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While Spike Lee has this tendency to grab the notoriety, the fame, and the headlines, there are other truly amazing Black filmmakers in America, gentle readers. One of my favorite such craftsmen is Charles Burnett. Burnett is an intuitive, empathic storyteller who seeks in each of his films to find the secret essence that powers his deeply humane characters. In Killer of Sheep (1978), we met a black family man who kept his family fed, working at a slaughterhouse that specialized in processing lambs. In To Sleep with Anger (1990), his protagonist is a drifter visiting an old family friend in Los Angeles and all the trouble that follows in this chaos engine’s wake.

With The Annihilation of Fish, we come to a film that I would argue is Burnett’s masterpiece. Fish (the legendary James Earl Jones) is a lifelong inhabitant of a mental institution. The vigorous nature of his mania has driven his social worker (David Kagen) to the brink of a breakdown. Fish, you see, is regularly and surprisingly ‘attacked’ by an unseen assailant determined to kill him through constant wrestling. This has flustered the entire staff of the institution, so they ultimately choose to de-institutionalize Fish and thus end the problem he presents. Fish goes on to rent a room with Mrs. Muldroone (Margot Kidder). The Jamaican Fish and the Southern-born Mrs. Muldroone have a feisty friendship. That, however, pales in comparison to Fish’s interactions with Poinsettia (the indomitable Lynne Redgrave).

With Pointsettia, Fish has found his other half. A woman who is fiery, passionate, and madly in love with a long-dead composer who she claims is very much with her. Pointsettia agrees to a relationship with the perennially knocked down and beaten up Fish, which is just perfect. We will spend the film learning the multitudinous ins and outs of their time together. I applaud Burnett for choosing to tell a story of romance for older people with wildly improbably eccentricities, social tics, and mental issues. The Annihilation of Fish is a celebration of that which makes us wholly unique as a species. This film pulsates and throbs with a lust for life I have rarely experienced in other filmmaker’s stories.

Truly, Burnett as a storyteller has cracked the code on what makes us humans tick. There are no better film making hands to find yourself proverbially cradled by. As Fish navigates the twists and turns of his conflict with his invisible pugilist and his deep feelings for Pointsettia we the viewers are proffered quite the cinematic delight.

The acting, directing, cinematography, production design, editing of The Annihilation of Fish are all top notch. Rare is the film that I find no defaults at all with it. This is Burnett’s one which fires on all cylinders to perfection. It simply must be witnessed to believe.

The remaster of The Annihilation of Fish is both handsome and exquisite in its refurbishments. I will heap great praise on the team who unearthed this 1999 gemstone and burnished it to a 4K luster. This is a remarkable accomplishment and deserves to be watched by anyone who loves the films of Charles Burnett. Also, anyone who likes a great romance. If movies involving the sweetly demented are your thing, The Annihilation of Fish is definitely for you. Seek this film out. It’s a most humane and beautiful story.

James Earl Jones (as Obediah Fish) in Charles Burnett’s THE ANNIHILATION OF FISH. Never officially released, Milestone Films will officially launch the premiere in 2024 celebrating the film’s 25th anniversary and the 80th birthday of Charles Burnett. This 1999 feature is a uniquely funny and touching story of an eccentric pair of aging and delusional visionaries played by James Earl Jones and Lynn Redgrave, along with Margot Kidder. Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Film Foundation in collaboration with Milestone Films. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

Restored from the 35mm original picture negative and 35mm optical track negative. Laboratory services by Roundabout Entertainment, Inc., FotoKem, Audio Mechanics, Simon Daniel Sound. Special thanks to Charles Burnett, John Demps, Dennis Doros, Amy Heller. UCLA Restorationist: Jillian Borders.

Acclaimed director Charles Burnett is finally getting the proper release for his lost feature “The Annihilation of Fish.”

