The brand new Afrofuturist film Memory of Princess Mumbi is coming to The Frida Cinema!
In 2093, filmmaker Kuve travels to Umata to document the aftermath of a war that revived ancient kingdoms. There, he meets Mumbi, who challenges him to make his film without the use of AI. As Kuve searches for his own voice, he begins to realize that even in a broken world, beauty can be found in the small human moments we often overlook.
The film premiered at Venice Days (Giornate degli Autori) in 2025 and went on to TIFF, BFI London, Zurich Film Festival (where it won the Critics’ Jury Award for Best Swiss Film), and San Francisco International Film Festival (where it received an Honorable Mention in the Global Visions category).
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Nu-Classics is back at The Frida Cinema, as this time around, our beloved host Maggie Mae Fish is joined by novelist and video essayist Lindsay Ellis for a very special screening celebrating thirty years since the release of Independence Day!
Strange phenomena surface around the globe. The skies ignite. Terror races through the world’s major cities. As these extraordinary events unfold, it becomes increasingly clear that a force of incredible magnitude has arrived. Its mission: total annihilation over the Fourth of July weekend. The last hope to stop the destruction is an unlikely group of people united by fate and unimaginable circumstances.
Upon its release in 1996, Independence Day became a global phenomenon, redefining what audiences expected from summer movie spectacle. Its earnest patriotism and larger-than-life action paved the way for many blockbusters that came after. Whether you’re revisiting it for the hundredth time or experiencing it on the big screen for the first time, this is the kind of movie that reminds us why theaters were built to be loud! Also…come on, a movie with Bill Pullman and Jeff Goldblum?
Lindsay Ellis is a novelist and video essayist residing in Long Beach, CA. After studying Cinema Studies from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, she earned her MFA in Film and Television Production from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts with a focus in documentary and screenwriting. As a video essayist she wrote and co-hosted the fiction-focused web series It’s Lit! for PBS Digital Studios. She continues to make video essay and documentary content for YouTube and the streaming service Nebula. Her novels include Apostles of Mercy, Truth of the Divine and Axiom’s End, which was a New York Times best seller. Her nonfiction debut, Degenerates, a survey of how fascists and authoritarians appropriate and censor the arts, is slated for release in 2028.
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In the basement of a university medical school, Dr. Jessup floats naked in total darkness. The most terrifying experiment in the history of science is out of control…and the subject is himself.
It’s Ken Russell Season (wink wink) around here, as we’re palying a late night one-off of Altered States, one of the wildest studio films ever made.
A research scientist (The late, great William Hurt) explores the boundaries and frontiers of human consciousness. Using sensory deprivation and hallucinogenic mixtures from Native American shamans, he explores these altered states of cognizance and finds that memory, time, and reality itself are states of mind.
Altered States is a head-on collision between prestige science fiction, body horror, psychedelia, and New Age philosophy, making it a perfect late night cinematic experience!
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The brand new Afrofuturist film Memory of Princess Mumbi is coming to The Frida Cinema! And make sure to stick around after the movie for a special in-person Q&A with its director, Damien Hauser!
In 2093, filmmaker Kuve travels to Umata to document the aftermath of a war that revived ancient kingdoms. There, he meets Mumbi, who challenges him to make his film without the use of AI. As Kuve searches for his own voice, he begins to realize that even in a broken world, beauty can be found in the small human moments we often overlook.
The film premiered at Venice Days (Giornate degli Autori) in 2025 and went on to TIFF, BFI London, Zurich Film Festival (where it won the Critics’ Jury Award for Best Swiss Film), and San Francisco International Film Festival (where it received an Honorable Mention in the Global Visions category).
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Let the love feast begin.
We’re concluding Gregg Araki’s legendary Teen Apocalypse Trilogy with Nowhere, a delirious, end-of-the-millennium fever dream that’s turned up to eleven.
