Please join us for a one-night screening event of fifteen experimental short films by Stephen Broomer projected in 16mm. The director will be in attendance to introduce his films and conduct a post-screening Q&A.
Cyclists are also welcome to join Cultivate Cinema Circle for a group ride to Hydraulic Hearth afterwards for discounted drinks with your ticket. Attendees are welcome by car and foot too. Here is the map:
Stop in early to be sure to score a FREE soft pretzel from Breadhive Cooperative Bakery!
The moment is an indefinite measure of time into which almost all experience falls. It is the conclusive present and it permeates all written past. It forms in our vision and consciousness. History enters as the moment fleeting, but the moment, in and out of time, the present moment, is our epiphany, when eternity reaches into our time and into us. Eternity carves its expression into us. It comes to us to build.
Film has allowed the artist to tame the moment, to record and possess it, to suspend it in a representation that pretends to permanence. The moment, as inscribed on film, becomes an elastic interval. In this raw form, it opens onto the many possibilities for further creation, be they achieved by distortion and obscurity, by the heightened clarity that comes in the movement study, by the divergent gestures of alternating patterns, and by other operations played on the visual field. Our mastery over the moment and its contents invites us deeper inside the instant and eternity. That moment of insight, formed in the improvisatory gesture or tempered and realized by later contemplation, might be transformed to damn out old motions, to make them new; to give polyrhythmic integrity to both moment and memory itself; to reach for the essential energy of experience. Transformations reveal a composition as a field of individual and endlessly renewed meanings and energies. But the epiphany is rare and ultimate.
Every moment possesses the power to transform itself. In its stagnant chronology, its fixed coordinate, it changes. By memory and by history, time transforms itself. We use film to alter the moment, to cradle the moment, to annihilate the moment, or at least its impression, and by these operations, the image bears out the mystical associations of consciousness. The transformable moment is the moment turning into both its opposite and its other, and meaning arises in the gap between opposition and otherness. By this transformation, the moment departs from the assurances of memory and becomes a breathing passage.
Please join us for a one-night screening event of Fredrik Gertten’s latest documentary Bikes vs Cars [2015]. The director will be in attendance to introduce the film and conduct a post-screening Q&A.
Ticket Information: $5.00 at the door / CASH ONLY
ATM available across the street at Hotel Lafayette
Cyclists are also welcome to join Cultivate Cinema Circle and GO Bike Buffalo for a group ride to Hydraulic Hearth afterwards for discounted drinks with proof of your ride down. Here is the map:
Stop in early to be sure to score a FREE soft pretzel from Breadhive Cooperative Bakery!
The bicycle, an amazing tool for change. Activists and cities all over the world are moving towards a new system. But will the economic powers allow it? Bikes vs Cars, a new film project from BANANAS!* and Big Boys Gone Bananas!* director Fredrik Gertten, looks into and investigates the daily global drama in traffic around the world.
Climate change and never-ending gridlocks frustrate people more than ever. Instead of whining, people in cities around the world take on the bicycle as a Do It Yourself solution. Road rage and poor city planning creates daily death amongst the bicyclists. And now they demand safe lanes.
It’s an uneven fight. Activists and politicians that work for change are facing a multi-billion dollar car, oil and construction industry that use all their means to keep society car dependent. We know that the world needs radical changes to save the climate and the environment, but the car industry is selling more cars than ever. Today there are one billion cars in the world. By 2020, that number will double.
The film will follow the individuals around the world that are fighting to create change. We meet Aline at Sao Paulo’s Ciclofaxia, the weekly Sunday ride where one lane of Paulista Avenue is opened for bikes only. Aline is an inspirational person in the city’s bicycle movement, who tries to focus on the positive aspects of being a cyclist. But that can be difficult in a city where one bicyclist is killed every four days. And in Toronto, where mayor Rob Ford strips away the city’s bike lanes in his battle to win the “war on cars,” we watch as members of the Urban Repair Squad infiltrate the streets at night, using spray paint and stencils to replace them.
