Acropolis Cinema
Bringing experimental, international, and undistributed films to Los Angeles
May 11, 2022
Los conductos (Camilo Restrepo, 2020)
Time: 8:00pm
Location: 2220 Arts + Archives
Address: 2220 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90057
Los Angeles premiere!
Pinky is on the run. At night the empty streets smell of the apocalypse and the city seems to be on fire. Narcotics swirl through the veins and the air. Having freed himself from the clutches of a sect led by a certain “padre” and determined to take his fate into his own hands, he is now holed up in an illegal T-shirt factory, surrounded by paints, slogans and heat presses. Pinky is looking for the light at the end of the tunnel, but ghosts are breathing down his neck. He is running for his life, and Colombia is on fire. But Colombia is alive.
After his highly promising short films, Camilo Restrepo has now made a debut feature that is as visionary, physical and elastic as the 16mm celluloid on which it was shot. The deeper Los conductos dives into the nightmarish and the hallucinatory, the tougher, more political and hungrier for reality the film becomes. In a narrative downward spiral, it conveys with the utmost precision the survival instincts of a character who is unwittingly fighting to liberate an entire country, perhaps even a continent. Restrepo uses the medium of cinema to transform an allegorical exploration of one’s roots into an irrepressible desire to change the world. Winner of the Best First Feature prize at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival.
Stunning. Hallucinatory. A swirling, cryptic journey into a hellish Medellín night.
Jonathan Romney, Sight & Sound
Vivid and dreamlike. Nearly every sequence contains a moment of sudden, arresting beauty.
Clinton Krute, BOMB Magazine
Every frame is gorgeous. Restrepo’s debut feature burns white-hot with the misterioso story of an outlaw at large.
Devika Girish, Film Comment
Striking and evocative. A fever-dream. An arresting, committed performance from newcomer Luis Felipe Lozano.
Nikki Baughan, Screen
Like a forge in which volatility becomes the rule, where narrative is not so much subject to contingency as it is inherently contingent, exposed to violent convulsions and capricious digressions.
Jay Kuehner, Cinema Scope
May 18, 2022
Inland Empire (David Lynch, 2006)
Time: 7:30pm
Location: 2220 Arts + Archives
Address: 2220 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90057
New 4K remaster supervised by David Lynch! Author Melissa Anderson in person! Co-presented by Mezzanine.
David Lynch’s tenth movie—which he has claimed to be his final feature—is also his most intuitive and defiantly avant-garde film, and one of the most significant digital works of the new millennium. Featuring an unforgettably intense performance by Laura Dern, the film was developed out of Lynch’s early-2000s web-short experiments and a 14-page monologue written for Dern, only to expand into a dense, nightmarish web of intrigue, with déjà vu encounters and nefarious doppelgängers appearing within and beyond a cursed Hollywood studio system. Shot piecemeal over the course of a year before Lynch self-distributed it in 2006, Inland Empire uses the freedom and harshness of digital video to exploit blown-out, muddy images and freakish close-ups, while featuring some of the most haunting original music of his career (by Lynch and Chrysta Bell). Emotional and absorbing, this cinematic mise-en-âbyme is still as unclassifiable as it was when first released.
Acropolis and Mezzanine co-present a special screening of Lynch’s newly remastered epic on occasion of Melissa Anderson’s monograph on the film—part of Fireflies Press’s Decadent Editions, which cover essential works of world cinema from the first decade of the 2000s. Copies of the book INLAND EMPIRE, including a limited number signed by Anderson, will be available to purchase after the screening.
In person: Melissa Anderson
About Mezzanine: Developed and overseen by Micah Gottlieb, Mezzanine is an irregular independent and revival film series based in Los Angeles. Programs are frequently done in collaboration with local artists, filmmakers, writers, curators and other luminaries from specific disciplines. For more information visit mezzaninefilm.com
Extraordinary, savagely uncompromised.
Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
Seems like a transmission from cinema's future.
Jonathan Rothkopf, Time Out
The Atlas Shrugged of narrative avant-garde films, compulsively watchable and insanely self-devouring.
Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine
A sinister and critical portrait of Hollywood... Lynch's best and most experimental feature since Eraserhead.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
One of the ten best films of the year. Everything in Inland Empire is uncanny, unmoored, and out of joint. The major special effect is the creepy merging of spaces or times.
J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
June 18, 2022
Déjà vu: A Hong Sangsoo Double Bill
Tale of Cinema & Nobody's Daughter Haewon (2005/2013)
Time: 5:00pm: Nobody's Daughter Haewon | 8:00pm: Tale of Cinema
Location: 2220 Arts + Archives
Address: 2220 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90057
Los Angeles launch of Dennis Lim's new book on Hong Sangsoo!
Dennis Lim in person!
Hong Sangsoo is one of world cinema's most distinguished and prolific filmmakers. His sixth feature, Tale of Cinema, uses a multilayered film-within-a-film to tell two stories: that of a depressive young man who forms a suicide pact with a friend...and that of a filmmaker who sees a film he believes was based on his life, and who meets its lead actress in a collision of fantasy and reality.
In Nobody's Daughter Haewon, a chamber piece at once eloquently simple and deceptively complex, a young film student named Haewon (Jeong Eun-chae) finds herself at loose ends when her mother moves to Canada. She clings to her married lover, a filmmaker/professor (Lee Sun-kyun), and is bowled over by the insights of another professor (Kim Eui-seong) visiting from San Diego. Meanwhile, she struggles to find her own way and her own identity as we all do when we’re young: a little bit at a time, encounter by encounter, experience by experience, in reality and in dreams. (AGFA/Filmlinc)
Acropolis presents a special double bill of two rarely screened Hong features on occasion of Dennis Lim's monograph on the film—part of Fireflies Press’s Decadent Editions, which cover essential works of world cinema from the first decade of the 2000s. Copies of the book TALE OF CINEMA, including a limited number signed by Lim, will be available to purchase after the screening. Lim will participate in a discussion of Hong's career between the two screenings.
In person: Dennis Lim
Tale of Cinema is simply told but resonates with profound meaning.
Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine
Nobody's Daughter Haewon is teasing, poignant, enigmatic. Think of Eric Rohmer, add sadness, set in Seoul.
Nigel Andrews, Financial Times
A crucial film. [In Tale of Cinema], Hong delineates character with the lightest of strokes... rarely have intimate love scenes been so bluntly physical yet so dramatically precise.
Richard Brody, The New Yorker
Emotionally honest in its late-bloomer humility... [Tale of Cinema is] a love-story diptych whose two halves reflect and refract upon one another through the all-seeing eye of film itself.
Aaron Hillis, Premiere Magazine
By the end of Nobody's Daughter Haewon, there's a feeling of having completed the routines the film has set out and, perhaps, achieved a sort of understanding. It might be too much to hope for catharsis, much less transcendence, but at least we might be able to move forward.
Leo Goldsmith, Reverse Shot