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: 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.

6:30 pm: The Greeks Had a Word for Them. 1932. Directed by Lowell Sherman

The Greeks Had a Word for Them. 1932. USA. Directed by Lowell Sherman. Screenplay by Zoe Akins, Sidney Howard. With Joan Blondell, Madge Evans, Ina Claire. New York premiere. 80 min.

Originally conceived as a vehicle for Jean Harlow (who remained unavailable due to Howard Hughes's contractual grip), The Greeks Had a Word for Them instead became a showcase for Broadway legend Ina Claire, whose razor-sharp comic timing elevates this tale of three mercenary showgirls navigating Manhattan's elite social circles during the Depression.

Director and costar Lowell Sherman brings particular resonance to the material through his complex relationship with the character type he helped create. Having established the archetype of the sophisticated seducer in D. W. Griffith's Way Down East (1920), Sherman spent the 1920s refining this "toxic bachelor" persona across numerous films. By 1932, as both performer and director, he approaches the material with an almost anthropological detachment, supplying a critical commentary on his own screen image.

The source material is a 1930 play by Zoe Akins (the original title, The Greeks Had a Word for It, was apparently too much for producer Samuel Goldwyn). One of the most successful dramatists of the interwar period, Akins would later win the Pulitzer Prize for her adaptation of Edith Wharton's The Old Maid. She and Sherman would collaborate one last time, on the 1933 Morning Glory, which won an Oscar for Katharine Hepburn shortly before Sherman's untimely death in 1934.

This meticulous restoration from the Library of Congress and The Film Foundation rescues the film from decades of circulation in poor-quality public domain prints (usually under the title Three Broadway Girls). Heather Linville, who supervised the restoration for the Library, will introduce the January 21 screening.

Restored by the Library of Congress and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.