Union Cinema
Experimental Tuesdays presents: From the Archives
Union CinemaFrom the Archives is an ongoing series curated by MFA candidates in the UWM Film Department. 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 Matt Feldman.
Gospel of Revolution
Union CinemaThrough powerful archival footage and contemporary interviews, the film shows how these radical Catholics fought injustice alongside peasants, workers, and Indigenous people, refusing to accept poverty and oppression.
Soundtrack To a Coup d’Etat
Union CinemaUnited Nations, 1960: the Global South ignites a political earthquake, jazz musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash the Security Council, Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe, and the U.S. State Department swings into action, sending jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to Congo to deflect attention from the CIA-backed coup. Director Johan Grimonprez captures the moment when African politics and American jazz collided in this magnificent essay film, a riveting historical rollercoaster that illuminates the political machinations behind the 1961 assassination of Congo’s leader Patrice Lumumba. Richly illustrated by eyewitness accounts, official government memos, testimonies from mercenaries and CIA operatives, speeches from Lumumba himself, and a veritable canon of jazz icons, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat interrogates colonial history to tell an urgent and timely story of precedent that resonates more than ever in today’s geopolitical climate.
The Decay of Fiction
Union CinemaThe walls of the Ambassador are cracked and peeling, the lawns are brown, and mushrooms grow in the damp carpets of the Cocoanut Grove. The pool is empty, and the ballroom where Bobby Kennedy died is shuttered and locked. A tall, elegant blonde stands transparently on the terrace of her bungalow, smoking and watching the sunrise. Voices and tinkles waft across the lawn. A contingent of vaguely sinister men arrive and ask for Jack. Jack is expecting trouble, but not this kind of trouble. Louise, a guest, replays a nightmare in which she drowns Pauline so that she can marry Dean. The sun sets and rises again.
Nightshift
Union CinemaOver the course of a single nightshift, a West London hotel clerk plays mute witness to a nocturnal constellation of guests ranging from punk rockers and scenester magicians to seemingly staid businessmen and old-world gentry. As the hours march deeper into night and the varied clientele depart the waking world, the hotel transforms into an otherworldly, liminal space swaying between the everyday and the enchanting.
Nightshift
Union CinemaOver the course of a single nightshift, a West London hotel clerk plays mute witness to a nocturnal constellation of guests ranging from punk rockers and scenester magicians to seemingly staid businessmen and old-world gentry. As the hours march deeper into night and the varied clientele depart the waking world, the hotel transforms into an otherworldly, liminal space swaying between the everyday and the enchanting.
The Decay of Fiction
Union CinemaThe walls of the Ambassador are cracked and peeling, the lawns are brown, and mushrooms grow in the damp carpets of the Cocoanut Grove. The pool is empty, and the ballroom where Bobby Kennedy died is shuttered and locked. A tall, elegant blonde stands transparently on the terrace of her bungalow, smoking and watching the sunrise. Voices and tinkles waft across the lawn. A contingent of vaguely sinister men arrive and ask for Jack. Jack is expecting trouble, but not this kind of trouble. Louise, a guest, replays a nightmare in which she drowns Pauline so that she can marry Dean. The sun sets and rises again.
Experimental Tuesdays and Vernacular Film Zine Journal present: Calum Walter
Union CinemaCalum Walter is an artist working in sound and moving image. His recent work has focused on human and machine error, collective anxieties, and the cultural moment shaped by emerging and consumer technologies. His films have been screened widely at film festivals including the Berlinale, Sundance, TIFF, the New York Film Festival, and IFF Rotterdam International Film Festival. Filmmaker in person.
Hale County This Morning, This Evening
Union CinemaAn 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.
Sujo
Union CinemaWhen a cartel gunman is killed, he leaves behind his beloved four-year-old son, Sujo. The shadow of violence surrounds Sujo during each stage of his life in the isolated Mexican countryside. As he grows into a man, Sujo finds that following his father’s path may be inescapable.
The 46th Annual Latin American Film Series
Union CinemaUWM’s Latin American Film Series returns this April for its 46th year, showcasing recent feature-length films from across Latin America and the Caribbean. This year’s lineup includes a variety of dramatic, comedic, and documentary titles, with stories set in urban capitals (Lima, La Paz), rural communities (Mexico’s Michoacán, Colombia’s Caribbean coast), and places in between. Join us to explore society, history, and the human experience.
Toll
Union CinemaSuellen, a toll booth attendant, falls in with a gang of thieves in an attempt to keep her family afloat. Her cause: sending her teenage son Antônio to an expensive gay conversion workshop led by a renowned foreign priest. Antônio follows his own path to survival.