Film: FISTS IN THE POCKET

Directed by Marco Bellocchio
(1965) Ah, la famiglia. In a country house outside Piacenza, a blind mother holds all the deeds, while elder brother Augusto, the only one with a job, wants to marry his way out, but it’s hard to do after his fiancée receives an incriminating letter, obviously from sister Giulia, who in turn has to fend off under-the-table footsying from epileptic brother Lou Castel and his barely suppressed rage (think of the title)… Add man-child youngest brother Leone, some murder attempts (two successful), an epileptic fit or two, and Castel’s magnetically hateful performance for a scabrous look at an Italian institution – Bellocchio’s debut. (The villa was borrowed from his own mother.) DCP restoration. Approx. 105 min.

Film: IMPULSO

WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY EMILIO BELMONTE
Rocίo Molina is 32 years old: an avant-garde performance artist/flamenco dancer with a dash of Björk and Pina Bausch thrown in for good measure. Often onstage alone, her work grows from the flamenco tradition but she infuses it with a modern, magnetic passion: crawling through red paint (suggestive of menstrual blood or the aftermath of a violent crime) or moving to a hard-driving rock beat. At times her look is minimal, almost Japanese in its austerity; at other times her performance suggests a sexy, plump fruit, ripe and edible. Emilio Belmonte follows Molina as she rehearses for her Paris debut at the Chaillot National Theater. She is never less than a force of nature.

https://youtu.be/LcPGPtFe9lQ

Dance: Nacera Belaza, "Sur le fil" at Danspace 2018

https://vimeo.com/233122834

From the web site: https://www.bozar.be/en/activities/115675-sur-le-fil

Nacera Belaza lighting design, dance, sound designer, choreography – Aurélie Berland dance – Anne-Sophie Lancelin dance – Christophe Renaud lighting design – Dalila Belaza dance – Gwendal Malard sound

Persisting in a logic of personal introspection which leads her to the Other, in this trio Sur le fil, Nacera Belaza once again experiences shared transcendence with two other female performers and the audience. Since her very first performances her dance, which is both telluric and meditative and which stretches the body to its extremes thus enabling it to go beyond the live experience, shows the way like others might work the earth. She is elsewhere and takes the audience with her along those quiet routes in a contemporary trance.

Film: NYFF 2018

American Dharma (documentary re: Steve Bannon)
Border
A Family Tour
Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes

Dance: Deborah Hay's "Ten" at MoMA 2018

Music: GatherNYC

GatherNYC is a revolutionary weekly concert experience.

Held every Sunday morning in downtown Manhattan, Gather evokes the community and spiritual nourishment of a religious service, but the religion here is music, and all are welcome.

Guests are served exquisite live classical music by New York’s most celebrated artists, artisanal coffee and pastries, a taste of the spoken word, and a brief celebration of silence. The entire experience lasts one hour.

http://subculturenewyork.com/gathernyc/

9/30/18 Attacca Quartet played:
Caroline Shaw: Entr'Acte
Beethoven: String Quartet, Op. 130, 1. Adagio ma non troppo - Allegro
Dvorak: String Quartet No. 13 in G majoe, 2. Adagio ma non troppo
Caroline Shaw: Valencia

Theater: The True (The New Group 2018)

(L to R): Michael McKean, Edie Falco, Peter Scolari in 'The True' by Sharr White, directed by Scott Elliott for The New Group, Pershing Square Signature Center (Michelle Carboni)

THE TRUE

by Sharr White

directed by Scott Elliott

with Austin Cauldwell, Edie Falco, Glenn Fitzgerald, Michael McKean, John Pankow, Peter Scolari, Tracy Shayne 

​

Scenic Design Derek McLane, Costume Design Clint Ramos, Lighting Design Jeff Croiter, Sound Design and Music Composition Rob Milburn & Michael Bodeen

Edie Falco stars as Dorothea “Polly” Noonan, the blunt, profane, decades-long defender of Albany’s Democratic Party machine in Sharr White’s fiery return to The New Group.  When it comes to Polly, politics is only personal, especially now that her hero, “mayor for life” Erastus Corning II (Michael McKean), is battling for party control while at the same time fighting the fiercest primary challenge of his life. The True is an intimate portrait of the bounds of love, loyalty, and female power in the male-dominated world of 1977 patronage politics.

