Jeffrey A. Miller, Ph.D.
Jeffrey A. Miller, Ph.D.
Professor of Communication and Media
(315) 792-3086
FILMS on THURSDAY
FREE Utica University Film Series
Thursday Evenings | 7:00 P.M.
MacFarlane Auditorium, DePerno Hall
Utica University
Upcoming FilmsLocation
Showings take place in Macfarlane Auditorium, which is located on the first floor of Rocco F. Deperno Hall.
Directions
Park in Lot C and proceed along walkways to Romano Plaza (#11 on map image). Enter DePerno Hall (#10) and take the stairway down to the first floor. The entrance to Macfarlane Auditorium is to your left at the foot of the stairs.
This project is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrants Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered by CNY Arts.
Spring 2025 Series
JANUARY 16
The Great Dictator
(1940, USA, dir. Charles Chaplin, 2 hours 5 minutes)
A Jewish barber resembles his country's anti-Semitic dictator in this comedy masterpiece caricaturing Hitler, culminating in Chaplin’s famously impassioned anti-Fascist speech that remains just as relevant today.
JANUARY 23
Democracy Noir
(2024, USA/Denmark, dir. Connie Field, 1 hour 30 minutes)
This timely documentary chronicles the lives of three brave women – a politician, a journalist, and a nurse – pushing back against the corruption, media manipulation, and hate-mongering rhetoric of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
JANUARY 30
Daytime Revolution
(2024, USA. Dir. Erik Nelson, 1 hour 48 minutes)
For one extraordinary week beginning on February 14th, 1972, John Lennon and Yoko Ono co-hosted the iconic Mike Douglas Show, bringing the counterculture’s vision of a new world into the living rooms of 40 million weekly viewers.
FEBRUARY 6
House Arrest
(2021, Russia, dir. Aleksey German, Jr., 1 hour 46 minutes)
A Russian university professor who takes to social media to criticize his city’s mayor finds himself accused of embezzlement and placed under house arrest, but remains defiant and unapologetic.
FEBRUARY 13
Evil Does Not Exist
(2023, Japan, dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 1 hour 46 minutes)
Widower and single father Takumi, a respected local figure living a modest life with his daughter in the snowy mountain village of Mizubiki, becomes conflicted by his involvement in the plans of a corporation to develop an opulent glamping site nearby that will damage both the community and the environment.
FEBRUARY 20
Razing Liberty Square
(2023, USA, dir. Katja Esson, 1 hour 26 minutes)
Eight miles inland of Miami's beaches, residents of Liberty City public housing – located on the highest-and-driest ground in the city – fight to save their community from climate gentrification in the form of a $300 million revitalization project.
FEBRUARY 27
The Animal Kingdom
(2023, France, dir. Thomas Cailley, 2 hours 8 minutes)
In the near future, a father and son desperately try to save their wife and mother, and themselves from the authorities as a mysterious phenomenon strikes humanity and unexplained mutations transform parts of the population into human-animal hybrids.
MARCH 6
Thelma
(2024, USA, dir. Josh Margolin, 1 hour 28 minutes)
Inspired by a real-life experience of the director’s own grandmother, 93-year-old Thelma enlists the help of an old friend to pull off a thrilling heist and retrieve the $10,000 stolen from her by a phone scammer.
Season Archive
AUGUST 29
They Shot the Piano Player
(2023, Spain, dirs. Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal, 1 hour 44 minutes)
A New York music journalist travels to Rio de Janeiro to uncover the truth behind the mysterious disappearance of Francisco Tenório Júnior, a young Brazilian piano virtuoso and pioneer of the samba-jazz movement known as Bossa Nova.
SEPTEMBER 5
Green Border
(2023, Poland, dir. Agnieszka Holland, 2 hours 32 minutes)
A family of refugees from Syria, an English teacher from Afghanistan, and a border guard become pawns in an intractable conflict amid the humanitarian calamity on the so-called “green border” between Poland and Belarus.
