Who: Bryan Cranston, Hunter Doohan, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Liz Glotzer, Alon Aranya
What: Live discussion about Showtime series Your Honor
Where: The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center
When: Monday, January 25, free with RSVP, 6:30
Why: For those of you watching the eight-part Showtime series Your Honor, you might be feeling a little lonely on January 24 as the Sunday-night show takes a week off before presenting two new episodes on January 31. But you can get your fix on Monday night when stars Bryan Cranston (Michael Desiato), Hunter Doohan (Adam Desiato), and Isiah Whitlock Jr. (Charlie Figaro) and executive producers Liz Glotzer and Alon Aranya appear in a live, virtual discussion for the Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center. In the series, which is based on the Israeli show Kvodo, Cranston portrays a widowed judge in New Orleans whose teenage son accidentally kills the son of a mob boss in a hit-and-run, and the judge goes to extreme lengths to protect his child. The panel will talk about the show as well as adapting Israeli television programs; such popular Israeli shows as Homeland, In Treatment, The Spy, and Euphoria have also been remade for American audiences.
this week in film and television
ACASĂ, MY HOME
Acasă, My Home follows the trials and tribulations of a Roma family living off the grid in the wilderness
ACASĂ, MY HOME (Radu Ciorniciuc, 2020)
Opened virtually and in theaters January 15
kinomarquee.com
“Anywhere you are is home,” Elvis Presley sang in the 1962 movie Kid Galahad. Where one puts down roots is at the heart of Acasă, My Home, debut filmmaker Radu Ciorniciuc’s gripping documentary about the Enaches, a Roma family living in squalor away from society in the wilderness of Văcărești Nature Park in the Bucharest Delta. For nearly twenty years, the patriarch, Gică Enache, and his wife, Niculina Nedelcu, existed off the grid, raising nine children whom they hid from social services and did not send to school; the family subsisted on fish from a lake, hunted birds and small animals, and used books for kindling. Ciorniciuc, an investigative journalist who cofounded the independent media organization Casa Jurnalistului, was doing a story on the park when he came upon the Enache clan, led by Gică, who in 2012 had temporarily emerged when he became a local hero for saving some children from a burning house. When the government decides to turn the swampland into a public park, Gică, Niculina, Vali, Rică, Corina, Duca, Georgiana, Gigel, Luci, Marcel, Nicușor, and Zâna might have to rejoin civilization, a prospect the parents are ready to fight against. “I’ll set myself on fire. I’m not afraid to die,” Gică says.
Acasă, My Home is an intimate film told in cinéma verité style; written by journalist Lina Vdovîi and shot by director of photography Mircea Topoleanu, the film follows the Enaches as they go about their daily life. They are well aware they are being filmed, but they never speak directly to the camera, and Ciorniciuc does not interview anyone about their situation. The narrative develops in such a way that if you didn’t know better, you might think it is a fiction film. Ciorniciuc, who served as cowriter, co-cinematographer, and producer (with Monica Lãzurean-Gorgan), also gave cameras to the children for them to photograph themselves as they go fishing, play with pigeons, chickens, dogs, cats, and pigs, and head into the big town, which is just across a road, an ever-present threat to their not-quite-Walden-like existence. He merely keeps the camera rolling as Gică rages on, the media arrive to cover an inspection by Prince Charles and Prime Minister Dacian Cioloș, one of the sons gets himself into a personal dilemma, and Niculina tries to avoid the spotlight. There’s an implicit discrimination inherent in the treatment of the family; no one cared about them when they lived in filthy, abject poverty, but now that the government wants the parkland, they are on everyone’s mind.
