This thoughtful, elegant meditation on work, family and the art of perfection centers on 85-year-old Jiro Ono, the world’s best sushi chef. His restaurant, inauspiciously located in a Tokyo subway station, has been honored with three Michelin stars. And sushi lovers around the globe shell out top dollar months ahead to book one of its ten coveted seats and dine with a master still scaling new heights of culinary genius.

Intimate, raw and unexpectedly funny, the new documentary from the makers of The Art of the Steal and Rock School tells the story of Bobby Liebling of the cult rock band Pentagram. After decades holed up in his parents’ basement, Bobby and his music are discovered by the heavy metal underground—but he has years of addiction, loneliness and broken dreams to overcome.

Directors in person!

GIRL MODEL shows a rarely seen side of the fashion industry. The film brings a novelist’s eye for emotional and psychological complexity to its portrait of two women. Ashley, an American former model, travels to remote Siberian villages to scout young teenaged girls for fashion shoots in Japan. We see her discover Nadya, a thirteen-yearold blonde, who radiates the innocence coveted by Ashley’s clients. Like thousands of other Russian girls, Nadya sees modelling as the best chance to support her family. She feels lucky when Ashley’s agency offers a contract with guarantees. But as the film follows Nadya to Japan and Ashley on her further scouting trips, we see each one grapple with the kind of harsh realities that fashion magazines tend to ignore.

Filmmakers David Redmon and Ashley Sabin (a different Ashley from the one onscreen) demonstrate an intrepid ability to track an unregulated system, and go far beyond mere fact collecting. Their attention to poetic detail — in faces, interactions and environments — elevates the film to a work of art.

Beautiful bodies are ever present. As a scout, Ashley makes selections from hundreds of aspiring girls. Her livelihood depends on getting them at the youngest age possible — and on matching current tastes. The criteria “changes minute by minute,” she says, “and it’s based on nothing.” We glimpse brief excepts of a video diary she kept during her own modelling days in the late nineties, revealing her distress and disillusionment. In the present, she projects an array of contradictory feelings that range from calculated to confused, jaded to vulnerable. She struggles to find her way between the glamorous and grotesque. Her sentences often trail off in doubt or end with “I don’t know.”

After watching GIRL MODEL, the viewer can’t pretend not to know something of the realities of this industry. You start looking at models with new questions in mind.

Dir. in person!

“Famously and successfully sued by Jackie Onassis, and slugged just as famously and successfully by Marlon Brando, denounced from the pulpits of punditry for decades, Galella has been a man easy to hate. But whether he can be blamed for sparking the current celeb-ysteria, he certainly created a body of work that is historically irreplaceable. [Director Leon] Gast, who won an Oscar® for his documentary When We Were Kings, gives us a man of personal complexity as well, a man who has photographed legends but still says ‘Catherine De Nerve,’ a tough guy who lives in a house a friend describes as right out of The Sopranos, except the Sopranos did not have a statue-studded pet bunny cemetery in the backyard.” — Mary McNamara, Los Angeles Times

One night only — director in person!

In this offbeat, quirky romantic comedy, high school chums Herman and Shelly navigate the odd transition from much-hyped youthful art prodigies to overlooked adult artists. Ambitions are pitted against lifelong bonds, with the zany mess of the art world acting as an ever-changing backdrop. A fresh take on coming of age, the murky space between lovers and friends, and the personal sacrifices endured for one’s art.

Introduced by Rose Troche!

It’s hard to believe that Steve McLean’s landmark of queer cinema was finished only two years after the death of its subject, artist and provocateur David Wojnarowicz. A wild, sad, passionate kaleidoscopic ride through New York gay life, the film highlights the intensely personal nature of Wojnarowicz work, from his Jersey roots, to his years hustling on and off the West Village piers. For filmmaker Rose Troche, who worked on the film while she was finishing her own queer groundbreaker, go fish, the film “epitomized a moment when we began to believe in our voice, our power, our numbers…and represents the beginning of community and collectivity that still exists.”