SEPTEMBER 12
This Much We Know
(2022, USA, dir. L. Frances Henderson, 1 hour 45 minutes)
Following a friend’s seemingly inexplicable suicide, filmmaker L. Frances Henderson investigates the suicide of a teenager in Las Vegas only to find the city is grappling with both a suicide epidemic and the Federal government’s proposed plan to bury decades of nuclear waste in a nearby mountain.
SEPTEMBER 19
here
(2023, Belgium, dir. Bas Devos, 1 hour 24 minutes)
The budding romance between a Romanian construction worker living in Brussels and a Belgian-Chinese woman preparing a doctorate on mosses offers a simple, yet rich and endearing reminder of our interconnectedness.
SEPTEMBER 26
The Invisible Fight
(2023, Estonia, dir. Rainer Sarnet, 1 hour 55 minutes)
A Soviet soldier pursues his dream of becoming a kung fu warrior in an explosive and unapologetically quirky combination of wuxia, heavy metal, and Orthodox Christianity, that is as much a nod to Enter the Dragon as it is and exploration of faith, spiritual duty, and the modern state of Russia and Europe.
OCTOBER 3
The Monk and the Gun
(2023, Bhutan, dir. Pawo Choyning Dorji, 1 hour 47 minutes)
Set during the Kingdom of Bhutan’s 2006 transition to democracy, an American travels to the Land of the Dragon in search of valuable antique rifle only to cross paths with a young monk wandering the mountains and whom an elderly lama has given the unusual task of obtaining a pair of guns.
OCTOBER 10
Snow Leopard
(2023, China, dir. Pema Tseden, 1 hour 49 minutes)
The complicated relationship between the snow leopard and the communities of the Tibetan plateau is told through the eyes of a local television producer whose plans to film a show about the mysterious animal are complicated by a herder who has vowed to kill a snow leopard that has killed nine of his rams, and the herder’s brother, a monk, who believes he can communicate with the big cat and wants to save it at all costs.
OCTOBER 17
Robot Dreams
(2023, Spain, dir. Pablo Berger, 1 hour 43 minutes)
Tired of living alone in his tiny Manhattan apartment, Dog buys a robot to keep him company and the two become fast friends exploring the city together, until circumstances force them to confront separation, abandonment, and the fragility of friendship.
JANUARY 18
Fantastic Machine
(2023, Denmark, dirs. Axel Danielson & Maximilien van Aertryck, 88 mins.)
Using the very medium it examines, this self-reflective yet hilarious montage of archival and found footage takes us from the invention of photography to 45 billion cameras, YouTube, and the world of social media in just two centuries, exploring how our unchecked obsession with the capturing of images has changed human behavior.
JANUARY 25
Another Body
(2023, USA, dirs. Sophie Compton & Reuben Hamlyn, 80 mins.)
This timely documentary offers a cautionary tale for the social media age, following a college student's search for answers and justice after she discovers deepfake pornography of herself circulating online.
FEBRUARY 1
Total Trust
(2023, Germany, dir. Jialing Zhang, 97 mins.)
This chilling and urgent documentary revealing the lives of three families in China who have been monitored, intimidated and even tortured by their own government serves as an urgent warning about the dangers of Big Data, AI, and surveillance technology in the hands of unbridled power.
FEBRUARY 8
Songs of the Earth
(2023, Norway, dir. Margreth Olin, 90 mins.)
84-year-old Jørgen, the filmmaker’s father who has been exploring Norway’s wilderness all his life, takes us to stunning vistas of glaciers, waterfalls, and fjords in this stunning, deeply personal cinematic work about life, death, nature, and about simply being present in the world.
FEBRUARY 15
Skin Deep
(2023, Germany, dir. Alex Schaad, 103 minutes.)
Leyla and Tristan, who seem like the perfect young couple, travel to a remote island with numerous other couples – all yearning to live outside their skin and to see the world through the eyes of someone else – where they embark on a body-swapping journey that explores questions of experience, identity, and the pursuit of happiness.
FEBRUARY 22
Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
(2023, Vietnam, dir. Thien An Pham, 179 mins.)
A simple story of a thirty-something man’s journey back to his rural hometown in Vietnam, where he wrestles with his own agnosticism in the face of others' religious beliefs, becomes an enthralling meditation on faith, loss, and nature.
