The Museum of Modern Art Presents To Save And Project: The 20th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation

This year’s edition of MoMA’s annual festival includes more than 80 newly preserved features and shorts from 18 countries, many having world or North American premieres and presented in original versions not seen since their initial theatrical releases. The festival opens with the North American premiere of the Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckler The Black Pirate (Albert Parker, 1926), introduced by filmmaker Alexander Payne. MoMA and The Film Foundation’s complex restoration faithfully reconstruct the film’s original palette of rich browns and greens, capturing the look of Technicolor’s Process Two such as it has not been seen in nearly 100 years.

The 2024 program features the world premiere of John Ford’s Arrowsmith (1931) in its original theatrical release version, as well as Andy Warhol’s never-before-seen Bitch (1965) in a special program with a newly struck 35mm print of Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Other festival highlights include the North American premieres of Wim Wenders’s Lightning over Water (1980); Chantal Akerman’s All Night Long (1982) and Hôtel des acacias (1982); Alain Tanner’s Messidor (1979); Agnès Varda’s The Creatures (1966), starring Catherine Deneuve and Michel Piccoli; Agnieszka Holland’s Fever (1981); Idrissa Ouédraogo’s Yam Daabo (1987); Menelek Shabazz’s Burning an Illusion (1982); Kōzaburō Yoshimura’s Undercurrent (1956); Wong Tin-lam’s The Wild, Wild Rose (1960), a cosmopolitan Hong Kong retelling of Bizet’s Carmen starring Grace Chang; Aribam Syam Sharma’s The Chosen One (1990), which offers a rare glimpse of moviemaking in the Indian state of Manipur; and Richard Eichberg’s Weimar melodrama Pavement Butterfly (1929), presented in a tribute to the actress Anna May Wong.