PAM CUT’s Tomorrow Theater

Tomorrow Theater is teaming up with MUBI for this screening of Eleanor Coppola’s Making Marie Antoinette, a lush, intimate documentary about Sofia Coppola creating Marie Antoinette. The mother-daughter duo began creating this documentary at the beginning of the COVID lockdown, and Sofia finished the film after her mother passed in 2024.

In 2005, Sofia Coppola shot her third feature film, Marie Antoinette, starring Kirsten Dunst and Jason Schwartzman, at the Palace of Versailles, securing unprecedented filming permission that had never before been granted to any production. Her mother, acclaimed documentarian Eleanor Coppola, accompanied her on set, capturing approximately eighty hours of footage chronicling her daughter’s journey throughout the making of the film. This year, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the release of Marie Antoinette and in fulfilment of her mother’s wish, Sofia Coppola reviewed that previously unseen material. Making Marie Antoinette explores the craftsmanship and care that brought the film to life, follows legendary costume designer Milena Canonero at work, and offers a glimpse into what it meant to be a young female director at that time. The result is a fascinating look at the creative process behind a landmark film and, at the same time, a surprisingly intimate family portrait.

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Shu Lea Cheang is an artist, conceptualist, filmmaker, and networker who has worked in the field of net-based installation, social interface, networked performance, and film production. Her work traverses between hard and soft, sex and politics, fiction and reality, fantasia and earth-bound.

Fresh Kill (1hr 20min) 1996: Shareen and Claire, a lesbian couple living on Staten Island, find themselves ensnared in a vast conspiracy involving a ghost ship of nuclear refuse, ominous television commercials, and deadly cat food.

SEX FISH (6mins) 1993: An erotic lesbian video involving swimming upstream, female power, and fish love. Made as a collaboration under the name E.T. (Ela Troyano) Baby (Jane Castle) Maniac (Cheang). “In Sex Fish water provides the common denominator for nature imagery and explicit sex. Unlike 1970s feminist imagery, however, nature is sexualized rather than sex naturalized. Dripping from the faucet, spraying against a shower curtain, swirling down a toilet, water leads viewers from one sex scene to another, private to public and back again. Swimming through the video are various fish, seemingly unaware of the derogatory pun they enact, and all gulping enviously as cunnilingus surrounds them.” —Chris Straayer, Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-orientations in Film and Video (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996)

SEX BOWL (7:43 mins) 1994: All forms of human sport become sites for sexual play and celebratory eroticism.

“The tape’s images are quick, suggestive, and sexy: fingers moving into bowling balls, shoe-smelling and toe-sucking, a dog wearing chain jewelry, fish being wrapped at the market, young naked couples having sex…. Edited like a music video, the image track is a constant flow of fetishes that lure us into the promiscuous pace of girls who keep lists of their sexual encounters.” —Chris Straayer, Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-orientations in Film and Video (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996)

FINGERS AND KISSES (4:35 mins) 1995: Cheang has taken her camera to the streets for a candid glimpse of lesbian public sexuality. If Asian women and lesbians share a certain amount of invisibility in the culture, Fingers and Kisses offers not only a bold representation of both, but a challenge to the question “What do lesbians do?” Tokyo’s own out-and-loud music by Chu punctuates the narrative as what begins in the streets continues under the sheets.

COMING HOME (5mins) 1995: This humorous video begins with two women—one white, the other Asian—attempting to fit into a Japanese bathtub. The awkward fitting of bodies into a small space is just one of the allegorical scenarios dramatized in a pressing appeal for lesbian rights. In a game of hanafuda (flower cards), the terms of lesbian domesticity are cleverly played out according to such legalities as joint property, social security, and pensions.

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Meet Edie Arnold: a timid Catholic school kid who accidentally discovers she’s a natural drummer after getting pulled onstage at a punk show. Soon she’s secretly forming a band called The NunDead, navigating a crush on the altar boy, getting herself suspended, and discovering that being a little rebellious might be exactly what she needs.

This indie punk-rock comedy premiered at this year’s SXSW festival, and stops by the Tomorrow for one night only.

Timid Catholic school dork Edie Arnold is dragged to a punk show where a mishap lands her onstage behind the drums. She’s mortified… but a natural. Convinced by her best friend, she secretly forms a band called The NunDead. Her newfound confidence leads to a date with the altar boy but also a fight that gets her suspended. Thinking she bailed on their first gig, her bandmates bust her out of the house just in time to win a Battle of the Bands. But when she faces expulsion and her mother’s wrath at a disciplinary hearing, footage of her kick-ass performance has an unexpected effect on her mom.

2026. Directed by Kate Atwood & Megan Rico. Runtime: 1 hour 13 minutes.

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Designer Isaac Mizrahi proved a force of nature on the road to his legendary fall 1994 collection, a career-defining triumph that was documented with an effervescent intimacy by Douglas Keeve, Mizrahi’s then-partner. Both a time capsule of the buoyant, raucous 1990s, when pop culture and high art became interchangeable, and a vérité-style, in-the-trenches report on the daily agonies and ecstasies of the creative process, this seminal artistic portrait—sumptuously shot by Ellen Kuras and Robert Leacock—transcends glitz and glamour to offer an extraordinary view of the charisma and force of will inherent to genius, as well as its personal costs.

