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 

​

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.