this week in film and television

COLD CASES — THE DEPARTMENT Q TRILOGY AND THE NEW NORDIC NOIR: THE PUSHER TRILOGY

Mads Mikkaelsen has a tough go of it in the Pusher trilogy

Mads Mikkelsen has a tough go of it in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher trilogy

THE PUSHER TRILOGY (Nicolas Winding Refn, 1996, 2004, 2005)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Pusher: Friday, June 17, 1:25, and Monday, June 20, 6:00
With Blood on My Hands: Friday, June 17, 3:30, and Monday, June 20, 8:15
I’m the Angel of Death: Friday, June 17, 5:30, and Monday, June 20, 10:15
Series runs June 17-23
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.pusherthemovie.co.uk

Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher trilogy is a gritty, violent, brutal, and brilliant look at the devastation wrought by drugs. In Pusher (1996), Kim Bodnia stars as Frank, a small-time hood who loses both the money and the drugs when a deal goes bad. Over the course of a week, he grows more and more desperate as druglord Milo (Zlatko Buric) and his henchman, Radovan (Slavko Labovic), grow more and more impatient, preparing to do some serious damage to Frank. Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands (2004) focuses on Tonny (Mads Mikkelsen), Frank’s former partner who has just been released from prison. Addled by a beating he took, Tonny gets lost in a drug haze, trying to prove himself a worthy criminal to his big-time father, the Duke (Leif Sylvester Petersen), while also refusing to accept that he might be the father of Charlotte’s (Anne Sorensen) child. With the whole world crashing in on him, Tonny goes to extreme measures that affect everybody in his sphere. The gritty, powerful trilogy concludes with Refn’s masterwork, Pusher III: I’m the Angel of Death (2005), this time with Milo in the forefront. While preparing for his daughter’s (Marinela Dekic) twenty-fifth birthday party, he discovers that a major score has changed significantly, and he is forced to deal directly with a new generation of drug dealers — and by himself, because his cooking has made his crew sick. Shuttling between the ever-worsening situation, NA meetings, and his daughter’s party, Milo is faced with some deadly choices. Buric is spectacular as the aging druglord who does not like what he sees as he takes stock of his life. While the first two films feature hard-driving punk music, classical music slows things down in the far more contemplative conclusion. To add to the remarkable realism, many of the supporting actors were actual criminals. The grand finale is unforgettable, a multilayered, deeply philosophical, and extremely violent statement on the nature of drugs and the men and women addicted to that life. You can see all three films back-to-back-to-back on June 17 and 20 at IFC Center in the series “Cold Cases: The Department Q Trilogy and the New Nordic Noir,” which runs June 17-23 and includes such other cool films as Mikkel Norgaard’s Department Q threesome (A Conspiracy of Faith, The Absent One, The Keeper of Lost Causes), the original Swedish Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, Baltasar Kormákur’s Jar City, and Erik Skjoldbjærg’s Insomnia.

LUMINOSITY — THE ART OF CINEMATOGRAPHER MARK LEE PING-BING: FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI

Hou Hsiao-hsien gem FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI explores complex relationships between wealthy patrons and courtesans

FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI (HAI SHANG HUA) (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1998)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Friday, June 17, 7:30, and Wednesday, June 29, 7:30
Series runs June 16-30
Tickets: $12, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

Taiwanese New Wave master Hou Hisao-hsien might be the best filmmaker whose work you’ve never seen. For more than thirty years, he has been telling intimate, meditative stories about life, family, and relationships with a gentle, deeply intuitive style, infused with gorgeous visuals and subtly beautiful soundtracks. One of his most elegant works, Flowers of Shanghai, is set in brothels, known as flower houses, in 1884 in the British Concession, where men and women congregate for social interaction and develop long-term bonds and responsibilities to one another based on much more than just sex. The men play drinking games, smoke opium, and buy the women gifts. The story, told in a series of vignettes as Mark Lee Ping-Bing’s camera slowly moves through dark, lush, reddish gas-lit interiors, focuses on Master Wang (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), who has promised to be the sole patron of Crimson (Michiko Hada) but who has also been secretly seeing the younger Jasmin (Vicky Wei) and lavishing her with presents. The elder Master Hong (Luo Tsai-erh) and Auntie Huang (Rebecca Pan), the madam, discuss the situation, bringing up issues of responsibility and honesty, attempting to come to some kind of understanding in an exchange that shows respect for both the men and women who are a far cry from the Western conception of johns and prostitutes.

