Jordan Peele‘s iconic film “Us” will be feted by Film at Lincoln Center, to honor the legacy of his 2019 feature. IndieWire can announce that Peele will be at the center of curated festival “The Other America: A Cosmology of Jordan Peele’s ‘Us,’” which will take place from June 20 to 26.
“Us” stars Lupita Nyong’o as a mother who is determined to save her family from doppelgänger killers who stalk their Santa Cruz beach house. The nuances of the film are reflected in the festival program, which is arranged in thematic sections based on recurring motifs from the film, including “The Shadow Self,” “The Uncanny,” “Labyrinths,” “Rabbits,” and “The Uniform.” Peele’s nods to “Dead Ringers,” “Scissors,” “Donnie Darko,” “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” are highlighted during the festival, which coincides with the recent publication of “‘Us’: The Complete Annotated Screenplay.” The book has in-depth footnotes, commentaries, marginalia, and a slew of images, definitions, and inspirations for “Us,” leading Film at Lincoln Center to “interpret the cosmology outlined through a presentation of double features, supplementary reading material, and in-person appearances from some of the book’s contributing writers,” as the center announced.
Of course, the festival will also kick off with a never-before-seen 35mm presentation of “Us” courtesy of auteur Peele’s personal collection. The Opening Night presentation has a two-for-one 35mm double feature of “Us” with Oscar Micheaux’s silent film “Body and Soul,” which will feature live grand piano accompaniment by Makia Matsumura. Shana L. Redmond, the Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University, and Michael Gillespie, Associate Professor in NYU’s Department of Cinema Studies, will take part in a conversation after the screenings.
Additional speakers throughout the festival include fashion designer Mary Ping; Mellissa Huber, Associate Curator at The Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art; writer and designer Leila Taylor; and filmmaker Sierra Pettengill.
Copies of the annotated screenplay will be available for purchase at all in-person events, with an option to bundle the book with a ticket to the Opening Night double feature or a signed copy with a series All-Access Pass. “The Other America: A Cosmology of Jordan Peele’s ‘Us’” is organized by Florence Almozini and Tyler Wilson in collaboration with Monkeypaw Productions and Inventory Press.
Check out the full program, with language provided by Film at Lincoln Center, below.
“Us“
Jordan Peele, U.S., 2019, 35mm, 116m
A haunted house turned home–invasion thriller stretched to national proportions, Us transforms a family vacation in Santa Cruz into a metaphysical horror of doppelgängers, repression, and class anxiety. When the Wilson family are attacked by their red-jumpsuited doubles—the Tethered—they’re swept into a coordinated uprising emerging from a subterranean labyrinth and government conspiracy. Blending slasher and creature-feature thrills, cultural iconography, and Jungian psychology, Peele crafts a propulsive, frequently hilarious allegory that’s at once genre pop and political provocation, in which the threat isn’t some external invader but our own warped reflection wielding a pair of scissors. Lupita Nyong’o’s astonishingly splintered dual performance anchors a film teeming with mirrored symbols, from rabbit warrens and the eerie symmetry of 11:11 to the sharp line drawn from Reagan-era mythmaking to its 2010s implosion. Us remains a richly layered, destabilizing vision, and Film at Lincoln Center is proud to revive it in a new 35mm print—made to be seen, and reseen, on the big screen. 35mm print courtesy of Jordan Peele’s personal collection.
Friday, June 20 at 6:00pm – Opening Night double feature with Body and Soul beginning at 6:00pm, followed by a conversation with Shana L. Redmond and Michael Gillespie and a reception, and Us beginning at 9:15pm
Saturday, June 21 at 6:00pm
Sunday, June 22 at 5:30pm – Post-screening conversation with Mary Ping and Mellissa Huber
Monday, June 23 at 8:00pm
Tuesday, June 24 at 1:30pm
Wednesday, June 25 at 3:30pm
Thursday, June 26 at 8:30pm
The Shadow Self
“It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows any thing of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible that he should ever in any circumstances go beyond himself. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster.” –From Psychology of the Unconscious (1912) by Carl G. Jung
“Body and Soul“
Oscar Micheaux, U.S., 1925, 35mm, 105m
Silent with English intertitles
In his boldest surviving film, pioneering Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux casts Paul Robeson—making his screen debut—in dual roles that expose the fault lines between America’s religious and justice systems. As an escaped convict posing as a beloved preacher, and as his gentle, upright twin, Robeson embodies a devastating split between appearance and truth, and whose uncanny doubling plays out in a community shaped by racial violence, spiritual deception, and economic precarity. Made nearly a century before Us, Body and Soul claimed the doppelgänger as a distinctly Black metaphor: not for abstract guilt or buried sin, but for the internal schism demanded by a racist society—what W. E. B. Du Bois described, in 1903, as the double consciousness of Black American identity. To this day one of the great race-melodramas, Micheaux’s silent-era masterwork still shocks with its formal audacity and searing political clarity. Featuring live piano accompaniment by Makia Matsumura. 35mm print preserved by George Eastman Museum.
