this week in (live)streaming

PUBLIC ART FUND TALKS: JACOLBY SATTERWHITE

Jacolby Satterwhite’s An Eclectic Dance to the Music of Time is on view at Lincoln Center (photo by Nicholas Knight)

Who: Jacolby Satterwhite
What: Public Art Fund Talk
Where: The Cooper Union’s Frederick P. Rose Auditorium, 41 Cooper Sq., Third Ave. at Seventh St.
When: Wednesday, April 26, free with advance RSVP for in-person or livestream, 6:30
Why: In a 2021 “Meet the Artist” interview with the Haus der Kunst museum in Munich, multimedia artist Jacolby Satterwhite explains, “The influences I draw on are from pop culture, politics, my family, my personal histories, queer theory, art history, postructuralism and design, gaming. It’s sort of like, you know, the simulacra of the universe.” Born in 1986 in Columbia, South Carolina, the New York–based Satterwhite’s latest installation is An Eclectic Dance to the Music of Time, on view on the fifty-foot-long Hauser Digital Wall in the Karen and Richard LeFrak Lobby in David Geffen Hall, home of the New York Philharmonic.

Commissioned by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in collaboration with the Studio Museum in Harlem and Public Art Fund, the nearly half-hour work explores the past, present, and future of Lincoln Center, featuring more than seventy-five dancers and more than fifty musicians from local performing art schools amid HD color video and 3D animation incorporating real-life figures, archival footage, trees, buildings, text, paintings, and photographs. On April 26 at 6:30, Satterwhite will be at the Cooper Union’s Frederick P. Rose Auditorium to discuss An Eclectic Dance to the Music of Time and place it within the context of his career as well as the arts community it celebrates. “I wanted to describe time and history through a vehicle of abstraction, using color, shape, landscape, horizontality, and movement as a way to kind of reorient the history in a way that it hasn’t been normally told,” he says in the above Lincoln Center video. You can hear more on April 26 either at the Cooper Union or via livestream, both free with advance RSVP.

ESTROGENIUS FESTIVAL: BAN(NED) TOGETHER

ESTROGENIUS FESTIVAL: BAN(NED) TOGETHER
The Kraine Theater, 85 East Fourth St.
UNDER St. Marks, 94 St. Marks Pl.
Arts on Site, 12 St. Marks Pl.
721 Decatur Street Community Garden, Bushwick
March 15 – April 2, sliding scale $20
www.estrogenius.nyc

Since 2000, the EstroGenius Festival has been celebrating “the artistry of femme, nonbinary, nonconforming, and trans womxn artists.” The 2023 edition, presented by FRIGID New York and Manhattan Theatre Source, launches March 15 with “Funny Women of a Certain Age,” an evening of comedy with Amanda Cohen, Jessie Baade, Laura Patton, and Carole Montgomery. The festival, curated by maura nguyễn donohue, Melissa Riker, and John C. Robinson, kicks into high gear March 18 through April 2 with nearly two dozen productions taking place at the Kraine Theater, UNDER St. Marks, Arts on Site, and the 721 Decatur Street Community Garden in Bushwick, from concerts and plays to discussions and burlesque.

On March 19 at 3:30, Joya Powell and Pele Bauch team up for the open dialogue “Who We Are | Ban(ned) Together,” getting to the heart of this year’s theme: “Ban(ned) Together,” a response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the violence being committed against trans and femme bodies.

Claire Ayoub heads down memory lane in her solo show The GynoKid. Marina Celander shares the family-friendly story The Tale of An-Noor, incorporating dance and puppets. In the duet Develop(ing) Together: BEAR, c/s movement projects investigates balance, exhaustion, and tolerance. Molly Kirschner’s BiPolar Brunch brings together four characters seeking connection. Alt-folkers Brokeneck Girls perform songs from The Murder Ballad Musical.

“An Evening with Peterson, Savarino & Wells” features Muriel “Murri-Lynette” Peterson’s Black Enough, Kim Savarino’s Blue Bardo, and Portia Wells’s Inside Flesh Mountain, Part II. Anabella Lenzu examines herself as a woman, a mother, and an immigrant in Solo Voce: The Night You Stopped Acting. Hip-hop takes center stage with Yvonne Chow’s #Unapologetically Asian and an excerpt from Janice Tomlinson’s PRN. There are also works by sj swilley, Emily Fury Daly, Vanessa Goodman, Donna Costello, Kayla Engeman, Leslie Goshko, Soul Dance Co., and Petra Zanki, among many others.

