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: 7th Heaven. 1927. - Directed by Frank Borzage

7th Heaven. 1927. USA. Directed by Frank Borzage. Screenplay by Benjamin Glazer, based on the play by Austin Strong. With Janet Gaynor, Charles Farrell, David Butler. World Premiere. Silent. 118 min.

Casting Fox contract player Janet Gaynor as a Parisian street urchin and newcomer Charles Farrell as the sanitation worker who loves her, director Frank Borzage created one of the great screen couples, an alliance that would continue through 11 more films. 7th Heaven stands as Borzage's strongest expression of the transcendent power of romantic love, evoking emotions of such strength and purity that only the dream world of silent film could contain them. At the first Academy Awards ceremony, the film won Oscars for Gaynor (Best Actress), Borzage (Best Director) and Benjamin Glazer (Best Adapted Screenplay).This is the premiere presentation of a new, upgraded digital restoration featuring improved image quality, stabilized intertitles, and the original color tints.

Digital restoration by The Museum of Modern Art. Funding provided by the Lillian Gish Fund for Preservation.

4:00 pm: A Circle in the Fire. 1974.Directed by Victor Nunez Elijah Pierce: Woodcarver. 1974. Directed by Carolyn Jones

A Circle in the Fire. 1974. USA. Directed by Victor Nunez. Screenplay by Nunez, based on the short story by Flannery O'Connor. With Betty Miller, Ingrid Schweska, Katherine Miller. World premiere. 50 min.

Digital restoration by the filmmaker using IndieCollect's 5K scan of the original camera reversal.

Elijah Pierce: Woodcarver. 1974. USA. Directed by Carolyn Jones. With Elijah Pierce. World premiere. 18 min.

Digital restoration by Colorlab in conjunction with the Ohio State University Libraries Preservation and Digitization Lab, with funding provided by the National Film Preservation Foundation.

An early work by one of American independent cinema's most distinctive regional voices, Victor Nunez's 50-minute adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's haunting short story marks the transition between his UCLA student shorts and the sublime series of features he began with Gal Young Un in 1979. The story follows Mrs. Cope (Betty Miller), a proud farm owner whose carefully ordered world is disrupted by three teenage boys, led by the son of a former worker. Their unwanted presence escalates from nuisance to threat, culminating in an act of biblical proportions that eerily echoes the Book of Daniel's fiery furnace. Unlike John Huston in his O'Connor adaptation Wise Blood, Nunez refuses wide-angle close-ups and eccentric performances, finding his Southern gothic instead in the experience and perspective of his very human characters.

Elijah Pierce: Woodcarver is an 18-minute documentary from 1974 that explores the life and artistry of Elijah Pierce, a self-trained African American woodcarver whose sculptures explore historical, Biblical, and personal themes. The film traces his journey from Baldwin, Mississippi, where he was born to formerly enslaved parents, to Columbus, Ohio, where he worked as a barber, turning his shop into a gallery and community center.