February 26 - March 4, 2021
Un Film Dramatique (Dir. Éric Baudelaire, 2019)
From February 26 - March 4, Un Film Dramatique will be available to stream via Acropolis Cinema and Cinema Guild. Acropolis will receive 50% of all revenue.
If you'd like to offer additional support, you can make a tax deductible donation to Acropolis by clicking here.
Commissioned as a dedicated artwork for the newly constructed Dora Maar middle school on the outskirts of Paris, Un Film Dramatique is a lively portrait of the first class to attend the school, filmed over the course of four years. The group of 21 middle schoolers discuss the drama of their daily lives and experiment with cameras and equipment. They are the film’s subjects, and also its makers.
With a refreshingly uninhibited approach, Baudelaire (Letters to Max, The Anabasis of May...) offers a new perspective on the realities of our current socio-political moment that is both playful and purposeful. As the students debate the approaching elections and the immigration crisis, they also seek to answer a key political question—what are we doing here together?
A work of refreshing spontaneity and continuous revelation.
Jordan M. Smith, Nonfics
[A] rare film that conveys the capacious lyricism we tend to associate with the cinema of Agnès Varda. This is one of the year’s very best.
Michael Sicinski, Cinema Scope
A worthwhile, inspiring project – and the kind of opportunity that might go some way towards putting the kids from the 93 on a level playing field with those from more privileged backgrounds.
Cath Clark, The Gaurdian
As the years pass, the shaky camerawork grows more assured, and pupil after pupil disappears from the project, the true drama becomes time itself, which neither life nor cinema can escape.
James Lattimer, The Brooklyn Rail
A lovely and intimate work that explores the possibilities of the cinematic medium, what it means to tell a story, and the power and liberation in shaping a narrative—all through the eyes of middle-schoolers.
Demi Kampakis, Reverse Shot
March 3-12, 2021
A Shape of Things to Come (Dir. J.P. Sniadecki and Lisa Marie Malloy, 2020)
From March 4-12, A Shape of Things to Come will be available to stream via Acropolis Cinema and Grasshopper Film. Acropolis will receive 50% of all revenue.
If you'd like to offer additional support, you can make a tax deductible donation to Acropolis by clicking here.
Sundog lives out in the Sonora Desert on the Mexican border. He is an elderly gentleman, who lives off anything that the brutal nature gives him, be it a wild boar or the psychedelic poison of a toad. A Shape of Things to Come gives precedence to the sensory materiality of the desert instead of to explanations and dialogue, and moves beyond the human scale and down to animal perspectives.
It creates a world that stretches from a distant past in the ecological movements of the 1960s to a possible future in the aftermath of the apocalypse. But the border patrol agents are threatening the peace in Sundog's desert kingdom, which the armed recluse is prepared to defend. With the desert as the ultimate existential (and cinematic) setting, the film shows the relationship between humanity and nature at a critical time, when civil disobedience is the provocative answer to the most pressing questions.
Fascinating. Sublime. Has aesthetic qualities that rival anything contemporary documentary has to offer.
Matt Turner, The Brooklyn Rail
Continues an idiosyncratic method of inquiry, rooted in curiosity for all manner of individual and collective existence.
Nicolás Pereda, BOMB
A Shape of Things to Come is possessed of [El mar la mar's] appreciation of the awesome power of the desert and its sublime, aesthetic potentialities.
Carmen Gray, Modern Times Review
An intriguing film and beautiful to look at with its striking desert scenery captured by Sniadecki and Molloy who also act as their own editors and composers of the film’s haunting electronic soundscape.
Meredith Taylor, Filmuforia
A loner in America’s Southwestern desert is the elusive subject of this mysterious documentary... Malloy and Sniadecki’s minimalist portrait evokes several themes — everything from the restorative power of nature to civilization’s destructive tendencies.
Tim Grierson, Screen Daily