The pandemic has revealed one of the most complicated issues at the heart of American family and economic life: the problem of safe, affordable child care, especially for single and working-class mothers. Loira Limbal’s intimate and heartfelt documentary, Through the Night, shares the moving story of Deloris “Nunu” Hogan and Patrick “Pop Pop” Hogan, who have run Dee’s Tots daycare out of their New Rochelle home since 1985. The film, which was shot prior to the coronavirus crisis, focuses on Nunu and PopPop in addition to two women whose children they care for, Marisol Valencia, who is struggling to make ends meet even with three jobs, and pediatric ER nurse Shanona Tate, both of whom often work overnight shifts. The Hogans operate their “day” care twenty-four/seven and never seem to take a break; they have two young children of their own as well.
“It’s not just a job. This is really our life,” NuNu says. “My children, ever since they were the age of two years old, they had to share me with other children. I remember my children saying, ‘Mommy, why do they have to come first?’ Sometimes my children didn’t get what I had to give to the other kids.”
What NuNu gives to these other kids is love and affection; to their parents, she gives them a much-needed lifeline: the ability to hold a job. Dee’s Tots is like one big extended family; there’s a lot of laughing and a lot of crying, and the Hogans make personal sacrifices: Not only are they worried about their own children, but they limit the time they see each other, sleeping at different times so there’s always someone watching the kids.
The film also reveals a problem at the heart of working-class poverty and the American economy without hammering at it: The mothers of the children the Hogans take care of are primarily women of color who work what would be deemed essential jobs even before Covid-19 and who don’t have the option of corporate or expensive independent daycare. They are barely making enough money to keep their children at Dee’s, which has also felt the impact of the lockdown. In July 2020, Awesome without Borders, which awards grants to initiatives and projects “that increase representation and inclusion in age, class, race, gender, sexuality, religion, and/or ability,” gave a grant to Dee’s, explaining that “the Hogans are frontline heroes in their own right. They make it possible for essential workers to leave their children in good hands and do essential work.” Meanwhile, NuNu notes on the film’s official website, “We are staying open until they shut us down because our parents need us. It is a little bit scary because every person who walks in could bring in Covid-19.”
Afro-Dominican director and DJ Limbal (Estilo Hip Hop,#APartyCalledRosiePerez), a single mother of two living in the Bronx who holds a full-time job, says in her director’s statement: “I was raised by an amazing cast of Black and Latinx women who performed miraculous acts of resilience, creativity, and subversion on a daily basis. Unfortunately, when I look around at our popular culture these women are rarely seen and when they do appear, they are represented in reductive ways that often amount to caricatures. My vision as a filmmaker is to flood our popular culture with beautifully complex portrayals of the lives of working-class women of color so that we have new gazes and new ways of seeing ourselves.”
Limbal filmed at Dee’s from 2016 to 2018, showing Nunu and/or PopPop making arts and crafts with the kids, flipping through a family album, marching in a parade, preparing children for overnight stays, dancing at a party, teaching gardening, and playfully auctioning off goodies. It is a love story not only between the Hogans and the children but between the Hogans themselves. “We kinda feed off of each other. We need our spirits lifted up too in order to be the people that we are,” NuNu says. Through the Night, which is screening virtually December 11-24 at the maysles documentary center, will lift viewers’ spirits as well while also opening their eyes.
Atsuko Maeda is mesmerizing as a young woman trying to find her place in the world in To the Ends of the Earth
TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2019)
Metrograph Digital
December 11-17, $12 metrograph.com www.kimstim.com
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s To the Ends of the Earth is a gorgeously photographed, hauntingly meditative treatise on finding one’s place in the world. In her third film with Kurosawa following Seventh Code and Before We Vanish, former J-pop idol Atsuko Maeda of AKB48 fame is transcendent as Yoko, the host of a global travel show. She is making her way through Uzbekistan with her small crew — director Yoshioka (Shota Sometani), cameraman Iwao (Ryo Kase), production assistant Sasaki (Tokio Emoto), and translator Temur (Adiz Rajabov) — but the peppiness and determination she displays when being filmed is not repeated in real life, where she is quiet, lonely, and somber.
