We’re asking you, our loyal patrons and fellow lovers of cinema to pitch in, for us to be able to re-open The Plaza once the COVID-19 virus order is over.

We are offering private screenings for groups of less than 10 people currently! Email richard@plazaatlanta.com for more info.

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Danish film master Carl Theodor Dreyer’s homoerotic classic is a mature and visually elegant period romance decades ahead of its time. Michael takes its place alongside Dreyer’s better known masterpieces as an unusually sensitive and decorous work of art and is one of the earliest and most compassionate overtly gay-themed films in movie history.

One of the great masters of photography, Helmut Newton made a name for himself exploring the female form, and his cult status continues long after his tragic death in a Los Angeles car crash in 2004. Newton worked around the globe, from Singapore to Australia to Paris to Los Angeles, but Weimar Germany was the visual hallmark of his work. Newton’s unique and striking way of depicting women has always posed the question: did he empower his subjects or treat them as sexual objects? Through candid interviews with Grace Jones, Charlotte Rampling, Isabella Rossellini, Anna Wintour, Claudia Schiffer, Marianne Faithfull, Hanna Schygulla, Nadja Auermann, and Newton’s wife June (a.k.a. photographer Alice Springs), this documentary captures his legacy and seeks to answer questions about the themes at the core of his life’s work – creating provocative and subversive images of women. The film also features Newton’s own home movies, archival footage (including a pointed exchange with Susan Sontag) and, of course, scores of iconic Newton photographs. The result: a wildly entertaining portrait of a controversial genius.

In the heart of Chinatown, New York, an ornery, chain-smoking, newly widowed 80-year-old Grandma (Tsai Chin) is eager to live life as an independent woman, despite the worry of her family. When a local fortune teller (Wai Ching Ho) predicts a most auspicious day in her future, Grandma decides to head to the casino and goes all in, only to land herself on the wrong side of luck… suddenly attracting the attention of some local gangsters. Desperate to protect herself, Grandma employs the services of a bodyguard from a rival gang (Corey Ha) and soon finds herself right in the middle of a Chinatown gang war.

Director Sasie Sealy brings to life a dark comedy about immigrant life, the vulnerabilities of aging, and an unexpected friendship. Set in alleyways and underground mahjong parlors with a cast of richly drawn characters (including Taiwanese movie star Corey Ha), Lucky Grandma is a love letter to Chinatown and an homage to all the badass elderly women who inhabit it.

After discovering that her husband’s addiction to escorts has left their family penniless, Alice finds herself drawn into the world of high-end prostitution as a means of caring for herself and her child.

Abel Ferrara’s first dramatic feature since 2014’s Pasolini reteams the filmmaker and his frequent lead Willem Dafoe, who delivers a career-best performance as the title character, an older American expat living in Rome with his young wife and their daughter. Disoriented by his past misgivings and subsequent, unexpected blows to his self-esteem, Tommaso wades through this late chapter of his life with an increasingly impaired grasp on reality as he prepares for his next film. Tommaso is easily Ferrara and Dafoe’s most personal and engrossing collaboration to date, a delicately surrealistic work of autofiction marked by the keen sensitivity of two consummate artists.

‘In My Blood It Runs’ follows the life of ten-year-old Arrernte/Garrwa boy Dujuan and his family. The film charts the challenges Dujuan faces as he meets the overt and concealed prejudices still perpetuated against Aboriginal people/First Australians in Australia today: in school, at home and on the streets of Alice Springs. ‘In My Blood It Runs’ reveals the ways marginalised First Nations communities negotiate the colonial culture and keep their identities and cultures alive through self-determination, the revitalisation of languages and cultural practices. Ten-year-old Dujuan is a child healer, a good hunter and speaks three languages. Yet Dujuan is ‘failing’ in school and facing increasing scrutiny from the police. As he travels perilously close to juvenile detention, his family fight to give him a strong Arrernte education alongside his western education. We walk with him as he grapples with these pressures, shares his truths and somewhere in-between finds space to dream, imagine and hope for his future self.

Flailing thirty-four-year-old Bridget (Kelly O’Sullivan) finally catches a break when she meets a nice guy and lands a much-needed job nannying six-year-old Frances (played by a scene-stealing Ramona Edith-Williams). But an unwanted pregnancy introduces an unexpected complication. To make matters worse, she clashes with the obstinate Frances and struggles to navigate a growing tension between Frances’s moms. Amidst her tempestuous personal relationships, a reluctant friendship with Frances emerges, and Bridget contends with the inevitable joys and shit-shows of becoming a part of someone else’s family.

