this week in film and television

HOT TIME: SUMMER FOR THE CITY AT LINCOLN CENTER

Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City features numerous events tied to the World Cup

SUMMER FOR THE CITY: TOGETHER, WE MOVE
Lincoln Center
June 10 – August 8, free or choose-what-you-pay
www.lincolncenter.org

The fifth iteration of Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City features art, film, music, comedy, workshops, discussions, meditation, silent discos, and more, but its focus is on dance — along with World Cup–related soccer programs.

Describing the series, which features an outdoor installation by Clint Ramos, Chief Artistic Director Shanta Thake explains, “Lincoln Center becomes a celebration of bodies in motion — dancing, gathering, and connecting people from all walks of life.” There are hundreds of events, with performers from around the globe.

All presentations are free or choose-what-you-pay, and some require advance RSVP; below are twi-ny’s don’t-miss highlights.

Reg Bloor will conduct her late husband Glenn Branca’s symphony for one hundred guitars at Lincoln Center on June 12 (photo by Maria Jose Govia)

Glenn Branca’s Symphony No. 13 (Hallucination City) for 100 Guitars
Wu Tsai Theater, David Geffen Hall
Friday, June 12, choose-what-you-pay, 7:30
www.lincolncenter.org

On June 13, 2001, avant-garde composer Glenn Branca premiered Symphony No. 13 (Hallucination City) for 100 Guitars on the plaza at the World Trade Center. Writing about the piece for Sound American, Reg Bloor, guitarist Reg Bloor, Branca’s wife, explained, “This is the first time Glenn had done anything like this with volunteers, so we had no idea if anyone was going to show up. I’ll never forget walking around the corner of the North Tower onto the World Trade Center Plaza for the first rehearsal and seeing people sitting there on their amps waiting for us. This was really going to work. . . . The piece was a swirling cauldron of consonance and dissonance, like a giant swarm of bees trapped in a cyclone, the single movement a long, gradual build of dynamics, pitch, and tempo to a crescendo bouncing off the towers and ringing through the plaza, spilling out onto the streets of Lower Manhattan. It’s a sound that stays with you for the rest of the day after the piece is over. You hear it coming out of the subway tunnel or in the air conditioning. You can’t get it out of your ear until whole world starts to sound like Glenn.” Bloor will conduct the symphony at David Geffen Hall on June 12 at 7:30, with one hundred guitarists along with drummer Greg Fox.

Juneteenth
Multiple locations
Friday, June 19
www.lincolncenter.org

Lincoln Center honors Juneteenth with three special performances that, unfortunately, overlap one another: Carl Hancock Rux’s Oh Sankofa at Hearst Plaza at 7:00, boasting a talented cast exploring the importance of folklore during the Transatlantic Slave Trade; Jeremy Nedd’s from rock to rock . . . aka how magnolia was taken for granite at Alice Tully Hall at 7:30, which looks at the Milly Rock; and Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Tune Up at the David Rubenstein Atrium at 7:30, directed by the Flea’s Niegel Smith.

The music of Labelle is celebrated by original member Nona Hendryx at David Geffen Hall

Nightbirds, the Music of Labelle
Wu Tsai Theater, David Geffen Hall
Sunday, June 28, choose-what-you-pay, 7:30
www.lincolncenter.org

In 1974, Patti LaBelle, Nona Hendryx, and Sarah Dash, known as LaBelle, took the country by storm with the monster hit “Lady Marmalade.” The trio had been together in other forms since 1961, broke up in lurid circumstances in 1976, the re-formed from 2005 to 2009. On June 28, Dream Machine Studio is presenting “Nightbirds, the Music of Labelle” at David Geffen Hall, led by Hendryx, joined by the original Labelle backing trio of guitarist Eddie Martinez, bassist Carmine Rojas, and percussionist Jose Rossy, along with Tony winner Adrienne Warren, Kimberly Nichole, Ledisi, and Sandra St. Victor.

