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NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL 2022

Alicia Jo Rabins offers a public kaddish for Bernie Madoff in new film

THIRTY-FIRST ANNUAL NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL
Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center
165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
January 12-25, $12 virtual (all-access $85), $15 in person (all-access $95)
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org
thejewishmuseum.org

The 2022 New York Jewish Film festival goes hybrid this year, with more than two dozen shorts and features exploring Jewish art, history, culture, and politics around the world. Running January 12-25 both at the Walter Reade Theater and online, the thirty-first annual event, a collaboration between Film at Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum, includes in-person introductions and Q&As for many screenings. The opening-night selection is Mano Khalil’s autobiographical Neighbours, about a six-year old Kurdish boy enamored with the last Jewish family in his village as nationalism and anti-Semitism rise up. The centerpiece is Kaveh Nabatian’s Sin La Habana, dealing with cross-cultural relationships in Cuba. And Aurélie Saada’s Rose closes things out, a tale about a suddenly widowed woman, played by French legend Françoise Fabian, who has to reevaluate her future as she approaches her eightieth birthday.

In addition, there will be a special tribute to film scholar, author, archivist, educator, activist, filmmaker, and independent distributor Pearl Bowser, with virtual screenings of Lloyd Reckord’s 1963 short Ten Bob in Winter and Oscar Micheaux’s 1925 classic, Body and Soul, along with a ten-minute November 2021 interview with Bowser at the Jewish Museum reflecting on the 1970 exhibition she curated there, “The Black Film.”

A KADDISH FOR BERNIE MADOFF (Alicia J. Rose, 2021)
Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center
Monday, January 17, 1:00 & 7:00
www.filmlinc.org
www.akaddishforberniemadoff.com

I kicked myself when I missed Alicia Jo Rabins’s one-woman show, A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff, when it debuted at Joe’s Pub in 2012. I had seen her play with the klezmer band Golem and had wanted to see the song cycle live. She released the album in 2014, but now she has collaborated with director and photographer Alicia J. Rose on a delightful, kooky film version, playing at the New York Jewish Film Festival on January 17 at 1:00 and 7:00, with Rose, Rabins, and producer Lara Cuddy at the Walter Reade Theater for postscreening Q&As.

Rose follows Rabins as she becomes endlessly fascinated with the story of Bernie Madoff, the financier who built an elaborate Ponzi scheme over forty years, bilking nearly five thousand clients out of billions of dollars. Rabins, in the midst of an arts residency in a Financial District office tower while earning money by teaching bat mitzvah girls how to chant from the Torah, spoke with numerous people impacted by Madoff’s fraud, from a credit risk officer (her mother’s college roommate), a whistleblower, and an FBI agent to a therapist, a lawyer, and a Buddhist monk.

“I wasn’t just obsessed with Bernie Madoff; I was obsessed with anyone who had a connection to him, and they kept coming, one after the other,” Rabins says in the film. “I interviewed them, went back to my studio, and turned their stories into songs. I was being sucked deeper and deeper into my obsession.”

Each song is its own set piece in a different space, with Rabins dressing up like the person (her wigs are particularly fun while evoking the work of Cindy Sherman) and detailing how they were affected by Madoff’s scheme in such pop tunes as “Due Diligence,” “No Such Thing as a Straight Line,” “Down on the Seventeenth Floor,” “My Grandfather Deserted the Czar’s Army,” and “What Was the Pathology There?” She is occasionally joined by members of her band (drummer David Freeman, cellist Jennifer Kersgaard), meets a couple of yentas by a Palm Beach pool (Robin McAlpine and Judy Silk), participates in synchronized swimming, and considers holding a ritual excommunication. “I hated thinking about Madoff as a Jew. I mean, he’s pretty much the definition of bad for the Jews,” she opines. She’s not the only one to feel that way.

A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff is a great fit for the festival because it is not only about Judaism but also about New York City, shot on location in and around Wall Street, the Lipstick Building in Midtown, the Williamsburg Bridge, and other familiar spots. There is cool animation by Zak Margolis and several Golem songs in the background as Rabins relates her life and art to Madoff’s legacy, incorporating what she refers to as a kabbalistic interconnectedness and a “messianic idea of perfection.” She questions the entire financial system as she explains, “Very few people knew he was just making shit up.” And she admits that “confronting Bernie was confronting myself.” You’re bound to connect with this film in more ways than you might think.

