NEW YORK, NY.- The Museum of Modern Art announces the 16th annual edition of To Save and Project, a festival dedicated to celebrating newly preserved and restored films from archives, studios, distributors, foundations, and independent filmmakers around the world. Running from January 4 to 31, 2019, this year’s festival includes more than 50 newly preserved features and shorts from Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the United States—virtually all of them North American or New York premieres—by filmmakers as diverse as Fernando de Fuentes, André de Toth, Safi Faye, Ha Gil-jong, F. W. Murnau, and Doris Wishman. Many of these films are receiving their first American screening since their original release; others will be shown in meticulously restored versions that recapture the long-lost sound and image quality of their initial release; and some will be publicly screened for the first time ever in New York. To Save and Project is organized by Joshua Siegel, Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.

To Save and Project opens with a tribute to Barbet Schroeder through all of his documentaries. Schroeder, who is also celebrated for fiction films like Tricheurs, Reversal of Fortune, Barfly, and Single White Female, will present his self-described “trilogy of evil”: General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait (1974), Terror’s Advocate (2007), and the New York premiere theatrical run, from January 4 to 10, of The Venerable W. (2017). He will also introduce new digital preservations of Koko: A Talking Gorilla (1978), The Charles Bukowski Tapes (1985), and three rarely screened anthropological shorts made in 1971 in Papua, New Guinea during the shooting of his fiction film The Valley (Obscured by Clouds).

Other highlights include special guest appearances by Peggy Ahwesh, Wolf-Eckart Bühler, George Griffin, Barbara Hammer, Yvonne Rainer, and Arturo Ripstein; “The Great Victorian Moving Picture Show”—two illustrated lectures of astonishing large-format 68mm Mutoscope and Biograph shorts from the late 19th century—as well as an illustrated lecture on color innovations in British silent cinema; Michael Anderson’s spy thriller The Quiller Memorandum (1966), written by Harold Pinter and starring Alec Guinness, George Segal, and Max von Sydow; an exceedingly rare screening of André de Toth’s Crime Wave (1954) in a pristine 35mm print struck from the original camera negative, together with two merciless (auto-)portraits of the film’s leading actor, Sterling Hayden, made at the end of his life; and the North American premiere of MoMA’s own restoration of Ernst Lubitsch’s Forbidden Paradise (1924), in association with The Film Foundation. The festival concludes with the world premiere theatrical run, from January 25 to 31, of MoMA’s new restoration of Ida Lupino’s melodrama Never Fear (The Young Lovers) (1950).

Other highlights include:

• Spotlight on Female Filmmakers. Female filmmakers are represented in depth through narrative and documentary features by Chantal Akerman, Safi Faye, Ida Lupino, Márta Mészáros, Wanda Tuchock, and Doris Wishman, as well as avant-garde work by Peggy Ahwesh, Barbara Hammer, Jenni Olson, and Yvonne Rainer. Included are new restorations of Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s Histoires d’Amérique: Food, Family and Philosophy (1989), the Senegalese-French filmmaker Safi Faye’s Fad’jal (1979), the Hungarian Márta Mészáros’ Ők Ketten (The Two of Them) (1979), and MoMA’s new restoration of Yvonne Rainer’s Journeys from Berlin/1971, which is presented in memory of the film’s “star” (scholar Annette Michelson, who died this past September), with the American artist and choreographer Rainer present to introduce. Also included are Doris Wishman’s recently preserved Nude on the Moon (1961); Peggy Ahwesh’s The Color of Love (1994); Wanda Tuchock and George Nicholls’s Finishing School (1934), a late pre-Code melodrama starring Ginger Rogers and Frances Dee; and a weeklong run (January 24 to 31) of MoMA’s new restoration of Ida Lupino’s Never Fear (The Young Lovers) (1950).

• Rediscovering African American and LGBTQ Independent Cinema. To Save and Project presents underappreciated independent African American and LGBTQ filmmakers, including the New York premiere of writer-director Horace Jenkins’ Cane River (1982), a film championed by Richard Pryor. The festival highlights the brief but astonishing film career of Edward Owens with three experimental films from the late 1960s: Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, Remembrance: A Portrait Study, and Tomorrow’s Promise. Owens was marginalized for decades as a gay African American artist.