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Anthology Film Archives The home of experimental cinema in NYC. Anthology is a center for the exhibition, preservation, and study of independent and artist-made film and video.

Anthology Film Archives is an international center for the preservation, study, and exhibition of film and video, with a particular focus on independent, experimental, and avant-garde cinema. Founded in 1969 by Jonas Mekas, Jerome Hill, P. Adams Sitney, Peter Kubelka, and Stan Brakhage, Anthology in its original conception was a showcase for the Essential Cinema Repertory collection. An ambitious attempt to define the art of cinema by means of a selection of films which would screen continuously, the Essential Cinema collection was intended to encourage the study of the medium’s masterworks as works of art rather than disposable entertainment, making Anthology the first museum devoted to film as an art form. The project was never completed, but even in its unfinished state it represented an uncompromising critical overview of cinema’s history, and remains a crucial part of Anthology’s exhibition program. In the decades since its founding, Anthology has grown far beyond its original concept to encompass film preservation; the formation of a reference library containing the world’s largest collection of books, periodicals, stills, and other paper materials related to avant-garde cinema; and a remarkably innovative and eclectic film exhibition program. Anthology screens more than 900 programs annually, preserves an average of 25 films per year (with 800 works preserved to date), publishes books and DVDs, and hosts numerous scholars and researchers. Fueled by the conviction that the index of a culture’s health and vibrancy lies largely in its margins, in those works of art that are created outside the commercial mainstream, Anthology strives to advance the cause and protect the heritage of a kind of cinema that is in particular danger of being lost, overlooked, or ignored

BOOK RELEASE EVENT!TWENTY YEARS LATER: A MAN MARKED TO DIENov 1 at 7:00This evening features a screening of Eduardo Cout...
10/21/2026

BOOK RELEASE EVENT!
TWENTY YEARS LATER: A MAN MARKED TO DIE
Nov 1 at 7:00

This evening features a screening of Eduardo Coutinho’s TWENTY YEARS LATER: A MAN MARKED TO DIE (1984), introduced by the internationally acclaimed and Booker-shortlisted writer Itamar Vieira Junior. The evening also celebrates the English publication (by Verso) of Vieira Junior’s new novel, Saving the Fire, which presents the ghosts of a family’s past, lost amid the shadows of Brazil’s history. Vieira Junior masterfully blends the intimate journeys of his characters with faithfully rendered elements of Brazilian life in a world where the scars of colonialism still ache.

For more info about Itamar Vieira Junior’s Saving the Fire, visit: https://www.versobooks.com/products/3303-saving-the-fire

Eduardo Coutinho
TWENTY YEARS LATER: A MAN MARKED TO DIE / CABRA MARCADO PARA MORRER
1984, 119 min, 35mm-to-digital. In Portuguese with English subtitles.
“TWENTY YEARS LATER rescues a history doubly interrupted by the brutal military coup of 1964 in Brazil: that of Peasant League activism and of Coutinho’s project, A MAN MARKED TO DIE, a film that was meant to reenact the story of Agrarian Reform struggles leading to the assassination of the Peasant League leader João Pedro Teixeira in 1962. Featuring the leader’s widow and their children, as well as people from a similar community, the film was never finished, and the crew had to flee. In 1981, Coutinho set about locating the actors, in order finally to narrate the history of the Peasant League up to 1964. The 1984 film radiates centripetally from the absence at the core of the interrupted film: its dead protagonist, the assassinated leader. Coutinho was haunted for years by the rushes hidden in a suitcase at a friend’s. He admitted that the original film patronized and idealized the people but claimed to value the unfinished A MAN MARKED TO DIE precisely because of the participation of the organized rural movement. Besides its inordinate value as a record of a traumatic history, the film marks the passage from an idealized documentary representation to a testimonial, reflexive mode incorporating memory and commentary.” –Ivone Margulies

PEOPLE’S POETRY GATHERING FILM FESTIVALOctober 24 & 25The People’s Poetry Gathering, founded as a biennial event in 1999...
10/16/2026

