Calendar – Past Event

Three award-winning docs open September 9 in New York-The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 and We Were Here-with dates in other theatrical markets to follow. Descriptions are below.

The Film Desk is pleased to present the US theatrical premiere of The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu, the masterwork by Romanian filmmaker Andrei Ujică that concludes his trilogy that began with the groundbreaking Videograms of a Revolution. An official selection of the Cannes, New York and Toronto film festivals, The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu is a genre-shattering cinematic work of the "new nonfiction" that culls decades of propaganda films from the Romanian national archives, synthesizing them into a taught, tragic, sprawling epic that seems recounted from the megalomaniacal point of view of the brutal 20th century dictator himself. Ujică breaks the bounds of traditional documentary form, revealing this draconian autocrat's fabricated cinematic version of a nation's reality as a delusional, scathing and dreamlike self-portrait.
The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu opens September 9 at The Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, 144 W. 65th St., followed by a nationwide release to select cities.   There will be an Andrei Ujică retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image October 1 and 2.

Presented by Sundance Selects, Swedish filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson's revelatory The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, co-produced by longtime activist and actor Danny Glover, is an irresistible audiovisual collage. The film combines a treasure trove of recently rediscovered footage of the 1967-75 Black Power movement with penetrating commentary by leading contemporary African-American voices, all set to an evocative soundtrack by Questlove of the Roots and Om'Mas. A Best Editing prize-winner at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 opens theatrically September 9 in New York at the IFC Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinema and September 23 in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Berkeley. in late September.

 We Were Here, from director David Weissman, is the first documentary to take a deep and reflective look back at the arrival and impact of AIDS in San Francisco, and how the city's inhabitants dealt with that unprecedented calamity. Five people who survived describe how the AIDS epidemic challenged everything they knew about themselves and their adopted hometown. The film explores what was not so easy to discern in the midst of it all--the parallel histories of suffering and loss, and of community coalescence and empowerment.
Though this is a San Francisco-based story, the issues it addresses extend not only beyond San Francisco, but beyond AIDS itself.  We Were Here speaks to our societal relationship to death and illness, our capacity as individuals to rise to the occasion, and the importance of community in addressing unimaginable crises with love, compassion and determination.
We Were Here opens September 9 at the Angelika Film Center in New York and September 16 at the Arclight Hollywood in Los Angeles.