OPENING NIGHT 2025

7:00pm FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER

Robert Bresson (1971) 83 mins – Unclassified 15+

In his rarely screened second colour film – evocatively shot by Pierre Lhomme (Melville’s L’armée des ombres) – Bresson reinterprets Dostoevsky’s short story “White Nights” by “focusing solely on the momentum provided by the reading” (Bresson), replacing the source’s neurotic interior monologue with pure gesture and a playful use of sound. As a result, the master director’s retelling of the strange ritual between arts graduate Jacques (Guillaume des Forêts) and the disillusioned Marthe (Isabelle Weingarten) over four nights by the Pont Neuf emerges as one of his most musical, surprisingly tender and slyly humorous films.

4K DCP.

CTEQ ANNOTATION
Rolling Down That Hill: Robert Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer
by David Heslin

8:45pm A COUCH IN NEW YORK

Chantal Akerman (1996) 108 mins – M

Akerman’s blithe deconstruction of the romantic comedy is one of her most deceptive and least widely seen films. Negotiating the fine line between her often incisive and razor-sharp approach to filmmaking and her love of genre, as well as her shifting allegiances between Europe and New York, this playful “fish out of water” comedy stars Juliette Binoche and William Hurt in a tale revolving around the exchange of apartments between an American psychoanalyst and a Parisienne dancer. Featuring a wonderful score by Akerman’s long-term partner, Sonia Wieder-Atherton.

35mm print courtesy of La Cinémathèque Suisse.

CTEQ ANNOTATION
A Couch in New York
by Eloise Ross