NOTE: Theatre locations of BALAGAN programs change from show to show. Although The Coolidge Corner Theatre is still our beloved home base we have expanded our offerings to present programs at the ICA Boston, The Carpenter Center at Harvard University, and The Musuem of Fine Arts. Please check carefully the location of each show.

Please join our mailing list by sending an e-mail to jeff at balaganfilms dot com and you will be able to receive regular updates about our programs.

Spring 2008

February 27, 2008, Wednesday, 7:00PM
Location: Coolidge Corner Theatre - Movie House II


Balagan & the Harvard Film Study Center present
s:
Santiago by João Moreira Salles (Director in person)


João Salles is one of Brazil's foremost documentary filmmakers. In 1992 he began shooting a film about Santiago, the butler in his childhood home who left an indelible mark upon the family and had written over 60,000 pages of stories about the people and things that surrounded him. Salles did not finish the film for 13 years until Santiago's death rekindled Salles determination for a conclusion.

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March 19, 2008, Wednesday at 8PM
Location: Carpenter Center for Visual Art-Harvard University - 24 Quincy St. Cambridge, MA


Balagan, Mass College of Art Film Society and the Harvard Film Study Center presents:
Peggy and Fred in Hell by Leslie Thornton (Director in person)

Peggy And Fred In Hell
is one of the strangest cinematic artifacts of the last 20 years, revealing the abuses of history and innocence in the face of catastrophe, as it chronicles two small children journeying through a post-apocalyptic landscape to create their own world. Breaking genre restrictions, Thornton uses improvisation, planted quotes, archival footage and formless timeframes to confront the viewer's preconceptions of cause and effect.
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March 27, 2008, Thursday, 5:30PM
Location: Museum of Fine Arts Boston- 640 Huntington Ave., Boston


Balagan & the Muesum of Fine Arts presents:

Selections of Shorts from the Black Maria Film Festival

Since 1981, the annual Black Maria Film and Video Festival, an international juried competition and award tour, has been fulfilling its mission to advocate exhibit and reward cutting edge works from independent film and videomakers. The festival is known for its national public exhibition program, which features a variety of bold contemporary works drawn from the annual collection of 50 award winning films and videos. Balagan is delighted to again co-present the Boston leg of the festival with the Museum of Fine Arts.

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March 30, 2008, Sunday, 5:00PM
Location: Coolidge Corner Theatre


Balagan presents:
Unidentified Vietnam No.18 & other films by By Lin+Lam
(Directors in person)

Since 2001, Lana Lin and H. Lan Thao Lam have been researching an archive of South Vietnamese propaganda films at the Library of Congress. Unidentified Vietnam No. 18 is a successor to the seventeen films in the collection labeled only as  "Unidentified Vietnam, #1-17". Lin + Lam's personal, experimental film examines the contested relationship between Vietnam and the US, between history and propaganda, between democracy and nation building.

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April 17, 2008, Thursday, 7:30PM
Location: Coolidge Corner Theatre


Balagan presents:
Dreams and Apparations of Mark Lapore (2007) by Saul Levine
(Director in person)

w/ Polina Marshakova, Adam Savje, Kim Keown, Saul Levine, Joe Briganti, Alison Holt, Schiller Diny, Luther Price and Ericka Beckman.

Each of these persons recount dreams or visions of Mark Lapore. It was made in response to his suicide on 9/11/2005. Shot with a Black & White Panasonic studio tube camera.

“Saul Levine is the foremost dissenting filmmaker in America. With about 35 years of consistent production behind him, and no signs of fatigue, he can show us the shape of a life passionately and uncompromisingly devoted to filmmaking. His works are high-energy messages of friendship, records of sexual love and political activism, radiated by humor, prophetic anger, loneliness and even though rarely, representing repose. His incessant, chaotic outpouring of political energy seems less geared to a naïve notion of bettering the world than to a perpetual pressure to keep it from getting worse.” — P. Adams Sitney.
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April 26 & 27, 2008, Friday 7PM & Saturday at 3PM
Location: Harvard Film Archive
Carpenter Center for Visual Art
24 Quincy St. Cambridge, MA

Balagan, the Harvard Film Archive and the Film Study Center presents:

The Sun and the Moon in Indonesia:
The Single-Shot Cinema of Leonard Retel Helmrich
(Director in person)

Indonesia is one of the most populous nations on earth, and that population is among the most diverse anywhere. In order to depict and explore that diversity and its complexities, Leonard Retel Helmrich (b. 1959) aims not for a vast overview but rather focuses on the daily, the specific and the intimate. He has spent several years documenting the fortunes of one working-class family in Jakarta, headed by the matriarch Rumidjah. The two films that he made with that family, The Eye of the Day and Shape of the Moon, have won prizes at festivals from Amsterdam to Sundance.

Upcoming:
Ken Brown's 1960's Psychedelic Cinema with Live Musicians (TBA)