twi-ny recommended events

LUNAR NEW YEAR 4711: THE YEAR OF THE SNAKE

More than half a million people are expected at Chinese Lunar New Year parade (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Sara D. Roosevelt Park and other locations
East Houston St. between Forsythe & Chrystie Sts.
February 9-23
www.betterchinatown.com
2012 lunar new year parade slideshow

The Year of the Black Water Snake slithers into the city beginning this weekend, with Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations galore. First up is the very loud New Year Firecracker Ceremony and Cultural Festival, taking place February 10 from 12 noon to 5:00 in and around Chinatown and Sara D. Roosevelt Park, with live music and dance, speeches by politicians, drum groups, lion, dragon, and unicorn dancers making their way through local businesses, and more than half a million rounds of firecrackers warding off evil spirits and welcoming in a prosperous new year. The fourteenth annual Chinatown Lunar New Year Parade and Festival will wind its way through Chinatown, Sara D. Roosevelt Park, and Columbus Park on February 17, with cultural booths in the park and a parade with floats, antique cars, special performers, and many others from China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, and other nations. The Flushing Lunar New Year Parade is scheduled for February 16 at 11:00. Throughout the two weeks, the Museum of Chinese in America will host special New Year walking tours (February 9-23). The Snake, the sixth sign of the zodiac, favors intuitiveness, attention to detail, introspection, stylishness, research, and investigation in order to be successful both professionally and personally. People born in the Year of the Snake (1929, 1941, 1953, 1965, 1977, 1989, 2001, 2013) are most compatible with the Ox and the Rooster and least compatible with the Tiger and the Pig. Much of the celebration of Lunar New Year is tied to eating specific delicacies; we got a list of some favorites courtesy of food expert Chu Chen-fan of the social/culinary website Food Culture in Taiwan. Gōng xǐ fā cái!

Buddha Jumps over the Wall is a traditional dish eaten during Lunar New Year celebrations

1. Hot pot (including Fó Tiào Qiáng — Buddha Jumps over the Wall): The indispensable star attraction main course at the dinner table when family members gather for the New Year, representing wealth and prestige.

2. Hot dish: Yearlong Plant (mustard greens) and bamboo shoots (dried shoots are okay) are used when stewing pork or diced chicken, representing “wealth and rank year after year.”

3. Turnip: The term in Taiwanese for “turnip” is almost a homonym for the phrase “good luck,” so eating turnips means that good fortune is at hand and things will go one’s way.

4. Whole chicken: The word for “chicken” in Taiwanese is a homonym for the word “family.” Therefore, serving chicken connotes a “family on the rise” and symbolizes good fortune. The chicken is usually boiled or smoked.

5. Chives: The first syllable of the word for “chives” in Mandarin Chinese is a homonym for “long” or “enduring”; hence, this dish symbolizes longevity and durability.

6. Fish balls, meatballs, shrimp balls: Any one of these expresses the idea of the entire family reunited; having all three, the “Three Grand Primordials,” connotes a robust and unstoppable luck.

7. Deep-fried chicken or pork: The sudden burst of energy that is released when meat is deep-fried brings good fortune for the entire household.

8. Stir-fry medley: Also known as the “As You Wish” dish, it symbolizes having everything one’s way.

9. Tofu: The word for tofu in Mandarin Chinese is a homonym for “everything being blessed”; thus, this dish symbolizes “the entire family being blessed.”

10. Composite stir-fry of three kinds of vegetables: This dish evokes the Chinese aphorism signifying “a fresh and auspicious start.”

11. Red-cooked silver carp: It is best to serve two fish to fully realize the significance of “a surplus year after year,” since the word for “fish” in Mandarin Chinese is a homonym for the word “surplus.” When the dish is placed on the table, the head and tail must not be eaten in order to signify that every venture “has a beginning and an end,” which is to say endeavors will be seen through to completion and not abandoned midway.

12. Fermented bean curd: The name of this dish is a virtual homonym in Mandarin Chinese for the words “happiness and wealth,” making it a good omen.

13. Glutinous rice cake: The name of this dish in Mandarin Chinese is a homonym for the words “to rise in rank year after year.”

14. Dumplings: The name of this dish in Mandarin Chinese is a homonym for the latter half of the Chinese aphorism “to see out the old and ring in the new”; thus, it signifies a new beginning to everything at the start of a new year. When the dumplings are boiled together with Chinese noodles, they are regarded as resembling “silver ingots threaded with strands of gold,” or “bottle gourds suspended by silver strands.” (The Mandarin Chinese word for “bottle gourd” is a virtual homonym for the words “happiness and wealth.”) Both visual similes connote financial success and fortune.

