this week in film and television

THE OTHER CITY

Documentary looks at the other side of the nation’s capital

THE OTHER CITY (Susan Koch, 2010)
Chelsea Cinema
260 West 23rd St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Opens Friday, September 17
www.theothercity.com
www.clearviewcinemas.com

Washington, D.C., might be famous as a city filled with wealthy politicians, international ambassadors, ruthless lobbyists, and tourists visiting some of the finest cultural institutions and historical monuments in the world, but lurkng in the shadows is a very different story. As revealed in Susan Koch’s surprising documentary THE OTHER CITY, the District of Columbia is in the midst of an HIV/AIDS epidemic that is actually on par with what many African nations are experiencing. Although Koch includes frightening statistics about the crisis — between three and five percent of D.C. residents are living with HIV or AIDS, primarily blacks and Hispanics as well as a growing number of women and teenagers — she focuses on a handful of fascinating protagonists who serve as a microcosm for this rampant epidemic that Washington has turned a blind eye to for three decades. J’Mia Edwards, who got infected by a boyfriend who knew he was HIV+ and didn’t tell her, is a single mother of three doing everything she can to keep her family from becoming homeless, but the red tape suffocates her at every step. Ron Daniels, who got infected from a reused needle, is a recovering addict who every day hands out medical supplies, AIDS tests, and love and hope from a van on the street. Jose Ramirez, who contracted AIDS from his much older lover, shares his story with young Latino immigrants in schools and at La Clinica del Pueblo while also handing out condoms in places where gay men go to have unprotected sex. Koch also visits the Courage to Change Group, former prisoners with HIV/AIDS who meet regularly for emotional support, and Joseph’s House, where HIV/AIDS victims such as Jimmy go to die in peace, surrounded by loved ones and dedicated caregivers. Among those adding their opinions are New York Times columnist Frank Rich, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, playwright and activist Larry Kramer, and journalist and documentary coproducer/writer Jose Antonio Vargas, whose reporting in the Washington Post inspired Koch to make the film. THE OTHER CITY is a devastating look at a horrific crisis going on right under the noses of those who can do the most to do something about it.

STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH DAY WITH KEN JACOBS

There will be no cheek-pinching of Ken Jacobs at special day celebrating his avant-garde classic STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH

Union Docs
322 Union Ave.
Saturday, September 18, 1:30
Suggested donation: $12
www.uniondocs.org
www.starspangledtodeath.com

Union Docs, in conjunction with Electronic Arts Intermix, will honor legendary filmmaker and artist Ken Jacobs with a full day of festive events on Saturday, September 18, built around the Brooklyn native’s magnum opus, the no-budget STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH, which was begun in the 1950s and completed in 2004. Jacobs describes the four-hundred-minute work as “an epic film shot for hundreds of dollars! [C]ombining found-films with my own more-or-less staged filming, it pictures a stolen and dangerously sold-out America, allowing examples of popular culture to self-indict. Racial and religious insanity, monopolization of wealth and the purposeful dumbing down of citizens and addiction to war oppose a Beat playfulness.” The cast includes Jacobs, Jack Smith as the Spirit Not of Life But of Living, and Jerry Sims as Suffering. The day will feature a screening of the film, a Star Spangled Supper, a Jacobs-led tour of East Village locations used in the film, and a discussion with J. Hoberman and Jacobs at around 10:00. This is a spectacular program that lovers of independent, avant-garde film and the city itself should not miss.

INDEPENDENT FILMMAKER CONFERENCE

Director Debra Granik (WINTER’S BONE) is one of the many special guests participating in the IFP’s Independent Filmmaker Conference

Haft Auditorium, FIT
227 West 27th St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
September 19-23
Tickets: $35-$300
www.ifp.org

The IFP, which is dedicated to independent film and its ability to “expand people’s points of view by exposing them to different ones,” is holding its annual Independent Filmmaker Conference from September 19 to 23 at FIT’s Haft Auditorium. Daily discussions will focus on “The Future of Film” (Sunday), “Do or DIY: Distribution and Marketing” (Monday), “The Truth About Non-Fiction” (Tuesday), “The Reel World: Doc and Fiction Collide” (Wednesday), and “Sustaining a Film (and Media) Making Career” (Thursday), with six panels each day, featuring directors, producers, marketers, bloggers, composers, festival curators, film critics, online experts, and other industry insiders and outsiders. There will also be several “case studies,” taking special looks at Debra Granik’s WINTER’S BONE, Jay Duplass’s CYRUS, Lena Dunham’s TINY FURNITURE, and Tim Hetherington’s RESTREPO, as well as conversations with HBO’s Sheila Nevins, Power to the Pixel’s Liz Rosenthal, and AMERICAN SPLENDOR’s Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. The event is open to the public; ticket prices begin at $35 for individual sessions, with festival passes for nonmembers running $300.

