final frames
What do final films mean to us, and to the filmmakers who create them? This series highlights the question of late and last works, adapted as a powerful lens for thinking about film style and meaning across contemporary global cinema. Inspired by the passing of key auteur directors of the twentieth century, as well as celebrated filmmakers currently making films in an advanced career phrase, the series invites us to reflect on the last works that a director gets to make— whether knowingly, as a considered closing act, or as a stark endpoint to creative activity.
Curated by Dr. Lee Carruthers (University of Calgary), the series spans five fascinating titles, screening late and last works from Agnes Varda, Orson Welles, Abbas Kiarostami, Derek Jarman, and Alfred Hitchcock. This diverse program illuminates the distinctive qualities associated with final works of cinema and also the ideas about creativity, mortality, and legacy that we project onto them.
This series is presented in collaboration with Dr. Lee Carruthers (University of Calgary) with support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Experience all five films in the Final Frames Series at a special bundle price. Plus score a set of exclusive custom risographs inspired by the films, free with your pass (while supplies last)!
Art by Spencer Smith
Series Films
Faces Places (2017)
Directed by Agnes Varda, JR
October 2, 2025
Described by critic Amy Taubin as “an unassuming masterpiece,” Faces Places is an ideal launch point for the series’ focus on late and last works. The film frames an unlikely creative collaboration, bringing together Agnes Varda, titan of French cinema, and the much younger street photographer, J.R. What results is a buoyantly good-humoured road trip across the French countryside, mapping large-format photographs of ordinary citizens on its rural surfaces.
The Other Side of the Wind (2018)
Directed by Orson Welles
October 10, 2025
Orson Welles’ final film, The Other Side of the Wind, has a certain notoriety: messy and ambitious, shot over a six-year period between 1970-1976 with his partner Oja Kodar, the sprawling production was never completed. Three decades after Welles’ death and an extended legal battle, 100 hours of footage was retrieved from a Paris vault and painstakingly reconstructed, led by Welles’ friend and collaborator, director Peter Bogdanovich. Finally, the film was released posthumously as a ‘complete’ work via Netflix in 2018.
24 Frames (2017)
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
October 15, 2025
24 Frames (2017) is a final, elegiac work from Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. The project was originally conceived as a collaboration with the Louvre, animating a series of iconic paintings by Bruegel, Picasso, Millet, and others by adding layers of digital imagery and sound elements. The concept eventually shifted from a focus on paintings to centre Kiarostami’s own photographic work, aiming to capture, via moving images, the moments before and after a photograph is taken.
Blue (1993)
Directed by Derek Jarman
October 23, 2025
Perhaps the best-known monochrome film in the history of cinema, Derek Jarman’s Blue is a profound audiovisual experiment, foregoing conventional representation to offer a single, saturated frame of Yves Klein blue. Far from a static work, however, Jarman’s project is also an intricate and affecting auditory collage, combining voice-over narration (read by actors John Quentin, Nigel Terry, and Tilda Swinton, and the filmmaker himself), music, and ambient sound elements.
Family Plot (1976)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
October 30, 2025
The closing title of the series is the last work of cinematic master Alfred Hitchcock, a loose adaptation of Victor Canning’s The Rainbird Pattern, (1972) originally titled Deceit. With a witty script by Ernest Lehman and a John Williams score, Family Plot is a dark comedy set in sunny California, focused on a pair of grifters, spiritualist Blanche Tyler (Barbara Harris) and her unemployed actor boyfriend, George Lumley (Bruce Dern) as they pursue a missing heir for a cash reward.