Shen Wei Dance Arts and Guangdong Modern Dance Company team up for site-specific MindScape on Hearst Plaza (photo by Gabe Palacio)

Shen Wei Dance Arts | Guangdong Modern Dance Company: MindScape
Hearst Plaza
July 1-3, free, 5:00
www.lincolncenter.org

Chinese-born, NYC-based choreographer, director, and painter Shen Wei brings together Shen Wei Dance Arts (SWDA) and Guangdong Modern Dance Company for MindScape, a forty-five-minute piece that incorporates poetry, calligraphy, painting, and movement on Hearst Plaza. SWDA has presented dazzling dances in the Park Ave. Armory Drill Hall, at the Prospect Park Bandshell, in the Met’s Charles Engelhard Court, and other unique locations, so it should be fascinating to see what they’ll be doing outdoors at Lincoln Center. MindScape is part of Lincoln Center’s Dance Encounters series, which also has performances by Omari Wiles / Les Ballet Afrik (New York Is Burning), Ogemdi Ude (Major), Anna Sperber (Bow Echo), Benjamin Akio Kimitch (Tiger Hands), and Vangeline (Naiad Metal), which takes place in and around the Milstein Reflecting Pool, as well as Chinese Arts Week, which also includes Chinese-born, NYC-based Pulitzer Prize winner Du Yun’s family-friendly The Ocean Etched in the Forest.

Akram Khan’s Thikra is part of Summer for the City at Lincoln Center

Akram Khan Company: Thikra: Night of Remembering
Alice Tully Hall, 1941 Broadway
Thursday, July 2, 7:30; Friday, July 3, 7:30; Sunday, July 5, 2:00, choose-what-you-pay
www.lincolncenter.org

English choreographer Akram Khan, who melds the Indian kathak form with contemporary dance, collaborates with visual director Manal AlDowayan on Thikra: Night of Remembering, a piece for between nine and eleven women set to “Gyura Beli Belo Platno” by the London Bulgarian Choir and “The Elephant’s Funeral” by Sushma Soma with Aditya Prakash. “As I stand humbled within the vastness of this epic desert known as AlUla, I feel the urge to unearth the many cultures that have passed through here,” Khan says about the work, which explores the ancient Saudi Arabia desert civilization. Thikra: Night of Remembering is part of the Lincoln Center Contemporary Dance Festival, which also features Jeremy Nedd, Yinka Esi Graves, Sung Im Her / Her Project, Rachid Ouramdane / Compagnie de Chaillot, and others.

Documentary reveals how Elizabeth Streb and her Extreme Action Company (including Jackie Carlson, seen here) take dance to a whole new level

Dance Encounters: Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity (Catherine Gund, 2014)
Hearst Plaza
Friday, July 10, free, 6:00
www.lincolncenter.org
www.borntoflymovie.com

For more than fifteen years, New Yorkers have gotten the chance to see Elizabeth Streb’s Extreme Action Company perform such dazzling works as Ascension at Gansevoort Plaza, Kiss the Air! at the Park Avenue Armory, and Human Fountain at World Financial Center Plaza as her team of gymnast-dancer-acrobats risk their physical well-being in daring feats of strength, stamina, durability, and grace. In addition, Streb herself walked down the outside wall of the Whitney as part of a tribute to one of her mentors, Trisha Brown. Catherine Gund takes viewers behind the scenes in the exhilarating documentary Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity, going deep into the mind of the endlessly inventive and adventurous extreme action architect and the courage and fearlessness of her company. Gund follows Streb as she discusses her childhood, her dance studies, the formation of STREB in 1985, and her carefully thought out views on space, line, and movement as her work stretches the limits of what the human body can do. “I think my original belief and desire is to see a human being fly,” Streb says near the beginning of the film, which includes archival footage of early performances, family photos, and a warm scene in which the Rochester-born Streb and her partner, Laura Flanders, host a dinner party in their apartment, cooking for Bill T. Jones, Bjorn Amelan, Anne Bogart, Catharine Stimpson, and A. M. Homes. Gund also speaks with current and past members of the talented, ever-enthusiastic company — associate artistic director Fabio Tavares, Sarah Callan, Jackie Carlson, Leonardo Giron, Felix Hess, Samantha Jakus, Cassandre Joseph, John Kasten, and Daniel Rysak — who talk about their dedication to Streb’s vision while using such words as “challenge,” “velocity,” “endurance,” “magic,” “invincibility,” and “risk” to describe what they do and how they feel about it. The film is screening on Hearst Plaza on July 10 at 6:00 as part of Lincoln Center’s Dance Encounters series, which also includes “Movement on Film: Athletic Shorts” July 15–17.

