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TWI-NY TALK: STEVE LOVERIDGE (MATANGI / MAYA / M.I.A.)

Documentary reveals the many sides of M.I.A.

Sundance-winning documentary reveals the many sides of musician and activist M.I.A.

MATANGA/MAYA/M.I.A. (Steve Loveridge, 2018)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, September 28
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.miadocumentary.com

In the mid-1990s, Steve Loveridge and Maya Arulpragasam met at St. Martin’s College and became friends. Over the last twenty years, Loveridge and Maya — better known as M.I.A. — have collaborated on songs and videos, leading up to the documentary Matangi/Maya/M.I.A., an intimate portrait of Arulpragasam, from her childhood days as Matangi in Sri Lanka, where her father was the founder of the Tamil Resistance Movement, to her teen years as Maya, a developing artist, and finally as M.I.A., the controversial music star and political activist who has released such albums as Arular, Kala, and 2016’s AIM, which she claimed would be her last. Maya has been filming herself since she was very young, and she opened up her vast archives to Loveridge, who sifted through nearly nine hundred hours of recordings to make his first film. Loveridge shows Maya working on her music, protesting for peace, and famously raising her middle finger while performing with Madonna at the Super Bowl. M.I.A. is a powerhouse onstage — I was blown away by an October 2007 concert at Terminal Five — but Loveridge reveals her more sensitive and vulnerable sides in addition to her fierce ambition and pride in who she is and where she is from. Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. is now playing at IFC Center; before attending several postscreening Q&As, Loveridge discussed the film with twi-ny, giving thoughtful, extremely honest, and provocative answers to questions about his friendship with Maya, his feelings about the music industry, and his future as a filmmaker.

twi-ny: What was it that first attracted you to Maya at art school?

Steve Loveridge: She was confident. I was very shy and I think she was much better at meeting people, finding ways to access different places. She took me on lots of adventures and made London seem like a playground.

Also, in our work — I think the other students and tutors on the course kind of looked down on pop culture — music videos, TV movies, mainstream film — but Maya and I, being a gay guy and a brown girl, maybe we saw more value and significance in what pop culture could mean and how it could reach and create change in the world because we had personal experience of it changing our ideas of ourselves, helping us have a vision of who we could become, and being a lifeline when we were teenagers and we didn’t have any people the same as us around to guide us in real life.

twi-ny: Could you tell back then that she was primed for international stardom?

sl: Yes. I think everybody’s got a story, everyone is interesting — but if you’re a poor person and don’t have a “way in” to the arts, or any connections, you have to have a special kind of confidence and robustness to go and knock on doors and ask to be let in, because no one’s going to do it for you. She had that. It took a while for her to find the right door, but she was looking for a way in every day.

Steve Loveridge and M.I.A. at New York premiere of documentary at Film Society of Lincoln Center (photo by Sean DiSerio)

Steve Loveridge and M.I.A. at New York premiere of documentary at Film Society of Lincoln Center at New Directors/New Films festival (photo by Sean DiSerio)

twi-ny: Do you think it is easier or harder to make a documentary about someone you know so well?

sl: Ordinarily, I’d say it’s harder. I think objectivity is too difficult and I would question the wisdom of a friend making a film about a friend. But in this circumstance I feel like Maya, and her family, and the Tamil community were so jaded and mistrustful of the media and interviewers that this story had to be trusted to someone who had earned that trust on a personal level.

twi-ny: In the film, Maya says that she originally wanted to become a documentary filmmaker, and that is evidenced by how much footage she compiled over the years. Did she ever stray from being the subject and instead act like a director or editor? How involved in the process was she?

sl: It was vital from the outset that she wasn’t involved in the edit at all. Even though we’re friends, just to keep things clear, we got a lawyer and did a contract that said I had final cut and she wasn’t allowed into the edit suite. I think that’s amazing trust on her part — I would never ever let someone do that with my personal videos. Especially as she hadn’t watched most of them for years.

twi-ny: What was it like sifting through her archives?

sl: It was emotional and also very educational — I learnt a lot more about her family story. It also reminded me of why I became her friend in the first place.

twi-ny: Was there anything that she declared was off-limits?

