Celebrating 40 years since its founding, the Melbourne Cinémathèque has revealed its 2024 annual screening program.
With 18 seasons delivering celebrated world cinema, overlooked figures of film history, and important local works, presented in new digital restorations and on rarely screened celluloid prints.
The Melbourne Cinémathèque 2024 program
- Screens 7 February – 18 December
- 7pm Wednesdays at ACMI
- Tickets at acmi.net.au/cteq
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About Melbourne Cinémathèque
Since 1984, the Cinémathèque has grown to become an internationally recognised film society that works with organisations around the globe, beginning with screenings at the RMIT Glasshouse Theatre, before moving to the State Film Centre, and then to its current home with its Presenting Partner ACMI, Australia’s national museum of screen culture. Across four decades, the Cinémathèque has managed to flourish and survive many social, cultural, industrial and technological changes, while its ethos – to show a wide array of films from many countries and from across film history in carefully contextualised programming – has remained constant.
Jean-Luc Godard
To mark the occasion, the 2024 program will open on Wednesday 7 February with the very first film screened in 1984, Jean-Luc Godard’s endlessly playful Une femme est une femme (1961), as part of the season ‘From the Boulevards of Paris to the Docks of Cherbourg: Landmarks of the French Film Musical’, a larger focus on the multifaceted history of French filmmakers’ approach to the genre.
Ann Hui
Following on from the opening season, the 2024 program sees a particularly strong focus on international auteurs whose works have confronted the personal and political realities of their time and place, such as an exploration of one of Hong Kong’s most important filmmakers in “Keep Rolling: Ann Hui’s Counter-Cinema”, and “The Pain of Living: Jean Eustache, Being Cinema”, a near-complete retrospective of the works of an enigmatic French maverick.
From Powell and Pressburger to New Iranian Cinema
Elsewhere, the 2024 program explores collective authorship with seasons highlighting significant filmmaking teams, including a focus on a singular British duo in ‘“All art is one”: The Visionary Cinema of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’, and an overview of a prolific filmmaking family who remain one of the great legacies of New Iranian Cinema, ‘The House That Mohsen Built: The Films of Samira Makhmalbaf, Marzieh Meshkini and Mohsen Makhmalbaf’.
Gloria Grahame
Highlighting roles outside of the director’s chair, the program also features ‘In the Afterglow: The Mercurial Stardom of Gloria Grahame’, showcasing a luminary actress from Hollywood’s golden age, as well as a co-presentation with the Italian Cultural Institute that looks into a pivotal cinematic artisan, ‘Writing with Her Eyes: Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Screenwriter as Observer’.
Full listings and membership options are now available at acmi.net.au/cteq.
