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Amharic
Lamb
Directed by Yared Zeleke
(Ethiopia/France/Germany/Norway/Qatar, 2015, 94 min.)
When Ephraim, an Ethiopian boy, is sent from his homeland to live with distant relatives, he takes his beloved sheep with him. One day, his uncle announces that he will have to sacrifice his sheep for the upcoming religious feast, but Ephraim is ready to do anything to save his only friend and return home.
Washington DCJCC
Tue., June 28, 7:30 p.m.
Arabic
The Idol
Directed by Hany Abu-Assad
(Argentina/Palestine, 2016, 100 min.)
“The Idol” tells a fictionalized version of the life of Mohammed Assaf, a wedding singer from a refugee camp in Gaza who went on to win 2013’s “Arab Idol” singing competition (Arabic and Spanish).
Angelika Mosaic
Angelika Pop-Up
Opens Fri., June 3
English
A Bigger Splash
Directed by Luca Guadagnino
(Italy/France, 2016, 124 min.)
The vacation of a famous rock star and a filmmaker is disrupted by the unexpected visit of an old friend and his daughter.
Angelika Mosaic
Dough
Directed by John Goldschmidt
(U.K./Hungary, 2016, 94 min.)
An old Jewish baker takes on a young Muslim apprentice to save his failing London kosher bakery. When his apprentice’s marijuana stash accidentally falls in the mixing dough, the challah starts flying off the shelves.
West End Cinema
The Fallen Idol
Directed by Carol Reed
(U.K., 1948, 95 min.)
A butler working in a foreign embassy in London falls under suspicion when his wife accidentally falls to her death, the only witness being an impressionable young boy.
Landmark’s E Street Cinema
Opens Fri., June 10
Genius
Directed by Michael Grandage
(U.K./U.S., 2016, 104 min.)
“Genius” chronicles Max Perkins’s time as the book editor at Scribner, where he oversaw works by Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others.
Landmark’s E Street Cinema
Opens Fri., June 10
Gurukulam
Directed by Neil Dalal and Jillian Elizabeth
(Canada/U.S., 2016, 108 min.)
In vivid and sensuous detail, “Gurukulam” follows a group of students and their teacher as they confront fundamental questions about the nature of reality and self-identity at a secluded forest ashram in southern India (English and Tamil).
Angelika Pop-Up
Opens Fri., June 17
The Lobster
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
(Greece/Ireland/Netherlands/U.K./France, 2016, 118 min.)
In this highly imaginative, absurdist comedy, Colin Farrell stars as a man who has just been dumped by his wife. To make matters worse, he lives in a dystopian society where single people have 45 days to find true love, or else they are turned into the animal of their choice and released into the woods.
Angelika Mosaic
Landmark’s Bethesda Row Cinema
Landmark’s E Street Cinema
Love & Friendship
Directed by Whit Stillman
(Ireland/Netherlands/France/U.S., 2016, 94 min.)
Beautiful young widow Lady Susan Vernon takes up temporary residence at her in-laws’ estate to wait out colorful rumors about her dalliances and to be a matchmaker for her daughter Frederica — and herself too, naturally.
Angelika Mosaic
Landmark’s Bethesda Row Cinema
Landmark’s E Street Cinema
The Music of Strangers
Directed by Morgan Neville
(U.S., 2016, 96 min.)
Cellist Yo-Yo Ma and other international artists of the Silk Road Project discuss their philosophies on music and culture.
Angelika Mosaic
Landmark’s E Street Cinema
Opens Fri., June 24
Older Than Ireland
Directed by Alex Fegan
(Ireland, 2016, 81 min.)
This year marks the centenary of the Easter Rising of 1916 that led to the birth of the Republic of Ireland — and all of the people featured in “Older Than Ireland” were born before then. This funny and heartwarming documentary reveals 100 years of a life as seen through the eyes of 30 Irish centenarians.
Atlantic Plumbing Cinema
Presenting Princess Shaw
Directed by Ido Haar
(Israel, 2015, 80 min.)
By day, Samantha Montgomery cares for the elderly in one of New Orleans’s toughest neighborhoods. By night, she writes and sings her own songs as Princess Shaw on her confessional YouTube channel. Across the globe in Israel, Ophir Kutiel creates video mash ups of amateur Youtube performers. These two strangers, almost 7,000 miles apart, begin to build a song (English and Hebrew).
Landmark’s E Street Cinema
Opens Fri., June 3
Sing Street
Directed by John Carney
(Ireland/U.K./U.S., 2016, 106 min.)
Dublin in the 1980s is seen through the eyes of a 14-year-old boy who is looking for a break from a home strained by his parents’ relationship and money troubles, while trying to adjust to his new inner-city public school where the kids are rough and the teachers are rougher. Trying to impress a beautiful classmate, he forms a band with a few lads, and the group pours their heart into writing lyrics and shooting videos.
Angelika Mosaic
Sunset Song
Directed by Terence Davies
(U.K./Luxembourg, 2015, 135 min.)
