Film & Media Culture

Two years after his wife’s unexpected death, Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a renowned stage actor and director, receives an offer to direct a production of Uncle Vanya at a theater festival in Hiroshima. There, he meets Misaki Watari (Toko Miura), a taciturn young woman assigned by the festival to chauffeur him in his beloved red Saab 900. Adapted from Haruki Murakami’s short story, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car is a haunting road movie traveling a path of love, loss, acceptance, and peace.

WITNESS, the latest project from Arlekin’s Zero Gravity (zero-G) Virtual Theater Lab, is a new documentary theater piece about Jewish immigration in the face of antisemitism. The piece is inspired by the journey of the MS St. Louis, which left Hamburg in 1939 with over 900 Jewish people on board and headed to Cuba only to be turned away, leaving the passengers stranded with nowhere to go and no escape. WITNESS shares stories of Jewish immigrants from around the globe through an interactive virtual theater experience at the nexus of film, theater and video games. (1 hour 30 minutes.) Free.

We are commemorating International Holocaust Remembrance Day with a video-on-demand screening of “Petit Rat” (Vera Wagman, 2021, USA, 45 mins.). https://www.petitrat.com/. In 1940, a French Jewish girl’s dream of becoming a ballerina is cut short by World War II. She vows that if she has daughters, they will become dancers. Nearly 80 years later, she and her two daughters confront the impact of that? pledge. Petit Rat is a portrait of three women, bonded by the intergenerational trauma of war and uplifted by the resilience of familial love.

Short films produced by students in the Collaborative Video Projects course during winter term. Admission is free.

UPDATE: This is virtual only - all are welcome to stream online. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Pedro arrives in Tierra del Fuego, a violent and hostile territory, to immortalize the marriage of a powerful landowner. Fascinated with the bride-to-be’s beauty, he betrays the rules and is left to face a land crawling with violence and marked by the genocide of its indigenous inhabitants. In Spanish with English subtitles. (1 hour 40 minutes.) Free. A Hirschfield International Film Series event.

UPDATE: This is virtual only - all are welcome to stream online. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Pedro arrives in Tierra del Fuego, a violent and hostile territory, to immortalize the marriage of a powerful landowner. Fascinated with the bride-to-be’s beauty, he betrays the rules and is left to face a land crawling with violence and marked by the genocide of its indigenous inhabitants. In Spanish with English subtitles. (1 hour 40 minutes.) Free. A Hirschfield International Film Series event.

Sundance triple award winner HIVE is a searing drama based on the true story of Fahrije, who has battled grief and financial struggle since her husband went missing during the war in Kosovo. In hope of providing for her family, she launches a business selling hot pepper preserves, a controversial act of independence that scandalizes her patriarchal village. In Albanian with English subtitles. (1 hour 23 minutes.) Free. A Hirschfield International Film Series event.

Sundance triple award winner HIVE is a searing drama based on the true story of Fahrije, who has battled grief and financial struggle since her husband went missing during the war in Kosovo. In hope of providing for her family, she launches a business selling hot pepper preserves, a controversial act of independence that scandalizes her patriarchal village. In Albanian with English subtitles. (1 hour 23 minutes.) Free. A Hirschfield International Film Series event.

Twelve-year-old Beans is on the edge: torn between innocent childhood and delinquent adolescence; forced to grow up fast to become the tough Mohawk warrior she needs to be during the Indigenous uprising known as The Oka Crisis, which tore Quebec and Canada apart for 78 tense days in the summer of 1990. In English, French, and Mohawk with English subtitles. (1 hour 32 minutes.) Free. A Hirschfield International Film Series event.

Twelve-year-old Beans is on the edge: torn between innocent childhood and delinquent adolescence; forced to grow up fast to become the tough Mohawk warrior she needs to be during the Indigenous uprising known as The Oka Crisis, which tore Quebec and Canada apart for 78 tense days in the summer of 1990. In English, French, and Mohawk with English subtitles. (1 hour 32 minutes.) Free. A Hirschfield International Film Series event.