sl: On a couple of the tapes she’s chatting to people about me when she’s in a bad mood, and it’s funny eavesdropping on conversations about you that people had fifteen years ago.

twi-ny: How many hours of footage was available?

sl: It was very difficult to deal with the amount of material. There was about seven hundred hours of vérité filming, one hundred of media archive of M.I.A., about thirty hours of performance. One of the hardest things was watching footage of her and talking about her all day and then also trying to maintain a friendship — it was too much, so we had to take a break from each other for a bit and not really talk much.

twi-ny: Regarding that, there were some issues between you, Maya, and her record label, leading to your posting that you “would rather die than work on this.” How did that all get settled? It certainly appears that you and M.I.A. are on good terms again, if there ever really were problems.

sl: Yeah, the problem wasn’t Maya (although I did think she coulda stepped in and helped me out a bit more — it’s hard for a little filmmaker to deal with Interscope, Roc Nation, and all these music industry people all on your own!).

The basic problem was that I worked on the film for a whole year in 2012, with it funded by Interscope, and then suddenly one day they just stopped the funding — but not in a professional, courteous way; they just didn’t pay their bills, stopped answering the phone, and left the production company just guessing. I got angry that Maya’s management weren’t interested in helping me sort the situation and we had a fight about it.

Part of the frustration was that in 2013, Sri Lanka was controversially chosen to host the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, which felt like a real blow to the Sri Lankan Tamil community in their quest for some kind of accountability for the human rights abuses that had happened at the end of the civil war in 2009.

Maya was really, really keen to get the film out in some form that year, in case it helped raise awareness in some tiny way, so it was difficult feeling blocked by her own team.

In the end, the situation was resolved by scrapping the whole project with the record label. I went away and got a job, forgot about the movie for a year, and then in 2014 we found funding from Cinereach, a New York not-for-profit who had seen the trailer I leaked online and got in touch. We started again from scratch with a whole different approach. Making the film in the independent documentary space instead of from inside the music industry transformed it completely, and I was able to make a film that matched my vision.

So when Maya says the film took seven years, or ten years, like she keeps telling interviewers — it wasn’t all my fault! It really only took from 2014 to 2017, which apparently isn’t that bad for a feature doc, especially as I was a first-timer and had nearly nine hundred hours of material.

twi-ny: Are you fully satisfied with the final product? Is the Maya onscreen the Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. you’ve known for more than twenty years?

sl: I am. It’s definitely only about a certain aspect of her story — I focused on her cultural identity and how she negotiates being all these different things at once, and I think it does a good job at evoking what that feels like to be around. People describe the film as “messy in a good way,” and that’s how she feels. I left out all the gossipy relationship stuff with boyfriends, and it’s not really a traditional music doc in that there’s not much of her artistic process or output other than when it serves the identity narrative. But I feel like her music and art are out there and available for people to discover and dip into as much as they like.

twi-ny: Do you have a favorite song/album/video of hers?

sl: “The Message” is great, on her third album [Maya] — whoever wrote that is a genius. [Ed. note: The song was cowritten by Loveridge with Sugu Arulpragasam, Maya’s brother.] But my favorite is always “Galang” because it was the first thing. When the record label sent us the first pressing, it was so exciting holding a vinyl record in my hand that she’d actually made, and then doing the video with all her stencil artwork in it and seeing it on YouTube, it felt like some kind of validation and like the world was suddenly opening up for us.

twi-ny: This is your first feature documentary; do you plan on making more films in the future?

sl: Maybe — I’d certainly never sign up for something again where I only get paid based on hitting certain stages; making this film has crippled my personal finances, and it’s going to be hard to ever contemplate doing that again! I honestly sometimes feel like filmmaking is really only for rich people. But I love stories and storytelling and maybe I’ve learnt enough about the things that slowed this project down to not make the same mistakes again and I could do it in a way that can work for me creatively and financially.

