this week in lectures, signings, panel discussions, workshops, and Q&As

ZERO HOUR: TOKYO ROSE’S LAST TAPE

Miwa Yanagi’s ZERO HOUR: TOKYO ROSE’S LAST TAPE will have its North American premiere at Japan Society this week (photo by Ayumi Sakamoto)

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
January 29-31, $35, 7:30
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org
www.yanagimiwa.net

We’ve been fans of Japanese multidisciplinary artist Miwa Yanagi since her summer 2007 exhibit at the Chelsea Art Museum, consisting of three photographic series that featured highly cinematic compositions and videos. So it comes as no surprise that the Kobe-born Yanagi is also now creating theatrical works and performance art projects. The North American premiere of Yanagi’s latest piece, Zero Hour: Tokyo Rose’s Last Tape, will take place January 29-31 at Japan Society as part of the institution’s “Stories from the War” series, being held in recognition of the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II. Conceived, written, and directed by Yanagi, who also designed the sets and costumes, Zero Hour follows one of the many women known as Tokyo Rose, who broadcast propaganda for the Japanese Imperial Army. The production, which will be performed in English and Japanese (with English subtitles) by Yohei Matsukado, Hinako Arao, Megumi Matsumoto, Ami Kobayashi, Sogo Nishimura, Aki, and Sachi Masuda, with video projection by Tadashi Mitani, lighting design by Akane Ikebe, sound design by Yasutaka Kobayakawa, and choreography by Megumi Matsumoto. The January 29 show will be followed by a meet-the-artists reception. “Stories from the War” continues through August with Michiko Godai in Yokohama Rosa April 25-26, New and Traditional Noh: Holy Mother in Nagasaki and Kiyotsune May 14-16, Meet the Author lectures by Julie Otsuka and Hayden Herrera, and the Globus Film Series “The Most Beautiful: The War Films of Shirley Yamaguchi & Setsuko Hara.”

NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL CLOSING NIGHT: FELIX AND MEIRA

Meira (Hadas Yaron) takes a long, hard look at her life in Maxime Giroux’s FELIX AND MEIRA

FELIX AND MEIRA (FÉLIX ET MEIRA) (Maxime Giroux, 2014)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Thursday, January 29, 3:30 & 9:00
Festival runs through January 29
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com

The 2015 New York Jewish Film Festival comes to a close on January 29 with Maxime Giroux’s somber, reflective Félix and Meira. Named Best Canadian Feature at the Toronto International Film Festival, the film stars Israeli actress Hadas Yaron as Meira, a young married woman who is feeling trapped by the constraints of the Hasidic world in which she lives in Montreal’s Mile End district. Her husband, Shulem (Luzer Twersky), is a devout man who follows the tenets of his religion; he and Meira sleep in separate beds, and he seems more intent on ritualistically washing his hands in the bedroom than touching his wife. One morning, while pushing her daughter in a stroller, she is approached by Félix (Martin Dubreuil), a conflicted man whose father just died so he is seeking advice about God and death. Meira tells him to leave them alone, but soon Félix and Meira are meeting in secret, and when Shulem finds out about it, he ships Meira off to Brooklyn. Félix goes after her, wanting to take their relationship to the next level as Meira considers her responsibilities to her husband, her daughter, and herself.

Félix (Martin Dubreuil) and Meira (Hadas Yaron) are both looking for something more in Canadian drama set in Hasidic world

Félix and Meira is a subtle, slow-moving tale that avoids genre clichés, keeping the details tantalizingly vague and mysterious. There’s not a lot of humor in the film; instead, there’s an ominous, moody cloud hanging over everything, the story bordering just on the edge of passion without ever exploding. Yaron (Fill the Void) plays Meira with a dark foreboding, while Dubreuil (Bunker, Ressac) and Twersky (Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish, Where Is Joel Baum?) work well as adversaries who want Meira in their life, albeit for different reasons. Cowriter and director Giroux (Demain, Jo pour Jonathan) doesn’t force any issues, maintaining a low-key approach that is intensified by an overall palette of blacks, whites, and grays. Félix and Meira is the closing-night selection of the New York Jewish Film Festival, screening on January 29 at 3:30 and 9:00 at the Walter Reade Theater, with each show followed by a Q&A with Giroux and members of the cast.