They head from Samarkand to Tashkent to Zaamin, from old cities to modern urban centers to the mountains and the sea, seeking out unusual and compelling stories, but not much is going well. At Lake Aydar on the hunt for the elusive bramul fish, a local fisherman refuses going out on the water with a woman. At an amusement park, a ride operator does not think she is strong enough to handle a fierce topsy-turvy spin. And a woman at a chaykhana won’t make her a proper plate of plov. But she soldiers on, doing whatever is necessary for the sake of the show, but it’s clear that her heart is no longer in it, if it ever was.
When she comes upon a goat tethered in a small pen in a back alley, she stops and says, “If I set that goat free in some grassy place, it’d be so happy.” Then, speaking directly to the goat, she asks, “What do you want?” It’s really a question she’s asking herself. Later she tells Iwao, “I feel like I’m moving away from what I really want to do.”
She rarely hangs out with the crew when they’re not filming. She eats by herself, is constantly late, does her own makeup and chooses her own clothing, and spends evenings alone in her hotel room, texting her firefighter boyfriend, who is in Tokyo, the only time she appears to experience any sort of genuine pleasure, but even that becomes problematic later on. When she is given a handheld video camera to take on her private adventures, she soon finds herself on the run from the law. Yoko is a kind of cross between Iris (Kati Outinen) in Aki Kaurismäki’s The Match Factory Girl, though not nearly as dark and pathetic, and Giulietta Masina in any of a number of Fellini films, sweet and innocent but hiding pain. The camera adores her face, as if it’s a character unto itself.
The film is filled with memorable images: Yoko standing waist-deep in the lake, lying flat on the floor of her hotel room, hiding from the police, trekking through sandy mountains, skittering through a sketchy underpass, and wandering into the empty Navoi Theater. It was made in conjunction with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Japan and Uzbekistan and takes place along the Silk Road. Akiko Ashizawa’s cinematography of these little-seen landscapes is captivating, each shot composed like a unique work of art. Editor Koichi Takahashi’s pacing is mesmerizing, with immersive sound by Shinji Watanabe and understated music by Yusuke Hayashi.
Kurosawa is known for such gripping thrillers as Cure and Pulse as well as the elegiac Tokyo Sonata and the romantic drama Journey to the Shore; To the Ends of the Earth, which opens December 11 at Metrograph Digital, takes him to another level, highlighted by an unforgettable performance by Maeda in a film that is about filmmaking, about telling stories and acting them out in a fictitious world where, as in reality, life doesn’t always follow the script.
Jefferson Mays portrays more than fifty characters in A Christmas Carol (photo by Chris Whitaker)
A CHRISTMAS CAROL
Twenty-four-hour stream through January 3, $50 ($30 with code SCROOGE through 12/12) Daily lottery: $15 (10 random winners) www.achristmascarollive.com
Jefferson Mays’s mostly one-man version of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is the best filmed theatrical production made during the pandemic that I have seen. It is also the best one I’ve heard. Tony winner Mays may be the star of the holiday tale, spectacularly portraying more than fifty characters in ninety minutes, but Joshua D. Reid nearly steals the show with his stunning sound design, which works hand in hand with Ben Stanton’s pinpoint-precision lighting; headphones and as large a screen as possible are a must to fully appreciate this outstanding presentation. A big monitor and great speakers will also increase the scare level, because first and foremost, this telling is a ghost story, with genuine frights, one of which made my heart drop into my stomach.
Originally produced at the Geffen Playhouse in LA in 2018, the play, adapted by Mays and his wife, Susan Lyon, with director Michael Arden, has been reimagined by Arden and set and costume designer Dane Laffrey for online viewing. It was recorded in October at the historic United Palace theater on Broadway at 175th St., built in 1930 as a lush vaudeville and movie house that served as a church for the Rev. Ike and his ministry from 1969 to 2017. United Palace calls itself the Home of Spiritual Artistry, and that’s exactly what you’ll find in A Christmas Carol.
“Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, was Scrooge!” Mays announces early as the narrator. “A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.” The word “solitary” hits us differently during the pandemic lockdown, as we watch a single actor onstage, performing in an empty theater for an audience of one, or maybe a few more, sheltering at home.
He continues, “Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, `My dear Scrooge, how are you?’ No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even blind men’s dogs, when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways. . . . But what did Scrooge care! It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance.” At that instant, Arden cuts to a far shot of Mays, looking lonely and far away, socially distanced from the rest of humanity.