HEAVENLY BODIES: FASHION AND THE CATHOLIC IMAGINATION

The Met’s dazzling “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” continues through October 8 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Met Fifth Ave.
1000 Fifth Ave. at Eighty-Second St.
Met Cloisters
99 Margaret Corbin Dr.
Through October 8, $25 (New York residents pay-what-you-wish)
www.metmuseum.org

You don’t have to be a clothing aficionado or a Catholic to be awed by the Met’s spectacular exhibition “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.” There’s a good reason why it has become the institution’s third most popular show ever (after the 1963 presentation of the Mona Lisa and the 1978 blockbuster “Treasures of Tutankhamun”), welcoming more than a million visitors: It’s a sensational display, superbly organized by Andrew Bolton. Continuing through October 8, “Heavenly Bodies” is spread across the Met Fifth Ave., in the medieval galleries, the Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries for Byzantine Art, the Robert Lehman Wing, and the Anna Wintour Costume Center, as well as the Met Cloisters, totaling more than sixty thousand square feet. Mannequins dressed in jaw-dropping outfits line hallways, gather on pedestals, appear in surprising places, and interact with installations, revealing the influence Catholicism and art have had on fashion, and vice versa.

Cloisters installation re-creates the Garden of Eden inspired by Hieronymous Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

“Some practicing Catholics might perceive certain fashions shown as indelicate or even offensive, either for their retrograde and reactionary associations (by the liberal left) or for their sacrilegious and blasphemous implications (by the conservative right),” Bolton writes in his catalog introduction. “Similarly, there might be concerns on the part of Catholics and non-Catholics alike that fashion is an unfitting and unseemly medium by which to convey ideas or reflect imagery related to the sacred and the divine. Dress, however, is central to any discussion about religion: it affirms religious allegiances and, by extension, asserts religious differences.”

At the Met Fifth Ave., a row of colorful dresses refers to the ecclesiastical fashion show from Federico Fellini’s Roma. Hierarchical clothing and habits appear in front of medieval tapestries. Thierry Mugler’s tenth-anniversary collection, “The Winter of the Angels,” consists of celestial figures, while Jeanne Lanvin’s dresses are inspired by Fra Angelico paintings. Jean-Paul Gaultier’s “ex-Voto” evening ensemble is paired with Byzantine copper panels depicting scenes from the life of Jesus. An evening dress by Gianni Versace has a bold cross running down the entire front, inspired by a Byzantine processional cross he saw at the Met. A haunting choir row in robes by Cristóbal Balenciaga stands high above. John Galliano’s evening ensemble for the House of Dior looks like it could be worn by Jeremy Irons as the pope in The Borgias. In the Costume Institute, actual papal finery is on display, real items worn by religious leaders, shown in vitrines but not on mannequins.

Marc Bohan’s “Hyménée” for the House of Dior plays out as a haunting narrative at the Cloisters (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

At the Cloisters, there are several tableaux in which a figure is placed in such a way as to create a narrative, most effectively with a woman seen primarily from the back in a wedding dress by Balenciaga as she waits alone in the Fuentidueña Chapel while “Ave Maria” plays on a loop, along with another wedding dress, by Marc Bohan for the House of Dior, worn by a woman in the Langon Chapel. The Garden of Eden is re-created in the Glass Gallery with garments by Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli for Valentino, Raf Simons for Christian Dior, and Jun Takahashi that include direct references to such famous works as Hieronymous Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” Thom Brown incorporates the Met’s famous Unicorn Tapestries into a wedding dress in that room. Chiuri and Piccioli’s daring red dress in the Merode Room is based on the virgin in “The Annunciation Triptych” (and is echoed in a small stained-glass image of Jesus behind it), on view nearby. Galliano’s stunning black gown for Dior in the Gothic Chapel mimics the crypts and armor surrounding it. Gaultier’s “Guadalupe” boasts a knife plunged through a dripping heart. Classical music echoes in each hall and gallery.

Another star of the show is Shay Ashual, who created the remarkable wigs and hairstyles on the mannequins, artworks in their own right that bring an unusual and engaging aspect to the wide-ranging couture. In his catalog essay, “A Vision of Beauty: Fashioning Heaven on Earth,” C. Griffith Mann writes, “Beauty and its role in visualizing the holy was a fundamental preoccupation of medieval thinkers, artists, and patrons.” As “Heavenly Bodies” so lovingly and intelligently demonstrates, the same is still true today, so make your pilgrimage before it’s too late.

