Winner of Cannes’ Un Certain Regard Special Jury Prize, Elena is a gripping, modern twist on the classic noir thriller. Sixty-something spouses Vladimir and Elena uneasily share his palatial Moscow apartment. He’s a still-virile, wealthy businessman and she’s his dowdy former nurse who has clearly “married up.” Estranged from his own wild-child daughter, Vladimir openly despises his wife’s freeloading son and family. When a sudden illness and an unexpected reunion threaten the dutiful housewife’s potential inheritance, she must hatch a desperate plan. Masterfully crafted by award-winning Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev (Golden Globe nominee The Return) and featuring evocative, Hitchcockian music by Philip Glass, Elena is a subtly stylish exploration of crime, punishment, and human nature.

“A wise and impeccably controlled drama that finds Russian helmer Andrei Zvyagintsev in outstanding form…Zvyagintsev spins a taut, engrossing yarn about a coveted inheritance, cruel class differences, and quietly monstrous misdeeds.” -Variety

In Russian with English subtitles.

Directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2011
109 minutes
Official Site

In a small, remote, mountain-top primary school in the Kenyan bush, hundreds of children are jostling for a chance at the free education newly promised by the Kenyan government. One applicant causes astonishment when he knocks on the door of the school. He is Maruge, a Mau Mau veteran in his 80s, who is desperate to learn to read at this stage of his life. He fought for the liberation of his country and now feels he must have the chance of an education so long denied, even if it means sitting in a classroom alongside six-year-olds.

Moved by his passionate plea, head teacher Jane Obinchu supports his struggle to gain admission, facing fierce opposition from parents and officials who don’t want to waste a precious school place on such an old man.

Based on a true story, The First Grader explores the remarkable relationships Maruge builds with his classmates some 80 years his junior with vitality and humor. Through Maruge’s journey, we are taken back to the shocking untold story of British colonial rule 50 years earlier when Maruge fought for the freedom of his country, eventually enduring the extreme and harsh conditions of the British detention camps.

Directed by Justin Chadwick, The First Grader is a heart-warming and inspiring tale of one man’s fight for what he believes is his right in order to overcome the burdens of his past. It is a triumphant testimony to the transforming force of education.

“Irresistible! An inspiring story about the universal human urge to make our lives better.” -indieWIRE

Directed by Justin Chadwick, 2010
103 minutes
Official Site

Rousseau is a bestselling crime novelist from Paris, troubled by writer’s block. Candice Lecoeur is a local beauty, gracing the famous Belle de Jura cheese packaging, and who has gotten it into her head that she might well be the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe. The two will meet in the coldest village in France, but only after Candice has been found dead. The case was closed before it even opened and the cause of death declared suicide by sleeping pills. Rousseau is the only one who doesn’t buy it. Reality turns out to be stranger than fiction—and a source of inspiration—as Rousseau uncovers the truth about Candice’s past and her untimely death. Boasting strong lead performances and gorgeous wintertime landscapes, this off-beat mystery breathes fresh life into the thriller genre.

“A hint of Twin Peaks and a large helping of the Coen Brothers in this offbeat, cleverly crafted French thriller…perhaps the closest thing to Fargo to come along in a long while.” -The Hollywood Reporter

In French with English subtitles.

Directed by Gerald Hustache-Mathieu, 2011
102 minutes
Official Site

Q & A with producer and co-writer David D’Arcy will follow the Friday, June 29 screening.

Portrait of Wally, Egon Schiele’s tender picture of his mistress, Walburga (“Wally”) Neuzil, is the pride of the Leopold Museum in Vienna. But for 13 years the painting was locked up in New York, caught in a legal battle between the Austrian museum and the Jewish family from whom the Nazis seized the painting in 1939.

The documentary Portrait of Wally traces the history of this iconic image—from Schiele’s gesture of affection toward his young lover, to the theft of the painting from Lea Bondi, a Jewish art dealer fleeing Vienna for her life, to the post-war confusion and subterfuge that evoke The Third Man, to the surprise resurfacing of “Wally” on loan to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan in 1997.

In 1997, when the heirs of art dealer Lea Bondi asked MoMA to hold the painting in New York, MoMA and the Leopold Museum dug in their heels and refused. District Attorney Robert Morgenthau issued a subpoena and launched a criminal investigation. A 13 year battle in court followed, tracking the course of a Holocaust property crime and reopening the wounds of one of the century’s worst tragedies—all at a time when the prices of Egon Schiele’s works rose faster than those of any painter on the art market.

Schiele collector Ronald Lauder found himself caught between several loyalties—he was chairman of MoMA and the founder of the Commission for Art Recovery, an organization committed to returning looted art to the Jews who lost it to the Nazis. Lauder sided with the Museum, and against the Jewish family as did all the museums in New York—even the Jewish Museum.