Double Dutch Fusion Freestyle & Open Jump
The Dance Floor, Josie Robertson Plaza
Thursday, July 16, free, 5:00
www.lincolncenter.org

One of the most exciting events of every summer at Lincoln Center is the National Double Dutch League strutting its stuff with breathtaking displays of athleticism. It’s three hours of exhilarating movement, including an open jump where visitors are encouraged to participate.

Five troupes come together for annual BAAND Festival (Francesca Levita by Rachel Neville, Christopher R. Wilson by Andrew Eccles, Fangqi Li by Karolina Kuras, Taylor Stanley by Paul Kolnik, DTH Company Artist Kamala Saara by Nir Arieli)

BAAND Together Dance Festival
David H. Koch Theater
Tuesday, July 28, through Sunday, August 1, choose-what-you-pay
www.lincolncenter.org

The sixth BAAND Together Dance Festival takes place July 28 thorugh August 1, with five exciting troupes performing in the David H. Koch Theater: Ballet Hispánico New York, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, and Dance Theatre of Harlem. It doesn’t get much better than that. Each company will also host a family-friendly dance workshop every day.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]

ENCORE PRESENTATION — BILLY PRESTON: THAT’S THE WAY GOD PLANNED IT

The life and career of Billy Preston held many surprises revealed in documentary

BILLY PRESTON: THAT’S THE WAY GOD PLANNED IT (Paris Barclay, 2024)
Maysles Documentary Center
343 Lenox Ave./Malcolm X Blvd. between 127th & 128th Sts.
June 12, 7:00, June 13, 7:00, June 14, $15 (reduced price $7), 4:30
maysles.org
www.billyprestonfilm.com

“Will it go ’round in circles? / Will it fly high like a bird up in the sky?” Billy Preston sang in his 1973 smash hit. He might not have realized it then, but that line foretold his career, which had a seemingly endless series of ups until it all came crashing down.

The rise and fall of one of popular music’s most talented and beloved figures is intimately detailed in Paris Barclay’s revelatory documentary, Billy Preston: That’s the Way God Planned It.

Born in 1946 and raised in the church by his mother, gospel singer Robbie Lee Williams, Preston began playing the piano at age three, appeared on The Nat “King” Cole Show in 1957, accompanied Mahalia Jackson and Pearl Bailey on keyboards in the 1958 film St. Louis Blues, played with the gospel group the Cogics (Church of God in Christ), and as a teenager toured with Little Richard and the Rolling Stones. An enthusiastic man with an infectious gap-toothed smile and a collection of impressive wigs, Preston was soon recording with the Stones, Sam Cooke, Sly Stone, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin.

He singlehandedly rescued the Beatles when the Fab Four was preparing the Let It Be album and concert, just dropping by to say hello but then taking a seat at the organ and starting to improvise with John, Paul, George, and Ringo, infusing them with the energy they had been previous lacking as rumors swirled that the band was breaking up. The tabloids nicknamed him the Fifth Beatle and the Black Beatle. “He never put his hands in the wrong place,” Starr says in the film.

Preston might have been the ultimate sideman, but when performing he couldn’t help himself, often getting up and dancing wildly, joy emanating out of every pore. He couldn’t read music and never used charts but just felt the music blaze through him, even when playing backup. “He would steal the record without you even knowing until later, and you’d go, ‘He’s done it again,’” Eric Clapton explains.

When Preston brought an original song to George Harrison for a potential solo LP, the Quiet Beatle quickly assembled an all-star roster to back him up: Harrison, Clapton, Keith Richards, and Ginger Baker.

In the 1970s, he hit the charts with such songs as “Outa-Space,” “Will It Go Round in Circles,” “Nothing from Nothing,” and “With You I’m Born Again,” all of which are featured prominently in the film. He was a musical guest on the very first episode of Saturday Night Live. Most people don’t realize that Preston wrote and originally recorded “You Are So Beautiful,” made famous by Joe Cocker; one of the highlights of the documentary is Preston’s performance of the song at the Apollo 50 celebration, joined by Cocker and Patti LaBelle on vocals. We also learn that it is a love song — to his mother, who he also plays it with in the film.

