this week in film and television

TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL FREE EVENTS

Free thirtieth anniversary screening of BACK TO THE FUTURE at the Tribeca Film Festival should be a hot ticket

TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL
Multiple locations
April 16-26, free
tribecafilm.com

The Tribeca Film Festival can get rather pricey, with tickets for screenings followed by Q&As running $38.50, while special events such as the Monty Python appearance at the Beacon reaches $355. Below are eleven TFF 2015 programs that won’t cost you a cent.

Thursday, April 16
Tribeca Talks Master Class — ARC Adorama Rental Company: The Producers, with Matt Parker, Olivia Wilde, Carly Hugo, and Alex Orlovsky, moderated by Tatiana Seigel, SVA Theater 2 Beatrice, 333 West 23rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves., 2:30

Friday, April 17
Tribeca Talks Script & Screen: Act Your Age, with Felix Thompson, Jeppe Ronde, and Ido Mizrahy, moderated by Gordon Cox, Barnes & Noble Union Square, 33 East 17th St., 1:00

Tribeca Talks Master Class: Get the Look, with Catherine Martin and Hamish Bowles, SVA Theater 2 Beatrice, 333 West 23rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves., 2:30

Saturday, April 18
Tribeca Talks Script & Screen: The Beauty of Angst, with Reed Morano, David Osit, Malika Zouhali-Worrall, and Sibs Shongwe-La Mer, moderated by Eric Kohn, Barnes & Noble Union Square, 33 East 17th St., 1:00

Sunday, April 19
Tribeca Family Festival: Downtown Youth Behind the Camera, featuring works by young filmmakers, SVA Theater 1 Silas, 333 West 23rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves., 11:00 am

Tribeca Talks Script & Screen: This Is the Real Life, with Pamela Romanowsky, Kevin Kerslake, Zachary Treitz, and Nick Sandow, moderated by Ross Miller, Barnes & Noble Union Square, 33 East 17th St., 1:00

Monday, April 20
Tribeca Talks Master Class: CNN Films Capture Reality, with Liz Garbus, Rachel Boynton, and Roger Ross Williams, moderated by Eric Hynes, SVA Theater 2 Beatrice, 333 West 23rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves., 2:30

Tuesday, April 21
Tribeca Talks Master Class — The Dolby Institute: The Sound of the Coens, with Carter Burwell and Skip Lievsay, moderated by Glenn Kiser, SVA Theater 2 Beatrice, 333 West 23rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves., 2:30

Saturday, April 25
Tribeca Family Festival Street Fair, Greenwich St. from Hubert to Chambers Sts., 10:00 am

Tribeca/ESPN Sports Day, North Moore St. from Greenwich to West Sts., 10:00 am

Back to the Future — Thirtieth Anniversary Screening, BMCC Tribeca PAC, 199 Chambers St., 6:00

LIVE IDEAS: S K Y — FORCE AND WISDOM IN AMERICA TODAY

Laurie Anderson and Bill T. Jones will join forces for third annual Live Ideas festival at NYLA

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th St.
April 15-19
212-691-6500
newyorklivearts.org

In April 2013, New York Live Arts held its inaugural Live Ideas multidisciplinary festival, celebrating the life and career of Oliver Sachs through dance, music, film, theater, panel discussions, and scientific investigation, with Sachs participating in multiple events. Last year, Live Ideas paid tribute to writer James Baldwin, whom NYLA artistic director Bill T. Jones called “another multifaceted generator of and magnet for ideas.” This year, NYLA has handed the reins over to Laurie Anderson, who is curating the third Live Ideas festival, “S K Y – Force and Wisdom in America Today.” From April 15 to 19, more than two dozen programs will examine social, political, artistic, and environmental issues, taking stock of the state of the country in the twenty-first century. The free Noon-Time Talk Series consists of “Timothy Ferris: Beyond Belief”; “Arvo Pärt, Journeys in Silence,” with Anderson, Peter Bouteneff, James Jordan, and William Robin; “Marjorie Morrison: Proactive Military Mental Health,” with Marjorie Morrison, Mateo H. Romero, and Joseph Mauricio; the multimedia presentation “Vito Acconci: WORD/ACT/SIGN/DE-SIGN”; and the three-hour installation “Lou Reed: DRONES,” introduced and operated by Reed’s longtime guitar tech, Stewart Hurwood. Every evening will conclude with the free “Blue Room” DJ party either in the NYLA lobby or G Lounge right down the street, with King Britt, Drew Daniel, Glasser, Yuka C. Honda, and Jonathan Toubin and Geo Wyeth.