A young woman’s endurance against the hardships of rural Scottish life, based on the novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, is told with gritty poetic realism in Terence Davies’s intimate epic of hope, tragedy and love at the dawning of the Great War.
Landmark’s Bethesda Row Cinema
Those People
Directed by Joey Kun
(U.S., 2015, 89 min.)
In this elegantly stylish coming-of-age story about a young Jewish painter in New York’s Upper East Side, Charlie is young, good looking and talented, but torn between his unrequited love for the decadent and selfish Sebastian, and his growing interest in Tim, a charming and unaffected Lebanese pianist.
Washington DCJCC
Tue., June 21, 7:30 p.m.
French
Black Girl
(La Noire de…)
Directed by Ousmane Sembène
(France/Senegal, 1966, 80 min.)
The first work by an African filmmaker to be seen widely in the West, “Black Girl” adapts director Ousmane Sembène’s own short story, a contemporary tale of a naïve young woman lured to France from Senegal by a white couple who enslaves her as their domestic servant (preceded by “Borom Sarret” (1963, 18 min.)).
National Gallery of Art
Sun., June 5, 4 p.m.
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
Directed by Chantal Akerman
(Belgium/France, 1975, 201 min.)
Chantal Akerman’s early tour de force — an examination of a woman’s ritualized behavior inside her bourgeois Brussels flat, composed of simple visuals made in real time — gradually reaches the intensity of tragedy.
National Gallery of Art
Sat., June 11, 2 p.m.
News from Home
Directed by Chantal Akerman
(France/Belgium/W. Germany, 1977, 85 min.)
Chantal Akerman’s reflection on her own nomadic lifestyle, realized through readings of letters from her Belgian mother juxtaposed against Babette Mangolte’s images of mid-1970s Manhattan, explores the disjunction between a mythic, monumental New York and the reality of place.
National Gallery of Art
Sat., June 4, 3:30 p.m.
No Home Movie
Directed by Chantal Akerman
(Belgium/France, 2016, 115 min.)
“No Home Movie” is both an unassuming recording of Chantal Akerman’s mother made on a small consumer-grade digital camera within her Brussels apartment, and a poignant reference to the inevitability of having “no home,” as Akerman is clearly laboring to let go of her mother’s presence toward the end of her life (French, English and Spanish).
National Gallery of Art
Sun., June 12, 4 p.m.
Korean
4th Place
Directed by Jung Ji-woo
(South Korea, 2015, 119 min.)
A washed-up competitive swimmer is hired by an ambitious mother to coach her young son, who keeps finishing fourth in competitions. But his increasingly brutal training methods begin to carry on the circle of abuse that destroyed his own youthful athletic career.
AFI Silver Theatre
Wed., June 1, 7 p.m.
Cinema Arts Theatres
Sun., June 12, 7 p.m.
The Battle of Gwangju
Directed by Yi Ji-sang
(South Korea, 2015, 121 min.)
The 1980 Gwangju Uprising, in which government soldiers firing on student protesters led to days of deadly fighting, is one of the most significant events in recent Korean history. In this powerful documentary, Yi Ji-sang combines archival footage with reenactments based on the actual experiences of everyday people—factory workers, waitresses, and college students, for example—who took up arms against the military.
National Museum of American History
Sat., June 18, 3 p.m.
Eyelids
Directed by O Muel
(South Korea, 2015, 85 min.)
In this poetic feature, an old man lives an ascetic existence on a mysterious island, communing in sometimes amusing ways with the wildlife who share his home.
National Museum of American History
Sat., June 18, 1 p.m.
How to Use Guys with Secret Tips
Directed by Lee Won-suk
(South Korea, 2013, 116 min.)
Lee Won-suk’s directorial debut stars Lee Si-yeong as an overworked assistant director of television commercials, who is so disregarded by her coworkers that they leave her behind on a cold beach when she falls asleep during a shoot. When she wakes up, she meets a mysterious hawker who sells her an advice video that he guarantees will turbocharge her romantic life.
National Museum of American History
Sun., June 5, 2 p.m.
The Lovers and the Despot
Directed by Robert Cannan and Ross Adam
(U.S., 2016, 94 min.)
In this true story, Shin Sang-ok, a young, ambitious South Korean filmmaker, and actress Choi Eun-hee meet and fall in love in 1950s postwar Korea. In the ’70s, having risen to the top of Korean society with his successful films, Choi was kidnapped by North Korean agents and taken to meet Kim Jong-il. While searching for Choi, Shin also was kidnapped. After five years of imprisonment, the couple was reunited by the movie-obsessed Kim, who declared them his personal filmmakers (Korean and Japanese).
AFI Silver Theatre
Fri., June 24, 4:45 p.m.
Landmark’s E Street Cinema
Sat., June 25, 10 p.m.
The Royal Tailor
Directed by Lee Won-suk
(South Korea, 2014, 127 min.)
Featuring more than a thousand gorgeous costumes, Lee Won-suk’s historical comedy-drama tells the story of two tailors — one a staunch traditionalist, the other a brash newcomer — in a Joseon era king’s court.
