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: 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.

6:30 pm: The Craving. 1918. Written and directed by Francis Ford, John Ford - The Post Telegrapher. 1912. Directed by Francis Ford

The Craving. 1918. USA. Written and directed by Francis Ford, John Ford. With Francis Ford, Mae Gaston, Peter Gerald. Silent. New York premiere. Silent. 50 min.

The Post Telegrapher. 1912. USA. Directed by Francis Ford. Silent. 24 min.

1918 found both Francis Ford and his younger brother John working at Universal, where Francis was an established action star and accomplished director and John was learning his craft in a series of Westerns starring Harry Carey. The brothers appear to have come together for The Craving, a powerful psychological drama about alcoholism (the Ford family curse), though there is some ambiguity about John's involvement. Drawing on both Victorian temperance narratives and emergent theories of psychoanalysis, the film crafts a remarkably modern exploration of addiction and moral responsibility through the story of Carroll Wayles, played by Francis himself, a brilliant chemist whose struggle with alcoholism makes him vulnerable to manipulation.

Ford's innovative direction makes use of groundbreaking multiple-exposure effects that visualize his protagonist's torment. Particularly striking are the delirium tremens sequences, in which tiny figures dance in a glass of liquor-a technical achievement that turns a "trick film" technique of early cinema into a psychologically expressive moment and demonstrates how Hollywood's pioneering directors were already pushing the boundaries of visual storytelling well before the commonly recognized innovations of the 1920s.

The Craving survived through a single nitrate print with Dutch intertitles, preserved by Eye Filmmuseum. This new restoration, produced by Ben Model (and accompanied by him on the piano), comes with recreated English intertitles. Also on the program is The Post Telegrapher, a 1912 two-reeler directed by Francis Ford for Thomas Ince's Bison 101 studio. The evening will be introduced by Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, a film historian and professor at the University of Texas at Austin who is working on a biography of Francis Ford.

Digital restorations produced by Undercrank Productions.