Theater: Sakina's Restaurant (2018, Minetta Lane Theater, NYC)

Photo Credit: Walter McBride

A presentation of Wheelhouse Theater Company
Actor, writer, and former correspondent for The Daily Show Aasif Mandvi's Sakina's Restaurant is a vibrant, funny, and heartwarming one-man show that centers on an Indian immigrant who comes to New York to work at a restaurant and live the American dream. Sakina's Restaurant is written and performed by Mandvi, who brings his acclaimed performance back to the New York stage 20 years after its Obie Award-winning debut.

Review: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/14/theater/sakinas-restaurant-review-aasif-mandvi.html

Theater: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE

Written by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Directed by Jeffrey Wise
October 18 - November 29, 2018

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE takes a searing and darkly comedic look at American culture through the brilliantly perverse lens of Kurt Vonnegut. After being presumed dead for eight years, respected war veteran and big game hunter, Harold Ryan, returns home and brings with him an old way of thinking, celebrating a Hemingway-esque machismo and American exceptionalism. Harold soon discovers that the society he returns to has made attempts to progress into a more modern, enlightened cultural narrative. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE is a dynamic and often hilarious meditation on toxic masculinity and a capitalistic America's failed attempts at progress cloaked in honor and morality. Simply put, and as the first few lines of the play state, this is a play about men who enjoy killing, and those who don't.

http://www.wheelhousetheater.org/

Theater: The Ferryman

Northern Ireland, 1981.
The Carney farmhouse is a hive of activity with preparations for the annual harvest. A day of hard work on the land and a traditional night of feasting and celebrations lie ahead. But this year they will be interrupted by a visitor.

Paddy Considine, as Quinn Carney, presiding over a family gathering shadowed by tragedy in Jez Butterworth’s sprawling play. Credit: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/21/theater/the-ferryman-review-broadway-jez-butterworth.html

Film: A Bold Peace

Director: Matthew Eddy

Costa Rica disbanded its military 70 years ago and directed its resources toward education, health, and the environment. Since then it has earned the number one spot in the Happy Planet Index, a ranking of countries based on measures of environmental protection and the happiness and health of its citizens. Surrounded by war elsewhere in the Americas, how has the government of Costa Rica managed to put the happiness of its people first?

Mead Film Festival 2018

Film: The Sign for Love

Directors: Elad Cohen, Iris Ben Moshe

Director Elad Cohen grew up deaf and gay in a hearing family in Israel. He never felt at home, especially after his mother’s death. Fearing he won’t find a partner in their small deaf community, Cohen decides to have a baby—a hearing infant—with his best friend, Yaeli, who is also deaf. They raise the baby together, revealing the challenges of parenting and the ways that a child can repair a family.

Mead Film Festival 2018

Film: Nothing is Forgiven

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zineb_El_Rhazoui?wprov=sfti1

Directors: Vincent Coen and Guillaume Vandenberghe

How much would you sacrifice to fight for your freedom of expression? Meet Zineb El Rhazoui, a Moroccan journalist and activist living in Paris, and follow her journey before, during, and after the attacks on the famous satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, where she worked as a writer. Her story provides both a radical and layered perspective on religious expression and its representation.

Mead Film Festival 2018

Film: The Art of Moving

Director: Liliana Marinho de Sousa

Can the Syrian creators of Daya Al-Taseh, a satirical daily web series that mocks ISIS recruitment videos, maintain their creative output while their world crumbles? In the face of violent threats, political upheaval, and ramped-up economic pressures, this young group of comedian-activists move from country to country struggling to keep their show—and themselves—alive and safe.

Mead Film Festival 2018

Film: Genesis 2.0

Director: Christian Frei

What if scientists brought the woolly mammoth back from extinction? Straight out of speculative fiction, follow two brothers as they search for the key to a bioengineered future: woolly mammoth tusks. One, a scientific researcher, pursues his Jurassic Park dream of bringing the extinct mammal back to life while his brother searches for DNA-rich tusks in the frozen earth of the New Siberian Islands.

Mead Film Festival 2018

Film: Eastern Memories

Directors: Niklas Kullström, Martti Kaartinen

From the Mongolian steppes to the diplomatic circles of Tokyo, Asia has seen rapid economic and social transformation in the last century. Narration drawn from the writings of a late-19th-century linguist create a provocative sense of contrast against scenes of contemporary life.

“In the time span of over a hundred years Mongolians have gone through three completely different kinds of societal systems, that each have nullified the previous one. The ardor that remains is deeply rooted in their immutable surroundings, binding together generation after generations.”

– Martti Kaartinen | Director, Eastern Memories

Mead Film Festival 2018

Film: Stolen Daughters: Kidnapped by Boko Haram

Director: Gemma Atwal

Meet the young women whose kidnapping by Boko Haram, a militant terrorist organization based in northeastern Nigeria, drew global attention and inspired the social media campaign #BringBackOurGirls. Through exclusive interviews, see how girls who managed to escape are adapting to life after their imprisonment as thousands of women and girls remain captives of Boko Haram today.

Mead Film Festival 2018

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 

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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