Annual Museum Of Modern Art International Festival of Film

Our annual To Save and Project festival returns in 2025 with a rich selection of newly restored treasures from archives around the world. This year's program spans nearly a century of cinema, from pioneering German Expressionist works like Robert Wiene's Raskolnikow (1923) to groundbreaking independent films of the 1970s like James Bidgood's Pink Narcissus (1971). Films from Argentina, Thailand, India, Syria, the Czech Republic, and beyond highlight cinema's global diversity and the work of film preservation institutions worldwide.

Highlights include the rediscovery of Yevgeni Cherviakov's forgotten Soviet masterpiece My Son (1928), found in Argentina and restored by GEM; the racy pre-Code Hollywood comedy The Greeks Had a Word for Them (1932) from the Library of Congress; and Andre Bonzel's Flickering Ghosts of Loves Gone By, a powerful repurposing of home movies from Janus Films. The program features restorations by major archives and funders, including The Film Foundation, UCLA Film and Television Archive, the Cinemathèque française, and Filmmuseum München.

The series opens on January 9 with the world premiere of MoMA's newly upgraded restoration of Frank Borzage's transcendent romance 7th Heaven (1927), and concludes on January 30 with the world premiere of MoMA's new reconstruction of the long unseen, original 1918 version of Charles Chaplin's World War I comedy Shoulder Arms.

Schedule of Events:

4:00 pm: Maya Miriga. 1984. Written and - directed by Nirad Mohapatra

Maya Miriga. 1984. India. Written and directed by Nirad Mohapatra. North American premiere. Courtesy Film Heritage Foundation. In Odia; English subtitles. 110 min.

Nirad Mohapatra's sole feature film, rescued from near-oblivion, stands as one of the masterpieces of Indian regional cinema. Through its patient, observant lens and haunting score by Bhaskar Chandavarkar, the film chronicles the gradual dissolution of an extended middle-class family in a small Odisha town. With remarkable subtlety, Mohapatra's nonprofessional cast brings to life the complex dynamics of a household caught between tradition and modernity-the trapped daughters-in-law yearning for freedom, the married sons walking an emotional tightrope, and the slow erosion of familial bonds by individual ambition. We are not far from the world of Satyajit Ray, or from the atmosphere of Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons.

Though it garnered international acclaim and helped put Odia cinema on the map upon its release, both film and filmmaker mysteriously vanished from India's cinematic landscape. This meticulous restoration by the Film Heritage Foundation, working from severely damaged negatives found abandoned in a warehouse, returns to the screen a vital work whose intimate portrayal of family life under pressure resonates perhaps even more strongly in today's India. As critic Maithili Rao noted, the disappearance of Mohapatra after such an "exquisitely elegiac" debut remains one of Indian cinema's most poignant mysteries.

4K digital restoration by Film Heritage Foundation from the 16mm original camera negative preserved at Film Heritage Foundation and a 35mm print preserved at the NFDC – National Film Archive of India at L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, Bologna.

7:00 pm: Kalamita (Calamity). 1982. - Directed by Vera Chytilova

Kalamita (Calamity). 1982. Czechoslovakia. Directed by Vera Chytilova. Screenplay by Chytilova, Joseph Silhavý. With Bolek Polivka, Dagmar Blahova, Jana Synkova. North American premiere. Courtesy Janus Films. In Czech; English subtitles. 101 min.

Vera Chytilova, the most prominent female director of the Czech New Wave and one of its most uncompromising voices, crafts a biting social satire about a shaggy, idealistic young man who quits university to become a train engineer in a small mountain town. As played in a star-making performance by the brilliant mime Boleslav Polivka, Honza embarks on a search for authenticity that brings him into head-on conflict with small-town hypocrisy, bureaucratic absurdity, and romantic entanglements with three very different women. When his train becomes trapped in an avalanche, the physical calamity mirrors the moral chaos within. Shot under difficult conditions with frequent interference from Communist authorities, the film showcases Chytilova's signature blend of formal experimentation, absurdist slapstick, and sharp social commentary.

4K digital restoration carried out by Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in collaboration with the Narodni filmový archiv, Prague and the Czech Film Fund in UPP and Soundsquare, with funding by Mrs. Milada Ku?erova and Mr. Eduard Ku?era.