SHORT FILMS ON CREATIVITY: UNTITLED (TANIA PROJECT) (Rima Yamazaki, 2020)
Available virtually January 20-25
www.filmlinc.org
rimayamazaki.com

In the fall of 2017, filmmaker Rima Yamazaki was invited by Ranger Mills, the widower of the late artist Tania Milicevic, to explore her legacy. Yamazaki, who has made previous films about still-life painter Ellen Altfest, on-site painter Rackstraw Downes, photographer James Casebere, and multimedia icon Joan Jonas, had never heard of Tania, but she took on the project, doing a deep dive into her work, which included painting, sculpture, collage, and public installations.

Yamazaki went through Tania’s letters, official documents, press clippings, family photographs, exhibition brochures, and personal writings to form a compelling portrait of the little-known artist, whose large-scale murals can still be seen at the corner of Mercer and Third St. in Manhattan (from 1970) and at 10 Evergreen Ave. in Brooklyn (1967), in addition to a Torah ark she designed for Tribeca Synagogue (1967). Tania was also an early feminist with intriguing statements about life and art — she favored geometric abstract patterns in multiple colors — that Yamazaki types out on the screen.

“I had four husbands . . . but I don’t think I’ve ever been married,” Tania, who was born Tatiana Lewin in Łódź, Poland, in 1920, wrote. “I want to escape gravity and the surfaces that prevent us from feeling our weight — Can we understand what we cannot feel?” she jotted down. And: “I never know what the art world is talking about. . . . I hope they do.”

Yamazaki visits the sites of Tania’s work while also going through her old studio. She uses split-screens to show photos of Tania’s oeuvre, including slides taken by Joel-Peter Witkin, known for his depictions of corpses and grotesque figures. We learn about the Construction Process Environment that Tania and Nasson Daphnis were commissioned to design in 1971 at 1500 Broadway in Times Square as well as her plans for city rooftops, which was left unfinished after her death from cancer in 1982. Yet we never see or hear Tania speak, or see others talk about her. It’s an intensely personal journey for Yamazaki, who shares only select tidbits.

The twenty-five-minute documentary will be available virtually January 20-25 as part of the New York Jewish Film Festival program “Short Films on Creativity,” which also includes Cynthia Madansky’s AA (about poet and photographer Anna Alchuk), Yoav Potash’s Beregovsky #136 (about folklorist Moshe Beregovsky), Asali Echols’s The Violin Upstairs (about the filmmaker’s violin), Eli Zuzovsky’s Mazel Tov (about Adam Weizmann’s wartime bar mitzvah), and Adrienne Gruben’s Lily (about comic-book artist Lily Reneé).

NEW YORK: AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY WITH RIC BURNS AND JAMES SANDERS

Who: Ric Burns, James Sanders
What: An Evening with Ric Burns and James Sanders
Where: National Arts Club Zoom
When: Friday, January 14, free with advance RSVP, 8:00
Why: This past November, documentarian Ric Burns and architect, author, and filmmaker James Sanders released a revised and expanded version of their 1999 book, New York: An Illustrated History (Knopf, $75), a companion volume to PBS’s eight-part, seventeen-hour TV series that ran from 1999 to 2003. On January 14 at 8:00, Burns and Sanders will discuss the third edition of the book in a free, livestreamed National Arts Club discussion over Zoom.

“Especially in the past year — a defining crossroads in the life of the city and the planet — the eyes of much of the world have turned to New York City, which has found itself, yet again, at the epicenter and leading edge of increasingly momentous global experiences,” they write in the new preface. “In the coming years, as the world emerges from the worst of the pandemic, and New Yorkers themselves try to comprehend what has happened to their city and their lives, the example of New York — its history, its perspective, its setbacks, and perhaps above all its capacity for innovation, resilience, and adaptation — will be looked to as a kind of vanguard in which, in many ways, the lineaments of the future of all cities may be discerned.” The third edition goes up to the present day, with two new chapters, 128 new illustrations, and contributions from Adam Gopnik, Suketu Mehta, and Ester Fuchs, in conjunction with new episodes of the series.