A CONVERSATION WITH F. MURRAY ABRAHAM

F. Murray Abraham will discuss his long career at National Arts Club virtual event (photo courtesy HBO)

Who: F. Murray Abraham, John F. Andrews
What: Virtual conversation
Where: The National Arts Club online
When: Tuesday, February 21, free with RSVP, 6:00
Why: At the 2010 National Arts Club gala, the Shakespeare Guild honored actor F. Murray Abraham with its Gielgud Award for Excellence in the Dramatic Arts, calling the Pittsburgh-born, El Paso–raised Syrian American actor “one of the most versatile artists of our time.” Among those celebrating him were Tom Hulce, Jerry Stiller, Anne Meara, Oskar Eustis, and Michael Feingold.

Over a six-decade career onstage and small and big screen, Abraham has accumulated one Oscar, two Obies, one Grammy nod, three Emmy nominations, and other accolades with stellar performances in Amadeus, Homeland, The White Lotus, Uncle Vanya, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and so many more productions. On February 21 at 6:00, the eighty-three-year-old Abraham, who lost his wife of sixty years, Kate Hannan, this past November, will discuss his long, wide-ranging career, in conversation with Shakespeare Guild president John F. Andrews. The special National Arts Club virtual event is free with advance RSVP here.

NYC INDIE THEATRE FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Samantha Soule and Daniel Talbott’s Midday Black Midnight Blue kicks off New Ohio Theatre’s seventh and final NYCITFF

NYC INDIE THEATRE FILM FESTIVAL
New Ohio Theatre
154 Christopher St.
February 16-19 in person, February 20-26 streaming, passes $35-$50, individual screenings $14-$20
newohiotheatre.org

There will be a melancholy cloud hovering over New Ohio Theatre’s seventh NYC Indie Theatre Film Festival (NYCITFF); this iteration will be its last, as founding artistic director Robert Lyons announced earlier this week that the company will cease operations at the end of the current season after thirty years of presenting experimental and cutting-edge theater and film.

“The decision is the result of a confluence of factors, including my intention to step down as artistic director, the shifting landscape and dynamics of the field, and increased financial pressures on the organization,” Lyons wrote in a statement. “The board and I believe theater organizations have their own natural life spans, and felt the time was right for New Ohio to step aside and make space for the next generation of theater-makers and producers. We believe this is an important moment for new ideas, new energy, and new models for the indie theater scene.”

The final NYCITFF takes place February 16-19 at New Ohio’s longtime home on Christopher St., with encore streamings of all films February 20-26. The festival consists of six features, thirty-four shorts in four programs (“Non-traditional Storytelling,” “Dating Drama,” “Everything Changes,” “Friendship Bonds”), two workshops (“Infinite Space: Making Theater in Virtual Reality” with Jocelyn Kuritsky, Alex Basco Koch, and Meghan Finn, and “Staging Film: Tricks of the Trade, Merging Stage and Film” with Kevin Laibson), and a reception and a happy hour.

The opening night selection on February 16 at 8:00 is Samantha Soule and Daniel Talbott’s Midday Black Midnight Blue, a drama set on Whidbey Island where a man (Chris Stack) is haunted by a lost love (Soule); the cast includes two-time Emmy winner Merritt Wever (Nurse Jackie, Godless) and off-Broadway favorite Dale Soules (I Remember Mama, The Capables). In-person screenings conclude February 19 at 4:00 with Rat Queen Theatre Co and Colt Coeur’s The Goddamn Looney Tunes, a multimedia musical about a teen punk band.

Director Reid Farrington gives instructions to Rafael Jordan on set of Mendacity (photo by Miguel Aviles)

The work that perhaps best encompasses the intersection of film and theater is Mendacity, which uses real political protests as a way into exploring lies through a production of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Connelly Theater, starring Lindsey Graham as Maggie the Cat (Adam Patterson), the United States of America as Brick (Rafael Jordan), AOC as SisterWoman (Jennifer McClinton), Tr*mp as Big Daddy (Kevin R. Free), and Jared Kushner as Big Mama (assistant director Laura K Nicoll). When Brick tells Maggie, “I can’t be trusted anymore,” it takes on multiple meanings. Married director and editor Reid Farrington and writer Sara Farrington have been melding film and theater for more than fifteen years, in such original and complex shows as The Passion Project (Carl Th. Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc), Gin & “It” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope), and CasablancaBox (Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca), so Mendacity is a natural next step for them. (In addition, Sara Farrington’s Untitled Ukraine Project was part of New Ohio’s “Now in Process” earlier this month.)

