MoMI Presents Stephen Cone Retrospective and PRINCESS CYD

Museum of the Moving Image will present the New York theatrical premiere engagement of Princess Cyd, the 2017 BAMcinemaFest hit from Chicago-based writer-director Stephen Cone, starring Rebecca Spence, Jessie Pinnick, and Malic White. Concurrently, the Museum will present Talk About the Passion: Stephen Cone's First Act, an early career retrospective of Cone's work, highlighting features such as Henry Gamble's Birthday Party and The Wise Kids, all preceded by selections of the director's shorter work. Cone and cast members will be appearing in person at select screenings (to be announced). The retrospective and its centerpiece, the presentation of Princess Cyd, run November 3 through 12, 2017.

Associate Curator of Film Eric Hynes, who organized the series, said: "Stephen Cone has established himself as one of the most distinctive and accomplished filmmakers working today. In both his features and short films, Cone has dexterously explored, and sometimes exploded the borders between comedy and drama, community and the self, faith and sexuality, sincerity and performance. As a writer, he imbues his characters with humanity and respect, and as a director oriented toward collaboration and improvisation, he approaches his actors the same way."

Princess Cyd made its New York debut at the 2017 BAMcinemaFest to critical acclaim. "An endearing, full-hearted film of self-discovery and mentorship and love. The film's warmth and generosity reminded me of the late Jonathan Demme," wrote Calum Marsh, The Village Voice. Princess Cyd follows sixteen-year-old Cyd (Pinnick) who decides to take a break from her depressive single father and spend time in Chicago with her aunt Miranda (Spence), a well-known novelist. Soon after her arrival, she encounters a young barista named Katie (White), and their low-key connection quickly becomes something more charged. As Cyd and Katie navigate their new attraction, Miranda sorts through her own complicated relationships, which are brought into higher contrast by Cyd's youthful curiosity and daring. Sensitive to the contradictions and confusions of the ever-changing self, Stephen Cone's subtle and deeply felt film summons that distinct summer feeling when adolescence overlaps with adulthood, skin-exposing days beget soul-exposing nights, and everything feels potently and precariously alive.

Raised in the south by churchgoing parents-his father became a pastor when he was in grade school-Cone eventually settled in Chicago, where he teaches at Northwestern University. Drawing on Chicago's legendarily deep bench of working actors, he populates his films with diversely talented performers who are nevertheless mostly unknown to national audiences stuck on a diet of New York- and Los Angeles-based faces. And the characters they play are just as revelatory, dotting the spectrum from self-possessed young people to self-challenging older people, sincere believers to curious non-believers, gays and straights and bisexuals and those uncertain or defiantly undefined, and every one of them still in the process of questioning themselves and the meaning of it all.

The screening schedule is included below and also posted at movingimage.us/stephencone. Short films and personal appearances will be added in the coming days (and posted online).

SCHEDULE
All screenings take place at Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35 Avenue in Astoria, Queens, NY. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $15 ($11 seniors, students, Standard level members / Free for Museum members at the Film Lover, and Kids Premium levels and above). For Princess Cyd, tickets for members are discounted at $7. Advance tickets are available online at movingimage.us.

NEW RELEASE: NEW YORK PREMIERE THEATRICAL ENGAGEMENT
Princess Cyd
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 3-SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12 (For daily showtimes, go to movingimage.us)
Dir. Stephen Cone. 2017, 96 mins. Digital projection. A Wolfe Releasing presentation. With Rebecca Spence, Jessie Pinnick, Malic White, James Vincent Meredith, Tyler Ross, Matthew Quattrocki. It is summertime, and sixteen-year-old Cyd (Pinnick) decides to take a break from her depressive single father and spend time in Chicago with her aunt Miranda (Spence), a well-known novelist. Soon after her arrival, Cyd encounters a young barista named Katie (White), and their low-key connection quickly becomes something more charged. As Cyd and Katie navigate their new attraction, Miranda sorts through her own complicated relationships, which are brought into higher contrast by Cyd's youthful curiosity and daring. Sensitive to the contradictions and confusions of the ever-changing self, Stephen Cone's subtle and deeply felt film summons that distinct summer feeling when adolescence overlaps with adulthood, skin-exposing days beget soul-exposing nights, and everything feels potently and precariously alive. "An endearing, full-hearted film of self-discovery and mentorship and love. The film's warmth and generosity reminded me of the late Jonathan Demme."-Calum Marsh, The Village Voice

