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Refund Policy: When we experience technical issues, the projectionist will get contact information of the attendees. The attendees will be contacted by the department, and they would need to come to the Cinema Department office (CW-B41, basement of Classroom Wing) within 4 weeks from receiving notice to get a refund.

SPRING 2025: Harpur Cinema Program

Don Hertzfeldt presents ANIMATION MIXTAPE (Various, 2025, 85 mins)

Fri 2/20 - Sun 2/22

Two-time Academy Award nominee and Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize winner Don Hertzfeldt partners with Ink Films to release Animation Mixtape, an 85-minute short film program personally selected by Hertzfeldt. An exclusive collection of animated shorts by talented artists from around the world, Mixtape features many recent films from up-and-coming animators next to classics that originally inspired Hertzfeldt to start animating. “Animated short films are a vital part of our cinematic ecosystem, and I’ll always leap at every opportunity to bring the work of amazing artists to the biggest screens we can find," said Hertzfeldt. "This feature-length collection includes many strange treasures I’ve admired over the years — from new films that haven’t been released widely yet, to titles that inspired me to become an animator over thirty years ago.” 

Spell Reel (Filipa César, 2017, 96 mins)

Fri 3/6 - Sun 3/8

At once archive, memory, and cinematic voyage, Spell Reel traces a sea change in post-colonial African cinema through the collaboration of Portuguese filmmaker Filipa César and Guinean directors Sana na N'Hada and Flora Gomes. During Guinea-Bissau's war of independence (1963–74), N'Hada and Gomes documented the liberation struggle, working under Amílcar Cabral's decolonizing vision and trained by radical filmmaker Chris Marker. Decades later, César joins them as they return to those original sites, screening the footage for local audiences—many seeing it for the first time in fifty years. Spell Reel becomes both an evocation of revolutionary cinema's spirit and a living archive of its improbable emergence: cinema as collective memory, as pedagogy, as antidote to our current crisis.

The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, 2008, 87 mins)

Fri 3/13 - Sun 3/15

A compelling and oblique tale of a poster child for the South American haute bourgeoisie: blonde and bland, perfectly coiffed and made-up, usually sitting behind the wheel of a Mercedes. María Onetto plays a woman whose perfect life may be a dream or whose nightmare accident (was that a child her car hit? a dog? or nothing?) may indicate that her entire existence lacks reality. Critics have referenced David Lynch and Luis Buñuel as forerunners for the kind of hyper-reality the film exudes. When the film played at the 2008 New York Film Festival, the Village Voice’s J. Hoberman wrote: “The third feature by Lucrecia Martel, leading director of the Argentine renaissance, is her strongest to date — at the very least, this brilliantly edited, purposefully disorienting comedy about a middle-aged woman’s post-car-accident confusion is the movie I’m most looking forward to revisiting.”

In the Manner of Smoke (Armand Tukenkian, 2025, 90 mins)

Fri 3/20 - Sun 3/22

Through landscapes and canvases, Armand Yervant Tufenkian’s debut feature In the Manner of Smoke traces how perception shifts over time. Moving between California’s Sequoia National Forest and painter Dan Hays' London-based studio, the film observes two solitary practices: the vigilance of a fire lookout and the meticulous rendering of digital landscapes. The camera dwells on subtle transformations, such as trees dissolving into haze, paintings oscillating between pixels and depth, and silence unfolding into sound, allowing each moment to stretch and change before our eyes. Rather than telling a linear story, the film creates a patient, immersive experience where every image feels transitory, suspended, and fleeting, like smoke carried by the wind.

Drylongso (Cauleen Smith, 1998, 86 mins)

Fri 4/10 - Sun 4/12

A rediscovered treasure of 1990s DIY filmmaking, Cauleen Smith’s Drylongso embeds an incisive look at racial injustice within a lovingly handmade buddy movie/murder mystery/romance. Alarmed by the rate at which the young Black men around her are dying, brash Oakland, California, art student Pica (Toby Smith) attempts to preserve their existence in Polaroid snapshots, along the way forging a friendship with a woman in an abusive relationship (April Barnett) and experiencing love, heartbreak, and the everyday threat of violence. Capturing the vibrant community spirit of Oakland in the nineties, Smith crafts both a rare cinematic celebration of Black female creativity and a moving elegy for a generation of lost African American men.

Ralph Hocking Retrospective (Ralph Hocking, various)

Fri 4/17 - Sun 4/19

Tomonari Nishikawa Retrospective (Tomonari Nishikawa, various)

Fri 4/24 - Sun 4/26 (*Sunday Screening at 5:30pm)

In April 2025, the experimental film community lost Tomonari Nishikawa, 91���� University Cinema professor and master of celluloid, who died at 55. Working with meticulous devotion to 16mm and 35mm film, Nishikawa developed optical techniques entirely his own—rigorous, patient explorations that established him as one of the most vital artists in contemporary artisanal film practice. He was an exacting technician and a generous teacher, as precise in the darkroom as he was open-hearted with students and colleagues. His films remain: luminous works that fracture and reconstruct our perception, inviting us to see time, space, and light anew.