A Christmas Carol has been reimagined for online viewing during the pandemic (photo by Chris Whitaker)
Cinematographer Maceo Bishop’s camera follows Mays across the space, zooms in for extreme close-ups, and occasionally pulls back to remind us that Mays is on a stage; this Christmas Carol is a hybrid piece of film/theater, a new kind of work that is both and neither, something that is likely to last beyond Covid-19, when venues are open again for audiences to sit together in community while people around the world are craving access to the same show. At one point, when Mays is shifting between Ebenezer Scrooge and one of the ghosts, Mays not only changes his voice for each character, enhanced by Reid’s bold sound manipulation, but he merely needs to shift his shoulders from left to right to move between the roles, his face bathed in green as the ghost and in white light as the grinchy banker. It’s a terrifying scene that could not be captured in the theater for all to see, while on a movie screen it would lose its intimacy. There are also video projections, smoke and fog, and lighting effects so palpable they have an intense physicality to them.
Mays knows his way around multiple parts; his breakthrough came in 2003 in Doug Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning I Am My Own Wife, in which he portrayed the real-life Charlotte von Mahlsdorf and thirty-nine others, earning a Tony, and he played nine members of the D’Ysquith family in the Tony-winning musical A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder. In A Christmas Carol, he plays more than fifty characters, from Jacob Marley, Bob Cratchit, Fezziwig, and Tiny Tim to Fred, Scrooge, and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. He does so in the same Victorian outfit, a white shirt under a dark suit and long coat, with a top hat. His hair, styled by Cookie Jordan, fluffs up over each ear, evoking an unbalanced Princess Leia.
Mays inhabits the roles from the very start with an easygoing grace and familiarity; when he was a child, his parents would read the story to the family every year. Two-time Tony nominee Arden (Spring Awakening,Once on This Island) began his career playing Tiny Tim in a Texas community theater production of A Christmas Carol when he was ten. The care and understanding they have for the material shines through; the only weakness is Sufjan Stevens’s treacly caroling, which feels like it was meant for a different holiday show.
A Christmas Carol streams through January 3 and is a benefit for more than fifty local theater companies and venues around the country that have been impacted by the Covid-19 crisis. When two gentlemen knock at the door seeking a charity donation, Scrooge is none too happy, leading to the following exchange:
“Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”
“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.
“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman.
“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”
“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”
He politely gets to the point.
“What shall I put you down for?”
“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.
“You wish to be anonymous?”
“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry.”
This Christmas Carol should make many people merry during what will be a very challenging holiday season, with the coronavirus raging inside and outside prisons, millions out of work, so many charities and businesses in need of funds, and the desperate need to not be alone overwhelming our daily existence. Mays, Arden, et al. don’t just transport us to another plane for ninety thrilling minutes — they have given us a present that will stay with us for a long time.
PJ Harvey traveled to Kosovo, Kabul, and Washington, DC, to inspire 2016 album The Hope Six Demolition Project
A DOG CALLED MONEY (Seamus Murphy, 2019)
Film Forum online
Opens virtually Wednesday, December 9, $12 for 48-hour rental filmforum.org
Irish photojournalist Seamus Murphy lays bare English musician PJ Harvey’s creative process in the irresistible documentary A Dog Called Money. Polly Jean Harvey initially hired Murphy to take photos for her 2011 album, Let England Shake, after having seen Murphy’s 2008 exhibit and book, A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan. Murphy ended up making twelve short films with her, one for each song on the record, and in 2012 he asked Harvey if she wanted to accompany him on his trips to Kabul, Kosovo, and Washington, DC, where they would work separately, he on a book, she on a record. But the journeys led to a creative cornucopia that also resulted in their collaborating on the book The Hollow of the Hand, featuring his photographs and her poetry, as well as the 2016 album The Hope Six Demolition Project and the documentary, which opens virtually December 9 at Film Forum.
Murphy follows Harvey, dressed all in black, as she goes through old photos and other detritus in a looted, destroyed home, sits on the rocky shore of a lake writing in her journal (with voice-over narration of her thoughts), hangs out with Corny’s crew in Anacostia, wanders into a theater in ruins (“I’ve heard twenty years ago, you could pay to get into the cinema with bullets,” she says), has tea with a group of children, and visits with local musicians in Kabul’s “Tin Pan Alley.” Murphy cuts between these scenes and Harvey and her band recording new songs in a specially constructed studio in the basement of the historic arts center Somerset House in London. Harvey, who burst onto the alternative music scene in the 1990s with such seminal records as Dry,Rid of Me, and To Bring You My Love, turns the sessions into an art installation by allowing people to watch from behind a one-way mirror; they can see her, but she can’t see them. It’s a genuine treat to observe Harvey’s process as she works with such musicians as John Parish, Terry Edwards, Kenrick Rowe, Enrico Gabrielli, Mike Smith, Alessandro Stefana, James Johnston, Alaine Johannes, Adam “Cecil” Bartlett, Jean-Marc Butty, and Mick Harvey (no relation) on melody, vocalization, and instrumentation, the songs taking shape right before our eyes and ears.
