Step into a bygone era of film magic with the Denver Silent Film Festival.

Join us again as we draw back the curtain on another superb slate of silent-era masterpieces and newly restored discoveries, presenting them as they were meant to be experienced: on the big screen with extraordinary live musical performances.

A feast for lovers of classic films and live music, our festival promises something beyond special.

Schedule :

September 22, 2023

7:00 PM : Opening Night: Lady Windermere's Fan - Sie FilmCenter - H2 - Maglione

Accompaniment by The Mont Alto Orchestra

This film will be preceded by the presentation of the David Shephard Career Achievement Awards

Acclaimed filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch directed this silent gem based on the Oscar Wilde play, which bitingly satirizes Victorian society and marriage. After finding out that her husband, Lord Windermere, has been visiting a certain Mrs.

Erlynne and giving her large sums of money, Lady Windermere accuses him of cheating on her. Although he swears he is not being unfaithful, Lord Windermere cannot explain his actions — and invites Mrs. Erlynne to his wife's coming-of-age birthday ball... where all things will be revealed.

This film is presented with support from David Emrich.

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September 23, 2023

10:00 AM : The Narrow Trail - Sie FilmCenter - H2 - Maglione

Accompanied by Hank Troy

Ice Harding, an outlaw with a devoted gang hold up a stagecoach and encounter a San Francisco vice king and his innocent niece. Ice is taken with the young woman, who at first she sees nothing in him, but she begins to come around when her uncle tries to swindle Ice, and the outlaw himself undergoes a change of course under the influence of the girl.

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12:10 PM : Upstream - Sie FilmCenter - H2 - Maglione

Accompaniment by Donald Sosin with vocalist and percussionist Joanna Seaton

Preceeded by a TBA short film

Among the residents of a theatrical boarding-house is the last member of a once-great acting family, who has fallen down on his luck. When an offer to star in a London "Hamlet" comes, he takes lessons from a faded former star and goes on to huge success--but the climb soon finds him forgetting his old friends on the way.

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2:15 PM : Alice Guy Shorts Program - Sie FilmCenter - H2 - Maglione

Accompaniment by Hank Troy

The French filmmaking pioneer, Alice Guy, is the very first person of any gender to have her name on screen as the maker of a movie -- The Cabbage Fairy in 1896. Historian Anthony Slide says that Guy almost single-handedly established the idea of the director of a film. She worked her way up at Gaumont from secretary to leading director. She directed everything at Gaumont up to 1906, and she hired male filmmakers who later became major figures -- Zecca, Feuillade. And she was really good -- I think that many of her early shorts show far more sophistication and wit than the work of her contemporaries.

Films in this program include:

A Fool and His Money (1912), 10 min.
Starting Something (1911), 8 min.
Midwife to the Upper Class (1902), 4 min.
Mixed Pets (1911), 14 min.
The Strike (1912), 9 min.
Drunken Mattress (1906), 9 min.
Two Little Rangers (1912), 15 min.

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4:30 PM : The Johnstown Flood - Sie FilmCenter - H2 - Maglione

Accompaniment by Rodney Sauer

Preceded by short film: The Land Beyond the Sunset (1914), 14 min.

THE JOHNSTOWN FLOOD re-creates one of the greatest disasters in American history, when, in 1889, over 2,000 people in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, lost their lives. In her first major role, Janet Gaynor plays a teenage girl smitten with dashing engineer George O'Brien, whose pleadings about the imminent collapse of the local dam are ignored. It's up to Gaynor to ride through the streets à la Paul Revere to warn the townspeople of the imminent disaster. After 97 years, the movie's flood sequence is still a pre-CGI marvel of optical effects, matte paintings, and miniatures.

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7:00 PM : Moral - Sie FilmCenter - H2 - Maglione

Accompaniment by The UCD Student Silent Film Orchestra with Donald Sosin and Todd Reid

An early pioneer of censorship-pushing, this story of a revue entertainer who humiliates the Emilsberg morality committee who condemn her show, by filming them when they call on her in private, turns the morality tables in all the right directions.

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September 24, 2023

10:00 AM : UCD Student Made Silents - Sie FilmCenter - H2 - Maglione

FREE ADMISSION!

Returning to a program from years past, the short films in this program are made by students in the Department of Film & Television at CU-Denver, tasked with creating films in 2023 that would fit well with or expand upon the filmmaking ideas of 1923. Music for each film was selected by the filmmakers themselves.

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12:00 PM : Body and Soul - Sie FilmCenter - H2 - Maglione

Accompanied by Tenis Nelson

A bold and controversial film by pioneer independent filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, Body And Soul marked Paul Robeson's screen debut and was the only motion picture he made with an African-American director.

Robeson plays a hard-drinking thief and vicious womanizer who poses as a pastor in a small southern town. Through this diabolical ruse he preys upon a young member of his flock, not unlike the murderous minister of The Night Of The Hunter. The film's depiction of clergy was deemed so incendiary that at least one prominent black newspaper refused to even mention the film in its column.

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2:30 PM : The City Without Jews - Sie FilmCenter - H2 - Maglione

The City Without Jews With live original music composed and performed by world-renowned klezmer violinist Alicia Svigals and celebrated silent film pianist Donald Sosin

Made Possible with support from the Sunrise Foundation of Education and the Arts

Set in the Austrian city of Utopia (a thinly-disguised stand-in for Vienna), the story follows the political and personal consequences of an anti-Semitic law passed by the National Assembly forcing all Jews to leave the country.

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Date : September 22, 2023 - September 24, 2023

Location :

Sie FilmCenter 

2510 East Colfax

Denver, CO 80206

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