Documentary Film: The Force, dir. Peter Nicks

Director

Peter Nicks 

2017
93 minutes

The Force presents a deep look inside the long-troubled Oakland Police Department in California as it struggles to confront federal demands for reform, civil unrest in the wake of the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and layers of inefficiency and corruption. A young police chief, hailed as a reformer, is brought in to complete the turnaround at the very moment the #BlackLivesMatter movement emerges to demand police accountability and racial justice in Oakland and across the nation. Despite growing public distrust, the Oakland Police Department is garnering national attention as a model of police reform. But just as the department is on the verge of a breakthrough, the man charged with turning the department around faces the greatest challenge of his career—one that could not only threaten progress already made, but the very authority of the institution itself.

https://www.filmlinc.org/films/the-force/

Documentary Film: The Good Postman, by Tonislav Hristov

Tonislav Hristov  2016 Bulgarian 80 minutes

A quiet Bulgarian community on the Turkish border finds itself in the middle of a European crisis. This otherwise unremarkable village has become an important loophole for asylum seekers making their way through Europe. But Ivan, the local postman, has a vision. He decides to run for mayor and campaigns to bring life to the aging and increasingly deserted village by welcoming the refugees and their families. While some of his neighbors support the idea, it meets with resistance from others, who want to make sure the border stays shut. With surprising warmth, humor, and humanity, The Good Postman provides valuable insight into the root of this timely and internationally relevant discussion.

“How amazing to find a little forgotten town where all the European Union and US discussions and politics about refugees and immigration are distilled so clearly. The Good Postman has great characters and surreal moments – genuine and moving.”

—Bill van Esveld, senior researcher, Middle East and North Africa Division, Human Rights Watch

Documentary Film: Muhi - Generally Temporary, by Rina Castelnuovo-Hollander and Tamir Elterman

Rina Castelnuovo-Hollander, Tamir Elterman  2017 Arabic, Hebrew 87 minutes

For the past seven years Muhi, a young boy from Gaza, has been trapped in an Israeli hospital. Rushed there in his infancy with a life-threatening immune disorder, he and his doting grandfather, Abu Naim, wound up caught in an immigration limbo that made it impossible for them to leave. With Muhi’s citizenship unclear, and Abu Naim denied a work permit or visa, the pair reside solely within the constraints of the hospital walls. Caught between two states in perpetual war, Muhi is being cared for by the very same people whose government forbids his family to visit, and for him or his grandfather to travel back. Made by two filmmakers from Jerusalem, this documentary lays out the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in human terms, documenting the impact these paradoxical circumstances have on individual lives. Screening followed by discussion with filmmakers and Omar Shakir, Researcher, Middle East and North Africa division, HRW.

“A beautiful, haunting film about a man and a child who find themselves sheltered and also trapped in an absurd, extraterritorial corridor between Israel and Palestine, at war with each other…This story challenges the notion of enemies and shows ordinary human beings trying to be human in a world that has betrayed humanity.”

—Sari Bashi, Israel/Palestine advocacy director, Human Rights Watch

https://www.filmlinc.org/films/muhi-generally-temporary/

Documentary Film: City of Ghosts, dir. Matthew Heineman, HRW Film Festival 2017

City of Ghosts

Matthew Heineman  2017 91 minutes
Post-Screening Discussion

With deeply personal access, this is the untold story of a brave group of citizen journalists forced to live undercover, on the run, and in exile—risking their lives to stand up against one of the most violent movements in the world today. City of Ghosts follows the efforts of anonymous activists in Syria who banded together to form a group named “Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently” (RBSS) after their homeland was taken over by the Islamic State (ISIS) in 2014. Finding safety is no easy task either, as growing anti-refugee sentiment in Europe greets them with anger and rejection and ISIS pledges to target them wherever they go. Terror, trauma, and guilt similarly follow the men at the center of the film, having left loved ones behind to expose the horrors happening in their town. The strength and brotherhood that bonds the men is clear: the film is full of affecting intimacy and humanity in a situation where little else can be found. Screening followed by discussion with filmmaker Matthew Heineman and Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa Executive Director, Human Rights Watch.

“Matthew Heineman’s film shows us the valor of ordinary Syrians putting their lives on the line to document the brutality of ISIS as it rules their city, Raqqa. The film reconnects us to the human toll inflicted by the war in Syria, through the personal journeys of young citizen journalists who are driven from their homes but remain tethered to the country’s struggle for freedom and justice.”

—Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director, Middle East and North Africa Division, Human Rights Watch

https://www.filmlinc.org/films/city-of-ghosts/

Theater: Invincible, by Torben Betts at 59E59

The Original Theatre Company & Ghost Light Theatre Productions presents

INVINCIBLE

By Torben Betts

Directed by Stephen Darcy

with Elizabeth Boag, Emily Bowker, Graeme Brookes, Alastair Whatley

With the recession biting hard, Emily and Oliver have decided to downsize and shift their middle- class London lifestyle to a small town in the north of England.

