Hans Haacke’s 2014 Gift Horse is starting point for New Museum panel discussion (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Thursday, January 16, $10, 7:00
Exhibition continues through January 26
212-219-1222 www.newmuseum.org
Debate has raged across the country over public statues honoring figures who are now considered by many to be controversial, from Civil War leaders to doctors and presidents. Here in New York, there have been calls to take down James Earle Fraser’s statue of Theodore Roosevelt because of claims that Roosevelt was a white supremacist, and She Built NYC, organized to erect statues of pioneering women, refused to include Mother Frances Cabrini in their final list of subjects even though she garnered the most nominations in a public vote. (Governor Cuomo intervened; a statue of the saint will go up in Battery Park’s South Cove.) On January 16, the New Museum is hosting the panel discussion “The Plinth and Monumentality,” which will examine monument-making from multiple angles. The conversation, featuring artist and curator Kendal Henry of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, artist and Hunter College associate professor Paul Ramírez Jonas (whose “Half-Truths” ran at the museum last year), architect, designer, and educator J. Meejin Yoon, and moderator Andrew An Westover of the New Museum, is being held in conjunction with the museum’s current exhibition “Hans Haacke: All Connected,” a retrospective of the eighty-three-year-old German-born, New York-based artist who has been exploring the sociopolitical links between art and commerce, class, corporations, and the environment through photography, sculpture, and installation for more than half a century.
The centerpiece of the exhibit is Haacke’s 2014 Gift Horse, a large-scale sculpture of the skeleton of a horse mounted on a platform, taking up much of the fourth floor gallery space. An electronic bow around its frontal thighbone transmits a live digital printout of the FTSE 100 ticker of the New York Stock Exchange. Also on view is DER BEVÖLKERUNG [TO THE POPULATION], a provocative public project Haacke proposed for the Bundestag. In a catalog interview, Haacke notes, “I consider how the public might understand a work and whether it would, indeed, promote openness and democratic values or — to put it in French revolutionary terms — liberté, égalité, fraternité.”
Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) and Eli (Lina Leandersson) discover a different kind of love in Let the Right One In
LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (LÅT DEN RÄTTE KOMMA IN) (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)
Nitehawk Cinema Prospect Park
188 Prospect Park West
Tuesday, January 21, $95, 7:15 nitehawkcinema.com
If you have a taste for the ghoulish, you’re likely to get sucked in by Nitehawk’s latest Film Feast, in which a multicourse meal accompanies a movie for the cinematic gourmand. On January 21, Nitehawk’s Prospect Park branch will be serving up a delicious gem, the original Swedish thriller Let the Right One In, a chilling yet tender coming-of-age story about friendship and the meaning of family. In a snow-covered Stockholm suburb, twelve-year-old Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) is severely bullied by Conny (Patrik Rydmark), Andreas (Johan Sömnes), and Martin (Mikael Erhardsson). The frail, blond Oskar dreams of getting even, but he always backs down. But then he meets the dark-haired, somewhat feral Eli (Lina Leandersson, dubbed by Elif Ceylan), who has moved in next door in their apartment complex. While Oskar lives with his divorced mother (Karin Bergquist) — his father (Henrik Dahl) has moved out to the country — Eli lives with Håkan (Per Ragnar), an older father figure who goes out to gather what Eli needs to survive: blood. But the aging Håkan begins encountering difficulties, forcing Eli to go out and hunt down her own food. As people start to go missing in the small community, Eli and Oskar’s friendship begins to blossom, two outsiders coming to terms with who they are. But when Oskar suddenly strikes back, Conny’s older brother, Jimmy (Rasmus Luthander), gets involved, and the steaks, er, stakes, get a whole lot higher.
Based on the 2004 novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In is a gripping horror film that is one of the best of the young century. By making the protagonists children with common adolescent problems, Lindqvist, who wrote the screenplay, and director Tomas Alfredson (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Snowman) create a more realistic setting, so the scares are that much more intense. Hedebrant and Leandersson have a magical chemistry, their tentativeness and fears intoxicating. They exist in a world that is meant only for them; all of the adults are essentially peripheral, whether parents, teachers, or community members wondering what is going on, and the other kids are merely in their way. And it’s all about that very moment; they both might be twelve, but Eli is going to be that age forever while Oskar gets older.
