this week in film and television

IN THE LAND OF POMEGRANATES

Ayana Lekach and Rotem Dar

Ayana Lekach and Rotem Dar get emotional as a group of young people argue about Israel in Hava Kohav Beller’s In the Land of Pomegranates

IN THE LAND OF POMEGRANATES (Hava Kohav Beller, 2017)
Lincoln Plaza Cinema
1886 Broadway at 63rd St.
Opens Friday, June 14
212-757-2280
firstrunfeatures.com
www.lincolnplazacinema.com

Hava Kohav Beller’s documentary In the Land of Pomegranates begins with an epigraph quote from Swiss writer and political activist Friedrich Dürrenmatt: “This inhuman world has to become more human. But how?” The writer of The Pledge and The Visit also claimed, “Without tolerance, our world turns into hell,” and argued that Swiss citizens were both prisoners and guards. One wonders what Dürrenmatt would have thought of Beller’s film, which explores the ongoing battle between Jews and Palestinians over who has the right to exist in Israel. The two-hour film starts out slowly, with interviews dating back to 2010 as random men and women share their views on the fierce debate; they are not artists, politicians, public figures, acknowledged experts, or professional thinkers. Ofra Eviatar talks about the dangers of being a Jew living by the wall at the Gaza border. An Arab man explains that he felt scared when he was a child, so “my fear meant I would get revenge when I grew up.” The people chosen feel a bit too arbitrary, too selective and manipulative. But then, suddenly, the film finds its focus as it zeroes in on a gathering of young Palestinians and Jews participating in a retreat in Germany called “Vacation from War,” where they live together and have intense group discussions about the controversy surrounding the State of Israel. “Here we are having a break from reality and here we will try to see if we can understand each other,” facilitator Shadi Hanoun says. But just when it seems like the next generation might be able to find some common ground, the conversation gets brutal as the Jews ask whether the Palestinians will ever accept Israel’s right to exist and the Palestinians demand that their land must be returned to them. Meanwhile, a young Palestinian mother has to cross the border to bring her son, who has a severe heart problem, to an Israeli hospital where Jewish doctors try to save the boy.

Guy Zuzut

Guy Zuzut shares his thoughts on Israel, the Jews, and the Palestinians in powerful documentary

Beller (The Burning Wall, the Oscar-nominated The Restless Conscience: Resistance to Hitler within Germany 1933-1945), a former dancer and choreographer who was born in Germany, raised in Israel, and lives in New York City, occasionally cuts away to show horrific terrorist bombings as well as supremely gorgeous shots of Israel, stunning locales that serve as a dramatic counterpoint to the bitter feuds and spilled blood. (The lush cinematography is by Colin Rosin, Christoph Lerch, and Shalom Rufeisen, with superb editing by Jonathan Oppenheim.) One of the most striking elements of the film is how similar the young Palestinians and Jews look; aside from those wearing burkas or yarmulkes, it is not immediately apparent what side Ayana Lekach, Amal Shater, Rotem Dar, Shadi Abu Arrah, Rabea Arar, Guy Zuzut, Nira Ponso, and Aya Awad are on. And no matter what side you’re on, you’re likely to become enraged as the subject of the Holocaust takes center stage and the film reaches its sizzling conclusion. (The film also offers an alternate look from Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky’s 2016 The Ruins of Lifta: Where the Holocaust and Nakba Meet, in which an elderly Jewish woman and Palestinian man examine their differences.) “There needs to be an acceptance of the two national narratives,” Mohammad Judeh says, which seems to be impossible. It would be fascinating to hear what the participants think of President Trump’s decision to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which led to further violence. As Beller notes in the film, “The pomegranate is the fruit of the land, a symbol of rejuvenation and rebirth. It is also a euphemism for a hand grenade.” A lasting peace is not on this menu. In the Land of Pomegranates is having its theatrical world premiere on January 5 at Lincoln Plaza Cinema, which will be closing at the end of the month as its lease expires and the building and plaza undergo renovation. “At the completion of this work, we expect to reopen the space as a cinema that will maintain its cultural legacy far into the future,” owners Milstein Properties announced in a statement.

