THE 11TH GREEN

USA 2020 - DCP - 108 minutes

In English

Director, Screenplay: Christopher Munch

Producers: Valeria Lopez, Christopher Munch

Cinematography: Sara Garth

Cast: Campbell Scott, Agnes Bruckner, Ian Hart, George Gerdes

Director Christopher Munch’s films, including THE LIFE AND TIMES and COLOR OF A BRISK AND LEAPING DAY, have always been distinctive, inventive and original. But Munch has outdone himself with THE 11TH GREEN, which features a great central performance by Campbell Scott, of films from BIG NIGHT to ROGER DODGER to AMAZING SPIDER MAN 2… and a truly otherworldly plot. When his 85-year-old father drops dead of a heart attack, Jeremy Rudd is summoned to the exclusive California golf resort where he lived. Though estranged from his father for two decades (Jeremy’s muckraking Washington journalism flew in the face of his father’s career in classified aerospace programs), he is now forced to become acquainted first-hand with the man’s secretive legacy. In his father’s former assistant, Laurie (Agnes Bruckner of BLUE CAR and MURDER BY NUMBERS), a woman with a past, he develops a romantic interest that threatens to undermine his judgment. But his judgment is even more challenged when his father’s protégé, Jacobsen, a charming but shifty intelligence operative, offers him several astonishing reels of film that purport to document our interaction with off-world visitors half a century ago. It doesn’t take long for the trail to lead to a post-presidency version of Dwight Eisenhower who has dreams of a future president asking his help and a possible attempt by elements of the government to open the murky topic of UFOs to the light of day. THE 11TH GREEN is a film to ponder, wonder at, and discover.

Sponsored by Joan and Peter Beckerman

Wednesday

July 15

Northeast Premiere THE LAST SHIFT

USA 2020 - DCP - 90 minutes

In English

Director, Screenplay: Andrew Cohn

Producers: Ron Yerxa, Albert Berger, Sam Bisbee, Bert Kern, Alex Lipschultz

Cinematography: W. Mott Hupfel III

Cast: Richard Jenkins, Shane Paul McGhie, Allison Tolman, Da’Vine Joy Randolph

Thursday July 16

Restoration U.S. Premiere

Latcho Drom

France 1994 - DCP - 103 minutes

Sung in various languages with English subtitles

Director, Screenplay: Tony Gatlif

Producer: Michel Ray-Gavras

Cinematography: Éric Guichard

U.S. digital restoration premiere of the truly spectacular film (the first major release of Waterville’s own Shadow Distribution, never available on streaming, DVD, BluRay, download, or anything else.) Winner of a special award from the National Society of Film Critics in 1994, LATCHO DROM was called “haunting, vibrant…the ultimate music video”

(John Anderson, Newsday)…only this is no mere music video. Shot in ravishing widescreen images, LATCHO DROM is a journey told entirely through music, song and one spectacularly staged visual sequence and jaw-dropping musical performance after another, literally following the path of the Rom or Romany people (more popularly but questionably called “gypsies”) through the Rom musicians and dancers of India, Egypt, Turkey, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, France, and Spain.

Sponsored by Third Row Center in memory of Peter Townsend

Midwestern white working class Stanley (Richard Jenkins, Oscar nominee for THE SHAPE OF WATER and THE VISITOR) is retiring after 38 reasonably proud years as a fast-food worker, intending to move to Florida, but when he’s tasked with training his replacement, Jevon (Shane Paul McGhie), a bright, aspiring young black journalist on probation with a family, Stanley discovers uncomfortable truths about himself and the culture and world he’s rarely questioned. Warm and unflashy, THE LAST SHIFT is both timely and terrific, a smart, quiet film about how much needs to change that refuses pat answers and simply engages us deeply. Jenkins is just plain terrific as a guy who’s traded four decades of his life and loyalty to Oscar’s Chicken and Fish in what he considered fair trade in wages that started at $3.10 an hour in 1971 and has now reached the dizzying heights of $13.00. Executive produced by Alexander Payne (SIDEWAYS, ELECTION), who was at one time going to direct it, THE LAST SHIFT, the fine fiction debut of documentary-maker Andrew Cohn, bears the best of each, Payne’s sly humor and Cohn’s determined honesty.

Sponsored by Jill Gordon and Jon Haddow