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: Le Rendez-vous des quais(Rendez-vous of the Docks).1955. Directed by Paul Carpita Despues del terremoto (After the Earthquake). 1979. Written and directed by Lourdes Portillo, Nina Serrano

Le Rendez-vous des quais (Rendez-vous of the Docks). 1955. France. Directed by Paul Carpita. Screenplay by Carpita, Andre Maufray. With Maufray, Jeanine Moretti, Roger Manunta. North American premiere. Courtesy Anaïs Carpita. In French; English subtitles. 75 min.

Digital restoration by the Centre national du cinema et de l'image animee (CNC) and the Cinemathèque française, in collaboration with the heirs of Paul Carpita and Cine-Archives.

Despues del terremoto (After the Earthquake). 1979. USA. Written and directed by Lourdes Portillo, Nina Serrano. With Vilma Coronado, Agnelo Guzman, Mario Lara. New York premiere. Courtesy Women Make Movies. In English, Spanish; English subtitles. 24 min.

Digital restoration by University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, in collaboration with Corpus Fluxus, with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.

Banned in France for three decades, Paul Carpita's 1955 feature Rendez-vous of the Docks emerges both as a vital document of postwar French social consciousness and a precious record of working-class life in midcentury Marseille. Self-described as "a schoolteacher who knew how to use a camera," Carpita brought both artistic ambition and documentary rigor to this politically charged narrative, in which a young couple searches for a home against the background of Marseille's dock workers' strikes of the early 1950s. The film captures a critical moment when workers, discovering they were loading munitions by day while secretly unloading soldiers' coffins by night, went on strike in protest of France's Indochina War.

A groundbreaking early work from acclaimed Chicana filmmaker Lourdes Portillo, After the Earthquake emerged during the 1970 renaissance of political cinema, and represents a significant intersection of feminist filmmaking and Latin American diasporic narratives. Shot in grainy black and white, this dramatic short follows a young Nicaraguan woman who has immigrated to San Francisco in the wake of the 1972 Managua earthquake, enduring both personal and political aftershocks as she navigates her new reality.

6:30 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).