The atmosphere is thick and tense throughout, elevated by Hoyte van Hoytema’s inventive cinematography and Johan Söderqvist’s dramatic score, performed by the Slovak National Symphony Orchestra. Despite some very memorable scenes involving shocking violence, at its heart Let the Right One In is a sweetly innocent love story, albeit with a few unusual complications. Matt Reeves directed a 2010 English-language remake starring Kodi Smit-McPhee and Chloë Grace Moretz, and the National Theatre of Scotland staged a terrific theatrical adaptation that played at St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2015, but there’s still nothing like the original, a visually stunning and psychologically adept fresh new take on the vampire legend.
The five-course feast, with each dish and cocktail named after a part of the film, consists of “”A Little About Drugs” (black cherry, lemon infused Absolut, clarified lemon juice, black shaved ice) with “Good Job Pig” (caraway scented pork belly, pickled carrots, rosemary parsnip purée); “You Smell Funny” (lingonberry, Swedish punsch, allspice, cinnamon, Absolut, Amaro Pasubio, violets, Laphroaig 10 Yr.) with “the Sled Drag” (blodpudding, celery root, Napa cabbage, lingonberry); “Oskar, Do You Like Me?” (acid adjusted apple juice, dill infused Absolut, pine, Salers, pickled apple) with “I’m Trapped” (Swedish meatballs with pour it yourself Absolut gravy); “Virginia!” (Absolut, banana, cream, walnut, caraway, served ice cold) with “Blood Brothers” (rye bröd, gravlax, apple, dill crème fraîche, beet reduction splatter), and “Thank You” (frozen chocolate and espresso martini, white shaved ice) with a “Bloody Kiss” (Hallongrotta, Absolut Pear whipped cream, powdered sugar). Smaklig måltid!
The life and times of Aulcie Perry on and off the court are documented in New York Jewish Film Festival opener
AULCIE (Dani Menkin, 2019)
Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center
165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
Thursday, January 16, 8:30
Festival runs January 15-28
212-875-5050 www.filmlinc.org thejewishmuseum.org
Israeli director Dani Menkin follows up his 2016 documentary, On the Map, about Maccabi Elite Tel Aviv’s unlikely victory in the 1976-77 European Champions Cup, with an inside look into the life of one of its stars in Aulcie, the opening night selection of the New York Jewish Film Festival. After being the last man cut from the New York Knicks in 1976, Newark native Aulcie Perry was recruited to play for Maccabi in Israel, where the 6-10 black man — an unusual sight in the Land of Milk and Honey — quickly became a superstar, helping the team to championships, falling in love with top model Tami Ben Ami, and hanging out in hot clubs, living the high life. But it all came tumbling down in a haze of drugs, and Menkin traces Perry’s attempt to put it all back together, primarily by finding the daughter he has not seen since she was a baby.
The film is set up as Perry’s confession to that daughter, Cierra Musungay. “I always knew one thing: that I wanted to tell you my story, the way it is, with the good and the bad,” he says at the beginning. “So where do I start? People say you start at the beginning. But I wanted to start at the end, or when I thought the end was coming.” He was inspired to track her down after facing a serious health scare. “I think, that only when I almost died, I started to really live. And that’s when I wanted to find you and, maybe in some ways, find myself,” he adds.
Top model Tami Ben Ami and basketball superstar Aulcie Perry are shown as the hot couple in Aulcie
Menkin goes back and forth between archival footage, animation by Assaf Zellner, and interviews with Aulcie’s sister Bernadine Lewis, his friends Wayne Tyre and Roy Young, his ex-girlfriend Juanita Jackson, his son Aulcie Perry Jr., and many men from his Maccabi family, including former teammates Earl Williams and Tal Brody, team president Shimon Mizrahi, co-owner Oudi Recanati, coach Zvi Sherf, and manager Shamluk Maharovsky, who was like a father to him. “In Israel, there wasn’t that much prejudice against black players, and he felt at home here,” NBA commentator Simmy Reguer says. “Aulcie came in like a blessing from the gods,” fellow Jersey native and team captain Brody recalls. And Sports Illustrated writer Alexander Wolff explains, “At Maccabi Tel Aviv, Aulcie Perry was Michael Jordan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar rolled into one.”
