AMERICAN CINEMATHEQUE'S BLEAK WEEK:  CINEMA OF DISPAIR  IS HERE!  AS ONE OF OVER A HUNDRED PARTICIPATING  MOVIE THEATERS AROUND THE WORLD, WE'RE OFFERING UP FIVE DOUBLE FEATURES  (WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES / COME & SEE, IN A YEAR OF 13 MOONS / STROCZEK, CHRISTIANE F. / AU HASARD BALTHAZAR) & A CLOSING  7 PLUS HOUR  BELA TAR MONUMENTAL FEATURE  SATANTANGO!

NOTE:  THIS DOUBLE FEATURE WILL BE WITH BELA TARR &  ÁGNES HRANITSKY'S HUNGARIAN LANDMARK WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES!

Staff member Jack Mahoney's pick! 

This widely acclaimed film from Soviet director Elem Klimov is a stunning, senses-shattering plunge into the dehumanizing horrors of war. As Nazi forces encroach on his small village in present-day Belarus, teenage Flyora (Aleksei Kravchenko, in one of the screen’s most searing depictions of anguish since Renée Falconetti’s Joan of Arc) eagerly joins the Soviet resistance. Rather than the adventure and glory he envisioned, what he finds is a waking nightmare of unimaginable carnage and cruelty—rendered with a feverish, otherworldly intensity by Klimov’s subjective camerawork and expressionistic sound design. Nearly suppressed by Soviet censors who took eight years to approve its script, Come and See is perhaps the most visceral, impossible-to-forget antiwar film ever made.

"This 1985 Soviet anti-war drama is one of the best movies ever made." - Tom Cassidy, Common Sense Media

"A compelling, harrowing, absurdly beautiful account of the little known holocaust in Byelorussia." - Victoria Mather, Daily Telegraph (UK)