The Black Mirror Experience takes place on a special grid at the Shed (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
THE BLACK MIRROR EXPERIENCE
The Shed
545 West 30th St. at Eleventh Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 6, $56.35-$79.35 (approx. 10% discount for groups of four to six; priority access for VIP) theshed.org nyc.theblackmirrorexperience.com
The Black Mirror Experience is an ultracool interactive, immersive, participatory, multimedia, AI-generated, virtual reality presentation at the Shed that puts you inside an episode of the hit streaming series.
Inspired by The Twilight Zone,Black Mirror is an Emmy-winning British anthology show created in 2011 by Charlie Brooker; there have been thirty-two episodes across seven seasons in addition to two specials, with a dedicated focus on how advancements in technology impact the future of humanity.
In The Black Mirror Experience, which earned a Special Mention at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival and is concurrently taking place in Montreal and Madrid as well as New York City, groups of up to six people at a time, wearing VR headsets, enter the mysterious world of Phaethon Labs. Each person has their biometrics scanned in order to create their own LifeAgent, a lifelike avatar, and then is thrust into an original story by Brooker that introduces the LifeAgent Integration Pathway, leading from a store, a life goals selection, and general orientation to a neural mapping facility, the LifeAgent Customization Centre, a testing playground, and final delivery. Its motto: “Do less. Live more.”
“At Phaethon, we believe in reversing time’s decline, because your LifeAgent exists to give you back what time has taken: space, clarity, energy, and self. Which is why our origin story imagines these ancient ages in reverse,” Phaethon Labs founder Dakota “Cody” Winters explains.
Phaethon is named after the Greek demigod who searched for his father, Helios, and traveled too close to the sun, an apt metaphor for the dangers of AI. A chart details Phaethon’s brief history from the Genesis Iron Age in 2025, the Breakthrough Age of Heroes in 2027, and the Revelation Bronze Age in 2028 to the Evolution Silver Age in 2029 and the Revolution Underway Golden Age in 2030 and beyond. Various items are on display, including a PhaethonVault, which stores thoughts and memories; PhaethonSync neural implants for communicating with your LifeAgent; and an Emotional Intelligence Filter.
“I wasn’t trying to create a new kind of AI. I was just trying to understand how my own brain worked,” Winters states.
The journey into the AI world is a VR marvel. I had two companions in my group; we boarded a shuttle that moved us into various fantastical realms, where we competed in a game show, formed a band, danced, painted, and spoke with Sigmund Freud. Through it all, we were accompanied by our LifeAgent, which gets pretty creepy, for reasons I won’t divulge here. Just when you think the credits are going to roll — without ever having kicked into overdrive — a spectacular twist sends you deep into a darkly threatening society from which escape will not come easily. It’s absolutely thrilling as you battle strange creatures, claustrophobic rooms, and yourself, desperately attempting to survive against ever-mounting odds.
Depending on your answers to several questions, some of the details of your adventure will be different from those of your friends, just like in real life. At one point, I was luxuriating in a gorgeous mountain mansion, a tiger by my side, while my wife was advising a small cult in Bhutan.
The narrative reaches its epic conclusion after about fifty minutes; when you return your headset, you get to see others in the midst of the odyssey, which is in itself a fun revelation.
“Is that we looked like?” I asked a member of the staff.
“Yup,” she responded with a smile.
I’m not a video-game player, but I had a blast. I am a big fan of Black Mirror, but you don’t have to know anything about it to get caught up in these proceedings. (However, you should watch the show, which casts a sharp reflection on who we are and where we are going; I suggest starting with “The National Anthem,” “San Junipero,” and “USS Callister.”)
On the way out, you are given a link to a video that re-creates your actions not the way you saw them but how the technology has re-created it.
