Laemmle Theatres

January 22, 25 & 26, Eat the Night, France, 2024 ~ Pablo, a small-time drug dealer, and his teenage sister Apolline have forged an unbreakable bond through their shared obsession with the online video game Darknoon. When Pablo falls for the mysterious Night, he gets swept up in their liaison, abandoning his sister to deal with the impending shutdown of their digital haven alone. As Pablo’s reckless choices provoke the wrath of a dangerous rival gang, the end of their virtual life draws near, upending their reality. The newest vision from Caroline Poggi & Jonathan Vinel (Jessica Forever) is a bittersweet, apocalyptic love story with a modern MMORPG twist.

January 29, February 1 & 2, Oceans are the Real Continents, Cuba/Italy, 2023 ~ Three stories of migration, exile, and memory develop in the Cuban town of San Antonio De Los Baños, a place that time forgot. Alex and Edith, a young couple in their 30s, build their lives upon small gestures, reminisces, and a deep connection amidst the nation’s ruins. Milagros survives selling peanut cones on the street, spending her days listening to the radio and reading old letters. Nine-year-old best friends Frank and Alain go to school and dream of emigrating to the U.S. to become baseball players.

February 5, 8 & 9, Sujo, Mexico/France/USA, 2024 ~ After a sicario is murdered, four-year-old Sujo is left orphaned and at risk. With his aunt’s help, he survives in the isolated countryside, facing hardship and danger tied to his identity. As a teenager, he rebels and joins the local cartel. As a young man, Sujo seeks to escape his violent past, but when his father’s legacy resurfaces, he confronts the fate that seems destined for him.

February 12, 15 & 16, Ma Mère, France/Portugal/Austria/Spain, 2004 ~ Ma Mère takes place in the Canary Islands, where the film’s family shares a home. The mother Hélène (Isabelle Huppert), cool and in charge, and her teenaged son Pierre (Louis Garrel), a pious Catholic back from boarding school, discuss his father’s infidelity; the next they learn that he has died in a car crash. Hélène launches into a wild series of parties, gradually involving her son in her drugging, drinking and sex-fueled nights out.

February 19, 22 & 23, The Blond Boy from Casbah, France, 2023 ~ Filmmaker Antoine travels to his birthplace, Algiers, with his young son to present his new film: an account of his childhood in mid-20th century Algeria during the country’s civil war. As he wanders through the city, the filmmaker immerses us in the moments of happiness, laughter, and tears of his childhood – spent between school, friends, and his Jewish family. Growing up in the final moments of Algeria’s pre-independence period, the young Antoine discovers his profound fascination with cinema and starts to understand who he truly is.

February 26, 29 & 30, Amal, Belgium, 2023 ~ Amal is a powerful film by acclaimed Belgian-Moroccan director Jawad Rhalib, is a thought-provoking drama that explores the transformative power of education and self-expression. The title character is a teacher who courageously confronts fundamentalism through literature, offering a moving exploration of courage and compassion. Starring Lubna Azabal (The Blue Caftan, Incendies), Fabrizio Rongione (Two Days, One Night), and Catherine Salée (The Unknown Girl), Amal tackles urgent themes of identity, tolerance, and acceptance.

March 5, 8 & 9, My Motherland, France, 2023 ~ The celebrated actress Fanny Ardant plays the role of France, a wealthy Frenchwoman living alone in her Parisian apartment since the death of her husband. When she hears on the radio that the Singa association puts homeless migrants in contact with people who can take them in, she decides, against the advice of her friends and family, to take in Reza, a young Hazara Afghan refugee. Directed by Benoit Cohen, My Motherland is based on his own book Mohammad, My Mother, and Me, which is based on his mother’s experience welcoming a young Afghan refugee. This deeply personal film beautifully captures the complexities of navigating identity and belonging.

March 12, 15 & 16, Born for You, Italy, 2023 ~ Born for You tells the moving true story of Luca, a single gay Catholic man who in 2017 adopted Alba, a child with Down syndrome who was abandoned in the hospital shortly after being born. Thirty heterosexual families rejected her before the court decided to entrust her to him: with him, the legal foster care register for singles was inaugurated in Italy. Luca was, in fact, the first case in Italy of a single, gay person successfully adopting a daughter. But his was not a charitable gesture, nor to fight a system set against him and others like him: he simply wanted a family.

April 16, 19 & 20, Love Hotel, Japan, 1985 ~ Newly restored! A tale of two broken souls. A call-girl named Yumi, “night-blooming flower,” and Tetsuro, a married man with a debt to the yakuza, have a violent rendezvous in a cheap love hotel. Years later, haunted by the memory of that night, they reconnect and begin a strange love affair. Determined to finish what they started, they return to the scene of their first macabre passion. With a taste for wicked absurdity and coursing with undercurrents of operatic emotion, at times veering into near-musical territory, Love Hotel is moved by the irrational forces that attract two bodies together. It’s a film with a uniquely materialist sense of eros manifested in Shinji Somai’s long takes, each shot a tightrope-like predicament flushed with earthly tension and livewire physicality. Made in the same year as Typhoon Club, this elegiac erotica is one of Somai’s most bewitching and unnervingly romantic works, a high-water mark of Nikkatsu Studio’s legendary Roman Porno cycle of films.