From bike activists in Sao Paulo and Los Angeles, fighting for safe bike lanes, to the City of Copenhagen, where forty percent commute by bike daily, Bikes vs Cars will look at both the struggle for bicyclists in a society dominated by cars, and the revolutionary changes that could take place if more cities moved away from car-centric models.
Director’s Note:
Born in a city where the bike is the natural choice for going from one place to another, I’ve travelled the world wondering why there are so few bicycles. Now, the car model as we know it has reached an extreme level with constant gridlock and millions of productive hours lost. Frustration is growing and cities need to look into new models.
The new urban biking is pushing this development. It’s a growing movement, which I’ve now seen around the world. People who simply put a sign on their bike saying “ONE LESS CAR.” A Do-It-Yourself attitude towards a global crisis.
It’s a positive message. If all cities adopted the model of Copenhagen, where forty percent commute within the city on bikes, it would be a radical change for the world. Something you can measure in health, pollution, oil usage.
And now the conflict. The car industry is in the center of our economic system. For the car owners and commuters that have become so invested in their lifestyle, it will be painful to change. It’s a conflict that interests me, and that is why I’ve decided to take on this project. A project of passion.
Jean-Luc Godard’s subversive foray into commercial filmmaking is a star-studded Cinemascope epic. Contempt [Le Mépris] stars Michel Piccoli as a screenwriter torn between the demands of a proud European director (played by legendary director Fritz Lang), a crude and arrogant American producer (Jack Palance), and his disillusioned wife, Camille (Brigitte Bardot), as he attempts to doctor the script for a new film version of The Odyssey. Contempt is a brilliant study of marital breakdown, artistic compromise, and the cinematic process based on Italian novel A Ghost at Noon by Alberto Moravia.
Please join us for a FREE one-night screening event of Mommy [2014]: Canada’s official selection for Foreign Language Film at the 87th Academy Awards and winner of the Jury Prize at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival.
Stop in early to be sure to score a FREE soft pretzel Breadhive Cooperative Bakery!
A passionate widowed single mom (Anne Dorval) finds herself burdened with the full-time custody of her unpredictable 15-year-old ADHD son (Antoine Olivier Pilon). As they struggle to make ends meet, Kyla (Suzanne Clément), the peculiar new neighbor across the street, offers her help. Together, they strive for a new sense of balance.
DIRECTOR’S NOTE:
Since my first film, I’ve talked a lot about love.
I’ve talked about teenage hood, sequestration and transsexualism. I’ve talked about Jackson Pollock and the 90s, about alienation and homophobia. Boarding schools and the very French-Canadian word “special”, milking the cows, Stendhal’s crystallization and the Stockholm syndrome. I’ve talked some pretty salty slang and I’ve talked dirty too. I’ve talked in English, every once in a while, and I’ve talked through my hat one too many times.
Cause that’s the thing when you “talk” about things, I guess, is that there is always this almost unavoidable risk of talking shit. Which is why I always decided to stick to what I knew, or what was -more or less – close to my skin. Subjects I thought I thoroughly or sufficiently knew because I knew my own difference or the suburb I was brought up in. Or because I knew how vast my fear of others was, and still is. Because I knew the lies we tell ourselves when we live in secret, or the useless love we stubbornly give to time thieves. These are things I’ve come close enough to to actually want to talk about them.
But should there be one, just one subject I’d know more than any other, one that would unconditionally inspire me, and that I love above all, it certainly would be my mother. And when I say my mother, I think I mean THE mother at large, the figure she represents.
Because it’s her I always come back to. It’s her I want to see winning the battle, her I want to invent problems to so she can have the credit of solving them all, her through whom I ask myself questions, her I want to hear shout out loud when we didn’t say a thing. It’s her I want to be right when we were wrong, it’s her, no matter what, who’ll have the last word.
Back in the days of I Killed My Mother, I felt like I wanted to punish my mom. Only five years have passed ever since, and I believe that, through Mommy, I’m now seeking her revenge. Don’t ask.
