TV on the Radio headlines the second day of the free Afro-Punk Festival in Brooklyn (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Commodore Barry Park
Park Ave., Navy St., Flushing Ave. & North Eliot Pl., Brooklyn
Saturday, August 25, and Sunday, August 26, free, 11:00 am – 9:00 pm
www.afropunkfest.com
www.nycgovparks.org
After the disappointment of last year’s Afro-Punk Festival being canceled at the last minute because of Hurricane Irene, we can’t wait for this year’s free celebration in Commodore Barry Park in Brooklyn. Taking place August 25 & 26, the eighth annual fest features another stellar lineup of rap, hip-hop, R&B, indie, alternative, and hot DJs, with Saturday’s roster including Radkey, the Skins, the Joe Jordan Experiment, Sinkane, Toshi Reagon, Alice Smith, Purple Ferdinand, the Memorials, and Erykah Badu with the Cannabinoids on the Green Stage and Ninjasonik, Oxymorrons, Cerebral Ballzy, Spank Rock, and Das Racist on the Red Stage. On Sunday, the Green Stage will host Inky Jack, Tess, Phony Ppl, Gordon Voidwell, Body Language, Reggie Watts, Toro y Moi, and TV on the Radio, with Flatbush Zombies, Bad Rabbits, Straight Line Stitch, Gym Class Heroes, and Janelle Monae on the Red Stage. Fifteen food trucks will fill out Bites & Beats, with such favorite mobile eateries as Mexicue, Jamaican Dutchy, Bian Dang, Fishing Shrimp, Korilla BBQ, Kelvin Natural Slush, and Van Leeuwen Ice Cream. More than eighty local artisans will be selling their goods at the Spin Thrift Market, while BaJa Ukweli, RIP Josama, Nelson Cekis Rivas, Coby Kennedy, Rob Fokused, See One, and David RIMX Sepulveda will show their stuff on the Art Wall. Amateur skaters from all over the country will participate in the Nike Battle for the Streets, hosted by Alex Corporan and Billy Rohan and judged by Shawn Powers, Danny Supa, Ray Mate, and others, while a dozen custom bikes will fight it out for best in show in Brooklyn Rhapsody. There’s nothing quite like the Afro-Punk Festival, which is doing all it can to make up for last year with one helluva program this weekend.
Inspired by a book written by his wife, Agneta Ulfsäter-Troell, based on part of her family history, Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments captures a pivotal time of change in Sweden. In a small town in 1907, Maria Larsson (Maria Heiskanen) is struggling to keep her growing family together as her brutish oaf of a husband, Sigge (Mikael Persbrandt), regularly comes home drunk, cheats on her, and goes on strike with the rest of the local dockworkers. Maria scrubs floors and sews for extra money, but she dreams of her own independence and freedom. When she enters Mr. Pedersen’s (Jesper Christensen) photography studio one day, she has every intention of selling a camera that she had won in a lottery years before. But Pedersen instead convinces her to try out the camera first, and she is soon documenting the world around her. As Sigge becomes more and more ornery — and more and more dangerous, threatening the future of the family — Maria has discovered a whole new way of looking at things, both literally and figuratively, but still needs to find the inner strength to improve her lot. Seen through the eyes of eldest daughter Maja (first played by Nellie Almgren, then by Callin Öhrvall), Everlasting Moments is a beautiful, bittersweet personal tale told by one of Sweden’s greatest filmmakers. In his late seventies at the time, director Troell (The Emigrants, Hamsun) also cowrote the script with his wife and Niklas Rådström and served as cinematographer with Mischa Gavrjusjov; the film was nominated for a Golden Globe and won five Guldbagge (Golden Beetle) Awards from the Swedish Film Institute, including Best Film, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Special Achievement (composer Matti Bye). Everlasting Moments is screening August 24 at 9:30 as part of the Rubin Museum series “Women and Their Cameras,” in conjunction with the exhibition “Candid,” and will be introduced by photographer Victoria Sambunaris. Admission to the Rubin is free on Friday nights, so you should also check out such other exhibitions as “Illuminated,” “Modernist Art from India,” and the outstanding “Casting the Divine.” The series concludes August 31 with Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, introduced by Sophie Elgort.
Sergei M. Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin might be a seminal silent classic that changed the nature of filmmaking, but it is also still a vastly entertaining movie regardless of its cinematic influence and worldwide importance. Divided into five episodes — Men and Maggots, Drama at the Harbour, A Dead Man Calls for Justice, The Odessa Staircase, and The Rendez-vous with a Squadron — the film tells the based-on-fact story of a mutiny on board a sailing vessel, the result of unfair treatment of the workers, a microcosm of the Russian Revolution of 1905 that later led to the bigger revolution of 1917. The film is like an editing primer, its approach to montage causing its own revolution at the time, particularly during the unforgettable Odessa Steps sequence, in which Eisenstein’s cuts manipulate the action in powerful, emotional ways that were new to cinema. The film also features the best mustaches in the history of movies. Battleship Potemkin is screening on August 23 at 7:30 as part of Anthology Film Archives’ Essential Cinema series, which will also be showing such other Eisenstein films as Strike on August 24, October and Old and New on August 25, and both parts of Ivan the Terrible on August 26.
