The African Burial Ground is one of fifteen downtown institutions offering free programs during Night at the Museums, part of the River to River Festival (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
NIGHT AT THE MUSEUMS
Multiple downtown locations
Tuesday, June 21, free, 4:00 – 8:00
lmcc.net
Last Tuesday, the Museum Mile Festival offered free admission to seven institutions along Fifth Ave. between 82nd and 105th Sts. On the following Tuesday, June 18, fifteen downtown organizations will open their doors for free. As part of the River to River Festival, which includes experimental dance, theater, music, and more through June 26, people are invited inside to see exhibitions and special programs as well as join walking tours. In addition, there will be live music along the way in conjunction with the tenth annual Make Music New York. The participating organizations (with current exhibitions) are the African Burial Ground, the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, Federal Hall, Fraunces Tavern Museum (“Dunsmore: Illustrating the American Revolutionary War”), the Museum of American Finance (“Worth Its Weight: Gold from the Ground Up”), the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust (“Stitching History from the Holocaust,” “Seeking Justice: The Leo Frank Case Revisited”), the National Archives at New York City, the National Museum of the American Indian (“Unbound: Narrative Art of the Plains,” “Circle of Dance”), the National September 11 Memorial Museum, the NYC Municipal Archives, the 9/11 Tribute Center, Poets House (“The Poets’ Rebellion: Poetry, Memory, and the Easter Rising,” “Metamorphosis: The Collaboration of Poet Barbara Guest & Artist Fay Lansner”), the Skyscraper Museum (“Garden City | Mega City”), the South Street Seaport Museum, and Wall Street Walks.
First it took a long time for French-Vietnamese writer-director Tran Anh Hung (The Scent of Green Papaya) to convince Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami to let him adapt his 1987 novel, Norwegian Wood — Tran had been interested in turning the book into a movie ever since he first read it in 1994, but Murakami notoriously does not allow his novels to become films — and then, once the film was made and played at prestigious festivals in Venice, Toronto, and Dubai, still took more than a year to find a U.S. distributor. Norwegian Wood is a moving, faithful adaptation of Murakami’s elegiac novel about unrequited love, romantic communication, and death. After his best friend, Kizuki (Kengo Kora), commits suicide, Watanabe (Death Note’s Ken’ichi Matsuyama) and Kizuki’s girlfriend, Naoko (Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi), who previously were part of an inseparable trio with Kizuki, go their separate ways. After a short time, they meet up accidentally in Tokyo, where Watanabe is attending university and Naoko is trying to get over her loss. But an event on her twentieth birthday causes Naoko to take off again, this time seeking professional help at a sanitarium. Watanabe can’t stop thinking about Naoko, jeopardizing a possible relationship with the aggressive, sexually open Midori (Kiko Mizuhara), who already has a boyfriend but is extremely interested in Watanabe. Meanwhile, Watanabe disapproves of how his friend Nagasawa (Tetsuji Tamayama) continually cheats on his girlfriend, Hatsumi (Eriko Hatsune), who is devoted to him. With the student riots of the late 1960s swirling around them, Watanabe, Naoko, Midori, Nagasawa, Hatsumi, and Naoko’s roommate, Reiko (Reika Kirishima), take long, hard looks at what they want out of life and love, and they don’t always like what they find. Beautifully shot by Mark Lee Ping-Bing and featuring a subtle score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood (There Will Be Blood), Norwegian Wood is a slow-paced, psychologically intense drama. Watanabe and Naoko are often shown walking amid vast natural landscapes of green forests and snow-covered mountains, but they are tied up tight within themselves, trapped in their own memories. The carefully composed sex scenes give depth and intelligence to the main characters without overplaying their emotions. The story itself might be relatively slight — it lacks the range of Murakami’s later books — but Tran has done a fine job bringing it to the screen. Norwegian Wood is screening at MoMA on June 17 and 29 at 7:30 in the series “Luminosity: The Art of Cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-Bing,” which runs June 16-30 and includes such other Lee-lensed treasures as Yang Chao’s Crosscurrent, Wang Tung’s Strawman, Tran’s The Vertical Ray of the Sun, and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai, Dust in the Wind, The Assassin, and The Puppetmaster. In addition, Lee will sit down with Department of Film associate curator La Frances Hui for 
“To me, this is a story about two parents who love their children, who love this particular child who is transgender, and who want the very best things in the world for her,” Michael Silverman of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund says at the beginning of Growing Up Coy, a poignant and timely documentary about one family’s public fight to allow one of their children to legally establish her gender identity. When she was eighteen months old, Coy Mathis, who was born male but was unhappy that way, began displaying distinct female tendencies, exhibiting extreme displeasure when treated as a boy. She began kindergarten in the conservative town of Fountain, Colorado, as male but soon chose to transition, identifying as female. “She started asking us, when are we going to take her to the doctor so that she can be a girl, and when are we going to get the doctors to cut her penis off,” her mother, Kathryn Mathis, says in the film. “That was when it became a problem, and we reassured her that we would do everything we could so that she would be happiest as an adult.” Coy was initially given permission to use the girls bathroom, but in first grade, in late 2012, the school changed its policy and she was denied access. Kathryn, a photographer, and her husband, former Marine and full-time student Jeremy, decided to fight back, engaging in a legal battle that they eventually brought to the press when the school administration refused to acknowledge Coy’s gender choice. Soon the Mathises, who have five children under the age of eight — Dakota, who is is autistic, Auri, and triplets Coy, Max, and Lily, who has cerebral palsy and quadriplegia — are being both celebrated and excoriated on social media, in newspaper columns, and by talking heads on television, but they are determined to do whatever it takes, even if it includes making Coy the poster child in a heated debate over a controversial issue that most people don’t fully understand. “She doesn’t want to have to explain who she is and talk about how she’s different,” Kathryn says. “She just wants to be.”
Taiwanese New Wave master Hou Hisao-hsien might be the best filmmaker whose work you’ve never seen. For more than thirty years, he has been telling intimate, meditative stories about life, family, and relationships with a gentle, deeply intuitive style, infused with gorgeous visuals and subtly beautiful soundtracks. One of his most elegant works, Flowers of Shanghai, is set in brothels, known as flower houses, in 1884 in the British Concession, where men and women congregate for social interaction and develop long-term bonds and responsibilities to one another based on much more than just sex. The men play drinking games, smoke opium, and buy the women gifts. The story, told in a series of vignettes as Mark Lee Ping-Bing’s camera slowly moves through dark, lush, reddish gas-lit interiors, focuses on Master Wang (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), who has promised to be the sole patron of Crimson (Michiko Hada) but who has also been secretly seeing the younger Jasmin (Vicky Wei) and lavishing her with presents. The elder Master Hong (Luo Tsai-erh) and Auntie Huang (Rebecca Pan), the madam, discuss the situation, bringing up issues of responsibility and honesty, attempting to come to some kind of understanding in an exchange that shows respect for both the men and women who are a far cry from the Western conception of johns and prostitutes.