Please join us for a FREE one-night screening event of The Terminator [1984]: the movie that ignited a franchise once more in theaters with its fifth installment Terminator Genisys.
Stop in early to be sure to score a FREE soft pretzel Breadhive Cooperative Bakery!
In the year 2029, the ruling super-computer, Skynet, sends an indestructible cyborg (Arnold Schwarzenegger) back in time to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) before she can fulfill her destiny and save mankind.
The Terminator is a 1984 American science fiction action film directed by James Cameron, written by Cameron and the film’s producer Gale Anne Hurd, and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn, and Linda Hamilton. It was filmed in Los Angeles, produced by Hemdale Film Corporation and distributed by Orion Pictures. Schwarzenegger plays the Terminator, a cyborg assassin sent back in time from the year 2029 to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, played by Hamilton, whose son will one day become a savior against machines in a post-apocalyptic future. Biehn plays Kyle Reese, a soldier from the future sent back in time to protect Sarah.
Though not expected to be either a commercial or critical success, The Terminator topped the American box office for two weeks and helped launch the film career of Cameron and consolidate that of Schwarzenegger. In 2008, The Terminator was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the American National Film Registry, being deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.
The film’s success led to four sequels: Terminator 2: Judgment Day [1991], Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines [2003], Terminator Salvation [2009], and Terminator Genisys [2015], with a planned two more films to follow.
Please join us for a one-night screening event of the first film from Satyajit Ray’s famed Apu Trilogy, Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) [1955]. We are honored to also have the author of “The New Cinephilia” Girish Shambu in attendance to introduce the film.
The release in 1955 of Satyajit Ray’s debut, Pather Panchali, introduced to the world an eloquent and important new cinematic voice. A depiction of rural Bengali life in a style inspired by Italian neorealism, this naturalistic but poetic evocation of a number of years in the life of a family introduces us to both little Apu and, just as essentially, the women who will help shape him: his independent older sister, Durga; his harried mother, Sarbajaya, who, with her husband often away, must hold the family together; and his kindly and mischievous elderly “auntie,“ Indir—vivid, multifaceted characters all. With resplendent photography informed by its young protagonist’s perpetual sense of discovery, the Cannes-awarded Pather Panchali is an immersive cinematic experience and a film of elemental power.
AWARDS
Best Human Document, Cannes Film Festival, 1956
Best foreign film, National Board of Review, 1957
Best picture, best director, San Francisco International Film Festival, 1957
About The Apu Trilogy restoration:
Two decades after its original negatives were burned in a fire, Satyajit Ray’s breathtaking milestone of world cinema rises from the ashes in a meticulously reconstructed new 4K restoration. The Apu Trilogy brought India into the golden age of international art-house film, following one indelible character, a free-spirited child in rural Bengal who matures into an adolescent urban student and finally a sensitive man of the world. These delicate masterworks—Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road), Aparajito (The Unvanquished), and Apur Sansar (The World of Apu)—based on two books by Bibhutibhusan Banerjee, were shot over the course of five years, and each stands on its own as a tender, visually radiant journey. They are among the most achingly beautiful, richly humane movies ever made—essential works for any film lover.
New 4K restorations made by the Criterion Collection in collaboration with the Academy Film Archive at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Please join us for a FREE one-night screening event of legendary Russian auteur Aleksei German’s final film—an adaptation of science fiction novel Hard to Be a God [Трудно быть богом] [2014].
Stop in early to be sure to score a FREE soft pretzel Breadhive Cooperative Bakery!
A group of research scientists has been sent to the planet Arkanar, living under an oppressed regime in a period equivalent to earth’s Middle Ages. The local population is suffering a ban issued on anyone who knows how to read and write. The scientists must refrain from influencing political and historical events on Arkanar. They must work incognito, and they must remain neutral. Don Rumata, recognized by the locals as a sort of futuristic god, tries to save the local intelligentsia from their punishment. He cannot avoid taking the stance: “What would you do in God’s place?”
