David  Lynch’s tenth movie—which he has claimed to be his final feature—is also  his most intuitive and defiantly avant-garde film, and one of the most  significant digital works of the new millennium. Featuring an  unforgettably intense performance by Laura Dern, the film was developed  out of Lynch’s early-2000s web-short experiments and a 14-page monologue  written for Dern, only to expand into a dense, nightmarish web of  intrigue, with déjà vu encounters and nefarious doppelgängers appearing  within and beyond a cursed Hollywood studio system. Shot piecemeal over  the course of a year before Lynch self-distributed it in 2006, Inland Empire uses the freedom and harshness of digital video to exploit blown-out,  muddy images and freakish close-ups, while featuring some of the most  haunting original music of his career (by Lynch and Chrysta Bell).  Emotional and absorbing, this cinematic mise-en-âbyme is still as  unclassifiable as it was when first released.

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Acropolis and Mezzanine co-present a special screening of Lynch’s newly  remastered epic on occasion of Melissa Anderson’s monograph on the  film—part of Fireflies Press’s Decadent Editions, which cover essential  works of world cinema from the first decade of the 2000s. Copies of the  book INLAND EMPIRE, including a limited number signed by Anderson, will  be available to purchase after the screening.

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In person: Melissa Anderson

About Mezzanine: Developed and overseen by Micah Gottlieb, Mezzanine is an irregular independent and revival film series based in Los Angeles. Programs  are frequently done in collaboration with local artists, filmmakers,  writers, curators and other luminaries from specific disciplines. For more information visit mezzaninefilm.com