TICKET GIVEAWAY: DAVID GARRETT AND THE DEVIL’S VIOLINIST

Who: David Garrett, world’s fastest violinist
What: Celebration of the U.S. theatrical release of The Devil’s Violinist (Bernard Rose, 2013) and the accompanying soundtrack album, Garrett vs. Paganini (Decca/Universal), matinee screening followed by a Q&A and live performance by David Garrett
Where: Quad Cinema, 34 West 13th St., 212-255-2243
When: Sunday, February 1, free ticket giveaway below, 3:25
Why: German-born crossover musician David Garrett has been playing violin since the age of four; he makes his film debut in The Devil’s Violinist, starring as nineteenth-century Italian violin virtuoso, composer, and womanizer Niccolò Paganini, with Jared Harris as Urbani, Joely Richardson as Ethel Langham, and Christian McKay as John Watson, written and directed by Bernard Rose (Candyman, Immortal Beloved, The Kreutzer Sonata), opening at the Quad and on VOD January 30; the album, which also features Andrea Bocelli and Nicole Scherzinger, releases January 27.

TICKET GIVEAWAY: International superstar David Garrett will be at the Quad on Sunday, February 1, for a special Q&A and live performance following the 3:25 screening of The Devil’s Violinist, and twi-ny has three pairs of tickets to give away for free, along with CDs of the Garrett vs. Paganini album. Just send your name, daytime phone number, and the name of your favorite classical composer to contest@twi-ny.com by Thursday, January 29, at 3:00 to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; three winners will be selected at random.

SUNDAYS ON BROADWAY

Yvonne Rainer’s CARRIAGE DISCRETENESS kicks off marathon opening of Sundays on Broadway winter season

Who: Cathy Weis Projects
What: Rare screening of 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, documenting collaboration between experimental artists and Bell Labs in 1966 at the 69th Regiment Armory
Where: WeisAcres, 537 Broadway between Prince & Spring Sts., buzzer #3
When: Sunday, January 25, free, 2:00 (all future events at 8:00)
Why: The 2014 winter season of Sundays on Broadway begins on January 25 with a ten-hour marathon of 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, consisting of films by David Tudor, John Cage, Deborah Hay, Övynid Fahlström, Robert Rauschenberg, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Robert Whitman, Alex Hay, and Lucinda Childs; the salon-style series continues Sunday nights at 8:00 through March 29 with live performances, readings, film screenings, discussions, and more, including a selection of Trisha Brown’s early works on February 1 with Wendy Perron, a screening of Léonide Massine’s Choreartium on February 8 with Tatiana Massine Weinbaum, and a reading of Fortunato Depero’s unpublished Dramma plastico futurista by puppeteer Dan Hurlin on February 15 (advance reservations are required for the immersive installations taking place the last four Sundays in March with Jon Kinzel, Jennifer Miller, Vicky Shick, and others)

MISS HILL: MAKING DANCE MATTER

Engaging documentary pays tribute to the life and legacy of Martha Hill, seen here dancing at Bennington in 1938 (photo by Thomas Bouchard)

MISS HILL: MAKING DANCE MATTER (Greg Vander Veer, 2014)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St.
Opens Friday, January 23
212-255-2243
www.quadcinema.com
www.misshillfilm.com

Greg Vander Veer’s Miss Hill: Making Dance Matter is a charming celebration of a woman who had a tremendous impact on the development of modern dance but is still little known outside her tight-knit circle. Born in 1900 in a small town in Bible Belt Ohio, Martha Hill danced with Martha Graham before concentrating on teaching the art form, which as a child she was told was sinful, at Bennington and NYU. But she created her legacy as the first director of dance at Juilliard, where she taught from 1951 to 1985, balancing instruction in both modern dance and classical ballet. Vander Veer (Keep Dancing) and coordinating producer Vernon Scott, who graduated from Juilliard in 1985 and is currently president of the board of directors of the Martha Hill Dance Fund, combine wonderful archival footage of Hill as both a dancer and a teacher, along with old clips of many of her students, including Pina Bausch, Lar Lubovitch, Bessie Schönberg, Hanya Holm, José Limón, and Doris Humphrey, as well as fellow teacher Antony Tudor; there are also new interviews with Paul Taylor, Martha Clarke, Francis Patrelle, Robert Battle, Ohad Naharin, Dennis Nahat, H. T. Chen, and others. “She’s created the dancers of the twenty-first century,” says former Boston Ballet artistic director Bruce Marks. One of the most fascinating parts of the eighty-minute documentary is Hill’s fight to preserve Juilliard’s dance program during the building of Lincoln Center, which pitted her against George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, the New York City Ballet, and Lincoln Kirstein. Miss Hill displays its subject with clarity, smartly exploring her understanding that dance is more than just language and movement. “Modern dance is not a system, it is a point of view,” Hill explains. Meanwhile, Patrelle gets right to the heart of the matter: “She was dance. She defined it.” A lovely treat for dance fans, Miss Hill opens January 23, at the Quad, with Vander Veer and Scott participating in Q&As following the 7:00 shows Friday and Saturday and the 4:30 shows Saturday and Sunday.