Adapted from the 1960s cult sci-fi novel “Hard to Be a God” by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
Hard To Be a God is a project that Russian director Aleksei German had been considering since the mid-1960s. German tried to make it as his debut film as early as 1964. Instead, he made Trial on the Road in respect to Lenfilm, the historic production company for which the director worked throughout his career. The project was later approved by Goskino, the State agency responsible for organizing filmmaking in the Soviet Union, but in 1968, after the uprising in Prague, the authorization was revoked for ideological reasons. Twenty years later the director returned to the project, but decided instead to make a film that would take him a long time to complete, Khrustalyov, My Car! Ten years later, after stating “I am not interested in anything but the possibility of building a world, an entire civilization from scratch”, German committed his efforts to Hard to be a God. The film was shot between the autumn of 2000 and August 2006: it even involved the construction of castles near Prague and on the sets at Lenfilm; the shooting took so long that some of the actors died of old age; the post-production phase took over five years. German died on February 21st, 2013; the film was completed by his wife and closest collaborator, Svetlana Karmalita, and by their son Aleksei A. German.
To help increase excitement around Cultivate Cinema Circle‘s inaugural screening of The Case Against 8 on June 4th at North Park Theatre, we’ve begun a contest on Twitter.
Come join us for a one-night screening event of The Case Against 8 [2014] with promotional assistance from the Pride Center of Western New York during Pride Week June 1st – 7th, 2015.
The riveting documentary THE CASE AGAINST 8 takes an in-depth look at the historic federal lawsuit filed in an effort to overturn Prop 8, California’s discriminatory ban on same-sex marriage. Shooting over five years, with exclusive behind-the-scenes footage of the powerhouse legal team of David Boies and Ted Olson and the four plaintiffs in the suit, directors and producers Ben Cotner and Ryan White (“Good Ol’ Freda,” “Pelada”) have created a powerful emotional account of the journey that took the fight for marriage equality all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
A crowd-pleaser on the festival circuit, THE CASE AGAINST 8 won the 2014 Sundance Film Festival Directing Award in the U.S. Documentary category and the SXSW Audience Award in the Festival Favorites category.
“Ben and I grew up as LGBT youth admiring those who led our movement, especially the leaders of the marriage equality cause who devoted their lives to this issue,” notes filmmaker Ryan White. “Those individuals paved the way for this case and for this moment, which we were able to capture on film.”
In May 2008, the California Supreme Court legalized marriage for same-sex couples in the state. Some 18,000 couples were married in the next few months, but the backlash was swift. Six months later, a coalition of conservative forces placed a proposition on the November statewide ballot that defined marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman. After a fiercely contested campaign that drew national attention, the controversial initiative known as Prop 8 passed with 52% of the vote, resulting in an amendment to the state constitution banning marriage for same-sex couples.
Stunned by the passage of Prop 8, activist Chad Griffin and his colleagues decided they needed to act immediately and formed the American Foundation for Equal Rights. A chance meeting pointed Griffin to an unexpected ally: Ted Olson, lead counsel for the Republicans in the critical 2000 Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision and solicitor general under President George W. Bush, was interested in taking on the case. In contrast to many of his conservative colleagues, Olson believed in the right to marry for all loving couples.
“Marriage is a conservative value,” Olson explains in the film. “It’s two people who love one another and want to live together in a stable relationship, to become part of a family and part of a neighborhood and part of our economy. We should want people to come together in marriage.”
Not only did Olson agree to lead the legal team that would challenge Prop 8, he made a surprising recommendation for his co-counsel: David Boies, the attorney who opposed him in Bush v. Gore. Although they held dramatically different beliefs on many political issues, both had become an admirer of the other during that trial. Now, they had found a case they could pursue passionately together, all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States.
The unlikely pairing of Olson and Boies sparked outcry from both sides of the aisle, as conservatives protested that Olson was turning his back on traditional principles, and liberals and the LGBT community accused Boies of collaborating with the enemy. But, as Boies puts it, “Everybody on that case had a sense that what was important was the mission.”
