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: Mia Luang (My Dear Wife). 1978. Directed by Vichit Kounavudhi

Mia Luang (My Dear Wife). 1978. Thailand. Directed by Vichit Kounavudhi. Screenplay by Kounavudhi, based on the novel by Krisna Asosksin. With Jatupon Paupirom, Viyada Umarin, Wonguen Intrawuth. North American premiere. Courtesy Five Star Production Co., Ltd. In Thai; English subtitles. 145 min.

A sophisticated, Sirkian entry in Thailand's domestic melodrama tradition, My Dear Wife exemplifies the genre's preoccupation with class aspiration and marital discord in rapidly modernizing Bangkok. Director Vichit Kounavudhi, later named a National Artist, crafts an emotionally extravagant narrative centered on the rivalry between a legitimate wife and her husband's mistress, set against a backdrop of rising middle-class prosperity and social ambition. The film's widescreen cinematography, conjuring the look of midcentury American melodramas, lavishes attention on the material trappings of urban affluence-modern apartments, fashionable clothes, new automobiles-while its narrative explores the price of such advancement through the intense psychological warfare between its female protagonists.

Made during Thai cinema's commercial peak, when local studios were producing hundreds of features annually for an enthusiastic domestic audience, My Dear Wife demonstrates the industry's ability to adapt international melodramatic conventions while addressing distinctly Thai social dynamics. This new restoration by the Thai Film Archive preserves a vital example of how popular cinema could transform social tensions into compelling entertainment, offering contemporary viewers insight into a crucial period of Thai cultural history.

7:00 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.