About ten minutes into the film, a spectacular drone shot begins with a few of the boys kicking around a ball by one of their two shacks and rises dramatically hundreds of feet into the air, wind blowing ominously, until the Enaches’ tiny patch of dirt amid the vast green landscape is barely visible, then turns to reveal the large white and gray city next door, where a very different life awaits. But Ciorniciuc, who in addition to the film has created a book and a continuing social project about the Enaches, refuses to celebrate this marginalized group of people as heroic figures; he depicts them as they are, warts and all, perhaps victims of circumstance but also complicit in the decisions that set them apart from the rest of the world.
VIRTUAL VIEWS: GARRETT BRADLEY’S AMERICA, A LIVE Q&A
MoMA talk will focus on Garrett Bradley’s multichannel video installation America
Who: Garrett Bradley, Thelma Golden
What: Live Q&A about Projects: Garrett Bradley
Where: MoMA YouTube
When: Thursday, January 21, free, 8:00
Why: In November, MoMA posted “Re-Imaging America,” a conversation between artist Garrett Bradley, Studio Museum in Harlem associate curator Legacy Russell, and Studio Museum in Harlem director and chief curator Thelma Golden, discussing Bradley’s multichannel video installation America, continuing at MoMA through March 21 as part of the Elaine Dannheisser Projects Series. The work combines twelve new black-and-white short films (about Harry T. Burleigh, James Reese Europe, the Negro National League, and other historical subjects) and a score by Trevor Mathison and Udit Duseja with archival footage of the unreleased 1914 film Lime Kiln Club Field Day, which is thought to be the oldest-surviving feature-length work with an all-Black cast, a love story starring Bert Williams and Odessa Warren Grey. “I knew that Bert was required to wear blackface, and I did not, even in my initial introduction to the material, feel that it took away from his brilliance. But it became critical to prove that, and to prove it using what already existed within the original footage,” Bradley says in the talk.
“That is one of the exciting challenges in working with archives — the prospect of revealing a new dimension of something that appears fixed. How could I make it clear that Bert’s power and creative genius were not confined to his performance alone? His vision extended far beyond our immediate gaze as audience members, and could be seen in-between the scenes themselves. It could be seen in a simple portrait, unmasked and still. I wanted to open America with these moments that made clear who he was, separate from the character in the film and outside of the narrative. It was important we saw him giving direction and in negotiation with the surrounding power structures. It became all the more critical that we had a moment to sit with certain frames — certain truths — that are less discernible at seventeen frames per second.” On January 21 at 8:00, Golden, who curated the exhibition with Russell, will host a live “Virtual Views” Q&A with Bradley on MoMA’s YouTube channel; museum members can send in questions beforehand here. The discussion will also be archived for later on-demand viewing, and you can check out three audio clips of Bradley delving into her work here.
AMERICAN SELFIE: ONE NATION DIVISIBLE THROUGH THE LENS OF ALEXANDRA PELOSI
Who: Alexandra Pelosi, Sheila Nevins
What: Live discussion (preregister to watch film in advance)
Where: The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center online
When: Tuesday, January 19, free with RSVP, 6:00
Why: Documentary filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi turns her camera lens on the country in her latest work, American Selfie: One Nation Shoots Itself. Over the course of one year, Pelosi journeyed across the United States, filming citizens, immigrants, and tourists as they gathered for various causes (abortion, gun rights, BLM, masks) and took pictures with their phones of themselves and others, bitterly fighting over hot-button issues or waiting online for the latest iPhone, cheering people like heroes as they emerged from the store with the treasured item under their arm. “I think phones are much more dangerous than guns,” Pelosi, the daughter of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, told the Guardian last October.
Pelosi, who has previously made such nonfiction films as Journeys with George, Right America: Feeling Wronged – Some Voices from the Campaign Trail, Fall to Grace, and Goodbye, Congress, clearly chooses her targets, but even so she reveals an America that we are all aware of but don’t always get to see so directly. Unsurprisingly, the film has gotten mostly good reviews from critics, but its online rating is low, perhaps because Americans on all sides of the political spectrum are not so fond of what they really look like these days. On January 19 at 6:00, Pelosi will speak with MTV Studios documentary films head Sheila Nevins in the program “American Selfie: One Nation Divisible through the Lens of Alexandra Pelosi.” The film ends prior to the 2020 election, so it should be fascinating to see what Pelosi has to say about what has happened since. Free registration is required and comes with access to the film.
