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  • SEASON 4
    On Versimilitude

    Autumn 2020 • 12 films

    How to recreate the real? From the early pioneers of the Kino Pravda movement in 1920s Russia to the masters of Cinéma Vérité in 1960s Paris, this question has preoccupied directors for decades. For TANKtv’s fourth season, we look at the innovative and radical ways filmmakers have represented reality, suspending our rational faculties and successfully drawing us into their mimetic spells. This season, we are pleased to be showing 12 films spanning seven decades from the greatest names in cinema, including Andrei Tarkovsky, Michael Haneke, Paolo Sorrentino, Agnès Varda, Louis Malle, Roy Andersson, Andrea Arnold, Hal Hartley, Denis Villeneuve, Peter Strickland, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Mia Hansen-Løve. Through rich storytelling and technical nuance, these directors bring to light cinema's raw power to move and to persuade, and perhaps, to flicker more truthfully than life itself. No Longer available.

  • Berberian Sound Studio

    Peter Strickland | 2012

    EXIT

    Berberian Sound Studio

    Peter Strickland | 2012

    Gilderoy makes his living replicating reality, using technical ingenuity to evoke footfalls, rustling leaves and clattering vehicles as an expert sound designer. After accepting a new job on an Italian giallo – or horror-thriller – film in need of blood-curdling screams and stomach-churning crunches, he finds himself becoming dangerously immersed in the project. The boundaries separating fiction and reality soon become treacherously leaky in Peter Strickland’s deliciously lurid black comedy. 

  • The Unbelievable Truth

    Hal Hartley | 1989

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    The Unbelievable Truth

    Hal Hartley | 1989

    Like its hyperbolic title, The Unbelievable Truth dares you to guess at the sincerity behind its melodrama. Josh Hutton returns to his hometown in Long Island dressed all in black and wreathed in foreboding. As he becomes involved with Audry, daughter of the local auto repair man, rumours begin to circulate about the hidden and possibly hard-to-credit truth about his past. Hal Hartley’s drama shrewdly picks apart both middle-class sensibilities and filmic clichés.  

  • Solaris

    Andrei Tarkvosky | 1972

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    Solaris

    Andrei Tarkvosky | 1972

    Kelvin is a Soviet psychologist dispatched to the heavens to investigate reported cases of soul-sickness among the crew of a spaceship orbiting the planet Solaris. On arrival, he finds the craft plagued by an existential despair which may or may not be related to the seemingly sentient oceans of Solaris below, and soon finds himself contending with its mysterious influences. For Andrei Tarkvosky, space is not where the realities of human existence dissolve into irrelevance, but rather where they are laid most hauntingly bare.

  • Il Divo

    Paolo Sorrentino | 2008

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    Il Divo

    Paolo Sorrentino | 2008

    No one handles a “true story” quite like Paolo Sorrentino. This coruscating indictment of the Italian political establishment centres around the career of seven-time prime minister Giulio Andreotti. Sorrentino renders the sallow bureaucracy of Andreotti’s world and the fierce violence it oversees with bombastic cinematic style. Il Divo is a pleasingly dizzying spectacle that reeks of outrage. 

  • Father of My Children

    Mia Hansen-Løve | 2009

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    Father of My Children

    Mia Hansen-Løve | 2009

    Grégoire, the eponymous father in Mia Hansen-Løve’s family drama, is an ambitious film producer secretly suffering from dire financial troubles. When his desperate situation leads to desperate acts, Hansen-Løve follows his wife, Sylvia, and their daughters in the fallout with patient but bracingly clear-eyed attention. Father of My Children is a limpid account of the catastrophic and disorienting arrival of melodrama into real life.

  • Wuthering Heights

    Andrea Arnold | 2011

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    Wuthering Heights

    Andrea Arnold | 2011

    With this adaptation of Wuthering Heights, Andrea Arnold pulls off no mean feat: telling a hard-worn story with bracing newness. Smuggling Emily Brontë’s novel out from the strongholds of A-level reading lists, Arnold approaches its rugged landscapes – both geographic and emotional – with frank immediacy untroubled by histrionics. Cathy and Heathcliff are introduced as two vital kids battling the forces of fate on the otherworldly Yorkshire moors.