COLLECTIVE RAGE: A PLAY IN 5 BETTIES

Betty 1 (Dana Delany) lets it all out in Collective Rage (photo by Joan Marcus)

MCC Theater at the Lucille Lortel Theatre
121 Christopher St. between Bleecker & Hudson Sts.
Sunday – Friday through October 7, $49-$125
212-352-3101
www.mcctheater.org

For hundreds of years, the name “Betty” has been used to describe various types of women, from hot and stylish to relaxed and self-confident, from schoolteachers and the girl-next-door to wholesome and plain; it can also refer to a man who performs household duties, a gay man, and a light-skinned black man, according to Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang. The term has been linked to Betty Grable, Bettie Page, Betty Rubble from The Flintstones, Betty Cooper from the Archie comics, Betty Boop, and Betty Crocker and has been popularized in such films as Clueless and Encino Man. The word, with its wide range of meaning, can be a metaphor for the obscured individuality of women, one name covering the vast diversity and lack of sameness for a gender that has been treated as second-class citizens for millennia. But the second sex, as Simone de Beauvoir called women, has been fighting back in new ways in recent years, as depicted in Jen Silverman’s outrageously funny and perceptive play, Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties, an MCC production that continues at the Lucille Lortel through October 7. In the show, Silverman also reclaims the word “pussy,” which has multiple meanings too but has become a kind of feminist call to arms given its controversial usage by President Trump. The word appears about fifty times in the play, including in the subtitle: In Essence, a Queer and Occasionally Hazardous Exploration; Do You Remember When You Were in Middle School and You Read About Shackleton and How He Explored the Antarctic?; Imagine the Antarctic as a Pussy and It’s Sort of Like That.

Collective Rage features five characters from across the spectrum: Betty 1 (Dana Delany) is white and uptight, an erudite and elegant woman in a loveless marriage with the wealthy Richard; Betty 2 (Adina Verson) is white and unsophisticated, in a boring marriage with Charles; Betty 3 (Ana Villafañe) is a tough-talking bisexual Latinx who says what’s on her mind; Betty 4 (Lea DeLaria) is a heavily tattooed white butch lesbian who spends most of her time working on her truck and pining for Betty 3; and Betty 5 (Chaunté Wayans) is an African American boxing gym owner who self-identifies as a “gender-non-conforming masculine-presenting female-bodied individual.”

Five Betties gather together to stage their own play in biting work by Jen Silverman (photo by Joan Marcus)

Betty 1 sets the tone in her opening monologue, in which she states after watching the news, “This world is terrible. This world is awful. / I am Very Very Concerned about the State of Things. / My husband Richard came home and I said to him RICHARD / I said RICHARD / I am Very Very Concerned About the State of Things. / My husband Richard is a calm person. / He is a logical and a rational person and He Wears a Suit. / And Richard said to me: BETTY / Richard said: BETTY / Richard said: Betty, Don’t Worry. / AND THAT DIDN’T MAKE ME FEEL BETTER.”

Each Betty busts female stereotypes; yet even as each is different, they all share a common loneliness, which is revealed at several women-only dinner parties. The intimate gatherings are not for men; in fact, the play itself was not written for the male gender, and in particular not straight white men. At one party, after Betty 3 raves about the first time she had sex with a woman, Betty 1 says, “That’s not good conversation for a dinner party.” Betty 3 says, “No?” Betties 1 and 2 answer in unison, “No.” Betty 3 asks, “How come?” Betty 1 says, “We don’t talk about sex at dinner parties.” Betty 3 responds, “What else you talk about?” Betty 2 replies, “We aren’t having sex, so we can’t talk about it.” Betty 3 offers, “Maybe you should start having it.” Betty 1 ends the discussion by saying, “We’re married.”

Betty 5 (Chaunté Wayans) teaches Betty 1 (Dana Delany) how to fight back in Collective Rage (photo by Joan Marcus)

At another dinner party, Betty 3 gives Betty 2 and Betty 4 hand mirrors so they can look at their vaginas up close and personal. Betty 2 is terrified, claiming she has never done that before. “What if it’s ugly?” she says. “What if there’s teeth? What if it’s lopsided? What if it’s lumpy? Or flat? Or geometrically displeasing? Or what if I don’t have one at all and there’s just a small animal who lives there, like a lizard or a dwarf-hamster, and all I see are the gleam of its little eyes as it stares back up at me?” It’s a hysterically funny scene, but it also brilliantly depicts a woman’s fear of her sexuality and control of her own body. “Look at your pussy,” Betty 3 tells her. “Both eyes,” Betty 4 adds.

