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Chantal Akerman made headlines in 2022 when she became the first female director to ever to top the BFI's list of the Greatest Films of All Time. Made when she was just 25 years old, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles has held the BFI's #1 spot ever since.

D'Est may not be her widely-regarded masterwork, but it is without a doubt one of the finest achievements in her prolific career. In D'Est Chantal Akerman captures the reality and mutation of former Soviet territories following the fall of the Berlin Wall, shot from summer through to winter in a series of traveling shots or with a static camera.

From East Germany to Moscow, passing through Poland, Lithuania and the Ukraine, she records the bodies and faces of the anonymous masses, their expressions unreadable, either walking or simply waiting for who knows what. She films buildings, landscapes, snow, nightfall and offers a mass of visual and aural impressions that constitute a bewitching, impressionistic poem.

This screening is a in conjunction with Cowgirl Gallery's current exhibition of painting works by Hanna Tordai. Hanna's work takes direct inspiration from Akerman's photography and will be present to speak about the relationship between her and Akerman's work.

In the salt flats and ports of Djibouti, a legionnaire's obsession curdles into something closer to liturgy. Denis Lavant's Galoup drills his men through choreography as exacting as it is erotic, while Agnès Godard's camera turns muscle and desert into something almost abstract. Claire Denis strips Herman Melville's Billy Budd down to gesture, sweat, and sun-bleached stone:  command, jealousy, and the disciplined male body become one continuous dance — until the film's final minutes cut loose entirely, and Lavant explodes alone under strobe light to Corona's "The Rhythm of the Night."

Twenty-five years on, Beau Travail remains one of the most influential films ever made about masculinity, colonialism, and the body on screen — closer to sculpture than to narrative, closer to rhythm than to plot. Essential on the big screen.

In 1936, a Tokyo geisha named Sada Abe strangled her lover during sex, then carried a part of him with her for days afterward. Forty years later, Nagisa Oshima turned the case into In the Realm of the Senses, a film so committed to its subject that it dispensed with simulation altogether — and so controversial that its negatives were developed in France to sidestep Japanese obscenity law, its screenplay-with-stills was tried in court, and the finished film still cannot legally be shown uncut in its country of origin.

None of this would matter if the film weren't also a serious piece of cinema. Oshima — a key figure of the Japanese New Wave, no stranger to state censors after Night and Fog in Japan — uses Sada and Kichizo's affair to ask what happens when private desire is pushed past every social boundary meant to contain it. The couple's isolation grows more total by the scene; the outside world, with its uniforms and its wars, keeps intruding at the edges of the frame, a reminder of the discipline the lovers are refusing. Sex here isn't titillation so much as method: a way of dissolving the self, scene by scene, until nothing is left to negotiate with.

Programmed rarely, and almost never uncut. This is a chance to see, on a big screen, a film that spent decades defined by what it was accused of rather than what it actually does.

Unsimulated sexual content throughout. 18+. Recommended for audiences familiar with Oshima's work or arthouse/pink film traditions.

There's a reason Martyrs still gets invoked as the benchmark whenever a new "extreme" horror film needs a point of comparison. Pascal Laugier's film doesn't stay in one genre long enough to be filed neatly: it begins as a story of childhood trauma and revenge, transforms into something closer to a home-invasion film, and finally arrives somewhere almost no horror film goes — an inquiry, conducted with clinical patience, into what happens to a human being at the absolute far edge of suffering.

That inquiry is the point, not an excuse. Laugier structures the film's violence as an experiment with its own internal logic: a group convinced that enough pain, applied with enough precision, might produce a glimpse of the transcendent — a martyr's vision, stripped of any religious comfort. Whether the film endorses that logic, exposes it, or simply refuses to look away from its consequences is exactly what makes Martyrs worth arguing about afterward. It's less interested in scaring you in the moment than in leaving you with something to sit with for days.

This isn't a film to program lightly, and it isn't one to watch passively — but it's a landmark of 2000s genre cinema, and one that rewards seeing on a big screen, in a room full of people who came prepared for it.

Extremely graphic violence and torture throughout, including prolonged scenes of physical and psychological abuse. 18+. Audience discretion strongly advised — this is one of the most intense films in the New French Extremity movement.

Some films tell a story. Daughters of the Dust holds a memory up to the light and lets you look at it from every angle. Julie Dash's 1991 feature — the first by an African American woman to receive wide theatrical distribution in the United States — is set on a single day in 1902, as the Peazant family gathers on the Sea Islands off South Carolina before some of them leave for the mainland. The Gullah Geechee community they belong to has preserved language, foodways, and spiritual practice largely unbroken since the transatlantic slave trade; the film treats that inheritance not as backdrop but as the actual subject.

Dash and cinematographer Arthur Jafa build the film around image and rhythm rather than conventional plot — indigo-stained hands, white dresses against black sand, a wedding and a departure happening almost simultaneously. The narration comes from the "Unborn Child," a device that lets the film hold past, present, and future in the same frame, more griot than narrator. It's a structure closer to quilting or oral history than to Hollywood continuity — deliberately, since Dash spent years unable to get the film funded through conventional channels precisely because it refused to explain itself in familiar terms.

Its influence is easy to trace and still growing: you can see it in Beyoncé's Lemonade, in Barry Jenkins, in a whole generation of filmmakers working in a visual language Dash had to invent from scratch. Restored and re-released decades later, it plays now as what it always was — a landmark, arriving late to the recognition it earned the first time.

A special Halloween event hosted by Death Cafe Malmö. The afternoon will begin with the screening of a film on the subject of death, followed by coffee/tea, cake and conversation on death. 

Doors open: 14.45 

Film begins: 15.00

Director Ebba Stoppelenburg on her documentary film Jolly (2026): 

“For generations, my family has had a human skull at home. In Jolly I journey through historical, ethical, spiritual and scientific perspectives to try to understand who this individual was and how to properly care for their remains.”

Death Cafe is a space where people come to share and listen to other people's thoughts on the subject of death over a slice of cake and a hot beverage. Subjects which can be touched upon are for example thoughts on burial ceremonies, personal anecdotes on death and religious or non-religious perspectives on death. Everybody is welcome to join! Conversations will be held in Swedish and in English. Please note that Death Cafe is a philosophical meeting place and not a professional health service.

Here is some more information on Death Cafe: https://deathcafe.com/what/