Like most of us, I have severe suspicions about the future of AI, but when it is used for such astonishing, harmless exhilaration as The Black Mirror Experience, count me in as one of the converted.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Dennis Hopper found himself in Hollywood exile after making The Last Movie
EXPERIMENTAL WESTERNS, PART 1: AVANT-GARDE WESTERNS: THE LAST MOVIE (Dennis Hopper, 1971)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Saturday, July 4, 9:00
Saturday, July 18, 6:00
Sunday, July 19, 8:00
Series runs July 3-26 anthologyfilmarchives.org arbelosfilms.com
Flying high off his international success with Easy Rider in 1969, cowriter, director, and star Dennis Hopper was given carte blanche by Universal for his next film, 1971’s The Last Movie, a controversial picture that, despite winning the Critics Prize at the Venice Film Festival, led to Hopper’s unofficial exile from Hollywood for nearly a decade. The Last Movie was finally released in 2018 in a gorgeous 4K digital restoration made by Il Cinema Ritrovata from the original 35mm camera negative, screening at Anthology as part of the series “Experimental Westerns, Part 1: Avant-Garde Westerns.” As documented in Nick Ebeling’s 2017 Along for the Ride and elsewhere, The Last Movie was a longtime labor of love for Hopper and his cowriter, Stewart Stern (who had penned Rebel without a Cause, in which Hopper played a key role), but it ended up being a critical and financial flop. Over the years, there have been occasional rare screenings as the film’s legend grew, and the restoration proves that the mythos was fully justified. Hopper stars as Kansas, a movie wrangler working on a Western about Pat Garrett (Rod Cameron) and Billy the Kid (Dean Stockwell) in Chinchero, Peru, directed by one of the toughest auteurs of them all, the great, cigar-chomping Samuel Fuller (Pickup on South Street, Shock Corridor). Kansas is with former prostitute Maria (Stella Garcia), but he is instantly attracted to the fur-wearing Mrs. Anderson (Julie Adams), the wife of a wealthy factory owner (Roy Engel). Kansas’s best friend, Neville Robey (Don Gordon), wants Mr. Anderson to invest in his gold mine while both Anderson and Maria become jealous of Kansas’s romantic interest in Mrs. Anderson. In addition, following the accidental death of a stunt man during a dangerous scene, the local community of Chinchero blames Kansas and begins making their own movie directed by the vengeful Tomas Mercado (Daniel Ades), using real violence and fake equipment, creating a kind of passion play with Kansas at the center, much to the chagrin of the concerned priest (Tomas Milian), who was never in favor of Hollywood bringing its decadence to his town. It all leads to a stunning, unforgettable finale that questions much of what has come before.
Hopper, who was also a photographer and painter, said about the film, “The Last Movie is something that I made in Peru. I won the Venice Film Festival with it, and Universal Pictures wouldn’t distribute it. You should think about [Jean-Luc] Godard a little when you watch it. I made it because I’d read him say that movies should have a beginning, a middle, and an end — but not necessarily in that order. I was trying to use film like an Abstract Expressionist would use paint as paint. I’m constantly reminding you that we’re making a movie — I’m constantly making references to the fact that maybe you’re just being silly sitting in an audience, being sucked into a movie and starting to believe it — and then I jar you out of it. It’s not a very pleasant experience for most audiences.” But things have changed significantly over the last half-century, and audiences are now more attuned to watching nonlinear, more unorthodox films that merge fiction and reality and challenge them with purposely confusing plot twists and character development. Some scenes repeat, while others might have been lost — several times a title card identifies that a scene is missing, but it is impossible to know whether that is true or Hopper is playing with the viewer yet again. (The film was edited by David Berlatsky, Antranig Mahakian, and Hopper.) In fact, Tomas and the priest regularly refer to moviemaking as a game. It’s also not always clear when we’re watching the film, the film-within-a-film, or even a different film as Hopper explodes genre tropes to continually defy expectations. At one point the soundtrack features Kris Kristofferson singing “Me and Bobby McGee,” but the camera soon finds Kristofferson himself, guitar in hand, warbling away. Thus, when we later hear a song by John Buck Wilkin, we look for him as well.
Beautifully photographed by László Kovács, The Last Movie turns Kansas into a kind of Jesus figure. Both text and image often reference various stories from the Bible, directly and indirectly, including Jesus being whipped, his relationship with prostitute Mary Magdalene, a celebration around a golden calf, Jesus rising from a cave, and Christ being led to the cross. All seven deadly sins — gluttony, lust, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride — enter the narrative. The color red plays a significant role, as if staining the land with blood, from fake movie blood to the color of Kansas’s truck. Everyone ends up guilty of something, with some paying a higher price than others; as the original 1971 production notes explain: “Every character in the film is an innocent. Only as they are tarnished by their participation in the games do they become agents of their own destruction. The dreams that they succumb to are all encompassed in or produced by the American dream. Their sin, however, is the movies.” Hollywood has done them in, as it will Hopper himself, who filled the cast with such nonconventional, mostly non-Hollywood actors as Henry Jaglom, Toni Basil, Severn Darden, Sylvia Miles, Warren Finnerty, Peter Fonda, Clint Kimbrough, John Phillip Law, Russ Tamblyn, and Michelle Phillips, who was married to Hopper for eight days. The two-time Oscar-nominated Hopper went on to direct such films as Out of the Blue, Colors, and The Hot Spot and appear in such works as Apocalypse Now, Blue Velvet, Hoosiers, True Romance, and Speed before passing away in May 2010 at the age of seventy-four. His legacy is now cemented with the restoration of The Last Movie, a masterpiece that has, at last, received the due it, and Hopper, deserves.
“Experimental Westerns, Part 1: Avant-Garde Westerns” runs July 3–26 and includes such other gems and rarities as Robert Downey Sr.’s Greaser’s Palace, Adolfas Mekas’s The Double-Barrelled Detective Story, Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 2 with Mary Lucier’s Arabesque, and Andy Warhol’s Horse celebrating a different take on the American genre for the nation’s 250th anniversary.