Produced in the final days of the Weimar Republic, this dazzling, gender-bending musical romance about a female singer posing as a man performing in drag received limited exposure in the United States, and is today best known by Blake Edwards’s 1982 remake and the 1995 Broadway production. Viewers will be delighted to discover that the original is every bit as charming and outrageous, reminiscent of the sly sex comedies of Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder.

When you purchase a ticket to VASULKA EFFECT, fifty percent of the proceeds will directly support the Plaza Atlanta. Your ticket will let you view the film from now through May 31st. Pioneers of video art, The Vasulkas are lifetime hackers and grandparents of the “YouTube” generation. They are struggling in their retirement years to archive their body of work. By a fluke they are rediscovered by the art world that had forgotten them. People and institutions are all of a sudden fighting over who will represent them when they are gone.

The 1981 Academy Award-winning Best Foreign Language Film MEPHISTO, by Hungarian master István Szabó, concerns a passionate but struggling actor (Klaus Maria Brandauer) who remains in Germany during the Nazi regime and reaps the rewards of this Faustian pact by finally achieving the stardom he has long craved. Sparkling new 4K restoration by the Hungarian Film Fund.

As a new student at an all-girls boarding school, Manuela falls in love with the compassionate teacher Fräulein von Bernburg, and her feelings are requited. Experiencing her first love, lonely Manuela also discovers the complexities that come with an illicit romance. This artfully composed landmark of lesbian cinema – and an important anti-fascist film – was the first of just three films directed by Leontine Sagan.

Streaming 4/24. Ivete Lucas and Patrick Bresnan paint a detailed and astonishing portrait of Pahokee, a rural village in the Everglades, Florida. Very close-knit, its inhabitants fight to face fragile financial situations and an uncertain
future. Through a precise observational approach, the film captures the daily life of this city restoring a rich palette of nuances. From sporting events to beauty contests at school, the filmmakers explore social and
community rituals, and how gender and identity are portrayed as new stories are created. Going well beyond the teaching of Wiseman, which Lucas and Bresnan have perfectly integrated, the film seems to bathe in the
singular atmosphere of a song of Gil Scott Heron, with lingering hints of rural blues tinged with urban echoes. A complex multi-faceted work that recalls both the raw social realism of the new American cinema and the
neorealist style. Pahokee is the powerful portrait of a forgotten America, absent from the current political discourse.

Several undocumented youths deliberately get detained by the Border Patrol to infiltrate a for-profit detention center.

When world-famous conductor Eduard Sporck accepts the job to create an Israeli-Palestinian youth orchestra, he is quickly drawn into a tempest of sheer unsolvable problems. Having grown up in a state of war, suppression or constant risk of terrorist attacks, the young musicians from both sides are far from able to form a team. Lined up behind the two best violinists – the emancipated Palestinian Layla and the handsome Israeli Ron – they form two parties who deeply mistrust each other, on and off-stage alike. Will Sporck succeed and make the young people forget their hatred, at least for the three weeks until the concert? With the first glimmer of hope, however, the political opponents of the orchestra show them how strong they are…

In celebration of the release of the new documentary Capital in the Twenty-First Century based on Thomas Piketty’s acclaimed book, The New Republic and Kino Lorber present a live, virtual roundtable discussion with Piketty, Gillian Tett, and Ian Bremmer, moderated by Chris Lehmann.

In the shadows of the bright lights of Las Vegas, it’s last call for a beloved dive bar known as the Roaring 20s. That’s the premise, at least; the reality is as unreal as the world the regulars are escaping from. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is a mosaic of disparate lives, teetering between
dignity and debauchery, reckoning with the past as they face an uncertain future, and singing as their ship goes down.

Filmmaking duo Bill and Turner Ross (Western, 2015 Sundance Film Festival) return with an elegiac portrait of a tiny world fading away but still warm and beating with the comfort of community. Their beguiling approach to nonfiction storytelling makes for a foggy memory of experience lost in empty shot glasses and puffs of smoke.

José (magnetic newcomer Enrique Salanic) lives with his mother (Ana Cecilia Mota) in Guatemala City, where they survive on her selling sandwiches at bus stops and with him working at a local restaurant. It is a poor and sometimes dangerous country where, dominated by conservative Catholic and Evangelical Christian religion, living one’s life as an openly gay man is hard for José to imagine. His mother has never had a husband, and as her youngest and favorite child, though at the edge of manhood at 19-years old, she is determined to hold on to him. Reserved and private, José fills his free moments playing with his phone and random sex with other men arranged on street corners and dating apps. When he meets attractive and gentle Luis (Manolo Herrera), a migrant from the rural Caribbean coast, they pursue an unexpected relationship with more emotion than José has ever felt. He is thrust into new passion and pain, and self-reflection, that push him to rethink his life even as he is reluctant to take a leap of faith.