But his life started falling apart as he got lost in a haze of drugs and alcohol (Courvoisier, coke, eventually crack), starred as Sgt. Pepper in the ill-fated movie Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and continued to hide his sexuality, even though his friends, family, and musical colleagues knew he was gay going back to his youth. He was often seen with young men he referred to as cousins, but he was overcome with loneliness.

In their debut documentary, three-time Emmy winner Barclay (NYPD Blue, Glee) and cowriter Cheo Hodari Coker (Ray Donovan, Luke Cage) also delve into the sexual abuse Preston suffered as a child, which added to his problems as an adult. In the 1990s, he was arrested for DUI, charged with assault and child molestation, and spent time in prison, but he kept on playing music until his death in 2006 at the age of fifty-nine.

“He couldn’t move on,” soul and gospel singer Merry Clayton says. “No one knew what had transpired but us, the inner circle, family people. He’d have that smile, but his heart would be broken.”

Producer Suzanne de Passe notes, “Billy Preston was a gifted, genius, wonderful, talented human being, and he had a very, very self-destructed aspect to who he was. I wish I could have been more of a help in the parts that weren’t any of my business.”

Similarly, engineer Bob Margouleff says wistfully, “I don’t think anyone, including me, knew how to help him.”

The film has a bevy of revelatory archival material, from photographs and home movies to rare clips of Preston from childhood through his entire career, including key segments from a 2004 live appearance. Barclay also speaks with Billy Porter, producer Tony Jones, recording artists Gloria Jones and Blinky Williams, Pastor Sandra Crouch, musician Cory Henry, A&M publicist Don Mizell, biographer David Ritz, Preston’s cowriter Bruce Fisher, his nephew Derrick Preston, his managers Bob Ellis and Joyce McRae Moore, and numerous members of his bands, who all share poignant stories of Preston as a performer and a human being, a man bursting with life but hiding so much inside.

“I just want to be free, to play the music that God’s given to me,” Preston says.

It’s a tragic, if not unfamiliar, story, in this case happening to a cherished person who could not conquer his demons. But as he sang in his first big hit: “Let not your heart be troubled / Let mourning sobbing cease / Learn to help one another / And live in perfect peace.”

If you missed the theatrical release of Billy Preston: That’s the Way God Planned It earlier this year at Film Forum, you can catch it at Maysles Documentary Center from June 12 to 14.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]

PROFOUND ABSENCE: SHTTL KICKS OFF REEL JUDAISM SERIES

Two men are at odds over religion and love in Ady Walter’s Shttl

SHTTL (Ady Walter, 2022)
Temple Israel
112 East Seventy-Fifth St. between Park & Lexington Aves.
Tuesday, June 2, free, 7:00
Series runs select Tuesday nights through August 11
tinyc.org
www.menemshafilms.com

On the eve of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, a small Yiddish-speaking village on the Polish border teeters on the edge as the citizens debate war, collaboration, religion, women’s roles in society, and true love. In the tense, gripping Shttl, Ady Walter pulls off quite an impressive directorial debut, shooting the 110-minute film in one continuous take, shifting between black-and-white and color as the narrative unfolds: Mendele (Moshe Lobel) joins the military, promising to come back for Yuna (Anisia Stasevich), but while he is gone she is wooed/harassed by the mean-spirited Folie (Antoine Millet), whose father (Saul Rubinek) is the community’s spiritual leader. The strange spelling of the title is an homage to Georges Perec’s 1969 novel, La Disparition (A Void), which never uses the fifth letter of the alphabet, its loss a symbol of profound absence. (Both of French novelist Perec’s parents were killed during the Holocaust, his father on the field of battle, his mother in Auschwitz.) The village, or shtetl, was built for the film and was going to be turned into a Jewish-Ukrainian museum until Russia invaded Ukraine.

