In a small, sleepy village in the Basque Country, a sculptor named Ane and her three children arrive at her mother Lita's home for summer vacation where they are surrounded by extended family and nosy neighbors. Ane and her mother's relationship is strained — Lita disapproves of her daughter's frayed marriage, career as an artist, and the way she parents her obstinate and mischievous children. Chief among them is eight-year-old Aitor, nicknamed Coco after it becomes clear that being referred to by the Aitor elicits feelings of distress in the child. Born biologically male, neither birth name nor the genderless nickname feel quite right, and Ane’s concern for her child grows as Coco becomes more withdrawn. The child’s only respite lies in the Basque hills, where Ane's aunt Lourdes tends to the family's beekeeping farm. Among the peaceful humming of bees and Lourdes' open-minded guardianship, Coco slowly begins to confide in family and friends her discomfort in her body, eventually voicing a desire to be treated as a girl. As Coco explores her own developing identity over the summer, Ane and the rest of her family in turn must learn to accept the child as she is.

Considered the premier showcase for short films and the launchpad for many now-prominent independent filmmakers, the Festival includes fiction, documentary and animation from around the world. Throughout its almost 40 years of history, the Festival has always supported short films, providing a platform for both established and new filmmakers to connect with audiences. The 2024 Short Film Tour program is a sampling of Festival offerings and a testament to the unique storytelling potential that the format holds. Audiences who missed the Sundance Film Festival – which took place online and in-person in Park City, Utah January 18 through January 28 this year – can enjoy a mix of fiction, documentary, and animated shorts that are funny, sad, inspirational, and full of strong characters. The Festival’s Short Film Program has long been established as a place to discover talented directors, such as past alumni Andrea Arnold, Lake Bell, Damien Chazelle, Destin Daniel Cretton, Jay and Mark Duplass, Debra Granik, Rashaad Ernesto Green, Reinaldo Marcus Green, Todd Haynes, Sterlin Harjo, Don Hertzfeldt, Sky Hopinka, Shaka King, Lynne Ramsay, Dee Rees, Joey Soloway, Taika Waititi, and many others.

Richard Myers’ surreal dream-memory piece about growing up in Massillon, Ohio, is an ideal introduction to the visually-stunning work of this NE Ohio-based (but nationally known) artist and indie filmmaker, a Cleveland Arts Prize recipient. Myers’ award-winning movies have been praised by Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael, and many others. The film’s title references the year Myers was born and the year the film was shot.

How does one assess artistic talent? That is the main question asked by this new documentary, in which young artists vie for admission to Prague’s selective Academy of Fine Arts via portfolios, written exams, and interviews with the colorful professors.

When Iranian taxi driver Hashem finds a little boy in the back seat of his vehicle, an argument ensues between him and his girlfriend, Taji, over whether to keep him with them or get rid of him. Hashem defends the first position, Taji the second.

For nearly five years, acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog desperately tried to complete one of the most ambitious and difficult films of his career, Fitzcarraldo, the story of one man’s attempt to build an opera house deep in the Amazon jungle. Documentary filmmaker Les Blank captured the unfolding of this production, made more perilous by Herzog’s determination to shoot the most daunting scenes without models or special effects, including a sequence requiring hundreds of indigenous Peruvians to pull a full-size, 320-ton steamship over a small mountain. The result is an extraordinary document of the filmmaking process and a unique look into the single-minded mission of one of cinema’s most fearless directors.

The full, unexpurgated version of Tinto Brass's infamous soft-porn Roman epic. Malcolm McDowell stars as the deranged Emperor whose depraved acts include giving his horse political office, sleeping with his own sister and executing anyone who remotely displeases him. Gore Vidal provides the (uncredited) screenplay. The film, which is punctuated by a sequence of elaborate orgy scenes, remained in limbo for two years as Brass wrangled over the right to a final cut, and various versions have been in circulation over the years since its initial release.

U.S. government officials who apparently never saw 2001: A Space Odyssey assign control of the country’s nuclear weapons to a supercomputer. What could possibly go wrong? This early AI thriller from the future director of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (see 7/20 at 8:45) is a big favorite among those who know it.

Björk and Catherine Deneuve star in Lars von Trier’s polarizing musical that won the top prize at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival. The Icelandic singer-songwriter plays a Czech single mother (and lover of screen musicals) who works in a factory in rural 1964 America and suffers from a degenerative eye disease. While working to earn enough money to pay for an operation that will save her 12-year-old son from also going blind, she experiences a cruel twist of fate. With Joel Grey.

Henry Mancini, the great film and TV composer who was born in Cleveland 100 years ago, won the third of his four Oscars for the famous theme song of this affecting drama—about two married alcoholics (Jack Lemmon, Lee Remick) on a devastating downward spiral.

Charlie Korsmo, the child lead in Warren Beatty’s film version of Chester Gould’s classic comic strip about a 1930s police detective, will answer audience questions after tonight’s screening of the movie. Korsmo plays Kid, a 10-year-old street urchin who helps Beatty’s Dick Tracy battle crime boss “Big Boy” Caprice (Al Pacino). Madonna, as nightclub siren Breathless Mahoney, warbles Stephen Sondheim’s Oscar-winning “Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man),” one of five original Sondheim songs written for the film. Shot by Vittorio Storaro, this stylish, eye-popping movie also won Oscars for its art direction and makeup. (Try to recognize the big-name stars like Dustin Hoffman and James Caan doing cameos.)

