Clinton, N.Y. – The Hamilton College F.I.L.M. (Forum on Image and Language in Motion) series returns for the spring 2025 semester. All events are free and take place in the Bradford Auditorium in the Kirner-Johnson Building on the Hamilton College campus.
F.I.L.M. series organizer and Hamilton Professor of Cinema and Media Studies Scott MacDonald has directed the F.I.L.M. series for more than 30 years. He has taught at Hamilton for many years, as well as at Utica College (now Utica University), Bard College, Harvard University, and the University of Arizona.
Listed below are the programs in the spring 2025 series.
Sunday, Feb. 9, at 2 p.m., John Martoccia presents Critical Acclaim (2024).
Utica Indie filmmaker John Martoccia makes deeply religious Roman Catholic films about people in the throes of challenges to their faith, and to their senses of failure and success. His newest film, Critical Acclaim, is the third in a trilogy that includes Vito Bonafacci (2011) and Death of a Tree (2015).
Filmed in and around Utica, Critical Acclaim stars Robert Funaro (The Sopranos, The Irishman…) as “Johnny Boy,” once a struggling filmmaker, now in a relentless battle against alcoholism. Johnny Boy is forced to confront his inner demons and the imminent self-destruction threatening to consume him. Paul Borghese (The Irishman) plays his friend Vito; and Emma Hullar (You Belong with Me), a prostitute on her own journey.
Sunday, Feb. 16, at 2 p.m., Yi Cui, presents To Alexandra (2024).
Yi Cui is a professor of art who teaches film and filmmaking at Colgate University. Her newest feature documentary intertwines two travelogues.
The journey of researcher-writer Alexandra David-Néel across the Himalayas a century ago is evoked using David-Néel’s letters home. Yi Cui depicts her own experiences in eastern Tibet, using her camera to record and collaborate with the native Tibetan people she meets.
The film moves between image, sound, and text — and between past and present — inviting viewers into a cine-meditative space, where they can contemplate life and death, as well as an amazing landscape and the people who live there.
Sunday, Feb. 23, at 2 p.m., Yi Cui returns to show Of Shadows (2016).
F.I.L.M. series director Scott MacDonald said, “Centuries before the invention of cinema, people in various cultures were drawn to shadow play: forms of moving image and sound that told stories and provided audiovisual commentary on lived experience. As modern movie-making technologies evolved, these earlier premonitions of cinema struggled to survive.”
In Of Shadows, filmed in China’s Loess Plateau where shadow plays have entertained people and deities for centuries, Yi Cui documents the struggles of one loyal group of shadow players to keep their art alive.
Monday, March 31, at 7 p.m., writer and director Zana Briski presents Born into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids (2004).
Born into Brothels, Briski’s collaboration with a group of young people living in a red-light district of Calcutta, won the Oscar for Best Feature Documentary in 2005. An inventive photographer and teacher, Briski engaged the group by teaching them how to photographically record their world.
Briski’s visit to Menagerie, currently on view at Hamilton’s Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, provided an opportunity to bring her to campus to present her film. Her photograph, “Bearogram #10,” is the introductory image in Menagerie.
Sunday, April 13, at 2 p.m., Jay Craven returns with a cut of Major Barbara, the newest Cinema Semester production.
For a decade, screenwriter and director Jay Craven has worked with collaborative groups of film professionals and students from a range of colleges, including Hamilton, to produce feature films.
He returns to Hamilton with the newest production, an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara. The story is about an idealistic young woman engaged in helping the poor as a major in the Salvation Army in London. Nine Hamilton College students were involved in making the film.
Bradford Auditorium is located in the Kirner-Johnson building, on the south side of the Hamilton campus.
From off campus, follow the “F.I.L.M. event” signs up College Hill Road. Turn left onto Green Apple Way after the flashing lights of the crosswalk. Parking is available just around the bend, on the right behind the Kennedy Center for Theatre and the Studio Arts.