Women working in a brothel discuss their futures amid intimate lighting in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s gorgeous FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI

Most scenes end by fading quietly to black, then introducing the woman protagonist of the next section — Crimson, Jasmin, Pearl (Carina Lau), Jade (Shuan Fang), and Emerald (Michelle Reis) — as the women gossip and Crimson and Hong, and other pairs, try to figure out what they want out of life and from one another. In Flowers of Shanghai, Hou explores class differences, gender roles, the Asian notion of saving face, and intimacy with grace and sophistication. When the film fades out for the final time, viewers are left knowing they’ve just experienced something special, a stunning work that uses the technologies of cinema to delve into the very nature of humanity. Flowers of Shanghai is screening at MoMA on June 17 and 29 at 7:30 in the series “Luminosity: The Art of Cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-Bing,” with Lee participating in a Q&A following the June 17 show. The series runs June 16-30 and includes such other Lee-lensed treasures as Tian Zhuangzhuang’s Springtime in a Small Town, Gilles Bourdos’s Renoir, Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love, and Hou’s Dust in the Wind, The Assassin, and The Puppetmaster. In addition, Lee will sit down with Department of Film associate curator La Frances Hui for “A Conversation with Cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-Bing” on June 18 at 5:00.

GERMANS & JEWS

Documentary explores how Germans are dealing with their Nazi past and why so many Jews are moving to the country

GERMANS AND JEWS (Janina Quint, 2015)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, June 10
212-529-6799
germansandjews.com
www.cinemavillage.com

Janina Quint’s debut feature documentary, Germans & Jews, explores an intriguing premise: why so many Jews are moving to Germany, either returning to their homeland or living there for the first time. However, director and producer Quint, a non-Jewish German, and producer and executive producer Tal Recanati, an American-born Jew raised in the U.S. and Israel, reduce the film to random cocktail-party chatter; in fact, far too much of Germans & Jews takes place at a dinner party as second-generation Germans and Jews ramble on about guilt, responsibility, education, forgiveness, and how Germany has changed since WWII. The film would have benefited from more speakers like German-born American historian Dr. Fritz Stern and Thorsten Wagner, a Danish-German historian and grandson of a Nazi sympathizer, who are able to put the situation into fascinating perspective with a sincere intelligence. “I think it is true that most Germans now understand their past and the horror that they visited upon the world, but it’s a very hard thing,” Dr. Stern says. “And to find ways around to explain it is a natural human response.”

The film does offer insight into the effect of the 1978 Holocaust miniseries, which was shown in West Germany but not in East Germany, and takes viewers to various public art installations that serve as memorials to what happened under the Nazis. Quint does touch upon the issue of whether ordinary Germans in the 1930s turned a blind eye to what was building or really didn’t know the truth. But in the end, the work doesn’t dig deep enough, delivering little more than interesting conversations and comments from a relatively arbitrary gathering of experts and regular people. Germans & Jews opens June 10 at Cinema Village, with Quint, Recanati, and producer Maria Giacchino participating in Q&As at all 7:00 shows.

LAST CAB TO DARWIN

Rex (Michael Caton) has a long road ahead of him in LAST CAB TO DARWIN (photo by Wendy McDougall)

LAST CAB TO DARWIN (Jeremy Sims, 2015)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, June 10
212-529-6799
www.lastcab.com.au
www.cinemavillage.com

Jeremy Sims’s Last Cab to Darwin is a poignant road-trip movie about a man determined to end things on his own terms. Australian star Michael Caton (The Castle, The Sullivans) is Rex, a grizzled, gruff cabdriver who has never been outside his small hometown of Broken Hill, a mining city in the far west of the country. In his late sixties, he has reached the point where he says and does whatever he wants in life, regardless of the consequences. But when he is diagnosed with stomach cancer and given three months to live, he decides to get in his taxi and drive nearly two thousand miles across Australia to meet with Dr. Farmer (Oscar nominee Jacki Weaver), who has just developed a controversial new assisted suicide method in Darwin that Rex wants to be the first to use. Barely acknowledging his neighbor and lover, an Aboriginal woman named Polly (Ningali Lawford-Wolf), Rex hits the road, where he eventually picks up a young indigenous hustler, Tilly (Mark Coles Smith), and a British nurse-slash-barmaid, Julie (Emma Hamilton), and the three get caught up in some crazy adventures.

Rex is the kind of a man who, when Dr. Farmer tells him to keep up his fluids, buys a six-pack of beer, not exactly the best medicine. As they approach Darwin, all three travelers take stock of their lives, even as Rex looks to end his. Unfortunately, Dr. Farmer’s character is too underdeveloped, the film stumbles when dealing with racism, and the final scenes are a major cop-out with a gaping plot hole. But there’s still much to enjoy in this well-made film, which features many lovely shots of sunsets and sunrises, courtesy of cinematographer Steve Arnold, signaling the beginning and the end. The story, adapted by Reg Cribbs from his own play, was inspired by the real-life case of Australian cabdriver Max Bell, a cancer sufferer who in August 1996 drove from Broken Hill to Darwin (yes, Darwin is the name of the town he went to, not a movie metaphor evoking the survival of the fittest) shortly after the passage of the Rights of the Terminally Ill Act in order to go through voluntary euthanasia. Rex’s fiction turns out to be very different from Bell’s reality.