National Museum of American History
Sat., June 4, 2 p.m.
The Throne
Directed by Lee Joon-ik
(South Korea, 2015, 125 min.)
Based on the true story of an 18th-century king who executed the royal heir by locking him in a rice chest for eight days, Korea’s Oscar entry represents a triumphant return to form for historical drama specialist Lee Joon-ik.
AFI Silver Theatre
Wed., June 8, 7 p.m.
Cinema Arts Theatres
Thu., June 9, 7 p.m.
Under the Sun
Directed by Vitaly Mansky
(Russia/Germany/Czech Republic/Latvia/North Korea, 2015, 106 min.)
Given permission by the authorities to make a film about a Pyongyang family, director Vitaly Mansky soon realized that his government minders were turning his documentary into a highly manipulated fiction. So he simply left the camera running between takes to capture them staging scenes, feeding lines and cajoling performances out of Mansky’s supposedly “typical” subjects.
AFI Silver Theatre
Thu., June 23, 2 p.m.
Landmark’s E Street Cinema
Sun., June 26, 7:45 p.m.
Veteran
Directed by Ryoo Seung-wan
(South Korea, 2015, 124 min.)
The timely subject of income inequality gets the action-comedy treatment in this story of a tough cop on the trail of the sneering heir to a vast conglomerate, who uses his money and connections to make the less fortunate pay for his crimes.
Cinema Arts Theatres
Thu., June 2, 7 p.m.
AFI Silver Theatre
Wed., June 15, 7 p.m.
Mandarin
Dragon Inn
Directed by King Hu
(Taiwan, 1967, 111 min.)
During the Ming dynasty, the emperor’s minister of defense is framed by a powerful court eunuch and executed, and his family is pursued by secret police. In the ensuing chase, a mysterious band of strangers begins to gather at the remote Dragon Gate Inn, where paths (and swords) will cross.
Landmark’s E Street Cinema
Spanish
Easy Sex, Sad Movies
(Sexo fácil, películas tristes)
Directed by Alejo Flah
(Spain/Argentina, 2014, 90 min.)
Spanish producers hire Argentinian screenwriter Pablo (because “he won’t charge us in euros”) to write a romantic comedy set in Madrid. Pablo supplies all the expected genre ingredients — meet-cute, best friends, shared preference (gin-and-tonic) — but complications set in as he becomes increasingly aware of the contrast with his own deteriorating marriage, and his real and fictional worlds begin to bleed into each other.
AFI Silver Theatre
Sat., June 18, 6 p.m.,
Sun., June 19, 9:10 p.m.
Happy 140
(Felices 140)
Directed by Gracia Querejeta
(Spain, 2015, 98 min.)
On the eve of her 40th birthday, Elia invites a group of close family and friends to a luxury Canary Islands getaway to tell them some extraordinary news: She’s won a 140-million-euro jackpot. But while they all feign excitement to the birthday girl’s face, behind closed doors they quickly begin to plot their way into a piece of the fortune.
AFI Silver Theatre
Sat., June 18, 8 p.m.,
Sun., June 19, 7 p.m.
A Monster with a Thousand Heads
(Un monstruo de mil cabezas)
Directed by Rodrigo Plá
(Mexico, 2016, 74 min.)
When Sonia receives the news that her husband’s cancer has progressed to a terminal stage, she races to secure the insurance company approval for the care that can help him. Met with indifference and negligence at every turn, Sonia’s desperation triggers a primal survival instinct as a series of increasingly violent confrontations unfold.
Landmark’s E Street Cinema
My Big Night
(Mi gran noche)
Directed by Álex de la Iglesia
(Spain, 2015, 100 min.)
The troubled taping of a television New Year’s Eve variety special devolves into chaos, beset by a fatal accident, an attempted assassination, outsized egos and raging libidos.
AFI Silver Theatre
Fri., June 17, 7:15 p.m.,
Sat., June 18, 10:15 p.m.
Nothing in Return
(A cambio de nada)
Directed by Daniel Guzmán
(Spain, 2015, 93 min.)
A bright, rebellious teenager, expelled from school and estranged from his battling parents, runs away from home. He forms a surrogate family on the streets of Madrid with his hefty best friend, an avuncular auto mechanic and a nonagenarian junk-dealer.
AFI Silver Theatre
Thu., June 16, 7:15 p.m.,
Sun., June 19, 4:30 p.m.
Tamil
Dheepan
Directed by Jacques Audiard
(France, 2016, 115 min.)
Dheepan is a Tamil freedom fighter who flees his native Sri Lanka when the civil war is reaching its end. At a refugee camp, he joins a woman and a little girl, both strangers, to pretend to be a family, hoping that they will make it easier for him to claim political asylum. Arriving in Paris, Dheepan finds work as the caretaker of a run-down housing block in the suburbs, where he works to build a new life and a real home for his “wife” and his “daughter,” but the daily violence he confronts in his new neighborhood quickly reopens his war wounds (Tamil, French and English).
Landmark’s E Street Cinema
Opens Fri., June 10