For cool international Westerns, check out the concurrent Metrograph series “The Worldwide West” here.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
THE WORLDWIDE WEST
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
July 3 – August 2 metrograph.com
Film doesn’t get much more American than the Western, and Metrograph is paying tribute to the art form with “The Worldwide West,” a celebration of international movies that reimagine the US frontier for their countries. In honor of the 250th birthday of the United States, Metrograph is screening works by Yılmaz Güney (Kurdish), Sammo Kam-Bo Hung (Hong Kong), Alejandro Jodorowsky (Chile and France), Radu Jude (Romania), Ted Kotcheff (Canada), Akira Kurosawa (Japan), Sergio Leone (Italy), Ramesh Sippy (India), Ali Khamraev (Uzbekistan), and Rogério Sganzerla (Brazil).
The thirteen films will be shown July 3 to August 2; below is a look at some of the highlights. For cool avant-garde Westerns, check out the concurrent Anthology series “Experimental Westerns, Part 1: Avant-Garde Westerns” here.
Clint Eastwood introduces the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (photo courtesy MGM / Cineteca di Bologna / Park Circus)
A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (PER UN PUGNO DI DOLLARI) (Sergio Leone, 1964)
Friday, July 3, 3:35
Sunday, July 5, 2:00
Wednesday, July 8, 4:00 metrograph.com
Clint Eastwood made a name for himself on the big screen playing the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone’s 1964 spaghetti Western, A Fistful of Dollars. In his first lead movie role, Eastwood, the costar of the television series Rawhide, is a gunslinger draped in a poncho and smoking a small cigar who rides on a mule into San Miguel, a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, home to an ongoing feud between the gun-running Baxters and the liquor-dealing Rojos. The stranger decides to play both sides against the middle, caring only that he earns lots of cash. “Never saw a town as dead as this one,” the stranger tells saloon owner Silvanito (Jose Calvo), who explains, “The place is only widows. Here you can only get respect by killing other men, so nobody works anymore.” The stranger hears the sound of banging outside and says, “Somebody doesn’t share your opinion.” Silvanito opens the window to reveal old man Piripero (Joe Edger) making coffins. “You’ll be a customer,” Silvanito tells the stranger with assurance. The stranger goes back and forth between the Baxters, led by the sheriff (W. Lukschy), and the Rojos, who follow the dangerous, unpredictable Ramón (Gian Maria Volontè). Also caught up in the Hatfield-McCoy battle are the sheriff’s wife, Consuelo (Margherita Lozano), and brother, Antonio (Bruno Carotenuto), along with Rojo brothers Benito (Antonio Prieto) and Esteban (S. Rupp) and their enforcer, Chico (Richard Stuyvesant). Ramón, meanwhile, has his eyes set on Marisol (Marianne Koch), who is married to Julio (Daniel Martín), who does not want to get involved in any fighting. Carefully watching it all is Juan de Díos (Raf Baldassarre), who rings the church bell at every death.
The Italian-German-Spanish production is a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which led to legal entanglements when the Japanese auteur demanded, well, a fistful of dollars in financial compensation. According to Christopher Frayling’s Sergio Leone — Something to Do with Death, Leone received a note from Kurosawa that read, “Signor Leone — I have just had the chance to see your film. It is a very fine film, but it is my film. Since Japan is a signatory of the Berne Convention on international copyright, you must pay me.” Frayling also suggests that Leone was influenced by Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest and Carlo Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters and did not feel he was stealing only from Kurosawa. In The BFI Companion to the Western, Frayling quotes Leone as saying, “Kurosawa’s Yojimbo was inspired by an American novel of the serie-noire so I was really taking the story back home again.” (For a montage of similarities between the two films, check out this video.). Regardless, A Fistful of Dollars, made for about two hundred grand, set the standard for the new genre, and Eastwood was its antihero. He and Leone would team up again on the sequel, For a Few Dollars More, which is not a direct remake of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo follow-up, Sanjuro, as well as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the best of the Dollars Trilogy.
Clint Eastwood watches his back in first of the Dollars Trilogy (photo courtesy MGM / Cineteca di Bologna / Park Circus)
Fistful is steeped in violence and death, from Iginio Lardani’s rad title sequence of silhouettes in black, white, and blood red to an early shot of the stranger riding under a noose and giving it a long look. Whereas Toshirô Mifune played the bodyguard in Yojimbo with a devilish glee, Eastwood — in a role that had been previously offered to Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, and others — is much more serious as the Man with No Name, who would become more sympathetic in future outings. The extremely poor dubbing only adds to the film’s magnificence. To enhance its foreign appeal to American audiences, several members of the cast and crew appear under pseudonyms in the credits, including Leone (Bob Robertson), cinematographer Massimo Dallamano (Jack Dalmas), actor Gian Maria Volontè (John Wells), and composer Ennio Morricone (Leo Nichols or Dan Savio). There is no mention of Kurosawa or Yojimbo anywhere.
