FLM 200: The MSU Film Collective
We are the professors, students, filmmakers, screenwriters, and cinéphiles at MSU who gather weekly in the course FLM 200 to watch and discuss good films. In the spirit of the Cinémathèque française and the generation of film critics and French New Wave directors it inspired, our collective abides by the principle that good film writing and good filmmaking (and just plain good living) begin with serious film watching.
Fall 2025: Slow Cinema
This season the MSU Film Collective examines Slow Cinema, also called Contemplative Cinema. Emphasizing long takes, a minimalist approach and an emphasis on extended observation, Slow Cinema is the antithesis of the kinetic and frenetic practitioners of montage theory. Slow cinema dares you to keep looking, and when your attention span causes your mind to wander slow cinema is still there waiting for you when you return to it, and gently asks you to contemplate the very nature of attention. Relax, breathe deep, and let these slow cinema masterworks wash over you.
All screenings will take place in B122 Wells Hall at 7pm. The series is free and open to all. West doors to Wells Hall, nearest Spartan Stadium, stay open until 7pm.
Thursday, August 28 – The Settlers (Felipe Gálvez Haberle, Chile, 2023, 100′)
Presented by Bill Vincent
In Chile, three horsemen are paid to protect a vast estate. Accompanying a British soldier and an American mercenary is a mixed-race sniper, who realizes that his true mission is to kill the indigenous population.
Thursday, September 4: Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson, France, 1951, 115′)
Presented by Dan Smith
A new priest (Claude Laydu) arrives in the French country village of Ambricourt to attend to his first parish. The apathetic and hostile rural congregation rejects him immediately. Through his diary entries, the suffering young man relays a crisis of faith that threatens to drive him away from the village and from God.
Thursday, September 11: The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy/USA, 1975, 119′)
Presented by Pedro N Doreste Rodríguez
A frustrated war correspondent takes the risky path of co-opting the identity of a dead arms-deal acquaintance.
Thursday, September 18: Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, Russia, 1979, 163′)
Presented by David Schwartz
A hired guide—the Stalker—leads a writer and a professor into the heart of the Zone, the restricted site of a long-ago disaster, where the three men eventually zero in on the Room, a place rumored to fulfill one’s most deeply held desires.
Thursday, September 25:
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, Belgium, 1975, 201′).
Presented by Farzaneh Ebrahimzadeh Holasu
A singular work in film history, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow—whose chores include making the beds, cooking dinner for her son, and turning the occasional trick. In its enormous spareness, Akerman’s film seems simple, but it encompasses an entire world.
Thursday, October 2: Where Is the Friend’s House (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran, 1987, 84′)
Presented by Ali Kherarmand
The first film in Abbas Kiarostami’s sublime, interlacing KOKER TRILOGY takes a simple premise—a boy searches for the home of his classmate, whose school notebook he has accidentally taken—and transforms it into a miraculous, child’s-eye adventure of the everyday. As our young hero zigzags determinedly across two towns, aided (and sometimes misdirected) by those he encounters, his quest becomes both a revealing portrait of rural Iranian society in all its richness and complexity and a touching parable about the meaning of personal responsibility.
Thursday, October 9: Ito: Diary of an Urban Priest (Pirjo Irene Honkasalo, Finland/Japan, 2010, 111′)
Presented by Ellen McCallum
Follow young boxing-champion-turned-Buddhist-monk, Yoshinobu Fujioka, on a hypnotic journey through nighttime Tokyo. The monk’s earnest search for the meaning of life is poetically set against the gritty back alleys and complex, dark characters he encounters. He hears confessions from all quarters—an inmate in a woman’s prison, patrons of his own establishment, Monk Bar, a man in an abandoned restaurant, and in a home for aging geisha, where an otherworldly, heavy-lidded figure delivers a stunning karaoke performance, sending the lyrics to “Tokyo is no longer mine” crying out into the night.
Thursday, October 16: Mekong Hotel (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand, 2012, 61′)
Presented by Dalina Perdomo Alvarez
A quiet hotel overlooking the vast Mekong River in northeast Thailand accommodates both living and undead guests. Its patrons hang around together on the veranda, listen to or play guitar, and rehearse for a film about the relationship between a vampire-like woman and her daughter.
Thursday, October 23: Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/Columbia, 2021, 136′)
Presented by Kaveh Askari
One morning, Jessica Holland, a Scottish orchid farmer visiting her sister in Bogotá, is woken by a loud ‘bang’. This haunting sound dispels her sleep for days, calling into question her identity and guiding her from recording studios to secluded jungle villages in an attempt to find its source.
Thursday, October 30: Halloween Extravaganza
Thursday, November 6: Vulcanizadora (Joel Potrykus, USA, 2024, 85′)
presented by Joel Potrykus (guest speaker)
Two friends trudge through a Michigan forest with the intention of following through on a disturbing pact. Once their plan goes shockingly awry, the haunting consequences of their failure can’t stay hidden for long.
Thursday, November 13: First Cow (Kelly Reichardt, USA, 2019, 121′)
Presented by Justus Nieland
Two travelers, on the run from a band of vengeful hunters in the 1820s Northwest, dream of striking it rich — but their tenuous plan to make their fortune on the frontier comes to rely on the secret use of a landowner’s prized dairy cow.
Thursday, November 20: Duvidha (Mani Kaul, India, 1973, 82′)
Presented by Kuhu Tanvir
A newly-married merchant’s son is sent away for business. A ghost, who laid eyes on the bride, falls madly in love with her and takes the form of the husband and begins living with her.
Thursday, December 4: Days (Tsai Ming-liang, Malaysia/Taiwan, 2020, 127′)
Presented by Ayana Dey
Kang lives alone in a big house. Through a glass façade, he looks out onto the treetops lashed by wind and rain. He feels a strange pain of unknown origin which he can hardly bear and which grips his whole body. Non lives in a small apartment in Bangkok where he methodically prepares traditional dishes from his native village. When Kang meets Non in a hotel room, the two men share each other’s loneliness.