Harpur Cinema
Since 1965, Harpur Cinema has been seeking to bring to campus a range of significant films that in most cases would not be available to local audiences. Our program is international in scope, emphasizing foreign and independent films, as well as important films from the historical archive. All foreign films are shown in their original language with English subtitles.
Lecture Hall 6, unless otherwise noted
7:30pm on Friday and Sunday
$4 Single Admission
*Tickets will be for sale at the door from 7:00pm on the evening of the screening.
Free admission to students currently enrolled in CINE 121.
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.
FALL 2025: Harpur Cinema Program
Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1977, 80 mins)
Fri 9/12 - Sun 9/14
Charles Burnett's cinematic masterpiece Killer of Sheep, magnificently restored in 4K with sparkling picture and sound, is one of the crown jewels of the Black indie filmmaking movement known as the L.A. Rebellion. The film evokes the everyday trials, fragile pleasures, and tenacious humor of blue-collar African Americans living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in the 1970s. Burnett made it on a minuscule budget with a mostly nonprofessional cast, combining keen on-the-street observation with a carefully crafted script.
No (Pablo Loraine, 2012, 118 mins)
Fri 9/19 - Sun 9/21
Augusto Pinochet's reign of fascist terror across Chile involved political murders, disappearances, torture, and the mass incarceration of enemies. Cornered into a plebiscite to determine a new eight-year term, Pinochet leverages his political capital against a splintered opposition that must assemble, not by agreement, but by necessity. Enter Ren茅 Saavedra (Gael Garc铆a Bernal), a Santiago ad man who raids the toolkit of jingles, test markets, and candy-colored optimism to upend the regime. For 27 nights, Saavedra and a scrappy cohort of artists hijack the airwaves, broadcasting joy as sabotage, using the same gloss that sells soda to overthrow the government. The first Chilean film ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Pablo Larra铆n's No is a bracing paradox rendered as thriller: a reminder that even when advertising helps dislodge a tyrant, liberation arrives branded, and what鈥檚 won on the screen must still be defended in the streets, in memory, and in the everyday work of refusing amnesia.
All We Imagine As Light (Payal Kapadia, 2014, 123 mins)
Fri 10/17 - Sun 10/19
Payal Kapadia鈥檚 acclaimed fiction-feature debut is a radiant ode to hope-giving connections forged amid big-city anonymity. Set against the hypnotic luminescence of Mumbai, All We Imagine as Light follows three very different women working at the same hospital鈥擯rabha (Kani Kusruti), Anu (Divya Prabha), and Parvathy (Chhaya Kadam)鈥攅ach contending with personal and material struggles amid a modernizing India riven by gentrification and rising Hindu nationalism. When Parvathy is evicted and forced to move back to her childhood village, Prabha and Anu travel with her to the seaside, where they shake loose their remaining secrets and鈥攊n one otherworldly sequence鈥攁 lingering ghost. Winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, All We Imagine as Light is a deep-rooted study of the fortifying power of friendship, propelled by moving performances and the director鈥檚 compassionate eye.
Preemptive Listening (Aura Satz, 2024, 89 mins)
Fri 11/7 - Sun 11/9
Aura Satz鈥檚 inventive documentary, the latest iteration of the artist鈥檚 ongoing project on sirens, is sonic collage, design history, and thought experiment in equal measure. Filming in locations as varied as the Fukushima nuclear site in Japan and alert-system assembly lines in the US, Satz considers the siren as a cipher for contemporary ideas of emergency and preparedness. A relic of World War II and Cold War infrastructure, today the siren can be read as a warning sign, a crisis management tool, an emblem of climate collapse鈥攁nd even, in the age of predictive policing, a threat in and of itself. Preemptive Listening features original compositions from over 20 experimental musicians reimagining what form the siren can take, from harp melodies to the rumbling of the Earth鈥檚 core. Breaking free from the weight of catastrophes past, Satz鈥檚 film conjures alternative ways to respond to the siren鈥檚 call as a path toward possible futures.
Richland (Irene Lusztig, 2023, 93 min)
Fri 11/14 - Sun 11/16
US government to house the Hanford nuclear site workers who manufactured weapons-grade plutonium for the Manhattan Project, Richland, Washington is proud of its heritage as a nuclear company town and proud of the atomic bomb it helped create. RICHLAND offers a prismatic, placemaking portrait of a community staking its identity and future on its nuclear origin story, presenting a timely examination of the habits of thought that normalize the extraordinary violence of the past. Moving between archival past and observational present, and across encounters with nuclear workers, community members, archeologists, local tribes, and a Japanese granddaughter of atomic bomb survivors, the film blooms into an expansive and lyrical meditation on home, safety, whiteness, land, and deep time.
The Said and the Unsaid (AEMI Touring Film Program, 76 mins)
Fri 11/21 - Sun 11/23
Stephanie Barber - 3 Peonies - 2017 - U.S. - 3 mins.
Jonathan O鈥橤rady - In Search of the Forenaughts Longstone - 2021 - Ireland - 12 mins
Maryam Tafakory - Nazarbazi - 2022 - Iran/UK - 19 mins
Frank Sweeney - Few Can See - 2023- Ireland - 42 mins
This eclectic programme of work shifts from an act of deliberate and playful obfuscation (3 Peonies) to a process of attempted rediscovery (In Search of the Forenaughts Longstone) to an uncovering of media artefacts that speak to both deliberate and discrete forms of expression in the face of state sponsored censorship (Nazarbazi and Few Can See). Together these works describe a variety of creative means of expression borne out of a necessity to speak, however indirectly.