15. Taro soup: The name of this dish in Mandarin Chinese is a homonym for the words “to encounter the optimal outlook.” It acts as an excellent omen when eaten on the morning of the first day of the Lunar New Year.

SYMPHONIC BALANCHINE

New York City Ballet
David H. Koch Theater
20 Lincoln Center between West 62nd & 65th Sts. and Columbus & Amsterdam Aves.
Saturday, February 9, 2:00, and Sunday, February 10, 3:00, $29-$155
212-496-0600
www.nycballet.com

This week the New York City Ballet is presenting its Symphonic Balanchine program, comprising Western Symphony, featuring traditional American tunes orchestrated by Hershy Kay, Symphony in Three Movements, set to music by Igor Stravinsky, and Symphony in C, with music by Georges Bizet, all choreographed by NYCB founder George Balanchine, creator of the American classical ballet tradition. Demonstrating Balanchine’s love of music and mastery of multiple genres, from Stravinsky’s twentieth-century modernism to Bizet’s nineteenth-century Romanticism, the program showcases NYCB’s particularly strong corps du ballet this season as well as a well-rounded group of soloists and principals. Western Symphony is a lively production, with fanciful costumes by Karinska; the men wear cowboy hats and western shirts, while the women are beribboned, tightly encased in satin with showgirl flounces. Energetic and fast-paced, the piece is as American as Broadway, which is fitting, since Kay also did the orchestrations for On the Town, Once Upon a Mattress, A Chorus Line, and Evita, among many other musicals. Megan Fairchild and Jared Angle are among the high-spirited pairs who prance and twirl playfully against the western backdrop. The stark stage of Symphony in Three Movements could not be more different; with nary a prop in sight, the dancers wear plain white or black leotards, executing Balanchine’s precise choreographic architecture to Stravinsky’s stark modernism with grave precision. The evening concludes with a longtime favorite, Balanchine’s glittering tour de force for the corps du ballet, Symphony in C. Originally titled “The Crystal Palace,” Symphony in C sparkles this year in brand-new costumes liberally set with Swarovski crystals. With a cast of more than fifty dancers and a stunningly intricate finale featuring some three dozen dancers onstage at the same time, Symphony in C is, as Ballet Master in Chief Peter Martins says in the above video, “arguably our signature piece . . . perhaps the most challenging ballet for the company.” The two-hour Symphonic Balanchine program continues on February 9-10 at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center.

MoMA PRESENTS: ALEJANDRO LANDES’S PORFIRIO

Porfirio dreams of a better life in minimalist film based on a true story

PORFIRIO (Alejandro Landes, 2011)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
February 8-14
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.magic-lantern-films.com

Brazilian filmmaker Alejandro Landes’s minimalist Porfirio begins and ends with close-up shots of the title character, Porfirio Ramírez Aldana, taken slightly from below by cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis, focusing on the upper half of the man’s bare body, which is paralyzed from the waist done. Porfirio looks around as if he’s lost in a world that has let him down, and indeed it has. In the film, which opens theatrically at MoMA on February 8 for a one-week engagement, Porfirio plays himself, a Colombian father who was paralyzed by a policeman’s bullet and now lives a hard life selling minutes on his cell phone and needing the help of his eldest son, Lissin (played by his youngest son, Jarlisson Ramírez Reinoso), and neighbor/lover, Jasbleidy (real-life neighbor Yor Jasbleidy Santos Torres), just to get through every day. Landes uses natural light and sound and no score to add reality to the true story of a once-proud man now imprisoned in his wheelchair and getting the runaround from the state regarding compensation he feels he is owed. Landes (Cocalero) keeps the tale purposefully vague, never giving the details of the legal case or how and why Porfirio was shot, instead telling the story through Porfirio’s mesmerizing eyes, which are filled with a beguiling mixture of pain and mystery. “In one of the deepest moments of the film, Porfirio gazes out the window of his bedroom and, I dare say, we can peak into his very soul,” Landes, who spent five years with his subject, explains in the film’s production notes. “It was the second shot on the first day of the shoot. Although I think we captured many other fine moments, I must admit none matched a shining innocence I saw in his eyes that first day.” Landes was drawn to Porfirio’s story after reading about the extraordinary thing he did, which made him famous in South America and around the world, earning him the nickname the Air Pirate, but the director doesn’t delve into those details either. There’s no past or future for Porfirio, only the present for a compelling man desperate to regain his dignity. Landes will be at MoMA on opening night to participate in a discussion following the 7:00 screening of this small gem.