Toshirō Mifune can’t believe what he sees in Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo
YOJIMBO (Akira Kurosawa, 1961)
Friday, July 3, 1:15
Sunday, July 5, 11:30 am
Saturday, July 11, 11:30 am metrograph.com
Kuwabatake Sanjuro (Toshirō Mifune) is a lone samurai on the road following the end of the Tokugawa dynasty in yet another of Akira Kurosawa’s unforgettable masterpieces, which was inspired by Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. Sanjuro comes to a town with two warring factions and plays each one off the other as a hired hand. Neo’s battles with myriad Agent Smiths are nothing compared to Yojimbo’s magnificent swordfights against growing bands of warriors that include the evil Unosuke (Tatsuya Nakadai), who is in possession of a new weapon that shoots bullets. Try watching this film and not think of several Clint Eastwood Westerns (including Sergio Leone’s pasta remake, A Fistful of Dollars) as well as High Noon.
Rival bounty killers colonel Douglas Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef) and Manco (Clint Eastwood) join forces in Sergio Leone’s For a Few Dollars More
FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE (PER QUALCHE DOLLARO IN PIÙ) (Sergio Leone, 1965)
Saturday, July 4, 1:10
Sunday, July 5, 4:15
Sunday, July 12, 11:15 am metrograph.com
Determined to capitalize on the immediate success of A Fistful of Dollars, director and cowriter Sergio Leone and stars Clint Eastwood and Gian Maria Volonté quickly got back in the saddle to make the initially underrated, now celebrated follow-up, For a Few Dollars More. In the 1965 spaghetti Western, filmed in Almería, Spain, and at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios — and featuring a town doubling as El Paso built by production designer Carlo Simi that still stands today, part of the MiniHollywood theme park in Tabernas — Eastwood is a bounty killer that some call Manco, but he is essentially the Man with No Name again. He travels from wretched place to wretched place with his horse, poncho, cigar, squinty eyes, and guns, shooting criminals and collecting rewards. When he encounters a rival, former Confederate colonel Douglas Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef), they are initially at odds, going after the same trophies, but they ultimately decide to join forces to capture and kill El Indio (Volonté), a murderous psychopath who likes to use a pocket watch that plays a gentle tune when opened when he is getting ready to shoot someone, an element from his past (involving a mystery woman played by Rosemary Dexter) that haunts him. Manco embeds himself with Indio’s mangy gang, which includes Groggy (Luigi Pistilli), Niño (Mario Brega), Cuchillo (Aldo Sambrell), Tomaso (Lorenzo Robledo), Sancho Perez (Panos Papadopulos), Slim (Werner Abrolat), Blackie (Frank Braña), Chico (José Canalejas), Frisco (Antonio Molino Rojo), Hughie (Benito Stefanelli, who was in all three Dollars films), and Wild (the one and only Klaus Kinski). As Indio prepares to rob a bank in El Paso, a series of double crosses and personal vengeance lead to a memorable ending.
Manco (Clint Eastwood) becomes part of Indio’s (Gian Maria Volonté) gang in For a Few Dollars More
Written by Leone and Luciano Vincenzoni with added dialogue by Sergio Donati, For a Few Dollars More fits right in between A Fistful of Dollars and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, from its overall look and mood to Ennio Morricone’s stupendous score and Massimo Dallamano’s beautiful cinematography, both veterans of Fistful. Eastwood further established his ability to carry a film as a compelling antihero, Van Cleef (How the West Was Won, Escape from New York) earned one of the three title roles in Ugly, and Volonté, who would go on to make such classics as A Bullet for the General, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, and Christ Stopped at Eboli, is superbly grimy as a brutal villain hiding a soft spot. Genre tropes abound, highlighted by Leone’s love of close-ups of his characters’ eyes, shifting from one side to the other as they face their destinies.
Clint Eastwood is the Good in classic Sergio Leone operatic oater
THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (Sergio Leone, 1966)
Friday, July 10, 2:30
Sunday, July 12, 2:00 metrograph.com
One of the all-time-great spaghetti Westerns, Sergio Leone’s dusty three-hour operatic oater stars Clint Eastwood as the Good (Blondie), Lee Van Cleef as the Bad (Angel Eyes), and Eli Wallach as the Ugly (Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez, whose list of criminal offenses is a riot), three unique individuals after $200,000 in Confederate gold buried in a cemetery in the middle of nowhere. Nearly twenty minutes of never-before-seen footage was added to the film several years ago, with Wallach and Eastwood overdubbing brand-new dialogue, so if you haven’t seen it in a while, it might just be time to catch it again. Ennio Morricone’s unforgettable score and Torino delli Colli’s gorgeous widescreen cinematography were also marvelously enhanced; their work in the scene when Tuco first comes upon the graveyard will make you dizzy with delight. And then comes one of the greatest finales in cinema history.
