Abel Ferrara
This very special film features a carefully curated selection of some of the priceless messages that have graced Anthology’s voicemail system over the years. From the historically important to the utterly (and sublimely) absurd, they feature a cast of characters ranging from legendary avant-garde filmmakers, scholars, and other cultural figures to civilians whose legend has (until now) been confined to the offices of Anthology, thanks precisely to their witty, eloquent, eccentric – or in some cases unforgettably psychotic – voicemails. We’ve toyed with the idea of sharing these messages in some form for years, and the “Imageless Films” series provides a perfect pretext.
The panorama of human affairs encounters the “man with a movie camera”. His playground has no boundaries, his curiosity no limits. Characters, situations and places pitch camp in the life of a humanity that is at once the viewer and the thing viewed. But what are the last days of this humanity? Have they already passed? Are they now or still to come?
In his first New York City-set documentary in nearly a decade, filmmaker and provocateur Abel Ferrara uses the experience of one longtime cinema owner to chart the vast changes to the city’s theatrical landscape.
Abel Ferrara directed this thirty-minute documentary that interviews the cast of his film THE ADDICTION.
Abel Ferrara headlines a film retrospective and a series of concerts in France dedicated to songs and music from his films. Preparations with his family and friends will form the material of this self portrait, showing another side of the director of legendary films BAD LIEUTENANT, THE KING OF NEW YORK and THE ADDICTION. Ferrara is joined on stage by past collaborators, including composer Joe Delia, actor-singer Paul Hipp and his wife actress Cristina Chiriac for concerts at the Metronum in Toulouse and the Salo Club in Paris in October 2016.
Abel Ferrara’s new documentary is a vivid mosaic/portrait of Rome’s biggest public square, Piazza Vittorio, featuring talks with African musicians and restaurant workers, Chinese barkeeps and relocated eastern Europeans, homeless men and women, artists, actors, and many others.
In July of this year, Hans Hurch travelled to Rome to meet Abel Ferrara and discuss the terms and content for a potential Viennale trailer with him. Following Hurch's unexpected death, Ferrara conceived the trailer as an obituary: We see a landscape at dusk and hear music and children crying in the distance. The face of the late Viennale director is superimposed, his first name pronounced by an electronically distorted voice that can hardly be understood. Captured in an extremely aesthetic manner, a photo of Bob Dylan in his youth and an emblematic image of John Ford with a black patch over his eye are rolling past. Abel Ferrara's trailer is a phantasmagoria, a visual game of deception, combining some of the things that were important to Hans Hurch with dream-like sequences and celebrating a moment of utmost existential compression. In his accompanying note, Ferrara wrote: "A small thank you to someone who constantly and consistently maintained the dream of the eternal cinema."
A man wakes up in a strange place. Peeled walls, a bare, cold and damp room. He doesn't understand where he is. He has severe pain especially in the head, tries to open the door but it's locked, tries to call someone but nobody answers. He is a prisoner. A nightmare begins for him in which he will have to go through a path of understanding to finally get to understand what really happened.
Paul is a down-on-his-luck screenwriter who picks up a drifter and offers him a place to stay. However, when the deranged stranger takes Paul hostage and forces him to write, their unhinged relationship brings buried secrets to light.
A documentary directed by Abel Ferrara for the series ‘BOATS – Based On A True Story’ about the Padre Pio di Pietrelcina.
Fiction inspired from the story of the rise and the fall of french politician and former head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
An ordinary guy delves deep into counterculture, conspiracy theories and the like as he tries to discern the structure of society.
We are with Pasolini during the last hours of his life, as he talks with his beloved family and friends, writes, gives a brutally honest interview, shares a meal with Ninetto Davoli, and cruises for the roughest rough trade in his gun-metal gray Alfa Romeo. Over the course of the action, Pasolini’s life and his art (represented by scenes from his films, his novel-in-progress Petrolio, and his projected film Porno-Teo-Kolossal) are constantly refracted and intermingled to the point where they become one.
Filmmaker Hermann Vaske explores the creative Balkan world in the hopes of understanding the meaning of "Balkan spirit".
A simple, modest and faithful record of some moments at the Lucca Film Festival in October 2010, with songs and speeches by Abel Ferrara: trace of the co-presence of two of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, dissident and true sons of Cesare Zavattini’s revolutionary spirit.
