Ackland Film Forum
Events

Ackland Film Forum: “Aftersun” (Charlotte Wells, 2022)
Chelsea Theater 1129 Weaver Dairy Road, Suite AB, Chapel Hill, United StatesSet during a modest holiday at a Turkish resort in the early 2000s, Aftersun approaches coming of age obliquely, through memory and retrospection. Stunningly shot on 35mm film, which is contrasted with mini DV home movie video footage, the plot follows young Sophie (Frankie Corio) and her father Calum (Paul Mescal). But it is the adult…

Ackland Film Forum: “Boyhood” (Richard Linklater, 2014)
The Lumina Theater 620 Market Street, Chapel Hill, United StatesFilmed over twelve years with the same cast members who conspicuously age from segment to segment, Boyhood offers one of cinema’s most literal and radical explorations of coming of age. Following Mason (Ellar Coltrane) from early childhood through his first days of college, the film refuses traditional narrative climaxes in favor of accumulation: small moments, shifting…

Ackland Film Forum: “Crooklyn” (Spike Lee, 1994)
Varsity Theatre 123 E. Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC, United StatesSet in 1970s Brooklyn, Crooklyn recounts childhood from the perspective of nine-year-old Troy Carmichael (Zelda Harris), whose coming of age unfolds within the rhythms of Black family life, neighborhood culture, and social constraint. The film balances warmth and humor with moments of rupture, revealing how maturity often arrives through confrontation with authority, injustice, and grief. Lee…