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:

4:30 pm: Will. 1981. Directed by Jessie Maple

Will. 1981. USA. Directed by Jessie Maple. Screenplay by Maple, Anthony Wisdom. With Obaka Adedunyo, Robert Dean, Loretta Devine. New York premiere. Courtesy Janus Films. 73 min.

A landmark of independent American cinema, Will represents the culmination of Jessie Maple's determined path through the film industry's racial and gender barriers. After training at Third World Cinema and honing her craft shooting local news for WABC-TV, Maple became the first Black woman to join the East Coast camera union in 1974. Her early work included news coverage for CBS and NBC, with assignments ranging from local politics to the American Indian Movement's occupation of Wounded Knee.

Maple's hard-won experience behind the camera informed her directorial debut, bringing a documentarian's precision to this intimate portrait of a former college basketball star's struggle with addiction and redemption in Harlem. The film's protagonist, Will (Obaka Adedunyo), finds the strength to stay off drugs when he becomes a mentor to an orphaned boy, played with remarkable naturalism by Robert Dean. In her film debut, Loretta Devine brings her uniquely gentle screen presence to the role of Will's steadfast wife Jean.

Shot on 16mm with a budget of $12,000, the film exemplifies the production methods and alternative distribution networks that sustained African American cinema outside the mainstream industry. Maple and her husband, cinematographer Leroy Patton, founded LJ Film Productions to produce and distribute the film, screening it in community centers, churches, and educational institutions.

This meticulous new restoration came from the original 16mm camera negative and magnetic sound elements preserved by Indiana University's Black Film Center and Archive.

The new 4K restoration of Will (1981) was a joint project between the Black Film Center and Archive (BFCA), the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture's Time-Based Media Archives and Conservation staff, and the Center for African American Media Arts. The source material used for the restoration was a 16mm color print, held by the BFCA at Indiana University. The print was donated to the BFCA in 2005 by the director, Jessie Maple, and is preserved within the larger Jessie Maple collection. Work on the restoration was completed between 2020 and 2023, with generous funding provided by the SI-NMAAHC Robert Frederick Smith Center for the Digitization and Curation of African American History; Prasad (image restoration); ColorLab (film scanning, color grading, and laboratory services); and Audio Mechanics (audio mastering).

6:30 pm: Dutchman. 1966. Directed by Anthony Harvey We Are Universal. 1971. Directed by Billy Jackson

Dutchman. 1966. UK/USA. Directed by Anthony Harvey. Screenplay by Amiri Baraka, based on his play (as LeRoi Jones). With Shirley Knight, Al Freeman Jr., Frank Lieberman. World premiere. Courtesy Janus Films. 55 min.

4K digital restoration from the original camera negative supervised by The Criterion Collection with Metropolis Post. The original monaural soundtrack was restored from the 1/4" magnetic track.

We Are Universal. 1971. USA. Directed by Billy Jackson. With Jesse Jackson, Quincy Jones, Nikki Giovanni. World premiere. 24 min.

Digital restoration by Pittsburgh Sound + Image, with digital transfers by MediaPreserve and funding from the National Film Preservation Foundation.

When Amiri Baraka's explosive one-act play Dutchman premiered off Broadway in 1964, it outraged and electrified audiences in equal measure before winning an Obie Award as the best American play of the year, making Baraka the first Black playwright to receive this recognition. Despite its critical success, the play's scalding critique of liberal racial politics proved too controversial for American film studios, leading producer Henry T. Weinstein to seek both financing and creative freedom in Britain. At London's Twickenham Studios, first-time director Anthony Harvey, fresh from editing Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, transformed the theatrical material through sophisticated cutting and claustrophobic camerawork into a dynamic work of cinema, as a charged encounter between a buttoned-down Black professional (Al Freeman Jr., who originated the role on stage) and a dangerously seductive white woman (Shirley Knight) unfolds within a meticulously reconstructed New York City subway car.

Grove Press, the legendary publisher of avant-garde and politically radical literature, supported the film's eventual American distribution through their nascent cinema division, though its circulation remained limited primarily to university film societies and urban art houses, and Dutchman virtually disappeared from view when Grove Press dissolved in 1985. This restoration restores the original luster of Gerry Turpin's black-and-white cinematography.

We Are Universal is a 1971 documentary short, directed by the prolific filmmaker and activist Billy Jackson (Didn't We Ramble On), that surveys African American arts and culture, drawing inspiration from the "Black Is Beautiful" movement. It features onscreen commentary from such prominent figures as Jesse Jackson, Quincy Jones, Nikki Giovanni, Babatunde Olatunji, Hugh Masekela, and Freddie Hubbard. Restored by Pittsburgh Sound + Image.