Le Festival des 3 Continents, held annually since 1979 in Nantes, France, presents a distinctive selection of new fiction, documentary, and classic art cinema from Africa, Asia, and South America to critics, filmmakers, and scholars from around the world. Devoted to raising awareness of important and interesting production outside the mainstream, F3C was the first festival to endorse, for example, China's Hou Hsiao-hsien and Iran's Abbas Kiarostami. The National Gallery is pleased to join the Freer Gallery of Art and the Embassy of France in saluting this vital forum on its 30th anniversary. Seven Latin American films from past festivals will be shown at the Gallery, African films at the Embassy of France, and Asian films at the Freer Gallery. Special thanks to Antoine Sebire, Tom Vick, and to Jean-Philippe Tessé, programmer for Le Festival des 3 Continents.

The National Gallery's annual showcase of recently preserved and restored films from international archives this year focuses on the work of La Cinémathèque de Toulouse, Anthology Film Archives, UCLA Film and Television Archive, George Eastman House, Library of Congress, Museum of Modern Art, British Film Institute, Cineteca Nazionale, L’Immagine Ritrovata, and La Cinémathèque française, with special thanks to Tim Lanza, Mike Mashon, Natacha Laurent, Antoine Sebire, Kim Tomadjoglou, Caroline Yeager, and Il Cinema Ritrovato, the annual festival in Bologna, Italy, devoted to history, restoration, and rediscovery.

Four rarely shown sound features and one short film by Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889–1968) are presented in recently restored or preserved prints to mark the 120th anniversary of his birth. While the director's dedication to the form and contributions to world cinema are now celebrated, his first sound film Vampyr was a commercial failure, and the war and other material matters interfered with the accomplishment of these later works. Ultimately, however, they became his most remarkable achievements. The Gallery wishes to thank the Danish Film Institute for its cooperation in loaning these films.

Two adaptations of Pierre Louÿs' celebrated 1898 novel La Femme et le Pantin (it was later also filmed by Luis Buñuel and Julian Duvivier) are presented in honor of the National Gallery exhibition The Art of Power: Royal Armor and Portraits from Imperial Spain.

"A creature is a memory that acts." Research scientist Henri Laborit's remark sums up the abiding artistic obsession of Alain Resnais (b. 1922), one of Europe's most thoughtful and thought-provoking filmmakers. Resnais' collaborations with powerful literary figures such as Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet are legendary and unique—he maintains that a script should be conceived apart from any concession to the medium. Yet Resnais is also a superb virtuoso of filmic technique, as this retrospective reveals. Restored prints are made possible through the cooperation of the French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs and support of the French Embassy.

An afternoon with the distinguished documentary filmmaker George C. Stoney (b. 1916) includes a dialogue between Mr. Stoney and Patricia Aufderheide, professor of film and media arts at American University School of Communication.

Three archival films on the British painter and printmaker are featured in association with the exhibition Stanley William Hayter: From Surrealism to Abstraction. The first, A New Way of Gravure (Jess Paley, 1950, 12 minutes), shows the artist at work in Atelier 17; the second, The Other Side of the Mirror (Julian Hayter, 1976, 30 minutes), is a documentary by the artist's son; and the third is Stanley William Hayter: The Artist as Teacher (Ohio State University, 1970, 12 minutes). (54 minutes total)

A new film essay on the American modernist from Lewiston, Maine—whose peripatetic life, personal tragedy, and original style have made him a topic of endless fascination—is discussed by the filmmaker Michael Maglaras. (2008, digital beta, 65 minutes)

The Alloy Orchestra returns to the National Gallery to perform its stirring original score for Vertov's legendary silent masterpiece, an avant-garde portrayal of urban life, work, and leisure in Soviet cities that ultimately advanced the arc of experimental filmmaking. (Dziga Vertov, 1929, 35 mm, silent with live music, 70 minutes)

New Wave forebear and auteur maudit Jean-Pierre Melville accepted an offer to adapt Béatrix Beck's Prix Goncourt-winning novel Léon Morin, prêtre, a book Melville considered "the most accurate picture of the French under the Occupation." A young widow (Emmanuelle Riva), relocated to a provincial town, experiences a spiritual turn toward God and her handsome confessor, the village priest (Jean-Paul Belmondo). "Maximum emotional and metaphysical toughness to inveigle the most skeptical of observers into acknowledging the operation of divine grace"—Chris Petit. (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1961, 35 mm, French with subtitles, 114 minutes)

Media artist Péter Forgács has assembled this unparalleled collage of footage from the Spanish Civil War using the home movies of two talented amateurs, Joan Salvans and Ernesto Diaz Noriega. An extraordinary view of contemporary Spain during the chaotic 1930s, El Perro Negro: Stories from the Spanish Civil War was created for Forgács' ongoing personal chronicles of 20th-century European history. (Péter Forgács, 2005, HD-Cam, 84 minutes)

Guernica combines motifs from Picasso's epic painting with Paul Éluard's poetic text on the besieged Spanish town. (Alain Resnais and Robert Hessens, 1950, 35 mm, 13 minutes)