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:

4:30 pm: Nujum al-Nahar (Stars in Broad Daylight). 1988. Written and - directed by Ossama Mohamed

Nujum al-Nahar (Stars in Broad Daylight). 1988. Syria. Written and directed by Ossama Mohamed. With Zuhair Abdulkarim, Sabah As-Salem, Saad Eddin Baqdoones. North American premiere. In Arabic; English subtitles. 105 min.

Opening with the paradoxical declaration "I am a free man," Ossama Mohammed's masterwork uses the microcosm of a rural Syrian family to explore the psychology of life under dictatorship. In a coastal village, the preparations for two weddings become a devastating study of power and control, centered on Abbas, a despotic older brother whose resemblance to Hafez al-Assad is no accident. Mohammed transforms domestic spaces-seen through cracks, dusty windows, and broken mirrors-into a stark visual poetry that reveals how authoritarian violence seeps into society's most private corners. Banned in Syria after a single screening but celebrated at Cannes, the film draws on influences from Georgian comedy to Federico Fellini while establishing its own powerful visual language. This restoration, from The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project, recovers a vital work by a director who, despite living in exile since 2011, continues to probe the complex relationship between beauty, justice, and political repression.

Restored by The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in collaboration with Ossama Mohammed. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

7:00 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.