Join us this Wednesday the 20th of May for the final night of our season, A Woman of Her Time: Julie Christie.
Our program will begin at 7pm with Sally Potter’s The Gold Diggers (1983). Made with an entirely female crew and partially shot in Iceland by Babette Mangolte, this landmark of 1980s feminist counter-cinema emerged from a unique moment in film history. When the film’s protagonist (Christie) has to try to recollect her memories in order to discover who (or what) she is, the viewer shares her labour in putting the fragments together.
This will be followed at 8:45pm by Sarah Polley’s Away From Her (2006). Christie was nominated for an Academy Award for her “career-defining performance” (Jonathan Rosenbaum) as a woman whose diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease reveals a wedge in her marriage to Grant (Gordon Pinsent). Tender scenes are set against an idyllic snowbound landscape, made picturesque so as to underline the cruelties of ageing.
Please also note the Melbourne Cinémathèque’s 2026 Annual General Meeting will be held at 6:30pm in ACMI Cinema 1, ahead of the screening of The Gold Diggers. This is your chance to get an update on the Cinémathèque’s finances and operations, ask questions, or join the committee. Attendance is open to all with memberships valid on 20 May.
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"FILM ANNOUNCEMENT: WE HAVE MANY NAMES (1976) 🐴🤦♀️⛓️
Acclaimed feminist Swedish actor/director Mai Zetterling's rarely shown heartbreak ballad exploring despair and hope in the wake of divorce—co-presented by @melbcinematheque
Swedish multi-hyphenate Mai Zetterling directs and stars in this deeply personal study of a self-sacrificing woman reeling from her husband’s abandonment, told through flashbacks and fantasies.Zetterling blends the theatrical and cinematic to express a woman’s mind and body on the verge. Intense monologues whisper over Zetterling’s cropped hair and grieving eyes as she tries to rebuild and reconceive her life, and the movie howls for her all the while.
Screens with Lotte Reiniger's THE STOLEN HEART (10 mins), a 1934 German stop motion shadow puppet also about the ways men can take all that's meaningful to someone.
See them Saturday May 16, 11:00am, at BUFF 2026!
Join us this Wednesday the 13th of May for the second night of our season focused on Julie Christie.
Our program will begin at 7pm with McCabe & Mrs. Miller. In Robert Altman’s sleety folk Western, a brothel entrepreneur (Warren Beatty) joins forces with an opium-addicted madam (Christie, in a wonderfully modulated performance). Shot by Vilmos Zsigmond and hauntingly scored with songs by Leonard Cohen, McCabe & Mrs. Miller also features Shelley Duvall, Michael Murphy and Keith Carradine.
At 9:15pm, we will screen Joseph Losey’s Cannes Palme d’Or winning The Go-Between. Christie plays a romantic young aristocrat in this exquisitely judged English pastoral drama set at the end of the Victorian era (where the past is indeed a “foreign country”). Seemingly resigned to the overwhelming influence her social class will have on her future, she confides in a schoolboy who visits for the summer holidays.
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Come along this Wednesday for the opening night of our new season, A Woman of Her Time: Julie Christie.
At 7pm we’ll be screening Darling (1965). Christie’s iconic performance as Diana Scott, an ambitious yet fickle-minded model in Schlesinger’s romantic drama won her international recognition, including the BAFTA and Academy Award for Best Actress. This cynical take on the emerging consumer society of “Swinging Sixties” London follows Diana’s ascendancy up the social scale as she toys with the affections of two older men.
This will be followed at 9.25pm by Billy Liar (1963). A daydreaming undertaker’s clerk drifts between fantasy and the fear of adulthood in this key work of the British New Wave. One-time actor Schlesinger presides over an accomplished ensemble, with Tom Courtenay giving Billy’s evasions a sharp, restless energy. But it’s Christie – in her breakout role – who jolts the film awake.
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Join us this Wednesday the 29th of April for the conclusion of our season, X-Rays of the Soul: The Intimate Human Dramas of Ryusuke Hamaguchi.
Our first program will begin at 7pm with Heaven Is Still Far Away (2016, 38 mins), a ghost story made partly as a reward for contributors to the crowdfunding campaign that facilitated the production of 2015’s Happy Hour. This will be followed by Touching the Skin of Eeriness (2013, 54 mins). Hamaguchi’s evocative drama follows Chihiro (Shota Sometani) who, overwhelmed with grief after his father’s death, channels his emotions into dance.
At 8:45pm, we will screen The Sound of Waves (2012, 142 mins). This first and most expansive entry in Hamaguchi and Sakai’s four-part series on the 2011 Tohoku earthquake presents firsthand accounts from survivors while exploring how tsunamis have helped form the region’s cultural fabric.
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Join us this Wednesday the 22nd of April for the second night of our season focused on one of the most distinctive cinematic voices to emerge from Japan in the new millennium, Ryusuke Hamaguchi.
At 7pm we will begin with Asako I & II (2018). Hamaguchi’s follow up to his widely acclaimed critical breakthrough Happy Hour (2015) is a faithful adaptation of a 2010 novel by Tomoka Shibasaki. Erika Karata plays Asako, a modern young woman who lives first in Osaka and then in Tokyo. When these two distinctly different chapters of Asako’s life suddenly blur together we glimpse the fickle and complex nature of romantic love.
This will be followed at 9:15pm by The Depths (2010). In this Korean-Japanese co-production, a fashion photographer (Kim Min-joon) on assignment in Japan is drawn into a fraught triangle with his old friend (Soji Arai) and a young male escort (Hoshi Ishida), as desire and professional curiosity start to blur. This early feature already shows Hamaguchi’s feel for relationships and desires built around glances, misread signals and half-spoken needs.
