Who: Ryan Amador, Donna Auston, BETTY, R. Emery Bright, Great Caesar, Staceyann Chin, Kate Clinton, Julissa Contreras, Michael Cunningham, Lea DeLaria, Eve Ensler, Laura Flanders, Dan Fogler, Alixa Garcia, Suzanne Gardinier, Valarie Kaur, James Lecesne, Amy León, Mickey Love, Ian Pai, Mack Royal, Ally Sheedy, Casey Spooner, Elizabeth Streb, New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Imani Uzuri, more
What: V-Day protest gathering as part of annual One Billion Rising campaign
Where: Washington Square Arch, north side of Washington Square Park at Fifth Ave.
When: Tuesday, February 14, free, 6:00 – 9:00
Why: On Valentine’s Day, you can join the solidarity movement to end the exploitation of women at what is expected to be a huge gathering in Washington Square Park led by V-Day, the nonprofit organization cofounded by Eve Ensler. On February 14 from 6:00 to 9:00, a group of activists and artists will lead “a day of revolutionary love & resistance,” continuing the protests that included the Women’s March on Washington on January 21 and the airport protests against the Muslim ban. According to its Facebook page, “The event is being called in a response to the current racist, misogynist, xenophobic political climate where the rights of women, refugees, immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQIAGNC people, African Americans, the indigenous, and the poor are at serious risk.” There will be performances and speeches by writers, actors, musicians, dancers, and others, and audience members will get a chance to take the stage too and let loose as part of Where We Meet’s Ranting Box. The protest will take place on Valentine’s Day in two hundred countries around the world, so people can feel the love around the globe as they rise up, disrupt, incite, mobilize, arouse, awaken, inspire, resist, connect, and come together “to hold our governments and other patriarchal institutions accountable.”
Nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary, Ava DuVernay’s devastating 13th is back for an encore engagement at IFC Center. DuVernay’s follow-up to the Oscar-nominated Selma, her feature debut about the 1965 voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, examines the history of institutional racism from slavery to today, focusing on the phrase of the 13th Amendment that says, “except as a punishment for crime.” Using archival footage, animation, music, and new interviews, DuVernay traces the criminalization of African Americans beginning with the passage of the amendment in 1865. “There’s really no understanding of our American political culture without race at the center of it,” Harvard professor Khalil G. Muhammad says. The film explores the 150-year demonization of blacks as the government built a fear-based narrative that led to the frightening imbalance in the incarceration of African Americans that has escalated dramatically since the 1970s. Among the issues that are covered are mandatory minimum sentencing, the wealth gap, the crack epidemic, the Southern Strategy, the Three Strikes law, the KKK, the Central Park Five, the 1994 crime bill, white privilege, Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No program, Willie Horton, prison labor, the Civil Rights Act, and the ongoing cultural depiction of blacks as wild animals that need to be caged. DuVernay has assembled a wide-ranging collection of experts who share their views, including Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., Maryland state senator and ALEC member Michael Hough, educator and author Michelle Alexander, UConn professor Jelani Cobb, UC Santa Cruz professor emerita Angela Davis, former American Conservative Union chairman David Keene, Grandview University professor Kevin Gannon, Dream Corps founder and president Van Jones, American Conservative Union board member Grover Norquist, and formerly incarcerated activists Shaka Senghor, Pat Nolan, Cory Greene, and Craig DeRoche in addition to such politicians as David Dinkins, Charles B. Rangel, Cory Booker, and former Speaker of the House and presidential candidate Newt Gingrich. “The objective reality is that virtually no one who is white understands the challenge of being black in America,” Gingrich explains.
Japan Society prepares for Valentine’s Day with the awesome weekend series “Cruel Beauty: A Romantic Weekend with Meiko Kaji,” paying tribute to the legendary genre actress and pop singer, who will turn seventy in March, by screening five of her films February 10-12. “Japanese movie stars don’t get much more iconic than actress Meiko Kaji,” guest curator Marc Walkow writes in a program note. “She remains an inimitable presence in Japanese cinema, and an icon who continues to inspire filmmakers and audiences around the world.” The series gets under way Friday night with the international premiere of Kinji Fukasaku’s 1975 three-part yakuza film New Battle without Honor and Humanity: The Boss’s Head and also includes Teruo Ishii’s Blind Woman’s Curse, Shunya Ito’s Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable, and Yasuharu Hasebe’s Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter, works that show off Kaji’s skills in contemporary and historical action movies. One of her most intense roles is Lady Snowblood, based on the manga by Kazuo Koike (Lone Wolf and Cub) and illustrator Kazuo Kamimura. Japan Society is screening the second film in the duology, 1974’s Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance, on February 11 at 4:30. In the first film, set during the Meiji Period of the late nineteenth century, Yuki Kashima is born in prison, her dying mother declaring her to be an asura demon who will avenge the murder of her father and brother and the mother’s rape. The cinematography pays tribute to its manga roots, with impressively composed shots that one can almost see on the page, the pacing between wide-angle and closeup echoing the rhythm of panels and frames. In the second film, Yuki, known as Lady Snowblood, has become a coldhearted master assassin who kills virtually without emotion. Hired by Seishiro Kikui (Shin Kishida) to recover an important document, she poses as a maid to infiltrate the home of anarchist Ransui Tokunaga (Juzo Itami) but soon finds herself in the middle of a conspiracy and coverup that could bring down the corrupt government following the Russo-Japanese War. Allying herself with Ransui’s hot brother, Shusuke (Yoshio Harada), she wields her sword with skillful abandon, leaving an ever-growing pile of bodies in her wake. 