Shttl is screening June 2 at 7:00 at Temple Israel on the Upper East Side, kicking off the synagogue’s free summer Reel Judaism festival, and will be followed by a Q&A with New Yiddish Rep veteran Lobel, moderated by Rabbi David Gelfand. The series continues select Tuesday nights through August 11 with such other films as Katharina Otto-Bernstein’s 2025 The Last Spy, Sandi DuBowski’s 2025 Sabbath Queen, and Daniel Am Rosenberg’s 2023 Less Than Kosher, all followed by discussions.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]

AUDITIONING SCHEHERAZADE: 1001 FRAMES AT BROOKLYN FILM FEST

Mehrnoush Alia’s 1001 Frames makes its NYC premiere at the Brooklyn Film Festival

1001 FRAMES (Mehrnoush Alia, 2025)
Brooklyn Film Festival
Sunday, May 31, Wythe Hotel, 80 Wythe Ave., Williamsburg, $25, 4:00
Monday, June 1, BRIC, 647 Fulton St., $28.37, 4:00
Festival runs May 29 – June 7
www.brooklynfilmfestival.org
www.loco-films.com

In the Middle Eastern fairy-tale collection One Thousand and One Nights, also known as The Arabian Nights, a woman named Scheherazade marries an evil king and tells him a different bedtime story every evening in order to stay alive. Brooklyn-based Iranian-American filmmaker Mehrnoush Alia uses that as her jumping-off point in her chilling feature debut, 1001 Frames, making its New York premiere at the Brooklyn Film Festival on May 31 and June 1.

Expanded from her 2015 short Scheherazade, the intense 1001 Frames brilliantly blurs the lines between fiction and reality, photographed by Hamed Hosseini Sangari in a cinéma vérité style. The film is set in a vast, empty warehouse studio where a famous Iranian director (Mohammad Aghebati) is holding auditions for the role of Scheherazade in his new horror film. Over the course of one day, he meets with more than a dozen women, ostensibly to audition them, but it becomes clear early on that something else is going on.

In the first shot, a woman is on the floor on all fours, grunting like an animal until she rolls over and lays still. Writer, director, editor, and producer Alia then cuts to a series of interviews as the unseen director asks the women ever-more-invasive questions. The actresses sit in a plain wooden folding chair, trying to balance confidence with their growing sense of discomfort as the director asserts his power and control over them in both subtle and overt ways, mirroring the treatment of women not only in the film industry but in the world as a whole.

“Tell me. It stays right here between us. It’s only you and the camera here,” he says to one auditioner, as if his presence is not central to their relationship.

Alia switches between a stationary camera focused on the woman in full and in closeup and a handheld camera as the director physically approaches them, often in a threatening manner. The effect forces the viewer to be the perpetrator, to be the one with the male gaze, a phrase coined by Laura Mulvey, who wrote in Visual and Other Pleasures, “Woman, then, stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of a woman still tied to her place as the bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.”

As the interactions become more personal and intimate, some of the women squirm, some consider leaving, while others start challenging the director.

“You think you can edit everything, even your life!” his ex-wife, Firoozeh (Iranian multidisciplinary artist Mahin Sadri), boldly argues. A model states, “I’m not supposed to do whatever I’m told.” Another actress, looking frightened, says, “I’m afraid of that moment that you cross a line that things become ok that shouldn’t be.”

Meanwhile, the director refuses to back down, asking one auditioner about the role, “What are you willing to do to get it?” He scolds another, “This is my workplace. You can’t show up and say whatever you want.”

The dynamic of men’s insistent domination over women, in all areas of life, turns 1001 Frames into its own horror film, going beyond the mere psychological as the ending approaches.

“Are you scared of me?” the director asks one actress, who answers, “Do you want me to be scared?”

Previously known as Mehrnoush Aliaghaei, Alia based many of the incidents in 1001 Frames on real stories; she also worked closely with the actresses in developing their characters, allowing improvisation and giving the full script to only some of the women, depending on their preference. The result is a terrifying finale that morphs into a spectacularly effective coda.

The ensemble cast is remarkable, representing a wide range of ages and experience, each worthy of note: Sadri, Leili Rashidi, Mahsa Rezaei, Behafarid Ghaffarian, Fereshteh Aliyari, Maryam Arabzadeh, Aisan Ghanbari, Parastoo Ghorbani, Mahdieh Mohammadi, Dorsa Panjehband, Shayesteh Sajadi, Fatemeh Salehian, Helia Shadifar, and Avin Taffakori. They spend most of the film sitting in the chair, the camera zooming in on their face, capturing their changing, conflicted emotions as they reach difficult realizations and have impossible decisions to make. Aghebati, who is also the casting director and one of the film’s producers, is menacing as the director, his face never seen, as if he could be any man; he is a persuasive and controlling figure who completely understands his power and flaunts it, and perhaps not only to find the right actress for the part.