NOW IN PROCESS 2023

Untitled Ukraine Project kicks off “Now in Process” at New Ohio Theatre (photo courtesy the Mill)

NOW IN PROCESS 2023
New Ohio Theatre
154 Christopher St.
February 1-12, $15, 7:00
newohiotheatre.org/now-in-process

New Ohio’s annual “Now in Process” series returns February 1-12 with sneak peeks at four intriguing works-in-progress, either in person at the theater’s downstairs space on Christopher St. or available via livestream (for each second performance).

The showcase begins February 1-2 at 7:00 with Untitled Ukraine Project, Sara Farrington’s adaptation of short stories from Kyiv-born photographer and author Yevgenia Belorusets’s 2022 book, Lucky Breaks. In the note before the preface, Belorusets explains, “With these photographic sequences and stories I want to show how collisions of different contexts inform and transform the manufacture of narratives, resulting in the rejection of any instrument of certainty.” In the hourlong play, Monica Goff, Rachel Griesinger, Kara Jackson, Jennifer McClinton, and Aurea Tomeski portray five women impacted differently by war. In her collaborations with her husband, Reid Farrington, including CasablancaBox, BrandoCapote, and the upcoming film Mendacity, which will premiere February 17 at the NYC Indie Theatre Film Festival at the New Ohio, Sara Farrington mixes fantasy and reality in cutting-edge ways, developing “collisions of different contexts [that] inform and transform the manufacture of narratives,” so she’s the right person for this job. Presented by the Mill, Untitled Ukraine Project is directed by Jaclyn Biskup, with costumes by Kristy Hall and lighting by Jackie Fox.

“Now in Process” continues February 4-5 with writer-director Jaime Sunwoo’s Embodied, a multimedia production from Free Rein Projects in which Ella Dershowitz, Blaze Ferrer, Vanessa Rappa, and Saadiq Vaughan portray fifty-five interviewees responding to the prompt “Describe a time you were acutely aware of your race.” The forty-five-minute work features sound and lighting by Matt Chilton and video design by Andrew Murdock, with interactive projections and live camera feeds.

Rubalee follows the plight of a solitary whale trying to return home (photo courtesy Caborca)

On February 8-9, Caborca presents excerpts from writer-director Javier Antonio González’s Rubalee, an experimental musical about a North Atlantic right whale journeying from the equator to her ancestral home of Eubalena (named after their genus, Eubalaena), battling global warming, human hunters, industrial pollution, and more. The forty-five-minute work, performed by Yaraní del Valle Piñero, Courtney Ellis, Susannah Hoffman, Marty Keiser, Tania Molina, Jordan Rutter, Pelé Sanchez Tormes, and David Skeist, combines choral singing and black metal percussion; the music was composed by Skeist and Michael Rekevics.

The festival concludes February 11-12 with writer-director Deniz Khateri’s Longing Lights, an adaptation of thirteenth-century poet and mystic Attar Neishabouri’s Tazkirat al-Owlia, about Sufi saints and their miracles. The thirty-five-minute opera, with music by Bahar Royaee, focuses on the only female subject in the book, Rabia of Basra.

SLAMDANCE: ONLOOKERS

Kimi Takesue’s Onlookers looks at tourists and locals in Laos

ONLOOKERS (Kimi Takesue, 2023)
Streaming January 23-29
slamdance.com
www.onlookersfilm.com

“Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak,” John Berger writes in the seminal text Ways of Seeing. “But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.”

In documentary filmmaker Kimi Takesue’s Onlookers, having its world premiere at Slamdance in Park City, Utah, this weekend and available for streaming January 23-29, there are no words, no dialogue — just seventy-two minutes of stunning visuals exploring what we see and what we know, what we are present for and what we are absent for.

The film takes place in various parts of Laos as director, producer, cinematographer, sound recordist, and editor Takesue sets up her camera and leaves it there as scenes unfold in real time and with natural sound, from a breathtaking fourteen-second sunset to five and a half minutes of six women sitting by the side of the road, preparing to fill begging bowls for a long line of Buddhist monks. Animals graze in a temple courtyard as bells chime. Women sell goods at an open-air market. Rivers flow, wind rustles trees, roosters crow, birds chirp, a cat rests on a step, a man relaxes in a hammock, all taking their time, no one in a hurry.

Then the tourists arrive; a few run up to take pictures of a monk beating a drum, then walk away, not actually stopping to watch and listen. A woman snaps a photo of three fellow sightseers standing atop a small, raging waterfall as a man fishes below. A local worker waits as a woman checks her cell phone, as if he isn’t there, standing next to her. A group of backpackers gets a prime view at a boat racing festival while locals observe from the shore. On a mountain, six tourists search for the best angle to take selfies. Visitors at a guest house sit in an outdoor lounge and watch Friends.