Murphy draws direct parallels between what Harvey witnesses and the songs she is writing. She meets a woman walking with her hands behind her back, holding a chain with two keys, who says, “I would kill them with my own hands if I knew who was responsible”); in “Chain of Keys,” Harvey sings, “The woman’s old / The woman’s old and dressed in black / She keeps her hands / She keeps her hands behind her back / Imagine what / Imagine what her eyes have seen / We ask if she / We ask but she won’t let us in.” After playing with the Kabul musicians, she transforms their sounds into the powerful “Homo Sappy Blues.” She uses some of Corny’s crew’s exact words and actions in her lyrics for “A Dog Called Money.” She also captures the overall feeling of her experience in such tunes as “The Ministry of Defence” (“Those are the children’s cries from the dark / These are the words written under the arch / Scratched in the wall in biro pen / This is how the world will end”) and the stunning “I’ll Be Waiting” (“They swept across the land / They did not leave a thing / They did not leave a person / A stone or a tree / They did not leave anything / They did not leave anything / All that’s left is sand / All that’s left is sand”).
At first what seems like it could be cultural appropriation develops into something else, a genuine attempt to understand what is happening in these countries and around the world — as well as in America with the inclusion of DC — and sharing that through music. “Everyone driving in one direction / Everyone driving in every direction / Where to go? / Why? / What to say when I get there?” Harvey narrates near the start of the film, which opens with an extended close-up of a smiling boy with a dirty face, his nose pressed against the window of a car, the sound of traffic all around him. For ninety minutes, we are all that boy, and he is us. And we have a book, an album, and now a documentary to remember that.
Who: Paul Pfeiffer, Eiko Otake, Amina Henry, Morgan Bassichis, Mona Chalabi, Ivy Mix, Mariana Valencia, Jessica Lappin, Maggie Boepple What:LMCC benefit fundraiser Where:Lower Manhattan Cultural Council online When: Wednesday, December 9, free with RSVP (donations accepted), 7:00 Why: Since 1973, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council has “served, connected, and made space for artists and communities in NYC through programs that deepen artists’ creative practice and afford them opportunities to share their process and work with local communities.” Rarely has that been more important than during the pandemic lockdown. On December 9 at 7:00, LMCC’s annual fundraiser goes virtual with “A Toast to Downtown,” celebrating the great work the organization does not only in Lower Manhattan but on Governors Island and other locations. This year’s civic leadership honorees are Downtown Alliance president Jessica Lappin and former LMCC president Maggie Boepple; in addition, Amina Henry (The Animals, Bully) will receive the Sarah Verdone Writing Award, Eiko Otake will be presented with the Sam Miller Award for Performing Arts, and Paul Pfeiffer will receive the Michael Richards Award for Visual Arts.
The evening will include video from Pfeiffer, who will show excerpts from a new work as well as from 2001’s Orpheus Descending, which was installed at the World Trade Center and follows the life cycle of a flock of chickens; a new video from Eiko, made for this gala and recently shot on location at LMCC’s Arts Center at Governors Island; and appearances by LMCC artists and alumni Morgan Bassichis, Mona Chalabi, Ivy Mix, and Mariana Valencia. It’s free to RSVP, but $20 gives you a chance to win a limited edition “100 New Yorkers” print by Chalabi based on her 2020 River to River project, $50 helps fund artist residencies, $100 supports grants to neighborhood arts communities, and $250 gives artists the opportunity to share their work and their creative process.
Two essential healthcare workers take a much-deserved brief break in a Wuhan hospital in 76 Days
76 DAYS (Hao Wu, Weixi Chen, and Anonymous, 2020)
Opens virtually at Film Forum at Home on Friday, December 4 Live Q&A Tuesday, December 8, 7:00 filmforumhome.org www.76daysfilm.com
The prospect of sitting through a ninety-minute documentary about essential healthcare workers in four hospitals in Wuhan fighting in the early days of Covid-19, during the city’s seventy-six-day lockdown, might seem daunting. But what could have been a difficult, emotional, and political roller coaster about fear and anger, government lies and finger pointing turns out to be a deeply affecting film that celebrates our most basic hopes and humanity.