Jean-Louis Trintignant stars as a mute antihero in Sergio Corbucci’s The Great Silence
THE GREAT SILENCE (IL GRANDE SILENZIO) (Sergio Corbucci, 1968)
Friday, July 17, 1:50
Saturday, July 18, 3:35
After half a century, Sergio Corbucci’s underseen masterpiece, The Great Silence, was finally released in the United States in 2018, in a gorgeous fiftieth anniversary restoration. Corbucci’s revisionist spaghetti Western was shot by Silvano Ippoliti in the Dolomites in northeastern Italy, where luxurious white snow (actually shaving cream) goes on forever until it is stained with so much blood. French star Jean-Louis Trintignant plays a variation of the quiet hero who lets his guns do his talking; Trintignant, who did not speak English, is Silence, who, as a young boy, witnessed the merciless murder of his parents by bounty killers and is rendered mute with a knife to prevent his testimony. Years later, now an adult, Silence, with his unusual Mauser C96, roams the land in search of bounty killers, getting them to draw first so he can then fire back in self-defense, shooting off their thumbs so they can never use a gun again. It’s 1898, and hard times have come to Snow Hill, leading many average citizens to break laws just to put food on the table. Greedy banker Henry Pollicut (Luigi Pistilli) puts a price on their heads, wanted dead or alive, attracting various bounty killers, including the notorious Loco (German star Klaus Kinski), aka Tigrero, who never brings his targets in breathing, no matter how minor their crimes. Relatively hapless sheriff Gideon Burnett (Frank Wolff) is caught somewhere in the middle, as it’s Loco who is on the right side of the law and Silence who is walking a fine line about what’s legal. After Loco kills James Middleton, his widow, Pauline (Vonetta McGee), hires Silence to gain revenge, setting the stage for one of the most brutal endings in the history of cinema.
Klaus Kinski is a vicious bounty killer on the right side of the law in Corbucci masterpiece
The pairing of Trintignant, who had gained international fame in Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman, and Kinski, who had made such previous Westerns as Damiano Damiani’s A Bullet for the General and Sergio Leone’s For a Few Dollars More, has a dark magic, particularly since their characters are not clear representations of good vs. evil. Each one uses their eyes to intense dramatic effect, with Trintignant particularly effective since he doesn’t speak a word — just wait till you see him scream. In her film debut, McGee (Blacula, Repo Man) brings a stark sensitivity to Pauline; her interracial love scene was shocking for the genre, especially with Corbucci (Django, Navajo Joe) handling it in such a gentle way. Meanwhile, composer Ennio Morricone (Once Upon a Time in the West; The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) delivers one of his most emotional and wide-ranging scores. Fifty years on, The Great Silence can still be read as a parable attacking rampant injustice in society while also subverting the Western genre itself, a dark and bleak tale about the hopelessness of life. (If the ending is too much for you, you can watch the absurdly ridiculous alternate happy ending made for some foreign markets here.)
Father (Teodor Corban) and son (Mihai Comānoiu) hunt for a runaway slave in wickedly funny Aferim!
Romanian director Radu Jude won the Silver Bear as Best Director at the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival for Aferim!, his savagely funny blacker-than-black comic Western about bigotry, infidelity, and frontier justice in 1835 Wallachia. Lawkeeper Costandin (Teodor Corban) and his son, Ionitā (Mihai Comānoiu), are galloping through the local countryside, searching for runaway Gypsy slave Carfin (Cuzin Toma), who Boyar Iordache Cindescu (Alexandru Dabija) has accused of having an affair with his wife, Sultana (Mihaela Sîrbu). The surly Costandin leads the hunt, verbally cutting down everyone he meets, from random old women to abbots to fellow lawmen, with wicked barbs, calling them filthy whores, crows, and other foul names while spouting ridiculous theories about honor and religion; he even batters his son, saying he’s “a waste of bread” and that “if you slap him, he’ll die of grief.” It’s a cruel, cholera-filled time in which even the monks beat the poor, where Costandin regales a priest with the telling riddle, “Lifeless out of life, life out of lifeless,” which the priest thinks refers to the coming doomsday.
Cowritten by Jude (The Happiest Girl in the World, Everybody in Our Family) and novelist Florin Lăzărescu (Our Special Envoy, Numbness), who previously collaborated on the short film The Tube with a Hat, and shot in gloriously stark black-and-white by Marius Panduru (12:08 East of Bucharest; Police, Adjective), the Romanian / Bulgarian / Czech coproduction is an absurdist combination of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail, and John Ford’s The Searchers, skewering everything in its path, either overtly or under its wide-reaching breath. Even Dana Pāpāruz’s costumes are a genuine riot, especially the boyar’s majestically ridiculous hat. But Aferim! is more than just a clever parody of period films and nineteenth-century Eastern European culture and social mores; it is also a brilliant exploration of the nature of racism, discrimination, misogyny, and the aristocracy that directly relates to what’s going on around the world today as well as how Romania has dealt with its own sorry past of enslaving the Romani people. Jude was inspired by real events and historical documents, setting the film immediately after the 1834 Russian occupation, which adds to its razor-sharp observations. “Aferim! is an attempt to gaze into the past, to take a journey inside the mentalities of the beginning of the nineteenth century — all epistemological imperfections inherent to such an enterprise included,” Jude says in his director’s statement. “It is obvious that such an effort would be pointless should we not believe that this hazy past holds the explanation for certain present issues.” Don’t miss this absolute gem of a film, Romania’s submission for the Academy Awards.