Now sixty-nine, Perry is honest and forthright thorughout, admitting his failings and wanting to make up for lost time. He makes no excuses for his precipitous fall, and he’s not seeking sympathy. He’s a man who made mistakes and wants a chance to set things right. Aulcie is a cautionary tale of redemption with heart and soul, focusing on the need to be part of a family, no matter how different and unexpected it may be. Aulcie is having its New York City premiere January 16 at 8:30 at the Walter Reade Theater, with Perry, Menkin, and producer Nancy Spielberg (brother of Steven) participating in a Q&A. Aulcie might be the opening selection of the New York Jewish Film Festival, but the twenty-ninth annual fest actually kicks off a day earlier with Picture of His Life, a documentary codirected by Menkin and Yonatan Nir about Yom Kippur War veteran and underwater photographer Amos Nachoum, showing on January 15 at 1:00, with Menkin, Spielberg, and Nachoum present. A joint presentation of Film at Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum, the festival continues through January 28 with such other works as Marceline Loridan-Ivens’s centerpiece The Birch Tree Meadow, starring Anouk Aimée and August Diehl, a fiftieth anniversary presentation of Vittorio De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and Dror Zahavi’s closing night selection, Crescendo, about an attempt to establish an Israeli-Palestinian youth orchestra.
London-born comedian and disability activist Jess Thom returns to the BRIC House Ballroom with a spectacular sixty-minute presentation, a brilliantly conceived evening that reimagines the theatrical experience, for both actor and audience. In May 2016, Thom, who has Tourette Syndrome, held the New York premiere of her Edinburgh Fringe hit Backstage in Biscuit Land at the Brooklyn arts institution, delivering a “one-woman show for two” that humorously looks at her life and how she deals with Tourette’s, a neurological disorder that causes her to uncontrollably shout out words and phrases, such as “biscuit,” “hedgehog,” “sausage,” “I love cats,” and “Fuck a goat.” (Only ten percent of those with Tourette’s have copralalia, involving foul language.) She also uses a wheelchair, as her disability comprises various physical tics, such as banging her chest whenever she says “biscuit,” that make it too dangerous for her to walk on her feet.
Back at BRIC for the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival, Thom is performing Samuel Beckett’s 1972 monologue Not I in a relaxed, inclusive environment. As you enter the small, intimate black-box space, Thom is in her wheelchair, greeting each audience member and inviting them to sit either on cushions, benches, or folding chairs. She is friendly and outgoing, and she doesn’t pause or change moods when the tics come up. She even plays off them; for example, when she says, “I love cats,” she quickly adds something like, “Well, I don’t really even like cats,” and when she proclaims, “Fuck a goat,” she responds by assuring everyone that no one will be having sex with an animal. Meanwhile, to her right, ASL performer Lindsey D. Snyder signs everything Thom says, including the verbal tics. Reaching the whole audience matters to Thom: The seating in Not I is inspired by how she was rudely treated when she attended a 2011 show by stand-up comic Mark Thomas, when theater staff confined her to a sound booth because other members of the audience objected to her gesticulations and vocal outbursts.