Vittorio De Sica’s MIRACLE IN MILAN will help shed some light on NYLA Live Ideas festival

Film will play an important role, with Robert Milazzo introducing Chris Marker’s seminal La Jetée; Julian Schnabel’s Before Night Falls, followed by a conversation with Anderson and Schnabel; Vittorio De Sica’s Miracle in Milan; Dorian Supin’s 24 Preludes for a Fugue, introduced by Bouteneff; and a selection of Anderson’s films, including Hidden Inside Mountains, What You Mean We?, Carmen, and excerpts from The Personal Service Announcements, with Anderson on hand to talk about the works. Among the live musical events are Eyvind Kang’s “Time Medicine,” with Kang and Anderson; John Zorn’s “Music for Piano, Strings and Percussion,” with “In the Hall of Mirrors” performed by pianist Steve Gosling, bassist Greg Cohen, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey and “CERBERUS” featuring Kinan Idnawi on oud, Erik Friedlander on cello, Cohen on bass, and Cyro Baptista on percussion; a pop-up show by the Symptoms (John Colpitts, Tony Diodore, and Anderson); a concert of chamber works by Pärt including Solfeggio, Da Pacem, Fratres, Spiegel im Spiegel, and Für Alina; and a two-part evening starting with a performance by Reverend Billy & the Stop Shopping Choir and ending with Hal Willner and Chloe Webb’s “Doing the Things We Want To,” a tribute to the late Reed and Kathy Acker.

Beth Gill and Deborah Hay will present new works on April 15 at multidisciplinary NYLA festival

Dance, NYLA’s bread and butter, will be represented by New York choreographer Beth Gill’s specially commissioned Portrait Study, paired with an advance look at legendary experimental choreographer Deborah Hay and Anderson’s Figure a Sea. The former is built around short autobiographical solos by such dancers as Neal Beasley, Eleanor Hullihan, John Jasperse, Jodi Melnick, Stuart Singer, David Thomson, Meg Weeks, and Emily Wexler, set to live music by Eliot Krimsky and Ryan Seaton, with a transitioning lighting and color design by Thomas Dunn. The latter is a sneak peek at Hay and Anderson’s evening-length piece for the Cullberg Ballet, premiering in Stockholm in September. There’s a whole lot to take in at the 2015 Live Ideas festival, but Anderson and Jones will get right to the point — and explain how they came up with the name “S K Y – Force and Wisdom in America Today” — in their opening-day discussion, aptly titled “Where Are We Going?” To Jones, the sky is “a multidimensional symbol of aspiration, vastness, change, threat, and now information storage,” while Anderson will explore why we live in “a society that is deeply divided, unjust, and often toxic.” And if all of that isn’t wide ranging enough for you, on April 17, Master Ren will lead a Taijiquan martial arts demonstration, accompanied by Lou Reed’s DRONES.

CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA

Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart mix fact and fiction in Olivier Assayas’s CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA

CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA (Olivier Assayas, 2014)
IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave. at Third St., 212-924-7771
Lincoln Plaza Cinema, 1886 Broadway between 62nd & 63rd Sts., 212-757-2280
Opens Friday, April 10
www.ifcfilms.com

The related concepts of time and reality wind through Olivier Assayas’s beautifully poetic, melancholy Clouds of Sils Maria much like actual snakelike clouds slither through the twisting Maloja Pass in the Swiss Alps, as life imitates art and vice versa. Juliette Binoche stars as Maria Enders, a famous French actress who is on her way to Zurich to accept an award for her mentor, playwright Wilhelm Melchior, who eschews such mundane ceremonies. But while en route, Maria and her personal assistant, the extremely attentive and capable Valentine (Kristen Stewart), learn that Wilhelm has suddenly and unexpectedly passed away, and Maria considers turning back, especially when she later finds out that Henryk Wald (Hanns Zischler), an old nemesis, will be there to pay homage to Wilhelm as well, but she decides to go ahead after all. At a cocktail party, Maria meets with hot director Klaus Diesterweg (Lars Eidinger), who is preparing a new stage production of Wilhelm and Maria’s first big hit, The Maloja Snake, but this time Maria would play Helena, an older woman obsessed with ambitious eighteen-year-old Sigrid, the role she originally performed twenty years earlier, to great acclaim. Klaus is planning to cast Lindsay Lohan-like troublemaking star and walking tabloid headline Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloë Grace Moretz) as Sigrid, which does not thrill Maria as her past and present meld together in an almost dreamlike narrative punctuated by the music of Handel and cinematographer Yorick Le Saux’s gorgeous shots of vast mountain landscapes.