FEBRUARY 29
Four Daughters
(2023, France, dir. Kaouther Ben Hania, 107 mins.)
This compelling portrait of five women is a unique and ambitious work of nonfiction cinema that explores the nature of memory, the weight of inherited trauma, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters, with two professional actresses cast as the missing eldest daughters who were radicalized by Islamic extremists.
MARCH 7
The Old Oak
(2023, UK, dir. Ken Loach, 113 mins.)
A once proud community in the Northeast of England, feeling hopeless and abandoned since the mine closed, strains to find the compassion to welcome Syrian refugees trying to make a new home for themselves in the struggling village.
AUGUST 31
Two Gods
(2020, USA, dir. Zeshawn Ali, 82 mins.)
This intimate documentary about faith, renewal, and healing follows a Muslim casket maker and ritual body washer in New Jersey who finds spiritual grounding in his work, as he takes two young men under his wing to teach them how to live better lives.
SEPTEMBER 7
Bones of Crows
(2022, Canada, dir. Marie Clements, 124 mins.)
Unfolding over 100 years, this moving, multi-generational epic of resilience, survival, and the pursuit of justice is told through the eyes of Cree Matriarch Aline Spears, who was forced as a child to endure systemic starvation, racism, and sexual abuse in Canada’s residential school system.
SEPTEMBER 14
The Baldies
(2021, USA, dir. Dave Roth, 50 mins.)
This bare-knuckles documentary explores the previously untold history of the Baldies, a 1980s multiracial skinhead gang who fought Neo-Nazis in the streets of Minneapolis, and later organized themselves into Anti-Racist Action, a nationwide network of anti-racist punks.
SEPTEMBER 21
Gabriel Over the White House
(1933, USA, dir. Gregory La Cava, 86 mins.)
Newly elected U.S. President Judd Hammond miraculously survives a car accident and emerges from a coma a changed man – a totalitarian dictator who suspends the Congress, commands death squads in the streets, launches massive public works programs, and believes he has been divinely chosen as the only man who can save America – in this controversial, mostly forgotten Depression-era Hollywood drama.
SEPTEMBER 28
The Mole: Undercover in North Korea
(2020, Denmark, dir. Mads Brügger, 123 mins.)
Brügger’s suspenseful latest documentary, filmed in secrecy for over 10 years, tells the incredible story of a retired chef and a convicted drug dealer who together infiltrate a multinational geopolitical plot by the North Korean government to manufacture and traffic drugs and weapons from a secret underground factory beneath a luxury hotel.
OCTOBER 5
Smoking Causes Coughing
(2022, France, dir. Quentin Dupieux, 77 mins.)
A loopy, absurd spoof of the superhero genre in which a jaded team of superheros named the Tobacco Force must attend a mandatory week-long retreat to overcome their malaise and strengthen the group’s cohesion only to have their plans interrupted by an evil plot to destroy the Earth.
OCTOBER 12
A Short History of the Long Road
(2019, USA, dir. Ani Simon-Kennedy, 90 mins.)
Teenage Nola and her self-reliant father live a transient life out of a van until tragedy leaves her alone on the open road with no means and no safety net, to deal with her sense of loss and figure out how she will survive on her dad’s life lessons.
OCTOBER 19
Bantú Mama
(2021, Dominican Republic, dir. Ivan Herrera, 77 mins.)
A tender and compelling portrait of a makeshift family in which a French refugee of African descent manages to escape arrest in the Dominican Republic and takes shelter in the most dangerous district of Santo Domingo, where her life is transformed by a group of children who take her in and adopt her as their maternal figure.
JANUARY 19
Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues
(2023, USA dir. Sasha Jenkins, 106 mins.)
This definitive documentary about jazz progenitor and national treasure Louis Armstrong, uses archival footage and never-before-heard home recordings and personal conversations to celebrate his world-renowned music, illuminate his complex personality, and explore the nuances of his role in the Civil Rights Movement.
JANUARY 26
Geographies of Solitude
(2022, Canada, dir. Jacquelyn Mills, 103 mins.)
A playful yet reverent experimental documentary immersing us into the rich ecosystem of Sable Island, a remote sliver of land in the Northwest Atlantic where naturalist and environmentalist Zoe Lucas has lived and catalogued marine litter for over 40 years.