35mm print “Carpenter’s second feature borrows the conventions of protagonists in jeopardy from Night of the Living Dead to produce one of the most effective exploitation movies of the decade. The gimmick is cops and cons besieged in an abandoned LA police station by a group of kamikaze urban guerillas. Carpenter scrupulously avoids any overt socio-political pretensions, playing it instead for laughs and suspense in perfectly balanced proportions. The result is a thriller inspired by a buff’s admiration for Ford and Hawks (particularly Rio Bravo), with action sequences comparable to anything in Siegel or Fuller. It’s sheer delight from beginning to end.” – Time Out (London)

”[Allen’s] new, remarkably self-assured comedy is to his career what… Berlin Alexanderplatz is to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s and… Fanny and Alexander is to Ingmar Bergman’s… ZELIG is not only pricelessly funny, it’s also, on occasion, very moving. It works simultaneously as social history, as a love story, as an examination of several different kinds of film narrative, as satire and as parody . . . [It] is a nearly perfect — and perfectly original — Woody Allen comedy.” – Vincent Canby, New York Times

ZELIG is a 1983 American mockumentary film written and directed by Woody Allen, and starring Allen and Mia Farrow. Allen plays Zelig, a curiously nondescript enigma who is discovered for his remarkable ability to transform himself to resemble anyone he’s near.

The film was shot almost entirely in the style of 1920s-style black-and-white film newsreels, which are seamlessly interwoven with stock footage from the era, including cleverly filmed re-enactments of historical events. Narration is likewise largely in newsreel style. While being mostly set in the 1920s, the storyline occasionally shifts to present day (1983) interviews, shot in color. – Wikipedia

Q&A with director Carl Colby

A son’s riveting look at a father whose life seemed straight out of a spy thriller, THE MAN NOBODY KNEW: IN SEARCH OF MY FATHER, CIA SPYMASTER WILLIAM COLBY uncovers the secret world of a legendary CIA spymaster. Told by William Colby’s son Carl, the story is at once a probing history of the CIA, a personal memoir of a family living in clandestine shadows, and an inquiry into the hard costs of a nation’s most cloaked actions.

From the beginning of his career as an OSS officer parachuting into Nazi-occupied Europe, William Colby rose through the ranks of “The Company,” and soon was involved in covert operations in hot spots around the globe. He swayed elections against the Communists in Italy, oversaw the coup against President Diem in Saigon, and ran the controversial Phoenix Program in Vietnam, which sparked today’s legacy of counter-insurgency. But after decades of obediently taking on the White House’s toughest and dirtiest assignments, and rising to become Director of CIA, Colby defied the President. Braving intense controversy, he opened up to Congress some of the agency’s darkest, most tightly held secrets and extra-legal operations.

Now, his son asks a series of powerful and relevant questions about the father who was a ghost-like presence in the family home – and the intelligence officer who became a major force in American history, paving the way for today’s provocative questions about security and secrecy vs. liberty and morality. The film forges a fascinating mix of rare archival footage, never-before-seen photos, and interviews with the “who’s who” of American intelligence, including former National Security Advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense and Director of CIA James Schlesinger, as well Pulitzer Prize journalists Bob Woodward, Seymour Hersh and Tim Weiner. Through it all, Carl Colby searches for an authentic portrait of the man who remained masked even to those who loved him most.

Introduced by Elizabeth Streb!

RUNAWAY TRAIN is the highly propulsive story of two men who escape from a maximum-security prison via a runaway train pummeling through the Alaskan wilderness. One of the most exhilarating films you’ll ever see, this 1985 action masterpiece stars the two great hunks of the era, big-lipped Eric Roberts and Jon Voight in what is arguably his most memorable performance. The film astounded our February guest, choreographer Elizabeth Streb, and inspired her to start an Action Lab that would similarly stretch the boundaries of human possibility. For Streb, the film is also a very queer reminder that “in choosing whom we love, we break all rules.”