One night they open their doors and invite next door neighbours, Dawn and Alan into their home. Over the course of a disastrous evening of olives, anchovies, Karl Marx and abstract art; class and culture collide where the consequences are as tragic as they are hilarious.

From one of the most exciting playwrights to emerge since Alan Ayckbourn, Torben Betts, and produced by the award-winning Original Theatre Company comes this "riotously funny" production.

http://www.59e59.org/moreinfo.php?showid=282

Theater: My Eyes Went Dark, by Matthew Wilkinson at 59E59

107group in association with Traverse Theatre and Cusack Projects Ltd presents

MY EYES WENT DARK

By Matthew Wilkinson

Directed by Matthew Wilkinson

With Declan Conlon, Thusitha Jayasundera

Following sold out performances at the Finborough Theatre, London and the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, Matthew Wilkinson's taut, brilliantly acted two hander arrives at 59E59.

Declan Conlon and Thusitha Jayasundera give electrifying performances in a searing modern tragedy about a Russian father driven to revenge after losing his family in a plane crash. Inspired by real events.

http://www.59e59.org/moreinfo.php?showid=284

Theater: Bucket Club presents "Fossils" at 59E59 NYC, 2017

Vanessa's life is science. 

Fact based, evidence led, no nonsense, no monsters. But when a photograph surfaces showing something in Loch Ness, she must embark on a very personal research project. The multi award-winning company Bucket Club create a "magical, melancholy world" (The List) featuring an extinct fish, a missing father, and breath-taking live electronic sound.

'A beautifully hewn story about how we connect to the past, and how our lives are shaped by the no-longer living things we carry with us... A gem of a piece by Bucket Club, a company taking its own very solid place in the world.'  Total Theatre

'An object lesson in how to take a simple character-driven story and by sheer stagecraft to elevate it to another level of experience' - Fest

From the review in the NYT's https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/02/theater/review-a-search-for-dad-and-the-loch-ness-monster-in-fossils.html :

Bucket Club’s style mixes story theater and toy theater with both whimsy and rigor. The set consists of a couple of water tanks up front, along with a lot of plastic dinosaurs. At a mixing board in the back, the actors loop music and their own voices to make a wonderfully weirdo score, composed by the sound designer David Ridley. One instrument they use is a repurposed video game console that should have Léon Theremin giggling in his grave. 

Under Nel Crouch’s direction, the performers manipulate stegosaurus figurines and act, score and narrate with scientific precision and obvious warmth. You probably don’t believe in the Loch Ness monster and you may not believe in “Fossils.” But you should have faith in these actors.

Theater: A Doll's House, Part 2

Written by: Lucas Hnath
Starring: Laurie Metcalf, Chris Cooper, Jayne Houdyshell and Condola Rashad
Directed by: Sam Gold

A Doll's House, Part 2 is described as follows: "In the final scene of Ibsen's 1879 groundbreaking masterwork, Nora Helmer makes the shocking decision to leave her husband and children, and begin a life on her own. This climactic event — when Nora slams the door on everything in her life — instantly propelled world drama into the modern age. In A Doll's House, Part 2, many years have passed since Nora's exit. Now, there's a knock on that same door. Nora has returned. But why? And what will it mean for those she left behind?"

For the review: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/27/theater/a-dolls-house-part-2-review-laurie-metcalf.html

Theater: Iphigenia in Splott at 59E59, 2017

Sherman Theatre presents

IPHIGENIA IN SPLOTT

By Gary Owen
Directed by Rachel O'Riordan
With Sophie Melville
Stumbling down Clifton Street at 11:30am drunk, Effie is the kind of girl you'd avoid eye contact with, silently passing judgement. We think we know her, but we don't know the half of it. Effie's life spirals through a mess of drink, drugs and drama every night, and a hangover worse than death the next day - till one night gives her the chance to be something more. Effie will break your heart.
Inspired by the enduring Greek myth, this urgent new play drives home the high price people pay for society's shortcomings. This critically acclaimed and award-winning new play makes its debut in New York following performances at the National Theatre, London.

Film: Risk, dir. Laura Poitras, 2017

"Laura Poitras, Academy Award winning director of CITIZENFOUR, returns with her most personal and intimate film to date. Filmed over six years, RISK is a complex and volatile character study that collides with a high stakes election year and its controversial aftermath. Cornered in a tiny building for half a decade, Julian Assange is undeterred even as the legal jeopardy he faces threatens to undermine the organization he leads and fracture the movement he inspired. Capturing this story with unprecedented access, Poitras finds herself caught between the motives and contradictions of Assange and his inner circle. In a new world order where a single keystroke can alter history, Risk is a portrait of power, betrayal, truth, and sacrifice."