Once everyone is settled, she explains the plans for the evening and describes how a friend had told her that she should consider staging her own version of Not I, because it relates so organically to her life. The play, which has been performed by such actresses as Jessica Tandy, Beckett muse Billie Whitelaw, Julianne Moore, and Lisa Dwan and gets its title because it is told in the third person by the protagonist, is an ellipses-filled diatribe of incomplete thoughts and tangents that generally runs between nine and fifteen minutes; it is not a race, but the performer is expected to go through the 2,268 words as fast as possible. “I am not unduly concerned with intelligibility. I hope the piece may work on the nerves of the audience, not its intellect,” Beckett wrote in a 1972 letter to Tandy prior to the play’s world premiere at Lincoln Center. Dressed all in black, wearing a balaclava and a hoodie, Thom, in her wheelchair, is lifted eight feet in the air (the set is designed by Ben Pacey), and she is lit so only the bottom half of her face can be seen. Usually, only the actress’s mouth can be seen, as if it exists by itself, but changes had to be made because of Thom’s Tourette’s. As she power-drives through the piece, she occasionally gets caught in a series of “biscuit” moments but then forges ahead. She is moving through the dialogue so fast, and so unpredictably, that Snyder, also dressed in black and taking the place of the Auditor, the second character in the play, is practically dancing on the floor. (Beckett’s movement directions for the Auditor note, “This consists in simple sideways raising of arms from sides and their falling back, in a gesture of helpless compassion.”)
The audience is not meant to understand every word and plot detail as a woman, identified as “Mouth” in the script, relates several stories involving shopping in a supermarket, going to court, sitting on a mound in Croker’s Acres, and searching for cowslips in a field, bringing up such concepts as shame, torment, sin, pleasure, and guilt. This protagonist has suffered an unnamed trauma that has led to her becoming an outcast from society and virtually unable to communicate with others via speech. It’s clear why Thom’s friend suggested Not I for her, perhaps most evident from the following excerpt:
“what? . . tongue? . . yes . . . lips . . . cheeks . . . jaws . . . tongue . . . never still a second . . . mouth on fire . . . stream of words . . . in her ear . . . practically in her ear . . . not catching the half . . . not the quarter . . . no idea what she’s saying . . . imagine! . . no idea what she’s saying! . . and can’t stop . . . no stopping it . . . she who but a moment before . . . but a moment! . . could not make a sound . . . no sound of any kind . . . now can’t stop . . . imagine! . . can’t stop the stream . . . and the whole brain begging . . . something begging in the brain . . . begging the mouth to stop . . . pause a moment . . . if only for a moment . . . and no response . . . as if it hadn’t heard . . . or couldn’t . . . couldn’t pause a second . . . like maddened . . . all that together . . . straining to hear . . . piece it together . . . and the brain . . . raving away on its own . . . trying to make sense of it . . . or make it stop . . .”
Not I has a sound map to ensure everyone is comfortable and no one feels excluded for auditory reasons
When we go to live theater and watch someone stumble over lines or hesitate and stammer as if they’ve lost their place, our hearts tend to sink and we don’t want the actor to be embarrassed. But when Thom, tearing through the words at a frenetic pace, suddenly goes into “biscuit” mode, not only are we rooting for her, we are with her every second, willing her on to get to the finish line with glory. It’s exhilarating when she storms back into Beckett’s language. But it’s important to note that we are not rooting for her because of or in spite of her disability (a word, by the way, that she freely uses); we are helping carry her to the end in a communal act that goes far beyond mere kindness.
The Beckett section is followed by Sophie Robinson’s short documentary Me, My Mouth, and I, which goes behind the scenes of the creation of Thom’s performance, and then Thom — who is also known as Touretteshero for her work with children and for her same-named organization that seeks to “change the world one tic at a time” — offers the audience the chance to talk to their neighbors about their thoughts on the play and ask her questions. The evening, which is passionately directed by her longtime collaborator Matthew Pountney, concludes with Thom signing copies of her 2012 book, Welcome to Biscuitland, in which Stephen Fry writes in the foreword, “Jess is a true hero, with or without her Touretteshero costume. Jess fuck biscuit Thom, I biscuit fuck fuck biscuit salute biscuit you.” And so will you.
