Founded in 2014 to explore “the most expansive possible view of documentary film,” Film Society of Lincoln Center’s annual Art of the Real series has sustained its singular legacy as the premiere North American  showcase for international non-fiction and hybrid works. Since its  inaugural edition, curators Dennis Lim and Rachael Rakes have shed light  onto otherwise overlooked, boundary-pushing films that blend  traditional conceptions of reality with formalistic and avant-garde  processes for category-defying results. Observational documentaries and  their familiar form always have their place, here alongside essayistic,  lyrical tone poems and phenomenological, personal history lessons. Along  with UCLA Film & Television Archive, Acropolis Cinema is proud to  offer a West Coast home to a curated selection of these spectacular  works from the past five years of Art of the Real, all of which are  premiering in Los Angeles for the very first time. Screenings will start  at the Archive’s home at the Billy Wilder Theater, and will continue at  the Downtown Independent into the week. Curated by Jordan Cronk, Paul Malcolm, KJ Relth, and Robert Koehler.

Special thanks to Dennis Lim, Rachael Rakes, and Film Society of Lincoln Center

Funding for this series was generously provided by:

Tadashi Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities

UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies

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Additional funding provided by:

UCLA Confucius Institute

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*Note: Tickets to opening weekend screenings at the Billy Wilder Theater can be purchased through the UCLA Film & Television Archive's website.

SCHEDULE:

Friday, January 11 (Opening Night): Billy Wilder Theater, 7:30pm

- INFINITE FOOTBALL (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania, 2018, 70 min.)

The  latest from Romanian New Wave master Porumboiu is a hilarious and  politically incisive portrait of a bureaucrat who dreams of radically  revising the rules of the world’s most popular sport.​

- Panel discussion about the evolution of contemporary nonfiction cinema with  Art of the Real curators Dennis Lim and Rachael Rakes and director  Kazuhiro Soda (Inland Sea). Moderated by Robert Koehler.

- THE SECOND GAME (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania, 2014, 97min.)

Director Corneliu Porumboiu watches a 25-year-old historic soccer match with his  father, who was the referee, in this look at the ways in which we  relate to the past and, to a certain extent, to our parents.

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Saturday, January 12: Billy Wilder Theater, 7:30pm

- THE ANABASIS OF MAY AND FUSAKO SHIGENOBU, MASAO ADACHI, AND 27 YEARS WITHOUT IMAGES (Éric Baudelaire, 2011, France, 66 min.)

Conceptualized  while researching the Japanese Red Army during a residency in Japan,  Eric Baudelaire’s first feature is a probing and often mesmerizing weave  of Super-8 footage, television clips, film excerpts, and archival  miscellany.

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- INLAND SEA (Kazuhiro Soda, Japan, 2018, 122 min.)

Mrs.  Koso, an elderly fishmonger, and Mr. Murata, an 86-year-old fisherman  who still takes his boat out daily, are captured in this  vérité-inflected black and white documentary. In person: Kazuhiro Soda

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Sunday, January 13: Billy Wilder Theater, 7:00pm

- UNTITLED (Michael Glawogger & Monika Willi, Austria/Germany, 2017, 107 min)

The  late Michael Glawogger’s longtime editor combines the remarkable  footage from the director’s final, unfinished project with excerpts from  his journals for a revealing and moving elegy.

​- STREETSCAPES [DIALOGUE] (Heinz Emigholz, Germany, 2017, 132 min.)

A  director speaks at length to a psychoanalyst, confiding his obsessions,  fears, ideas about cinema, and psychological blocks. Emigholz’s magnum  opus is a playful, moving treatise on trauma and architecture in which  foreground and background carry equal weight.​

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Monday, January 14: Downtown Independent, 8:00pm

- OPTIMISM (Deborah Stratman, US, 2018, 15 min.)

A multilayered portrait of the residents of Dawson City, Yukon Territory, who live in perpetual winter and hibernal darkness.

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- WHAT MEANS SOMETHING (Ben Rivers, UK, 2016, 67 min.)

Ben Rivers’s latest exploration of solitude is an intimate, real-time  portrait of the painter Rose Wylie at work in her home studio in the  English countryside, and a film that truly illuminates a singular  creative process.

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- LE PARADIS (Alain Cavalier, France, 2014, 70 min.)

Voted one of the 10 best films of 2014 by Cahiers du Cinéma, this series of domestic sketches, shot by the 83-year-old Alain Cavalier (Thérèse, Le Combat dans l’île) in his own home, is a subtle, serene, and deeply touching meditation on how it feels to approach life’s end.

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Tuesday, January 15: Downtown Independent, 8:00pm

- ALL STILL ORBIT (Dane Komljen & James Lattimer, Croatia/Serbia/Germany/Brazil, 2015, 22 min.)

A  philosophical-historical investigation of Brasília. Tracing its origins  from Saint Don Bosco’s (possibly apocryphal) dream in 1883, the  filmmakers use a lyrical voiceover and hyper-tinted digital images of  the city and its environs to question the idealism of the city’s  international style.

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- IEC LONG (João Pedro Rodrigues & João Rui Guerra da Mata, Portugal, 2014, 31 min.)

Interweaving  archival footage, photographs, figurine-based reconstructions, oral  testimony, slices of contemporary life, and the nearly omnipresent sound  of fireworks exploding in the distance, Rodrigues and Guerra da Mata  have crafted another multivalent and eclectic exploration of memory,  place, and the politics underlying both.

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- POET ON A BUSINESS TRIP (Ju Anqi, China, 2015, 103 min.)

A  bawdy, absurdist journey across China’s remote Xinjiang Uygur  Autonomous Region that yields 16 funny and astute poems. Grand Prize  winner of the 2015 Jeonju International Film Festival. In person: Ju Anqi

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Wednesday, January 16: Downtown Independent, 8:00pm

- METEORS (Gürcan Keltek, Turkey, 2017, 84 min.)

Gürcan  Keltek’s poetic, engrossing debut feature captures a critical moment  from 2015 in the Turkish-Kurdish conflict via otherworldly  black-and-white images, gradually arriving at a political truth that  verges on the cosmic.

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- WHITE OUT, BLACK IN (Adirley Queirós, Brazil, 2014, 95 min.)

Two  men partially paralyzed by police violence in the 1980s describe living  under institutionalized racism against a science-fiction backdrop in  Adirley Queiros’s ingenious contemporary take on Afrofuturism.

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Thursday, January 17 (Closing Night): Downtown Independent, 8:00pm

- CASANOVA GENE (Luise Donschen, Germany, 2018. 67 min.)

Donschen’s  feature debut is a funny, eclectic, and seductive film about seduction,  veering radically from fiction to observational documentary to  single-subject interview (including John Malkovich) to landscape and  back again.

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- VICTORY DAY (Sergei Losnitza, Germany, 2018, 94 min)

Loznitsa’s  incisive film documents the annual gathering at the Soviet Memorial at  Berlin’s Treptower Park to commemorate the Red Army’s defeat of the  Nazis, capturing the event in all its patriotic spectacle and ecstatic  strangeness.