📆 February at Hard Light

happy thursday, hard lighters 🌞

Another big month at the movies! Shoutout to everyone who came out to La Strada this past Tuesday despite the ice and the reschedule :))

Some real heaters still coming up this month, like the debut feature from Payal Kapadia, director of last year’s much-lauded All We Imagine as Light, and a stone-cold classic with Fistful of Dollars. We’ve also been seeing a lot of excitement for A New Love in Tokyo, so be sure to get ur tickets early! Looking forward to another great month of movies w y’all, see u soon ❤️

2/3: La Strada (1954) dir. Federico Fellini

📍 Jepson Hall, Room 118

📅 February 3

⏰ doors 6:30p / starts 7p

🇮🇹 Part 1/4 of our series Hard Light at UR: A Trip to Italy

Federico Fellini’s perfect combination of his early Italian Neorealist tendencies and his adoration for Chaplin and the cirque, La Strada is a perfect road movie. The film stars Giulietta Masina as Gelsomina, sold to the strongman Zampanò to join a circus in a barren postwar Italy. There’s an immediate battle of the wills as Gelsomina remains optimistic and upbeat despite Zampanò’s brutal and impudent behavior. Their adventures on the road culminate in an unforgettable finale to what Fellini called one of his most sentimental films. Join us and consider bringing tissues!

— Warner West, Hard Light Cinema

2/8: A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021) dir. Payal Kapadia

📍 RPL Main Library

📅 February 8

⏰ doors 1:30p / starts 2p

🎥 Part 2/3 of our Experimental Documentary series

Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia, director of 2024’s Grand Prix-winning All We Imagine as Light, is one of the freshest and most exciting voices in experimental cinema today. Fusing protest documentary with romantic fiction, her debut film A Night of Knowing Nothing is a moving record of left-wing student activism at the Film and Television Institute of India. Fictional letters between an anonymous student named L. and her lover reveal the heartbreaking consequences of struggle against the right-wing, anti-Muslim Modi regime. Kapadia catalogues and dramatizes the anguish and heroic bravery of these young activists with the gentle, haunting poetic style and dreamlike textures she would later find wide acclaim for in All We Imagine as Light.

— Syd, Hard Light Cinema

2/12: A New Love in Tokyo (1994) dir. Banmei Takahashi

📍 Studio Two Three

📅 February 12

⏰ doors 7p / starts 7:30p

🌟 NEW RELEASES

In the twilight of the Japanese Bubble era, Ayumi (Reiko Kataoka) is juggling between her work as a call-girl and a life with a boyfriend unable to get into college. Soon, she meets Rei (Sawa Suzuki), a seasoned dominatrix aspiring to become a theater actor, who spends her free time rehearsing with a troupe that blurs the line between the stage and the bedroom.

Marketed in some territories as a quasi-sequel to Ryu Murakami’s landmark pinku film Tokyo Decadence (1992), Banmei Takahashi’s A New Love in Tokyo unfolds as its tonal opposite: less a somber sexploitation film than an unexpectedly sex-positive workplace comedy ripe for rediscovery. A glimpse into a bygone era of Japanese eroticism, A New Love in Tokyo provides veteran pinku and V-cinema director Takahashi (Door, Door II, Neo Chinpira: Zoom Goes the Bullet) with a bridge towards a wider range of human experience.

2/17: A Fistful of Dollars (1964) dir. Sergio Leone

📍 Jepson Hall, Room 118

📅 February 17

⏰ doors 6:30p / starts 7p

🇮🇹 Part 2/4 of our series Hard Light at UR: A Trip to Italy

A Fistful of Dollars is a lot of things: one of the most iconic spaghetti westerns, the debut of Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name persona, and a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, just to name a few. It’s also a ton of fun! Gritty with a grey morality, A Fistful of Dollars is a classic that ought to be watched, or rewatched, on the big screen, so join us at Jepson 118 for a great time.

— Warner West, Hard Light Cinema