Just as important as the legal team that would argue against Prop 8 were the two couples who would become the faces of marriage equality in California. After a lengthy vetting process, Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, and Jeff Zarrillo and Paul Katami, were selected as the plaintiffs in the case that would be known as Perry v. Schwarzenegger.
Kris and Sandy, the mothers of four sons, first attempted to marry in California in 2004, during the brief period when marriage licenses were issued to same-sex couples by the city of San Francisco. When their original marriage was declared void, their family was devastated and confused. Comments Sandy, “We receive a form letter in the mail saying, ‘You thought you were married, but you’re not.’ What does that say to these people that we invited to celebrate our love for each other? I felt badly for making them feel badly for us. It’s just this awkward circle of guilt and shame.”
Jeff and Paul were ready to start a family, but hesitated to have children without the traditional status and legal protections of marriage. Jeff explains, “We’re strong believers that we want any child that we have to have the protections that an opposite-sex couple’s children and family would have. That’s very important to us.”
In intimate interviews, both couples speak frankly and emotionally about the effect of the law on their lives and families, and about how their participation made them highly visible targets of hatred. Their decisions to join the lawsuit brought unwanted attention and anonymous threatening phone calls, but all four stayed the course, meeting with the attorneys to prepare for court appearances over the five years of the case.
“I’ve never been as nervous in my life,” says Paul before their first court appearance. “Even though we’re ready, there is the weight of ‘I can’t mess this up.’ I have to represent so many people.”
THE CASE AGAINST 8 follows lawyers and plaintiffs from confidential war-room strategy sessions to last-minute trial preparation. From the Federal District Court in San Francisco to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and finally to the Supreme Court, Olson, Boies and their associates masterfully build a case with testimony from an army of experts, finally effecting a stunning last-minute reversal that Olson calls the “Perry Mason moment”: an admission from an opposition witness that changes the course of the trial.
Paul and Jeff were among the first same-sex couples to be married in California in 2013. Paul explains, “The right to get married is, to me, a civil right…so by accepting a domestic partnership, we’d also accept being second-class citizens. And that was unacceptable to us.”
Ted Olson proudly calls the Prop 8 suit “the most important case I have ever worked on.” Today, the fight continues: As of May 23, 2014, 19 states and the District of Columbia have legalized marriage for same-sex couples, while 31 states explicitly ban it. Lawsuits challenging the bans are in progress across the country and marriage equality has become one of the most visible and important civil rights issues debated today.
Director and producer Ben Cotner has served as an executive for ten years at Paramount Pictures and Open Road Films, where he most recently oversaw acquisitions and production. He has worked on such films as “An Inconvenient Truth,” “American Teen,” “Mad Hot Ballroom,” “A Haunted House,” “Side Effects,” “The Grey” and “End of Watch.”
Director and producer Ryan White is also the director and producer of “Good Ol’ Freda,” which tells the story of Freda Kelly, the Beatles’ longtime secretary, and “Pelada,” a journey around the world through the lens of pickup soccer. White’s other credits include “Capitol Crimes” and “9/11: For the Record” on PBS; “Dead Wrong: Inside an Intelligence Meltdown” on CNN; and “Country Boys” on PBS’ “Frontline.”
THE CASE AGAINST 8 is directed and produced by Ben Cotner and Ryan White; editor, Kate Amend, A.C.E.; music by Blake Neely; associate editor, Helen Kearns; co-producers, Rebekah Fergusson and Jessica Lawson; associate producer, Carin Bortz. For HBO: supervising producer, Sara Bernstein; executive producer, Sheila Nevins.
Synopsis courtesy of Bikes vs Cars:
Synopsis courtesy of 
Synopsis courtesy of Roadside Attractions:
In the year 2029, the ruling super-computer, Skynet, sends an indestructible cyborg (Arnold Schwarzenegger) back in time to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) before she can fulfill her destiny and save mankind.
Synopsis courtesy of 
Synopsis courtesy of 
Synopsis courtesy of 
Cultivate Cinema Circle 