The Wise Kids
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 5:00 P.M.
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 3:00 P.M.
Dir. Stephen Cone. 2010, 95 mins. Digital projection. A Wolfe Releasing presentation. Molly Kunz, Allison Torem, Tyler Ross, Sadieh Rifai, Stephen Cone. The film that marked the arrival of one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary American cinema, The Wise Kids is a poignant coming-of-age drama about young people in the Bible Belt struggling with growing up and growing apart, and weathering challenges to their beliefs and their own identities. Cone's film explores terrain- such as the crossroads between faith and sexuality- that is rarely seen on screen, and yet his touch is light, generous, and empathetic. "This isn't simply a portrait of vulnerable people, but a film that's intensely vulnerable itself. You want to give it a hug before it dissolves into pieces."-Michael Koresky, Reverse Shot

In Memoriam
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 5:00 P.M.
Dir. Stephen Cone. 2010, 101 mins. Digital projection. A Sunroom Pictures presentation. With Ian Forester, Kelly O'Sullivan, Sadie Rogers, Annabel Armour, Sue Redman. Two young people, nude and entangled, accidentally fall to their deaths from a roof. To his friends, it is nothing more than a mordantly humorous story, but for Jonathan it is something more-something hard to reconcile. His obsession with this incident inspires a spirited low-budget theatrical reenactment, one that, as observed by Robert Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times, is "possibly not a million miles distant from what Cone himself did" with this film. Cone's version is a sad and funny reckoning with life and death, and the need for connection-however elusive and fleeting.

This Afternoon
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 1:00 P.M.
Dir. Stephen Cone. 2014, 66 mins. Digital projection. A Sunroom Pictures presentation. With Nikki Taguilas-Pierce, Stephen Cefalu. A young seminary student (Cefalu) seeking self-knowledge inadvertently finds himself attending a sex addiction support group, where he meets Hilary (Taguilas-Pierce), an unhappy young mother taken to meeting strangers via Craigslist. Over the course of the afternoon, the two develop an affectionate yet complex relationship, helping each other wade through their mutual storm of love, sex, and religion. Featuring two disarmingly naturalistic performances by Cefalu and Taguilas-Pierce, This Afternoon unfurls in what seems like real time, yet takes on an emotional weight of years.

Black Box
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 5:00 P.M.
Dir. Stephen Cone. 2013, 84 mins. Digital projection. A Sunroom Pictures presentation. With Josephine Decker, Austin Pendleton, Jaclyn Hennell, Alex Weisman. A strong-willed graduate student in theater directs a group of fresh-faced undergrads in an adaptation of a 1980s horror novel, a process that alters them all in unexpected ways. The arrival of the book's author only furthers the ensemble's journey into the very personal, very real origins of horror. Featuring warm and colorful performances by acclaimed filmmaker Josephine Decker and veteran character actor Austin Pendleton (The Muppet Movie, My Cousin Vinny).

Henry Gamble's Birthday Party
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 5:00 P.M.
Dir. Stephen Cone. 2015, 87 mins. Digital projection. A Wolfe Releasing presentation. With Cole Doman, Joe Keery, Pat Healy, Tyler Ross, Elizabeth Laidlaw. On his seventeenth birthday, preacher's kid Henry Gamble (Doman) is throwing a pool party. While Henry treads through various sexual possibilities, questioning who he is and what he might want, so do both the adults and teenagers at the party stumble through and forge ahead in matters of desire, love, identity, and faith. Shot through with Cone's typical emotional precision and rigorous humanity, Henry Gamble's Birthday Party also has a formal ambition that does not call attention to itself, spanning 24 discrete hours and registering a host of experiences with a democratic curiosity that can rightfully be called Altmanesque.

Image courtesy of Wolfe Releasing