“An ace legal thriller, spinning a web of shame that snags everything from the Austrian government to America’s most beloved not-for-profits.” —Time Out New York

Directed by Andrew Shea, 2011
90 minutes
Official Site

“The Multidimensional Fate of 1912 Schiele Portrait” by Nicolas Rapold, The New York Times, Thursday, May 10, 2012.

In this warm-hearted portrait of the French harbor city that gives the film its name, fate throws young African refugee Idrissa (Blondin Miguel) into the path of Marcel Marx (André Wilms), a well-spoken bohemian who works as a shoe shiner. With innate optimism and the unwavering support of his community, Marcel stands up to officials doggedly pursuing the boy for deportation. A political fairy tale that exists somewhere between the reality of contemporary France and the classic cinema of Jean-Pierre Melville and Marcel Carné, Le Havre is a charming, deadpan delight.

In French with English subtitles.

“A stylized and sentimental fairy tale about the way the world might be…Aki Kaurismäki has become a major inheritor of the comic-humanist tradition of Charlie Chaplin, Jean Renoir, and Jacques Tati.” -The New York Times

Directed by Aki Kaurismäki, 2011
93 minutes
Official Site

David Kern is a hapless waiter who falls in love with an attractive literature student named Marie. Fate intervenes when he buys a table at a flea market and discovers a manuscript for a book in its drawers. It’s a romantic tale that moves him deeply so he decides to show it to her, pretending he’s the actual author. Indeed she loves it too, and their relationship blossoms. What he doesn’t know is that she sends the manuscript to a publisher who quickly transforms it into a bestseller. Suddenly thrust into the world of celebrity David struggles with keeping up the ruse, especially when the real author makes his presence known.

In German with English subtitles.

Directed by Alain Gsponer, 2009
107 minutes
Official Site

Marina Abramović is one of the most compelling artists of our time. Seductive, fearless, and outrageous, she has been redefining what art is for nearly 40 years. Using her own body as a vehicle, pushing herself beyond her physical and mental limits, and at times risking her life in the process, Marina creates performances that challenge, shock, and move us. Through her and with her, boundaries are crossed, consciousness expanded-and art as we know it is reborn.

The feature-length documentary film followed the artist as she prepared for what may have been the most challenging performance of her life—a new piece that was the highlight of a major retrospective of her work, which took place at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2010.

To be given a retrospective at one of the world’s premiere museums is, for any living artist, the most exhilarating sort of milestone. For Marina, it is far more—it is the chance to finally silence the question she has been hearing over and over again for four decades: “But why is this art?”

For the retrospective, Marina performed an ambitious new work, aptly titled “The Artist is Present.” All day, every day, from early March until the end of May, 2010, she sat at a table in the museum’s atrium, in what she describes as a “square of light.” Members of the audience were invited to join her, one at a time, at the opposite end of the table. There was no talking, no touching, no overt communication of any kind. Her objective was to achieve a luminous state of being and then transmit it—to create what she calls “an energy dialogue” with the audience.

With total access granted by Abramovic and The Museum of Modern Art, Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present is a mesmerizing cinematic journey inside the world of radical performance, and an intimate, engaging portrait of a woman who draws no distinction between life and art.

“Breathtaking…Extraordinary. The movie’s power as a potent secondhand art high is damned near peerless.” -Time Out New York

Directed by Matthew Akers, 2012
105 minutes
Official Site

Twenty-five years after rising to international acclaim in Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, Daniel Auteuil returns to the world of Marcel Pagnol for his first work as director with this celebrated remake of the 1940s classic.

Auteuil stars as the eponymous well-digger Pascale, a widower living with his six daughters in the Provence countryside at the start of World War I. His eldest, Patricia (the luminous Astrid Bergès-Frisbey), has returned home from Paris to help raise her sisters, and Pascale dreams of marrying her off to his loyal assistant Felipe (Kad Merad). But when she’s impregnated by a wealthy young pilot (Nicolas Duvauchelle) who promptly abandons her for the frontlines, Pascale is left to contend with the consequences.

An exquisitely crafted, sun-drenched melodrama, set to a score by Academy Award-nominee Alexandre Desplat (The King’s Speech), the film captures all the warmth and humanist spirit of Pagnol’s original work.

In French with English subtitles.

“The humanist spirit of Gallic novelist-director Marcel Pagnol is alive and well in the old-fashionedly sincere The Well-Digger’s Daughter, a competent remake of Pagnol’s eponymous 1940 melodrama about a working-class girl impregnated by a young pilot who’s sent off to war.” -Variety

Directed by Daniel Auteuil, 2011
105 minutes
Official Site