THE GREEN FOG / VERTIGO

The Green Fog

Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson reimagine Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo with clips from old films in The Green Fog

THE GREEN FOG (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson, 2017)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, January 5
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
guy-maddin.com

Winnipeg-based filmmakers Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson ingeniously reimagine Alfred Hitchcock’s psychosexual masterpiece, Vertigo, using clips from dozens of movies and television shows in the mesmerizing pastiche The Green Fog. When Maddin, who has made such previous films as Careful, The Saddest Music in the World, and My Winnipeg, which use early-cinema conventions and look like rediscovered, decayed old works, was commissioned by the San Francisco International Film Festival to make a film for its sixtieth anniversary, Maddin turned to the Johnson brothers, his collaborators on The Forbidden Room and Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton, and began poring over movies and TV shows set in the City by the Bay. Along the way they were continually reminded of Vertigo as they recognized locations from the classic thriller about an agoraphobic detective obsessed with a woman who resembles his former love. So the trio decided to re-create Vertigo with found footage, not shot-by-shot like Gus Van Sant did with Psycho but by employing themes, places, pacing, mood, and tension similar to Hitchcock’s, and in about half the time. (The Green Fog runs sixty-three minutes, Vertigo slightly more than two hours.)

The Green Fog

The Green Fog incorporates clips from such genre movies as Sudden Fear, starring Joan Crawford

In sections with such titles as “Prologue,” “Weekend at Ernie’s,” and “Catatonia,” Maddin and the Johnsons follow the general story line of Vertigo,, with the Jimmy Stewart role “played” primarily by Rock Hudson from McMillan & Wife, Vincent Price from Confessions of an Opium Eater, and Chuck Norris from Slaughter in San Francisco and An Eye for an Eye. There’s a rooftop chase, a visit to a flower shop, scenes in restaurants and with paintings in museums, and a trip up a tower. Occasionally a green fog threatens ominously. In the vast majority of the clips, the dialogue has been cut out, so the characters are seen in choppy edits looking at each other in offbeat ways, allowing viewers to infer their own Vertigo-esque narrative. Because viewers are likely not to be familiar with many of the scenes from the movies and thus don’t know the relationships between the characters, issues of sexuality, homoeroticism, and even incest arise as Maddin and the Johnsons redefine the male gaze — so prevalent in Hitchcock films — while passing the Bechdel test. Snippets of conversation occasionally come through, usually involving people watching surveillance footage on film or monitors or listening to tape recordings, commenting with inside jokes and references to the making of The Green Fog. “What are we looking for, sir?” Sgt. Enright (John Schuck) asks Commissioner McMillan (Hudson), who responds, “I don’t know, but at this point I’ll take anything.” McMillan also says, “That’s the trouble with that old film,” and later sets fire to filmstrips, leading to a series of disasters of epic proportions. And Michael Douglas as Det. Steve Keller from The Streets of San Francisco watches Michael Douglas as Det. Nick Curran from Basic Instinct get out of bed and walk to the bathroom naked. “Boy, you look good, Mike. You ever thought about going into showbiz?” Keller says to Lt. Stone (Malden).

Vincent Price

Vincent Price is one of many actors who “portray” John “Scottie” Ferguson (Jimmy Stewart) in mesmerizing cinematic collage based on Vertigo