IndieWire can announce that the 1999 film has landed a 4K restoration and theatrical release. “The Annihilation of Fish” first screened at the 1999 Toronto International Film Festival and was acquired for distribution; however, the distributor canceled the film’s release after one bad review in Variety. “The Annihilation of Fish” has never been available on all media anywhere for almost 30 years.

“The Annihilation of Fish” stars Lynn Redgrave as Poinsettia, a former housewife with an imagined lover in the form of 19th-century composer Giacomo Puccini. She moves into a Los Angeles boarding house with an energetic landlady (Margot Kidder) where she meets a Jamaican widower, Fish (James Earl Jones), who has recently been released from a mental institution despite his continued battles against unseen demons. In the face of personal challenges and differences, the couple grows together and begins to discover new things about themselves and the nuances of love and happiness. 

The feature is adapted from a short story by Anthony C. Winkler, and billed as a “tender comedy that gracefully tackles such issues as race, mental illness, and aging with anarchic humor and energy.”

The 4K restoration of “The Annihilation of Fish” debuted in 2024 as part of the UCLA Festival of Preservation. Burnett reflected on the “difficult” journey to get the film a wide release.

“I’m curious, because it’s been locked away for a very long time for all sort of reasons and you sort of wonder if it’s still relevant, how audiences are going to take it,” Burnett told IndieWire. “Everyone I know who is an independent filmmaker is having similar problems in many ways, trying to get films made and trying to get them distributed, so you don’t really feel like an exception.”

He added, “I’m just sorry that Lynn Redgrave isn’t here to get her reward, so to speak, for working with us and getting the film made, and having faith and confidence in us to make a good film. Same thing with James Earl Jones, and Paul Heller, who worked so hard on everything, and [author/screenwriter] Tony Winkler, all good people, and they should be here enjoying this moment, and I’m sad about that.”

Burnett previously received a Governor’s Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2017, and is considered one of the most celebrated independent filmmakers. “The Annihilation of Fish” was his first comedy.

The restoration was by UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Film Foundation in collaboration with Milestone Films, with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. “The Annihilation of Fish” was restored from the 35mm original picture negative and 35mm optical track negative by UCLA restorationist Jillian Borders; the laboratory services were by Roundabout Entertainment, Inc., FotoKem, Audio Mechanics, and Simon Daniel Sound.

“The Annihilation of Fish” was written by Anthony Winkler, produced by Paul Heller and Kris Dodge, edited by Nancy Richardson, cinematography by John Demps, Jr., sound by Veda Campbell, music by Laura Karpman, production designer Nina Ruscio, and had production supervisor Ed Santiago.

“There are so many people whom I have to thank who worked over the years to get ‘The Annihilation of Fish’ restored and released,” Burnett said in a press statement. “Releasing the film conveys a great deal to everyone involved, particularly the cast and crew, especially the late Paul Heller, who spent ten years producing the film. I want to thank Milestone Films, UCLA Film & Television Archive, The Film Foundation, and the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation, who found the funding to restore and release it so that cinema lovers can enjoy this story about two distinctly different, lonely people who find love in the crazy world while still holding on to their bizarre outlooks on life.”

Milestone Films and Kino Lorber are releasing the restoration to celebrate the film’s 25th anniversary and the 80th birthday of director Burnett.

“The Annihilation of Fish” in 4K premieres in theaters February 14 at BAM. Check out the trailer below.

“Stars in Broad Daylight,” with a domineering character who strongly resembles Hafez al-Assad, had one official showing in Damascus. Now it’s been restored.

On the phone from a hotel in Damascus, the Syrian filmmaker Ossama Mohammed was trying to paint me a picture of the view from his window. He could see Mount Qasioun, which looks out over the city. He could also see the presidential palace — “where the new person is spending his time now,” he said. It was evening there, and he could hear the sound of 100 mosques in prayer.

He and his wife, the opera singer Noma Omran, are “not people of religion,” he explained. But that sound moves them. “It’s not only the word of prayer,” he said. “The melody itself — it came from very deep culture, from multicultural Syria, from prehistoric Syria.”