  • Enemy

    Denis Villeneuve | 2013

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    Enemy

    Denis Villeneuve | 2013

    Based on a novel by José Saramago, Enemy is a thriller charged by our fear of the familiar. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Adam, a history professor living a quiet life in Toronto, who one day spots his doppelgänger in the background of a rental movie. As he becomes increasingly obsessed with tracking down the actor, Adam’s life takes a sharp turn for the uncanny. Denis Villeneuve’s film is as symbolically rich as it is mercilessly gripping.

  • You, the Living

    Roy Andersson | 2007

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    You, the Living

    Roy Andersson | 2007

    Taking its title from an irony-laden line of Goethe’s, You, the Living is an unforgiving and unsettlingly perspicacious outsider’s view on human life. Swedish auteur Roy Andersson captures reality through exquisitely engineered artifice, capturing human foibles with vicious exactitude in a series of meticulously composed vignettes set in a desaturated, Beckettian Scandinavia. We can only wish that Andersson’s tragicomic world wasn’t so queasily familiar.

  • The Seventh Continent

    Michael Haneke | 1998

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    The Seventh Continent

    Michael Haneke | 1998

    This piercing social drama follows the day-to-day lives of a profoundly normal, middle-class Austrian family. From between sharply observed scenes of them going to work, eating breakfast, and washing their car seeps a sense of insidious unease. Director Michael Haneke suggests unexpressed sentiments surging behind every surface of daily life, building to a true sideswipe of a denouement.

  • La Pointe Courte

    Agnès Varda | 1955

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    La Pointe Courte

    Agnès Varda | 1955

    In La Pointe Courte, Agnès Varda’s insatiably curious camera introduces us to a tiny quarter of the fishing town of Sète in the south of France. Principally following the fractured relationship of a young couple, one of whom is from the town, Varda’s film grows to include a whole host of local characters and perspectives, evoking a communal voice in contrast with the solipsism of the existentially beleaguered couple.

  • The Dance of Reality

    Alejandro Jodorowsky | 2013

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    The Dance of Reality

    Alejandro Jodorowsky | 2013

    “Something is dreaming us,” suspects Alejandro Jodorowsky. In this auto-biopic like no other, he grapples with the oneiric strangeness of real life as he recounts his own coming-of-age, within a family of Ukranian immigrants in a remote Chilean fishing village. Absurdism, irreverent storytelling, musical numbers and Day-Glo visuals are all part of an arsenal of exuberantly cinematic tools deployed in this disarmingly rigorous work of self-analysis, a thousand miles from realism.  

  • Lacombe, Lucien

    Louis Malle | 1974

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    Lacombe, Lucien

    Louis Malle | 1974

    Lacombe, Lucien is an eloquently unadorned study of an individual caught in the crossfire of political pressures. The titular Lucien is a 17-year-old working in a hospital in occupied France, morally disengaged from the war around him but everywhere affected by its incursions on everyday life. Louis Malle’s film depicts the complex, unheroic reality of history experienced at ground level. 

Now Showing:
Seasons Library

SEASON 14 True Brit

Spring 2025 • 10 films

British cinema is synonymous with the kitchen sink drama and its claims to realism. On this season of Now Showing we present a series of realist classics from these islands that emerge not only from specific cultural and historic moments, but also interrogate the very nature of representation itself. Whether through the quiet serenity of turn-of-the-century Wales, the Technicolour vibrancy of the Swinging Sixties or the quiet despair of crisis-riven 1970s London, these films examine how British filmmakers have used the medium to explore the complexities of identity, class, race, and gender; not just documenting the world as it is, but questioning how we perceive it.

SEASON 13 The Stranger

Autumn 2024 • 10 films

What happens when a stranger comes to town? A staple of cinematic diets, this season considers characters who enter lives, communities, or even minds, serving as a catalyst for profound revelation. Featuring films by Francois Truffaut, Juliet Bashore, Isaac Julien, Yasujirō Ozu, Werner Herzog, Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, Claire Denis and Peter Greenaway, Season 13 of TANKtv Now Showing considers the Stranger: mysterious encounters, parallel selves, and the essential weirdness of one's own psyche.