With brash stylistic exuberance, this first feature from Bahram Beyzaie helped usher in the Iranian New Wave. When he takes a job as a schoolteacher in a new neighborhood, the hapless intellectual Mr. Hekmati finds that he is a fish out of water. Shot in luminous monochrome and edited with quicksilver invention, Downpour, which has been painstakingly restored from the only known surviving print, captures with puckish humor and great tenderness the cultural conflicts coursing through Iran at a pivotal historical moment.

Never before released in the U.S., this major work by one of Iran’s most important filmmakers (who died in 1998) was made as the director was forsaking his repressive homeland for Germany. Parviz Sayyad, perhaps the most popular Iranian actor/comedian of the pre-revolution era, stars in the movie, playing a Turkish “guest worker” in 1970s West Berlin who experiences racism and other indignities while holding down a dull factory job in an alien society. “One of the great unseen films of contemporary immigrant life.” –Museum of Modern Art.

We screened our first film at the Cleveland Institute of Art 38 years ago tonight. To celebrate, we present an autobiographical new film by an award-winning director. In Film Geek, Richard Shepard looks back on his moviegoing youth in 1970s-80s NYC, as well as on his relationship with a mysterious father who had multiple names but no discernable job.

Here are seven of the greatest animated masterpieces from the almost 700 cartoons produced by the influential Max and Dave Fleischer between 1919 and 1942. Fleischer Studios animation was darker, more adult, and more urban than that of Disney (their main competitor); their slinky, surreal, always morphing short films featured characters seemingly made of elastic. This program includes four Betty Boop toons: Bimbo’s Initiation (1931), Minnie the Moocher (1932), Snow-White (1933), and The Old Man of the Mountain (1933); one Popeye: Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor (1936); and two Supermans: The Mad Scientist (1941) and The Mechanical Monsters (1941).

From producer-director Arnold Leibovit (The Puppetoon Movie) comes a new program of fully-restored, stop-motion Puppetoon shorts (in Technicolor) made during the 1940s by Oscar-winning special effects wiz George Pal (1953’s The War of the Worlds, 1960’s The Time Machine). There are 10 classic puppet films in this all-ages program, including three Oscar nominees (Tubby the Tuba, Rhythm in the Ranks, Dr. Seuss’ 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins) and Ray Harryhausen’s first animation job, Western Daze. Also showing: A Hatful of Dreams (with Superman) and Date with Duke (Duke Ellington). Leibovit will introduce the program via a pre-recorded video.

One of the most controversial of Oscar Micheaux’s independently produced “race” films (Black-made movies for Black audiences) tells of a light-skinned Black woman whose obsession with whiteness turns her against her own people. Partly inspired by Imitation of Life, this complex film is “a rich, strange, sad achievement,” according to The Rough Guide to Film.

The first entry in Roger Corman’s celebrated, eight-film Edgar Allan Poe cycle is one of the series’ best—and the only one included on the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. Vincent Price plays Roderick Usher, the creepy owner of a gloomy mansion, who opposes his sister’s marriage to an outsider because the Usher bloodline is tainted by madness. 35mm scope.

Dom Cobb is a skilled thief, the absolute best in the dangerous art of extraction, stealing valuable secrets from deep within the subconscious during the dream state, when the mind is at its most vulnerable. Cobb's rare ability has made him a coveted player in this treacherous new world of corporate espionage, but it has also made him an international fugitive and cost him everything he has ever loved. Now Cobb is being offered a chance at redemption. One last job could give him his life back but only if he can accomplish the impossible, inception. Instead of the perfect heist, Cobb and his team of specialists have to pull off the reverse: their task is not to steal an idea, but to plant one. If they succeed, it could be the perfect crime. But no amount of careful planning or expertise can prepare the team for the dangerous enemy that seems to predict their every move. An enemy that only Cobb could have seen coming.

A skilled samurai swordsman in 19th-century Japan seeks revenge on the scoundrels who left him an orphan not once but twice. Raizo Ichikawa (whose premature death at age 37 prompted him to be called “Japan’s James Dean”) stars in this stylish color chanbara (sword-fighting film), the first part of Kenji Misumi’s “Sword Trilogy” (followed by 1964’s Ken and 1965’s Kenki). Written by Kaneto Shindo (Onibaba).

Follows Anne, a brilliant lawyer who lives with her husband Pierre and their daughters. Anne gradually engages in a passionate relationship with Theo, Pierre's son from a previous marriage, putting her career and family life in danger.

Last Things looks at evolution and extinction from the perspective of the rocks and minerals that came before humanity and will outlast us. With scientists and thinkers like Lynn Margulis and Marcia Bjørnerud as guides and quoting from the proto-Sci-fi texts of J.H. Rosny, Deborah Stratman offers a stunning array of images, from microscopic forms to vast landscapes, and seeks a picture of evolution without humans at the center. Preceded at 5:00 by Roman Kroitor and Colin Low’s 29-min. Universe (Canada, 1960, DCP), a dazzling journey into outer space that heavily influenced Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film’s narrator, Douglas Rain, became the voice of HAL.

