There’s nothing like watching a movie in theaters. To honor this favorite pastime of ours, we’ve dedicated the month of June to films that take place in cinemas. With documentaries about consummate cinephiles and tight-knight audiences, as well as fiction films about the thrills of moviegoing, our new series pays tribute to the incomparable joy of taking a trip to the movies.

Zoë Lund’s 96-second Hot Ticket was made in response to a prompt from the 1993 International Film Festival Rotterdam asking filmmakers to describe the importance of making films in one scene. Unlike the rest of the short films — most of which were filmed as interviews — later included in Mijke de Jong’s Scenes from Rotterdam to compile filmmakers’ response to the prompt, Hot Ticket stands out as an ingenious work of short-form fiction that bridges Lund’s personal concerns with larger questions about what it means to attend a movie.

In quick succession, Lund introduces herself before a mirror in the bathroom, dilly-dallies over to a ticket booth, and purchases a movie ticket using a syringe. Then, she states: “That which is not yet, but ought to be, is more real than that which merely is.” Her concise statement summarizes her belief in a cinema, and attention to cinema, that does not escape reality but instead challenges the status quo.

A short statement from Lund on cinema:

“A potentially, innately powerful and dangerous weapon… One has the obligation and debt to use it for good.” ZOË LUND

In addition to her work as a writer and actress, Lund was also an activist. A partner and collaborator of radical documentarian Édouard de Laurot, Lund was embedded in a militant milieu that protested Reagan-era conservatism. In an interview with the Danish film publication Balthazar, she remarked that the films she collaborated with Abel Ferrara on, Ms .45 and Bad Lieutenant, were about modern revolutionaries. In that same interview, she spoke about how she called out Jean-Luc Godard’s political deficiencies in Every Man for Himself during a press conference she snuck into at Cannes at the age of 17. For Lund, making movies, watching movies, and writing was both political and personal. Nothing illustrates these simple facts better than her own Hot Ticket.

Zoë Lund (née Tamerlis) was born in New York, NY, in 1962. Her interest in political activism led her to drop out of school at age 16. In 1981, she made her acting debut in Abel Ferrara’s Ms .45. Around the same time, she collaborated with the filmmaker and activist Édouard de Laurot. Later on, she married Robert Lund and wrote the script for Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, as well as the first draft of New Rose Hotel. Throughout her life, she also wrote several poems, short stories, essays, and novels. Éditions Lutanie and Small Press Books recently collaborated to publish some of her poetry; these efforts also led to the recovery and restoration of Hot Ticket. In 1999, Lund died of a heart failure at the age of 37.

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer. Special thanks to Manon Lutanie, Stephanie LaCava, and Robert Lund.