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2 years ago
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Courtesy of FilmRise
A tough yet poignant film, Gaysorn Thavat’s The Justice of Bunny King is the story of a New Zealand mother who battles the country’s social services bureaucracy to regain custody of her children. Bunny (Essie Davis), a funny, resourceful woman who refuses to be beaten down by the system, is the film’s motor—charming and scheming her way through various obstacles, all to fulfill her promise to celebrate her young daughter’s upcoming birthday.
We first see Bunny energetically cleaning windshields in a parking lot for cash with a posse of fellow squeegee operators. Gradually, we learn of her difficult situation, beginning with a visit to a social services office, where she is reminded that in order to get her children out of foster care—or to spend time with them at all—she needs to have a home. Unfortunately, she’s currently living with her sister’s family during a severe housing shortage.
Things get worse when Bunny witnesses a disturbing scene involving her teenaged niece Tonyah (Thomasin McKenzie) and the former is subsequently kicked out of her brother-in-law’s house. As Bunny faces and is defeated by one hurdle after another, with Tonyah as accomplice, she becomes even more determined, and the film spirals into a suspenseful race against time as the stakes get ever higher. Thanks to Sophie Henderson's script, and Thavat’s pacing and tone, we’re never quite sure what will happen next, while Davis’s terrific performance guarantees that we stay [...]
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4 years ago
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This may be the craziest, most emotionally disruptive fall in recent history, but the annual DOC NYC film festival is right on schedule. Like many other events these days, the country’s largest all-documentary fest, now in its 11th year, is completely virtual, making it available nationwide for the first time. Running online from November 11 through 19, and accessible to viewers across the U.S., this year’s edition includes 107 feature-length documentaries among over 200 films and dozens of events. There’s an emphasis on diversity with 57 features (53% of the lineup) directed or co-directed by women and 36 by Black, indigenous and people of color (34% of the feature program).
As always, there’s a lot of docs to choose from, many of
which are world or U.S. premieres. Aside from the films themselves, there will
be conversations with filmmakers taking place daily in “DOC NYC Live” events,
and pre-recorded filmmaker Q&As after film screenings.
Among the festival’s many worthy entries:
Duty Free, directed by Sian-Pierre Regis (making his feature debut), a film about Rebecca Danigelis, Regis’s 70-something mother, who is fired from her hotel housekeeping job. When she is unable to land another position, her son raises money through Kickstarter to fund Rebecca’s bucket list, which includes desires both humble (milk a cow) and expansive (a visit to England to her sister’s grave and reunite with the daughter she gave up). Many themes are woven throughout, in[...]
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5 years ago
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Milkwater
Like many events these days, the 23rd edition of the Brooklyn Film Festival is going virtual. New York City’s longest-running international competition film fest, which runs this year from Friday, May 29, through Sunday, June 7, is offering a full lineup of over 140 films for free. (Viewers need only register.)
Planned many months ago, the theme of this year’s event is “Turning Point,” which takes on a whole new significance given the implications of the current pandemic. In addition to 15 narrative features and 10 documentary features, there are narrative and documentary shorts, experimental films and animation. The festival’s long-running rules: Participating films cannot be older than two years, films are selected from submissions only, all the selected films participate in the competition, and the smallest film can win the top festival award: The Grand Chameleon. In each of the six film categories, a panel of judges will select the Best Film, while the festival will select the Spirit Award, and the audience the Audience Award winners. There are also awards given for Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Composer, Best Style, Best Editor, Best Cinematographer, Best Screenwriting, Best Producer, Best New Director, and Best Brooklyn Project. The festival's full slate of films can be found here.
A few highlights:
The Black Emperor of Broadway, directed by Arthur Egeli and written by Ian Bowater, is part of their Provincetown Trilogy collaboration, three narr[...]
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5 years ago
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Courtesy of Zeitgeist Films in Association with Kino Lorber
Ken Loach, Britain’s filmmaker laureate of socially conscious movies, often depicting working-class families, has created an emotionally wrenching, beautifully realized drama with Sorry We Missed You. What better times than this trying era for Loach, whose clear-eyed focus on the underclasses has driven his work since 1967’s Poor Cow.
He takes on the exploitation and false promises of the gig economy in his latest film, which opens with Ricky (Kris Hitchen), an unemployed father of two from Newcastle, interviewing for a van driver position with a company that's an unholy cross between Amazon and Uber. As a franchisee he’ll receive no wages, no contract, and no regular hours. “Like everything around here, it’s your choice,” says Ricky’s future boss, Maloney (Ross Brewster), regarding the decision to buy a van or rent one from the company. Ricky opts to own, even though he and his wife Abbie (Debbie Honeywood) are already in debt. There’s the dangling carrot of major money to be made, but we can already see that the couple are on a hellishly slippery slope, and not just because this is a Ken Loach movie.
Courtesy of Zeitgeist Films in Association with Kino Lorber
For her part, good-natured Abbie works tirelessly as a home health aide, visiting clients who need to be fed, cleaned and otherwise taken care of. Though the work can be frustrating, grueling and downright disgusting, Loach is careful to show t[...]
