DELPHINE'S PRAYERS, DUELLE, CHAMELEON STREET and More Come to BAM

The feature film's Delphine's Prayers, Duelle, Chameleon Street and more come to BAM this October an November.

Oct 8-14

Prisms and Portraits: The Films of Rosine Mbakam

The winner of this year's True Vision Award at the True/False film festival, Rosine Mbakam has established herself as a powerful, empathetic voice in documentary filmmaking. The Cameroonian-born, Belgium-based director's work focuses on the migrant experiences of women, the legacies of colonialism, and both the alienation and bonds of kinship found in the Cameroonian diaspora in Belgium. Mbakam's films are constructed with a patient rigor devoted to giving the women in her films space to tell their own stories. Prisms and Portraits features the exclusive theatrical engagements of both Delphine's Prayers (2021) and Prism (2021). With Delphine's Prayers, Mbakam focuses tightly on the eponymous Delphine, who recounts a life of hardship, sex work, and her desire to escape her native Cameroon for Belgium only to find herself in Europe enmeshed in a new type of sexual exploitation. Prism, which comes to BAM following its premiere in the Currents section of NYFF59, is a collaborative film co-directed with Eléonore Yameogo and An van. Dienderen. The film examines the legacy of racism inherent in photographic technology. The dual runs of Delphine's Prayers and Prism are accompanied by a retrospective of the documentarian's earlier films including: Chez Jolie Coiffure (2018) screening with Les portes du passé (2013), and The Two Faces of a Bamileke Woman (2018) screening with You Will Be My Ally (2012).

Oct 15-21

Duelle (1976) & Noroît (1976)

Directed by Jacques Rivette

New restorations of Jacques Rivette's Duelle and Noroît come to BAM for parallel runs this October. In the mid-1970s Rivette reunited with the producer of his legendary Out 1 for a series of interconnected films set in four genres: a love story, a western, a thriller, and a musical comedy. In the end, only two of the genre films were completed. The first, Duelle, stands as one of Rivette's most striking and beguiling works, starring French New Wave icons Juliet Berto and Bulle Ogier, the fantastical drama follows the Queen of the Sun (Ogier) and the Queen of the Night (Berto) as they search for a magical diamond in present day Paris. Noroît, the second completed film, is a true rarity: the arthouse pirate film. Working with the iconic performers Geraldine Chaplin and Bernadet Lafont, the film follows a woman (Chaplin) out to avenge the murder of her brother by a band of pirates led by Lafont. Full of Rivette's signature reflexivity and dreamlike imagery, Noroît is a singular film from one of cinema's most iconoclastic directors. In French with English subtitles. Restoration courtesy of Arrow Films and the American Genre Film Archive.

Oct 22-Nov 4

Chameleon Street (1989)

Directed by Wendell B. Harris Jr.

Wendell B. Harris Jr.'s brilliant debut feature comes to BAM in a new restoration following its premiere in the Revivals section of NYFF59. This daring, warped, and brilliant acid comedy-which won the 1990 Sundance Grand Jury Prize-tells the caustically hilarious, stylistically audacious true story of Douglas Street, a con artist who successfully impersonated a Time magazine reporter, a Yale student, and a surgeon. With a grab bag of Brechtian narrative tricks, writer-director-star Wendell B. Harris Jr. teases out the relationship between Black alienation and role-playing. An Arbelos release. The 4K restoration was completed from the original camera negative and sound materials by Arbelos and supervised by Wendell B. Harris Jr.

Oct 29-30

The Animation Block Halloween Special

Animation Block Party returns to BAM with two days of Halloween inspired programming featuring: "Animation Block Night Terrors," a collection of short films loaded with ghouls, ghosts, zombies galore; "Daffy Duck's Quackbusters," featuring Mel Blanc's final theatrical production as a Looney Tunes voice legend; "Malt Adult & Hellavision Television Mega Mashup," a superb combination of animation talent from Malt Adult in Columbus, Ohio and the Hellavision Television Network in Minneapolis, MN; "Animation Blood Party Shorts," a bloody kaleidoscope of animated horror genre shorts; and "Cartoons On Film: Halloween Haunts," featuring macabre silent and early sound cartoons that have been newly restored.

Nov 5-11

Uncharted Cartographies: Remapping Latin American Through Cinema

Celebrating the 20th anniversary of Cinema Tropical, the leading presenter of Latin American cinema in the United States, BAM presents this original program featuring unusual and playful pairings of feature-length and short narrative, documentary, and experimental films that challenge traditional tropes of Latin American culture and politics. Addressing issues of race, privilege, the indigenous experience, history, domestic service, and narcos, among other topics, "Uncharted Cartographies" offers novel ways to think about and creatively remap conceptions of Latin America in order to better reflect the often overlooked heterogeneity of the region. The series includes: End of the Century (Castro, 2019) screening with The Waves (Biniez, 2017); Rey (Atallah, 2017) screening with The Movement (Naishtat, 2015); Beyond the Beyond (Portillo, 2008) screening with Fauna (Pereda, 2020); Housemaids (Mascaro, 2012); Still Burn (Ovando, 2018) screening with El general (Almada, 2009); Las Marthas (Ibarra, 2014); Baronesa (Antunes, 2018); and Intimacies Between Shakespeare and Victor Hugo (Olaizola, 2008). Programmed by Jesse Trussell, Senior Programmer, Film, BAM; and Carlos A. Gutiérrez, Executive Director, Cinema Tropical. Additional support from the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University.

Nov 12-18

Bring Down The Walls (2020)

Directed by Phil Collins

BAM presents the exclusive New York run of Phil Collins' Bring Down The Walls. With a prison population of more than 2 million, the US is the world's biggest jailer. Coinciding with the escalation of mass incarceration in the 1980s, house music emerged from Black, Latinx and queer communities embattled by oppressive law enforcement policies. Bring Down The Walls looks at the prison industrial complex through the lens of house music and nightlife, proposing the dance floor as a space of personal and collective liberation, and new ways in which we could come together as a society.

Learn more at BAM.org.

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