Alejandro Jodorowsky takes viewers on quite an acid trip in surreal Western El Topo
EL TOPO (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1970)
Friday, July 24, 10:40
Sunday, July 26, 1:00 metrograph.com
Chilean-born French filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo is a psychedelic head trip, an acid Western that will blow your mind. Jodorowsky stars as the title character, a gunslinger traveling through a deserted landscape accompanied by his naked young son, who already knows his way around a firearm. After coming upon a town that has been decimated by a nasty group of marauders working for the Colonel, El Topo seeks violent revenge, eventually taking off with a woman and leaving his boy behind as he meets four masters on his path to proving he is the best there is. But soon El Topo is praying for redemption with a community of inbred cripples trapped in a cave.
El Topo is a wild and bizarre journey through religious imagery, romance, and vengeance, a surreal spaghetti Western strained through the mad mind of Jodorowsky, widely hailed as the creator of the midnight movie. The film melds Bergman with Leone, Tod Browning’s Freaks with Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai Trilogy, filtered through Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima’s Lone Wolf and Cub. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before and, despite your better instincts, will lure you into the cult of Jodorowsky.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Peter Asher signs autographs with Gordon Waller, as seen in Peter Asher: Everywhere Man
PETER ASHER: EVERYWHERE MAN (Dayna Goldfine & Dan Geller, 2025)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Thursday, June 18 quadcinema.com thefilmcollaborative.org
Peter Asher: Everywhere Man is so utterly engaging and delightful, so happy-making and surprising, that I actually wanted to crawl inside the screen and enter Peter Asher’s extraordinary life.
In Terry Gilliam’s 1988 film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, John Neville stars as the title character, who tells a fanciful, impossible-to-believe story based on Rudolf Erich Raspe’s 1785 collection The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen, consisting of heavily embellished tall tales loosely inspired by the real-life eighteenth-century German nobleman Hieronymus Karl Friedrich Freiherr von Münchhausen, whose name was given to the mental disorder Munchausen syndrome, a subtype of factitious illness in part characterized by, according to the National Library of Medicine, “pseudologia fantastica, a pattern of fabricating detailed falsehoods regarding personal history, education, and achievements.”
In the extraordinary documentary Peter Asher: Everywhere Man, the title figure tells his fanciful, impossible-to-believe story — but in this case, it’s all remarkably true, including that his father, endocrinologist Dr. Richard Asher, is credited with introducing the term “Munchausen syndrome.”
Born in England in 1944, Asher has lived a charmed, and charming, life. He and his sisters, Jane and Clare, three redheads, were child actors affectionately known as the Carrots of Wimpole Street. At Westminster School, he met Gordon Waller, a fellow guitarist, and they formed a duo, Peter and Gordon, who joined the British Invasion and scored a series of huge hits, anchored by “A World without Love,” written for them in 1964 by Jane’s boyfriend, Paul McCartney, who was living in the Asher home at the time. Other songs followed: “I Don’t Want to See You Again,” “Woman,” “I Go to Pieces,” and “Nobody I Know,” and they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. Asher’s mother, Margaret, was an oboist and professor who taught music to George Martin, the Beatles’ innovative producer.
Asher opened the highly influential Indica bookstore and gallery, where John Lennon met Yoko Ono. After serving as head of A&R for Apple Records, he became producer and then manager of a rising young folk singer named James Taylor, which led to him working with Linda Ronstadt, Carole King, and so many others (Diana Ross, Cher, Neil Diamond, Morrissey, Elton John, Rodrigo y Gabriela, 10,000 Maniacs, Robin Williams). He threw the party at which Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull fell in love, even though she was married to one of Asher’s Indica partners, John Dunbar. He put together backing bands with such musicians as King, bassist Leland Sklar, guitarists Danny “Kootch” Kortchmar and Waddy Wachtel, multi-instrumentalist Andrew Gold, and drummer Russ Kunkel, and he listed them on albums, something that previously was not done on pop records. And he did all of it with little or no training, just thriving on improvisation and experience.
“I think that Peter just got better and better at what he did,” Kortchmar says in the film. “Producing is a very broad term. Sometimes it means he’s a musical prodigy, and sometimes it means he’s a social worker or a therapist. And sometimes it means he or she just enables somebody who’s musically gifted to do their thing and get out of the way. And I think he probably can wear any of those hats.”
Directors and producers Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller structure the documentary around Asher’s cabaret show, A Musical Memoir of the ’60s and Beyond, which they saw in December 2019 with Ronstadt. In the multimedia performance, Asher narrates his story and sings various songs with a band, along with projections of archival photos and videos. Editor Darren Lund intercuts new interviews with Monty Python veteran and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen costar Eric Idle, Steve Martin, Lyle Lovett, McCartney (voice), Twiggy, Kortchmar, Pattie Boyd, Paul Jones (Manfred Mann), Taylor and his sister Kate, Rolling Stone journalist Ben Fong-Torres, Indica cofounders Dunbar and Barry Miles, Natalie Merchant, and Asher’s longtime personal assistant, Chris O’Dell, among others, in addition to clips from a 2006 interview of Waller. They also follow Asher around London as he gives a tour to his daughter, Victoria.