Chinese director Hao Wu was researching a film about pandemics when, in mid-February, he came upon footage being shot by a pair of reporters in Wuhan, Weixi Chen and a man who has decided to remain anonymous. They had been given full access to four hospitals, where they followed doctors, nurses, patients, and family members for several months. There are no talking heads, and no one speaks directly to the camera; instead, 76 Days offers a fly-on-the-wall perspective that manages to be as uplifting as it is frightening.
The film opens like a sci-fi thriller, as an unidentified group of people in head-to-toe protective gear that includes light-blue masks, long face shields, white Hazmat suits, and blue footies comforts a distraught colleague who is prevented from saying goodbye to her father, who has just died from the novel coronavirus. Near the end of the scene, one of her coworkers tries to calm her down, saying, “We don’t want to see you in distress or pain. What will we do if you fall sick? We all have to work in the afternoon.” Moments later, sick people are banging on a door of the hospital to be let in, like a crowd trying to escape a coming zombie apocalypse, while two workers decide who to admit first. Those exchanges set the stage for the rest of the film, in which doctors and nurses go about their business with a relatively relaxed demeanor, displaying endless empathy and compassion as they care for scared patients with uncertain futures.
Wu focuses on a few specific cases that serve to represent the crisis as a whole, following an elderly couple who both have the virus and are not permitted to see each other even though they are on the same floor, and a young couple who are forced to quarantine in their apartment after the woman gives birth to a baby girl, unable to see their newborn for two weeks. While the nurses fall in love with the infant, who must stay in an incubator and whom they name Little Penguin, the workers have their hands full with the old man, who constantly tries to leave the hospital and doesn’t seem capable of wearing his mask correctly, if at all.
Doctors and nurses in Wuhan care for Covid patients, displaying empathy and compassion during seventy-six-day lockdown
The genuine kindness and concern displayed by the hospital employees is, well, infectious. They are risking their lives at every moment; each encounter is fraught with the possibility that they could contract the virus even with all the PPE. It’s hard not to cringe when they feed the old man, wipe the face of the infant, or use a patient’s phone to call a relative with news, because the reality is that people die from this disease, and Wu is not afraid to show that. It’s a riveting film that immerses you in this global emergency that started right there, at that time; if this doesn’t make you wear a mask, wash your hands, observe social distance protocols, and avoid gathering with others indoors, I don’t know what will.
We also see the empty streets and highways of Wuhan, a city of eleven million people, deserted, with signs advising, “Staying home makes a happy family.” All the action is happening in the hospitals, where the doctors and nurses bond with themselves and the patients, decorate their white Hazmat suits with drawings and sayings (“Clay Pot Chicken: I miss you”), and caution everyone to “be extra vigilant.” As the crisis continues to surge around the world and here in America, where politics trumps safety, those are indeed words to live by. Winner of the Best Cinematography award at DOC NYC 2020 and nominated for a Best Documentary Gotham Award, 76 Days launches virtually at Film Forum on December 4; Wu will share more about the documentary and his process in a free, live Q&A on December 8 at 7:00.
Film fans can watch obsessive film fanatics in Cinemania, streaming at BAM festival
BAM online
December 4 – January 3, free – $12 www.bam.org
Among the endless negative aspects of the pandemic lockdown is our inability to see and interact with our fellow New Yorkers in locations that are special to this great city. We are trapped inside, most of us making only virtual contact with friends, families, work colleagues, and strangers on the street. BAM takes us on a trip down memory lane in the first online edition of its continuing Programmers’ Notebook series, this one titled “New York Lives”; of course, we can’t even go to BAM to watch them in an audience filled with other film fans. In addition to the below recommendations, BAM will be showing Angela Christlieb and Stephen Kijak’s 2002 Cinemania, which follows, well, five obsessed film fans who do whatever they can to see as many movies as possible, each with unusual quirks (and all of whom I used to see at various screenings); Diego Echeverria’s 1984 Los Sures, about Puerto Rican street culture; Loira Limbal’s 2020 Through the Night, a portrait of three caregivers of children; Brett Story’s 2020 The Hottest August, a poetic and poignant look at what New Yorkers think about the future in August 2017; Megan Rossman’s 2019 The Archivettes, which goes inside the Lesbian Herstory Archives; and a double feature of Marci Reaven and Beni Matías’s 1979 The Heart of Loisaida and William Sarokin and Matías’s 1985 Housing Court, both of which explore the housing crisis.
