It’s a happening: film as a sensual, non-narrative artform ripe for experimentation. “Aperitivo” is the latest flowering of Upstate’s intermittent Apparatus series of what-is-it work. The word “aperitivo” is from the Latin meaning “to open” and inspired an Italian tradition intended to open your stomach and stimulate your appetite. Open your mind to nine free-wheeling films, each accompanied by an advent-calendar inspired snack box. It will include: “Field Resistance” (dir. Emily Drummer, 16 min.), “The Great Grand Union Streak, 1974” (dir. Niles Jaeger, 3 min.), “Project Gasbuggy” (dir. Carl Elsaesser, 6 min.) “Sound Speed” (dir. Alexander Cunningham, 5 min.), “Humans Why?” (dir. Polina Malikin, 4 min.), “Serpentine” (dir. Bronwyn Maloney, 3 min.), Goodbye Thelma (dir. Jessica Bardsley, 13 min.) and “Carlin” (8 min.) featuring a live performance by director Brent Green.

A massive surveillance, militarized and carceral apparatus has been built to capture, imprison and deport millions of immigrants. But in the shadow of this border industrial-complex, immigrants are building a movement envisioning a future rooted in human rights. We meet Kaxh Mura’l, a Mayan man who would qualify for legal asylum but must undergo Kafka-esque challenges and Gabriela Castañeda, a Dreamer and mother whose citizenship was suddenly revoked. Then there are scholars who describe themselves as “digital humanists,” who trace the flow of money toward politicians on all sides of the issue. (dir. Pamela Yates, U.S./Mexico, 2025, 110 min.)

In her new memoir, “Care and Feeding,” Laurie Woolever looks back on 20 tumultuous, exhilarating years with two of America’s biggest celebrity chefs. It's a candid account of tending to high-wattage celebrities, and of working as a woman, wife and mother in a wildly male-dominated industry. It’s also a reckoning with the high-risk behaviors that tied the three together. She will be in conversation with the legendary author Ruth Reichl, interspersed by some video clips from her colorful history.

Begun in the summer of 1968 near Mt. Shasta in California, Black Bear Ranch was a utopian free-love experiment that attracted hippies and political idealists seeking “to get away from America.” They pressured movie stars and rock musicians to donate to their cause. A dozen people were expected to live there, but 40 showed up, then it quickly swelled to 100. The commune’s scorn for the “bourgeois decadence” of couples resulted in bed swapping before they paired off and had babies. This affectionate, keen-eyed documentary, now celebrating its 20th anniversary, intertwines present-day interviews with vintage home movies reinforcing the sense that the old commune and the new one are one and the same. (dir. Jonathan Berman, U.S., 2005, 78 min.)

Math is a gatekeeper in the US. In an increasingly algorithm-and-data-driven 21st century, assumptions made about a child’s mathematical ability affect their odds of finding future success. This revealing and urgent documentary weaves together a mosaic of voices and stories across generations and professions to explain the detrimental effects of declining math skills on civic participation, legal rulings, and fulfilling careers. Do we want an America in which most of us don’t consider ourselves “math people”? Why does math proficiency go down as students grow up? Or do we want a country where everyone can understand the math that undergirds our society—and can help shape it? (dir. Vicki Abeles, U.S., 2024, 89 min.)

For his first film as director, the twice-Oscar-nominated actor Michael Shannon adapts Brett Neveu’s 2002 play, following a mother (Judy Greer) who struggles after a profound family tragedy, moving through life as if in a haze, unable to let go of her anger and frustration. When the family’s pastor suggests an intervention, she and her husband (Alexander Skarsgård) are forced to confront their grief and guilt. Shannon’s soulful, precise film provides a deeply moving exploration of forgiveness. Presented by the Yellow Springs Film Festival (Ohio). (dir. Michael Shannon, U.S., 2023, 119 min.)