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5 years ago
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The 10th Anniversary edition of DOC NYC – America’s largest documentary festival – takes place from November 6 through 15. Among the 300+ films and events are 28 World Premieres, 27 U.S. Premieres, and 59 NYC Premieres. More than 500 doc makers and special guests will be on hand to present their films or participate on panels. This year’s festival is dedicated to the memory of D.A. Pennebaker (Don’t Look Back, Monterrey Pop), a DOC NYC fixture who died this past summer.
As always, there is a multitude of worthy films from all over the world, in myriad styles, about almost every conceivable subject. Individual portraits include the founder of the World Toilet Organization (Lily Zepeda's Mr. Toilet: The World’s #2 Man); an innovative and iconic punk performer (Beth B's Lydia Lynch: The War Is Never Over), and a revered Abstract Expressionist painter (Dennis Scholl's Lifeline: Clyfford Still), plus many others.
Among this year's offerings are docs sure to make you seethe (Matthew O'Connor & Barnaby O’Connor’s The Pickup Game, about the billion-dollar industry fueling the "art" of picking up women, and Deia Schlossberg’s environmental expose The Story of Plastic); docs that will crack you up (Weijun Chen's comedic City Dream, about a Chinese street vendor who clashes with authorities); and docs that will make certain people wildly nostalgic (Scott Crawford's Boy Howdy! The Story of Creem Magazine).
Here are just a few more highlights:
About LoveArchana Atul [...]
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6 years ago
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Mademoiselle Paradis
The 11th edition of the Panorama Europe film festival, co-presented by Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) and the members of European Union National Institutes for Culture (EUNIC), will take place from Friday, May 3, through Sunday, May 19.
The 17 films screening this year, programmed by David Schwartz, MoMI curator-at-large, represent some of the continent’s most intriguing emerging directors, nine of them women. Included are both documentaries and fiction, many of them set in contemporary Europe, reflecting its current state of flux. Though the films tackle weighty subjects such as politics, history, labor, and feminism, their stories focus on the lives of individuals.
In addition to films from cinematically prolific countries such as Germany, Spain and France, there are entries from Malta, Slovakia, and Croatia, among other places that are not as widely represented on screen, providing welcome glimpses into those cultures.
Screenings will take place at the Museum of the Moving Image (36-01 35th Avenue, Astoria) and Bohemian National Hall (321 East 73rd Street, Manhattan).
The festival opens with the U.S. premiere of Mademoiselle Paradis, Barbara Albert’s excellent period drama, starring Romanian actress Maria Dragus as blind, 18th-century pianist Maria-Theresia Paradis. Though visually lush and authentic to its time, this mildly satirical film is also feminist in its depiction of a determined young [...]
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6 years ago
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A truly original work from Icelandic director Benedikt Erlingsson, Woman at War is a whimsical action film about a middle-aged eco-terrorist fighting local industrialization. Starring the wonderful Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir as Halla, an upbeat choir director who secretly dismantles power lines in her spare time, Woman at War is also a musical of sorts, with both an Icelandic combo and a Ukrainian vocal trio punctuating the action. It’s doubtful that the issue of environmental conservation has ever been handled in such a delightful manner.
Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures
When we first meet Halla, she’s busily cutting down power lines that mar the gorgeous, almost otherworldly-seeming Icelandic countryside, as musicians playing percussive tuba, organ and drums look on. When she tries to escape a surveillance helicopter, Halla comes upon a gruff but sympathetic local farmer (Jóhann Sigurðarson), who agrees to help her. Apparently this is not the first time she’s sabotaged the power project.
Later, when Halla shows up for choir practice, one of its members takes her aside and begs her to stop her activities. Baldvin (Jörundur Ragnarsson), the only one who knows her secret mission, is a government minister who initially supported her, but now thinks she’s gone too far. Not only has China gotten cold feet about doing business in Iceland, but, the U.S. has launched a satellite to monitor the area. Meanwhile a young Spanish-speaking foreigner (Juan Camillo Roman Estrada) is t[...]
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6 years ago
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Federico Guzmán (AKA Fiko) has become an iconic figure in Western Sahara, utilizing the platform art offers as a vehicle to promote peace and social change to the Saharawi people. Guzmán treads between a soldier of solidarity and curator of cultures emphasizing on gatherings, art, and experiences that will induce an exchange of ideas and collaborations between artists and wherever his projects realize, and the local community.
For twelve years Guzmán has co-organized ARTifariti The Arts and Human Rights Encounters of Western Sahara in the African desert "as a way to explain the circumstances of the Saharawi people " creating a "weapon of visibility" to a story not globally known by many nor should be hidden from the public eye: and with projects such as ARTifariti one sees the opportunity to include foreign narratives and artists distanced by unfavorable political circumstances into the art world”.
The selected artists demonstrate couth in human rights and its relevance within the arts, but more importantly "are confronted a reality" that is life-changing from personal to professional, receiving a surreal cultural exchange with fresh perspectives and resilient power from the Sahawari people (especially from the matriarch figure whose role is to lead the community).
