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:

1:30 pm: Broadway. 1929. Directed by Paul Fejos

Broadway. 1929. USA. Directed by Paul Fejos. Screenplay by Edward T. Lowe Jr., Charles Furthman, based on the play by Philip Dunning and George Abbott. With Glenn Tryon, Evelyn Brent, Merna Kennedy. New York City premiere. 105 min.

A landmark in early sound filmmaking, Paul Fejos's Broadway decisively challenges the persistent myth that the arrival of synchronized dialogue resulted in static, stage-bound cinema. Adapting Philip Dunning and George Abbott's 1926 hit play about romance and crime in a Prohibition-era nightclub, the Hungarian-born Fejos-an avant-garde filmmaker recruited by visionary Universal executive Carl Laemmle Jr.-deployed what was then the largest camera crane ever constructed, creating elaborate tracking shots that sweep through a massive multilevel set with a fluidity that wouldn't become standard for decades.

Against the backdrop of a lavish Times Square nightclub, ambitious hoofer Roy Lane (Glenn Tryon) and chorus girl Billie Moore (Merna Kennedy) are pursuing dreams of stardom, but become entangled in a web of bootlegging and murder when gangster Steve Crandall (Robert Ellis) sets his sights on both the club and Pearl (Evelyn Brent), Roy's former dance partner.

This new restoration from Universal synthesizes several different sources and includes the surviving Technicolor sequences.

4K digital restoration by Universal Pictures from the 35mm nitrate original negative, 35mm composite fine grain, and 35mm two-strip (red/green) original.

4:00 pm: Pink Narcissus. 1971. Written and directed by James Bidgood

Pink Narcissus. 1971. USA. Written and directed by James Bidgood. With Don Brooks, Bobby Kendall, Charles Ludlam. World premiere. Courtesy Strand Releasing. 68 min.

A kaleidoscopic fever dream of queer desire, James Bidgood's underground masterpiece Pink Narcissus (1971) transforms a humble New York apartment into a technicolor fantasia of sexual awakening. Shot over seven years on 8mm film, this visually intoxicating work follows a young male prostitute (Bobby Kendall) as he retreats into elaborate fantasies, reimagining himself as a matador, a Roman slave, and the master of an exotic harem.

Predating the baroque aesthetics of Pierre et Gilles by decades, Bidgood's handcrafted sets and saturated lighting create a theatrical dreamscape in which artifice becomes transcendent. Classical music by Mussorgsky and Prokofiev underscores the film's ambitious fusion of high art and homoeroticism, while its confined domestic production speaks to both necessity and liberation-a queer creative spirit refusing to be constrained by material limitations.

Originally released anonymously in protest over creative differences, Pink Narcissus remained a subject of speculation until the 1990s, when writer Bruce Benderson confirmed Bidgood as its visionary creator. At once a milestone of experimental cinema and a landmark of queer representation, this haunting meditation on beauty, desire, and self-reflection remains as mesmerizing today as when it first emerged from its creator's private universe.

Restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive with funding provided by Snapdragon Capital Partners.