More: http://www.screendaily.com/festivals/cannes/cannes-laura-poitras-talks-risk/5104101.article
The director says: " Julian, in creating WikiLeaks, understood that the internet would change global power, it would empower states, it would empower citizens in new ways, it would empower journalism.”

Theater: Richard Maxwell’s "Samara," Soho Rep

It is strange when a vision of the horrible can be held as a thing of beauty. 

It is our Greek tragedy. Samara has that quality.

https://www.nycplayers.org/

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/16/theater/samara-review-steve-earle.html

Even the air aches with mystery in Richard Maxwell’s “Samara,” a sense of life as a teasing and unresolvable riddle.  

... 

It’s as if Mr. Maxwell had elicited the unspoken thoughts that throb within a vintage western, with his characters giving voice to the feelings you may experience when watching such entertainments in an abstracted, melancholy mood. This impeccably realized show — whose first-rate creative team includes Palmer Hefferan (sound), Junghyun Georgia Lee (the funky fairy-tale costumes) and Annie-B Parson (choreography) — gives us story and subtext in one breath.

And just so you know, this play does not conclude when its plot comes to its end. There’s a masque-like dance such as traditionally followed Elizabethan performances, and a subsequent postscript that’s both visual and verbal, a contemporary account of traveling through open spaces. Such is this show’s strange magic that you may well feel it’s your own memory that’s speaking.

Theater: Oslo

PLAY by J.T. Rogers
DIRECTED by Bartlett Sher
THE CAST: http://www.lct.org/shows/oslo-broadway/whos-who/

Inspired by the true story of the back-channel talks, unlikely friendships and quiet heroics that led to the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords between the Israelis and Palestinians, OSLO is a deeply personal story set against a complex historical canvas, a story about the individuals behind world history and their all too human ambitions.

Review: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/theater/review-a-byzantine-path-to-middle-east-peace-in-oslo.html?_r=0

Film: New York African Film Festival 2017

Vaya
Akin Omotoso  2016 South Africa 115 minutes
Opening Night • U.S. Premiere • Q&A with Akin Omotoso


Beginning on a train travelling from the coastal province of KwaZulu-Natal to Johannesburg, Vaya focuses on three passengers, strangers to one another bound by interlocking destinies and a shared naïveté. Imagine a South African spin on Amores Perros and you're on the right path.

Accra Power
Sandra Krampelhuber and Andrea Verena Strasser, Austria/Ghana, 2016, 49m
Accra Power focuses on the creative and artistic strategies of young Ghanaians situated at the crossroads of tradition and various belief systems, high technological and economic growth, infrastructural deficits and current energy crisis. Co-presented with Africa-America Institute.

ACCRA POWER Trailer from Sandra Krampelhuber on Vimeo.

Footprints of Pan-Africanism
Shirikiana Gerima  2017 USA 77 minutes
New York Premiere • Q&A with Shirikiana Gerima (Footprints of Pan-Africanism), and Sandra Krampelhuber & Andrea Verena Strasser (Accra Power)

The documentary ­­Footprints of Pan-Africanism revisits the era of Ghana’s emergence into independence, when Africans on the continent and in the diaspora participated in building a liberated territory. Co-presented with Africa-America Institute. Preceded by: Accra Power (Sandra Krampelhuber, 49m).

Theater: THE WHIRLIGIG

By Hamish Linklater
Directed by Scott Elliott
with Noah Bean, Norbert Leo Butz, Jon DeVries, Alex Hurt, Zosia Mamet, Jonny Orsini, Grace Van Patten, Dolly Wells

Mr. Elliott called “The Whirligig” “deeply personal” and said “it’s one of the most glorious plays I’ve read in recent memory.”

Music: TENET performs the music of Machaut

Machaut, the Ars subtilior, and the early 15th century

Concert featuring Machaut’s contribution to composition in the late medieval and highlights his predecessors and those who followed him. Machaut was known as an incredible poet and a stylistic inventor.

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_de_Machaut

Guillaume de Machaut (French: [gijom də maʃo]; sometimes spelled Machault; c. 1300 – April 1377) was a medieval French poet and composer. He is one of the earliest composers on whom significant biographical information is available. According to Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Machaut was "the last great poet who was also a composer". Well into the 15th century, Machaut's poetry was greatly admired and imitated by other poets, including Geoffrey Chaucer.
Machaut composed in a wide range of styles and forms. He is a part of the musical movement known as the ars nova. Machaut helped develop the motet and secular song forms (particularly the lai and the formes fixes: rondeau, virelai and ballade). Machaut wrote the Messe de Nostre Dame, the earliest known complete setting of the Ordinary of the Mass attributable to a single composer.

