Timely titles, fascinating profiles among BFS offerings
Though the local movie theater is reopening, Bozeman Film Society will continue virtually streaming its independent titles until the Ellen screen is lit once again. Watch safely at home with new titles added weekly. Streaming sales directly support BFS. Here’s a look at a few upcoming options.
Enter the tech-driven adolescence of Beast Beast through May 6th. Newcomer Shirley Chen gives a remarkable breakout performance, crackling with the vulnerability and joy of first love, while Will Madden and Jose Angeles deliver disquieting turns as young men grasping for individuality in an uncertain time. Brimming with energy and style, Beast Beast captures what it means to come of age in an era marked by technology and social media, where violent clashes awaken dormant passions and teenagers are faced with growing up all too quickly. The film runs 85 minutes.
Stream The Man Who Sold His Skin through May 7th. Sam Ali, a young, sensitive and impulsive Syrian, left his country for Lebanon to escape the war. To be able to travel to Europe and live with the love of his life, he accepts to have his back tattooed by one of the world’s most sulfurous contemporary artist. Turning his own body into a prestigious piece of art, Sam will come to realize that his decision might actually mean anything but freedom. The film runs 104 minutes.
Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts streams through May 13th. The film aims to reclaim the legacy of Traylor, born into slavery on a Benton, Alabama cotton plantation in 1853 and dying 96 years later as an artist, forgotten by history, not far away in Montgomery in 1949. After lifetime of sharecropping, he became homeless and started to draw and paint on scraps, reconstructing both memories from plantation days and scenes of a radically changing urban culture, having witnessed profound social and political change during a life spanning slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, and the Great Migration. Creating well over a thousand drawings and paintings between 1939-1942, his colorful, strikingly modernist work eventually led him to be recognized as one of America’s greatest self-taught artists. The film runs 75 minutes.
Feature doc In Silico streams through May 20th. A young filmmaker sets out to document a brilliant neuroscientist who has become frustrated with his field’s status quo. With time elapsing and millions of dollars on the line, In Silico explores an audacious 10-year quest to simulate the entire human brain on supercomputers. Along the way, it reveals the profound beauty of tiny mistakes and bold predictions – a controversial space where scientific process meets ego, and where the lines between objectivity and ambition blur. The film runs 83 minutes.
Also available until May 20th is critically acclaimed About Endlessness. Through a darkly comedic series of vignettes mixing landmark moments in world history with the quotidian, Roy Andersson’s masterpiece weaves an existential, meticulously crafted tale for our time. The film runs 76 minutes.
Pull up a chair with the Food Club through May 21st. Three lifelong girlfriends decide to travel to Italy to attend a cooking course in Puglia, where they each find the opportunity to redefine themselves and acknowledge that the most important thing in life is their friendship. The film runs 100 minutes.
Stream the Vertical Life Film Tour May 14th–21st. This climbing, mountaineering, slack line and vertical lifestyle film program was created for worldwide adventure audiences. Created and conceived by the team behind the magazine of the same name, titles include Valhalla, Out of the Blue and A Thousand Ways to Kiss the Ground.
Timely documentary Us Kids opens May 14th and will be available into June. Sparked by the plague of gun violence ravaging their schools, the film chronicles the March for Our Lives movement over the course of several years, following Emma Gonzalez, its co-founders, survivors and a group of teenage activists as they pull off the largest youth protest in American history. Its subjects set out across the country and globally to build an inclusive and unprecedented youth movement that addresses racial justice, a growing public health crisis and shocking a political system into change. The film runs 98 minutes.
Cost and rental period vary per title. Public film screenings at the Ellen will resume when large gatherings can be safely scheduled. Follow BFS on social media for updates. Visit www.bozemanfilmsociety.org for film previews and further information – and “Keep ‘Em Flickering!” •