PEOPLE’S POETRY GATHERING FILM FESTIVAL
October 24 & 25

The People’s Poetry Gathering, founded as a biennial event in 1999 by City Lore and Poets House, with the Bowery Poetry Club joining soon after, assembles poets from New York City and beyond to pursue discourse, exchange, and cultural preservation through poetry. In 2026, as the U.S. marks the 250th anniversary of its founding, the Gathering returns to Lower Manhattan for the first time in twenty years. It will feature performances and workshops by an array of artists, including indigenous, folk, youth, and literary poets and musicians, as well as collaborations with iconic venues and restaurants, free writing workshops, and a POEMobile initiative that will visit all five boroughs projecting poems onto walls and buildings alongside live readings and music.

As part of the Festival, Anthology hosts a weekend of programs featuring films about poetry, including an encore screening of Alystyre Julian’s portrait of Anne Waldman, OUTRIDER (which we premiered in the spring of 2025); Chuck Smith’s FUGS FILM! (which has not been shown in NYC since its 2025 premiere at DOC NYC); Steven Zeitlin and Amanda Dargan’s IN THE MOMENT: WORLD POETRY DUELS AND IMPROVISATIONS; and Roland Legiardi-Laura’s AZUL (1988), a meditation on the legacy of Nicaraguan modernist poetry, shot on the battlefront with the Sandinista forces. Proceeding some of the films is AFTER BASHŌ, a series of animated poems by Bob Holman and Richard Levine.

These programs have been guest-programmed by Ram Devineni and Bob Holman, and are organized by and co-presented with City Lore and the Bowery Poetry Club.

Full program details on our website.

TROMA-GEDDONOctober 23-November 152 years young, and still going strong – in a landscape littered with the remains of co...
10/15/2026

TROMA-GEDDON
October 23-November 1

52 years young, and still going strong – in a landscape littered with the remains of countless failed film studios and distributors – the proudly low-budget, defiantly tasteless, and astonishingly prolific Troma Entertainment is a goddamn national treasure! Founded in 1974 by the indefatigable Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz, and with a catalogue that currently numbers more than 450 titles, Troma picked up the mantle from the likes of American International Pictures and Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, extending their fast-and-dirty approach to filmmaking into the era of home video and R-rated permissiveness, and creating a space where creativity, ingenuity, collaboration, and sheer lunatic energy were more important than the niceties of good taste. Over the years, Troma has produced and/or distributed hundreds of sublimely over-the-top movies, nurtured the talents of untold numbers of filmmakers, performers, and crew members, and made an indelible mark on American popular culture, thanks to the likes of the TOXIC AVENGER series, CLASS OF NUKE ‘EM HIGH (1986), SGT. KABUKIMAN NYPD (1990), CANNIBAL! THE MUSICAL (1993), and many other lesser-known but deliriously inventive and entertaining films.

Back in the year 2000, Anthology presented a 25th-anniversary tribute to Troma. That series was wholeheartedly endorsed by Jonas Mekas – godfather of experimental cinema and co-founder of Anthology – who recognized in Lloyd Kaufman and his upstart studio a filmmaker who – however populist his sensibility and filmmaking philosophy – was in the tradition of the gleefully transgressive, anti-bourgeois, and defiantly independent spirit of much of 1950s-70s underground cinema. Twenty-six years later, Anthology welcomes Lloyd Kaufman and his team back for a new celebration of their half-century of unrestrained, raucous cinematic shenanigans – a body of work that is, simultaneously and paradoxically, politically incorrect yet politically uncompromising (the Troma filmography is suffused with Kaufman’s deep-seated anti-corporate convictions).

Featuring recent restorations of Troma classics, rare screenings of deep cuts from the company’s back-catalogue, 35mm prints of selected films, and appearances from cast, crew, and of course Kaufman himself, this series – while it may only scratch the surface of Kaufman and company’s output – contains enough comedy, gore, and cinematic resourcefulness to animate a whole year’s worth of programming. Come dive into the world of Troma – you’ll never be quite the same again.