After Betty 3 goes to a play with a rich white woman — they see what she calls “Summer’s Midnight Dream” — Betty 3 decides to quit her job and stage her own piece of “Thea-tah”; entranced by the play-within-a-play narrative (of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream,), she is going to do the same thing, a sly reference to Collective Rage, which now also has a similar structure. All five Betties become involved in the venture, for different reasons, furthering their relationships with one another and cleverly developing their individual characters as Silverman explores their innermost desires and their sense of self, as well as their thoughts on theater. “I think a lotta things that seem like art are maybe actually just about pussy. And then also, things that are mostly about pussy might actually be about art,” Betty 4 tells Betty 3, getting right to the point.

Collective Rage unfolds over ninety riotous yet poignant minutes, in chapters with such descriptive names as “Betty 2 Acts Out Her Feelings with a Puppet Because She Has No Real Friends,” “Betty 1 Has More Rage, and Does Something About It,” and “Betty 4 and 5 Work on Their Trucks and Talk About Relationships, Which Is Just Another Word for Pussy,” the titles projected above the stage. Dane Laffrey’s relatively spare set, just a few chairs and a desk, constantly surprises as items fall down through open grids in the ceiling, from truck engines and a punching bag to other key props, like gifts from heaven. (Kudos to prop master Joshua Yocom.) Director Mike Donahue (The Legend of Georgia McBride, Silverman’s The Moors) lets the women strut their stuff, and Delany (China Beach, Dinner with Friends), DeLaria (Orange Is the New Black, The Rocky Horror Show), Verson (Indecent, The Lucky Ones), Villafañe (On Your Feet, In the Heights), and Wayans (50 Shades of Black, Hollywood Misconceptions) don’t disappoint, shining a light on gender identity, sexuality, lust, love, societal expectations, and power in the twenty-first century. It’s about how to be a Betty, and how not to be a Betty, whatever that means. “I feel like things are changing,” Betty 4 says to Betty 5, who responds, “I hope so.” Betty 4 adds, “But everything was good the way it was. Wasn’t it?” Betty 5 replies, “Change is exciting.” And Betty 4 opines, “Change is sad. Change is things getting forgotten. Change is people getting left behind.” Exactly.

NYFF56: NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL 2018

Emma Stone in the film THE FAVOURITE. (photo by Yorgos Lanthimos. © 2018 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation All Rights Reserved)

Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, Alice Tully Hall
West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
September 28 – October 14
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.org/nyff2018

The fifty-sixth annual New York Film Festival is under way, consisting of more than two weeks of international shorts, features, documentaries, experimental works, and immersive, interactive virtual reality presentations. There are documentaries about Roger Ailes, Steve Bannon, Carmine Street Guitars, Maria Callas, the Memphis Belle, Bill Cunningham, and Watergate; retrospective tributes to Dan Talbot and Pierre Rissient; talks with Claire Denis, Alfonso Cuarón, Alice Rohrwacher, Errol Morris, Jia Zhangke, Mariano Llinás, Willem Dafoe, Morgan Neville, Frederick Wiseman, and Ed Lachman; revivals of such films as Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour, Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba, and Ronald Neame’s Tunes of Glory; and postscreening Q&As with Jodie Foster, Michael Almereyda, Richard Thompson, Alex Gibney, Elizabeth Holtzman, Lesley Stahl, Emma Stone, Julian Schnabel, Joel and Ethan Coen, Laetitia Casta, Elisabeth Moss, Eric Stoltz, Robert Pattinson, Olivier Assayas, Tamara Jenkins, Vincent Lacoste, Carey Mulligan, Jake Gyllenhaal, and many others. Below is a list of at least one highlight per day; keep checking twi-ny for reviews and further information.