2021 NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL
Ian McKellen is one of several luminaries celebrating theater in Oren Jacoby’s On Broadway
The Jewish Museum
Film at Lincoln Center
January 13-26, $12 per film, all-access pass $125
virtual.filmlinc.org
thejewishmuseum.org
The New York Jewish Film Festival might not be celebrating its thirtieth anniversary in quite the style it was hoping, but it’s still hosting a stylish two weeks of fiction and nonfiction shorts and features as well as panel discussions and Q&As. Presented by the Jewish Museum and Film at Lincoln Center, the festival kicked off January 13 with Nir Bergman’s Here We Are (available through January 16), about divorced parents dealing with their grown autistic son; Bergman will participate in a free talk on January 14 at 2:00.
The 2021 centerpiece selection is Anders Østergaard and Erzsébet Rácz’s Winter Journey (available January 21), starring the great Bruno Ganz in his final role, playing flutist Günther “George” Goldschmidt, father of radio commentator Martin Goldsmith, who portrays himself in the film, based on his memoir, The Inextinguishable Symphony: A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany. Østergaard and Martin Goldsmith will discuss the film in a free talk on January 22 at 2:00.
The virtual festival concludes with another family affair, Susan Fanshel and Veronica Selver’s documentary Irmi (January 26), about German Jewish refugee Irmi Selver, Veronica’s mother, with Hanna Schygulla reading narration from Irmi’s memoirs. There will be a free talk with the directors January 27 at 2:00.
Among the other films to look out for are Judith Helfand’s Love & Stuff and Absolutely No Spitting (January 22), about the director’s adoption of a daughter when she was fifty, followed by the death of her mother; Ruthy Pribar’s Asia (January 15), with Unorthodox breakout star Shira Haas playing a teenager living with her single mother (Alena Yiv); and Oren Jacoby’s On Broadway (January 22), honoring the Great White Way with archival footage and interviews with Ian McKellen, Helen Mirren, Hugh Jackman, Christine Baranski, John Lithgow, and others. (You can watch Jacoby’s On Broadway: Give My Regard to Broadway, a short about Covid-19’s impact on theater, for free here.)
In addition, the festival has teamed up with the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan for a special MLK Day event, a live Q&A on January 18 at 2:00 with Dr. Shari Rogers about her documentary Shared Legacies, part of the JCC’s Cinematters: NY Social Justice Film Festival, which runs January 14-18. The film can be accessed beginning January 16 at 10:00 am here. Keep watching this space for select reviews as NYJFF 2021 continues.
THE SIGN PAINTER (CITY ON THE RIVER) (Viestur Kairish, 2020)
Available January 19 (ticket comes with director Q&A)
virtual.filmlinc.org
Latvian theater, opera, and film director Viestur Kairish’s The Sign Painter is in some ways a miniature Little Big Man meets Forrest Gump, where the audience watches history unfold through the eyes of a person who doesn’t really take an active part in what’s happening around him. Dāvis Suharevskis stars as Ansis, a tall, thin, gangly young man who works as a sign painter in a small Latvian village during the tumultuous decade before and during World War II, a town that changes leadership and primary color from the green of authoritarian dictator Kārlis Ulmanis to the red of Stalin’s Soviet Union to the black of Nazi Germany. Ansis has steady work: Each time a new regime takes over, he has to update street names and symbols, and he does so with a calm expertise, avoiding any personal political involvement. However, his true love, Zisele (Brigita Cmuntová), the daughter of pharmacist Bernshtein (Gundars Āboliņš) and who is reading Alexandra Kollontai’s Free Love, does get caught up in the tumult, taking up with German soldier Andreas (Aidas Jurgaitis) while Ansis is pursued by Naiga (Agnese Cīrule), as blond and Christian as Zisele is brunette and Jewish.