THE MUSIC OF STRANGERS: YO-YO MA AND THE SILK ROAD ENSEMBLE

Yo-Yo Ma leads the Silk Road Ensemble around the world in Morgan Neville documentary

THE MUSIC OF STRANGERS: YO-YO MA AND THE SILK ROAD ENSEMBLE (Morgan Neville, 2016)
Angelika Film Center, 18 West Houston St. at Mercer St., 212-995-2570
Lincoln Plaza Cinema, 1886 Broadway between 62nd & 63rd Sts., 212-757-2280
Opens Friday, June 10
themusicofstrangers.film

About midway through The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, the renowned international group performs an exhilarating song in a studio that leaves them just as thrilled as the audience. Renowned cellist Ma might be the heart of the ensemble, but it’s the joy of creating and playing music no matter what that makes this documentary soar. And music is something that director Morgan Neville clearly understands, having previously made the Oscar-winning 20 Feet from Stardom as well as Muddy Waters: Can’t Be Satisfied, Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story, and Johnny Cash’s America. In The Music of Strangers, Neville traces the history of the Silk Road Ensemble, named for the thousands-of-years-old trading route across Asia, from China to the Mediterranean. Born as an improvised gathering of musicians at Tanglewood in 2000, it became a venture that tours the world, promoting collaboration and celebrating international interaction. “The idea of culture is not so much to preserve tradition but to keep things alive and to evolve things,” says Ma, who has had to deal with accusations of cultural appropriation and dilution. Neville focuses on five members of the ensemble: Ma, the Paris-born Chinese-American cellist who has been a star his whole life (archival footage shows him at age seven with Leonard Bernstein, performing for President Kennedy and first lady Jacqueline); Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man, the first Chinese artist to play at the White House; Kinan Azmeh, a Syrian clarinetist who is the artistic director of the Damascus Festival Chamber Music Ensemble; Cristina Pato, a rock star on the gaita, the Galician bagpipe; and Iranian Kayhan Kalhor, a three-time Grammy nominee who is an expert on the kamancheh, the Persian bowed lute. Each shares stories of their personal history, focusing on their relationship with their native countries, which have undergone major changes over the last fifteen years.

They also explain how they almost didn’t continue after the events of 9/11, fearful of their Arabic connections and wondering whether proceeding with their mission was the right thing to do. “Everybody in the face of disaster reexamines who they are and their purpose,” Ma says, referring to their decision to go on. But their music transcends genre, history, and politics. “My intention is to represent my culture and the contribution that this very old culture made to human life,” Kalhor, who has been exiled from Iran, notes. And Ma adds, “The clearest reason for music, for culture, is it gives us meaning.” But Wu Man sums it all up: “There’s no East or West; it’s just a globe.”The Music of Strangers opens June 10 a the Angelika and Lincoln Plaza; Azmeh will give a special performance and participate in a Q&A following the 7:05 show on June 11 at Lincoln Plaza and the 5:00 show on June 12 at the Angelika, moderated by World Music Institute artistic director Par Neiburger. The Silk Road Ensemble has also released a companion album, Sing Me Home, which features such songs as “Green (Vincent’s Tune),” “Little Birdie,” “Ichichila,” “St. James Infirmary Blues,” and “Going Home,” featuring such guest artists as Bill Frisell, Abigail Washburn, Toumani Diabate, Sarah Jarosz, Gregory Porter, and Roomful of Teeth.

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH FILM FESTIVAL 2016: ALMOST SUNRISE

Anthony Anderson and Tom Voss go for a long walk to promote military veterans’ health issues in ALMOST SUNRISE

ALMOST SUNRISE (Michael Collins, 2016)
Saturday, June 11, 9:15, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway, 212-875-5050
Monday, June 13, 6:30, IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St., 212-924-7771
Festival runs June 10-19
ff.hrw.org/new-york
sunrisedocumentary.com

Michael Collins’s emotionally gripping documentary, Almost Sunrise, is built around an absolutely shocking statistic: According to the Department of Veteran Affairs, twenty-two U.S. veterans commit suicide every day. That’s one self-inflicted death every sixty-five minutes. In the film, two young veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom, facing depression and suicidal thoughts themselves, decide to walk from their homes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Los Angeles, California, in order to clear their own heads and raise awareness of this horrifying issue. Tom Voss and Anthony Anderson, a pair of big, bushy-haired men, became media darlings as they continued what became known as Veterans Trek, meeting with local press along the way and occasionally being joined by other veterans and supporters for parts of the 2,700-mile walk. But for much of the time, it’s just them against the elements, wandering across long stretches of deserted highways in the middle of nowhere, photographed beautifully by Clarissa de los Reyes. The two men intimately open up to Collins, who is with them every step of the pilgrimage; they share their thoughts about their families and speak dramatically about “moral injury,” a form of PTSD that the film describes as “a wound to the soul, caused by participation in events that violate one’s deeply held sense of right and wrong.” Similar distress is examined in Sonia Kenneback’s National Bird, in which military personnel working in the U.S. drone program try to deal with how they will never know the results of their classified operations, whether they hit the correct targets or whether they caused so-called collateral damage to innocent civilians.