CONTEMPORARY DANCE FESTIVAL: JAPAN + EAST ASIA

Japan Society dance festival takes place January 14-15 (photos © Korea National Contemporary Dance Company / © bozzo / © Hsin-Che Lee)

CONTEMPORARY DANCE FESTIVAL
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Friday, January 14, and Saturday, January 15, $30, 7:30
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

Following last year’s cancellation because of the pandemic, Japan Society’s “Contemporary Dance Festival: Japan + East Asia” (previously known as “Contemporary Dance Showcase”) returns for its nineteenth installment, albeit slightly changed because of the omicron surge. Two of the presenting companies will perform in person, while a third will be seen in a prerecorded video because of travel restrictions. The biennial event takes place January 14 and 15, beginning in the lobby at 6:45 with FreeSteps — NiNi, a thirty-minute site-specific solo choreographed by Wei-Chia Su, founder of the Taiwanese troupe HORSE, and performed by Yu-Ting Fang that is open to the first one hundred people, including those without tickets for the rest of the show.

The festival then moves into the theater at 7:30 with a video of A HUM SAN SUI, a duet choreographed and performed by Japanese butoh artists Kentaro Kujirai and Barabbas Okuyama. Subtitled in English Mountains and Rivers from Alpha to Omega, the piece features an electronic score by FUJIIIIIIIIIIITA, set design by T O J U, and costumes by Mika Tominaga and is divided into three chapters: “The Reincarnation Michinoku, the Back Country,” “The Soul of the Dead,” and “Mountains and Rivers in Tokyo.” The screening is followed by the live North American premiere of Choi x Kang Project’s Complement, a playful work with props and live video from Korean creators Choi Min-sun and Kang Jin-an. The evening concludes with the North American premiere of Hao “Demian” Cheng’s Touchdown, in which Hao, the founder of the Taiwanese company Incandescence Dance, incorporates his mathematical background and knowledge of quantum physics into a solo of movement and monologue set on a stage that mimics a school blackboard on which he draws in chalk, with lighting by Ke-Chu Lai and sound by Chao-En Cheng. The Friday night show will be followed by a reception with the artists, while the Saturday performance will be followed by a Q&A.

WHO IS QUEEN? READING GROUP AND DIALOGUES PODCAST

WHO IS QUEEN? READING GROUP
January 12, 19, 25, free with advance RSVP, 6:00
Exhibition continues through February 21 at MoMA
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Donald and Catherine Marron Family Atrium
www.moma.org

“It has been said that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, but what about the people the master treated as tools?” Adam Pendleton writes in his 2017 Black Dada Reader. “That is, the ‘tools’ that were themselves capable of practicing abstraction, those three-fifths? Before the question about tools can be asked, there must already be an understanding about what a tool is and what it is not. . . . One day there are masters and tools, and the next, only people.”

Pendleton’s multimedia installation, Who Is Queen?, on view in MoMA’s Donald and Catherine Marron Family Atrium through February 21, is a unique neighborhood built of various tools, where visitors walk in the middle of three five-story black scaffold towers made of timber, laden with paintings, drawings, text, graffiti-style screenprints, speakers, and a large screen that shows new and archival footage involving the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, Virginia (the city where Pendleton was born in 1984); Resurrection City, a forty-two-day encampment protest on the National Mall in 1968 that was part of the Poor People’s Campaign for civil rights; and So We Moved: A Portrait of Jack Halberstam, a film about author, professor, and gender theorist Jack Halberstam, the latest in a series by Pendleton that follows works about Kyle Abraham, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Lorraine O’Grady, and Yvonne Rainer. Among the text that can be made out on the canvases are such phrases as “But now I am,” “We are not,” “Everything,” and “They will love us all,” accompanied by a sound collage that includes American violinist Hahn Rowe’s “Yellow Smile,” a poem read by Amiri Baraka, excerpts from the 2014 Ferguson solidarity protest in New York City, and music by Jace Clayton, Julius Eastman, Laura Rivers, Frederic Rzewski, Linda and Sonny Sharrock, and Hildegard Westerkamp.