The most potent film about auditions since Takashi Miike’s 1999 ultraviolent cult classic Ôdishon, in which two men hold a fake audition in order to find a romantic partner for one of them, a tryout that doesn’t go particularly well, 1001 Nights is a haunting tale of all-too-real psychological horror, a beautifully rendered parable about misogyny with an unforgettable conclusion.

The eighteenth-century version of One Thousand and One Nights consists of such beloved, familiar tales as “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp,” “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” and “The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor.” 1001 Frames is never so benign but all too familiar and scary, a story that Scheherazade has to keep on telling, over and over again, one frame at a time.

The May 31 and June 1 screenings will be followed by a Q&A with Alia and Aghebati. The Brooklyn Film Festival runs May 29 to June 7 at multiple venues and online; among the other films to watch out for are Walter Thompson-Hernández’s If I Go Will They Miss Me, Carlye Rubin, Katie Green, and Tina Grapenthin’s Blood & Guts, and Thales Banzai’s Tony Odyssey.

[ Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]

CELEBRATING THE PEARL OF AFRICA: BAM DANCEAFRICA BRINGS UGANDA TO BROOKLYN

Who: Abdel R. Salaam, Ndere Troupe, Asase Yaa African American Dance Theater, the Billie’s Youth Arts Academy Dance Ensemble, DanceAfrica Spirit Walkers, DJ YB, more
What: DanceAfrica Festival 2026
Where: BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, BAM Rose Cinemas, 30 Lafayette Ave.
When: May 22-28, many events free, Gilman dances $21-$86, film screenings $17
Why: The coming of the summer season means the arrival of one of the best festivals of every year, BAM’s DanceAfrica. The forty-ninth annual iteration focuses on Uganda, with four companies performing “Umoja/Mirembe/Obulungi (Unity/Peace/Beauty)!” in BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House: DanceAfrica Spirit Walkers, Asase Yaa African American Dance Theater, the Billie’s Youth Arts Academy Dance Ensemble, and Ndere Troupe, highlighting movement and music from the Pearl of Africa. Curated by artistic director Abdel R. Salaam, the festival also includes the DanceAfrica Bazaar with more than 150 vendors, dance workshops and master classes at the Mark Morris Dance Center, Sanaa Gateja’s “Voices of Peace” art installation, the Council of Elders Roundtable: Legacy & Preservation moderated by Dyane Harvey-Salaam, the Memorial Room, which offers a place to honor festival ancestors, and a late night dance party with DJ YB.

This year’s FilmAfrica screenings and cinema conversations, held in conjunction with the New York African Film Festival, are highlighted by Mohamed Ahmed’s A Tribe Called Love (2025), Maia Lekow and Chris King’s How to Build a Library (2025), Ossie Davis’s Black Girl (1972), Olive Nwosu’s Lady (2026), and Awam Amkpa’s The Man Died (2024) all followed by Q&As with the directors and/or others.

“Thousands of years of African cultural development were interrupted by centuries of colonialism, which gave rise to a sociopolitical movement that led to Uganda’s independence on October 9, 1962, and its formal nationhood in 1963. In the decades since, a powerful artistic movement has emerged to reclaim and celebrate Ugandan identity and intelligence through cultural expression, a force that continues to this day,” Salaam said in his mission statement. “Today, ancient Uganda is considered a cradle of human evolution and early civilization in the East African region of Lake Nalu Baale, the traditional name of what became Lake Victoria. In Luganda, a Bantu language, ‘Nalu Baale,’ translates to ‘Mother of the Ancestral/ Guardian Spirits.’ I am honored to share more of these ancient dances and songs, mixed with shades of contemporary visions of East Africa.”

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

INCONCEIVABLE! WALLACE SHAWN AT METROGRAPH

WALLACE SHAWN: THE MASTER BUILDER
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
May 8-22
metrograph.com

It’s inconceivable that there can ever be too much Wallace Shawn.