A look at how a painter and a successful actor spend their last day together before the world comes to an end.
New York Tunez, an all techno record store, is going under. The owner, Keith, a down and out trance DJ, struggles to cope with the changing cultural climate. In a final effort to save the store he organizes a rave. Unfortunately, 2009 is a far cry from the early '90's.
Born in the Bronx and raised in upstate New York, Abel Ferrara started his professional film career on Mulberry Street in 1975. For the past year he's been living on the block, and the feast of San Gennaro is the subject of his new film. While he has used this location for a few of his features, this time it's the star of the film.
Since his wife's death, Arthur, a peculiar and severe surgeon, cloisters his teen daughter Lucille inside a strange mansion. Desperate, Lucille tries to commit suicide and ends up with her face completely burned and bandaged. Arthur, with the assistance of his aunt, prepares a weird skin graft in order to give back Lucille a face, a face that resembles his beloved and deceased wife. To take care of her, the father then hires Joan, an attractive nurse with a somber past. Lucille and Joan start a forbidden and passionate love affair.
After months of living a solitary existence, Lenny, 34, picks up his kids from school. Every year he spends a couple of weeks with his sons Sage, 9, and Frey, 7. Lenny hosts his kids within a midtown studio apartment in New York City. During these two weeks, he must figure out if he wants to act as their father or be their friend. Ultimately, their trip upstate results in complete lawlessness taking over their lives.
Weaving together fact and fiction, this docudrama performs a portrait of the often seamy underside of the city of Naples.Ferrara traveled to Italy to interview the inmates at the Naples Pozzuoli State Prison, a high security lockup for women, and with the help of a translator he allows a number of women doing time to talk about their lives before and after they were convicted. Ferrara chose to expand the short profile of the prisoners into a feature by offering a look at life in the slums of Naples and the actions of a number of law enforcement officers and social workers struggling to improve conditions for the poor, as well as adding three short fictional segments shot of digital video gear.
Chelsea on the Rocks celebrates the personalities and artistic voices that have emerged from New York’s legendary Chelsea Hotel. Once considered an untouchable, impenetrable tower for writers, artists, musicians and mavericks, it has been recently claimed as a boutique hotel venture for a management company that shows disregard for its formidable history. –Cannes Film Festival
From its simple beginnings in 1939 in a sleepy beach town in the south of France, the prestigious Cannes Film Festival has become the must-attend red carpet event of the year. Filmmaker Richard Schickel's fascinating documentary captures the glitz and glamour of the festival's incredible 60-year run with archival footage and unforgettable moments. Hollywood's biggest names including Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, Sharon Stone and Harvey Weinstein talk about the politics, madness, and thrills of competing for one of the industry's highest honors - the coveted Palme d'Or - and what it's like to be at the most fabulous festival by the sea.
Find the unique visual universe of Mylène Farmer accompanying the albums "Les Mots," and "Avant que l'ombre...." from 2001 to 2005.
Alex Grazioli follows bad-boy filmmaker Abel Ferrara as he spends three grueling years battling obstacles in Italy to direct "Mary," a modern-re imagining of the life of Mary Magdalene. Featuring candid interviews and on-set footage with Forest Whitaker, Heather Graham, Matthew Modine, and Juliette Binoche, "Odyssey," brings to bear an impressive tableau of Ferrara's colleagues as they discuss his unique approach to creating dynamic films.
Following the shooting of a film on the life of Jesus called This Is My Blood, Marie Palesi (Juliette Binoche), the actress who plays Mary Magdalene takes refuge in Jerusalem in search of the truth behind the myth. The director of the film, Tony Childress (Matthew Modine), who also plays Jesus, can think of only one thing: self-promotion. In New York, television journalist Ted Younger (Forest Whitaker) presents a programme about the life of Jesus.
A documentary on Asia Argento, made during the making of "the Heart is Deceitful Above All Things." Cinema has always been a part of her life, so much so that she cannot separate her childhood souvenirs from her film career. With Abel Ferrara, Peter Fonda, Marilyn Manson, Rancid, John Robinson...
Intimate portrait of Abel Ferrara: the result is an eccentric road movie, with the restless film maker as a charming, shabby guide around New York by night.
Includes videos of Mylène Farmer made by Laurent Boutonnat, Luc Besson, Abel Ferrara and Marcus Nispel.
A corporate raider and his henchman use a chanteuse to lure a scientific genius away from his employer and family.
Every morning, a married man and his wife enter the subway, buying a newspaper and coffee together before taking separate lines. One day, as the man is standing in the aisle of his train, leaning against the support pole while reading his newspaper, a strange woman touches his hand. She slides his hand down the pole and begins to discreetly pleasure herself with it. The man looks over, only to see that the woman is nonchalantly reading the newspaper, as she continues to pleasure herself with his hand. No words are spoken between them. The next day, the same encounter takes place, with the woman boarding the train and hovering over toward the pole by which the man is standing. This time, his hand is already waiting lower on the pole. These daily, wordless encounters between the man and woman continue over a nine month period.
A debauched Hollywood movie actor tries to piece together one wild night in Miami years earlier which remains a drug-induced blur, and soon finds out that some questions about his past are best left unanswered.
The actual experiences of New York City subway riders are dramatized in a collection of 10 intriguing and very different vignettes. The tales showcase an ensemble of familiar faces, and range from stories of compassion and love to reflections on violence and loss. Among them: a disabled beggar quarrels with a woman and ruins her shoes with his wheelchair, provoking onlookers to wrath and pity; a skittish tourist proves to be her own worst enemy; a newlywed trysts with a mysterious sexpot; a commuter helplessly witnesses a suicide attempt; and, in the most affecting segment, a young woman grieves over her mother's imminent death.
The story concerns the funeral of one of three brothers in a family of gangsters that lived in New York in 1930s. Details of the past of the brothers and their families are shown through a series of flashbacks.
A vampiric doctoral student tries to follow the philosophy of a nocturnal comrade and control her thirst for blood.
Michael Almereyda discussing the future of film with various directors at Sundance.
When Environmental Protection Agency inspector Steve Malone travels to a remote military base in order to check for toxic materials, he brings his family along for the ride. After arriving at the base, his teenage daughter Marti befriends Jean Platt, daughter of the base's commander, General Platt. When people at the base begin acting strangely, Marti becomes convinced that they are slowly being replaced by plant-like aliens.
A New York film director, working on his latest movie in Los Angeles, begins to reflect the actions in his movie and real life, especially when he begins an affair with the lead actress.
While investigating a young nun's rape, a corrupt New York City police detective, with a serious drug and gambling addiction, tries to change his ways and find forgiveness.
A former drug lord returns from prison determined to wipe out all his competition and distribute the profits of his operations to New York's poor and lower classes in this stylish and ultra violent modern twist on Robin Hood.
A Miami hotel owner finds danger when be becomes romantically involved with the wife of a deposed general from the Dominican Republic where he fought many years back.
Teenage lovers Tony (Richard Panebianco) and Tyan-Hwa (Sari Chang) tip the balance of power in New York's Little Italy and Chinatown.
A road warrior vigilante avenges his brother's death at the hands of a crazy motorist by using his souped-up pickup to apprehend drunken drivers and others who abuse their driving privileges.
An artist slowly goes insane while struggling to pay his bills, work on his paintings, and care for his two female roommates, which leads him taking to the streets of New York after dark and randomly killing derelicts with a power drill.
Two carefree women have a fun day out, pick up a prostitute and take her to a party hosted by one's husband.
Pauline (Pauline LaMonde), a wealthy and bored socialite, has a secret relationship with an opium smoking tarot card reading mystic, known only as Gypsy (Dominique Santos). Recording and reporting on her various sexual experiences, as well as those of her friends, Pauline and Gypsy each use each other to explore their darkest sexual and emotional recesses. But as Pauline begins to pull away from her emotional connection to Gypsy, Gypsy herself realizes that she must keep Pauline under her control at all costs.
Equal parts personal essay, intense rumination, and playful satire, this movie laments the death of the American Video Store while it searches for the missing human element in today's digital landscape.
JJ is an American soldier stationed in a Rome under siege, locked down, and at war. The Vatican being blown into the night sky is only the beginning of our hero’s journey to uncover and defend against an unknown enemy but threatening the lives of the entire world.