Ansis (Dāvis Suharevskis) is ever on the lookout for the next regime in The Sign Painter
Early on, aboard the small boat the White Swan, Ansis asks the captain, “May I steer?” It’s the only time he actively asserts being in charge of his direction. He wants to be a fine artist, and he is extremely talented at landscapes and portraits, but he carries on with his sign painting as revolution swirls about him.
Kairish (aka Viesturs Kairišs), who has made numerous documentaries in addition to the features Leaving by the Way, The Dark Deer, and The Chronicles of Melanie, and cinematographer Gints Bērziņš shoot nearly the entire film at a skewed angle, as if the characters can just fall off the screen in this continually upended world. They frame each shot with an artist’s eye; in one scene, Ansis speaks with Bernshtein while holding an empty picture frame, a spatial void that Zisele walks into. The story combines forbidden romance with religious, political, and military upheaval as one man continues to survive in dangerous times essentially despite himself, reminiscent of Jack Crabb in Little Big Man and Forrest Gump, who keep on keeping on. Based on a novel by Finnish-Latvian writer Gunars Janovskis, The Sign Painter is a beautifully rendered film about European collaboration, true love, regime change, and simple, everyday life.
THE LIGHT AHEAD (FISHKE DER KRUMER) (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1939)
Available January 25-28
virtual.filmlinc.org
jewishfilm.org
Jewish Austrian American auteur Edgar G. Ulmer is most well known for his atmospheric horror and crime films, including 1934’s satanic The Black Cat, which pits Boris Karloff against Béla Lugosi, 1944’s Bluebeard, with John Carradine as the multiple wife murderer, and 1945’s cult noir Detour, a genre favorite that was added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry in 1992. But Ulmer, who apprenticed with F. W. Murnau, also made a series of Yiddish shtetl films (Green Fields, The Singing Blacksmith) about life in poor Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, and the NYJFF is presenting the world premiere of one of them, the National Center of Jewish Film’s new 4K digital restoration of 1939’s The Light Ahead, beginning January 25.
The film is a heart-tugging melodrama about the fraught romance between a young blind woman, Hodel (Helen Beverley), and the lame Fishke (David Opatoshu), who earns a pittance by calling people to the baths in the tiny village of Glupsk. The town is thriving, with a fat surplus that the community leaders are deciding how to spend, but Reb Mendele (Izidore Cashier) and others have their own suggestions. The youngsters’ dream is to live in Odessa, the big city, but there’s not much chance of a bright future and times are dark, as is J. Burgi Contner and Edward Hyland’s cinematography, cast in a shadowy black-and-white.
Hodel (Helen Beverley) and Fishke (David Opatoshu) dream of a better future in The Light Ahead
The Light Ahead begins with a vaudeville-like comedy scene between Reb Mendele, Reb Alter (Leon Seidenberg), and Reb Isaak (Yudel Dubinsky) before turning serious. Most of the film depicts the people barely getting by as they deal with cholera, God’s will, prayer, and Galaganska chickens.
“What, I ask you, is the Jew’s life, anyway? An old story repeated over and over,” Mendele soliloquizes. “The form changes in every age. But the story remains the same. All the calamities, adversities, hardships, curses. All the troubles, afflictions, miseries, disasters. Every village has its rich, its paupers, its wise men, scholars, fools, ignoramuses, its stirrers of pots, its leading citizens, its innocent lambs and insolent ruffians. But always it’s the same old story.” It’s a story — inspired by a tale by Mendele Mokher Sforim, the Grandfather of Yiddish Literature — that Ulmer tells in charming, bittersweet ways, with intimate camerawork that sometimes makes it feel like a silent film.