Valentine (Kristen Stewart) and Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) go in search of the Maloja Snake in the Swiss Alps

Clouds of Sils Maria resonates on many levels, both inside and outside of the main plot and the film itself. Assayas (Irma Vep, Demonlover) cowrote André Téchiné’s 1983 film, Rendez-Vous, which was Binoche’s breakthrough; Assayas and Binoche wouldn’t work together again until his 2008 film Summer Hours, similar to the relationship between Wilhelm and Maria. Meanwhile, the story of the play-within-the-film is echoed by the relationship between Maria and Valentine, who are having trouble separating the personal from the professional. It is often difficult to know when the two women are practicing lines and when they are talking about their “real” lives. Binoche (Blue, Caché) is simply extraordinary as Maria, a distressed and anxious woman who is suddenly facing getting older somewhat sooner than expected, while Stewart (The Twilight Saga, On the Road) became the first American woman to win a French César, as Best Supporting Actress, for her sensitive portrayal of Valentine, a strong-willed young woman who might or might not be holding something back. The scenes between the two are riveting as they venture in and out of the reality of the film, their onscreen chemistry building and building till it’s at last ready to ignite. Art, life, cinema, theater, fiction, and reality all come together in Clouds of Sils Maria, as Maria, Assayas, and Binoche take stock of where they’ve been, where they are, and where they’re going.

DIOR AND I

Documentary follows Raf Simons as he becomes new creative director of Christian Dior

DIOR AND I (Frédéric Tcheng, 2014)
Film Forum, 209 West Houston St., 212-727-8110
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th St., 212-875-5601
Opens Friday, April 10
www.diorandimovie.com

After working on two previous fashion-related films, Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel and Valentino: The Last Emperor, Frédéric Tcheng makes his solo directorial debut with Dior and I. In April 2012, fashion designer Raf Simons was named the new creative director of Christian Dior, bringing along his right-hand man, Pieter Mulier. Tcheng goes behind the scenes to follow Simons as he prepares his first-ever haute couture collection, which is due in a mere two months. Tcheng zooms in on the Belgian designer’s working methods and general anxiety as he takes over at the legendary company, developing important relationships with Dior CEO Sidney Toledano, première atelier flou Florence Chehet, première atelier tailleur Monique Bailly, the seamstresses, the models, and other employees. Simons chooses to pay homage to Dior’s past with his new collection while attempting to rid himself of the designation of “minimalist designer.” One of his most fascinating directions is attempting to incorporate the work of artist Sterling Ruby into his designs. All the while he is haunted by the ghost of company founder and New Look creator Christian Dior, who is shown by Tcheng in archival footage accompanied by a voice-over of Omar Berrada reading from Dior’s memoirs. Dior and I is a slight but affecting race against time, as one man in the present honors the past while laying the groundwork for a bright future. Dior and I opens April 10 at Film Forum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, with Tcheng and Berrada appearing at Film Forum for the 7:30 show April 10 and the 5:20 show April 11; Tcheng will also be at the Walter Reade Theater for a Q&A following the 7:00 show April 11.

