@2026 by mezzanine film, inc.









LUC MOULLET: HARDLY WORKING
A Mezzanine retrospective

Tuesday, September 9 - Sunday, September 28
2220 Arts + Archives + Brain Dead Studios

8 screenings including brand-new 4K restorations courtesy of Cinema Guild!

Our first-ever retrospective is a salute to France’s consummate working-class independent filmmaker and film critic, whose many odes to the value of amateurism—in life, work, industry and relationships—comprises an oeuvre of brilliance. On the eve of his 88th birthday, we are thrilled to present the majority of his features and short films, across two venues throughout the month of September.

The last living member of the French New Wave, Luc Moullet began as a critic at Cahiers du cinéma (the first to champion B-movie masters Samuel Fuller and Edgar Ulmer) before embarking on a prodigiously active filmmaking career in irreverent fictions, reflexive documentaries and the in-between, where Moullet himself often appears on screen. At once earnest and sardonic, Moullet’s films (nearly all of them self-produced) play like driest of black comedies, chronicling the absurdities of life under capitalism with a sober glance. A master of nonfiction and satire who prefers the vantage point of the pedestrian on the street, Moullet’s shoestring cinema has an obvious through-line to modern filmmakers like John Wilson and Patrick Keiller, and remains one of cinema’s finest chroniclers of urban and industrial spaces – despite the vast majority of his films remaining undistributed in the U.S. until now.

While many of these restorations premiered in L.A. at the UCLA Film & Television Archive earlier this year, we have endeavored to revive this series in tandem with Film at Lincoln Center’s retrospective, and provide another chance for L.A. audiences to enjoy and appreciate Moullet’s work.

We are especially thankful to Ed McCarry (Cinema Guild), Dan Sullivan (Film at Lincoln Center), Becca Rieckmann, Pauline Kraatz, Bobby Sheppard, Will Sloan, Beatrice Loayza, Gal Amiram, Alex Gootter and Gael Teicher (La Traverse) for their help with this series.

“You will never find craggier, funnier, more brilliantly lo-fi and completely idiosyncratic comedies.” -MUBI Notebook

“Outside of George and Mike Kuchar in the United States, I am hard-pressed to name another filmmaker whose career has so fully embodied a lifelong dedication to the values of amateurism as Moullet’s has.” -Nick Pinkerton, Reverse Shot

“Moullet was the only rural, proletarian, and anarchist member of the New Wave…. He maintains a healthy contempt for all the pretensions that money and prestige can buy and burrows into his subjects like an unruly gopher. His movies are sweet, funny, distressing, and strangely noble–a powerful antidote to the self-important romantic psychodramas of Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen.” -Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

“For Moullet, who once wrote that ‘the filmmaker criticizes, and the critic praises,’ [his] ingenious hybrid films act as their own kind of criticism, effortlessly embodying the director’s longstanding concerns for the economic and bureaucratic nuances of a socially engaged film practice.” -Jordan Cronk

All restorations have been produced by La Traverse, with the assistance of the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC). Restorations carried out by Cosmodigital and L.E. Diapason and distributed in North America by Cinema Guild.