Both Zar Amir and Ulrike Ottinger will be in attendance for Q&As and intros.

Films : Holy Spider, Tatami, My Worst Enemy, Shayda, Two People Exchanging Saliva

A writer, director, casting director, producer, and actor—in which capacity she was awarded top honors for her performance in Ali Abbasi’s controversial thriller Holy Spider at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival—Tehran-born, Paris-based Amir helmed her first short, Khat, when she was only 18, and has since established herself as a force to be reckoned with in international cinema, surviving government censure and other attempts to silence this outspoken, ambitious woman.

Films : Pais Calligrammes + Berlin Trilogy (Ticket of No Return, Freak Orlando, Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press)

Looking at two ends of a career still very much unfolding, this series brings together German multihyphenate artist and gleeful madwoman Ottinger’s name-making “Berlin Trilogy” (Ticket of No Return, Freak Orlando, Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press) and her latest feature to date, 2020’s Paris Calligrammes, here having its New York theatrical debut. “Perhaps the major female filmmaker of the New German Cinema,” as Sam Bodrojan writes in the Metrograph Journal, Ottinger is a queer iconoclast whose vivacious, ultra-stylish, and zestily bizarre films, twisted tales of time-traveling gender-benders, budding romance in boozy lesbian bars, and malevolent media empire heads, never fail to leave viewers smiling and slightly stunned by the fanatical flurry they’ve just borne witness to. It’s only about 600 miles from Paris to Berlin, but with Ottinger at the wheel, the trip will take you around the world, to places you never dreamed existed.