ABOUT ELLY

An uneasy Elly (Taraneh Alidoosti) is hiding something in Asghar Farhadi’s shattering ABOUT ELLY

ABOUT ELLY (DARBÂREYE ELI) (Asghar Farhadi, 2009)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
April 8-21, 12:45, 3:15, 6:45, 9:15
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
www.cinemaguild.com

“A bitter ending is better than an endless bitterness,” Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini) tells Elly (Taraneh Alidoosti) in Asghar Farhadi’s shattering, masterful 2009 drama, About Elly. Iranian writer-director Farhadi, whose A Separation was named Best Foreign Language Film at the 2012 Oscars — the film also earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay — won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 2009 Berlinale for About Elly, which also nabbed Best Picture at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival. But rights issues have held up its U.S. theatrical release, depriving American audiences of a chance to see the work. Now that the film is finally opening here, beginning a two-week run at Film Forum on April 8 in a new 35mm print, the story of the film’s distribution is no longer bitter, but the searing tale itself couldn’t be more harrowingly acerbic. A group of upper-middle-class law school friends have come to a Caspian Sea villa from Tehran for a getaway weekend organized by Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani), who has brought along Elly, her daughter’s teacher, as a potential love match for the recently divorced Ahmad, who has been living in Germany. Because of a scheduling snafu, they have to stay in a seaside house in desperate need of renovation, but the friends just go with the flow, singing and dancing and making the best of the awkward situation. But the playful atmosphere turns sour when tragedy strikes, leaving everyone to reexamine who they are.

A group of friends has to face some hard truths during vacation gone terribly wrong

About Elly is a gripping, deeply thoughtful, and intensely intelligent exploration of class, romance, responsibility, culture, family, and, perhaps most of all, honesty in contemporary Iranian society. Although the film evokes such works as Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura and François Ozon’s Under the Sand, Farhadi (The Past, Fireworks Wednesday) infuses it with a profound sense of realism, involving the audience in its intricate, intimate mystery. You’ll feel like you’re on the beach with the friends, facing the same agonizing decisions. Shot in a naturalistic style by cinematographer Hossein Jafarian, About Elly takes place in a ramshackle vacation house, designed by Farhadi, that doubles for the characters’ psyche, with its broken windows, stuck doors, and lack of privacy. The scene in which a young boy goes missing in the ocean is as terrifying as it is heart-rending, a breathless extended sequence of events that feels like it will never let up. And indeed, the powerful emotions continue through the rest of the film — and will stay with you long after. The outstanding cast also includes Mani Haghighi as Amir, Sepideh’s husband; Peyman Moaadi and Merila Zarei as Peyman and Shohreh, the parents of the boy; and Ahmad Mehranfar and Rana Azadivar as another couple caught up in the tragedy. Fingers are pointed, bonds are tested, and relationships are fractured forever in Farhadi’s exquisite jewel of a film.

KINO! 2015 FESTIVAL OF GERMAN FILMS: SCHMITKE

Julius Schmitke (Peter Kurth) takes stock of his life in existential black comedy

SCHMITKE (Štěpán Altrichter, 2014)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Sunday, April 12, 10:00, and Wednesday, April 15, 6:00
Festival runs April 9-16
212-924-3363
www.schmitkefilm.com
www.kinofestivalnyc.com

Based on the wonderfully titled Tomáš Končinský short story “Julius Schmitke slipped through death’s fingers like an awkward seal,” Czech director Štěpán Altrichter’s debut feature, Schmitke, is a darkly comic, Kaurismäkian character study of a middle-aged engineer making his way through a pretty simple life. Julius Schmitke (Peter Kurth) wakes up each morning, watches the coffeemaker get going, walks about slowly, stares a lot, and follows the story of a Bear-Man living in the German woods. A bear of a man himself, he is disappointed when he is reassigned — demoted — to fix a broken wind turbine in the small, foggy Czech border town of Chřmeleva in the Ore Mountains. Meanwhile, his grown daughter shows up unexpectedly, moving in with him and declaring, “I invested my energy wrong!” Schmitke and his new partner, the young, rather talkative Thomas Gruber (Johann Jürgens), head out in their white van, getting lost before ultimately arriving at their destination, where everyone, including the mayor (Jakub Žáček), hangs out in the local pub, drinking all day. But when Gruber suddenly goes missing, Schmitke sets off on a desperate search to find him — and, perhaps, himself in the process.