Theater: Machine de Cirque at the New Vic 2018

Film: PRAIRIE TRILOGY

1978-1980 / 120min / DCP

DIRECTOR: JOHN HANSON & ROB NILSSON

John Hanson and Rob Nilsson, co-directors of Cannes Camera d’Or winner Northern Lights and fellow members of San Francisco’s Cine Manifest film collective, collaborated on this remarkable series of documentaries underwritten by the North Dakota Humanities Council and the North Dakota AFL-CIO. In Prairie Fire, 97-year-old ex-organizer and poet Henry Martinson recounts the 1916 birth of the Socialist Nonpartisan League—also the subject of Northern Lights—his narrative accompanied by images shot by Nilsson’s own grandfather, Frithjof Holmboe. Rebel Earth finds Martinson, accompanied by a younger farmer, revisiting the scenes of his life, seeking out the spot of his Divide County homestead. Survivor, finished the year before Martinson’s death, focuses on the biography of its subject, found in a funny and expansive mood. A gorgeously-shot work of documentary-as-historical corrective, which finds hope for the future through excavating a radical past.

Film: Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Dir. Chantal Akerman
1976 Belgium/France
French with English Subtitles
201 minutes

A landmark of feminist art, Chantal Akerman’s minimalist masterpiece is both a monumental and microscopic view of three days in the life of a fastidious Belgian single mother (a sphinx-like Delphine Seyrig) as she goes about her housework, peeling potatoes and washing dishes with the same clinical detachment with which she makes love to the occasional john. And then slowly, almost imperceptibly, things begin to go awry… The rigorous, relentlessly impassive gaze of Babette Mangolte’s camera is transfixing but, in the words of the director, “never voyeuristic”; it’s a uniquely feminine way of seeing made manifest by one of the most sui generis filmmaker-cinematographer partnerships in history.

Film: Summer 1993 - Estiu 1993 - dir. Carla Simón

Carla Simón
2017 Spain
Catalan with English subtitles
97 minutes

In the summer of 1993, following the disappearance of her parents, six-year-old Frida (Laia Artigas) moves from Barcelona to the Catalan countryside with her aunt, uncle, and younger cousin Anna (Paula Robles). Although her new family embraces her, Frida struggles to adjust in an environment that seems mysterious and estranging. Winner of the Best First Feature Award at the 2017 Berlin International Film Festival, Simón’s autobiographical drama is a captivating, emotionally frank reflection on family relationships and childhood loneliness, anchored by moving performances by its two young stars (Laia Artigas, Paula Robles).

Film: Look Up - Guarda in alto - dir. Fulvio Risuleo, Open Roads: New Italian Cinema 2018

Fulvio Risuleo
2017
Italy/France
Italian with English subtitles 90 minutes

While taking a cigarette break on a rooftop in Rome, a young baker (Giacomo Ferrara) notices a curious fowl plummeting from the sky. He crosses from one rooftop to the next to get a closer look, and what he discovers is the beginning of a journey down an urban rabbit hole of incredible situations and bizarre characters (including one played by a delightfully off-kilter Lou Castel). Documentary filmmaker Fulvio Risuleo’s fiction debut is an odd bird indeed, an unpredictable and imaginative twist on the road movie that evokes Alice in Wonderland...

Film: Beautiful Things, dir. Giorgio Ferrero (Open Roads: New Italian Cinema 2018)

Beautiful Things, dir. Giorgio Ferrero

This wildly ambitious documentary follows four men who work in isolation at remote scientific and industrial sites around the world. Like monks, they carry out their daily tasks in silence and solitude, creating products soon to enter the capitalist cycle of production, consumption, and destruction. A ravishingly beautiful audiovisual experience, Giorgio Ferrero’s debut feature is a transfixing work about the origins of consumer society imbued with a musical sense of rhythm (Ferrero is also a composer and sound editor) and a wealth of aesthetic ideas about the way we live now.

http://www.beautifulthings.it/en/



The creators of this film present us with a few 21st century "immensities" --
the immensity of our petroleum production and consumption, the immensity of cargo shipping, the immensity of our technology to test the physical construction of goods, and the immensity of garbage produced by our excessive consumption.

This is presented in a context of worldly immensities: the vastness of Texas oil field lands, the vastness of the oceans, the loneliness of humans in some of these consumer-propelled professions.