Marc Singer’s Dark Days looks at people living in underground tunnels below Penn Station
DARK DAYS (Marc Singer, 2000)
Opens December 4, $4.99 www.bam.org
The award-winning documentary Dark Days takes a frightening look at a community of homeless men and women — many of them former or current crack users — who live in the Amtrak tunnels beneath Penn Station. They sleep in tents, cardboard shacks, and small plywood shanties, some of which have been painted and decorated. As the belowground residents shave, cook, play with their pets, and take showers under leaking pipes, trains speed by, and rats scavenge through the countless mounds of garbage. At times some of the men venture aboveground (“up top”) to go through trash cans, mostly looking for recyclable bottles and junk items they can resell. First-time filmmaker Marc Singer became a part of this colony for two years (he initially went down to help the people, not to film them), getting the residents to open up and tell their fascinating stories, which turn out to be filled with a surprising zest for living. In fact, all of the underground shooting was completed with the help of the subjects themselves acting as the crew when they were not on camera. DJ Shadow composed the haunting music for this strangely enriching look at a mysterious, truly terrifying part of New York City.
Crystal Kayiza’s See You Next Time is set in a nail salon that does extraordinary work (photo courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Leroy Farrell)
“See You Next Time: Neighborhood Stories” takes viewers on six slice-of-life journeys into unique parts of New York City, local tales about people making a difference or just struggling to get by — while also reminding us of things we cannot do or that have been severely limited during the Covid-19 crisis. In Aisha Amin’s Friday, a Brooklyn community is excited about the potential of acquiring a building to house their mosque. Crystal Kayiza’s See You Next Time introduces us to the relationship between a woman who gets extravagant nails and her salon artist. In Emily Packer and Lesley Steele’s By Way of Canarsie, a coastal community fights for ferry access. In Heather María Ács’s fictional Flourish, drag queen Crystal Visions (Justin Sams) prepares for an important show while battling with her drunk partner, Beau (Becca Blackwell), and young nonbinary couple Lazer (Poppy Liu) and T-Bone (Delfina Cano) consider making an addition to their love life. In Anna Pollack’s fictional Briarpatch, teenage siblings Marcus (Juan Lara) and Ashley (Oumou Traoré) face multiple hardships after the death of their mother. And in Tayler Montague’s semiautobiographical In Sudden Darkness, thirteen-year-old Tati (Sienna Rivers) navigates her way around a blackout. The free screening on December 9 at 7:30 will be followed by a live Q&A with the filmmakers, moderated by programmer Natalie Erazo (RSVP required here).
Manfred Kirchheimer’s Free Time is a symphonic film about a very different time in the city
In 2019, eighty-eight-year-old Manfred Kirchheimer was at Lincoln Center’s Francesca Beale Theater to screen and discuss his latest work, the subtly dazzling Free Time, which had its world premiere in the Spotlight on Documentary section of the fifty-seventh annual New York Film Festival. The German-born, New York-raised Kirchheimer has taken 16mm black-and-white footage he and Walter Hess shot between 1958 and 1960 in such neighborhoods as Hell’s Kitchen, Washington Heights, Inwood, Queens, and the Upper East Side and turned it into an exquisite city symphony reminiscent of Helen Levitt, Janice Loeb, and James Agee’s classic 1948 short In the Street, which sought to “capture . . . an image of human existence.” Kirchheimer does just that, following a day in the life of New York as kids play stickball, a group of older people set up folding chairs on the sidewalk and read newspapers and gossip, a worker disposes of piles of flattened boxes, laundry hangs from clotheslines between buildings, a woman cleans the outside of her windows while sitting on the ledge, a fire rages at a construction site, and a homeless man pushes his overstuffed cart.
Kirchheimer and Hess focus on shadows under the el train tracks, gargoyles on building facades, smoke emerging from sewer grates, old cars stacked at a junkyard, and grave markers at a cemetery as jazz and classical music is played by Count Basie (“On the Sunny Side of the Street,” “Sandman”), John Lewis (“The Festivals,” “Sammy”), Bach (“The Well Tempered Klavier, Book 1 — Fugue in B flat minor”), Ravel (Sonata for Violin & Cello), and others, with occasional snatches of street sounds. The title of the film is an acknowledgment of a different era, when people actually had free time, now a historical concept with constant electronic contact through social media and the internet and the desperate need for instant gratification. Kirchheimer, whose Dream of a City was shown at the 2018 NYFF and whose poetic Stations of the Elevated was part of the 1981 fest (but not released theatrically until 2014), directed and edited Free Time and did the sound, and it’s a leisurely paced audiovisual marvel. The only unfortunate thing is that it is only an hour long; I could have watched it for days.
