Cinema Reborn 2025

“The festival always casts the net wide, introducing unexpected, overlooked, or rediscovered gems,” writes Philippa Hawker in the Saturday Paper. “A case in point is Tokyo Pop (1988), a vivid, disarming tale of musical ambitions and frustrations, cultural contradictions and appropriations.” Directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Tokyo Pop stars Carrie Hamilton as Wendy, an American singer who heads to Japan, where she meets Hiro (Diamond Yukai), “who has dreams of rock stardom of his own. It’s not a romantic meet-cute but something more awkward, messy, and by the end, heartfelt.”

Cinema Reborn organizers excel in pairing writers of program notes with each film. The closing night selection, for example, is The Fall of Otrar (1991), a panoramic depiction of the palace intrigue and the fierce battle that led to Genghis Khan’s conquest of the East Asian civilization in the thirteenth century. Filmmaker, archivist, curator, and Eastern European cinema scholar Daniel Bird calls The Fall of Otrar “a synthesis of three unique voices. First, it’s the debut of Ardak Amirkulov, part of the rabble of filmmakers who spearheaded what can now be considered the new wave of 1990s Kazakh cinema. Second, it’s the adaptation of an epic script, that is as bizarre as it is unique, by the great dramaturgist, Svetlana Karmalita, and her husband, Aleksei German,” the director of Khrustalyov, My Car! (1998) and Hard to Be a God (2013).

In his notes on the centerpiece presentation, Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), renowned critic Adrian Martin writes that “anachronism is the coin of the realm here. It’s through the inventions in the free-form dialogue, moreover, that one gets to the true heart of the film’s themes and obsessions: its many scatological riffs on body odor, bathing, rotten meat, toiletry, and extravagant sexual dysfunction give us more of Altman’s ‘vision’ than a simple parsing of the pro-or-anti-Western plot can manage.”

This year’s roundup ranges from Hollywood classics such as John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946) to the recently revived Bona (Lino Brocka, 1980) and Leila and the Wolves (Heiny Srour, 1984). The French contingent includes Julien Duvivier (Pépé le moko, 1937), René Clément (Forbidden Games, 1952), and Robert Bresson (The Devil, Probably, 1977), and the rest of the European continent is well-represented by Sergei Parajanov (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, 1965), Carlos Saura (Cría cuervos . . . , 1976), and Andrei Tarkovsky (The Sacrifice, 1986).

Seven Australian films will see world premieres of their new restorations, including two by the late Anna Kannava, who arrived in Australia from Cyprus when she was fifteen. The thirty-minute Ten Years After . . . Ten Years Older (1986) is a portrait of her grandmother, while The Butler (1997) “broadens the scope and reference points of the shared narrative,” writes Philippa Hawker. “With deceptive simplicity, beginning with her beloved brother Nino, the would-be ‘butler’ of the title, Kannava introduces us to her family, to their stories and hers, to dreams and memories, the imaginary and the documentary, creating layers and connections across time.”