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

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH FILM FESTIVAL: A QUIET INQUISITION

Dr. Carla Cerratao fights for women’s reproductive rights in Nicaragua in powerful documentary A QUIET INQUISITION

A QUIET INQUISITION (Alessandra Zeka & Holen Sabrina Kahn, 2014)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Friday, June 20, 7:00
Festival runs through June 22 at the IFC Center and the Film Society of Lincoln Center
212-924-7771
www.quietinquisition.com
www.ff.hrw.org

Alessandra Zeka and Holen Sabrina Kahn delve into the very real and personal impact of Nicaragua’s total ban on abortion as seen through the eyes of a doctor forced to comply with the law in the eye-opening documentary A Quiet Inquisition. In Hospital Aleman Nicaraguense, Dr. Carla Cerrato must regularly deal with patients, many of whom are teenagers, whose pregnancies could severely harm or even kill them. But since 2006, when former president Daniel Ortega of the Sandinista National Liberation Front ran for reelection in Nicaragua, all kinds of abortions are illegal, including cases involving rape, incest, and the health of the mother and fetus. The film shows Dr. Cerrato counseling pregnant girls, attempting to come up with options that can save their lives through what are known as therapeutic abortions, but she is often thwarted by her colleagues. They refuse to carry out her orders even when the live birth of the baby is considered impossible and the death of the mother a certainty, fearing their own prosecution and imprisonment. “We are at a crossroads because of a law that impedes us from inducing a pregnancy or making a determination that can prevent further complications in the mother,” says Dr. Zamora, another OBGYN at the public hospital. He later adds, “I have fear too. My wife is pregnant. If any of these complications happen to her, as a doctor my hands would be tied. But as a person I would decide to act on it differently.” While Dr. Cerrato applauds the Sandinista revolution for helping her and other women become doctors in the first place, she now blames President Ortega and the FSLN for making deals with the Catholic Church, trading votes for the rights of women to control their own bodies. As the title of the film implies, Dr. Cerrato, a calm, good-natured woman with a realistic perspective on the situation, is fighting back in a quiet way; anything louder is liable to place her career in jeopardy.

Brave women share their harrowing stories in Human Rights Watch Film Festival world premiere

In fact, she’s probably taking a huge chance by appearing in the documentary at all. Presented with Cinema Tropical, A Quiet Inquisition is having its world premiere in the “Women’s Rights and Children’s Rights” section of the 2014 Human Rights Watch Film Festival, screening June 20 at 7:00 at the IFC Center and followed by a panel discussion with director, producer, and cinematographer Zeka, director, producer, and editor Kahn, and Dr. Cerrato. The twenty-second HRWFF runs through June 22 at Lincoln Center, the IFC Center, and the Times Center and comprises twenty-two films that explore such other themes as “LGBT Rights,” “Human Rights Defenders, Icons, and Villains,” “Armed Conflict and the Arab Spring,” and “Migrants’ Rights” through such works as Richie Mehta’s Siddarth, blair dorosh-walther’s Out in the Night, Edet Belzberg’s Watchers of the Sky, and Zeina Daccache’s Scheherazade’s Diary.

KINO! FESTIVAL OF GERMAN FILMS: FINSTERWORLD

Foot fetishist Claude Petersdorf (Michael Maertens) sets things in motion in FINSTERWORLD

Foot fetishist Claude Petersdorf (Michael Maertens) sets some very strange things in motion in FINSTERWORLD

FINSTERWORLD (Frauke Finsterwald, 2013)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St.
Monday, June 16, 9:30, and Tuesday, June 17, 4:00 & 9:30
Festival continues through June 19
212-255-2243
www.kinofestivalnyc.com
www.finsterworld.de

