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Alfred Hitchcock, the late “Master of Suspense,” and Jiří Menzel, the late Czech director who won the foreign-language film Oscar for 1966’s Closely Watched Trains, will get some screen love during the 15th edition of the Beijing International Film Festival.

The “Homage-Restoration” section of the fest will feature, among others, Hitchcock’s classic spy thriller North by Northwest, starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, and James Mason, and late Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s Meetings With Anna, starring Aurore Clément and Jean-Pierre Cassel, in new 4K restorations.

Anna is about an emotionally unavailable filmmaker who is traveling through Western Europe to promote her new film, meeting with strangers, friends, former lovers, and family members. North by Northwest is known as a tale of mistaken identity, featuring a man pursued by agents of a mysterious organization.

The Beijing festival organizers also unveiled that this year’s “Homage” section will put a...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For regular updates, sign up for our weekly email newsletter and follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSSambizanga.For the past six years, the Belgian film journal Sabzian has invited a guest to deliver an annual “State of Cinema” address. This year’s speaker will be Alice Diop. She will deliver her text on Thursday, December 7, in Brussels, alongside a screening of Sarah Maldoror’s film Sambizanga (1972). Learn more on Sabzian’s website, recently sleekly redesigned for the publication’s tenth anniversary. You can also watch previous State of Cinema speeches on Sabzian’s Screening Room, including last year’s address by Wang Bing.Recommended VIEWINGOutwardly from Earth's Center.Streaming on e-flux until November 30 is Outwardly from Earth’s Center (2007), a short pseudo-documentary by filmmaker and artist Rosa Barba. The film details the experiences of the inhabitants of a fictitious offshore island as...

Seated before a photo of filmmaker Sarah Moldoror, panelists at this year’s Women in Film roundtable shared strategies for greater industry parity, while reflecting on recent successes and standstills in that ongoing pursuit. Variety has been give access to the video of the panel discussion.

Organized by Magaajyia Silberfeld and Winta Ghebre, and moderated by journalist and filmmaker Rahmatou Keïta, the Venice Film Festival roundtable brought together filmmakers Malgorzata Szumowska (“Woman Of”), Gina Kim (whose 3D-360 doc “Comfortless” screens in Venice Immersive), and Leila Basma (director of the Horizons-selected short “Sea Salt”), alongside set decorator Brandi Kalish (“The Killer”).

Moderator Rahmatou Keïta stressed the need for historical memory and for a greater degree of focus in order to prevent real gains from slipping into PR lip service. Keïta made mention of the equality charter signed at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival before caustically pointing out that five years prior,...

Since any New York cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Metrograph

Throw on your suede and pastels and prepare for the music-filled, light-streaked “Dim All the Lights: Disco and the Movies.”

Nicolas Roeg‘s Roald Dahl adaptation, The Witches, plays on Saturday morning; a print of Abel Ferrara‘s King of New York screens throughout the weekend; Oscar Micheaux‘s Ten Minutes to Live shows this Sunday.

An academic event I alerted out readers in Paris, France, to about 3 weeks ago, which took place on November 23 and 24, at the Quai Branly museum - an international colloquium titled "Francophone African Women Filmmakers: 40 Years of Cinema (1972-2012)." The objective of this event was to celebrate the 40 years of African filmmaking by African women, starting in 1972, with Angolan director Sarah Maldoror's feature film Sambizanga (which won recognition at the 1973 Berlin International Film Festival; that same year, Michael Kerbel of The Village Voice compared the film to Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin in terms of...

Information for our readers in Paris, France, courtesy of the African Women In Cinema blog... Taking place this Friday, November 23 and Saturday, November 24, at the Quai Branly museum - an international colloquium titled "Francophone African Women Filmmakers: 40 Years of Cinema (1972-2012)". The objective of this event is to celebrate the forty years of African filmmaking by African women, starting in 1972, with Angolan director Sarah Maldoror's feature film Sambizanga (which won recognition at the 1973 Berlin International Film Festival; that same year, Michael Kerbel of The Village Voice compared the film to Sergei...

To celebrate Africa Express rolling out across the UK, here's a guide to 10 classic films to have come from the continent

Africa played no part in the invention of cinema. For decades, in Tarzan movies, it was the subject of fake Hollywood fantasies. And yet, when Africans made films about themselves, the results were astonishing. There are scores of great African movies. Here are 10 of the best:

Cairo Station (Egypt, 1958)

If Alfred Hitchcock had been Egyptian and bisexual, and had himself played Norman Bates, Psycho might have been something like this. Sweaty, musical, melodramatic and political, Cairo Station stars ballsy writer-director Youssef Chahine as a homicidal newspaper seller in Cairo's vast railway station. In the 1950s, movies such as Rebel without a Cause and All That Heaven Allows were about repression as a ticking time bomb, but Chahine's film about sexual desire with no outlet was one of the biggest cinematic bombs of the decade.