FEBRUARY 2
First Cow
(2020, USA, dir. Kelly Reichardt, 122 mins.)
Two loners in 1820’s Oregon, a hired cook and an early Chinese immigrant, become partners in a lucrative business scheme that hinges on their clandestine siphoning of milk from another man’s cow – the first to arrive in the territory.
FEBRUARY 9
Utama
(2022, Bolivia, dir. Alejandro Loayza Grisi, 87 mins.)
An elderly Quechua couple who have spent their entire lives herding llamas are faced with a dilemma when an extended drought threatens their traditional way of life in this moving and gorgeously shot film set in the arid highlands of Bolivia.
FEBRUARY 16
Vesper
(2022, France, dirs. Kristina Buozyte, Bruno Samper, 112 mins.)
A compelling post-apocalyptic story about a teenage girl’s struggle to survive with her father in a hostile mycelium-and-mud world left following the collapse of Earth's ecosystem.
FEBRUARY 23
Know Your Place
(2022, USA, dir. Zia Mohajerjasbi, 118 mins.)
As an Eritrean-American teen and his friend make their way across the rapidly gentrifying city of Seattle to deliver a heavy suitcase intended for an ailing family member abroad, the errand becomes an odyssey amid the ongoing redevelopment and economic displacement of the only community they’ve ever known as home.
MARCH 2
Myanmar Diaries
(2023, Myanmar, dirs. Myanmar Film Collective, 70 mins.)
Ten short films by ten young anonymous Burmese filmmakers, combined with harrowing citizen journalism, document how Myanmar has gone from a military coup to nation-wide protests and civil disobedience, to brutal repression in which thousands of peaceful protesters are imprisoned and murdered, to a growing popular armed revolt against the brutal military junta.
MARCH 9
The Quiet Girl
(2022, Ireland, dir. Colm Bairéad, 94 mins.)
A delicate and poignant film – and the highest-grossing Irish-language film in history – about a neglected and withdrawn nine-year-old, the distant relatives in rural Ireland with whom she is left to spend the summer, and their painful but unspoken family secret.
SEPTEMBER 1
You Won’t Be Alone
(2021, Serbia, dir. Goran Stolevski, 108 mins.)
A little girl, after accidentally killing a woman, mysteriously finds that she has taken the shape of the dead woman and begins to experience life while in other people’s bodies, in this supernatural horror thriller set in 19th century Macedonia.
SEPTEMBER 8
Murina
(2022, Croatia, dir. Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic, 94 mins.)
A stirring coming-of-age drama set on a remote island along Croatia’s Adriatic coast in which 17-year-old Julija longs for independence from her heavy-handed father and passive mother but is unsure how to achieve it, until the arrival of the rich and mysterious Javier appears to offer a way out.
SEPTEMBER 15
DOUBLE FEATURE:
Peace Pipeline
(2021, Canada, dirs. Gitz Crazyboy and Tito Ybarra, 24 mins.)
The Indigenous Pipeline Council – actually the Indigenous comedians and activists Crazyboy and Ybarra – unveil plans to construct a winding pipeline carrying tar sands crude oil directly through backyards, golf clubs, and cemeteries in the wealthy white suburbs of Duluth, Minnesota, in this pointed and often hilarious agit-prop satire.
Beans
(2020, Canada, dir. Tracy Deer, 92 mins.)
A feisty twelve-year-old is must to grow up fast to become the warrior she needs to be during the 1990 Indigenous uprising known as The Oka Crisis, a 78-day standoff in which Mohawk communities came together to fight a proposed golf course on their ancestral land.
SEPTEMBER 22
Casablanca Beats
(2021, Morocco, dir. Nabil Ayouch, 101 mins.)
A former rapper who takes a job teaching hip hop in a cultural center located in an underprivileged neighborhood of Casablanca, challenges his students to overcome restrictive traditions, as well as their differences in identity, religion, and politics, in order to follow their passion and express themselves.
SEPTEMBER 29
Down With the King
(2021, USA, dir. Diego Ongaro, 100 mins.)