The Light Ahead was made just before the start of WWII and the Holocaust, which destroyed so much of Eastern European shtetl life, so to watch it now is to experience a piece of erased history. The cast, made up of members of New York’s Artef and Yiddish Art Theaters, is led by Opatoshu in his first film; he would go on to appear in dozens of movies and television shows as well as on Broadway, including memorable TV roles on The Twilight Zone, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Star Trek, and The Outer Limits. There will be a members-only discussion about the film with J. Hoberman and Dan Sullivan on January 26 at 6:00; you can find out more here.
LYNNE SACHS: BETWEEN THOUGHT AND EXPRESSION
Museum of the Moving Image
January 13-31, $5 per program ($12 for Film About a Father Who), $30 all-series pass
www.movingimage.us
www.lynnesachs.com
For more than three decades, experimental documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs has been shining an intimate light on our hearts and minds in poetic works that explore who we are and our place in the world. The Memphis-born, Brooklyn-based auteur is being celebrated this month with the Museum of the Moving Image virtual festival “Lynne Sachs: Between Thought and Expression,” being held in conjunction with the release of her latest work, Film About a Father Who. From January 13 to 31, MoMI will screen nineteen of Sachs’s films, from 1986’s four-minute Still Life with Woman and Four Objects, in which a woman goes through daily routines like preparing lunch, to the world premiere of the four-minute Maya at 24, comprising scenes of Sachs’s daughter, Maya, at six, sixteen, and twenty-four.
The festival is organized into five programs: “Early Dissections,” “Family Travels,” “Time Passes,” and the feature-length Your Day Is My Night and Tip of My Tongue. Each ticket comes with access to a new interview between Sachs and assistant curator Edo Choi delving into Sachs’s career and her unique, unconventional style, which evokes such avant-garde filmmakers as Chantal Akerman, Bruce Conner, Maya Deren, Bruce Naumann, and Martha Rosler. Sachs will also participate in the live, free “Discussion with the Sachs Family” on January 19 at 7:00 with her brother, Ira Sachs Jr., and documentarian Kirsten Johnson (Cameraperson, Dick Johnson Is Dead), introduced by MoMI curator Eric Hynes.
Chinese immigrants take stock of their lives in Lynne Sachs’s Your Day Is My Night
Sachs’s films invite us into her personal life as well as the life of others. Which Way Is East (1994) takes us on her trip to Vietnam with her sister Dana, who says when Lynne gives her the camera, “Lynne can stand for an hour finding the perfect frame for her shot. It’s as if she can understand Vietnam better when she looks at it through the lens of her camera. I hate the camera; the world feels too wide for the lens, and if I try to frame it, I only cut it up.” Lynne’s framing is extraordinary, unfurling in a calm, hypnotic pace that can be claustrophobic in its immediacy. In 2013’s Your Day Is My Night, Sachs documents a group of Chinese immigrants crammed into a closetlike apartment in Chinatown, where they ponder the differences between their lives in America and their native country and wonder if they made the right choice in coming here. There’s a fascinating kind of intervention when a young Puerto Rican woman moves in with them. And in 2007’s The Small Ones, Sachs shares the story of her Hungarian cousin Sandor Lenard, who during WWII in Italy was tasked with “washing, measuring, and cementing the bones of American dead.” His straightforward narration is accompanied by abstract images of war and slow-motion home movies of children at a birthday party.
In an essay Sachs wrote about the four-minute 1987 silent short Drawn and Quartered, depicting a naked man and woman divided into four frames, exploring the tacit nature of the human body, she explained how she felt at the film’s San Francisco premiere: “Within those few painful minutes, the crowd went from absolute silence, to raucous laughter, and back to an exquisite quiet. I was shaking.” That’s how you’re likely to feel as you experience Sachs’s work all these years later.