To listen to more music from this performance series:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyA_b9hznsLbIZjwx0ZOYs4tfx6CJ3nwi

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyA_b9hznsLY9QZ83bTOPY46kqulv1xUt

Theater: Arlington at St. Ann's Warehouse 2017

Charlie Murphy

Hugh O'Conor

Dancer: Oona Doherty

https://arlingtontheplay.com/

A waiting room, inside a tower, like all the others: Isla waits for her number to be called. A young dancer finally understands her fate. And a young man faces his stark decision. In a bleak and terrifying world that “echoes Orwell’s 1984” (The Guardian), Enda Walsh dares to imagine a strange and tender love story.

Written and directed by Enda Walsh
Choreographed by Emma Martin
Starring Charlie Murphy, Hugh O'Conor and Oona Doherty

Review:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/03/theater/enda-walsh-in-nyc-a-double-dose-of-bracing-irish-isolation.html

Theater: Nivelli's War, at New Vic Theater 2017

From Cahoots NI in association with the Lyric Theatre, Belfast

At the end of WWII, Ernst, a young evacuee from Frankfurt, finds himself alone and far away from home when he meets the mysterious Mr. H, a stranger with a trick or two up his sleeve. Fast friends, they set off down a road fraught with danger, hunger and uncertainty to return the young boy to his family. Original music and dreamlike stage effects help tell this dramatic story of two survivors who become each other's ally, protector and confidant. Inspired by a true story, NIVELLI'S WAR is a vivid and moving theatrical account of an incredible journey and magical friendship.

Co-founded by Mc Eneany and Zoe Seaton in 2001, Cahoots NI counts illusion and visual intrigue as essential to their storytelling. They collaborate with theater artists from across Northern Ireland to craft high-quality and inventive theatrical experiences for kids and families, expanding young imaginations and sparking creativity in the process.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/05/nyregion/auschwitz-magician-nivelli-war-play.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share

Film: Another Year

Director: Shengze Zhu
2016 China Chinese (Hubei dialect) with English subtitles
181 minutes

Thirteen meals shared by a family of migrant workers over 14 months. Through this simple premise, Shengze Zhu’s film speaks volumes about life in contemporary China. Shot in leisurely long takes with a static camera amid cramped living quarters, Another Year constantly finds something new and unexpected to focus on, magnifying small physical and psychological details and capturing subtly shifting family dynamics. Zhu uses her subjects as a microcosm for China’s broader socioeconomic realities, but her compassionate commitment to patient observation does justice to their specificity and dignity.

https://www.filmlinc.org/films/another-year/

Film: CHASING TRANE: THE JOHN COLTRANE DOCUMENTARY

CHASING TRANE: THE JOHN COLTRANE DOCUMENTARY is a thought-provoking, uplifting, powerful and passionate film about an outside-the-box thinker whose boundary-shattering music continues to impact and influence people around the world.

This rich, textured and compelling portrait of a remarkable artist reveals the critical events, passions, experiences and challenges that shaped the life of John Coltrane and his revolutionary sounds. It is a story of demons and darkness, of persistence and redemption. But, above all else, it is the incredible journey of a spiritual warrior who found himself, found God, and in the process, created an extraordinary body of work that transcends all barriers of race, religion, age and geography. It is a film for anyone who appreciates the power of music to entertain, inspire and transform.

The beauty, poignancy, energy, pain, joy and inspiration heard in nearly 50 Coltrane recordings from throughout his career brings alive the artist and the times in which he lived. Even those familiar with his music will be able to hear and appreciate the music of John Coltrane in a new and exciting way.

Although Coltrane never participated in any television interviews (and only a handful for radio) during his lifetime, he has an active and vibrant presence in the film through his print interviews. These words—spoken by Academy Award winner Denzel Washington–illuminate what John Coltrane was thinking and feeling at critical moments throughout his life and career.

Country USA
Running Time 99 minutes
Director John Scheinfeld

http://www.ifccenter.com/films/chasing-trane-the-john-coltrane-documentary/

Film: Citizen Jane: Battle for the City

CITIZEN JANE is a timely tale of what can happen when engaged citizens fight the power for the sake of a better world. Arguably no one did more to shape our understanding of the modern American city than Jane Jacobs, the visionary activist and writer who fought to preserve urban communities in the face of destructive development projects. Director Matt Tyranuer (Valentino: The Last Emperor) vividly brings to life Jacobs’ 1960s showdown with ruthless construction kingpin Robert Moses over his plan to raze lower Manhattan to make way for a highway, a dramatic struggle over the very soul of the neighborhood.

Country USA
Year 2017
Running Time 92 minutes
Director Matt Tyranuer

http://www.ifccenter.com/films/citizen-jane-battle-for-the-city/