The director, with his ear for music and cool handling of topics, allows the viewer to create their own emotional landscape(s) inside the luscious visuals. When we witness the final "music-video version of ourselves" joyfully dancing at the temple of consumerism (the shopping mall), we know that the director and all of the creators of the film are looking at us for our response.  -- dp

Theater: SECRET LIFE OF HUMANS, by David Byrne, 59E59 Brits Off Broadway

photo: David Monteith-Hodge 

SECRET LIFE OF HUMANS By David Byrne

Directed by David Byrne & Kate Stanley

With Richard Delaney, Olivia Hirst, Andy McLeod, Andrew Strafford-Baker, and Stella Blue Taylor

In 1949, Dr. Jacob "Bruno" Bronowski installs a secret, alarmed room in his house. Fifty years later, his grandson and his blind date delve into Bruno's locked room for the first time, unearthing echoes from across six million years of human history. 

Inspired by Yuval Harari's international bestseller, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and the work of the mathematician and intellectual behind hit television series, "The Ascent of Man", Jacob Bronowski.

Film: Stories of Love That Cannot Belong to This World - (Amori che non sanno stare al mondo) - dir. Francesca Comencini

Dir. Francesca Comencini
2017 Italy Italian with English subtitles
92 minutes

Francesca Comencini adapts her own novel for this intelligent, intensely felt romantic comedy. Academics Claudia (Lucia Mascino) and Flavio (Thomas Trabacchi) have been a couple for seven years, but their physically and intellectually passionate relationship seems to have reached an impasse, and neither of them understands why. As a result, Claudia begins a process of reflection and self-exploration to come to terms with Flavio’s love in light of her own insecurities and neuroses. This funny, charming movie reveals the inner work we must do in order to move on with our lives.

Theater: Peace for Mary Frances, The New Group, 2018

PEACE FOR MARY FRANCES
By Lily Thorne
Directed by Lila Neugebauer

Scenic Design Dane Laffrey, Costume Design Jessica Pabst, Lighting Design Tyler Micoleau, Music and Sound Design Daniel Kluger

Mary Frances has lived a good life; she's ninety years old and ready to die. Born to refugees fleeing the Armenian genocide, her last wish is to die peacefully at home surrounded by her family. Her dream collides with reality as three generations of explosive women flood her small New England home to battle for their family’s legacy. Mary Frances must navigate the volatile relationships of the children she raised -- or die trying. Lois Smith stars as a tenacious survivor, struggling to break the bonds that tie her to this life. Directed by Lila Neugebauer, Lily Thorne’s Peace for Mary Frances is a wrenching and caustically funny portrait of an American family in crisis.

Theater: Time’s Journey Through a Room by Toshiki Okada, 2018 NYC

Time’s Journey Through a Room is set one year after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. This intimate, multi-layered play observes how hope can spring up alongside sadness and fear, and change can be realized if we are awake to the present moment.

Written by
Toshiki Okada
https://chelfitsch.net/en/

Translated by
Aya Ogawa

Directed by
Dan Rothenberg

Featuring:
Maho Honda
Yuki Kawahisa
Kensaku Shinohara

Set Design:
Anna Kiraly

Costume Design:
Maiko Matsushima

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiki_Okada :

Okada focuses on connecting to his audience's sense of alienation by separating speech and movement in his plays. Okada's hyperrealistic style is often referred to as "super real Japanese," which draws influence from Oriza Hirata's "quiet theater" movement from the 1980s.
His works are distinguished by the use of fragmented and abbreviated idiosyncratic language in the vernacular of Japanese in their twenties, which is deliberately inarticulate, drawn out, and circular. 
...
Okada believes that his actors should be able to manipulate their consciousness and balance their attention on both their words and movement. The gap between language and the body is the lived experiences each performer gathers from their environment to bring to their performances, and they use the external body to reflect those lived experiences or "images." Okada advises his actors to not be overly attached with the language or the physicality of the performance so that the audience can interpret the "image," themselves. Actors are one single entity to the image; in addition, Okada uses "the performance's disjointed elements of language, movement, design, music, and more" to signify the "image" in his plays.

Theater: Replay, Nicola Wren

REPLAY

Written and performed by Nicola Wren
Directed by George Chilcott
DugOut Theatre

Featuring the voices of Will Brown, Tanya Kraljevic, and Mark Weinman

When a fiercely independent, workaholic police officer receives an old cassette tape with a message from her big brother on it, she is propelled back to her vibrant childhood and forced to confront a tremendous loss.

Replay is an intimate, moving, and life-affirming story about learning to celebrate the past, however painful.

Film: Columbia University Film Festival 2018 (CUFF)

Three Nights and a Goat (Tres Noches y una Cabra)
An unexpected arrival sets off a war between two neighboring families.