Peter Kurth stars as a man chasing a different kind of windmill in SCHMITKE

Cinematographer Cristian Pîrjol shoots Schmitke in muted greens and blues, with sudden bursts of red and yellow; his camera loves Schmitke, zooming in on his tired, heavy face, a man filled with desperation but too exhausted to do anything about it; instead, he dreams of becoming the Bear-Man himself. The old, rotting turbine, C174, turns agonizingly slowly, starting and stopping, emitting loud, echoing creaks that Schmitke might like to voice himself but won’t. “Damned thing,” he says to himself, but he could just as well be talking about his own life. He’s an existential Don Quixote figure, chasing windmills but just going around in circles. Altrichter, who wrote the script with Končinský and Jan Fusek, prefers short cuts with little camera movement, populating his film with strange characters and surreal plot twists. Johannes Repka’s moody score, going from mysterious to cheesy, and Katharina Grischkowski’s clever sound design enhance the overall subtly bizarre atmosphere. The motto of the company Schmitke works for is “Efficiency. Esteem. Energy.” The film has all three of those, albeit in its own unusual way. Schmitke is having its North American premiere April 12 and 15 as part of the Kino! 2015 Festival of German Film, which runs April 9-16 at Cinema Village and consists of ten recent features and one evening of shorts from Germany. Among the other films being screened are Mark Monheim’s About a Girl, Neele Leana Vollmar’s The Pasta Detectives, Christoph Hochhäusler’s The Lies of the Victors, and Christian Zübert’s Tour de Force. In addition, there will be conversations with some of the filmmakers at the Goethe-Institut and Deutsches Haus at NYU.

RECENT FILM ACQUISITIONS: THE PRINCESS OF MONTPENSIER

Marie de Mézières (Mélanie Thierry) and Henri de Guise (Gaspard Ulliel) have trouble keeping their hands off each other in Bertrand Tavernier’s sweeping romantic epic

THE PRINCESS OF MONTPENSIER (Bertrand Tavernier, 2010)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Friday, April 10, 7:30 (Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1), and Tuesday, April 14, 6:30 (Education and Research Building)
Series runs through April 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.ifcfilms.com

In Bertrand Tavernier’s sweeping romantic epic, young and beautiful Marie de Mézières (Mélanie Thierry) has a big problem: It seems that every man she meets falls in love with her. Already in a passionate relationship with the heroic Henri de Guise (Gaspard Ulliel), a leader of the Catholics against the Protestant Huguenots in the French Wars of Religion of the 1560s, Marie is suddenly part of a shady deal between her father (Philippe Magnan) and the Duke de Montpensier (Michel Vuillermoz), marrying her off to the rather uninspiring though steadfast Prince Philippe de Montpensier (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet), who warms to his bride much quicker than she to him. Returning to the battlefield, Philippe asks his mentor, the older and wiser Count de Chabannes (Lambert Wilson), to teach Marie in the ways of the court to prepare her for meeting Catherine de Medici, but even such a solid, moralistic man as Chabannes — who deserted from the army after killing a peasant family, supposedly in the name of his lord and saviour — cannot prevent himself from succumbing to the many charms of his unaware charge. And when she meets the wild and unpredictable Duke d’Anjou (Raphaël Personnaz), the king’s brother is smitten as well. But through it all, Marie, a modern woman who wants to learn to write and make her own choices, remains fiercely drawn to Henri, a forbidden love that threatens dire consequences.

Mélanie Thierry stars as the irresistible Marie de Mézières in THE PRINCESS OF MONTPENSIER

Based on the 1662 novella by Madame de La Fayette, The Princess of Montpensier is a thrilling tale of love and war, of honor and betrayal. Master filmmaker Tavernier (The Clockmaker of Saint-Paul, A Sunday in the Country), who cowrote the daring script with longtime collaborator Jean Cosmos and François-Oliver Rousseau, focuses on character and story rather than pomp and circumstance, creating an intoxicating intimacy often missing from the genre. Thierry is alluring as Marie, who can be seen as an early feminist in a time when women were little more than possessions. Even at two hours and twenty minutes, the film flies by; you’ll feel sorry you can’t spend more time with the many wonderfully drawn characters who help make The Princess of Montpensier such a marvelous treat. The film is screening April 10 and 14 as part of MoMA’s presentation of its latest film acquisitions; among the other recently acquired works being shown are Aktan Arym Kubat’s Svet-Ake (The Light Thief), Bruno Barretto’s Bossa Nova, Xavier Dolan’s Les Amours imaginaires (Heartbeats), and Bong Joon-hoo’s Barking Dogs Never Bite.