From Academy Award® winning writer/director Chloé Zhao, HAMNET tells the powerful love story that inspired the creation of Shakespeare’s timeless masterpiece, Hamlet. Starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal.

(Ira Sachs, 2025, 76min, United States, NR) The photographer Peter Hujar, whose images exist in an important lineage and dialogue with the work of groundbreaking gay artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and David Wojnarowicz, forms the center of the latest movie by fearless independent American filmmaker Ira Sachs (Passages). Based on rediscovered transcripts from an unused 1974 interview by nonfiction writer Linda Rosenkrantz (played by Rebecca Hall), in which she asked Hujar (Ben Whishaw) to narrate the events of the previous day in minute detail, Sachs’s film is a mesmerizing time warp, an illustration of the life of the creative mind, the quotidian and the imaginative at once, fully and lovingly inhabited by its two brilliant actors. With this engrossing and wholly unexpected film, Sachs shuttles us back to a specific moment in New York queer cultural history and a still-influential art scene that lives on in words as much as images.

Set in modern-day Tokyo, RENTAL FAMILY follows an American actor (Brendan Fraser) who struggles to find purpose until he lands an unusual gig: working for a Japanese "rental family" agency, playing stand-in roles for strangers. As he immerses himself in his clients’ worlds, he begins to form genuine bonds that blur the lines between performance and reality. Confronting the moral complexities of his work, he rediscovers purpose, belonging, and the quiet beauty of human connection.

THE DOC IS IN... Perfect for early risers, fans of documentaries, and those just looking for an excuse to go into work late or skip class, the Chelsea Theater has given a new meaning to getting a Doc’s note and making an appointment is as easy as purchasing a ticket. Chapel Hill’s favorite nonprofit indy theater is set to play documentaries four (4) times a week as morning screenings in new film series “The Doc Is IN.” RIEFENSTAHL - (Andres Veiel, 2024, 115min) Show Dates: Sat, 12/13, Sun, 12/14, Wed, 12/17, Thu, 12/18. All shows @ 10AM Filmmaker and Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl is considered one of the most controversial women of the 20th century. Her films Triumph of the Will and Olympia are defined by their fascist aesthetics, perfectly-staged body worship, and the celebration of all that is "superior" and victorious, simultaneously projecting contempt for the imperfect and weak. But Riefenstahl – who first broke into the German film industry as an actress – spent decades after the war denying her association with Nazi ideology, and claiming ignorance of the Holocaust. How did she become the Reich's preeminent filmmaker if she was just a hired hand? Riefenstahl examines this question using never-before-seen documents from Leni Riefenstahl's estate, including private films, photos, recordings and letters, uncovering fragments of her biography and placing them in an extended historical context. During her long life after the fall of Nazism, she remained unapologetic, managing to control and shape her legacy; in personal documents, she mourns her "murdered ideals." Meanwhile, her work would experience a renaissance, gaining esteem for its masterful technical skill. Today, Riefenstahl's aesthetics are more present than ever. Is that also true for their message? In an era where fascism is on the rise again, fake news is prevalent, and the meaning of political imagery is constantly dissected and debated, Andres Veiel's mesmerizing new film shows that Leni Reifenstahl is more relevant than ever.

Sisters Nora and Agnes reunite with their estranged father, the charismatic Gustav, a once-renowned director who offers stage actress Nora a role in what he hopes will be his comeback film. When Nora turns it down, she soon discovers he has given her part to an eager young Hollywood star. Suddenly, the two sisters must navigate their complicated relationship with their father — and deal with an American star dropped right in the middle of their complex family dynamics.

Sunday, December 14th @ 7PM Join the Chelsea Theater, Fatwood Studio, Cosmic Rays Film Festival, and Dani & Sheilah ReStack for their embodied, bold, and feeling films and for a chance to meet the artists for a conversation following the program. THE FERAL DOMESTIC TRILOGY (2017-2021) Total Film Runtime: 54min Total Program Runtime: 90min STRANGELY ORDINARY THIS DEVOTION (2017) 27min Strangely Ordinary This Devotion is a visceral exploration of feral domesticity, queer desire, and fantasy in a world under the threat of climate change. Utilizing and exploding archetypes, the film offers a radical approach to collaboration and the conception of family. – Aily Nash COME COYOTE (2019) 8min Come Coyote continues the investigation of environment, queer desire, motherhood, and collaboration. This 8-minute video brings together moments culled from our own life and fabricated scenes. One of the central themes in this chapter is the idea of reproduction and its implications — the reality/fantasy of both logistics and technology of queer reproduction, and the variations of our individual commitment. FUTURE FROM INSIDE (2021) 19min Future From Inside is the last in the trilogy begun in 2016, by Dani and Sheilah ReStack (also including Strangely Ordinary this Devotion and Come Coyote.) The work traces the ReStack collaboration, as it manifests in life and in work. The porous line between real and fantasy is further elaborated in this video — FFI utilizes body doubles, a continuing journey for answers and oracles, animal synthesis, queer desire, children and radical community to weave a fragmented future. This final offering of the trilogy does not offer answers to the personal and societal conflict, but continues the possibility of the feral domestic as a way to inhabit the space of living to yield surprising results. Fatwood is honored to host an evening with the trailblazing duo Dani ReStack & Sheilah ReStack — screening the full Feral Domestic trilogy, made between 2017–2021. These films don’t just depict domestic life — they reimagine it as radical, generative, and alive: a space where love, desire, fear, fantasy, care, and resistance co-exist. They describe the trilogy as a marker of time, queer desire, family, place, relation and conflict. The ReStacks present intimately rendered, and daring new possibilities for collaboration within their work and family structure, carving out spaces of invention in the quotidian, imbuing radical gestures in the everyday. “Being collaborators is like being life partners—full of compromise, and difficulty, and beauty. I think both of us see our collaboration as a domain that is somehow sacred; it allows us to recharge and feel committed to what we are together. The work we make is about the domestic, and I want to honor that as a site of creation and resistance; but I also don’t want to deny how difficult day to day life can be, and how it can be hard to see things other than as a long list of chores to be checked off. Artistic collaboration is our jumpcut to something else.” – Sheilah ReStack, Bomb Magazine “To live a feral domestic life is an aspiration, a refusal to be domesticated by capitalism. It’s an idea of the home being a generative place rather than simply a place of respite. Let’s sing at the top of our lungs while doing dishes! Let’s chase each other and roar like lions in the dining room! Of course we have to make dentist appointments, get the car fixed, and pay taxes; but we are refusing to let capitalism infuse us with fear.” – Dani ReStack, Bomb Magazine Dani and Sheilah ReStack live in Columbus, Ohio with their two daughters. They are committed to the domestic as a place of unruly possibility – a portal for emotional logic, fragmentation and new narratives that allows the quotidian to inform the imaginary.