Jack Ferver and Marc Swanson will present the glittering CHAMBRE as part of FIAF’s annual Crossing the Line festival (photo by Julieta Cervantes)
French Institute Alliance Française and other locations
Florence Gould Hall, 55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
FIAF Gallery, 22 East 60th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
September 10 – October 4, free – $35
212-355-6160
www.fiaf.org
Tickets are now available for FIAF’s ninth annual late summer/early fall multidisciplinary arts festival, and you better act fast if you want to see some of this year’s most intriguing programs. For us, the highlight is Jack Ferver and Marc Swanson’s Chambre, an installation and performance piece at the New Museum inspired by Jean Genet’s The Maids and pop-culture elements, with extravagant costumes by Reid Bartelme and experimental sound and music by twi-ny fave Roarke Menzies. British artist Ant Hampton’s Autoteatro series continues with The Extra People, in which participants will go on an individual adventure through FIAF’s Florence Gould Theater. The U.S. premiere of Brazilian artist Gustavo Ciriaco and Austrian artist Andrea Sonnberger’s Here whilst we walk will take small groups, bound by a giant rubber band, on a silent trip through Red Hook. Elana Langer’s free What I Live By will pop up at three locations, examining brand identification and personal values. Iranian artist Ali Moini searches for freedom in the multimedia dance work Lives at New York Live Arts (NYLA). Miguel Gutierrez will present the New York City premiere of all three parts of his Age & Beauty series, Mid-Career Artist/Suicide Note or &:-/; Asian Beauty @ the Werq Meeting or The Choreographer & Her Muse or &:@&; and Dancer or You can make whatever the fuck you want but you’ll only tour solos or The Powerful People or We are strong/We are powerful/We are beautiful/We are divine or &:’////, at NYLA, featuring such collaborators as Mickey Mahar, Michelle Boulé, Jen Rosenblit, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and Alex Rodabaugh. Italian artist Alessandro Sciarroni asks Folk-s, will you still love me tomorrow? in his unique interpretation of Bavarian folk dance at NYLA. French director Joris Lacoste investigates multiple languages and human spoken expression in Suite n°2 in Florence Gould Hall. Also on the bill are Shezad Dawood’s “It was a time that was a time” exhibition at Pioneer Works, a photography show by Mazaccio & Drowilal in the FIAF Gallery, Olivia Bransbourg’s ICONOfly magazine, and Adrian Heathfield and André Lepecki’s three-day symposium, “Afterlives: The Persistence of Performance,” at FIAF and MoMA.
In such films as Memento, Inception, and Interstellar, British-American writer-director Christopher Nolan has shown a flair for unusual storytelling devices and complex narratives. “I decided to structure my story in such a way as to emphasize the audience’s incomplete understanding of each new scene as it is first presented,” he said about his debut feature, 1998’s Following, and a similar aesthetic can be applied to the works of the Quay Brothers. Pennsylvania-born, England-based twins Stephen and Timothy Quay have been making complex narratives for three dozen years, short films and feature-length tales that push the boundaries of storytelling conventions. In hypnotic films such as In Absentia, The Comb (From the Museums of Sleep), and their universally acclaimed masterpiece, Street of Crocodiles, they use fragile dolls and puppets, psychologically tantalizing Expressionistic imagery, and experimental music to draw viewers into their Gothic, industrial, dreamlike fantasy world. In fall 2009, their mind-blowing sets were on display in the exhibit 
“This climb has seen more attempts and more failures than any route in the Himalaya,” Into Thin Air author Jon Krakauer says near the beginning of Meru, which follows two recent tries to make it to the Shark’s Fin summit atop Mount Meru in India. “It’s the headwaters of the Ganges River, one of the most sacred rivers on earth, the center of the universe. It’s this weird nexus that is the point where heaven and earth and hell all come together.” In 2008, Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin, and Renan Ozturk sought to be the first climbers ever to reach the top of the mountain, which features a 1,500-foot nearly sheer blade of granite at its apex. Scaling Mount Meru is more than just an extreme sport; it’s a passion and an obsession, and a supremely dangerous one at that. The film documents the two climbs as well as an extreme skiing photo shoot, and each time the men set out on a journey, they know that there is a chance that they might not make it back to their loved ones. Ozturk faces even more daunting odds; he attempts a second climb after a serious head injury with aftereffects that could kill him. But the trio is determined to go where no one has gone before, even as the stakes increase and their prospects for success dim considerably. “Meru is not just hard; it’s hard in this really complicated way,” Krakauer adds. “You can’t just be a good ice climber. You can’t just be good at altitude. You can’t just be a good rock climber. . . . It’s defeated so many good climbers and maybe will defeat everybody for all time. That, to a certain kind of mind-set, is an irresistible appeal.” In addition to carrying two hundred pounds of gear on their back, Chin, who is also a professional photographer, and Ozturk have small cameras, deatiling the treacherous trip up the twenty-one-thousand-foot-high mountain. The film is filled with gorgeous shots of the mountain and the surrounding area, but it is a beauty fraught with danger. Codirectors Chin and his wife, E. Chai Vasarhelyi (Youssou N’Dour: I Bring What I Love, Touba), include commentary by the three alpinists, some of their relatives, Krakauer, and big mountain snowboarding legend Jeremy Jones, which emphasizes the tremendous peril involved in the climb. “I often ask myself: Where do you draw the line between following your heart and your responsibility to others?” Chin explains in his director’s statement, and the film does an excellent job of examining that critical point, especially as potential death surrounds them. Winner of the U.S. Documentary Audience Award at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, Meru is a tense, tantalizing look at humanity’s never-ending desire to go beyond all limits to bond with, and conquer, nature and its elements, no matter the risks. Meru opens August 14 at the Angelika, with Chin and Vasarhelyi participating in Q&As following the 5:00 and 7:20 shows on Friday and Chin by himself on August 19 at 7:20.
As Hubert Sauper’s We Come as Friends opens, a naked young African boy is walking down a deserted road, carrying an empty plastic water bottle. He smiles into the camera as he heads toward the blazing hot sun. The scene recalls Jamie Uys’s The Gods Must Be Crazy, a 1980 comedy in which the arrival of an empty Coke bottle, dropped from the sky, has a profound effect on a South African tribe living in solitude in the Kalahari Desert. But We Come as Friends is no fictional farce as a filmmaker, not a Coke bottle, drops from the sky to let Africans reveal how world powers are still employing old methods of colonialism to exploit, and essentially steal, valuable resources from African nations in the twenty-first century. “Did you know that the moon belongs to the white man?” a man asks early on. In the 2014 documentary 