Born in Colorado and raised in Hawai’i and Massachusetts, Takesue has previously made Where Are You Taking Me? in Uganda, Heaven’s Crossroad in Vietnam, and 95 and 6 to Go in Hawai’i, about reconnecting with her grandfather. In Onlookers, she is not necessarily criticizing the tourists or celebrating the Laotian locals; she’s merely showing how people witness and experience the world, particularly when it comes to travelers and residents.

She beautifully captures this relationship in a short but captivating scene that begins with a static shot of an old religious shrine that looks like it hasn’t been in operation for years. A young woman enters the frame, sits down, poses for a selfie, stands up, snaps a photo of the shrine, then saunters off, never once stopping to just look at the shrine itself. The camera lingers on the building for several seconds, with nobody around, just the decaying structure set against a blue sky and between lush greenery.

We see what we want to see, when we want to see it, not always recognizing what is right in front of us, whether we’re at home or on vacation. It reminded me of people who go to a museum and take pictures of classic artworks but only see them through the lens of their phone rather than experiencing them with their own eyes. In fact, each frame of Onlookers is composed like a painting that slowly comes to life.

“The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe,” Berger writes in his book. “Yet this seeing which comes before words, and can never be quite covered by them, is not a question of mechanically reacting to stimuli. (It can only be thought of in this way if one isolates the small part of the process which concerns the eye’s retina.) We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice. As a result of this act, what we see is brought within our reach — though not necessarily within arm’s reach. To touch something is to situate oneself in relation to it. . . . We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are. Soon after we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen.”

In all films, the audience might not have a choice of what they’re looking at, but they can decide for themselves what they’re seeing. And in the case of Onlookers, what they’re seeing is a gorgeous portrait of ourselves that no selfie can catch.

NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Cecilia Suárez stars in NYJFF closing night selection, Violeta Salama’s Alegría

THIRTY-SECOND ANNUAL NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL
Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center
165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
January 12-23, $15 in person, $10 virtual (bundle $15)
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org
thejewishmuseum.org

The thirty-second annual New York Jewish Film Festival comes along at a time with rising anti-Semitism in America and around the world, disarray in the Israeli government amid the controversial return of a former leader, and continuing battles in the Middle East over human rights and land possession. Why should this year be different from any other year?

Running January 12-23 at Film at Lincoln Center, the series comprises twenty-one feature-length narrative films and documentaries and a program of six shorts by women that explore the past, present, and future of Judaism and the diaspora. The festival kicks off with the New York premiere of Fred Cavayé’s Farewell, Mr. Haffmann, in which Daniel Auteuil plays the title character, a jeweler in Nazi-occupied Paris trying to preserve his family. The opening-night selection is Ofir Raul Graizer’s America, about an Israeli swimming coach (Michael Moshonov) who returns to Tel Aviv after living in Chicago, a reunion that doesn’t go quite as planned; the screening will be followed by a Q&A with writer, director, and editor Graizer.

Hannah Saidiner’s My Parent, Neal is part of special shorts program at NYJFF

The centerpiece film is Delphine Coulin and Muriel Coulin’s Charlotte Salomon: Life and the Maiden, a documentary about the German-Jewish artist who was murdered at Auschwitz at the age of twenty-six but left behind a remarkable legacy; the film includes the voices of Vicky Krieps, Mathieu Amalric, and Hanna Schygulla, and both screenings on January 18 will be followed by a Q&A with the directors. The festival closes with Violeta Salama’s Alegría, about a single mother (Cecilia Suárez) wrestling with her own faith and the patriarchy as she ventures from Mexico to her hometown in the autonomous North African city of Melilla for her niece’s Orthodox wedding. Salama will discuss her debut feature after both screenings on January 22.