Adam Pendleton’s Who Is Queen? includes sculpture, painting, film, drawing, sound, and text (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The scaffolding resembles fire escape ladders with platforms, but the public is not permitted to walk up and get closer to some of the pieces, which can reach sixty feet high. You might also have trouble making out all the words on the lower works as a parade of museumgoers pose in front of them foor pictures without even reading what they say about politics, race, inequality, gender, and the social contract. Pendleton has previously explored those concepts in such exhibitions as “what a day was this” at Lever House, detailing his manifesto, and his lobby piece As Heavy as Sculpture welcoming visitors to the New Museum’s instantly seminal “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” show.

Adam Pendleton uses black-and-white text and imagery in multimedia MoMA installation (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

“Who Is Queen? is undergirded by a kind of Afro-optimism balanced by an abiding Afro-pessimism,” Pendleton explained in a statement. “It is optimistic in a deeply American sense of the word, and pessimistic along those same lines. That is to say, it is not black or white, and locates each within the other. It articulates the ways in which we simultaneously possess and are possessed by contradictory ideals and ideas.” The articulation of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which has been ten years in the making, expands with a series of livestreamed Zoom reading groups and recorded podcast dialogues that are all free; snippets of the conversations will be added to the overall sound collage in the atrium.

Wednesday, January 12, 6:00
Reading Group with Harmony Holiday and Jasmine Sanders, inspired by Adam Pendleton’s idea of “poetic research” and focusing on Amiri Baraka’s poem “Black Dada Nihilismus” and an interview between Ornette Coleman and Jacques Derrida, “The Other’s Language”

Wednesday, January 19, 6:00
Reading Group with Che Gossett and Jules Gill-Peterson, focusing on a 2011 interview between cultural theorist Lauren Berlant and political philosopher Michael Hardt, “No One Is Sovereign in Love”

Tuesday, January 25, 6:00
Reading Group with Jace Clayton and Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, focusing on “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture” by James A. Snead

Adam Pendleton installation reaches sixty feet high in MoMA atrium (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Dialogues Podcast:

Episode One
Wild: A Conversation with Jack Halberstam and Lynne Tillman

Episode Two
We: A Conversation with Michael Hardt and Joshua Chambers-Letson

Episode Three
Souls: A Conversation with Simone White and Ruby Sales

Episode Four
Heard: A Conversation with Susan Howe and Alexis Pauline Gumbs

FIAF TALKS: DREAMING OF DIOR

Special FIAF program looks at new book and exhibition about Christian Dior

Who: Marie-France Pochna, Matthew Yokobosky
What: Discussion about new book and art exhibition on Christian Dior
Where: FIAF Skyroom and online, 22 East 60th St. between Park & Madison Aves.
When: Thursday, January 13, online or in person, $25, 7:00
Why: “Women have instinctively understood that I dream of making them not only more beautiful but also happier,” fashion revolutionary Christian Dior once said. If you didn’t get tickets for the special scent tour the Brooklyn Museum is hosting on January 19 in conjunction with its exhibition “Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams,” you can still get a behind-the-scenes taste of the popular show with the January 13 FIAF Talk between Marie-France Pochna and Matthew Yokobosky, “Dreaming of Dior,” taking place in person at the French Institute Alliance Française’s Skyroom and online. Pochna is the author of the new book Christian Dior: Destiny: The Authorized Biography (Rizzoli, October 2021, $35), which includes the above quote, while Yokobosky, the senior curator of Fashion and Material Culture at the museum, collaborated with Denver Art Museum curator Florence Müller on the exhibit, which continues in Brooklyn through February 20. Depending on the nature of the omicron variant, the discussion will be followed by a Q&A and book signing.

A NEW YORK SEASON: POWER

Reggie Wilson’s Power explores Black Shakers and spirituality (photo by Christopher Duggan / courtesy Jacob’s Pillow)

POWER
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Harvey Theater at BAM Strong
651 Fulton St. between Ashland & Rockwell Pl.
January 13-15, $25-$55, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org/power

Reggie Wilson and his Fist & Heel Performance Group — “Not Just Your Mama’s Post-Modern Dance Company” — return to their home borough of Brooklyn for the New York City premiere of Power, running January 13-15 at the Harvey Theater at BAM Strong. Held in conjunction with BAM’s annual celebration of MLK Day, Power is an exhilarating seventy-minute piece about freedom and spirituality set in the world of the Shakers, asking the questions “What would the worship of Black Shakers actually have looked like?” and “How were the general, core Shaker tenets of ‘heaven on earth’ realized (social activism, pacifism, gender equality, celibacy, and the confession of sin)?”

