MoMA The Museum of Modern Art (Venue Partner)
11 W 53rd St
212.708.9400
This event has passed.
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Paradise. 2009. USA. Directed by Michael Almereyda
- When
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Wednesday Sep 30, 2009 (7pm)
- Where
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- Price
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Free with museum admission. Film-only tickets: adults $10; seniors $8; members and children under 16 are free; member friends $5. Please visit our website for more details.
- Links
“I am enthralled by Paradise,” Jonathan Lethem writes, “a film whose documentary eye wanders while seeming to have great fixity of purpose just below the level of conscious apprehension.” The artistic gifts that Lethem describes—a combination of quiet observation, narrative complexity, and an appreciation of the sensuous, material world—have distinguished Michael Almereyda’s films for the past twenty years, whether in fiction (Another Girl Another Planet; Nadja; and his contemporary retelling of Hamlet) or in documentary (This So-Called Disaster, which follows Sam Shepard directing a production of one of his plays; and William Eggleston in the Real World). Almereyda’s most recent film, Paradise, is an astonishingly beautiful and poignant sketchbook, a collection of fragmentary episodes captured during ten years of travels. It is a gathering up of intimately shared moments with friends and strangers, rendered with a sense of mystery, wonderment, and sly humor. Almereyda has noted that, over time, Paradise became “less a self-portrait and more of a panoramic group portrait of children and their adult counterparts. A description of the world we inherit, fumble around in, and grow into.” Episodes were shot in roughly two dozen cities in nine different countries, and they are linked, the director writes, by “the idea that life is made up of brief paradisiacal moments—moments routinely taken for granted, and always slipping away.”
Paradise. 2009. USA. Directed by Michael Almereyda. 82 min.