1995. Directed by Douglas Keeve. Runtime: 1 hour 16 minutes.

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Join a very special Portland premiere of director Chad Brown’s new documentary Unseen: Invisible Wounds, Invincible Spirit. Taking place the week of Veterans Day, this film follows five veterans as they bike through two hundred miles of raw, unforgiving wilderness on a trail that asks everything of you and gives back something no clinic or desk job ever could. Following the film, director Chad Brown will be joined on stage for a Q&A about the film.

They came to Lakeview, Oregon, carrying things that don’t fit in a pack. Five veterans. Two hundred miles of raw, unforgiving wilderness. One trail that asks everything of you and gives back something no clinic or desk job ever could. Unseen begins at the edge of what most people call the end of the map Lakeview, Oregon, the last frontier, the quiet gateway to the Oregon Timber Trail; from that threshold, it launches something that can only be called a reckoning. This is not an adventure film. This is a document of survival, of spirits refusing to be broken, of invisible wounds meeting invincible will. Five veterans strap into their bikes and ride into the kind of silence that forces you to finally hear yourself. The cameras go with them. And what unfolds over volcanic plateaus, through alpine forests and ancestral lands, across a living corridor of history that stretches 600 miles from the California border to the Columbia River Gorge is something that will not let you look away. But Unseen is not only the story of these five riders. It is haunted by another story one America nearly buried. The Triple Nickel. The 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion. America’s first Black smokejumpers, who were dispatched to Oregon’s forests during World War II on a covert mission called Operation Firefly protecting this very land from Japanese incendiary balloon bombs at a time when their country denied them the right to fight as combat soldiers overseas. They parachuted into burning forests to save a nation that had not yet decided to save them. Their bravery was classified. Their names, forgotten. Their sacrifice, erased. Today, as five veterans pedal through the same wilderness those men protected with their lives, their ghosts ride alongside. The Oregon Timber Trail becomes something more than a route. It becomes a corridor of memory. A long-overdue act of remembrance.

2026. Directed by Chad Brown. Runtime: 65 minutes.

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Part origin story, part healing spell. Decrepit psychedelia with a powerdrone score. Memory As A Rock Out Of Reach is a duet performance in which Erika M. Anderson (EMA) and visual artist Tabitha Nikolai use video game technologies to build out the psycho-sexual inner world of a girl-child in the ’80s. Soundtracked by modular synth and guitar, a narrator searches for her shape amid commercial detritus, degraded 3D scans, and a Polly Pocket apocalypse.

Erika M. Anderson is an artist and musician who has been active in the West Coast DIY and experimental scene for over two decades. She performs under her initials as EMA and has toured extensively, playing internationally in warehouses, sold-out arenas and everywhere in between. In 2011 she released her critically-acclaimed solo debut, Past Life Martyred Saints, which has been included on the “Best Of The Decade” lists from Pitchfork, Stereogum, and Rolling Stone. Her albums are frequently self-produced, with a signature style that borrows from noise, folk, and memories of popular music. While Anderson’s music has brought her to prestigious music festivals, including Coachella, Bonnaroo, and Roskilde, her multimedia performances have taken place in museums such as PS1 MoMA, The New Museum, and The Barbican Centre in London. She has been profiled in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, and many others. NPR called her indie music’s “greatest worldbuilder.” Originally from South Dakota, Anderson now lives in Portland, Oregon, where she runs a recording studio.

Tabitha Nikolai is a visual artist and designer who uses video games, installation, and writing to study life under the visceral and disorienting onslaught of mass virtuality. Currently based in Portland, she grew up in Utah, and is forever influenced by her experiences there. Her work orbits themes of gender, isolation, futurism, and fantasy, often with a dark and humorous twist. With a long history of running DIY spaces, Nikolai believes deeply in the lifesaving power of community-organized scenes. Her work has been shown internationally at venues including the Kunsthall Trondheim, Trondheim, Norway; Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA; and apexart, New York, NY. Nikolai’s video games have been covered by The New York Times, VICE, and Art in America, and in academic outlets including the Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds.

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Join a special screening of March Forth, a film about the poet, author, lawyer, activist, and 2021 MacArthur Fellow Reginald Dwayne Betts. Following the screening, there will be a moderated conversation with Reginald Dwayne Betts, Robe Imbriano (Director & Executive Producer), and Thomas Curtis (Production Designer and Animator).

Reginald Dwayne Betts went to adult prison at 16 and survived to write about it. March Forth is an intimate exploration into the life and thoughts of this acclaimed poet, author, lawyer, activist, and MacArthur “Genius Award” winner. Betts served almost nine years for carjacking, and before becoming an adult, bore witness to the cruelties of the American legal system. In prison, he named himself “Shahid,” meaning witness in Arabic. In solitary confinement, he became a poet. After his release on March 4th, 2005, Betts was determined to march forth into the world and leave prison behind. He began teaching, published multiple award-winning collections of poetry, a memoir, and even graduated from Yale Law School.

As an attorney, he’s secured the release of men he served time with. But instead of leaving prison behind, in 2020, he created Freedom Reads, a non-profit that places libraries he curates in prison cell blocks across America. The return has been complicated. Going back means remembering who is left behind and, more painfully, those he’s failed to get free. March Forth offers an intimate look into how he carries the two realities he moves through: one of immeasurable success and contribution and accolades and one of guilt and persistent doubt of his own self-worth. Through live performance, animation, poetry, and memoir excerpts narrated by Brian Tyree Henry, March Forth explores the lasting impact of serving time in adult prison as a teenager.

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