Union Cinema

In 1928 Paris, choreographer Ida Rubinstein commissions Maurice Ravel to compose the music for her next ballet. Facing a crisis of inspiration, the composer revisits his life and dedicates himself to create a universal masterpiece, Bolero.

Highlighting both the joys and trials of growing up Black in the Midwest, three young Milwaukee residents confront and reconcile the unrequited love between them and their city. Through outspoken interviews, they reveal the ways in which Milwaukee has shaped them and they in turn have shaped Milwaukee. Graced with poetry and luminous images, Marquise Mays's heartfelt documentary takes an at once loving and critical look at a city still riven by inequality-while offering an empowering vision for a brighter future.

Over the course of one hot summer, a group of children in the decaying rural South must confront a tangle of difficult choices. An ambitiously constructed, elegantly photographed meditation on adolescence, the first full-length film by director David Gordon Green features remarkable performances from an award-winning ensemble cast. George Washington is a startling and distinct work of contemporary American independent cinema.

Highlighting both the joys and trials of growing up Black in the Midwest, three young Milwaukee residents confront and reconcile the unrequited love between them and their city. Through outspoken interviews, they reveal the ways in which Milwaukee has shaped them and they in turn have shaped Milwaukee. Graced with poetry and luminous images, Marquise Mays's heartfelt documentary takes an at once loving and critical look at a city still riven by inequality-while offering an empowering vision for a brighter future.

Over the course of one hot summer, a group of children in the decaying rural South must confront a tangle of difficult choices. An ambitiously constructed, elegantly photographed meditation on adolescence, the first full-length film by director David Gordon Green features remarkable performances from an award-winning ensemble cast. George Washington is a startling and distinct work of contemporary American independent cinema.

Amidst the redwood trees on the California-Oregon border sits one of the most infamous prisons in US history. Pelican Bay is a labyrinthine construction of solid cement blocks – a supermax prison – opened in 1989 and designed specifically for mass-scale solitary confinement. For decades, it held men alone in tiny cells indefinitely. Then one day in 2013, 30,000 prisoners went on hunger strike.

The Strike weaves together, thread-by-thread, a half century of personal and criminal justice history into a single, compelling narrative around the drama of the 2013 hunger strike to end indefinite isolation.

For each program, the curator is invited to program a selection of films around a theme of their choosing from the remarkable Cinema Arts Archive collection, which contains over 400 essential works from the history of experimental cinema. Curated by MFA candidate Chae Yu.

The 18th-century Indian painter Nainsukh of Guler receives a poetic, visually stunning tribute from a young Indian filmmaker employing an arresting pictorial language.

In Los Angeles, a colorful assortment of bohemians try to make sense of their intersecting lives. The moody Dark Smith, his bisexual girlfriend, her lesbian lover, and their shy gay friend plan on attending the wildest party of the year. But they'll only make it if they can survive the drug trips, suicides, trysts, mutilations and alien abductions that occur as one surreal day unfolds.

Teens Jordan White and Amy Blue pick up a handsome drifter named Xavier Red. Red tends to create combustible situations - for example, a trip to a convenience store leads to a clerk getting decapitated. Afterward, the trio voyages through small-town America, where Amy is accosted by various men claiming to be her lovers, and she and Jordan find themselves drawn to Xavier. But can any amount of sex lift the sense of doom hanging over them?

Teens Jordan White and Amy Blue pick up a handsome drifter named Xavier Red. Red tends to create combustible situations - for example, a trip to a convenience store leads to a clerk getting decapitated. Afterward, the trio voyages through small-town America, where Amy is accosted by various men claiming to be her lovers, and she and Jordan find themselves drawn to Xavier. But can any amount of sex lift the sense of doom hanging over them?

In Los Angeles, a colorful assortment of bohemians try to make sense of their intersecting lives. The moody Dark Smith, his bisexual girlfriend, her lesbian lover, and their shy gay friend plan on attending the wildest party of the year. But they'll only make it if they can survive the drug trips, suicides, trysts, mutilations and alien abductions that occur as one surreal day unfolds.

An inspired and intimate portrait of a place and its people, Hale County This Morning, This Evening looks at the lives of Daniel Collins and Quincy Bryant, two young African American men from rural Hale County, Alabama, over the course of five years. Collins attends college in search of opportunity while Bryant becomes a father to an energetic son in an open-ended, poetic form that privileges the patiently observed interstices of their lives. The audience is invited to experience the mundane and monumental, birth and death, the quotidian and the sublime. These moments combine to communicate the region’s deep culture and provide glimpses of the complex ways the African American community’s collective image is integrated into America’s visual imagination.