Manhattan dentist Peter Pearce (Griffin Dunne) is facing a midlife crisis after his wife of 35 years (Rosanna Arquette) leaves him. On the spur of the moment, he books a trip to Tulum, Mexico, only to crash his son’s bachelor party. The film is about how things end: relationships, marriages, chapters in lives, and lives themselves. It’s also about things not ending—the way marriages and marital problems roll on and parents remain flawed, fallible people. (dir. Noah Pritzker, U.S., 2023, 99 min.)

Free for All: The Public Library tells the story of the quiet revolutionaries who made a simple idea happen. From the pioneering women behind the “Free Library Movement” to today's librarians who service the public despite working in a contentious age of closures and book bans, meet those who created a civic institution where everything is free and the doors are open to all.

Henry Fonda for President more than makes the case for the actor's centrality in the American imaginary—what Norman Mailer called the nation’s dream life. And a case can be made that Fonda’s straight-shooter persona is descended from his ancestors, 17th Dutch settlers who colonized the Hudson River Valley. In this razor-sharp essay film chock-a-block with film clips, director Alexander Horwath follows Fonda in his multiple roles and how these roles reflected his country. (dir. Alexander Horwath, Germany, 2024, 184 min.)

Back by popular demand! Legendary filmmaker Ralph Arlyck reflects on friends, family, and experiences that have become the fabric of his life. This richly textured film embraces the changes that come with age and the wonder of fulfillment during the time that remains. (dir. Ralph Arlyck, U.S, 2022, 88 min.)

Charles Burnett’s legendary, rarely seen 1977 movie about a family in the Watts ghetto has been newly restored in 4k. Begun while Burnett was a student at UCLA film school, it was shot on weekends in the Watts ghetto for $10,000 with a mostly amateur cast. Killer of Sheep is a lyrical, yet intensely rooted, tragic vision viewed through the eyes of Stan, a slaughterhouse worker ground down by poverty. It is a timeless vision that demands to be seen on a big screen. The new 4K restoration restores the original closing song, Dinah Washington’s performance of “Unforgettable.” (dir. Charles Burnett, U.S., 1978, 75 min.)

Leila Conner’s new documentary chronicles dozens of visionary innovators mostly in the Global South advancing groundbreaking carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies, showcasing human ingenuity in the face of our unfolding climate emergency. Narrated by Walton Goggins. Presented by Sustainable Hudson Valley.

One year in the life of an emperor penguin flock. At the end of each Antarctic summer, the emperor penguins of the South Pole journey to their traditional breeding grounds in a fascinating mating ritual that is captured in this documentary by intrepid filmmaker Luc Jacquet. The journey across frozen tundra proves to be the simplest part of the ritual, as after the egg is hatched, the female must delicately transfer it to the male and make her way back to the distant sea to nourish herself and bring back food to her newborn chick. (dir. Luc Jacquet, France, 2005, 86 min.)

In this play written by Maya Lawson and directed by William Burke, the revelry of a wedding after-party unlocks a shared past.

A breakthrough film in bloated Old Hollywood becoming the vibrant New Hollywood, Midnight Cowboy is the story of two outcasts — a naive young hustler (Dustin Hoffman) and an ailing conman (Jon Voight)— who form a friendship in the squalid streets of ’60s New York City. Winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture, the film was a catalyst for using cinema as a way to shed light on the turbulent reality of its time. It was the product of a rich collaboration between newly arrived British filmmaker John Schlesinger and his collaborators, chiefly Polish cinematographer Adam Holender who, using grainy film and fisheye lenses, succeeded in capturing the spirit of the city as a dirty, seductive wonderland. Holender, now 87, is credited with changing the whole look of American film, and he will be appearing in person to present his first film. (dir. John Schlesinger, U.S., 1969, 113 min.)

The teasingly entwined ambiguities of love and death continue to fascinate Alain Guiraudie (Stranger by the Lake), who returns with a sharp, sinister, yet slyly funny thriller. Set in an autumnal, woodsy village in his native region of Occitanie, his latest follows the meandering exploits of Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), an out-of-work baker who has drifted back to his hometown after the death of his beloved former boss, a bakery owner. Staying long after the funeral, the seemingly benign Jérémie begins to casually insinuate himself into his mentor’s family, including his kind-hearted widow (Catherine Frot) and venomously angry son (Jean-Baptiste Durand), while making an increasingly surprising—and ultimately beneficial—friendship with an oddly cheerful local priest (Jacques Develay). In Guiraudie’s quietly carnal world, violence and eroticism explode with little anticipation, and criminal behavior can seem like a natural extension of physical desire. The French director is at the top of his game in Misericordia, again upending all genre expectations.