Edward Mawere, Leland Fowler, and Jamyl Dobson star in Donja R. Love’s New Group world premiere, one in two (photo by Monique Carboni)
The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Through January 12, $33-$63 thenewgroup.org
Donja R. Love’s one in two presents the human side of numbers and elements of chance that are staggering: According to the CDC, fifty percent of queer and bisexual black men will contract HIV. Yes, one in two. The eighty-five-minute New Group world premiere takes place on Arnulfo Maldonado’s brilliant set, a blindingly white otherworldly waiting room that wittily morphs into a bar, a bedroom, a hospital room, and other locations. At the top of the back wall, three windowlike panels display numbers that move sequentially, reminiscent of the countdown clock in Lost, except here they go up, tallying the HIV toll second by second. But Love, who wrote the play in his notes app as he approached the tenth anniversary of his testing positive — and “experiencing suicidal ideations,” he explains in a program pamphlet — has not created a somber melodrama about disease. Instead, under the superbly inventive direction of Stevie Walker-Webb, one in two is as funny as it is serious, making its points in complex, intricate scenes filled with humor and intelligence.
As you enter the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre at the Pershing Square Signature Center, there are three shirtless men onstage, lounging about as if in a sauna that is not quite right. They take numbers from a ticket dispenser and then play Rock Paper Scissors to determine who will be #1, #2, and #3. (The actors have to know the lines for each character, since their part could change from one night to the next, the chances one in three.) At the show I saw, Leland Fowler was #1, who becomes Donté Hart, a young man who has just learned that he has HIV and the only character to have an actual name. Edward Mawere was #2, and Jamyl Dobson #3; they both play multiple roles, including a nurse, a bartender, Donté’s mother, Kinda Ex-Boyfriend, Married Man at the Center, Trade Hung Like Horse Underscore 99, and Man of Your Dreams. Fowler, Mawere, and Dobson have an intoxicating camaraderie that is a joy to watch, perhaps because each one so well understands the other men’s roles, since they have played them numerous times as well.
#1 (Leland Fowler) gesticulates wildly while facing a positive diagnosis in brilliantly realized play at the Signature (photo by Monique Carboni)
The trio goes back and forth in time, performing key moments from Donté’s life, fully aware that they are play-acting, occasionally breaking away to express their displeasure about what is happening onstage. “I don’t want to be the mom,” #3 says as a scene ends with him as the nurse. “If you don’t have to then neither, neither do I,” #2 replies. “Well, somebody’s gotta do it,” #1 argues. The one who becomes the mom puts on a colorful flowing wrap that is turned inside out for another role, the name of which can’t be printed here. (Andy Jean’s costumes also feature black T-shirts with the numbers 1, 2, and 3 on them to help identify who’s who.) The play has a powerful conclusion that resonates deeply; Love (Sugar in Our Wounds,Fireflies) and Walker-Webb (Ain’t No Mo’) avoid proselytizing and are not seeking sympathy; instead, they have an important narrative to share, and they do so with great skill and compassion while breaking through theatrical conventions. “I’m not just a number. I’m flesh. I’m blood. I feel,” #1 says early on. He’s not just a number, and as the play demonstrates, he might be number one, but his positivity affects so many others in his life. As Love writes in the pamphlet, one in two is “the story of a community — a community that’s in a hidden state of emergency.”
Faye Driscoll’s Thank You for Coming: Space is making its NYC premiere at Live Artery festival (photo by Maria Baranova)
LIVE ARTERY
New York Live Arts
219 West 19th St.
January 8-11, $15-$30
Festival continues through January 15 newyorklivearts.org fayedriscoll.com
Faye Driscoll concludes her seven-year “Thank You for Coming” trilogy with Space, a bold and courageous solo work making its New York City debut at New York Live Arts’ Live Artery winter performance festival this week. In March 2014’s Thank You for Coming: Attendance at Danspace, audience members could be as involved as they wanted to be as five dancers merged into one and Driscoll deconstructed and reconstructed the set as well as the relationship between performer and viewer. In November 2016’s Thank You for Coming: Play at BAM, Driscoll channeled passion, rage, intimacy, and an exhilarating frolicsomeness with five dancers and surprise appearances.