Many shots echo the doubling mirror image that is at the heart of Vertigo. In a scene from Nicholas Ray’s Born to Be Bad, Gobby Broome (Mel Ferrer) watches what appears to be twin girls looking intently at two paintings in a museum. In a restaurant, a daughter tells her father, “I’m trying to become somebody,” as if there’s another persona waiting to burst out of her. And Lt. Stone puts on clown makeup to try to catch a killer. Among the other actors who show up in the film are Mel Brooks, Lee Remick, Martin Landau, Nancy Kwan, Clint Eastwood, Meg Ryan, Richard Gere, Kim Basinger, Donald Sutherland, Miriam Hopkins, Dean Martin, Fritz Weaver, Sandra Bullock, Claude Akins, Sharon Stone, John Saxon, Joan Crawford, Sidney Poitier, Humphrey Bogart, Joseph Cotten, and Veronica Cartwright, from such movies and TV series as Murder She Wrote, Mission: Impossible, Hotel, Bullitt, High Anxiety, Dark Passage, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, The Towering Inferno, It Came from Beneath the Sea, Barbary Coast, The Conversation, Flower Drum Song, The Love Bug, Dirty Harry, A View to a Kill, The Lady from Shanghai, Sans Soleil, Sister Act, So I Married an Axe Murderer, Pal Joey, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Ten Commandments, and They Call Me Mister Tibbs! as well as an *NSYNC video. The intense, titillating score was composed by Jacob Garchik and is performed by the San Francisco-based Kronos Quartet. The Green Fog also evokes Christian Marclay’s The Clock and Telephones, in which the Swiss and American visual and sound artist edited together existing film footage to create narratives based on time and phone conversations, respectively. As with those montage-based works, it’s easy to get caught up in trying to identify the actors and the movies in The Green Fog, but don’t forget that the clips are all being employed to come up with something brand new that stands on its own. Maddin (Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Keyhole) and the Johnsons have made a dazzling love letter to Vertigo, to San Francisco, and to the history of movies themselves, offering a treasure trove of fun worthy of repeated viewings.

The Green Fog opens January 5 at IFC Center, screening with Maddin and the Johnson brothers’ 2015 short Lines of the Hand, which is based on Jean Vigo’s unrealized film poem Les lignes de la main and stars film critic Luce Vigo, who is Vigo’s daughter, along with Geraldine Chaplin and Udo Kier. Maddin will participate in a Q&A with SFFILM executive director Noah Cowan following the 8:55 show on January 5 in addition to Q&As after the 4:50 and 8:55 screening on January 6. There will also be some double features pairing The Green Fog with Vertigo.

VERTIGO

James Stewart and Kim Novak get caught up in a murder mystery in Vertigo

VERTIGO (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, January 5
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

Select screenings of The Green Fog will be accompanied by Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 mind-altering, fetishistic psychological thriller, Vertigo, which heavily influenced Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson’s San Francisco montage. Based on Boileau-Narcejac’s 1954 novel, D’entre les morts, the film delves deep into the nature of fear and obsession. Jimmy Stewart stars as John “Scottie” Ferguson, a police detective who retires after his acrophobia leads to the death of a fellow cop. An old college classmate, wealthy businessman Gavin Elster (Tom Holmore), asks Scottie to look into his wife’s odd behavior; Elster believes that Madeleine (Kim Novak) is being inhabited by the spirit of Carlotta Valdes, her great-grandmother, a woman who committed suicide in her mid-twenties, the same age that Madeleine is now. Scottie follows Madeleine as she goes to Carlotta’s grave, visits a portrait of her in a local museum, and jumps into San Francisco Bay. Scottie rescues her, brings her to his house, and starts falling in love with her. But on a visit to Mission San Juan Bautista, tragedy strikes when Scottie can’t get to the top of the tower because of his vertigo. After a stint in a sanatorium, he wanders the streets of San Francisco where he and Madeleine had fallen in love, as if hoping to see a ghost — and when he indeed finds a woman who reminds him of Madeleine, a young woman named Judy Barton (Novak), he can’t help but try to turn her into his lost love, with tragedy waiting in the wings once again.

VERTIGO

Scottie experiences quite a nightmare in Alfred Hitchcock classic

Vertigo is a twisted tale of sexual obsession, much of it filmed in San Francisco, making the City by the Bay a character all its own as Scottie travels down Lombard St., takes Madeleine to Muir Woods, stops by Ernie’s, and saves Madeleine under the Golden Gate Bridge. The color scheme is almost shocking, with bright, bold blues, reds, and especially greens dominating scenes. Hitchcock, of course, famously had a thing for blondes, so it’s hard not to think of Stewart as his surrogate when Scottie insists that Judy dye her hair blonde. Color is also central to Scottie’s psychedelic nightmare (designed by artist John Ferren), a Spirographic journey through his mind and down into a grave. Cinematographer Robert Burks’s use of the dolly zoom, in which the camera moves on a dolly in the opposite direction of the zoom, keeps viewers sitting on the edge of their seats, adding to the fierce tension, along with Bernard Herrmann’s frightening score. Despite their age difference, there is pure magic between Stewart, forty-nine, and Novak, twenty-four. (Stewart and Novak next made Bell, Book, and Candle as part of the deal to let Novak work for Paramount while under contract to Columbia.)