MIRANDA JULY IN CONVERSATION WITH HOST LENA DUNHAM

Miranda July will discuss her latest book, THE FIRST BAD MAN, with Lena Dunham at BAM on January 28

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Peter Jay Sharp Building
230 Lafayette Ave.
Wednesday, January 28, $35-$50
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

“Miranda July’s ability to pervert norms while embracing what makes us normal is astounding,” Girls creator Lena Dunham says of Miranda July’s debut novel, The First Bad Man (Scribner, January 2015, $25). “Writing in the first person with the frank, odd lilt of an utterly truthful character, she will make you laugh, cringe, and recognize yourself in a woman you never planned to be. By the time July tackles motherhood, the book has become a bible. Never has a novel spoken so deeply to my sexuality, my spirituality, my secret self. I know I am not alone.” On January 28, Dunham, who wrote, directed, and starred in the indie hit Tiny Furniture and whose memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, was released this past September, will host an evening of conversation with July, an influential multimedia artist who writes, directs, and stars in her own films (Me and You and Everyone We Know, The Future), writes short stories (many of her earlier ones have been collected in No One Belongs Here More Than You), has recorded albums (10 Million Hours a Mile, The Binet-Simon Test), developed the personal messaging app “Somebody,” and makes performance pieces and art installations (“Eleven Heavy Things,” “Things We Don’t Understand and Definitely Are Not Going to Talk About”).

Lena Dunham will be at BAM to host a conversation with Miranda July (photo by Autumn de Wilde)

Lena Dunham will host what should be a kooky conversation with Miranda July at BAM (photo by Autumn de Wilde)

In her first book since 2011’s It Chooses You (a companion piece to The Future), July introduces the world to one Cheryl Glickman, a rather persnickety, peculiar, strangely punctilious woman who lives her life and interprets situations a bit oddly. When her carefully laid out existence is suddenly interrupted by the arrival of her bosses’ troubled daughter, Clee, who will be staying with her for an indeterminate amount of time, Cheryl is forced to reevaluate her needs and her “funny way of doing things,” as Clee says. Cheryl suffers from globus hystericus, has a bizarre relationship with her therapist, pines away for an older member of the board of directors where she works, and is constantly in search of Kubelko Bondy, a “baby I think of as mine.” An eccentric both inside and out, Cheryl and her exploits are endlessly charming and plentifully weird as she deals with sexuality, femininity, class, age, and family. And just when you think you might have her figured out, she does yet another thing that surprises, delights, and confounds you. In reviewing No One Belongs Here More Than You, we wrote, “July’s characters live in their own alternate, warped realities, constantly confusing their relationships with friends, family, and even strangers, mistaking nothings for somethings,” a statement that suits The First Bad Man to a tee. The book even has a cool, chic design, courtesy of July’s husband, artist and filmmaker Mike Mills (Thumbsucker, Beginners); the dust jacket and case are all black, the title and author name in plain white sans serif type, but the endpapers are like a groovy psychedelic abstract painting. Seeing July, who was born in Vermont and raised in Berkeley, and Dunham, a New York City native, together at BAM should be endlessly charming and plentifully weird as well, making for one very entertaining evening. We’re hoping for a warped, brilliant view directly into two very particular expressions of contemporary female creative sensibility — and one very kooky discussion.

RAOUL PECK: APRÈS THE EARTHQUAKE

Raoul Peck’s MOLOCH TROPICAL kicks off four-day examination of the state of Haiti five years after the earthquake

MOLOCH TROPICAL (Raoul Peck, 2009)
Maysles Cinema
343 Malcolm X Blvd. between 127th & 128th Sts.
Thursday, January 22, $10, 7:30
“Après the Earthquake” runs January 22-25
212-582-6050
www.maysles.org