See our website for full program details.

ROSALYN DREXLER: WHO DOES SHE THINK SHE IS?October 22 at 7:00Rosalyn Drexler (1926-2025) was a category-defying creative...
10/13/2026

ROSALYN DREXLER: WHO DOES SHE THINK SHE IS?
October 22 at 7:00

Rosalyn Drexler (1926-2025) was a category-defying creative force. Over the course of her multidecade career, she worked as a painter (creating some of the first examples of Pop art), a novelist, an Obie-award-winning playwright, a film critic, an occasional nightclub singer, and briefly, a professional wrestler.

The documentary WHO DOES SHE THINK SHE IS? (1975) provides a window into Drexler’s extraordinary creative universe. Set against the backdrop of the lost artistic demimonde of 20th-century New York, the film – directed by Patricia Lewis Jaffe and Gaby Rodgers – shows the artist rehearsing her madcap cabaret performances, cooking for her family in her art-strewn Manhattan apartment, and speaking candidly about her art, writing, and life. As Newsweek critic Jack Kroll remarks in the film, “[Drexler’s] essential insight is that people and things are completely insane, and she speaks from inside the whale.”

The documentary will be accompanied by never-before-seen home movies shot by Drexler and her husband Sherman in the 1940-50s, as well as a panel discussion. The screening coincides with a major exhibition of her work from the 1960s at Garth Greenan Gallery at 25 Greene Street; for more info about the exhibition visit: https://www.garthgreenan.com/

Patricia Lewis Jaffe & Gaby Rodgers
WHO DOES SHE THINK SHE IS?
1975, 60 min, 16mm. Print courtesy of Garth Greenan Gallery.

SEXUAL CINÉMA VÉRITÉ: THE MULTI-MEDIA RESOURCE CENTER IN CONTEXTOctober 16-20In 1968, a coalition of s*x-positive, polit...
10/05/2026

SEXUAL CINÉMA VÉRITÉ: THE MULTI-MEDIA RESOURCE CENTER IN CONTEXT
October 16-20

In 1968, a coalition of s*x-positive, politically progressive San Francisco religious leaders and homophile activists founded the National S*x Forum (NSF). Led by the Methodist Reverend Dr. Ted McIlvenna, the NSF began producing films the following year, and was soon supplemented by a distribution arm called the Multi-Media Resource Center (MMRC). The MMRC distributed both NSF films – most of them directed by McIlvenna’s friend and fellow minister Laird Sutton – and erotic avant-garde cinema by a host of filmmakers from the Bay Area and beyond, among them James Broughton, Gunvor Nelson, Barbara Hammer, Jerry Abrams, Jan Oxenberg, and Honey Lee Cottrell.

The MMRC was radical not only in its ethos of s*xual freedom and openness as compatible with Christian doctrine, but also in its framing of experimental film as a form of s*x education. While some films produced by the NSF consist primarily of structured group conversations on topics of s*x and s*xuality, many depict real couples and friends engaging in unsimulated and unscripted s*x. Termed “pattern films” or “s*xual cinéma vérité,” they reflect McIlvenna’s belief that “almost all s*x problems have been directly related to either a lack of information or else a religiously reinforced s*x-negative attitude.”

The films of the MMRC concern various aspects of human s*xuality and s*x education. Many address q***r s*xuality, women’s s*xual autonomy and pleasure, the s*x lives of people with physical disabilities, and the intersection of s*xuality and aging. Produced in San Francisco beginning in the late 1960s, in the midst of the free love, women’s liberation, gay liberation, and disability rights movements, these films shed light on the historical context from which they emerged. They also played a key role in the development and composition of S*xual Attitude Reassessment, or SAR, a technique originated by McIlvenna and his collaborators that involved multi-day intensive sessions of s*xually explicit motion picture and slide film and accompanying discussion. Crucial to the practice of humanistic s*xology embodied by McIlvenna’s later venture, the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human S*xuality, SAR is used to this day – albeit in a modified form – in the training and certification of s*x educators and therapists.

