Also screens Thursday, October 23 | 1:45 PM | BB Sara Shahverdi is a badass. In her remote Iranian village, she sticks out like a sore thumb in her signature leather jacket and blue jeans. She lives on her own, which is enough to raise eyebrows in the deeply conservative community, and she loves riding […]

Like a man possessed, German filmmaker Christian Petzold—the auteur behind such immaculate movies as Phoenix, Barbara, and Transit—just keeps remaking Vertigo. He seems intent on reconfiguring Hitchcock’s puzzle-box until he solves the eternal mysteries of cinema. His latest cracked fairy tale, Miroirs No. 3, continues his fruitful partnership with his middle-period muse, Paula Beer, star […]

Also screens at Tuesday, October 21 | 2:30 PM | SR, and Saturday, October 25 | 2 PM | BB Aspiring YA author Edward, an avatar for people-pleasers everywhere, agrees to look after the ailing mothers of some friends who are going on an unexpected vacation. Already caring for his own mother, he finds himself […]

Film also screens on Wednesday, October 22 | 1:30 PM | BB In her elegant and thoughtful sophomore feature, Renoir, director Chie Hayakawa casts a glance backward to 1987 to tell the story of 11-year-old Fuki (fabulous newcomer Yui Suzuki). An introverted student with a vibrant internal life, Fuki has the usual stresses of a […]

This screening is sold out. We will start an in-person waitlist one hour before the screening in case we are able to release last-minute tickets. In 2022, filmmaker Jafar Panahi—one of Iran’s greatest living artists—was arrested and detained for seven months. The arrest was connected to his prior conviction for “propaganda against the Islamic Republic,” […]

It’s 2008 and BFFs Matt (Matt Johnson, BlackBerry) and Jay (Jay McCarrol) have only one goal: for their ludicrously-named band, Nirvanna, to play a gig at local venue the Rivoli in Toronto. Flash forward 17 years. It’s 2025 and BFFs Matt and Jay, older but none the wiser, have only one goal: for their ludicrously-named […]

Living in a remote North Macedonian village, teenage Ahmet (Arif Jakup) has issues: his mother has just died, his father doesn’t understand him, he’s being pulled from school to tend the family’s sheep herd full-time, his adorable young brother (Agush Agushev) refuses to speak, and the girl he’s crushing on, Aya (Dora Akan Zlatanova), is […]

Also screens on Wednesday, October 22 | 7:15 PM | BB Originally planned as a slice-of-life documentary about the everyday joys and struggles of five very different citizens of Sudan’s largest city, Khartoum turned into a completely different film with the advent of civil war in 2023, which decimated the city. It became a story […]

The screening is followed by a Q&A with director Angelo Madsen. A pioneer of the modern primitive movement and a “Gender Flex” icon, Fakir Musafar pioneered and redefined body modification through practices such as piercing, branding, corseting, and suspension, creating a radically self-expressive art that used the human body as its canvas. A photographer, performance […]

The film also screens on Thursday, October 23 | 4 PM | BB A wild, shape-shifting tale of how the quest for vengeance can fundamentally mar our humanity, Alireza Khatami’s The Things You Kill is a gritty, surprising, and thoroughly entertaining look at a man who traps himself in a cycle of violence. That man […]

Also screens on Friday, October 24 | 4:30 PM | BB Heads or Fails is an ode to chaos theory and to gross-out comedy. The Guit brothers’—Lenny and Harpo—sophomore effort, after the cult Sundance hit Mother Schmuckers, is a wonderful sugar rush of a movie. Full of pizzazz and lo-fi visual wit—not to mention a […]

At the crack of dawn, Ella and Charlie’s dad rouses them out of bed and tells them to pack their bags as quickly as possible. They hastily gather their most precious belongings, and their dog, Rex, and load up their station wagon. A police officer stops them just before they leave and asks the dad […]

Oscar Restrepo is an instantly indelible character, a wonderfully pathetic creature prone to combustible fits of self-pity, mouth-breathing quasi-Napoleon Dynamite blankness, rapid-fire soliloquies, and genuine pathos. Ubeimar Rios’ gloriously rumpled, totally unselfconscious performance anchors this bitter-pill tragicomedy, sneakily one of the year’s funniest movies, that could go toe-to-toe with prime Baumbach. Oscar’s obsession with poetry […]

100th Anniversary Screening This milestone birthday for Sergei Eisenstein’s revolutionary action epic also celebrates the birth of one of the fundamental building blocks of cinema. With this silent masterpiece, which was commissioned to mark the 20th anniversary of the first Russian revolution, Eisenstein innovated and perfected the art of montage. In his, and his Soviet […]

There are parties that you just know will end badly. But you wouldn’t miss them for the world. Hedda, a vibrant update/re-telling of Ibsen’s classic Hedda Gabler by director Nia DaCosta (Candyman), uses such a party as its centerpiece. Newly wed and deeply dissatisfied, thrill-seeking Hedda (Tessa Thompson) encourages her weak husband to throw a […]

The film also screens on Thursday, October 23 | 7 PM | BB The war in Ukraine has been well documented as an ongoing atrocity in a number of brilliant recent films (the Oscar-winning 20 Days in Mariupol, Porcelain War, Viktor, The Invasion, etc.), but Kateryna Gornostai’s film is something different. Using no narration or […]

The film also screens on Saturday, October 18 | 12 PM | FH The October 18 screening is followed by a panel discussion about Alzheimer’s resources in the Chittenden County area, featuring representatives from the organizations as well as director Heidi Levitt. In 2019, art director Charlie Hess was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. In […]

Told in four braided stories, each set in a different time period in the same residence in the Altmark region, Sound of Falling traces a lineage of girls coming of age in Germany across a godforsaken century. Each character—Alma in the early 20th century, Erika in the 1940s, Angelika in the 1980s, and Lenka in […]

The film also screens on Friday, October 24  |  1:45 PM  |  BB The Friday, October 24 screening is followed by a panel discussion and Q&A featuring local and regional librarians. In these divisive times, school librarians suddenly find themselves on the front lines of the culture wars. In some states, they can face prison […]

Winner of the Queer Palm and Best Actress awards at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Hafsia Herzi’s The Little Sister is a tale about a young woman working to reconcile her identity and her family’s worldview. Fatima (Nadia Melitti) is the youngest of three adult children in a loving but conservative French-Algerian household. At home, […]