A famous rapper, disillusioned with the music industry and the pressures of being a celebrity, trades the city for a rural house in the Berkshires to focus on his next album only to discover contentment in the simplicity of life in a small farming community.
OCTOBER 6
Balloon
(2020, China, dir. Pema Tseden, 102 mins.)
Drolkar and her husband already have three children when she discovers that she’s pregnant again, violating China’s strict family planning policies of the 1980s, in this poetic, gently comic family drama about sheep farmers, spirituality and condoms, and the human toll of far-off policy decisions.
OCTOBER 13
Everything Everywhere All at Once
(2022, USA, dir. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, 132 mins.)
With the fate of reality in the balance, an exhausted Chinese American woman who can't seem to finish her taxes becomes the unlikely time-shifting hero channeling her newfound powers to fight bizarre and bewildering dangers across the multiverse in this colorful, kinetic, wildly ambitious, and almost metaphysical explosion of kung-fu sci-fi.
OCTOBER 20
Saturday Fiction
(2019, China, dir. Ye Lou, 126 mins.)
Set in in December 1941, this stylish and melancholic black and white spy-tale explores themes of truth and artifice as a celebrated Chinese actress returns to Japan-controlled Shanghai to perform in a play with an old flame, but who may be there for entirely different reasons.
JANUARY 20
Bless Their Little Hearts
(1983, dir. Billy Woodberry, USA, 80 mins.)
Chronic unemployment damages a husband’s sense of manhood and takes a toll on the couple and their children in this newly digitally restored masterpiece of African American cinema.
JANUARY 27
Hive
(2021, dir. Blerta Basholli, Kosovo, 84 mins.)
Despite hostility in her patriarchal village, a Kosovo war widow seeks healing, solace, and a means to provide for her family by pulling together the other widows in her community to launch a business selling homemade ajvar, a traditional local food.
FEBRUARY 3
The Velvet Queen
(2021, dirs. Marie Amiguet & Vincent Munier, France, 92 min.)
An award-winning nature photographer and a writer ponder humanity’s place amongst the magnificent creatures and glorious landscapes of the Tibetan highlands as they attempt to document the notoriously elusive endangered snow leopard in this gorgeous and meditative documentary.
FEBRUARY 10
Becoming Animal
(2018, dirs. Emma Davis & Peter Mettler, Switzerland, 78 min.)
An urgent and immersive documentary, inspired by radical writer and philosopher David Abram and shot in and around Grand Teton National Park, exploring our relationship with the “more than human world” in which humans, animals, and landscapes are inextricably interdependent.
FEBRUARY 17
Lamb
(2021, dir. Valdimar Jóhannsson, Iceland, 106 mins.)
When a ewe gives birth to a strange lamb creature, a couple struggling to cope with being childless attempt to care for it as if it were their own child in this mysterious drama set on a faraway meadow farm in Iceland.
FEBRUARY 24
Wolfwalkers
(2020, dirs. Tomm Moore & Ross Stewart, Ireland, 103 mins.)
The enchanting animated story of a young apprentice hunter who travels to Ireland with her father to wipe out the last wolf pack only to befriend a free-spirited girl living outside the city walls who may be a member of a mysterious tribe rumored to have the ability to transform into wolves by night.
MARCH 3
When The Storm Fades
(2018, dir. Sean Devlin, Canada, 80 mins.)
This genre-defying docudramedy, with a blunt political message about how foreign intervention after a catastrophe can go wrong, punctures the White Savior Complex by intertwining the real-life experiences and memories of the Pablo family who survived the devastation of Typhoon Haiyan in 2013 with the fictional story of a Canadian couple of “volun-tourists” who are bent on saving them.
MARCH 10
Fanny: The Right To Rock
(2021, dir. Bobbi Jo Krals, USA, 96 mins.)
A passionate and compelling documentary about two Filipina-American sisters from Sacramento who formed a garage band with friends in the 1960’s that became Fanny, the first all-women band to release an LP with a major record label, yet after five critically-acclaimed albums over five years while fighting early barriers of race, gender, and sexuality in the music industry, disappeared from memory until reuniting fifty years later to record a new album.
Deep Archive
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