and Asia. With no adult commentary outside the filmmaker, Dear Thirteen offers an intimate view into the universal uncertainty inherent in growing up.