In Almost Sunrise, Emmett Cullen, a close friend of Voss’s who served alongside him in Iraq, explains, “After you see enough people getting hurt, and see other people get killed, you start to write yourself off in a way. You’re kind of resigned to the fact that you might as well just consider yourself already dead, and if you make it home, you’re lucky. ’Cause that’s the only real mental shift you can make to make it through those kinds of scenarios without kind of freaking out,” adding, “Mentally, you’re processing the situation you’re in, and the dangers, but you’re not feeling it. So that carries over to civilian life when you get out.” Both Voss and Anderson share their struggles with that transition, reaching deep inside themselves. The section near the end in which Voss turns to holistic breathing techniques feels tacked on, almost like an infomercial for that specific healing process, regardless of its success. But the rest of Almost Sunrise, which features a score by Adam Crystal and music by Yuka Honda and Nels Cline, is a sobering look at what soldiers go through in war and some of the profound psychological issues they have to face when they come home. Almost Sunrise is screening twice at the 2016 Human Rights Watch Film Festival, on June 11 at 9:15 at IFC Center and June 13 at 6:30 at the Walter Reade Theater, both followed by a Q&A with Collins, producer Marty Syjuco, Voss, and Anderson, with his wife, Holly.

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH FILM FESTIVAL 2016: HOOLIGAN SPARROW

Hooligan Sparrow risks her freedom and her life for protesting for women’s rights in China

HOOLIGAN SPARROW (Nanfu Wang, 2016)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Friday, June 10, 6:30
Series runs June 10-19
212-875-5050
ff.hrw.org/new-york
hooligansparrow.com

The 2016 Human Rights Watch Film Festival kicks off at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater on June 10 with Nanfu Wang’s alarming debut feature documentary, Hooligan Sparrow. Wang won the annual Nestor Almendros Award for courage in filmmaking with this brave, disquieting look at Chinese activist Ye Haiyan, better known as Hooligan Sparrow, an advocate for sex workers’ rights, as she leads protests against a school principal who sexually abused six elementary school girls. “If you film us, we’ll smash your camera,” a man tells Wang at the beginning. Later she’s told she will be beaten if she doesn’t hand over her equipment. But she’s determined to keep telling the story any way she can. Sparrow, who gained notoriety for a project in which she offered free sex to migrant workers, is joined by Shan Lihua, Tang Jitian, Jia Lingmin, Wang Yu, and lawyer Wang Jianfen as she battles law enforcement, the government, and brothel owners, her safety and freedom in constant jeopardy. “If I believe something is right and I’m obliged to do it, they can’t stop me by arresting me or even killing me,” she defiantly says. She and her daughter, Lan Yaxin, keep getting evicted from their homes and banned from numerous provinces, but that doesn’t prevent her from protesting with such signs as “All China’s Women’s Federation Is a Farce. China’s Women’s Rights Are Dead” and “You Can Kill Me, But You Can’t Kill the Truth.” Born and raised in a remote Chinese farming village and currently based in New York City, Wang, who directed, produced, photographed, and edited Hooligan Sparrow, never backs down even as she meets with Chinese officials and is followed everywhere she goes, forced to become suspicious of nearly everyone she encounters. “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you,” Joseph Heller wrote in Catch-22. Wang clearly has reason to be paranoid.

The film is executive produced by Andy Cohen and Alison Klayman, who collaborated on the award-winning documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry; the Chinese artist and activist, who has been under long-term house arrest, took up Hooligan’s cause, and he included her belongings in an installation in his 2014 Brooklyn Museum retrospective, “According to What?” Wang, who has three master’s degrees, cowrote the film with Mark Monroe, who wrote the Oscar-nominated documentary The Cove and numerous Sundance winners. Hooligan Sparrow also features a subtly ominous score by Nathan Halpern and Chris Ruggiero that helps keep you on the edge of your seat as Hooligan and her group continue to fight the power, despite each of them being detained and imprisoned at one point or another — and some still are. Hooligan Sparrow is the opening-night selection of the 2016 Human Rights Watch Film Festival, screening June 10 at 6:30 at the Walter Reade Theater; it will be followed by a discussion with Wang, HRW Women’s Rights division director Liesl Gerntholtz, and HRW China director Sophie Richardson, moderated by HRW Global Initiatives director Minky Worden.