Shot over five years, this doc is an intimate chronicle of life as residents of a Palestinian community in the West Bank struggle to stay put in their homes. For lawyer and activist Basel Adra, who grew up watching his activist parents fight to protect their land, nothing much has changed as he steps into his elders’ shoes. As his community is bulldozed before his eyes, Adra is helpless to do anything but keep his camera on: “I have nothing else, only my phone,” he despairs. (dir. Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Palestine-Norway, 2024, 95m)

A radical American journalist beocmes involved with the Communist revolution in Russia, and hopes to bring its spirit and idealism to the United States.

This epic documentary, shot over the span of twenty-one yearss, follows Amichai Lau-Lavie, an Israeli descended from an unbroken line of thirty-eight rabbis stretching back a thousand years. Yet as the film opens, Lau-Lavie is newly arrived in New York in the late 1990s, a young gay man declaring “Artists are the new rabbis” and appearing around the city in drag. Lau-Lavie soon embraces a range of creative spiritual endeavors, including his Lab/Shul congregation—until he shocks everyone with his decision to become a rabbi in the Conservative tradition of Judaism. Stimulating and moving, the film ends with Lau-Lavie’s words on Israel and Palestine post-October 7th. (dir. Sandi Dubowski, U.S., 2024, 105 min.)

In 2003, eight Rhode Islanders created a secret apartment inside the busy Providence Place Mall and kept it going for four years, filming everything along the way. Far more than just a wild prank, the secret mall apartment became a life-changing experience for all the participants. It also was an act of defiance against local gentrification and a boundary-pushing work of public/private art. (dir. Jeremy Workman, U.S., 2024, 91 min.)

Henry Fonda is Tom Joad, an itinerant ex-con leading his large family down Highway 66 in search of work and a better life in California. The adaptation of John Steinbeck’s worldwide bestseller of Depression dislocation and fiery social protest surprised even the author himself: “a hard, straight picture that looks and feels like a documentary, with no punches pulled.” Garnering five Oscar nominations, the film benefitted from the actors’ convincingly weathered faces and the richly lyrical camerawork of the legendary Gregg Toland (Citizen Kane), images to rank with the classic Depression era photos of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. It stands as perhaps John Ford’s most powerfully compassionate movie. (dir. John Ford, 1940, 129 min.)

Inspired by the true story of a disillusioned Englishman who went to work in a school in Argentina in 1976. Expecting an easy ride, Tom discovers a divided nation and a class of unteachable students. However, after he rescues a penguin from an oil-slicked beach, his life is turned upside-down.

Inspired by Hitchcock’s transitional Blackmail (April 18, Orpheum) we continue a 1929 series with some of the earliest talkies. Dorothy Arzner’s raucous pre-Code comedy stars “It Girl” Clara Bow in her—and Paramount’s first talkie.’ It skyrocketed Arzner’s career – she was the first out lesbian director to work in Hollywood. Clara Bow was 24 and was the biggest female star in America. The Wild Party is about a flirty co-ed attending a college where no one ever studies, and her romantic conquest of a stuffy anthropology professor, played by Frederic March. It is groundbreaking in its theme of female friendship –Bow’s spares a friend’s reputation by taking the blame for a transgression herself. (dir. Dorothy Arzner, U.S., 1929, 77 min.)

In John Ford’s exquisite work of American mythmaking, Fonda gives an extraordinary performance as the future president, an early-career lawyer trying an incendiary murder case. Ford’s film is a work of classical precision that trades Great Man clichés for a complex portrayal of America’s promise. Amidst Ford’s technical brilliance, Fonda exudes decency, eschewing larger-than-life grandiosity so as to live morally in a dark world. (dir. John Ford, 1939, 100 min.)