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Join us this Wednesday April 15 for the opening night of our new season, X-Rays of the Soul: The Intimate Human Dramas of Ryusuke Hamaguchi.
At 7pm we will begin with Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021). Released in the same year as the widely celebrated Drive My Car, and itself awarded the Silver Bear at the 71st Berlinale, Hamaguchi’s intimate triptych presents three separate tales highlighting the nature of coincidence and fate amidst unrequited romance, seduction and misunderstanding.
At 9.20pm, we will screen Like Nothing Happened (2003). Hamaguchi’s medium-length second film was shot on 8mm while the director was still a student at the University of Tokyo. Structured around a series of unhurried conversations between five young friends – one of whom is played by Hamaguchi himself – it contains many of the themes and formal elements that would come to define his cinema. This will be followed by Hamaguchi’s 2009 TV project, I Love Thee For Good, in which a young couple’s impending marriage is threatened by the bride’s secret.
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Join us this Wednesday April 8 for a special one-night program, Persons of Interest: The Independent Film Work of Haydn Keenan and Esben Storm.
First up, at 7pm, we’ll be screening 27A (1974). In Esben Storm’s audacious first feature, made when both he and producer Haydn Keenan were in their early 20s, a middle-aged alcoholic (the extraordinary Robert McDarra) volunteers for psychiatric treatment after receiving a six-week prison sentence, only to find himself indefinitely trapped under section 27A of Queensland’s Mental Health Act.
At 8:50pm, we will be screening Going Down (1982). This fiercely independent cult classic follows four friends on an odyssey of heady excess through inner-city Sydney on their final night together before one of them leaves for New York. Rarely screened, it has been praised by critic Adrian Martin as “one of the finest and most memorable films made in Australia”.
Both screenings will be introduced by Haydn Keenan.
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Join us this Wednesday 1 April for the final night of our season: Wim Wenders, Roads to Everywhere.
We will begin at 7pm with Wings of Desire (1987). Wenders’ profoundly moving modern fairytale follows an angel (Bruno Ganz) who, while watching over the stranded citizens of West Berlin, falls in love with a trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin). Now itself a significant artefact of a soon-to-be united Berlin, the film features Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Crime & the City Solution, Curt Bois and Peter Falk.
At 9:20pm, we will screen The State of Things (1982). Described by Wenders as a dark investigation into his profession, this low budget, noirish art-imitates-life work came about when he discovered a film production stalled for lack of funds. Offering to help fix things if he could use the crew to make a film, Wenders created this brilliant film-within-a-film about a remake of a Roger Corman apocalyptic science-fiction B-movie that has, unsurprisingly, stalled due to a lack of funds and film stock.
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Join us this Wednesday 25 March for the second night of our season focusing on Wim Wenders.
The evening will begin at 7pm with Wrong Move (1975). A loose adaptation of Goethe’s 1795 Bildungsroman ‘Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship’, Wenders’ road movie follows a young aspiring writer (Rüdiger Vogler) as he traverses contemporary Germany with a resigned, post-1960s pessimism, encountering the potent spectres of Germany’s past. Co-starring Hanna Schygulla and featuring Nastassja Kinski in her debut film role.
This will be followed at 8.55pm by The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty (1972). Adapting Peter Handke’s short novel, Wenders delivers a drifter’s-eye view of paranoia and dissociation. Following its titular, murderous protagonist (Arthur Brauss) with dispassionate curiosity, the film’s uncanny calm owes as much to Robby Müller’s sun-bleached, quietly dislocated images as to Handke’s dry, clipped dialogue – a combination that keeps everything slightly off balance.
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Join us this Wednesday 18 March for the first night of our new season: Wim Wenders, Roads to Everywhere.
At 7pm we will begin with the now-classic buddy movie Kings of the Road (1976) 175 mins. Wenders’ elliptical road odyssey follows two estranged men (Rüdiger Vogler and Hanns Zischler) traversing the nether regions of the East/West German border while servicing broken-down movie theatres. Powered by an idiosyncratic mix of 1960s pop music and Axel Lindstädt’s evocative score, this existential narrative poetically charts the Americanisation of the German mindscape, the impoverishment and beauty of the stark modern landscape, and the inevitable death of the cinema.
This will be followed at 10.15pm by Chambre 666 (1982) 48 mins. Filmed at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, this intriguing time capsule features candid and playful interviews with Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Steven Spielberg, Monte Hellman, Mike De Leon, Susan Seidelman, Yilmaz Güney, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and others. To be preceded by Wenders’ essay film Reverse Angle: Ein Brief aus New York l (1982) 17 mins.
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Join us this Wednesday 11 March for the final night of our season focusing on the singular French writer-director Leos Carax.
A reminder that, due to unforeseen circumstances, the order of our Leos Carax season had to be swapped. In a change from our printed calendar, this week’s program will now begin, at 7pm, with It’s Not Me (2024). Responding to the Centre Pompidou’s prompt, “Where are you at, Leos Carax?”, this “self-portrait seen from behind” explores the filmmaker’s work and influence against the legacies of postwar Europe. To be preceded by two other diaristic commissions for cultural organisations: Sans titre (1997, 9 mins) and My Last Minute (2006, 1 min).
This will be followed, at 8.05pm, by Pierre ou, les ambiguitiés (2001). Since its first broadcast on German–French TV channel ARTE, this now legendary alternative extended version of Carax’s polarising 1999 avant-garde horror film Pola X has rarely screened. A loose adaptation of Herman Melville’s extraordinary 1852 novel, it follows a wealthy young novelist (Guillaume Depardieu) who is shadowed by a mysterious woman (Katerina Golubeva) claiming to be his sister. Reconceived as a three-part miniseries paying homage to the serials of Carax’s youth, this brand-new restored version contains new sequences and, according to the director, is closer to his original conception.
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