The production was fraught with problems: The screenplay went through Maxwell Anderson, Alec Coppel, and finally Samuel A. Taylor; shooting was delayed by Hitchcock’s health and vacations taken by Stewart and Novak; a pregnant Vera Miles was replaced by Novak; Muir Matheson conducted the score in Europe, instead of Herrmann in Hollywood, because of a musicians’ strike; associate producer Herbert Coleman reshot one scene using the wrong lens; Hitchcock had to have a bell tower built atop Mission San Juan Bautista after a fire destroyed its steeple; and the studio fought for a lame alternate ending (which was filmed). Perhaps all those difficulties, in the end, helped make Vertigo the classic it is today, gaining in stature over the decades, from mixed reviews when it opened to a controversial restoration in 1996 to being named the best film of all time in Sight & Sound’s 2012 poll to a recent digital restoration.

NEW YEAR, NEW FUTURES

I Am Not Your Negro

Brooklyn Museum screening of I Am Not Your Negro will be followed by discussion of activism with James Baldwin’s niece

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, January 6, free, 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum looks to 2018 with its January First Saturday program, “New Year, New Futures.” There will be live music by Sinkane, BEARCAT, Zaven of Resonator Collective (an in-gallery soundscape for the terrific exhibition “Proof: Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Longo”), and New Kingston; a curator tour of “Rodin at the Brooklyn Museum: The Body in Bronze” with Lisa Small; a hands-on art workshop in which participants can make zines inspired by “Proof”; a community talk with Murad Awawdeh, the vice president of advocacy at the New York Immigration Coalition; a screening of the Oscar-nominated documentary about James Baldwin, I Am Not your Negro (Raoul Peck, 2017), followed by a discussion with activists Jessica Green and Aisha Karefa-Smart (Baldwin’s niece); a Feminist Book Club event focusing on the 1970 book Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement, edited by Robin Morgan, hosted by Glory Edim of Well-Read Black Girl based on selections by Judy Chicago; pop-up gallery talks on “Roots of ‘The Dinner Party’: History in the Making”; a Brooklyn Dance Festival movement workshop and live performances; pop-up poetry with DéLana R. A. Dameron (Weary Kingdom) and Rickey Laurentiis (Boy with Thorn), followed by a signing; and a NYLaughs comedy showcase with Negin Farsad, Nimesh Patel, and Jordan Carlos, hosted by Ophira Eisenberg and followed by a discussion on humor, activism, and crisis. In addition, the galleries will be open late so you can check out “Roots of ‘The Dinner Party’: History in the Making,” “Soulful Creatures: Animal Mummies in Ancient Egypt,” “Proof: Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Longo,” “Arts of Asia and the Middle East,” “Infinite Blue,” “Ahmed Mater: Mecca Journeys,” “Rodin at the Brooklyn Museum: The Body in Bronze,” “A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt,” and more.

MODERN MATINEES — CONSIDERING JOSEPH COTTEN: TOO MUCH JOHNSON

Joseph Cotten is on the run from a jealous husband in Orson Welles Too Much Johnson

Joseph Cotten is on the run from a jealous husband in Orson Welles’s recently rediscovered and restored Too Much Johnson

TOO MUCH JOHNSON (Orson Welles, 1938)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Wednesday, January 3, 1:30
Thursday, February 15, 1:30
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