Choreographed by Wilson and inspired by Black Shaker Eldress Mother Rebecca Cox Jackson, Shaker foundress Mother Ann Lee, the First Great Awakening (the Evangelical Revival), and American Utopianism and Binary Opposition (as well as Wilson’s 1995 The Littlest Baptist), the work is performed by eight dancers and three vocalists, with costumes by Naoko Nagata and Enver Chakartash and lighting by Jonathan Belcher, featuring songs by the Staple Singers, Bessie Jones & St. Simon’s Island Singers, Meredith Monk, Craig Loftis, Omar Thiam with Jam Begum & Khady Saar, and others. Power was developed at Danspace Project, then Jacob’s Pillow and the nearby Hancock Shaker Village.

“The idea of spirituality, religiosity, being able to be manifested with the body in relationship with other bodies is something really kind of exciting, so when I heard specifically about Mother Rebecca Cox Jackson in Philadelphia having a Black Shaker community, it seemed like there were two worlds that I had never actually put together in my imagination,” Wilson says in the above BAM behind-the-scenes video. “It also seemed parallel to my eternal and ongoing obsession with thinking about Black and Africanist traditions in relationship to white or postmodern performance or religions.”

Power is part of BAM’s program “A New York Season,” which continues with Pam Tanowitz Dance’s Four Quarters and Kyle Abraham’s An Untitled Love in February and SITI Company’s The Medium and Mark Morris’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato in March.

THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS

The set for The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is designed by John Farrell

THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS
New York City Opera / National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene
Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust
Edmond J. Safra Hall, 36 Battery Pl.
January 27 – February 6, $50-$125
855-449-4658
nycopera.com/shows/finzi
nytf.org/finzi-continis

Giorgio Bassani’s semiautobiographical 1962 novel, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, opens ominously enough with a description of the elaborate Finzi-Contini crypt, followed by an evaluation of their home. Bassani writes, “If the tomb of the Finzi-Contini family could be called a ‘horror,’ and smiled at, their house, isolated down there among the mosquitoes and frogs of the Panfilio Canal and the outlets of the sewers, and nicknamed enviously the magna domus, at that, no, not even after fifty years could anyone manage to smile.” The story, about a wealthy Jewish family that is more concerned with playing tennis than noticing the Fascism and anti-Semitism swirling around them in 1930s Italy, was turned into an Oscar-winning film by Italian director Vittorio De Sica starring Dominique Sanda and Helmut Berger.

Rachel Blaustein and Anthony Ciaramitaro star in world premiere of opera adaptation of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (photo © Sarah Shatz)

The Museum of Jewish Heritage will be hosting the world premiere of a new American opera based on the book, running January 27 to February 6 in Edmond J. Safra Hall. A coproduction of New York City Opera and National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, the show features a score by Ricky Ian Gordon (The Grapes of Wrath, the upcoming Intimate Apparel) and libretto by Michael Korie (The Grapes of Wrath, Harvey Milk), direction and choreography by Richard Stafford, and James Lowe conducting. “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis not only continues New York City Opera’s mission to produce new and important works by American composers, it will also continue NYCO’s tradition of showcasing outstanding talent,” NYCO general director Michael Capasso said in a statement. “I am very excited about our cast, which includes many young and emerging artists in leading roles alongside established NYCO stalwarts.” Rachel Blaustein and Brian James Myer star as Micól and Alberto Finzi-Contini, respectively, with Grammy winner Mary Phillips as Mama, Franco Pomponi as Papà, and Anthony Ciaramitaro as Giorgio; the sets are by John Farrell, with costumes by Ildiko Debreczeni and lighting by Susan Roth.

Ildiko Debreczeni designed the costumes for world premiere opera

“This important new work illuminates an important part of Italian Jewish history, and sadly, its themes of discrimination and anti-Semitism still resonate in our world today,” NYTF artistic director Zalmen Mlotek added. [Ed. note: The run has been pushed back a week because of the current omicron surge; the above dates have been adjusted.]