SEASON 12 Lust for Life

Spring 2024 • 14 films

Guest-curated by filmmaker Andrea Luka Zimmerman, season 12 of Now Showing ranges across many decades of cinema in pursuit of the pulses of desire and resistance in lives and locations often deemed marginal. Season 12, featuring films by Robert Bresson, Dennis Hopper, Ron Peck, Kent Mackenzie, Mira Nair, Leontine Sagan, Bill Douglas, Sally Potter, Lorenza Mazzetti, John Akomfrah and Andrea Luka Zimmerman, both examines and embodies humanity’s limitless lust for living.

SEASON 11 Forbidden Colour

Autumn 2023 • 12 films

These kaleidoscopic films by visionaries Bergman, Bidgood, Bakari, Greenaway, Herzog, Pasolini, Ozu, Jarman and Rosso represent the most enchanting, troubling and shocking uses of colour in cinematic history.

SEASON 10 Lives of the Saints

Spring 2023 • 12 films

There can be no sainthood without struggle, and for Ingmar Bergman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Robert Bresson, Margaret Tait, Carl Th. Dreyer, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Christopher Newby, Liv Ullman, Toshio Matsumoto, Timothy Neat, Jamil Dehlavi and Edward Bennett, the divine vision is in the details. Available for rental only.

SEASON 9 Conception

Autumn 2022 • 12 films

TANK’s ninth season, featuring films by John Cassavetes, Jean Cocteau, Terence Davies, Peter Greenaway, Werner Herzog, Derek Jarman, Takeshi Kitano, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Mike Leigh, Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen and Yasujiro Ozu, show that between the idea and the story there is a universe of possibility. Available for rental only

SEASON 8 Escape

Summer 2022 • 10 films

With films by Kryzsztof Kieślowski, Deniz Gamze Egüven, Andrei Tarkovsky, François Ozon, Cristian Mungiu, Hal Hartley, Atom Egoyan, Jean Vigo, Michael Haneke and Louis Malle – offering stories that cross borders, identities and contexts – this season looks at escape anew, not as resignation from our environment, but as re-engagement with it. No Longer available.

SEASON 7 Back to Earth

Autumn 2021 • 10 films

TANK presents ten films selected by the curators at Serpentine Galleries, as part of their multi-year project Back to Earth. Showing films by Agnès Varda, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Gianfranco Rosi, Charlie Chaplin, Luc Jacquet, Bela Tarr, Thomas Vinterberg, Lars von Trier and Babak Jalali. No Longer available.

SEASON 6 Ritual

Summer 2021 • 10 films

This season, we present 10 films spanning six decades by directors who train their lens on this ancient human practice, who, in doing so, capture the often unsaid behaviours and gestures that make us us. Showing films by Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrew Haigh, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Haneke, Agnès Varda, Corneliu Porumboiu, Aki Kaurismäki and Atom Egoyan. No Longer available.

SEASON 5 Metamorphosis

Spring 2021 • 10 films

We are pleased to be showing you 10 films spanning seven decades from the greatest names in cinema, including Andrei Tarkovsky, Wim Wenders, Paolo Sorrentino, Agnès Varda, Béla Tarr, Paweł Pawlikowski, Gabriel Axel, Robert Bresson, Olivier Assayas and Atom Egoyan. No Longer available.

SEASON 3 Sculpting in Time

Summer 2020 • 12 films

We look at films spanning five decades that approach time in profound ways, featuring Abbas Kiarostami, Paolo Sorrentino, Agnès Varda, Yorgos Lanthimos, Roy Andersson and more. From the hyper-real to the arcane, each provides its own portal into what Tarkovsky described as the “inner, moral qualities essentially inherent in time itself”. No Longer available.

SEASON 2 Growing Pains

Spring 2020 • 12 films

Filmmakers return to childhood because while it is universal, it is rarely identical. Whether delving deep into the turbulent experience of our earliest years or tracing their reverberations into adolescence and adulthood, these twelve films journey back to where it all begins. No Longer available.

SEASON 1 Beyond Varda

Winter 2019 • 10 films

With director Agnès Varda’s death in 2019, the film world lost a leading (and too-often overlooked) member of the Nouvelle Vague, a cinematic innovator and a pioneering voice. This season of TANKtv marks that legacy with 10 films by female directors for whom Varda laid a cinematic foundation. No Longer available.