During 2018's visitation in the Sahara, the artists delve into intense creative processes of art-making, finally exhibiting and documenting the work(s). Collaborations are accessible on the list of act[...]
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6 years ago
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Art for Progress (AFP) is thrilled and honored to present a night of empowering original music, created for a special evening to benefit AFP’s art education programs. Music for Progress will take place on Friday November 30th at NYC’s quintessential listening room, Rockwood Music Hall (stage 2) and feature psychedelic world-jam group Toubab Krewe, Brooklyn power trio Bad Faces, and 3Bridge Records and Flemcy Music recording artist and DJ, Gatto. Get your tickets [HERE]
Blending American and West African influences into a sound all its own, Toubab Krewe has set "a new standard for fusions of rock 'n' roll and West African music" (Afro pop Worldwide). Since forming in 2005, the magnetic Asheville, NC based quintet has won a diverse and devoted following while performing everywhere from Bonnaroo to the Festival of the Desert in Essakane, Mali. Mixing American rock with the musical traditions the band fell in love with on their travels to Africa, their sound also nods to surf and zydeco. This fusion of sound is what the Village Voice describes as "a futuristic, psychedelic, neo-griot frenzy" and Honest Tune hails as "one of the most innovative voices in music today."
Bad Faces are a Brooklyn power trio as deeply rooted in American traditional music as they are reaching for new stratospheric heights in their improvisational explorations. Led by singer/guitarist Barry Komitor, a fixture in New York's vibrant folk and bluegrass scene, the group has amassed a strong local foll[...]
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6 years ago
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This summer, thanks to a grant from the Matisse Foundation, I had the great pleasure of teaching the music portion of the Art for Progress Summer Arts & Music Program for high school students and young adults interested in pursuing creative careers. Consisting of series of four workshops held on Sunday mornings during July and August at the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural and Educational Center, the program was designed to explore the many real-world considerations inherent to careers in the arts and music. The focus was to look at some of the dynamics at play in the music and art worlds, and to provide support in the development of specific skills in the various media. Each week, a professional working in the arts was invited as a guest speaker and to host a short discussion. The speakers were happy to answer questions and were very informative and animated as they enlightened the group about the day-to-day life of a working artist. Everyone seemed to have a great time and to get a better sense of how to approach their work professionally going forward. On a personal note…I had the fantastic opportunity to study visual art in Paris while in college, and later jazz theory and improvisation, so it was auspicious to me to be able to work with the foundation representing French painter Henri Matisse, a personal favorite and early influence. Matisse was known to love American jazz music, and that added to my special sense of personal investment in this project. We at AFP are[...]
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6 years ago
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One of the things I used to detest so much as a child was watching the Spanish actress Charo shaking her ass and screaming out “cuchi, cuchi!" on stage. Her famous act would make my blood boil. Please, Charo, forgive me (for we are both Spanish, Latin women) but you're capitalizing on broken English and the need to be sexy all the time, and I wonder if you helped shape the brand, image for Latin women.
There is more to my personal history with Charo's legacy than growing up watching her on television: my paternal grandmother was a performer too and there was a crossing of paths between these influential Latin women. Seeing such a beautiful Latin woman depicted in Charo’s characteristic way was beyond me. I questioned this image constantly, wondering about the advantages of being famously sexy and vulnerable. As opposed to all the women in my family who were immigrants and championed higher education. They worked as professionals, speaking fluent English, and every single one of them was extraordinarily attractive.
On one hand, I saw Charo as a brilliant entrepreneur. She seized the opportunity to commoditize a stereotype and hence became a star with a net worth of twelve billion dollars. In a society where money is synonymous with power, that is a ton of power.
In contrast to Charo's sexy Latina character, Panamanian artist Sandra Eleta tapped into another Latin female stereotype by photographing housemaids, albeit, with a much different attitude depicted in her su[...]
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7 years ago
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It was the industrial revolution that first attempted to record sound “as a medium for preservation," activating the phenomena of noise as an integral source when documenting history. Thomas Edison received notoriety for the phonograph in 1877, but it was really Edouard-Lèon Scott de Martinsville who invented the phonautograph in 1857, the first recording device. The device was specifically created to study frequency found in sounds, an intention much different from the phonograph invented by Edison which was to play and “reproduce the recorded sound… originally recorded onto a tinfoil”. As per historical reference ( author unknown ), “The phonograph revolutionized the art of music. Performances were recorded and people could listen to them at their leisure. It also made music and communication more public. The invention signaled the birth of a new form of entertainment and an entirely new field of business that fed the demand for the new invention, the music industry”- hence both inventions put an end to the masses' naiveté to the sense of hearing, and introduced the start of audio’s sensational future possibilities.
When we fast forward through the history of music and sound, we could say that the underground rave music scene (which famously erupted somewhere in between Chicago and the UK during the late 80’s), had a lot of thanking to give the founding fathers of sound, more so Edison’s phonograph. It was the phonograph that gathered groups of people before a speake[...]
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