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: Maria Candelaria. 1943. Directed by Emilio Fernandez

Maria Candelaria. 1943. Mexico. Directed by Emilio Fernandez. Screenplay by Fernandez, Mauricio Magdaleno. With Dolores del Rio, Pedro Armendariz, Alberto Galan. New York premiere. In Spanish; English subtitles. 98 min.

Winning both the Palme d'Or and Best Cinematography awards at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival, Maria Candelaria marked Mexico's entry into the highest ranks of world cinema. The floating gardens of Xochimilco provide a lyrical background to a self-consciously mythological tale of a pair of lovers (Dolores del Rio and Pedro Armendariz) menaced by a covetous shopkeeper (Miguel Inclan, Mexican cinema's Man You Love to Hate). Cameraman Gabriel Figueroa brilliantly finesses that most difficult of lighting situations: nighttime on water. Director Emilio Fernandez captures the spirit of Mexico's great muralists with his epic vision of a noble peasantry exploited by the petty bourgeoisie. This new restoration, based on the camera negative preserved by Filmoteca UNAM, returns this work to its original visual splendor.

Restored by the Academy Film Archive, Televisa-Univision, Filmoteca UNAM, and The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project, with funding provided by the Material World Foundation. This project was initiated by Fundación Televisa and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.

7:00 pm: An Evening with Heather McAdams

Heather McAdams joins us to present new 16mm restorations of her irreverent collage films from the 1980s, recently preserved by the Chicago Film Society. Known for her work as a cartoonist and filmmaker, McAdams has long been a fixture of Chicago's alternative film and music scenes and was once hailed by B. Ruby Rich in the Chicago Reader as combining "the collage finesse of a Bruce Conner with the crude campiness of the Kuchar brothers." McAdams's found-footage films mine popular culture, often drawing on her extensive collection of industrials, educational films, advertisements, home movies, and music films. Through scratch animation, hand-painting, and audiovisual collage, these celluloid fragments of Americana are reassembled into feminist send-ups of gender norms, beauty standards, and the nuclear family.

The screening also features McAdams's personal documentaries, including her offbeat portrait of Bradley Harrison Picklesimer, a Kentucky drag queen who ran his own nightclub in downtown Lexington. Assembling found imagery with footage of Bradley tending bar or reflecting on the goings on at the club, gender expression, and the ups and downs of life, Meet…Bradley Harrison Picklesimer is a memorable entry in queer oral history, brought to life with McAdams's distinctive DIY sensibility.

The screening is followed by a conversation with the filmmaker, moderated by Sophie Cavoulacos, associate curator in the Department of Film.

The Scratchman. 1980. USA. Directed by Heather McAdams. 16mm. 3 min.
Scratchman # 2. 1982. USA. Directed by Heather McAdams. 16mm. 3 min.
Holiday Magic. 1985. USA. Directed by Heather McAdams. 16mm. 7 min.
All Up. 1983. USA. Directed by Heather McAdams. 16mm. 8 min.
Fetal Pig Anatomy. 1989. Directed by Heather McAdams. Sound by Billy DesJardins. 16mm. 6 min.
You. 1983. USA. Directed by Heather McAdams. 16mm. 4 min.
Comes to a Point Like an Ice-Cream Cone. 1997. USA. Directed by Heather McAdams, Chris Ligon. 16mm. 18 min.
Meet…Bradley Harrison Picklesimer. 1988. USA. Directed by Heather McAdams. 16mm. 32 min.

Program approx. 81 min.

New York restoration premiere. Meet…Bradley Harrison Picklesimer preserved by Chicago Film Society through the National Film Preservation Foundation's Avant-Garde Masters program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. All other films preserved by Chicago Film Society with funding from the National Film Preservation Foundation.