Asher is generous with his time, although every now and then he prefers not to go into deep detail. When he is asked about drugs back in the 1960s and ’70s, he admits that he partook, although Ronstadt points out, “Cocaine was a lot of fun but it ruined everything.” Meanwhile, he had the unique ability to go where the action was, or create it himself.
Peter Asher relaxes in his office surrounded by many of his successes in an extraordinary career
Throughout it all, Asher, with his shock of bright red hair and dapper style, seems to have remained a warm, gentle, and caring individual who would do whatever it takes for his clients and friends, without seeking stardom for himself, at least since Peter & Gordon broke up in 1968. However, Wachtel states, “He’s a ham like the rest of us.”
“I suppose I do have this sort of generally optimistic view of what I set my hand to seems to work out okay, and I don’t think it’s necessarily to my credit at all,” he says humbly. “I think it could all just be a series of fortunate circumstances. But I’ve never really known what I was going to be doing next.”
Asher, a three-time Grammy winner and CBE (Commander of the British Empire), has touched so many people around the world over the last seven decades, whether they realize it or not, and it’s to his credit that he doesn’t get caught up in that, although he is clearly proud of his nearly endless accomplishments, as he should be. The film, to its credit, captures that beautifully. Asher was so often in the room where it happened, and is still happening, and Goldfine and Geller bring audiences into those very rooms.
Peter Asher: Everywhere Man opens June 18 at the Quad, with Goldfine and Geller (The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden,Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song) participating in Q&As following the screenings on June 18 at 7:15 (moderated by Alan Light), June 19 at 7:00 (Dennis Elsas), June 20 at 7:00 (Joe Neumaier), and June 21 at 2:30 (Neumaier). You can find a Spotify playlist for the film here.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
“The stories behind our smiling family are complicated and sometimes painful to tell,” Karla Murthy says in her new documentary, The Gas Station Attendant. “But isn’t everyone’s? It reminds me of the saying my cousin recently told me, while we were cooking, about all families having problems: ‘Everybody’s dosas have holes in them.’”
The Gas Station Attendant is a poignant, intimate tale of a family whose dosas have more than their share of holes. It’s about the immigrant experience and the search for the American dream, told by the daughter of a gentle man, H. N. Shantha Murthy, who spends his entire life trying to make things better for everyone around him despite meeting obstacles nearly every step of the way.
Murthy started recording her family on video when she was a little girl; later, as an adult, she began taping phone conversations with her father when he was forced to take a late-night job as a gas station attendant to pay the bills. During those talks, he shares details of the complicated, painful life he led, anchored by his deep love for his family.
He ran away from his home in India when he was ten, escaping horrific poverty, only to soon consider suicide. “I can still see myself as a boy,” he tells Karla. “I’m hiding here and there, not having food to eat for weeks. I used to sleep on the street, looking at the stars and moon, and always prayed: Someday, somehow, my life will change.” His life did change when, as a teen working at a hotel, he served a white couple from Texas who decided to sponsor him in America, paying for his education, and he became an engineer.
Following a mass layoff at Boeing, he struggled to earn a living, taking on a series of odd jobs, not wanting his family to experience any hardship. His first wife died too young, and he got remarried to a caring woman; both were Filipino, and he had two kids with each. Through it all, he grits his teeth and smiles, making friends wherever he goes — he and his second wife sold small gift items at trade shows around the country, something Karla sees for herself when she accompanies her father on one of those trips and he falls ill.
“Dad, how did you get up and keep going?” she thinks to herself.
The Emmy-nominated Murthy (The Place That Makes Us,Love, Jamie) wrote, directed, edited, and produced the eighty-three-minute film, incorporating archival footage, family photos and home movies, and numerous shots of empty gas stations, concerned for her father’s safety in what is a very dangerous job.
“And so here I am, reliving the past while trying to live in the present, wondering what it means to be a good father, a good daughter, a good mother,” Karla says.
Named Best Documentary Feature at the Nashville and San Diego Asian Film Festivals, The Gas Station Attendant will run June 12–18 at DCTV Firehouse Cinema, with Murthy participating in four postscreening Q&As: June 12 at 7:00 with writer Mira Jacob, June 13 at 6:00 with composer and podcaster Jad Abumrad, June 14 at 5:00 with New York Taxi Workers Alliance founder Bhairavi Desai, moderated by executive producer and Basement Bhangra founder DJ Rekha (who makes a cameo in the film), and June 18 at 6:30 with Economic Hardship Reporting Project executive director Alissa Quart.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
THE ART OF SOCCER
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
June 12 – July 5 metrograph.com
It may take a few days for World Cup fever to take over New York City, which is currently owned by the Knicks, but the international game of soccer is being celebrated just about everywhere you look. At Metrograph, “The Art of Soccer” consists of a half dozen fútbol classics, beginning June 12 with Wim Wenders’s 1972 The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick and continuing with a new restoration of José Antonio Garcia and Ícaro Martins’s once-banned 1983 Onda Nova, Jafar Panahi’s 2006 Offside, Alexandre Koberidze’s 2021 What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, Abbas Kiarostami’s 1974 The Traveler, and Daniel Schmidt and Gabriel Abrantes’s 2018 Diamantino.