In August 2013, a 35mm nitrate workprint containing the raw footage of what was to be Orson Welles’s professional debut as a film director was discovered in a warehouse in Pordenone, Italy, home of an annual silent film festival. Consisting of sixty-six unedited, purposefully silent minutes, the film had been shot to accompany the Mercury Theatre’s streamlined staging of William Gillette’s 1894 farce, Too Much Johnson. Unfortunately, when the theatrical production opened in 1938 in a Connecticut theater, the filmed segments couldn’t be shown, spoiling the show’s chances to eventually make it to Broadway — various reports claim that the footage was not finished in time; the Stony Creek Theater lacked the proper projector; Paramount, which owned the rights to the play, demanded a fee; or it just wasn’t safe to screen the film in the theater. But you can see the raw footage at MoMA on January 3 and February 15 at 1:30, the first screening accompanied by a live score by Ben Model, the second by Makia Matsumara. Restored and preserved by George Eastman House, Too Much Johnson is a wacky, breathless tale of lust, passion, and betrayal, as Leon Dathis (Edgar Barrier) catches his wife (Arlene Francis) cheating on him with the dapper Augustus Billings (Joseph Cotten). Dathis sets out after Billings, chasing him through the streets, around a basket shop, and across the rooftops of Lower Manhattan, predominantly in the Meatpacking District — if you look closely, you can see the elevated railroad tracks that became the High Line. Dathis is joined by residents and storekeepers from the neighborhood and a pair of Keystone Kops (John Houseman and Herbert Drake) as they desperately try to catch the cad. The cast also includes Ruth Ford as Billings’s wife, Mary Wickes as Mrs. Battison, and Howard I. Smith as Cuba plantation owner Joseph Johnson.

The hats come off

The hats come off in rediscovered Welles footage meant to accompany Mercury Theatre stage production

In his cinematic debut, Cotten, who would team up with Welles on The Magnificent Ambersons, Citizen Kane, Journey into Fear, and The Third Man, shows quite an aptitude for slapstick comedy, à la Harold Lloyd, fearlessly portraying Billings, doing all the stunts himself, including several very dangerous ones. Meanwhile, Lenore Faddish (Virginia Nicolson, Welles’s wife at the time) and Harry MacIntosh (Guy Kingsley) are preparing to go to Cuba together (Tomkins Cove along the Hudson doubles for Cuba), which does not make her father (Eustace Wyatt) very happy. Welles and cinematographer Harry Dunham use silent-film tropes, from fast-paced action to overemoting to lush close-ups — and yes, the dastardly villain actually twirls his mustache — as well as what would become Welles’s trademark deep focus; the uncut footage features multiple takes, scenes shot from different angles, funny mistakes made by the cast and crew, clearly fake palm trees, a duel without swords, and long takes that would have likely been edited down later. One of the funniest bits involves Dathis and hats, which leads into a suffragette march. The whole thing is a hoot, but just be prepared and know that it’s not a fully realized, fully chronological story with a beginning, middle, and end. Fans of Welles, silent comedies, and Cotten will go crazy for it. And yes, the title means what you think it does. (You can see a home-movie clip of Welles directing the film here.) Too Much Johnson is screening as part of the MoMA series “Modern Matinees: Considering Joseph Cotten,” which runs January 3 to February 28 and also includes the Welles collaborations in addition to Shadow of a Doubt, Gaslight, Duel in the Sun, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Soylent Green, Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and other films by the underrated radio, TV, stage, and screen star, who was never nominated for an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, or Tony.

HUMAN FLOW WITH AI WEIWEI IN PERSON

Human Flow

Ai Weiwei takes a close look at the international refugee crisis in Human Flow

HUMAN FLOW (Ai Weiwei, 2017)
Quad Cinema, 34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves., 212-255-2243, Wednesday, January 3, 4:30
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas, 30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St., 718-636-4100, Wednesday, January 3, 7:00
www.humanflow.com

