• SEASON 7
    Back to Earth

    Humanity’s collective response to the climate crisis has been stifled by an inability to grasp the implications of our histories. Filmmaking’s inherent potential as a time-based medium can offer informative, poetic, or even useful stories that we might draw on as models for coexistence, cooperation and change. Spanning documentary, hard-hitting drama and deadpan comedy, 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.

  • The Return

    Andrey Zvyagintsev | 2003

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    The Return

    Andrey Zvyagintsev | 2003

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    After a 12 year absence, an errant father returns to his two sons, Andrey and Ivan, without explanation or apology. Both mesmerised and perturbed by the return of this Christ-like figure, a family fishing trip reveals the chasm between the adolescent boys and their no-nonsense father. Shot through beautiful, watercolour tones and steeped in quasi-religious symbolism, Zvyagintsev’s hard-edged debut unfolds as a complex portrayal of male relationships set against a barren, decaying Earth.

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    Matthew Janney is managing editor at TANK. Paula Erizanu is a writer and journalist and culture editor at The Calvert Journal. Here, they discuss their immediate post-viewing impressions as the credits roll on The Return.  

  • Melancholia

    Lars Von Trier | 2011

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    Melancholia

    Lars Von Trier | 2011

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    Lars von Trier’s imagined apocalypse Melancholia is a visual spectacle of epic proportions. When Justine’s wedding celebrations are marred by the gigantic planet Melancholia, on course to crash into Earth, celestial forces find expression in earthly passions as a cast – led by Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg – confront imminent extinction. Von Trier’s hallucinatory, hyper-stylized filmmaking once again delivers a magical, provocative and disturbing take on the human condition.

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  • The Gleaners and I

    Agnès Varda | 2000

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    The Gleaners and I

    Agnès Varda | 2000

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    Gleaning has been a constitutionally protected practice in France since 1554; gleaners, once the subjects of paintings by Van Gogh. In this street-level, first-person documentary, Varda digs into the motivations and frustrations of France’s contemporary gleaners, from rustics foraging for discarded potatoes to a bohemian gleaning the streets for art materials. Characteristically veering away from any sweeping, political manifesto, Varda’s imaginative documentary digs into the rhizomed roots of this pre-industrial custom, offering at once a cautionary tale against mass-consumption and a gentle ode to France’s noble scavengers.

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  • Frontier Blues

    Babak Jalali | 2009

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    Frontier Blues

    Babak Jalali | 2009

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    Artful cinematography and deadpan humour coalesce in this debut feature by filmmaker Babak Jalali set on Iran’s border with Turkmenistan. Through Jalali’s painterly tableaus, projected against stunning, dimly-lit vistas, Frontier Blues follows four idiosyncratic men in pursuit of a better life. A quiet exploration of heartbreak, escape and human folly, Jalali’s thought-provoking drama finds drifts of associative connections in an otherwise bleak landscape.

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    Babak Jalali is a London-based writer and director born in Iran. His debut feature Frontier Blues premiered in the International Competition at the Locarno Film Festival in 2009 and has gone on to screen at over 20 festivals worldwide. It won the FIPRESCI award at the San Francisco International Film Festival and was released in cinemas in the UK, Switzerland and Austria.

  • Fire at Sea

    Gianfranco Rosi | 2016

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    Fire at Sea

    Gianfranco Rosi | 2016

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    Fire at Sea is a masterful example of the artistic adage “show don’t tell”. Set on the island of Lampedusa near Sicily, a major entry point for thousands of migrants from Africa and the Middle East, Rosi’s hard-hitting documentary juxtaposes footage of these often fatal crossings and the daily experience of a local fishing family. In detached fixed-camera positions free from any traditional voiceover, Rosi’s documentary is a slow, disquieting exposure of Lampedusa’s complex realities.

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  • Satantango

    Béla Tarr | 1994

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    Satantango

    Béla Tarr | 1994

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    While its seven-hour-plus runtime might seem like a dare designed to test the endurance of cinephiles, Bela Tarr’s opus unfolds with the calculated poise of a dance – borrowing the twelve-act tango-inspired structure of the László Krasznahorkai book on which it is based. Faced with financial ruin, the members of a farming community in rural Hungary grapple with their coming obsolescence. Shot through with treachery, madness and a barrage of apocalyptic omens, Tarr’s towering achievement in slow cinema is more relevant than ever in millenarian times.

     

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  • Leviathan

    Andrey Zvyagintsev | 2014

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    Leviathan

    Andrey Zvyagintsev | 2014

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    Leviathan offers a bracing take on a familiar tale: the struggle of a solitary figure against an unjust system. In a remote Russian village, part-time mechanic Kolya ignites a labyrinthine game of corruption and intimidation when he recruits a lawyer friend from Moscow to contest the forced purchase of his property. Epic, bleak and cut through with inimitable wit, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s film is at once a precise critique of contemporary Russia and an otherworldly parable.

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    Matthew Janney is managing editor at TANK. Carmen Gray is a freelance journalist, film critic, and programmer from New Zealand who now lives in Berlin. Publications she has written for include The New York Times, The Guardian, The Observer, Art Review, Sight & Sound and The Calvert Journal, often focusing on the art and culture of Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. Here, they discuss their immediate post-viewing impressions as the credits roll on Leviathan.

  • Modern Times

    Charlie Chaplin | 1936

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    Modern Times

    Charlie Chaplin | 1936

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    Charlie Chaplin’s classic finds slapstick comedy in the rote mechanism of industrial society. Backdropped by class struggle and the devastation of the Great Depression in America, Chaplin’s Tramp toils at a factory job, unwittingly leads a strike, escapes prison and falls in love in this chaotic commentary on the perils of capitalist technology. The result is a prescient and often hilarious depiction of the struggle against alienation in an increasingly mechanised world.

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  • Ice and the Sky

    Luc Jacquet | 2015

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    Ice and the Sky

    Luc Jacquet | 2015

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    The deep-time history of our planet – much too vast for our puny human brains to grasp in its entirety – can be told in tiny ice bubbles. In Ice and the Sky, filmmaker Luc Jacquet follows 82-year-old glaciologist Claude Lorius on his final trip to Antartica to study these bubbles. Jacquet’s documentary is an urgent rejoinder to climate denialists, but it is also an emotive portrait of the personal attachments that fuel scientific research and the fastidious work that allows us to better understand the vast planetary systems on which our collective fate depends.

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  • The Commune

    Thomas Vinterberg | 2016

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    The Commune

    Thomas Vinterberg | 2016

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    In 1970s Copenhagen, a professor of architecture inherits a home far too big for his family of three. True to the sensibility of the era, him and his wife solve this problem by inviting all their friends to come stay with them and begin an experiment in radical collective living. Tensions soon arise as their own marital conflicts blur with those of the group, but this is far from a rote rehersal of how our selfish human nature undercuts our utopian aspirations. Instead, what Thomas Vinterberg’s film offers is a careful study of the plight and potential of our fundamental interdependence. 

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SEASON 10
Lives of the Saints

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.

SEASON 9
Conception

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.

SEASON 8
Escape

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.

SEASON 6
Ritual

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.

SEASON 5
Metamorphosis

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.

SEASON 4
On Versimilitude

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.

SEASON 3
Sculpting in Time

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”.

SEASON 2
Growing Pains

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.

SEASON 1
Beyond Varda

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.