Before Sunset, Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater

In Before Sunset, Jesse and Celine reconnect in Paris, where he is on a tour promoting his new best-seller based on their night in Vienna nine years earlier. The two are now both involved with other people (unhappily, they each discover), but their conversations and chemistry quickly resume from where they left off. (80 mins., 35mm) Double Play captures the unique friendship between Linklater and the experimental filmmaker James Benning. The film features many uninterrupted conversations between the two (echoing the formal tendencies of both filmmakers) as well as archival footage that illustrates the points of convergence between their respective bodies of work. Benning was the first filmmaker to receive a tribute at Linklater’s Austin Film Society in the early 1990s. (70 mins., DCP)