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: 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.

4:00 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.

7:00 pm: The Wages of Sin. 1938. Directed by Herman E. Webber

The Wages of Sin. 1938. USA. Directed by Herman E. Webber. With Constance Worth, Willy Castello, Blanche Mehaffey, Clara Kimball Young. New York premiere. 76 min.

A rare surviving example of Depression-era exploitation cinema produced outside the constraints of the Production Code, Herman E. Webber's stark melodrama follows Marjorie Benton, a struggling working woman coerced into prostitution. Like Dwain Esper's Narcotic (1933) and Sex Madness (1938), the film traveled the exploitation circuit under the pretense of public health education, complete with a live lecturer and sensationalistic lobby displays warning of "moral decay." Shot in a raw, unvarnished style typical of "vice films" of the period, The Wages of Sin exemplifies how independent producers addressed taboo social issues while skirting censorship through strategic marketing of their films as educational ventures. While ostensibly serving as a cautionary tale, it provides an unexpectedly sympathetic portrait of women's economic vulnerability during the Depression, sharing thematic concerns with more prestigious social-problem films like William Wyler's Dead End (1937).

Restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive with funding provided by David Stenn.