The eighty-two-year-old native New Yorker has written nine full-length plays, appeared in more than two hundred movies and TV series, published three books of essays, and cowritten several screenplays. Among my favorite acting roles of his are in 1981’s My Dinner with André, 1985’s Heaven Help Us, 1987’s Radio Days and The Princess Bride, and, for obvious reasons, 2020’s Rifkin’s Festival. In addition, I thoroughly enjoyed him in his 2017 play Evening at the Talk House; his current show, the terrific three-hour What We Did Before Our Moth Days, directed by André Gregory, continues through May 24 at Greenwich House Theater, where he and his longtime partner, Deborah Eisenberg, recently substituted for two ill actors and where, on Monday nights through May 18, he performs his 1991 Obie-winning monologue The Fever; and I’ve had the pleasure of bumping into him a handful of times around the city, and he has been nothing less than charming and adorable at each encounter.

Next he will be at Metrograph for “Wallace Shawn: The Master Builder,” an eight-film retrospective curated by actor and comedian John Early, who portrays Tim in Moth Days, and Lucas Kane, the play’s stage manager and assistant director; the selections are a mix of Shawn in major and minor roles or works based on his plays, in which he does not appear.

“The two of us have been lucky enough to spend the last two years steeping in this side of Wally’s practice, working on his most recent theatrical masterpiece, What We Did Before Our Moth Days,” Early and Kane said in a statement. “In awe of his particular blend of poetry and politics, we put together a program that centers around his writing — featuring two rarely seen filmic adaptations of his plays — while also celebrating his sometimes overlooked roles as a leading man, typified in his collaborations with Gregory and the late Tom Noonan. And yet! Lest we neglect his unforgettable ability to breathe life into pop films and cult classics, we’ve included a couple of films that highlight his character acting, in part, because it’s also roles like these which have helped fund his brilliant playwriting. We are proud to present these films and we hope it reveals a new side of our beloved Wally Shawn.”

The program kicks off May 8 with Amy Heckerling’s 1995 Clueless (“lt’s time for your oral.”), followed by a Q&A with Shawn, Heckerling, Early, and Kane, and Richard Kelly’s 2006 Southland Tales, introduced by Shawn and the curators. Shawn will talk with filmmaker and podcaster Theda Hammel after the May 9 screening of Tom Cairns’s 2004 Marie and Bruce, join Gregory for a Q&A after the May 15 screening of Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street, speak with Hammel and Early after the May 15 screening of David Hare’s 1997 The Designated Mourner, and, on May 22, introduce Woody Allen’s Radio Days (“Beware, evildoers, wherever you are!”) and Jonathan Demme’s 2014 A Master Builder and participate in a Q&A following a screening of Noonan’s 1995 The Wife.

“I have more free time than a lot of individuals, so, instead of talking, I sometimes write,” Shawn has said.

He clearly does a whole lot more than that.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]

LOOKING THE OTHER WAY: LUCRECIA MARTEL SCREENS 4K RESTORATION OF THE HEADLESS WOMAN AT METROGRAPH

A wealthy woman (María Onetto) looks the other way after she might have run over someone in The Headless Woman

THE HEADLESS WOMAN (LA MUJER SIN CABEZA) (Lucrecia Martel, 2008)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Friday, May 8, 11:30 am; Monday, May 11, 8:25; Tuesday, May 12, 7:15; Sunday, May 17, 8:10
metrograph.com

Inspired by nightmares she has in which she commits murder, Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman details a woman’s emotional and psychological reaction after having possibly killed someone. María Onetto gives a mesmerizingly cool, distant performance as Veronica, a middle-aged, upper-class wife and mother whose biggest worry appears to be the turtles that have infested the new pool built behind a veterinary office. But one afternoon, while out driving carelessly in her Mercedes along a twisting, barren road, she hits something. Not sure if it was a child, an adult, or an animal, she decides to continue on, telling no one what she has done. But when a poor, local boy goes missing, she begins to suspect that she might have killed him.

An intriguing mix of Luis Buñuel’s class-consciousness and Edgar Allan Poe’s flair for suspense, The Headless Woman is an unusual kind of murder mystery. In Veronica, Argentine writer-director Martel (La Cienaga, The Holy Girl) has created a compelling protagonist/villain, played with expert calm and faraway eyes by Onetto (Montecristo, The Heavy Hand of the Law), who passed away in 2023 at the age of fifty-six.

A 4K digital restoration of The Headless Woman is screening at Metrograph on May 8, 11, 12, and 17, with Martel, whose first feature-length documentary, Our Land (Landmarks), came out last year, will be on hand for Q&As.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]