Lynne Sachs takes a revealing look at her dad in Film About a Father Who
FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO (Lynne Sachs, 2020)
January 15-31, $12
www.movingimage.us
www.lynnesachs.com
“We’re pretty candid about who Dad is, and we’ve seen him through a lot, but we’re also able to shift what we might recognize as who he really is to what we want him to be,” experimental documentarian Lynne Sachs says in Film About a Father Who, a revealing look at the patriarch of her seemingly ever-expanding family, her dad, Ira Sachs Sr. Inspired by Yvonne Rainer’s seminal 1974 work A Film About a Woman Who . . . , a cinematic collage exploring sexual conflict, and Heinrich Boll’s 1971 novel Group Portrait with Lady, Sachs’s movie consists of footage taken over a period of fifty-four years, beginning in 1965, using 8mm and 16mm film, VHS, Hi8, Mini DV, and digital images, edited by Rebecca Shapass. Now eighty-four, Ira Sachs Sr. was a sex-loving, pot-smoking minor-league hotelier, a neglectful, emotionally unavailable husband and father, both selfish and generous, carefully guarding secrets that Lynne, her sister, journalist and author Dana Sachs, and her brother, filmmaker Ira Sachs Jr., discuss with their six half-siblings, children their father had with other wives and girlfriends, some of whom they did not know about for many years.
Ira Sr.’s mother, Rose Sachs, known as Maw-maw, who left him when he was young, says of his womanizing, “I can’t stand that way of life.” His first wife, Lynne’s mother, Diane Sachs, speaks about what an easy decision divorcing him was. “Marriage was just a lot of being up at night, going to the window, wondering when he was coming home,” she explains. His second wife, Diana Lee, says through tears, “He’s a mistake.” Yet nearly all the women in his life, relatives and companions alike, profess their undying love for the long-haired, bushy-mustached man who was able to cast a spell over them despite, at least outwardly, not appearing to be a particularly eloquent Don Juan type and never remaining faithful. But there’s also more than a hint of psychological abuse he suffered at the hands of his mother. “She treated me as an enemy,” he says.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that the first three children of such a secretive man all went into the storytelling arts, mixing fiction and nonfiction in film and literature; Ira has won awards for such films as Forty Shades of Blue and Love Is Strange, Dana’s books include the novel If You Lived Here and the Vietnam memoir The House on Dream Street, and Lynne’s documentaries range from Investigation of a Flame and Sermons and Sacred Pictures to Your Day Is My Night and States of UnBelonging. There are numerous shots of family members filming other relatives; at one point, Lynne is filming Ira Jr. filming Ira Sr. while watching home movies on the television. A Film About a Woman Who . . . , which features music by sound artist Stephen Vitiello, is a striking portrait of an unusually dysfunctional family, a true story that has been in the making for more than a half century and even now provides only some of the answers. Perhaps you can find out more when it begins streaming January 15-31 in the Museum of the Moving Image festival “Lynne Sachs: Between Thought and Expression”; Sachs will participate in a “Discussion with the Sachs Family” on January 19 at 7:00 with her brother Ira and documentarian Kirsten Johnson, introduced by MoMI curator Eric Hynes.
LYNN HERSHMAN LEESON’S THE ELECTRONIC DIARIES
Still from Lynn Hershman Leeson’s The Electronic Diaries (1984–2019) (courtesy the artist and Bridget Donahue, New York)
Who: Lynn Hershman Leeson
What: Special screening and conversation
Where: The New Museum online
When: Tuesday, January 12, free with RSVP, 8:00
Why: In advance of her upcoming “Twisted” exhibition at the New Museum, which opens June 30, Cleveland-born, San Francisco–based artist Lynn Hershman Leeson will present a free screening of her video The Electronic Diaries, which she has been compiling since 1984, examining her life in such segments as “Confessions of a Chameleon,” “Binge,” “First Person Plural,” and “Shadow’s Song.” Part of Rhizome and C-Lab Taiwan’s “First Look: Forking PiraGene,” the screening will be followed by a conversation with the artist.