On January 3, Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei will travel from Manhattan to Brooklyn, participating in two Q&As following screenings of his stunning new documentary, Human Flow. This past fall, Ai had several concurrent exhibitions in New York City that dealt with the international refugee crisis. At Deitch Projects in SoHo, “Laundromat” included racks of clothing that had been worn by Syrian refugees at the Idomeni refugee camp in Iraq, all freshly cleaned and pressed, as if ready to give the migrant men, women, and children a new lease on life. Among other items, the gallery show also featured several monitors playing footage that Ai had shot in various refugee camps, film that has now been turned into Human Flow. In 2016, Ai and his crew traveled to twenty-three countries, visiting dozens of camps in a year in which it was estimated that there were as many as 65 million displaced people around the world, fleeing war, poverty, famine, and persecution. In his first full-length documentary, Ai moves from macro to micro, shooting at a variety of scales. He uses drones to photograph tent cities in the desert from high above — reminiscent of the photography of Edward Burtynsky, turning individual items into parts of a vast pattern — along with gorgeous scenes of deserts and seascapes and intimate cell-phone footage and handheld camera shots that put viewers right in the middle of these makeshift villages, where some families live for decades. Ai, with his scruffy gray beard and in a hoodie, is often shown not only taking cell-phone videos but helping out and mingling with the refugees as dinghies arrive on the shores of Lesbos, Greece, or playfully trading passports with a refugee. Throughout the film, men and women stand proudly, often in traditional dress, looking directly at the camera for extended lengths of time, establishing their unique individuality, putting faces to what is most often seen in news clips as swaths of people struggling to survive. As Ai travels to each successive camp, he posts relevant quotes from writers and philosophers from that nation, from Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, the Dhammapada Buddhist scripture, and Persian poet Baba Tahir to Kurdish poet Sherko Bekas, Syrian poet Adonis, and U.S. president John F. Kennedy. Details about the situations are sometimes delivered news-crawl-style, along the bottom of the screen.

Human Flow

Ai Weiwei gets deeply involved in situation in Human Flow

In addition to giving voice to the refugees themselves — “Where am I supposed to start my new life?” one woman asks — Ai speaks with crisis workers on the ground and United Nations officials and other experts, such as UNHCR Communications Officer Boris Cheshirkov, Princess Dana Firas of Jordan, Human Rights Watch Emergencies Director Peter Bouckaert, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi, UNHCR Pakistan Senior Operation Coordinator Marin Din Kajdomcaj, UNICEF Lebanon representative Tanya Chapuisat, former Syrian astronaut Mohammad Fares, Dr. Cem Terzi of the Association of Bridging Peoples, and Dr. Kemal Kirişci, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who gets right to the point, explaining, “It’s going to be a big challenge to recognize that the world is shrinking, and people from different religions, different cultures, are going to have to learn to live with each other.” The powerful, immersive film was edited by Niels Pagh Andersen, who worked on Joshua Oppenheimer’s searing The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, from nine hundred hours of footage, with a score by Karsten Fundal and a dozen cinematographers, among them Ai, Christopher Doyle, Zhang Zanbo, Konstantinos Koukoulis, and Johannes Waltermann. “The more immune you are to people suffering, that’s very, very dangerous. It’s critical for us to maintain this humanity,” one woman says, and that gets right to the heart of the film. Human Flow is very personal to Ai, whose own battles with Chinese authorities and exile — he spent much of his childhood in a hard labor camp in the Gobi Desert because his father, a poet and intellectual, was part of a revolutionary group, and as an adult Ai has been imprisoned, placed under house arrest, and beaten for his activism — were detailed in the Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry. A masterful Conceptualist whose work explores sociocultural elements through a historical lens, Ai has always believed that artists have a responsibility to reveal the truth, and that’s precisely what he does in Human Flow, with a determined fearlessness to do what’s right.