Despite its contacts with legendary avant-garde filmmakers like Broughton and Hammer, and its long afterlife in the form of McIlvenna’s Institute (which only ceased operations in the mid-2010s, shortly before his death), the MMRC is little-known today. This series will introduce a modern audience to a host of works that have never (or very rarely) been shown theatrically. In the following programs, films that were distributed by the MMRC are paired with those that could have been: erotic avant-garde, educational, and agitprop films from the 1960s and ’70s that share an ethos of free s*xual expression.

Guest-curated by Lucy Talbot Allen, who wrote the introduction above.

WOMEN IN ANIMATIONOctober 11-15By no means an exhaustive history, this series attempts to chronicle the many talents of ...
10/02/2026

WOMEN IN ANIMATION
October 11-15

By no means an exhaustive history, this series attempts to chronicle the many talents of women working in animation. Lost to time until recently, FLOWER FAIRIES by Bessie Mae Kelley is the earliest-known hand-drawn animated film directed by a woman. Other women artists who worked within the animation studio system were largely uncredited for their contributions, while still others collaborated with male colleagues to create their own studios, such as Joy Batchelor & John Halas (represented here by THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT) and Morton & Millie Goldsholl (INTERGALACTIC ZOO).

Program 1 of the series focuses on family-friendly animations depicting the animal kingdom. Program 2 features animations that reflect on a diversity of experiences of womanhood, from being idolized (THE FIGUREHEAD) to being a mother (BIRTH and PETIT BONHEUR) to being a woman of the world (W.O.W). Program 3, co-presented with the animation collective Sunflower Lane, encompasses personal stories of reproductive health (CYCLES), meditations on existence (MY UNIVERSE INSIDE AND OUT), and an animated interview about female friendship (INTERVIEW).

Guest-programmed by Rachael Guma. The series is co-presented by WIA (https://wearewia.org/).

VACANCESby Victoria Hely-Hutchinson2025, 82 min, DCPOctober 9 – 13FILMMAKER IN PERSON!A strange and unusual mixture of w...
09/30/2026

VACANCES
by Victoria Hely-Hutchinson
2025, 82 min, DCP

October 9 – 13

FILMMAKER IN PERSON!

A strange and unusual mixture of warts-and-all family portraiture, subtle exposé of class and privilege, and minimalist depiction of a particular setting that’s rendered with an almost miraculously tactile sense of presence, photographer and filmmaker Victoria Hely-Hutchinson’s VACANCES is a deceptively unassuming film. Filmed over the course of a decade at the property in Provence inhabited by Hely-Hutchinson’s outrageously uninhibited grandmother, a bohemian Austro-Hungarian countess and family matriarch, VACANCES grew out of Hely-Hutchinson’s 2016 short film of the same name, and is something of a filmic complement to her autobiographical 2023 book, “I Left My Grandmother’s House”. The documentary delves, with a grace and open-endedness that belies its analytical bite, into both the bigger-than-life personality of “granny” as well as the sometimes strained dynamics among the rest of the family, including Hely-Hutchinson’s grandfather, mother, and siblings. Unique in suggesting by turns cinema vérité, reality TV, chamber theater, and the minimalism of landscape cinema, VACANCES is a profoundly singular work – a film whose technique is nearly invisible, but which sneaks up on you with its trenchant perceptions, layered meanings, and emotional and filmic complexity.

“This time-lapse film, shot over a period of ten years, follows members of several generations of a wealthy aristocratic family with Austro-Hungarian roots. The entire film is set in a Provençal villa, whose social heart is the swimming pool, around which the women gather to exchange various observations and, surreptitiously, gossip. The center of the family is the aging matriarch, who likes to talk about her extravagant, promiscuous life, but at the same time commands all the attention and authority of those around her. However, her influence gradually weakens with each passing generation.” –JI.HLAVA INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL

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