Giant fluffy puppies get in the way of a Portuguese soccer star’s dreams in Diamantino
At the fifty-sixth annual New York Film Festival in 2018, you could catch a documentary, foreign-language picture, political thriller, high-tech crime chiller, comedy, romantic melodrama, fantasy and sci-fi, and more — all in one wildly entertaining film. Diamantino, Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt’s full-length feature debut, is an absurdist multigenre mashup that is as tense as it is funny, an unpredictable romp that evokes Ernst Lubitsch, Howard Hawks, Michel Gondry, Philip K. Dick, South Park, Cinderella, James Bond, Being There,Minority Report, and Au Hasard Balthazar while feeling wholly original. Carloto Cotta stars as the title character, Diamantino Matamouros, a Portuguese soccer star à la Cristiano Ronaldo (pre-sexual assault allegations) who sees giant fluffy puppies when he is on the field. After botching a penalty kick in the World Cup Final, the stupendously beautiful star learns that his beloved father and mentor (Chico Chapas) has died. His evil twin sisters, Sónia (Anabela Moreira) and Natasha (Margarida Moreira), become his agents and make a secret deal with the mysterious Dr. Lamborghini (Carla Maciel) and a government minister (Silva Joana). Meanwhile, investigators Aisha Brito (Cleo Tavares) and Lucia (Vargas Maria Leite) — lovers who are soon to be married — are looking into Diamantino’s finances and devise a plan to get close to him by having Aisha pose as a male refugee named Rahim who Diamantino adopts as his son.
Diamantino Matamouros (Carloto Cotta) is surrounded by images of himself in Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt’s dazzling feature debut
Everyone except his sisters, who know better, thinks he is some kind of genius mastermind, but Diamantino is actually an addled simpleton who understands very little about life. He enjoyed playing soccer, likes eating Nutella and whipped cream sandwiches, and, following his tearful retirement, hangs out with his cat, Mittens, and dedicates himself to raising Rahim, who he does not realize is actually a grown woman. He’s reminiscent of Chance the Gardener (Peter Sellers) in Being There, but his airheaded statements — which are outrageously funny — are seldom mistaken for brilliance, except when he’s manipulated into making fascistic political statements he doesn’t understand. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes Critics’ Week, Diamantino is stunningly photographed by Charles Ackley Anderson, who quickly adapts the film’s visual style as it switches from fantasy to love story to futuristic thriller, with numerous memorable shots, including Lucia in a white nun’s habit on a motorbike, Diamantino and Rahim sleeping on pillows with large images of the soccer star’s head, and a huge fluffy puppy playing goal in the championship game. American-born directors and longtime collaborators Abrantes and Schmidt, who edited the film with Raphaëlle Martin-Holger, show a deep love and respect for movies, infusing Diamantino with charm and energy, humor and compassion, honoring, in their own way, the history of cinema. The rest of the cast and crew do their part as well, from art director Bruno Duarte and composers Ulysse Klotz and Adriana Holtz to the Moreira sisters and multidisciplinary Portuguese star Manuela Moura Guedes as television interviewer Gisele.
A group of women risk their freedom to watch a soccer match in Jafar Panahi’s Offside
Filmed on location in and around Tehran’s Azadi Stadium and featuring a talented cast of nonprofessional actors, Jafar Panahi’s Offside is a brilliant look at gender disparity in modern-day Iran. Although it was illegal at the time for girls to go to soccer games in Iran — because, among other reasons, the government did not think it was appropriate for females to be in the company of screaming men who might be cursing and saying other nasty things (the regulations have been somewhat loosened recently) — many try to get in, facing arrest if they get caught. Offside is set during an actual match between Iran and Bahrain; a win will put Iran in the 2006 World Cup. High up in the stadium, a small group of girls, dressed in various types of disguises, have been captured and are cordoned off, guarded closely by some soldiers who would rather be watching the match themselves or back home tending to their sheep. The girls, who can hear the crowd noise, beg for one of the men to narrate the game for them.
Meanwhile, an old man is desperately trying to find his daughter to save her from some very real punishment that her brothers would dish out to her for shaming them by trying to get into the stadium. Despite its timely and poignant subject matter, Offside is a very funny film, with fine performances by Sima Mobarak Shahi, Shayesteh Irani, Ida Sadeghi, Golnaz Farmani, Mahnaz Zabihi, and Nazanin Sedighzadeh as the girls and M. Kheymeh Kabood as one of the soldiers. The film was selected for the 2006 New York Film Festival, but Panahi, who was supposed to attend the opening, experienced visa problems when trying to come to America and was later arrested by the Iranian government for his support of the opposition Green movement; he was sentenced to six years in prison and given a twenty-year ban on making new films, something he comments on ingeniously in This Is Not a Film.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
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.
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
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.]
