Canadian Premiere
What would film history look like viewed not through the rise and fall of studios, actors, and directors, but according to a different organizing principle — the final movies watched by various cultural figures before they died? Moving from Franz Kafka (The Kid) and John Dillinger (Manhattan Melodrama) to Bette Davis (Waterloo Bridge) and Kurt Cobain (The Piano), British artist Stanley Schtinter embraces this simple concept to remap the entire history of the medium. Narrated by Jeremy Irons, the result is a dizzyingly detailed, mordantly funny, and deliberately skewed love letter to the movies.
Recalling the essay-films of Harun Farocki and Thom Andersen (Los Angeles Plays Itself), Last Movies is scrupulously researched, darkly humorous, and always entertaining. Like avant-garde artists from the Surrealists onward, Schtinter embraces chance as his organizing principle. Recognizing that all of us, too, will have our own last movies, it offers a scintillating twist on Tom Gunning’s concept of the cinema as “a machine for killing time.”
Content Considerations: Death, mortality, self harm
Community Partner
UK
2026
In English and French with English subtitles
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Credits & Director
Producer
Stanley Schtinter
Cinematography
Stanley Schtinter
Editor
Stanley Schtinter
Stanley Schtinter
Stanley Schtinter has been described as a “houngan of cinematic Vodou” by Sight & Sound Magazine. An artist, filmmaker, and author, his projects include Important Books [or, Manifestos Read by Children] (2021), which screened at Whitechapel Gallery, London; The Lock-In (2022), which screened at The Barbican; and Schneewittchen (2025), which screened at the British Film Institute. Schtinter is the founder and director of the Liberated Film Club and soundtrack label purge. In 2026, he adapted his 2023 publication Last Movies, into a film of the same title, which screened at the Venice Biennale.
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