In the second film of the Lone Wolf and Cub series, Ogami Itto battles a group of female ninja in the employ of the Yagyu clan and must assassinate a traitor who plans to sell his clan's secrets to the Shogunate.

Martin Scorsese first encountered the films of Powell and Pressburger when he was a child, sitting in front of the family TV. When their famous logo came up on screen, Scorsese says, "You knew you were in for fantasy, wonder, magic - real film magic." Now, in this documentary, he tells the story of his lifelong love-affair with their movies, including The Red Shoes, The Life and Death Of Colonel Blimp, Black Narcissus, and The Tales of Hoffmann. "Certain films you simply run all the time and you live with them," Scorsese says. "As you grow older they grow deeper. I’m not sure how it happens, but it does. For me, that body of work is a wondrous presence, a constant source of energy, and a reminder of what life and art are all about." Drawing on a rich array of archive material, Scorsese explores in full the collaboration between the Englishman Powell and the Hungarian Pressburger - two romantics and idealists, who thrived in the face of adversity during World War II but were eventually brought low by the film industry of the 1950s. Scorsese celebrates their ability to create "subversive commercial movies" and describes how deeply their films have influenced his own work.

A quietly colossal achievement from one of contemporary cinema's preeminent image makers. On a stormy night in the mountains of Greece, a pair of wayward young people abandon their newborn child. Taken in by a family of farmers, Jon grows up without knowing his father or mother. Years later, after a tragic accident, he is sent to prison, where he meets Iro. The two form a connection, expressed through music, that will, by turns, haunt them and uphold them the rest of their days. Freely inspired by the story of Oedipus, Angela Schanelec's latest is as terrifying as myth and as gentle as a folk song.

Martha Coolidge’s feature debut is a meta-movie in which the future director of Valley Girl and Rambling Rose looks back on her rape at the age of 16. Casting another rape victim in the role of her teenage self, Coolidge employs a mix of documentary and fiction to raise provocative questions about sexual violence and its on-screen representation.

A depressed musician reunites with his lover, though their romance - which has already endured several centuries - is disrupted by the arrival of uncontrollable younger sister.

A wildly inventive new comedy from Quentin Dupieux (MANDIBLES, RUBBER), SMOKING CAUSES COUGHING follows the misadventures of a team of five superheroes known as the Tobacco Force - Benzene (Gilles Lellouche), Nicotine (Anaïs Demoustier), Methanol (Vincent Lacoste), Mercury (Jean-Pascal Zadi), and Ammonia (Oulaya Amamra). After a devastating battle against a diabolical giant turtle, the Tobacco Force is sent on a mandatory week-long retreat to strengthen their decaying group cohesion. Their sojourn goes wonderfully well until Lézardin, Emperor of Evil, decides to annihilate planet Earth.

Being connected to nature, what does it mean? Father knows and father shows. The director's father is 84. We follow in his footsteps into the mountain home. Into nature's smallest life and out to grand panoramas, where he grew up.

Sophia's life is turned upside down when she meets Sylvain. She comes from a wealthy family, while Sylvain comes from a family of manual workers. Sophia questions her own values after abandoned herself to her great romantic impulses.

Powell & Pressburger’s WWII-set noir is a neglected suspense classic that Powell called “my best film.” David Farrar and Kathleen Byron (both of Black Narcissus) star in the movie—the tale of a frustrated, crippled bomb-disposal expert, drifting into alcoholism, who takes on a new challenge: the defusing of a foolproof German device.

The first installment in one of Japan’s longest running film series (26 theatrical features from 1962 to 1989, followed by a 100-episode TV series and assorted remakes and reboots) introduces us to the blind masseur/master swordsman Zatoichi (played by Shintaro Katsu), who fights for justice during late Edo-period Japan. Here Ichi becomes involved in a yakuza war.

Mœbius designed this surreal animated feature from the French director of 1973’s Fantastic Planet. The Time Masters is an exciting, existential sci-fi adventure in which an orphan boy stranded on a desert planet inhabited by giant killer hornets nervously awaits rescue.

A high ranking Russian official defects to the U.S., where he is interviewed by U.S. Agent Michael Nordstrom. The defector reveals that a French spy ring codenamed "Topaz" has been passing N.A.T.O. secrets to the Russians. Michael calls in his French friend and counterpart Andre Devereaux to expose the spies.

USA, 2002, Anthony and Joe Russo The first Hollywood film written and directed by Cleveland’s Russo brothers is a heist comedy set—and shot—in Cleveland. (It was inspired by Mario Monicelli’s masterful 1958 Italian farce Big Deal on Madonna Street.) A stellar cast (William H. Macy, Isaiah Washington, Sam Rockwell, Michael Jeter, Luis Guzmán, Patricia Clarkson, George Clooney, et al.) play the bumbling bozos who try to pull off a “perfect job”—stealing the valuable contents of an easily-accessed jewelry store safe.