Saturday, September 29
Special Events: The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018), Alice Tully Hall, $25, 2:15

Sunday, September 30
Revivals: Enamorada (Emilio Fernández, 1946), Howard Gilman Theater, $17, 12 noon

Charles Ferguson documentary takes a new look at Watergate break-in and its aftermath

Monday, October 1
Free Events — NYFF Live: In Conversation with Frederick Wiseman, moderated by Kent Jones, EBM Amphitheater, free, 7:00

Tuesday, October 2
Retrospective: A Touch of Zen (King Hu, 1971/75), Howard Gilman Theater, $17, 6:30

Wednesday, October 3
Talks — On Cinema: Claire Denis, Walter Reade Theater, $25, 6:00

Thursday, October 4
Retrospective: Mother India (Mehboob Khan, 1957), Howard Gilman Theater, $17, 6:30

Friday, October 5
Projections: Your Face (Tsai Ming-liang, 2018), Howard Gilman Theater, $17, 4:30

Saturday, October 6
Talks — Directors Dialogues: Alfonso Cuarón, Walter Reade Theater, free, 2:30

Sunday, October 7
Talks — Film Comment Live: Filmmakers Talk, with Louis Garrel, Jodie Mack, Alex Ross Perry, and Albert Serra, EBM Amphitheater, free, 7:00

Monday, October 8
Special Events: An Afternoon with Barry Jenkins, in Conversation with Darryl Pinkney, Alice Tully Hall, $25, 12 noon

Tuesday, October 9
Retrospective: My Dinner with André (Louis Malle, 1981), Howard Gilman Theater, $17, 6:30

Wednesday, October 10
Retrospective: The American Friend (Wim Wenders, 1977), Howard Gilman Theater, 6:30

Thursday, October 11
Convergence: iNK Stories – Fire Escape: An Interactive VR Series (Navid Khonsari, 2018), followed by a Q&A, EBM Amphitheater, 6:00 & 7:30

Friday, October 12
Convergence: Virtual Reality Documentary Program, featuring My Africa (David Allen, 2018), narrated by Lupita Nyong’o, The Drummer (Ana Kler, 2017), and the world premiere of Hope Amongst the Haze (Tiffany Hill, 2018), EBM Amphitheater, $10, 4:00 & 6:00

Saturday, October 13
Spotlight on Documentary — Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes (Alexis Bloom, 2018), Howard Gilman Theater, $25, 2:45

Sunday, October 14
Special Events: The Wild Pear Tree (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2018), Francesca Beale Theater, $25, 12 noon

306 HOLLYWOOD

Siblings Elan and Jonathan Bogarín use a dollhouse re-creation of their beloved grandmother’s home in excavating her life in 306 Hollywood

306 HOLLYWOOD (Elan and Jonathan Bogarín, 2018)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Friday, September 28
212-255-2243
www.306hollywood.com
quadcinema.com

Psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung both used the metaphor of a house to represent the whole of a person and his or her psyche. Siblings Elan and Jonathan Bogarín explore that concept in 306 Hollywood, an imaginative documentary in which they seek to define who their beloved late grandmother was — and where she is after her death. In 2011, Annette Ontell passed away at the age of ninety-three. In her will, she left her home of sixty-seven years, a relatively basic suburban house at 306 Hollywood Ave. in Hillside, New Jersey, to Elan and Jonathan, who at first were encouraged by their mother, Marilyn Ontell, to sell it. But after funeral director Sherry Anthony tells the siblings that it is believed that following a death, the soul of the deceased hovers around its home for nearly a year, they changed their mind. “You have eleven months to make your grandmother tangible again,” she explains. And the Bogaríns take that time to turn the house into an archaeological dig, excavating through physical items that spur memories of the past to celebrate the life of their beloved grandmother. “As far as we knew, the house was her world,” Jonathan says. “When you lose someone you love, you start to look for new ways to understand the world,” Elan adds.

