Contemporary World Cinema

As we progress further into the 21st century, the global currents of ideas, influences, and images that inform the art house cinema have both widened and deepened. Digital technologies enable new voices from disparate places to assert themselves into the conversation. Global travel and finance stimulate new, unexpected collaborations, ideations, and co-productions; ever-globalizing telecommunications ensures that word of new discoveries and developing reputations circulates freely between Berlin and Busan, Cannes and Karlovy Vary, and most everywhere in between.

Despite all this, it is still rare to see these films in theatres, with other people, projected on a big screen. In our Contemporary World Cinema series, programmed on an ongoing basis, we present a selection of the most vital, challenging, and artistically cutting-edge films from around the world. Most importantly, these works of critical cinema will be presented in the cinema, as intended. Don’t miss these one-of-a-kind works, which likely will not return to theatres in Calgary.

Series Films

A Man of Integrity (2017)
Directed by Mohammad Rasoulof

Mohammad Rasoulof’s Cannes-winning A Man of Integrity is a powerful film that smartly shows how corruption can take hold in society aided by men who lurk in the shadows and pull the strings.

BURNING (2018)
Directed by Lee Chang-dong

Winner of the FIPRESCI prize at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, Burning is a loose adaption of the 1983 Haruki Murakami story “Barn Burning.” Informed by what director Lee Chang-dong has described as his growing concern with “the rage of young people,” the film presents a simmering love triangle and pyromaniacal acting out within the context of a corroding social fabric.