A Life Apart: Hasidism in America returns to the New York Jewish Film Festival in a twenty-fifth anniversary 4K restoration

Among the other highlights are Sylvie Ohayon’s Haute Couture, starring Nathalie Baye as a Dior seamstress in Paris; the New York premiere of Tomer Heymann’s I Am Not, a documentary about boarding school student Oren Levy, who shuns human contact, which will be followed by a hybrid Q&A with Heymann and several of the film’s subjects; the New York premiere of octogenarian Ralph Arlyck’s I Like It Here, a personal film about aging; Jake Paltrow’s June Zero, a fictionalized retelling of the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann from three different perspectives; and a pair of revivals, Joseph Green and Leon Trystand’s 1939 Yiddish film A Letter to Mother, and the world premiere of the twenty-fifth anniversary 4K restoration of Oren Rudavsky and Menachem Daum’s A Life Apart: Hasidism in America, a seminal documentary narrated by Sarah Jessica Parker and Leonard Nimoy and with a score by Yale Strom, followed by a panel discussion with Daum, Rudavsky, Ayala Fader, Marcus Allison, Pearl Gluck, and Rabbi Mayer Schiller.

(Keep watching this space for full and capsule reviews throughout the festival.)

Farewell, Mr. Haffmann offers a unique perspective on the Nazi occupation of Paris

FAREWELL, MR. HAFFMANN (Fred Cavayé, 2021)
Walter Reade Theater
Monday, January 16, 8:30
www.filmlinc.org

Fred Cavayé’s stunning Farewell, Mr. Haffmann offers several unique twists on the Holocaust drama, resulting in a breathtaking microcosm of so much of what happened, particularly during the Nazi occupation of France. The film is adapted from a play by Jean-Philippe Daguerre, with nearly all the action taking place in Joseph Haffmann’s jewelry shop, where Haffmann lives with his wife and three children. After getting his family out in May 1941, Haffmann finds himself trapped in Paris, cutting a deal with his assistant (Gilles Lellouche) and his wife (Sara Giraudeau) that grows ever-more dangerous as Nazi leaders start coming to the shop to buy jewelry for their wives and mistresses. Daniel Auteuil (Jean de Florette, Girl on the Bridge) is riveting as Haffmann, who experiences anti-Semitism and war from a fascinating perspective, both psychologically and physically.

Two men are at odds over religion and love in Ady Walter’s Shttl

SHTTL (Ady Walter, 2022)
Walter Reade Theater
Monday, January 16, 5:30, and Tuesday, January 17, 1:00
www.filmlinc.org

On the eve of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, a small Yiddish-speaking village on the Polish border teeters on the edge as the citizens debate war, collaboration, religion, women’s roles in society, and true love. In the tense, gripping Shttl, Ady Walter pulls off quite an impressive directorial debut, shooting the 110-minute film in one continuous take, shifting between black-and-white and color as the narrative unfolds: Mendele (Moshe Lobel) joins the military, promising to come back for Yuna (Anisia Stasevich), but while he is gone she is wooed/harassed by the mean-spirited Folie (Antoine Millet), whose father (Saul Rubinek) is the community’s spiritual leader. The strange spelling of the title is an homage to Georges Perec’s 1969 novel, La Disparition (A Void), which never uses the fifth letter of the alphabet, its loss a symbol of profound absence. (Both of French novelist Perec’s parents were killed during the Holocaust, his father on the field of battle, his mother in Auschwitz.) The village, or shtetl, was built for the film and is being turned into a Jewish-Ukrainian museum. The screening on January 16 will be followed by a Q&A with Walter, New Yiddish Rep veteran Lobel, award-winning German-born Canadian actor Rubinek, and producer Jean-Charles Lévy.

Barren is a chilling look at faith and ritual

BARREN (Mordechai Vardi, 2022)
January 23-28, virtual only
www.filmlinc.org/films/barren

An intense melding of Unorthodox and Shtisel, Mordechai Vardi’s Barren is a heart-wrenching drama about an Orthodox couple, Naftali (Yoav Rotman) and Feigi (Mili Eshet), desperate to have a child. They live with his mother, a matchmaker (Ilanit Ben-Yaakov), and his father, a Torah scribe (Nevo Kimchi), both of whom were secular before becoming Orthodox. When Naftali goes on a pilgrimage to Uman for Rosh Hashanah to pray for fertility, his father invites over a mysterious man who has nowhere to spend the holiday. Rabbi Eliyahu (Gil Frank) claims to be able to heal by blowing the shofar; he offers to do so for Feigi, but their encounter turns terribly wrong, leading every member of the family to reconsider their faith and their personal responsibilities.

Eshet (Take the “A” Train, Beyond the Mountains and Hills) is haunting as Feigi, her eyes filled with yearning for what she imagined her life would be like. Based on actual events, the film focuses on the unjust treatment of women in Orthodox society, their rights determined by men, including local tribunals made up of supposedly wise scholars following religious doctrine, who decide what women should and should not do and whether they should remain married or get divorced. It’s a harrowing tale anchored by a powerful lead performance. The film will be available virtually January 23-28.