Okwui Okpokwasili takes viewers behind the scenes of her one-woman show in Bronx Gothic (photo courtesy of Grasshopper Film)
“Okwui’s job is to scare people, just to scare them to get them to kind of wake up,” dancer, choreographer, and conceptualist Ralph Lemon says of his frequent collaborator and protégée Okwui Okpokwasili in the powerful documentary Bronx Gothic. Directed by Okpokwasili’s longtime friend Andrew Rossi, the film follows Okpokwasili during the last three months of her tour for her semiautobiographical one-woman show, Bronx Gothic, a fierce, confrontational, yet heart-wrenching production that hits audiences right in the gut. Rossi cuts between scenes from the show — he attached an extra microphone to Okpokwasili’s body to create a stronger, more immediate effect on film — to Parkchester native Okpokwasili giving backstage insight, visiting her Nigerian-born, Bronx-based parents, and spending time with her husband, Peter Born, who directed and designed the show, and their young daughter, Umechi. The performance itself begins with Okpokwasili already moving at the rear of the stage, shaking and vibrating relentlessly, facing away from people as they filter in and take their seats.
She continues those unnerving movements for nearly a half hour (onstage but not in the film) before finally turning around and approaching a mic stand, where she portrays a pair of eleven-year-old girls exchanging deeply personal notes, talking about dreams, sexuality, violence, and abuse as they seek their own identity. “Bronx Gothic is about two girls sharing secrets. . . . It is about the adolescent body going into a new body, inhabiting the body of a brown girl in a world that privileges whiteness,” Okpokwasili, whose other works include Poor People’s TV Room and the Bessie-winning Pent-Up: A Revenge Dance, explains in the film. National Medal of Arts recipient Lemon adds, “It’s about racism, gender politics — it’s not just about these two little black girls in the Bronx.” Rossi includes clips of Okpokwasili performing at MoMA in Lemon’s “On Line” in 2011, developing Bronx Gothic at residencies at Baryshnikov Arts Center and New York Live Arts, and participating in talkbacks at Alverno College in Milwaukee and the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, where the tour concluded, right next to her childhood church, which brings memories surging back to her.
Okwui Okpokwasili nuzzles her daughter, Umechi, in poignant and timely documentary (photo courtesy of Grasshopper Film)
Rossi is keenly aware of the potentially controversial territory he has entered. “As a white man, I was conscious of the complexity and implications of embarking on a project that revolves around the experience of African American females,” he points out in his director’s statement. “But fundamentally, I believe in an artist’s creative ability to explore topics that are foreign to the artist’s own background. I think this takes on even more resonance when the work itself has an explicit objective to ‘grow our empathic capacity,’ as Okwui says of Bronx Gothic, [seeking] an audience that is composed of ‘black women, black men, Asian women, Asian men, white women, white men, Latina women, Latina men. . . .’” Cinematographers Bryan Sarkinen and Rossi (Page One: Inside the New York Times, The First Monday in May) can’t get enough of Okpokwasili’s mesmerizing face, which commands attention, whether she’s smiling, singing, or crying, as well as her body, which is drenched with sweat in the show. “We have been acculturated to watching brown bodies in pain. I’m asking you to see the brown body. I’m going to be falling, hitting a hardwood floor, and hopefully there is a flood of feeling for a brown body in pain,” Okpokwasili says. Meanwhile, shots of the audience reveal some individuals aghast, some hypnotized, and others looking away.
Editor Andrew Coffman and coeditors Thomas Rivera Montes and Rossi shift from Okpokwasili performing to just being herself, but the film has occasional bumpy transitions; also, Okpokwasili, who wrote the show when she was pregnant, does the vast majority of the talking, echoing her one-woman show but also at times bordering on becoming self-indulgent. (Okpokwasili produced the film with Rossi, while Born serves as one of the executive producers.) But the documentary is a fine introduction to this unique and fearless creative force and a fascinating examination of the development of a timely, brave work.