Since 2011, he and Omran had been living in exile in Paris. After Bashar al-Assad’s regime fell in December, Mohammed said, his wife persuaded him that they should go there directly.

“The timing — it’s just amazing,” he marveled.

Technically, we were on the phone to discuss the new restoration of “Stars in Broad Daylight,” his 1988 debut feature, which will screen in the Museum of Modern Art’s annual film preservation showcase, To Save and Project, on Sunday and Jan. 28.

That the film is resurfacing now is pure coincidence. The restoration had its premiere at Il Cinema Ritrovato, a festival of vintage cinema in Bologna, in June, when no one could have known that Bashar al-Assad would lose power. As it happens, “Stars in Broad Daylight” offers a harsh commentary on his father and predecessor, Hafez al-Assad, who died in 2000. More than one viewer has noted the resemblance between the former leader and the star.

The movie revolves around the complicated relationships of an extended family, the Ghazis. Khalid (Abdellatif Abdul Hamid), the most domineering of the clan — and the one who looks like Hafez al-Assad — has tried to orchestrate marriages for two of his siblings to maximize the Ghazis’ land ownership. After one bride runs from the double wedding, Khalid’s tyranny becomes even more overt.

When you are living under dictatorship, Mohammed explained, you are never a movie’s sole screenwriter. “Assad is the co-writer,” he said. “He is on your shoulder writing with you.” In “Stars,” he added, “I took him from my shoulder, and I saw him in the framing, inside.”

Still, he explained, his interest was not in insulting al-Assad but exploring what he saw as the twisted mind-set that dominated Syria under his rule. “It’s about the psychological and mental deformity that infects the individual under dictatorship,” Mohammed said.

An invitation-only premiere was held for an audience of intellectuals and artists at the Al-Assad National Library in Damascus, but that is the closest thing to a public screening “Stars in Broad Daylight” ever received in Syria. It was never allowed to be shown in Syrian theaters — only in international settings like the Directors’ Fortnight program at Cannes. Mohammed heard that Hafez al-Assad himself watched the film privately, although he emphasized that information was secondhand.

But no high-quality version has been available anywhere. When the film showed in New York in 2006 at Lincoln Center, the theater played it off a videotape; in 2017, MoMA screened it from a file. Cecilia Cenciarelli, head of research and special projects for the Cineteca di Bologna, said it was one of the most challenging titles that the organization had restored in collaboration with the World Cinema Project, an initiative of Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation that preserves work from countries neglected in Western film histories.

For a start, it was unclear if a restoration-grade copy existed. Mohammed had deposited a print with the Cinémathèque Française, but it was in poor shape; Cenciarelli tracked down copies with Spanish subtitles, but subtitles would be obstacles to a preservation effort. Then Mohammed remembered that the film had screened on German television in the 1990s, at a time when TV stations routinely used 35-millimeter prints for broadcast.

Cenciarelli, who speaks Italian, English, French and a little Spanish, but not German, took old TV guides from the Cineteca’s library, ran them through Google Translate — and found a match. But the station told her the print had been dubbed in Turkish. “There’s a very, very large Turkish community in Germany,” she said. Her hope was that the cataloger had simply mistaken the film’s dialogue, which is in Arabic, for Turkish. Sure enough, the station had a pristine print in the original language.

The other obstacle, Cenciarelli said, was the rights holder, the National Film Organization of Syria, with whom communication was fruitless. Luckily, she said, Mohammed retained the rights to screen it noncommercially, so the restored “Stars” could always show at festivals like To Save and Project, even though a release wasn’t in the cards.

But now, with the ouster of the younger al-Assad, maybe the film can be screened more widely. Mohammed is looking into showing it in Syria. He said that every day people ask him about a screening.

Mohammed acknowledged that it was a tense time in Syria, but also spoke of the “explosion” of “expression and imagination” now that the Assad regime is gone: “If you have five taxis in the day, you will hear amazing discoveries.”