On January 12, 2010, a devastating earthquake rocked Haiti, setting in motion a global relief effort. Five years later, there’s still a whole lot more to be done, as well as many questions to be answered. “Après the Earthquake” is a four-day examination of the state of Haiti and the Haitian people in 2015 organized by the Haiti Cultural Exchange and the DDPA (Durban Declaration & Programme of Action) Watch Group, who have teamed up with the Maysles Institute and Port-au-Prince–born filmmaker and activist Raoul Peck. The series begins with Peck’s Moloch Tropical, which was selected as the centerpiece of the 2010 Human Rights Watch Film Festival; the work of fiction follows the sad decline of democratically elected Haitian president Jean de Dieu (Zinedine Soualem) as power corrupts and overwhelms him. A combination of nineteenth-century Haitian leader Henri Christophe, twentieth-century president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, any of several Shakespearean kings, the protagonist of Aleksandr Sokurov’s Nazi drama Molokh, and General Vargas from Woody Allen’s Bananas, de Dieu lives in a mountain fortress where he takes advantage of the female servants, gets all excited when a Hollywood film crew shows up to meet him, and tries to prevent his mother from visiting because he is ashamed of the poverty he came from. In the beginning of the film, he steps on a piece of broken glass, so he limps through the rest of the movie, symbolic of his shaky regime. Although the film does suffer from an overabundance of clichés, it’s still a compelling portrait of the downfall of a powerful man. Moloch Tropical is being shown January 22 at 7:30 at the Maysles Documentary Center (MDC) and will be followed by a Q&A with series curator Michelle Materre and Dowoti Desir of the DDPA.

Documentary reveals that there’s still a whole lot to be done in Haitian recovery effort as organizations fight over details

FATAL ASSISTANCE (ASSISTANCE MORTELLE) (Raoul Peck, 2012)
Friday, January 23, Maysles Cinema, $10, 7:30
Saturday, January 24, Mount Morris Ascension Presbyterian Church, 15 Mount Morris Park West, $10, 4:00
www.maysles.org

Moloch Tropical is followed the next night by Peck’s Fatal Assistance, which starts by posting remarkable numbers onscreen: In the wake of the devastating earthquake that hit his native country on January 12, 2010, there were 230,000 deaths, 300,000 wounded, and 1.5 million people homeless, with some 4,000 NGOs coming to Haiti to make use of a promised $11 billion in relief over a five-year period. But as Peck reveals, there is significant controversy over where the money is and how it’s being spent as the troubled Haitian people are still seeking proper health care and a place to live. “The line between intrusion, support, and aid is very fine,” says Jean-Max Bellerive, the Haitian prime minister at the time of the disaster, explaining that too many of the donors want to cherry-pick how their money is used. Bill Vastine, senior “debris” adviser for the Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti (CIRH), which was co-chaired by Bellerive and President Bill Clinton, responds, “The international community said they were gonna grant so many billions of dollars to Haiti. That didn’t mean we were gonna send so many billions of dollars to a bank account and let the Haitian government do with it as they will.” Somewhere in the middle is CIRH senior housing adviser Priscilla Phelps, who seems to be the only person who recognizes why the relief effort has turned into a disaster all its own; by the end of the film, she is struggling to hold back tears.

There’s a lot of talk but not nearly as much action in Haitian recovery from devastating earthquake

A self-described “political radical,” Peck doesn’t play it neutral in Fatal Assistance, instead adding mournful music by Alexei Aigui, somber English narration by a male voice (Peck narrates the French-language version), and a female voice-over reading melodramatic “Dear friend” letters that poetically trash what is happening in Haiti. “Every few decades, the rich promise everything to the poor,” the male voice-over says. “The dream of eradication of poverty, disease, death remains a perpetual fantasy.” Even though Peck attacks the agendas of the donors and NGOs while pushing an agenda of his own, Fatal Assistance is an important document that shows that just because money pours in to help in a crisis situation doesn’t mean that the things that need to be done are being done properly. The centerpiece selection of the 2013 Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Fatal Assistance will screen at MDC on January 23 at 7:30, followed by a Q&A with Materre and Peck, a two-time Human Rights Watch Lifetime Achievement Award winner, in addition to a reception with food and live music from the Haitian Diaspora. The film is also being shown on January 24 at 4:00 at the Mount Morris Ascension Presbyterian Church as part of the public health forum “Haiti: Five Years Later,” a panel discussion with Peck, Materre, and others, followed by a reception at the nearby MDC. The series continues January 25 at 4:00 at MDC with Peck’s 2001 film, Profit and Nothing But!, followed by a Q&A with Materre and Darrick Hamilton, then concludes with Peck’s most well known work, 1992’s Lumumba: The Death of a Prophet, screening at 6:30, followed by a Q&A with Materre and others.