NIGHT ACROSS THE STREET

Raúl Ruiz’s final film, NIGHT ACROSS THE STREET, is an abstract, surreal examination of time and memory

THE NIGHT ACROSS THE STREET (LA NOCHE DE ENFRENTE) (Raúl Ruiz, 2012)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center: Francesca Beale Theater
144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
February 8-14
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com

Raúl Ruiz’s last film, Night Across the Street, proves to be a fitting finale for the long career of the Chilean-French auteur, who died at the age of seventy in August 2011, leaving behind a legacy of more than one hundred movies and one hundred plays. An adaptation — or as Ruiz explained it, “adoption” — from a pair of short stories by Imaginist writer Hernán del Solar Night Across the Street follows the odd meanderings of Don Celso (Sergio Hernandez), an old man about to retire from his office job. Past, present, and future, the real and the imagined, merge in abstract, surreal ways as Don Celso goes back to his childhood, where he (played as a boy by Santiago Figueroa) takes his idol, Beethoven (Sergio Schmied), to the movies and gets life lessons from Long John Silver (Pedro Villagra). As an adult, he hangs out with the fictional version of French teacher and writer Jean Giono (Christian Vadim), whose real self and family appear to be elsewhere. And he visits a haunted hotel run by Nigilda (Valentina Vargad) where he believes he will meet his doom. Memories and hallucinations mingle in front of obviously fake backgrounds, strange, unexplained characters appear then disappear, and Don Celso (and Ruiz, of course) has fun with such words as “Antofagasta” and “rhododendron” in a film that Ruiz created to be shown only after his death. (He made the film after being diagnosed with liver cancer, which he survived by getting a transplant, only to die shortly thereafter of a lung infection.) And at the center of it all is one of Ruiz’s favorite themes, time — Don Celso is regularly interrupted by an annoying alarm clock that signals him to take unidentified medication, keeping him alive even as the end beckons. Night Across the Street is an elegiac swan song by a master filmmaker.

FERLINGHETTI: A REBIRTH OF WONDER

Lawrence Ferlinghetti proves to be a man of many hats in refreshing documentary

FERLINGHETTI (Christopher Felver, 2009)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St.
Opens Friday, February 8
212-255-2243
www.quadcinema.com
www.ferlinghettifilm.com

“Poetry should be dissident, and subversive, and an agent for change,” poet, publisher, painter, activist, and military veteran Lawrence Ferlinghetti says in Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder, a refreshing and revealing documentary about the author of A Coney Island of the Mind and owner of the famous City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. Director Christopher Felver has compiled ten years of interviews with Ferlinghetti, including trips to Italy, where the poet’s father was born; France, where the aunt who raised him was from; and his childhood home in New York. Among those sharing their opinions of the charming and friendly Ferlinghetti, who turns ninety-four next month, are fellow poets Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Anne Waldman, and Billy Collins as well as such other artistic figures as David Amram, Dave Eggers, Dennis Hopper, and Jean-Jacques Lebel, all of whom have only the most positive things to say about the film’s subject. Despite his radicalism and calls for social and political change around the world, Ferlinghetti is nearly always wearing a smile, clearly enjoying the long life he’s leading. He discusses his friendships with Kenneth Rexroth, Shakespeare & Co. founder George Whitman, and the Beats, primarily Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, focusing at one point on the censorship trial involving his publication of Ginsberg’s Howl, which turned into a critical battle over First Amendment rights. Counterculture guru Ferlinghetti is shown performing in a studio with Amram, accepting an award from the city of San Francisco, discussing his family, working on his abstract paintings, and wearing silly hats. He is completely at ease with who he is and where he came from, as well as where he’s going, still fighting the power as valiantly as ever, not just relaxing on his many laurels. Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder is also likely to make viewers think twice about their own lives, realizing there’s a great big world out there, and it is possible for each and every person to make a difference. Felver, who has previously made documentaries on John Cage, Tony Cragg, Donald Judd, and Cecil Taylor, will be at the Quad opening night, participating in Q&As following the 6:15 and 8:00 shows on February 8.

CINEMA TROPICAL FESTIVAL: NEIGHBORING SOUNDS

Brazilian film NEIGHBORING SOUNDS examines a changing community in changing times

NEIGHBORING SOUNDS (O SOM AO REDOR) (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2011)
92YTribeca
200 Hudson St. at Canal St.
Saturday, February 9, $12, 7:30
212-415-5500
www.92y.org
www.cinemaguild.com