Friday, June 20 at 6:00pm – Opening Night double feature with Body and Soul beginning at 6:00pm, followed by a conversation with Shana L. Redmond and Michael Gillespie and a reception, and Us beginning at 9:15pm
“C.H.U.D.”
Douglas Cheek, U.S., 1984, 35mm, 88m
“Beneath the city of New York are living catacombs, an endless maze of subterranean tunnels, unfit for anything human, unauthorized for anything experimental…” Look closely during Us’s 1986 prologue and you might spot the VHS copy of C.H.U.D., which reimagines the city’s unhoused and neglected as irradiated mutants (Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers, in fact) who start dragging New Yorkers down through manholes and sewer grates. John Heard and Daniel Stern lead a scrappy ensemble of skeptics, activists, and urban outcasts navigating a conspiracy that tunnels deep into institutional rot. Grimy, industrial, neglected, and claustrophobic, C.H.U.D. wraps a bleak social parable in unapologetically low-budget B-movie scuzz, turning environmental decay and systemic failure into monstrous form—literalizing the nightmare that the forgotten might rise, and no longer recognize us as their own.
Monday, June 23 at 6:00pm
Rabbits
What is so real as the cry of a child?
A rabbit’s cry may be wilder
But it has no soul.
–Lines from “Kindness,” a poem by Sylvia Plath
“Who Framed Roger Rabbit“
Robert Zemeckis, U.S., 1988, 35mm, 104m
A hard-boiled noir wired with anarchic slapstick, Who Framed Roger Rabbit reimagines 1940s Hollywood as a city where humans and cartoons uneasily coexist—most notably in the segregated Toontown. When down-on-his-luck detective Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins) is hired to clear the name of the manic, wrongfully accused Roger Rabbit (voiced by Charles Fleischer), he falls into an underworld of gags, studio backstabbing, and a real-estate conspiracy that threatens to, quite literally, erase Toontown. Zemeckis’s film, realized in brilliant tandem with animation director Richard Williams, remains a jaw-dropping technical marvel years before CGI made such feats commonplace. It’s also a sharp satire of gentrification, exotification, otherness, tokenizing, and Hollywood hierarchy, where Toons are both stars and second-class citizens. The tone shifts to genuine horror with Christopher Lloyd’s nightmarish performance as the fascist toon-executioner Judge Doom, whose urban renewal plans would make Robert Moses break a sweat.
Saturday, June 21 at 1:45pm
“Alice“
Jan Švankmajer, Czechoslovakia, 1988, 35mm, 86m
Czech with English subtitles
The same year Who Framed Roger Rabbit blended hand-drawn cartoons and noir with big studio firepower, Jan Švankmajer dragged Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland through the looking glass and into a world of splintered dolls and taxidermy nightmares. Mixing live action and disturbing, tactile stop-motion animation, the great Czech surrealist’s debut feature transforms Alice’s descent into a waking dream of Victorian clutter. Decayed objects gnaw, toys bleed sawdust, and the White Rabbit—stitched-up and glassy-eyed—wields a pair of scissors like a surgical instrument. Less an adaptation than a dissonant echo of Carrollian logic, Alice is a marvel of handmade horror that channels the darker currents of adolescent imagination and, not unlike Us, treats the inner life of a child not as an innocent refuge but as haunted terrain. One of cinema’s strangest portals into the unconscious, and a rare moment to see it projected from an imported 35mm print.
Saturday, June 21 at 4:00pm
Monday, June 23 at 4:00pm
“Donnie Darko“
Richard Kelly, U.S., 2001, 35mm, 113m
Set in a leafy Anytown, USA of 1988, Richard Kelly’s cosmic tragedy follows a heavily medicated, sleepwalking teen (Jake Gyllenhaal, in a career-defining role) haunted by visions of Frank (a kind of Virgil in a rabbit suit) who tells him the world will end in 28 days, on the eve of Halloween. As the date approaches, time begins to warp—alongside Donnie’s relationships with his family, classmates, and therapist—into a looping puzzle of parallel realities and paths not taken. Kelly’s apocalyptic, darkly funny sci-fi debut channels millennial angst while both embracing and skewering the New Age mythos that defined the end of the 20th century, with its mercurial mood bookended by two different but equally unforgettable “Mad World” needle drops. Initially overlooked after its post-9/11 release, Donnie Darko soon found a cult following among those attuned to its eerily prescient vision of dislocation, ambient dread, and a fractured national psyche splintered across timelines.