In one of the film’s most heart-wrenching moments, thirteen thousand refugees, mostly from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, walk through the Greek countryside toward the Macedonian border, only to find that a fence has been erected and the entrance is now closed, leaving them with nowhere to go. It’s a harrowing scene, but Ai is no mere doomsayer. There are many shots in the film that show children running about and playing, laughing and smiling for the camera, still filled with hope for a better life. It’s the rest of the world’s job to make that happen, and as Ai exemplifies, every one of us can make a difference. Ai will participate in Q&As following the 4:30 screening at the Quad as part of the “One Shots” series and after the 7:00 show at BAMcinématek, the latter moderated by Laura Poitras (Citizenfour, Astro Noise). The film was released in conjunction with the Public Art Fund project “Ai Weiwei: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors,” consisting of dozens of installations and interventions in all five boroughs: at Doris C. Freedman Plaza, the Washington Square Arch, the Unisphere, Essex Street Market, the Cooper Union, bus shelters, lampposts, newsstand kiosks, and other locations, furthering Ai’s artistic ideas about immigrant bans and the treatment of refugees, spread across a city he called home in the 1980s.

THE CONTENDERS 2017: THE BIG SICK

The Big Sick

Actor and stand-up comic Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gardner (Zoe Kazan) explore love and romance in The Big Sick

THE BIG SICK (Michael Showalter, 2017)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Friday, December 29, $12, 7:30
Series runs through January 12
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.thebigsickmovie.com

Michael Showalter’s surprise summer hit, The Big Sick, is a heart-wrenchingly bittersweet romantic comedy loosely based on the real life of Pakistani American actor and comic Kumail Nanjiani. It would do a disservice to call the film, which was produced by Judd Apatow and Barry Mendel, a mere romcom, as it is so much more, taking on religion, assimilation, responsibility, culture, and personal identity with intelligence and wit. Kumail plays an Uber driver and stand-up comedian gigging at a Chicago club with fellow comics CJ (Bo Burnham), Mary (Aidy Bryant), and his doofy roommate, Chris (Kurt Braunohler). Kumail spends a lot of time at his parents’ suburban home, the heart of his family, where his mother, Sharmeen (Zenobia Shroff) and father, Azmat (Anupam Kher), continually invite single young Pakistani women to “drop by” to meet him, determined to arrange a proper marriage for their son. However, Kumail has started sort-of seeing a blond American woman, Emily Gardner (Zoe Kazan), after she playfully heckles him at a gig. As their relationship gets more serious, Kumail still hasn’t told his parents or his brother, Naveed (Adeel Akhtar), jeopardizing their future, but when Emily is struck by a sudden illness, Kumail reevaluates who he is and what he desires out of life. Emily’s illness also forces him to get to know her parents, Beth (Holly Hunter) and Terry (Ray Romano), who at first want nothing to do with him.

The Big Sick

Beth (Holly Hunter) and Terry (Ray Romano) wait for news on their daughter in Michael Showalter’s The Big Sick

Written by Nanjiani (The Meltdown with Jonah and Kumail, Silicon Valley) and freelance journalist and author Emily V. Gordon ( SuperYou: Release Your Inner Superhero, The Carmichael Show), The Big Sick is as gripping as it is funny. The characters are well defined, and the plot is filled with both delightful and shocking twists and turns that will have you on the edge of your seat, tears at the ready, particularly if you don’t know what ultimately happened to Kumail and Emily in actuality. Nanjiani is adorably understated playing a version of himself, while Emmy nominee Kazan (Ruby Sparks, Olive Kitteridge) is charming and quirky as Emily; the two have an instant chemistry that makes the stop-and-go beginning of their relationship thoroughly involving. Emmy winner Romano (Everybody Loves Raymond, Men of a Certain Age) and Oscar and Emmy winner Hunter (The Piano, Saving Grace) are terrific as Emily’s parents, who have some issues of their own to resolve aside from Kumail and Emily. (As a side note, the scene where Beth gets into a fight with a heckler was inspired by a real incident in which Hunter heckled a tennis player at the US Open.) Bryant (Saturday Night Live, Danger & Eggs) and musician and stand-up comic Burnham provide solid, um, comic relief, while Shroff and Kher excel as Kumail’s parents, who insist that Kumail follow tradition, regardless of what he wants for himself. One of the best films of the year, The Big Sick is screening December 29 at 7:30 in MoMA’s annual series “The Contenders,” which consists of films the institution believes will stand the test of time; it continues through January 12 with such other 2017 works as James Mangold’s Logan, James Gray’s The Lost City of Z, Steven Spielberg’s The Post, and Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird.