This Veterans Day weekend, the fifth annual Festival of Preservation comes to Sag Harbor Cinema (90 Main St., Sag Harbor, 631-725-0010), offering attendees five days of screening rare, restored and rediscovered films.
Inspired by renowned filmmaker Martin Scorsese, who founded The Film Foundation — a nonprofit established to protect and preserve motion picture history — in 1990, the Sag Harbor Cinema Festival of Preservation is a celebration of the preservation of film and its culture in all forms. Special guests will include archivists, historians, collectors, filmmakers, and relatives of filmmakers, joining in to discuss and illuminate. The festival will begin on Friday, Nov. 7, continuing through Tuesday, Nov. 11.
Inspired by director and film enthusiast Martin Scorsese’s efforts in restoring and preserving films, the fifth annual Festival Preservation at Sag Harbor Cinema will include screenings of movies spanning from the Golden Age of Hollywood to avant-garde films and documentaries. (Photos courtesy of Sag Harbor Cinema)
Over a dozen films are slated for screening, running the gamut from hand-painted animation to Hollywood classics to foreign films. Screenings will include an extended cut of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1984 crime musical The Cotton Club Encore, Footlight Parade (presented in 35 mm, directed by Lloyd Bacon), a James Cagney-led musical showcasing choreography by Busby Berkeley from 1933; director Charles Walters’ 1956 musical remake High Society starring Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong; and select cartoons from Fleischer Studios, the New York animation group responsible for Betty Boop, and for putting comic strip characters Popeye, Superman and Felix the Cat on the big screen.
Additionally, viewers will be able to enjoy Pictures of Ghosts (the 2023 documentary from acclaimed Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho; Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, a fully restored version of Georgian-Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov, and widely considered the most important film in Ukranian cinema; and Michael Mann’s 1981 debut feature Thief, the neo-noir heist film starring James Caan.
“I love the variety of the lineup this year — not only in terms of the scope of the films, but also because it engages with several notions of preservation itself,” says the cinema’s founding artistic director Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan.
A screening of Bruce Weber’s documentary Nice Girls Don’t Stay for Breakfast (2018), showcasing archival footage and conversations with Golden Age of Hollywood star Robert Mitchum, will be followed by a Q&A between Weber and Mitchum’s granddaughter, Carrie Mitchum. A new exhibit is on the cinema’s third floor, containing additional photographs from Weber.
The five-day long festival will include screenings as well as in-depth conversations, Q&A’s and an artist exhibition, all at the cinema in downtown Sag Harbor. (Photos courtesy of Sag Harbor Cinema)
Other guests include filmmakers Sara Driver, Brad Corbet and Mona Fastvold; artist and filmmaker Bill Morrison; archivists Grover Crispy (from Sony), Kevin Schaeffer (from Disney), Cassandra Moore (from NBCUniversal) and James Mockoski (from American Zoetrope); Turner Classic Movies director of original productions Scott McGee; executive director of The Film Foundation Margarette Bodde; and leading restoration laboratory Cineric Inc.
“Keeping our films, their artistry, and their idea(l)s alive and relevant is also a collective effort, in which the audience plays a very important part,” D’Agnolo Vallan says. “That sense of shared passion, enjoyment, and aesthetic experience is the ultimate meaning of a special weekend like this one.”
Passes are $95 for all five days (including the Preservation Party on Saturday, Nov. 8). $55 if you’re a member of the cinema. Click here snag yours.