In Los Angeles, a colorful assortment of bohemians try to make sense of their intersecting lives. The moody Dark Smith, his bisexual girlfriend, her lesbian lover and their shy gay friend plan on attending the wildest party of the year. But they’ll only make it if they can survive the drug trips, suicides, trysts, mutilations and alien abductions that occur as one surreal day unfolds.
The most visually audacious entry in the trilogy, Nowhere is Araki experimenting with science fiction, queer romance as a euphoric celebration of outsiders, making it the perfect culmination of one of the boldest trilogies in American independent cinema.
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From the Amazon’s forbidden depths comes…Creature from the Black Lagoon!
Cinematic Void is invading The Frida Cinema again to present one of the crown jewels of Universal’s monster canon that introduced audiences to the unforgettable Gill-man!
When scientists exploring the Amazon River stumble on a “missing link” connecting humans and fish, they plan to capture it for later study. But the Creature has plans of his own, and has set his sights on the lead scientist’s beautiful fiancée, Kay.
Combining atmospheric underwater photography and unforgettable creature effects, the film remains a marvel of 1950s genre filmmaking. More than seventy years later, the Gill-man still stands among cinema’s most iconic monsters, re-surfacing from the depths every so often to captivate new generation of moviegoers.
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July’s Hallucinations pick is the delightfully strange Musical Fantasy Tomorrow, featuring an early leading performance from the incomparable Olivia Newton-John!
In a whimsical future where science, music, and imagination collide, a brilliant young inventor and his eccentric companions set out on an adventure that spans planets, generations, and dimensions.
Released years before Grease would make her an international icon, Tomorrow offers a fascinating glimpse of Olivia Newton-John at the dawn of her screen career. Overflowing with colorful visuals and catch tunes, Tomorrow is a charming reminder that we used to make movies like this!
Hosted by Polygon’s editor-in-chief Chris Plante, Hallucinations is a monthly event that spotlights movies that challenge our expectations of story, style, and “good taste”. We invite guests to bond over films that change what we expect from the medium, the world, and themselves. So come early, stay late, make friends, and watch something strange, surprising, or just shamelessly sick.
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Our second Volunteer of the Month pick for July comes via Avalon, who has chosen chosen the hallucinatory body-horror classic Videodrome from visionary filmmaker and certified sicko David Cronenberg.
As the president of a trashy TV channel, Max Renn is desperate for new programming to attract viewers. When he happens upon “Videodrome,” a TV show dedicated to gratuitous torture and punishment, Max sees a potential hit and broadcasts the show on his channel. However, after his girlfriend auditions for the show and never returns, Max investigates the truth behind Videodrome and discovers that the graphic violence may not be as fake as he thought.
Videodrome remains one of Cronenberg’s most provocative and unsettling works. Filled with unforgettable practical effects and audacious ideas, the film predicts a world consumed by screens while asking who controls the images we consume.
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Abby, a brilliant, young neuroscientist who has recently lost her father, drowns her grief by spending her days working with a monkey named Dorey. Abby meets a programmer, Sam, who has created a technology that reconnects Abby with her beloved father. Her relationship with her digitized dad then forces her to re-examine everything from her romantic relationships to her life’s work.
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Our Spielberg Summer series concludes with some post-Thanksgiving screenings of War of the Worlds, his hauntingly realistic reinvention of a Sci Fi classic that transforms an alien invasion into a terrifying story of survival.
When colossal extraterrestrial machines suddenly emerge from beneath the Earth and begin annihilating entire cities, divorced dockworker Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) is forced to protect his children as civilization collapses around them. As humanity struggles to comprehend the scale of the catastrophe, Ray’s desperate journey becomes a fight not to save the world, but simply to keep his family alive.
Released in the shadow of a newly changed America, War of the Worlds channels post-9/11 anxieties into some of the most intense and visceral spectacle of Spielberg’s career. Stripping away triumphalism in favor of fear, the film stands as one of his darkest works. It’s a reminder that even at his most pessimistic, Spielberg never loses sight of the human beings at the center of the story, making it the perfect film to conclude our 14 film retrospective of his work.
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