To Save and Project, MoMA’s 22nd Annual International Festival of Film Preservation

Vixen! 1968. USA. Directed by Russ Meyer. Courtesy Severin Films

Presents More than 75 Newly Restored Masterworks and Cinematic Rediscoveries from Around the World

Running from January 8 through February 2, 2026, To Save and Project: The 22nd MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation presents more than 75 newly preserved features and shorts from 23 countries. The series will include world and North American premieres and the presentation of original versions of films not seen since their initial theatrical releases. Spanning more than a century of cinema, the festival opens with the New York premiere of MoMA’s new restoration of Russ Meyer’s Vixen! (1968), presented by Erica Gavin and Peggy Ahwesh, and closes with previously unseen Andy Warhol films from the 1960s. This year’s edition of To Save and Project is organized by Joshua Siegel, Curator, Department of Film, MoMA, with Olivia Priedite, Film Program Coordinator, Department of Film, MoMA, and Cindi Rowell, independent curator.

This year’s festival features world premiere digital restorations of Victor Fleming’s Hula (1927), starring Clara Bow, revived thanks to the recent discovery of a 35mm nitrate print; Philip Hartman’s No Picnic (1986), an artifact of New York’s pre-hipster East Village, with appearances by Steve Buscemi, Richard Hell, and Luis Guzmán; and, on the closing night of February 2, never-before-seen films from Andy Warhol’s Factory in a program titled Andy Warhol Exposed: Newly Processed Films from the 1960s. A January 29 tribute to the late Ken Jacobs (1933–2025) and Flo Jacobs (1941–2025), luminaries of downtown New York independent cinema, features the world premiere of Ken Jacobs’s Baud’lairian Capers (1963) in a new MoMA digital restoration, paired with his favorite Yiddish film, Sidney Goldin’s His Wife’s Lover (1931). Featured North American or US restoration premieres include Dimtri Kirsanoff’s spellbinding Rapt (1934) in its long-unseen, French-language version; Mario Monicelli’s medieval comedy For Love and Gold (1966); Michael Cacoyannis’s Attila ’74 (1975); and a pair of French films based on Georges Simenon crime novels: Henri Decoin’s The Truth of Our Marriage (1952) and Bertrand Tavernier’s The Clockmaker of St. Paul (1974).

Premiering on January 18 is Academy Award–nominated filmmaker Daniel Raim’s documentary The Ozu Diaries (2025), which interweaves passages from the Japanese film master’s rediscovered writings with unseen home movies and observations from directors including Wim Wenders, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and Tsai Ming-Liang; a screening of Yasujirō Ozu’s final masterpiece, An Autumn Afternoon (1962), follows. A special presentation of Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s essay film The Old Place (1999), which MoMA commissioned at the turn of the millennium, is presented alongside short subjects that D. W. Griffith made for the American Mutoscope & Biograph Company between 1908 and 1913, some not seen in more than 100 years.

This year’s To Save and Project invites audiences to experience cinema’s earliest days in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from the New York premiere of Thierry Frémaux’s Lumière, Le Cinema! (2025), about the pioneering achievements of the French entrepreneurs Auguste and Louis Lumière, to Albert Samama Chikli Rediscovered: Scenes of Tunisia, 1905–1916, a program featuring some of the earliest moving images ever recorded in North Africa. Lumière, Le Cinema! will also have a theatrical run at MoMA in March.

The theme of what Graham Greene once called “the lost childhood”—stories from around the world about children who have been orphaned by war, religious persecution, patriarchal traditions, or family neglect—is explored in Luigi Comencini’s The Window to Luna Park (1957, Italy), Sumitra Peries’s The Girls (1978, Sri Lanka), Mahama Johnson Traoré’s Njangaan (1975, Senegal), and Bahram Beyzaie’s Bashu, the Little Stranger (1986, Iran). Three German films from the 1920s and early 1930s evoke the Weimar Republic in its last years and the ascendance of the Nazi party: G. W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street (1925), starring Greta Garbo and Asta Nielsen, presented in its most complete version, with vastly improved image quality thanks to a definitive new reconstruction by the Munich Filmmuseum; Werner Hochbaum’s Life Begins Tomorrow (1933), a bold experimental drama that appeared in cinemas only months after the Nazi takeover; and Willi Forst’s Mazurka (1935), starring the Polish silent cinema legend Pola Negri.

Additional festival highlights include:

Women Independents. The festival includes the North American restoration premiere of Niki de Saint Phalle and Peter Whitehead’s controversial Daddy (1973) and the New York premiere of The Girls (1978), the debut feature of the Sinhalese writer, director, editor, and producer Sumitra Peries, set in rural Sri Lanka. Don’t Cry, Pretty Girls! The Early Films of Cecilia Bartolomé and Márta Mészáros is a program of groundbreaking 1960s and ’70s shorts by the Hungarian writer-director Mészáros (Adoption, the Diary films) and Spanish filmmaker Bartolomé (¡Vamonos, Bárbara!).