ICONS: BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN

Eisenstein classic is part of Icons film series at the Rubin Museum

BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1925)
Cabaret Cinema
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, September 17, free with $7 bar minimum, 9:30
212-620-5000
www.rmanyc.org/cabaretcinema

Sergei M. Eisenstein’s BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN might be a seminal silent classic that changed the nature of filmmaking, but it is also still a vastly entertaining movie regardless of its cinematic influence and worldwide importance. Divided into five episodes — Men and Maggots, Drama at the Harbour, A Dead Man Calls for Justice, The Odessa Staircase, and The Rendez-vous with a Squadron — the film tells the based-on-fact story of a mutiny on board a sailing vessel, the result of unfair treatment of the workers, a microcosm of the Russian Revolution of 1905 that later led to the bigger revolution of 1917. The film is like an editing primer, its approach to montage causing its own revolution at the time, particularly during the unforgettable Odessa Steps sequence, in which Eisenstein’s cuts manipulate the action in powerful, emotional ways that were new to cinema. The film also features the best mustaches in the history of movies. BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN is available in numerous versions with slightly different intertitles and soundtracks; although we’re not sure which one will be shown at the Rubin Museum on September 17 (introduced by Russian writer Alex Galper) as part of its latest K2 Friday night CabaretCinema series, Icons, you can rest assured that it will be a thrilling experience, especially if you’ve never seen the film before.

PATHS OF GLORY WITH DAVID SIMON

Kirk Douglas discovers that war is indeed hell in PATHS OF GLORY (courtesty Photofest)

PATHS OF GLORY (Stanley Kubrick, 1957)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Monday, September 20, 7:40
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

Stanley Kubrick’s harrowing PATHS OF GLORY, based on the novel by Humphrey Cobb, is quite simply the best English-language antiwar film ever made. Kirk Douglas stars as Colonel Dax, a French military man who disagrees with his superiors’ insistence on sending his men into certain annihilation in order to take a worthless hill during World War I. Dax’s verbal battles with Generals Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) and Mireau (George Macready) are unforgettable, as are the final scenes, in which three random men are chosen to pay the price for what the generals call cowardice. Filmed in stunning black and white, PATHS OF GLORY puts you right on the front lines of the folly of war. Kubrick, who wrote the unrelenting script with Calder Willingham and Jim Thompson, also made the best film about the cold war (DR. STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB), the Roman slave revolt (SPARTACUS), and, arguably, the Vietnam War (FULL METAL JACKET). PATHS OF GLORY will have a special screening at Film Forum on September 20, introduced by HOMICIDE, THE CORNER, and THE WIRE creator David Simon, who should have some fascinating things to say about one of the most emotional, powerful stories ever put on celluloid.

TICKET ALERT: NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

Helen Mirren’s stars in Julie Taymor’s THE TEMPEST, the centerpiece selection of the 2010 New York Film Festival

Film Society of Lincoln Center
Alice Tully Hall, 1941 Broadway at 65th St.
Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Tickets go on sale Sunday, September 12, at 12 noon
Festival runs September 24 through October 10
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com

Tickets for the forty-eighth annual New York Film Festival go on sale Sunday, September 12, at 12 noon, so you better not wait if you want to see such hotly anticipated flicks as David Fincher’s THE SOCIAL NETWORK, Helen Mirren in Julie Taymor’s version of THE TEMPEST, Matt Damon starring in Clint Eastwood’s HEREAFTER, festival veteran Mike Leigh’s ANOTHER YEAR, Olivier Assayas’s biopic of Carlos the Jackal, Jean-Luc Godard’s FILM SOCIALISME, and Raul Ruiz’s adaptation of Camilo Castelo Branco’s MYSTERIES OF LISBON, in addition to films by Hong Sang-soo, Abbas Kiarostami, Lee Chang-dong, Cristi Puiu, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and centenarian Manoel de Oliveira. Other highlights include the 1931 Spanish version of DRACULA, an evening with David Thomson, a tribute to Jack Cardiff, Frederick Wiseman’s BOXING GYM, masterworks by Masahiro Shinoda and Fernando de Fuentes, dialogues with Fincher, Taymor, Kelly Reichardt, and Weerasethakul, and other screenings and special events.

EAT THIS FILM! SWEETGRASS

Sheep are on one of their last trips through the mountains in SWEETGRASS (photo courtesy Cinema Guild)

SWEETGRASS (Lucien Castaing-Taylor, 2009)
92YTribeca
200 Hudson St.
Wednesday, September 15, $12, 7:30
212-601-1000
www.92y.org
www.sweetgrassthemovie.com

Husband-and-wife filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash follow a flock of sheep herded by a family of Norwegian-American cowboys on their last sojourns through the public lands of Montana’s Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness in the gorgeously photographed, surprisingly intimate, and sometimes very funny documentary SWEETGRASS. In 2001, Castaing-Taylor, director of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, and Barbash, a curator of Visual Anthropology at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, found out about the Allestad ranch, an old-fashioned, Old West group of sheepherders who still did everything by hand, including leading hundreds of sheep on a 150-mile journey into the mountains for summer pasture with only a few dogs and horses. Director Castaing-Taylor uses no voice-over narration or intertitles, instead inviting the viewer to join in the story as if in the middle of the action, offering no judgments or additional information. The film begins with shearing and feeding, then birthing and mothering, before heading out on the long, sometimes treacherous trail, especially at night, when bears and wolves sneak around, looking for food. Slowly the focus switches to the men themselves, primarily an old-time singing grizzled ranch hand and a cursing, complaining cowboy. Castaing-Taylor and Barbash spent three years with the sheepherders and in the surrounding areas, amassing more than two hundred hours of footage and making to date nine films out of their experiences, mostly shorter work to be displayed in gallery installations or for anthropological reasons; SWEETGRASS is the only one to be released theatrically. It’s a fascinating look at a something that is destined to soon be gone forever. The film is closing out 92YTribeca’s monthly Eat This Film! series with a special screening September 15, introduced by Castaing-Taylor, Barbash, and local sheep farmer Eugene Wyatt.