Second Run Presents

A Personal Map of Great Cinema

Have you ever gone in search of a film you’d only ever heard spoken of in legendary terms, only to find that there was simply nowhere to see it? It was precisely out of that kind of cinephile frustration – and out of boundless passion – that Second Run was born. Today, we are proud to announce a section created especially for Timeless Film Festival Warsaw by the man who has brought hundreds of forgotten masterpieces back into circulation: Mehelli Modi.

A Passion Turned into a Mission

Mehelli Modi founded Second Run in 2005, leaving behind a career in the music industry to return to his first love: cinema. Since then, the company has become synonymous with quality and curatorial boldness, championing films from Central and Eastern Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

For the 3rd Timeless Film Festival Warsaw, however, Mehelli Modi is not simply bringing a selection of standout titles from the Second Run catalogue. He is bringing films that have become personal touchstones – works that left a profound impression on him, films he has never forgotten since first seeing them and now wants to share with festival audiences. This section is an invitation to discover films that inspire, provoke and linger in the mind.

Here are five exceptional titles chosen personally by Mehelli Modi:

• Merry-Go-Round (Körhinta, dir. Zoltán Fábri, Hungary, 1956) – a classic of Hungarian cinema: visually dazzling and charged with emotion, a story of love set against the strict codes of rural community life.
• Diamonds of the Night (Démanty noci, dir. Jan Němec, Czechoslovakia, 1964) – one of the most intense debut features of the Czech New Wave: a hallucinatory, almost visceral account of two boys escaping from a transport bound for a concentration camp.
• Thampu (The Circus Tent) (Thamp̄, dir. Govindan Aravindan, India, 1978) – a rarely screened gem of Indian cinema: a poetic black-and-white meditation on a travelling circus arriving in a small village, where the sacred meets the profane.
• A Moment of Innocence (Noon o goldoon, dir. Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Iran, France, 1996) – a masterpiece of Iranian cinema in which the director, years later, meets the man he wounded in his youth. The line between reenactment and reality gradually dissolves in the name of humanism.
• Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Bu San, dir. Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan, 2003) – a hypnotic, almost wordless tribute to the passing of the great movie palaces: a farewell to a mythical cinema that becomes, in itself, an act of pure screen magic.

The section is curated by Mehelli Modi, founder of the distribution company Second Run.