Thursday, June 26 at 6:00pm
“The Uniform“
“The power of the uniform lives both in its simplicity and its magnitude when multiplied. When confronted by a collective many of the same, a monolith is formed. It can feel like a protective shield or a menacing threat. As an individual in uniform, only the role or service seems to exist, more enlightened depths of the person are pushed beneath the layers… The uniform’s ingenuity is its ability to communicate control and reliability while also being symbols of corporeal control.” –From “Uniform” by Mary Ping in Us: The Complete Annotated Screenplay (2024) New 4K Remaster
“Akira“
Katsuhiro Otomo, Japan, 1988, 124m
Japanese with English subtitles
2019, Neo-Tokyo: A biker clad in crimson slides his taillight-streaked motorcycle down an urban freeway, and anime was never the same. Set in a crumbling Japanese metropolis rebuilt after a devastating explosion, Akira follows teenage rebels Kaneda and Tetsuo as secret government experiments unleash psychic forces capable of unmaking the world. Katsuhiro Otomo’s pioneering cyberpunk landmark fuses anarchy with pop grandeur, layering social unrest, Cold War paranoia, echoes of Japan’s 1960s student movements, and adolescent fury into an explosion of hand-drawn invention. The Capsules gang’s uniforms—and their gleaming pill insignias—prefigure the red jumpsuit revolution of Us (and Keke Palmer’s motorcycle drifting in NOPE), while Otomo’s neon-tinged apocalyptic vision of Tokyo remains a gold standard of animated world-building. Propulsive, visionary, and still retina-scorching nearly 40 years later, Akira isn’t just the future—it’s the fuse.
Saturday, June 21 at 8:30pm
Tuesday, June 24 at 4:00pm
“Dead Ringers“
David Cronenberg, Canada, 1988, 35mm, 116m
“Don’t worry, baby brother… We’ll always be together.” David Cronenberg’s coolly perverse Dead Ringers dissects the entangled psyche of identical twin gynecologists, Beverly and Elliot Mantle (an iconic dual performance by Jeremy Irons). They share everything—patients, accolades, even a meticulously managed identity—but their bond begins to unravel when the more vulnerable Beverly falls for an actress, Claire Niveau (Geneviève Bujold), whose anatomy doesn’t quite conform to textbook norms. The indelible image of their deep red surgical scrubs signals the film’s antiseptic precision and the latent horror of medical authority, not least in the brothers’ custom-forged tools “for operating on mutant women.” It’s hard not to see its echoes in Us’s jumpsuits and sharp scissors. Still one of Cronenberg’s most psychologically disturbing works, Dead Ringers transforms the clinic into a nightmarish theater of bodily autonomy loss and violation.
Sunday, June 22 at 8:30pm
Wednesday, June 25 at 9:00pm
Labyrinths
“At the heart of every labyrinth, in fact, there is a blind spot. And if the subject of the narrative wanders in the labyrinth of his own blindness, the narrative in turn becomes for us readers [or watchers] a labyrinth in which we wander until someone like Theseus, just a name, attempts to deliver us from it… the point of horror resides in the blind space.” –From “Partial Vision” (1981) in Cahiers du Cinéma by Pascal Bonitzer
“The Lady from Shanghai“
Orson Welles, U.S., 1947, 35mm, 87m
Orson Welles’s hypnotic puzzle film set the standard for using literal and figurative labyrinths to mirror a society’s darkest truths. Hired as a crewman by a wealthy lawyer (Everett Sloane), Irish drifter Michael O’Hara (Welles) finds himself seduced and ensnared by the lawyer’s wife Elsa, played by a platinum-blonde Rita Hayworth in one of the genre’s most enigmatic femme fatale turns. Critics were baffled upon its release by the narrative contortions and dense plot, but the disorientation is the point; Welles fashions a baroque noir of fatalism and entrapment, where escape is an illusion and the self is a hall of mirrors. Its iconic, climactic mirror maze shootout has since been echoed in countless films (from Enter the Dragon to the climax of John Wick: Chapter 2); in Us, a seaside carnival’s funhouse of mirrors marks the inciting location of horror and revelation. Print courtesy of the Yale Film Archive.