There are also familiar sensations. “The main pleasure is when you walk in the popular market, and you see a 60-, 70-year-old man who was working there from the beginning of history,” he said.

He and Omran are there temporarily, for now — their Damascus apartment, which had been watched over by a caretaker, bore the hallmarks of “14 years of dust and emptiness” — and he said that thousands of other Syrians who left have returned to witness the moment. There’s something about it that doesn’t quite feel real: “It is not normal — this is the feeling,” he said. “It’s as if you are a part of a movie, and the movie is so different.”

Other Films in the Series

Not every title in To Save and Project can compete with world-historic circumstances, but as usual, the series is filled with wonders. “Raskolnikow,” a 1923 adaptation of “Crime and Punishment” directed by Robert Wiene (“The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”), has been considerably lengthened from available versions to what feels like a better approximation of the scope of Dostoyevsky’s novel. The angular German Expressionist production design contributes to the atmosphere of psychological breakdown.

The director Alberto Cavalcanti is best known for his Ealing Studios movies from Britain, but he made “A Real Woman” (1954) in his native Brazil. This rediscovery presents a daring, funny portrait of an inadvertent bigamist, a nurse (Inezita Barroso) who, through no fault of her own, winds up married to two men, one poor, one rich.

And “The Wages of Sin,” a 1938 American exploitation film made outside the strictures of the Production Code by claiming educational value, follows a woman (Constance Worth) who is tricked into sexual slavery. David Stenn, the film historian who financed the restoration, said, “There’s a fundamental truthfulness to these movies that you don’t see in the Hollywood studio films.”

To Save and Project runs through Jan. 30 at the Museum of Modern Art. For more information, go to moma.org.

Robert “Bob” Rosen, a pioneering film historian, archivist and former dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, has died. He was 84.

Rosen died Wednesday, UCLA said without specifying a cause of death. Born in 1940, Rosen was named Dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television in 1999, a position he held for slightly more than a decade.

Before that, he served as director of archives at UCLA starting in 1975, growing the school’s original film and TV vault into a world-leading collection. That appointment grew out of an invitation to teach one 10-week course at the UCLA Department of Film and Television in 1974.

“I never left. Understanding motion pictures and teaching filmmakers was to become my life’s goal, and over the course of the next four decades, I served as professor, then department chair, and finally for 11 years as dean of the school,” Rosen said during an informal conversation at the 68th International Federation of Film Archives Congress in Beijing in 2012.

“Bob was a transformative figure at UCLA, and his contributions to the field of film and television education, as well as his leadership here at the School of Theater, Film and Television, have left an indelible mark on our community,” UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television Dean Brian Kite said in a statement. “Bob’s impact on the global film community was profound, and his legacy will continue to shape the industry for years to come.”

In 2008, Rosen told the Associated Press that studying classic films helped young filmmakers find new ways to tell stories and discover their own point-of-view. “When you look at films from the past, you see the many different ways that filmmakers solve storytelling problems,” he noted. “And you break with formulas because you realize there are many ways to solve a problem. By looking at the past, you get the courage to find your own voice.”

Rosen also was the founding director of the National Center for Film and Video Preservation at the American Film Institute. He served on the executive committee of the International Federation of Film Archives, as a member of the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress for more than two decades and as a board member of both the Stanford Theatre Foundation and the Geffen Playhouse.

He was the film critic for KCRW National Public Radio for 10 years and a member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. He helped launch The Film Foundation and was the founding chair of The Film Foundation’s Archivists Council. 

He also received The Film Foundation’s John Huston Award from Martin Scorsese in 2008 for his contributions to film preservation and restoration.

“A titan of the film community, Bob elevated the field of archiving by championing training and advocating for the preservation of moving image media in all forms, from classic Hollywood to independent productions,” May Hong HaDuong, director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, said. “With advocacy, passion and an indomitable spirit, Bob played a pivotal role in transforming the UCLA Film & Television Archive into the world-class institution it is today.”