Imaginative documentary by her grandchildren explores the life and times of Annette Ontell

Elan and Jonathan use re-creations, home movies, family photographs, and filmed interviews they made with Annette, a fashion designer who was married to an accountant named Herman, every year from 2001 to 2011, in which she honestly and entertainingly shares her thoughts about her long life, including discussions of death. The siblings, who employ a visual sense of humor and magical realism akin to that of a Wes Anderson movie combined with the documentary style of Chantal Akerman and Agnès Varda, speak with their mother, Annette’s daughter, Marilyn Ontell, as well as fashion conservator Nicole Bloomfield; Rockefeller archivist Robert Clark; Biblioteca Casanatense librarian Isabella Ceccopieri and director Rita Fioravanti; archaeologist Jan Gadeyne; and MIT physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, who all offer views about interpreting physical and psychological aspects of a person’s life, from items they collected to papers they saved to the clothes they wore. Two of the most compelling scenes involve clothing; Elan and Jonathan film their grandmother trying to put on dresses, with the help of her daughter, that she made more than half a century before. Annette sits in a chair in her bra and panties, her aging body mostly exposed to the camera, as she insists she won’t fit into the chic clothes. Later, Bloomfield performs a forensics-like investigation on the dresses, offering yet more information about Annette.

Elan and Jonathan also have a precise miniature version of the house made by Rick Maccione of Dollhouse Mansions and often film inside it, playing with the scale of history, time, and memory and the role of the camera in recording the past. “It was plain to me that the house represented a kind of image of the psyche,” Jung wrote. But as Jonathan notes at one point, “Grandma’s house isn’t a home anymore. It’s a ruin.” And finally, Lightman asks, “Where is she?,” declaring that question to be the “great mystery of existence.” After watching 306 Hollywood, which the Bogaríns directed, produced with Judit Stalter, edited with Nyneve Laura Minnear and composer Troy Herion, and photographed with Alejandro Mejía, you’ll have a very clear picture of who Annette Ontell was — and you’ll wonder about who your own late relatives were, in addition to where they might be at this very moment. The Sundance hit opens September 28 at the Quad, which will host numerous postscreening Q&As with the filmmakers, Herion, Mejía, and such organizations as POV, the Wassaic Project, New York Women in Film & Television, Cinema Tropical, and WeCroak.

STARS IN THE NIGHT

The Man in the Orange Tie (Matt Brown) kicks off a unique adventure through DUMBO in Stars in the Night (photo by Matt Pulliam)

STARS IN THE NIGHT
Multiple locations in DUMBO
Tuesday – Sunday through October 13, $125, 7:00, 7:30, 8:00, 8:30
www.starsinthenight.net

Part of the fun of immersive theatrical productions is the opportunity to see unusual interior locations, from abandoned warehouses and hotels (Sleep No More, The Grand Paradise) and institutional facilities (Then She Fell) to navy yards (Doomocracy), churches (Beloved/Departed), and the otherwise off-limit areas of cultural institutions (Ghost Light, Hotel Savoy). But it’s always a bonus when an immersive show heads outdoors, offering another level of adventure; for example, The Great American Casket Company led the audience through Green-Wood Cemetery, while Empire Travel Agency took people four at a time through Lower Manhattan, including a subway trip and a car ride. The Firelight Collective’s dark and mysterious Stars in the Night combines the best of both types of immersive theater, shuttling up to twelve guests at a time through various indoor and outdoor spaces in DUMBO. It is a very adult story of separation and loss, of faded love and unfulfilled dreams, told in a time-twisting way that will have you attempting to decipher it all long after the one hundred minutes are up and you have been left on the street to your own devices.

Jennifer Sacks has something to say in Firelight Collective immersive production (photo by Matt Pulliam)

A treat for all five senses, Stars in the Night begins on a rooftop with a beautiful view of the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. The Man in the Orange Tie (Matt Brown) shares his tale of woe, kicking you off on a journey where you will meet a series of people who sometimes interact directly with you, sometimes carry out actions that you merely observe. You pick up important details through song, telephone conversations, dance, food and drink, and even touch, though you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. The narrative does not make it easy to figure who is who and when is when, so you need to pay close attention. The extremely talented cast consists of Brown, Allison Byrnes, Benjamin Chase, Davonna Dehay, David Haley, Hannah Broderick Kraft, William Nicol, Jennifer Sacks, and Firelight Collective founding member Deanna Noe; to tell you who they play would be giving too much away. Writer-directors Stephanie Feury and Nathan Keyes, the artistic directors of the troupe, keep up the pace throughout, dropping in plenty of clues along the way, leading to a powerful finale that is simply mesmerizing.