Inspired by the death of her mother, Space is about the physical and metaphysical weight we all carry every day as we attempt to shape our lives in a world that is whirling out of our control. The audience enters a blaringly white space on the stage, sitting in two rows of folding chairs; Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin’s set evokes a waiting room between life and rebirth, a kind of bardo.
Faye Driscoll’s Thank You for Coming: Space concludes seven-year artistic journey between audience and performer (photo by Maria Baranova)
In each corner is a small platform, and various objects lie on the floor or hanging from the rafters, including small, triangular black sandbags, numerous microphones, boots, cinder blocks, and a lemon. Driscoll, a California native based in Brooklyn, enters the room on a warm, unpretentious note, thanking us for taking time out of our busy schedules to get out of bed, put on clothes, and come to the theater to see her. She moves to the center and sends a rusty, soundless bell into motion, circling around us but not quite hitting anyone, then slowing down like a pendulum, as if we are all running out of time. Over the next seventy-five minutes, Driscoll, barefoot, wearing black jeans and a gray T-shirt, records gasps, sighs, and roars into microphones, stomps around in boots connected to speakers, and lifts cinder blocks. She makes specific requests of the audience to perform an array of critical tasks, from raising and lowering objects via a pulley system to holding her hands to maintain her balance; each interaction with animate or inanimate objects results in Driscoll experimenting with new dance movements, merging reality and performance with relentlessly building intensity.
When she throws clumps of clay, it is as if she is demonstrating that we have only so much control over our life and our bodies and might just have to abandon ourselves to chaos. In fact, elements of the piece itself are unpredictable; the night I went, one of the objects got caught in the lighting above, forcing Driscoll (There Is So Much Mad in Me,You’re Me) to improvise, although there is a looseness as well that allowed her to discuss the situation briefly with one of the tech people. (Kudos must go out to sound engineer Zachary Crumrine, sound designer Andrew Gilbert, and text adviser Amanda K. Davidson, who keep us fully immersed and on our toes in the participatory piece.)
“Space confronts what is simultaneously the most certain and uncertain of human states, our undoing and our final flourishing,” Driscoll explains in the program, which also notes that the work was in process during the death of her mother. “It is a reckoning with the fact that one being’s transition from the state of the living calls forth a concurrent transition in those not dead.” Space ultimately transforms into a darkly funny meditation on death in a strange monologue by Driscoll, who is dripping wet with sweat. Her performance is fierce and ferocious, intimate and heart-rending; she holds nothing back, leaving the audience exhilarated and uncomfortable, frightful and concerned, yet oddly victorious. By the time it’s over, she has engaged four of our five senses (only Driscoll gets to taste) while referring not only to the end of life but of the show we’ve just experienced, as well as the trilogy itself. But rebirth awaits; the audience gets up and goes on with their lives, and Driscoll will go on with hers, including bringing Space to the Walker Art Center in March and the Wexner Center in April.
Bernard-Henri Lévy speaks with General Maghdid Harki in gripping war documentary Peshmerga
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
January 10-16
212-255-2243 quadcinema.com
In the introduction to his most recent book, The Empire and the Five Kings: America’s Abdication and the Fate of the World, published in February 2019, controversial and provocative Algerian-born French Jewish philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy writes, “When I review the reasons why, at this stage of my life, I poured so much energy into the cause of the Kurds and Kurdistan, this is what comes to mind. The justice of the fight, of course. . . .
“Next, there is the debt they are owed. The indelible debt that the world owes to the only armed force that, when ISIS appeared and the region was frozen stiff with terror, dared fight it face-to-face. It was because I was aware of this debt that I, with a small band of friends, came to the region between July and December 2015 to shoot a documentary film, Peshmerga, along the six-hundred-mile front that the Kurds were holding, alone, against the fanatics of the Islamic State. It was because I was aware that these men and women — the Peshmerga includes battalions of women — were the first line of defense not only of Kurdistan but of the world, that I left Europe again in November 2016, on the first day of the fight for Mosul, to make a second documentary, The Battle of Mosul, about the liberation of the most important city of the Caliphate. And it was for the same reasons that I personally promoted these films wherever anyone was willing to show them, that I brought the first of them to the very symbolic great hall of the United Nations building in New York and to the hallowed dome of Congress in Washington, and that I lived those two years in step with the Peshmerga and their aspirations. These fighters were sentinels against barbarism, the world’s outposts and shields. The film crew and I deemed it essential to be the witnesses of that.”
