Rigorously Curated
ONGOING FILM FESTIVAL
A festival of films that put the "CULT" in culture!
Rigorously Curated
ONGOING FILM FESTIVAL
A festival of films that put the "CULT" in culture!
About Rigorously Curated
Experience familiar favorites and zeitgeist juggernauts guest curated by Brown faculty, students, and visiting luminaries around a different theme each semester.
Fall 2026
November 10–12, 2026 | 7:00 PM Each Night
Main Hall, The Lindemann Performing Arts Center
144 Angell Street, Providence, RI
Join us this fall for three films that ask what it means to be human in a world where people and machines are becoming increasingly intertwined. For the first time, our Rigorously Curated Film Festival is being screened in the Main Hall of The Lindemann Performing Arts Center, and the Nelson Atwater Lobby will become a movie theater lobby, offering classic cinephile concessions (think popcorn, chocolate-covered raisins, all the good stuff.)
The fall 2026 Sad Robot (Sentience Was a Mistake) festival begins on Tuesday evening with Sleep Dealer (dir. Alex Rivera), which examines the entanglement of technology, transnational labor, and ecological harm. Wednesday brings The Mitchells vs. the Machines (dir. Michael Rianda), an animated film which follows a dysfunctional family battling an AI uprising as its protagonist transitions from high school to college. The landmark 1995 anime film Ghost in the Shell (dir. Mamoru Oshii) concludes the series on Thursday, asking questions about embodiment, cyborg identity, and consciousness.
Tuesday, November 10, 2026 | 7:00 PM
Sleep Dealer (2008), dir. Alex Rivera
Wednesday, November 11, 2026 | 7:00 PM
The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021), dir. Michael Rianda
Get Tickets for The Mitchells vs. the Machines
Thursday, November 12, 2026 | 7:00 PM
Ghost in the Shell (1995), dir. Mamoru Oshii
Previous Festivals
Spring 2026
Brown Climate Week Special Edition
THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW (2004)
Thursday, March 5, 2026 | 7:00 PM
Martinos Auditorium, Granoff Center for the Creative Arts
Introduction by Sydney Skybetter, BAI Director; Matt Guterl, Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion; Kim Cobb, IBES Director; Baylor Fox-Kemper, Professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences
Celebrate Brown's first-ever Climate Week with a terrifyingly inaccurate portrayal of global warming. Because in this version of the apocalypse, a cold front chases Jake Gyllenhaal down a hallway and he outruns it by closing a door.
Co-Sponsored by the Institute at Brown for Environment & Society, and learn more about Brown Climate Week.
Fall 2025
Trash Camp Super Queer What Even Are Human Bodies Vaguely Dancerly Sci-Fi Film Festival
A festival of films that put the "CULT" in culture! This season’s selection of films “rigorously curated” by Sydney Skybetter and guest-curator Raja Feather Kelly includes: Cats, Black Swan, Ex Machina, Hedwig & The Angry Inch, Twilight, Suspiria (1979), Annihilation, and Arrival.
Rigorously Curated: Trash Camp Film Festival Recap
Thank you to everyone who joined us this semester for the TRASHIEST, CAMPIEST, QUEERIEST, MOST DANCERLY SCI-FI FILM FESTIVAL! The films were all very good (debatable!) but what made this first-ever Rigorously Curated truly great was YOU!
Highlights
Students engage with a captivating opening presentation by curators Sydney Skybetter and Raja Feather Kelly during the "Rigorously Curated" film series at the Martinos Auditorium.
Students participate in a swan-themed origami workshop at the Granoff Center prior to the Black Swan screening.
Post-screening conversation with writer, director, and star John Cameron Mitchell and Raja Feather Kelly
In a playful nod to the film Cats, students use custom augmented reality cat filters developed by the Creative Arts and Technology Spaces (CATS).
Brown Arts Institute staff transformed the Martinos Auditorium entryway with refractive transparent streamers to create an immersive atmosphere for the screening of Annihilation.
Curators Sydney Skybetter and Raja Feather Kelly capture a commemorative moment together before one of the "Rigorously Curated" film screenings.
Ahead of the Arrival screening, the BAI team created a retrospective display incorporating thematic elements from all eight previous "Rigorously Curated" film sessions.
About Sydney Skybetter
Sydney Skybetter is a choreographer. Hailed by the Financial Times as “One of the world’s foremost thinkers on the intersection of dance and emerging technologies,” Sydney’s choreography has been performed at such venues as The Kennedy Center and Jacob’s Pillow. He has lectured at SXSW, Yale, Mozilla and the Boston Dynamics AI Institute, and consulted for The National Ballet of Canada, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Hasbro, and The University of Southern California, among others. His work has been supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and a Creative Capital “Wild Futures” Award. He is a Senior Affiliate of metaLAB at Harvard University, a frequent contributor to WIRED and Dance Magazine, the Founder of the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces and Host of the podcast, “Dances with Robots.” Sydney serves as the Director of the Brown Arts Institute, is an Associate Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, and was the first choreographer at Brown University to receive tenure.