Inspired by actual events that took place in his hometown of Recife, Brazil, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighboring Sounds is an engaging slice-of-life examination of class differences and a community in the midst of social and economic change. When Clodoaldo (Irandhir Santos) and Fernando (Nivaldo Nascimento) go door-to-door offering their services as overnight security guards protecting the street, only Francisco (W. J. Solha), an aging, wealthy sugar baron who owns much of the surrounding property, and his grandson João (Gustavo Jahn) refuse to participate in the shady proposal, but Francisco insists that they keep their hands off another of his grandsons, Dinho (Yuri Holanda), who is responsible for a spate of car-stereo robberies. This suburban neighborhood, ever more in the architectural shadow of bigger high rises going up all around them, is filled with little secrets and minor resentments. A mechanic keys an expensive car when the owner is rude to him. Clodoaldo and a maid (Clébia Souza) make use of a fancy gated house he is taking care of while the owners are away. Sisters fight over the size of a flat-screen television. And a co-op board wants to fire their longtime night watchman without a severance package because he has taken to napping on the job. Meanwhile, João, who has two children by the daughter of the family’s maid, has started a relationship with the more acceptable Sofia (Irma Brown), but the privileged João still lives in the past; when he shows an apartment in one of Francisco’s condos, he points out what would be the maid’s room, assuming everyone can afford domestic help. And Bia (Meve Jinkings) finds a different kind of domestic help, buying large quantities of pot from the water guy, finding unique ways to deal with her neighbor’s howling dog, and using household appliances to pleasure herself. A film critic who has previously made documentaries, Filho, who wrote, directed, and coedited (with João Maria) Neighboring Sounds, has populated his debut full-length feature with believable characters caught up in realistic situations, along with just the right dose of black comedy. The film was shot with natural sound at a relaxed pace, inviting viewers into this intriguing fictional tale filled with real-world implications, involving a decaying past and modern issues of safety and surveillance. While João might be the moral conscious of the story, it is Jinkings’s Bia who steals this small gem of a film, her unique methods of daily survival a joy to behold.

Neighboring Sounds is screening February 9 at 7:30 at 92YTribeca as part of the second annual Cinema Tropical Festival honoring Latin American films; Cinema Tropical named Neighboring Sounds Best Fiction Film of 2012. The series begins February 8 at 7:00 with Matías Meyer’s The Last Christeros (Los Últimos Cristeros), which won the Best Director, Feature Film award, followed at 9:00 by Santiago Mitre’s The Student (El Estudiante), which garnered Best First Film. Neighboring Sounds will be preceded on Saturday by Maite Alberdi’s The Lifeguard (El Salvavidas) at 6:00, winner of the Best Documentary prize.

ATHENA FILM FESTIVAL: THE INVISIBLE WAR

Kori Cioca shares her shocking story in THE INVISIBLE WAR

THE INVISIBLE WAR (Kirby Dick, 2011)
Barnard College, Diana Event Oval – LL 100
117th St. & Broadway
Sunday, February 10, $12, 12 noon
www.athenafilmfestival.com
www.invisiblewarmovie.com

Kirby Dick’s The Invisible War is one of the bravest, most explosive investigative documentaries you’re ever likely to see. Dick (This Film Is Not Yet Rated) busts open the military’s dirty little secret, revealing that episodes of horrific sexual abuse such as the Tailhook scandal are not an aberration but a prime example of a rape epidemic that seems to an accepted part of military culture. Dick speaks with many women and one man who share their incredible stories, describing in often graphic detail the sexual abuse they suffered, then faced further abuse when they reported what had happened. Their superiors, some of whom were the rapists themselves, either looked the other way, laughed off their allegations as no big deal, or threatened the victims’ careers. Dick includes remarkable Defense Department statistics — the government admits that approximately one out of every five female soldiers suffers sexual abuse and that there were nineteen thousand violent sex crimes in 2010 alone — even as such military officials as Dr. Kaye Whitley, Rear Admiral Anthony Kurta, and Brigadier General Mary Kay Hertog make absurd claims that they are satisfied with the way they are handling the alarming trend. The central figure in the film is Kori Cioca, a former member of the Coast Guard whose face was broken when she was raped by a superior and now keeps getting denied necessary medical services from the VA. Such courageous women as USAF Airman 1st Class Jessica Hinves, former Marine Officer Ariana Klay, USN veteran Trina McDonald, USMC Lieutenant Elle Helmer, USN Lieutenant Paula Coughlin, and even Special Agent Myla Haider of the Army Criminal Investigation Command also open up about the physical and psychological damage the abuse has left on their lives and careers. Inspired by Helen Benedict’s 2007 Salon.com article “The Private War of Women Soldiers,” Dick and producer Amy Ziering (The Memory Thief) have presented a searing indictment of an endemic military culture that has to come to an end, and fast. The Invisible War, which earned Dick and Ziering this year’s Nestor Almendros Award for courage in filmmaking at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival at Lincoln Center and has been nominated for a Best Documentary Academy Award, is screening February 10 at 12 noon as part of the third annual Athena Film Festival at Barnard College and will be followed by a Q&A with Dick and executive producers Maria Cuomo Cole and Regina Kulik Scully.