Filmed at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival and directed by world-renowned photographer Bert Stern, Jazz on a Summer’s Day features intimate performances by an all-star line-up of musical legends including Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Anita O’Day, Chuck Berry, Dinah Washington, and closes with a beautiful rendition or The Lord’s Prayer by Mahalia Jackson at midnight to usher in Sunday morning. The film has been beautifully and extensively restored in 4K from the best surviving vault elements by IndieCollect.

Serving countless newlyweds in Hong Kong’s go-to one-stop-shop of cheap wedding supplies doesn’t exempt Fong from social pressure to marry. Since nodding to Edward’s proposal, she has been pushed beyond limits by unaffordable housing, archaic customs, and intrusive in-laws. What befuddles her further is the reappearance of Shuwei, a mainlander she’s supposed to be divorced from out of a sham marriage that solved her coming-of-age hardship. Zeroing in on nuts and bolts of modern marriage, My Prince Edward pokes around fixated correlations of freedom with relationship status and geographic residence. Like a breath of fresh air out of the breathless space it navigates, the whimsical gem contributes a rare humane take on the worldly metropolis’s divisions with humor and wisdom.

As Fong redefines her best life and writer-director Norris Wong reclaims her home city’s narrative from outsiders in this debut, their courage sparks thrills and will make you wholeheartedly cheer for a woman’s independence and a new age in Hong Kong cinema.

One of the most revolutionary and influential fashion designers of his time, Martin Margiela has remained an elusive figure the entirety of his decades-long career. From Jean Paul Gaultier’s assistant to creative director at Hermès to leading his own House, Margiela never showed his face publicly and avoided interviews, but reinvented fashion with his radical style through forty-one provocative collections. Now, for the first time, the “Banksy of fashion” reveals his drawings, notes, and personal items in this exclusive, intimate profile of his vision.

Take a rare journey into the mind of a fashion genius in HOUSE OF CARDIN, chronicling the life and career of legendary French designer Pierre Cardin. Originally renowned in the 50s and 60s for pioneering outrageously trendy ready-to-wear fashions, this documentary traces his origins as an apprentice all the way through to his current position atop a fashion empire.

Set just prior to the start of the 21st century, this vaguely futuristic story follows two residents of a quickly crumbling building who refuse to leave their homes in spite of a virus that has forced the evacuation of the area. As rain pours down relentlessly, a single man is stuck with an unfinished plumbing job and a hole in his floor. This results in a very odd relationship with the woman who lives below him. Combining deadpan humor with an austere view of loneliness and a couple of unexpected musical numbers, Tsai Ming-Liang crafted one of the most original films of the 1990s.

Epicentro is an immersive and metaphorical portrait of post-colonial, “utopian” Cuba, where the 1898 explosion of the U.S.S. Maine still resonates. This Big Bang ended Spanish colonial dominance in the Americas and ushered in the era of the American Empire. At the same time and place, a powerful tool of conquest was born: cinema as propaganda. In his latest film, Academy Award nominee Hubert Sauper (Darwin’s Nightmare) explores a century of interventionism and myth-making together with the extraordinary people of Havana—who he calls “young prophets”—to interrogate time, imperialism and cinema itself.

With her ravishingly sensual take on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor, Claire Denis firmly established herself as one of the great visual tone poets of our time. Amid the azure waters and sunbaked desert landscapes of Djibouti, a French Foreign Legion sergeant (Denis Lavant) sows the seeds of his own ruin as his obsession with a striking young recruit (Grégoire Colin) plays out to the thunderous, operatic strains of Benjamin Britten. Denis and cinematographer Agnès Godard fold military and masculine codes of honor, colonialism’s legacy, destructive jealousy, and repressed desire into shimmering, hypnotic images that ultimately explode in one of the most startling and unforgettable endings in all of modern cinema.

Wild Daze wades audiences gently through Africa’s murky and complex corruption to see how human activity takes a huge toll on the wild. Part nature documentary, part transnational crime journalism, part action thriller, Wild Daze breaks hearts, engages and amazes, educates and alarms …but most importantly viewers morph from audience members into environmental activists.