Spotlight on Music. This year’s To Save and Project features a range of musically themed films, including the world premiere restoration of Porgy and Bess in Wien (c. 1953), which documents the first stop of a four-year US State Department–funded tour of the Gershwin-Heyward opera. Also presented is the North American premiere of Michael Apted’s The Long Way Home (1989), a portrait of the Soviet underground rock legend Boris Grebenshchikov. A program of jazz films featuring Sun Ra (Phill Niblock’s The Magic Sun, 1968), Cecil Taylor (Gérard Patris’s Great Rehearsals: Cecil Taylor in Paris, 1968), and Archie Shepp (Ghaouti Bendeddouche’s We Came Back, 1969) is presented in association with the Mellon Foundation–funded Jazz Generations Initiative, and will be introduced on January 24 by the Pulitzer Prize–winning composer and musician Henry Threadgill, among others.

Previously banned films. This year’s lineup includes banned, suppressed, or severely censored and recut films that have been reconstructed as closely as possible to their original versions. Among these are Lino Brocka’s influential gay drama Macho Dancer (1988, Philippines), Bahram Beyzaie’s Bashu, the Little Stranger (1986, Iran), István Gaál’s The Falcons (1970, Hungary), and František Vláčil’s The Valley of the Bees (1968, Czechoslovakia). Also premiering are Ciro Durán’s La Paga (1962), banned by the Venezuelan government after a single screening and only resurfacing at Cannes in 2025; and Jomí García Ascot and María Luisa Elío’s On the Empty Balcony (1962), a Mexican film by two exiles of the Spanish Civil War to whom Gabriel García Márquez would dedicate his epic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Cult Classics. To Save and Project features a number of international cult classics in pristine new restorations, from Peter Yung’s The System (1979), a lesser-known gem of the Hong Kong New Wave, to Michael Almereyda’s Nadja (1994) in its director’s cut. MoMA’s own, uncut digital restoration of the Russ Meyer skin flick Vixen! celebrates one of 1968’s biggest box-office hits (despite, or because of, its X-rating). The New York premiere on January 8 features the film’s star, Erica Gavin, in a post-screening conversation with the filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh. To Save and Project also presents the world premiere digital restoration of Roger Corman’s Bloody Mama (1970), with Shelley Winters as the psychopathic Ma Barker and a young Robert De Niro, as well as newly struck 35mm prints of Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter (1974), starring Warren Oates and Harry Dean Stanton, and Jonathan Kaplan’s blaxploitation classic Truck Turner (1974), featuring Isaac Hayes.

Special guest presentations. Among the guest presenters this year are members of the cast and crew from New York Theatre Workshop’s new stage production of Tartuffe, presenting F. W. Murnau’s silent film adaptation of the classic Molière comedy from 1925 on January 12; and critic Melissa Anderson introducing Ron Peck’s 1978 debut feature Nighthawks, a milestone in queer cinema, in celebration of her latest collection, The Hunger: Film Writing, 2014–2024 (2025) on January 23. To celebrate the publication of The Art of John Canemaker: An Animator’s Garden (2026), the Academy Award–winning filmmaker will present Masters of American Animation, 1914–1998 on January 17, featuring new digital restoration premieres of Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) and cartoons starring Krazy Kat, Mutt & Jeff, Betty Boop, and Felix the Cat, as well as MoMA’s own restorations of John and Faith Hubley’s Dig (1972), featuring a funk score by Quincy Jones, and Canemaker’s own Confessions of a Stardreamer (1978) and Bridgehampton (1998). And on January 31, Scott Eyman, author of the new biography Joan Crawford: A Woman’s Face (2025), introduces Lewis Milestone’s Rain (1932), a pre-Code tale of religious hypocrisy and sexual violence, presented in a new digital restoration that improves the soundtrack immeasurably; together with Robert Aldrich’s Autumn Leaves (1956), in which Crawford gives one of her most deeply affecting late-career performances.

Please see the accompanying screening schedule at moma.org/film for full program details.

ABOUT TO SAVE AND PROJECT:

As the first cultural institution to collect film as an art form, The Museum of Modern Art has long been at the forefront of the preservation and restoration of moving-image material. Founded in 2003, MoMA’s annual To Save and Project festival has become the Museum’s showcase for presenting new restorations from our archive, as well as work from colleagues around the world—archives, foundations, studios, independent filmmakers, and others—engaged in saving cinema heritage.

SPONSORSHIP:

Film at MoMA is made possible by CHANEL.

Additional support is provided by the Annual Film Fund. Leadership support for the Annual Film Fund is provided by The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art, Agnes Gund through The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art, the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP), and The Young Patrons Council of The Museum of Modern Art.