Sunday, June 22 at 3:30pm
“Nightbreed“
Clive Barker, U.K./Canada/U.S., 1990, 35mm, 102m
Monsters live beneath the surface—but the real villainy remains above—in Clive Barker’s wildly ambitious horror-fantasy, which transforms society’s outcasts into mythic antiheroes. Boone (Craig Sheffer), a tormented young man accused of heinous crimes, is clinically manipulated by his psychiatrist Dr. Decker (played with icy menace by David Cronenberg), who moonlights as a masked serial killer. On the run, Boone discovers Midian—a hidden necropolis beneath a Canadian cemetery, where shape-shifting beings live in secret exile. Reclaimed from box office failure as a cult classic, Nightbreed fuses Hellraiser-level body horror with queer allegory, cryptozoology, and religious subversion to create a blood-soaked parable of persecution and chosen families. Its practical effects and creature designs remain dazzlingly strange, and its subterranean world—labyrinthine, liturgical, and etched with mysterious lore—echoes the Underpass in Us.
Preceded by:
“Labyrinthe“
Piotr Kamler, France, 1969, 12m
Hand-drawn in ink and meticulously rotoscoped frame by frame, Labyrinthe follows a solitary figure through alien architectures of shadows and mirrored chambers. Polish-born and Paris-based, Piotr Kamler is an experimental animator whose work explores temporal distortions and spatial paradoxes, conjuring here a slow-creeping sense of entrapment intensified by an unnerving soundscape—a clear antecedent to Barker’s nightmarish visions.
Wednesday, June 25 at 6:00pm – Post-screening discussion with Leila Taylor and Sierra Pettengill
The Uncanny
“The uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.” –From The Uncanny (1919) by Sigmund Freud
“Dead Again”
Kenneth Branagh, U.S., 1991, 35mm, 107m
Kenneth Branagh’s follow-up to his Henry V adaptation is this reincarnation noir pitched at full operatic tilt: by turns lush and implausible yet totally sincere. Spanning 1940s and 1990s Los Angeles, it follows a private eye (Branagh) and an amnesiac woman (Emma Thompson) whose present-day bond begins to echo a decades-old murder. Past lives begin to bleed into the present, while scissors, hypnosis, and mistaken identities swirl into a karmic spiral of romantic obsession and twisted humor. Often dismissed as a Hitchcock pastiche, Dead Again is far more playful and emotionally earnest than its influences suggest—a feverish genre bender full of theatrical flourishes and bold performances (including a scene-stealing Robin Williams) that plays like a romantic thriller possessed by a detective story, gothic fantasy, and historical melodrama all at once.
Sunday, June 22 at 1:00pm
Thursday, June 26 at 3:30pm
“A Nightmare on Elm Street“
Wes Craven, U.S., 1984, 35mm, 91m
Wes Craven’s genre-defining classic made sleep itself the most perilous realm imaginable. When teens begin dying in their dreams—each claimed by a disfigured man with a glove of knives—the boundary between waking life and unconscious terror erodes. As bodies pile up, bedtime becomes both a threat and an inevitability, and the desperate effort to stay awake only accelerates reality’s collapse. Enter Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), a child murderer turned boogeyman whose spectral presence twists domestic spaces into sites of terror. Bathtubs become sinkholes, beds explode with blood, and body bags whisper names. More than 40 years later Elm Street still feels radical: not just for its surreal inventions and practical effects, but for how bluntly it expresses horror that is personal, political, and inescapably inherited—from your parents, your nightmares, and the systems meant to keep you safe.
Tuesday, June 24 at 6:30pm
“Scissors“
Frank De Felitta, U.S., 1991, 35mm, 105m
A year before Basic Instinct, Sharon Stone delivered one of her most unusual performances in this cult curio of early-’90s pulp cinema. After a violent elevator encounter, the sexually repressed Angela Anderson (Stone) is lured to a mysterious high-rise loft—only to find herself framed for murder. Her attacker lies dead on the bed, a raven screams accusations, and the rooms are filled with warped mementos from her psyche. Based on a story by legendary casting director Joyce Selznick—developed nearly a decade after her death—Scissors gradually sheds its thriller skin to become something altogether stranger: a dream-logic chamber piece of dolls, doubles, and mental breakage.
Tuesday, June 24 at 8:30pm
