The Road Trilogy

In the 1970s, Wim Wenders was among the first true international breakthrough artists of the revolutionary New German Cinema movement, a filmmaker whose fascination with the physical landscapes and emotional contours of the open road proved to be universal. In the middle of that decade, Wenders embarked on a three-film journey that took him from the wide roads of Germany to the endless highways of the United States and back again. Each starring Rüdiger Vogler as the director’s alter ego, Alice in the Cities, Wrong Move, and Kings of the Road are dramas of emotional transformation that follow their characters’ searches for themselves, all rendered with uncommon soulfulness and visual poetry.

Two decades after its original negatives were burned in a fire, Satyajit Ray’s breathtaking milestone of world cinema rises from the ashes in a meticulously reconstructed new restoration. The Apu Trilogy brought India into the golden age of international art-house film, following one indelible character, a free-spirited child in rural Bengal who matures into an adolescent urban student and finally a sensitive man of the world. These delicate masterworks—Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road), Aparajito (The Unvanquished), and Apur Sansar (The World of Apu)—based on two books by Bibhutibhusan Banerjee, were shot over the course of five years, and each stands on its own as a tender, visually radiant journey. They are among the most achingly beautiful, richly humane movies ever made—essential works for any film lover.

The Hangover is a trilogy of American comedy films created by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, and directed by Todd Phillips. All three films follow the misadventures of a quartet of friends (also known as "the Wolfpack") who go on their road trip to attend a bachelor party. While all of the films finds three of the four men on a mission to find their missing friend, the first two films focus on the events following a night of debauchery before a party in Las Vegas and Bangkok; whereas the third and final film involves a road trip and a kidnapping in lieu of a bachelor party. Each film in the series focus on how the friends deal with the aftermath of their antics while they are being humiliated and occasionally physically beaten up at every turn.

Third part of THE AMERICAN WEST TRILOGY - the other two parts being NOME ROAD SYSTEM and MILLTOWN, MONTANA -, the film is a poignant and multi-layered portrait of the life and landscape of the Mojave Desert. Structured in a loose way, that almost allows comparisons to John Fahey's spare fingerpicking, like a skeletal blues lost in time, the film observes how life weaves itself in and outside the texture of an American life that the ideology of neo-liberal policies has completely forgotten. The voice of poet and inmate Stanley "Spoon" Jackson, who began serving a life sentence without possibility of parole in 1977 and has since then served time in more than a half dozen California state prisons, reads excerpts from his autobiography By Heart while images of a world suspended drenched in pure American mythology are intercut, drowned in the brutal reality and consequences of ruthless financial politics. BARSTOW, CALIFORNIA is truly the other side of the American dream.