Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project at the IFI 🌍
MAY 5TH — 26TH
The IFI is delighted to present a selection of films from The World Cinema Project, a programme of The Film Foundation, founded by Martin Scorsese, which is dedicated to protecting and preserving film history.
THE STRANGER AND THE FOG
(GHARIBEH VA MEH)
DIRECTOR: BAHRAM BEYZAIE
Film info: 140 mins, Iran, 1974, Digital, Subtitled
Screening Saturday 18th at 15.30
Impossible to see for decades, Bahram Beyzaie’s dazzling The Stranger and the Fog, about Ayat, the titular stranger who arrives, bloodied, bruised, and amnesiac, to an isolated fishing village on a drifting boat, is an endlessly symbolic tale in which uncontrollable forces of nature, superstition, ritual, and violence disorient the viewer in exhilarating ways, now presented in a new digital restoration from the original camera negative.
As Ayat recuperates, he marries a local widow, despite resistance from the community. Years later, a group of armed men come in search of Ayat.
CHESS OF THE WIND
(SHATRANJ-E BAAD)
DIRECTOR: MOHAMMAD REZA ASLANI
Film info: 93 mins, Iran, 1976, Digital, Subtitled
Screening Sunday 19th at 15.30
Screened publicly just once before it was banned and then lost for decades, this jewel of Iranian cinema can now take its place as one of the most singular works of the country’s New Wave.
A stylised murder mystery, Chess of the Wind unfolds in a candlelit mansion where a web of greed, violence, and betrayal ensnares the heirs to a family fortune as they vie for control of their recently deceased matriarch’s estate. An exquisitely controlled mood piece that erupts in a subversive final act in which class conventions, gender roles, and even time itself are upended with shocking ferocity.
INSIANG
DIRECTOR: LINO BROCKA
Film info: 124 mins, Philippines, 1976, Digital, Subtitled
Screening Saturday 25th at 13.30
Jealousy and violence take centre stage in this claustrophobic melodrama, a tautly constructed character study set in the slums of Manila. Lino Brocka crafts an eviscerating portrait of an innocent daughter and her bitter mother as women scorned. Insiang leads a quiet life dominated by household duties, but after she is raped by her mother’s lover and abandoned by the young man who claims to care for her, she exacts vicious revenge.
A savage commentary on the degradations of urban poverty, especially for women, Insiang was the first Philippine film ever to play at Cannes.
PIXOTE
(PIXOTE, A LEI DO MAIS FRACO)
DIRECTOR: HÉCTOR BABENCO
Film info: 128 mins, Brazil, 1981, Digital, Subtitled
Screening Sunday 26th at 15.30
With its blend of realism and humanity, Héctor Babenco’s electrifying look at lost youth fighting to survive on the bottom rung of Brazilian society helped put the country’s cinema on the international map.
Shot with documentary-like immediacy on the streets of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Pixote follows the eponymous preteen runaway (the heartbreaking Fernando Ramos da Silva, whose own too-short life tragically mirrored that of his character) as he escapes a nightmarish juvenile detention centre only to descend into a life of crime alongside a makeshift family of fellow outcasts.