Deanna Noe brings mystery and eroticism to Stars in the Night in DUMBO (photo by Matt Pulliam)

One of the coolest conceits of Stars in the Night is the pause between every scene during which the audience is not sure who will arrive to take them to the next part of the expedition. For example, after the Man in the Orange Tie takes off, you’re left standing in Brooklyn Bridge Park, guessing which of the passersby might be your next guide. The Firelight Collective’s previous shows were all presented in Los Angeles, including Unexpected Winter, Nobody’s Darling, Echoes of Voices, Savage/Love, and the first iteration of Stars in the Night. Despite its West Coast history, the group has done a fine job sustaining a New York sensibility in this production, which takes several surprising twists and turns as characters examine their lives and don’t always like what they see. “I just kept thinking how I wanted to be free, free of the pain, free of everything,” Nicole says. She’ll break your heart.

MUSEUM OF ILLUSIONS

Head on the Platter creates a unique effect at Museum of Illusions (photo by Sam Prete)

77 Eighth Ave. at Fourteenth St.
Open daily 9:00 am – 10:00 pm, adults $19, children six to thirteen $15
212-645-3230
newyork.museumofillusions.us
www.instagram.com/moi_newyork

The Museum of Illusions, which opened last week in the old 1907 New York County National Bank building on the corner of Eighth Ave. and Fourteenth St., is heavily branding itself as an “Instagram-friendly” institution, so much so that there are stickers on the floor to indicate where visitors can ostensibly take the best photographs. Unlike other pop-up exhibitions — Candytopia, the Museum of Pizza, the Color Factory — the Museum of Illusions is planning on staying around, becoming a longtime part of the cultural life of the city, appealing to tourists, locals, and school groups. The museum is the first branch in the United States; they also can be found in Vienna, Kuala Lumpur, Muscat, Zagreb, Zadar, and Ljubljana, with Kansas City next. The museum features more than forty interactive installations that play with visitors’ perception, tricking the brain and the body; while some are familiar optical illusions, others are new. There are holographic portraits that appear to follow you, Magic Eye–like pictures that slowly unfold, a zoetrope sculpture that looks like a moving blue brain, spinning turntables that seem to emerge from the wall, and a true mirror that reverses what you’re used to seeing in your reflection. (It’s particularly disconcerting for people with more asymmetrical faces.)

Kaleidoscope installation at Museum of Illusions is dazzling (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The Shepard’s Box and Jastrow, Ponzo, Fraser Spiral, and Müller-Lyer illusions defy logical geometrics of shape and size. In the Ames Room, you go from being very small in one corner to giant in another; the Tilted Room affects your equilibrium so you’ll feel off balance and unsure of your footing; the Rotated Room, flipped at a ninety-degree angle, helps explain how Fred Astaire danced on the walls and ceiling in Royal Wedding; and at the Clone Table you can sit down with five images of yourself. The coup de grâce is Head on the Platter, in which it appears that a head has lost its body. Most of the displays are lightly labeled (and hard to read) and describe how the illusion works; it’s best if you try to figure out how the illusion works before reading about it. Several of the installations resemble or share names with pieces by such international artists as Olafur Eliasson and Yayoi Kusama (although the Infinity Room contains multiple mirrors, it is not one of Kusama’s awe-inspiring installations), but no one is given credit for any of the individual illusions and puzzles on display.

The Ames Room challenges viewers’ perspective when it comes to size and distance (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Although strolling through most museums is something that can be enjoyed solo, you’re going to want to go to the Museum of Illusions with either friends or family, not just so they can take pictures of you, but so you can get the most out of exhibits that require at least two people to work. For example, a large kaleidoscope only dazzles if there are people on both sides, and someone has to be sitting in the Beuchet Chair in order for the viewer to get its full effect. Also, be sure to occasionally put the camera away and let yourself be absorbed by the illusions, not worrying about how photos of it will look on social media. “It’s a place where you can pause reality,” actor and CEO Renne Gjoni told me during an exclusive private tour a few days before the opening. Actually, it provides a fun, skewed view of reality, for narcissists and non-narcissists alike.