Before Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another hits our cinema, we believe it’s high time for a retrospective on the director’s past efforts, stretching back almost three decades. The versatile San Fernando Valley native predominantly sets his stories in California (besides two Daniel Day Lewis accompanied trips to Texas and the UK), writing what he knows and initially shooting what he learned from his heroes including Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme. PTA’s work always revolves around the writing and the performances, and while he worked with the absolute greatest (character) actors – Day Lewis, Hoffman, Moore, Phoenix – Anderson often finds the perfect fit in more unconventional picks like Wahlberg, Sandler and even the Haim sisters. His oeuvre reads like a greatest hits chart and contains a few of our favourite films of the past thirty years, presented here in total and with no less than four 35mm prints of his early work. On September 3rd KINO’s resident visual artist Baris Azman will give a reading prior to the screening of Punch-Drunk Love. It was an out of left-field decision to cast Adam Sandler as the lead for a kind-of romantic movie, that was kind-of based on real events and kind-of was different than anything Paul Thomas Anderson had done before. A real demarcation from his first three films, this film gave a glimpse of an artist truly came in to his own. Azman will dive into the filmography of Paul Thomas Anderson. As well as the film’s many inspirations including musicals, the visual arts and dissonant music.