Bernard-Henri Lévy embeds himself with Kurdish troops in The Battle for Mosul
What Lévy and his brave crew were witnesses to can be seen at the Quad, which will be hosting the series “Bernard-Henri Lévy x 4,” with the seventy-one-year-old Lévy, popularly known as BHL, making four appearances at the Thirteenth St. theater this weekend. The festival begins with the weeklong theatrical release of 2016’s Peshmerga and 2017’s The Battle of Mosul, shown as a double feature; the 7:00 screenings on January 10 and 11 will be followed by Q&As with Lévy, the first moderated by Adam Gopnik, the latter by Ben Cohen. In addition, on January 11, Lévy will introduce the 2:15 screening of 1994’s Bosnia-set Bosna! and the 4:45 screening of 2012’s The Oath of Tobruk, about the fall of Muammar Gaddafi.
Peshmerga and The Battle of Mosul are remarkable inside looks at war; Lévy, who has also directed the romance Day and Night and written such books as Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, In the Footsteps of Tocqueville, and In the Spirit of Judaism, embeds himself with the Peshmerga, troops dedicated to ridding the world of ISIS, aka Daesh; the name Peshmerga translates as “Those who stand in the face of death,” and that’s just what happens throughout the two films. Lévy rides with the Kurdish military, joining the somewhat ragtag but dedicated group of fighters as they investigate villages, journey into tunnels, and get shot at in bunkers. Along the way from Kirkuk to Erbil and Mosul, he encounters such brave men and women as General Kemal Kirkuki, General Maghdid Harki, Mike Barzani, Dr. Jacques Bérès, Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani, Iraqi general Fazeel Barwari, counterterrorism leader Abdulwahab al-Saadi, and Helly Luv, the Kurdish Madonna who makes anti-Daesh music videos. “Daesh is the enemy of the whole world,” one soldier says, explaining why they do what they do — and are extremely successful at it. Lévy risks his life and that of his crew, which includes cinematographers Ala Hoshyar Tayyeb, Olivier Jacquin, and Camille Lotteau, one of whom gets caught in an explosion. He thankfully chooses not to show the killing of one general, who gets shot in the head while using sandbags for cover, something Lévy will never forget.
The films feature gripping scores by Nicolas Ker, Jean-Fabien Dijoud, Henri Graetz, and Jeff D., with sound by Jean-Daniel Bécache and editing by Camille Lotteau that make you feel like you’re part of the action, the threat of snipers, booby-trapped vehicles, and IEDs ever present. “Good God, how ugly, dirty, and foul war is!” Lévy cries out, but he also sees reason for hope. “The spirit of Bashiqa, the timeless alliance between Yezidis, Muslims, and Christians, promptly flourishes again,” he says at one point while also showing villagers’ respect for the history of the region’s now-departed Jewish population.
“We witnessed the astonishing spectacle of the world’s leading power consenting to the defeat and humiliation of its staunchest ally in the region,” he continues in the book’s introduction. “We saw the same President Trump, who had just declared Iran to be enemy number one in the complicated Middle East, voice no objection as Major General Qasem Soleimani, head of the Quds Force, the elite unit of the Iranian revolutionary Guards responsible for Iran’s external operations, came and went, parading around the field of battle like a conqueror and posing for photographers. . . . The Kurds perceived this nonintervention as a terrifying enigma.” It should be fascinating to hear what he has to say about Trump and Soleimani now. Lévy also notes of the fighters who lined up to vote at the ballot box, “Like them, I was thinking that this affair bore an unmistakable odor of betrayal. Like them, I was shocked by the mixture of amateurism, fecklessness, and absence of vision of the U.S. and European administrations.”