Director: Nicolas Becerra
Writer: Ben Gottlieb

Talent Night at Auschwitz: Bunk Five
After he survives a shocking trauma, a 14-year-old boy retreats to his flamboyant imagination, a dark and glittering dreamworld. His fortress becomes a prison as memories refuse to stay buried in the sand.

Writer/Director: Max Rifkind-Barron
Producer: Alex Peace

Del Rio
A young mother separated from her daughter during a border patrol raid on the US/Mexico border struggles to make her way back to her daughter.

Director: Raj Trivedi
Writer: Raj Trivedi

The Bee
McKenzie is preparing for an important spelling bee. Just days before the bee, she grows increasingly insecure about her eyebrows. When her mother won't allow her to get them threaded, McKenzie takes matters into her own hands.

Director: Keenon Nikita
Writer/Producer: Alexandria Ashley

Knights in Newark
Armed with her vivid imagination, a young girl completes a secret project on the roof of her apartment building to protect her family from a dreaded curse brought upon by the Knights in Newark.

Director: Nic Yulo  
Writer/Producer: Christopher Abeel

One Sunny Day
On Ross’ 14th birthday, he wishes for his lifelong dream of watching the sunrise on a beach. But this is a lofty aspiration for Ross, who suffers from xeroderma pigmentosum—a rare genetic disorder that makes his skin intolerable to ultraviolet light.

Writer/Director: Minjae Chang
Writer/Producer: Elliot Zarrabi

Everything's Fine: A Panic Attack in D Major
A musical comedy about a woman at the onset of her quarter-life crisis and her existential journey through the various stages of anxiety in song and dance.        

Writer/Director: Zack Morrison    
Producer: Taylor Ortega    
Cast: Carly Blane, Derek Klena, Tait Rupert, Chelsea Watts, Alyson Reim, Elise Vannerson, Lauren Luciano

Tail End of the Year (年尾巴)
On Chinese New Year Eve, ten-year-old Yang Lan is anxiously waiting for her singer mother to come home. While her big family is celebrating loudly with Mahjong, fireworks, dinner, and laughs, she struggles to reconcile her urge to feel, at least for a brief moment, loved.

Writer/Director: Chieh Yang
Producer: Yu Yen Cheng  

Green
An undocumented Turkish pedicab driver unwittingly draws police attention, endangering his brother, his community, and himself.

Writer/Director: Suzanne Andrews Correa
Writer/Producer: Mustafa Kaymak

Happy Mask
A man suffering from depression is given a mysterious happy mask that allows him to keep up a cheerful appearance. However, is the smile genuine?

Director: Yi Liu      
Writer: Yi Liu, Sarah Abdulla
Producer: Luca Marcovici  

Horizon
To realize her dream of discovering uncharted space, a determined female astronaut must choose to leave her humanity behind.  

Writer/Director: Nic Yulo    
Producer: Mahak Jiwani    

Saturno
After her brother is killed in a drug bust operation, a guilt-stricken Luna begins to see his spirit and struggles to make meaning of his appearances to help him find peace.

Director: Bianca Catbagan
Writer: Chantel Clark

Curandera
Maruja, an Andean woman with mystical powers, works at a household where a little girl never seems to stop acting out her rage. Being able to see the images that haunt the little girl's mind, Maruja decides to try to heal her with the help of a special brew.    

Director: Mauricio Rivera Hoffmann
Writer: Mauricio Rivera Hoffmann
Cast: Magaly Solier, Danaya Sladkov, Katerina D’Onofrio  

Theater: Operation Crucible @ 59E59, Brits Off-Broadway 2018

OPERATION CRUCIBLE

By Kieran Knowles

Directed by Bryony Shanahan

With Salvatore D'Aquila, Kieran Knowles, Christopher McCurry, and James Wallwork

"Sheffield was on fire. It was glowing orange, like hell, like a furnace, like steel."

On the December 12, 1940, during World War II, a single bomb reduced the Marples Hotel, which stood proudly in Fitzalan Square in Sheffield, from seven stories to just 15 feet of rubble. Only one of the ten compartments in the hotel's cellars withstood the blast. Trapped within it were four men.

This is their story, from beginning to end...

"A SMASHING FIRST PLAY BY KIERAN KNOWLES... A CAST OF EXACTLY FOUR, ON A NEAR NAKED STAGE, MANAGED TO SUMMON THE ENORMITY OF THE SHEFFIELD BLITZ."
- Ben Brantley, The New York Times

★★★★ "GORGEOUSLY POETIC...THESE MEN AND THEIR STORIES STAY WITH YOU."
- The Stage