Journalist and documentarian Frauke Finsterwalder’s twisted and dark feature-length fiction debut, Finsterworld, paints a rather unflattering portrait of a modern-day Germany still haunted by World War II. Written by Finsterwalder (Die große Pyramide, Weil der Mensch ein Mensch ist) and her author husband, Christian Kracht, the black comedy follows a dozen interrelated characters, each with his or her own personal hang-ups and fetishes, as they go through one very wild and crazy day. Claude Petersdorf (Michael Maertens) is a pedicurist who has an unnatural desire for the feet of Frau Sandberg (Margit Carstensen), a wheelchair-bound resident of an old age home. Her son, Georg Sandberg (Bernhard Schütz), and his wife, Inga (Corinna Harfouch), are a wealthy, self-obsessed couple who are embarrassed to be Germans. Their son, Maximilian (Jakub Gierszał), is a spoiled brat who, with his best friend, Jonas (Max Pellny), bullies quirky-nerdy fellow students Natalie (Carla Juri) and Dominik (Leonard Scheicher) during a class trip to a concentration camp led by teacher Lehrer Nickel (Christoph Bach), who thinks the kids can actually learn something from the sins of the past. Tom (Ronald Zehrfeld) is a cop who likes to put on a different kind of uniform at times — he’s a closet Furry. Tom’s girlfriend, Franziska Feldenhoven (Sandra Hüller), is a frustrated documentary filmmaker stuck with a boring subject. And Einsiedler (Johannes Krisch) is a hermit who captures and cares for a forest raven. Various odd actions intersect, bringing the diverse cast of characters together in strange, ultimately dangerous ways as they all keep picking at their scabs, both physical and psychological.

Natalie (Carla Juri) makes an inopportune deal with Maximilian (Jakub Gierszał) in Frauke Finsterwalder’s insightful dark comedy

Finsterwalder bookends Finsterworld with Cat Stevens’s “The Wind,” in which the folkie who changed his name to Yusuf Islam sings, “I swam upon the devil’s lake / But never never never never / I’ll never make the same mistake / No, never never never,” but in Finsterwalder’s bleak yet complex vision of contemporary Germany, every generation is doomed to repeat those mistakes, in one way or another. The award-winning film will be making its East Coast premiere June 16-17 at the Quad as part of the Kino! Festival of German Films, with Finsterwalder on hand to talk about the wonderfully paced, beautifully photographed work. In addition, she and Kracht will be at NYU’s Deutches Haus on June 17 at 6:30 for the discussion “Finsterworld: From Script to Screen,” moderated by teacher and journal editor Eric Jarosinski (free with advance RSVP). Kino! continues through June 19 with such other films as Sabine Lidl’s Nan Goldin — I Remember Your Face, Noël Dernesch and Moritz Springer’s Journey to Jah, Denis Dercourt’s A Pact, and Maximilian Erlenwein’s Stereo.

PUBLIC FORUM: SHAKESPEARE IN AMERICA

James Earl Jones, who played the title role in the 1964 Shakespeare in the Park production of OTHELLO, will be back at the Delacorte as special evening honoring the Bard’s influence on America

FREE PUBLIC FORUM
Delacorte Theatre
Monday, June 30, free, 8:00
Tickets available June 30 at 12 noon at the Delacorte and online lottery
www.publictheater.org

The latest free public forum hosted by the Public Theater takes a look at the lasting and still-evolving impact of the works of William Shakespeare on American culture. The special evening is inspired by the new book Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now (Library of America, April 2014, $29.95), in which President Bill Clinton writes in the foreword, “Shakespeare only had a fleeting acquaintance with America, judging from his work, which brushed up against the New World on only a couple of occasions. . . . Nevertheless, our engagement with him as been long and sustained: generation after generation of Americans has fallen under his spell.” Taking place Monday, June 30, at the Delacorte, where Shakespeare in the Park is currently presenting a rousing version of Much Ado About Nothing, the forum will include James Earl Jones reading a scene from Othello, fifty years after he starred in a production at the Delacorte; Alec Baldwin reading from Macbeth and other works; Kelli O’Hara and Renée Elise Goldsberry singing a number from Shakespeare in the Park’s Twelfth Night; Steven Pasquale handling the male part of the “Tonight” duet from West Side Story; along with presentations from Elizabeth Alexander, Billy Collins, Brian Dennehy, Colin Donnell, Michael Friedman, André Holland, Harold Holzer, Stephen Merritt, Bryce Pinkham, Caesar Samoyoa, Vijay Seshadri, Sarah Amengual, Colman Domingo, Cynthia Nixon, Annie-B Parson, and Michael Stuhlbarg. “In a nation wrestling with great issues,” Shakespeare in America editor and Public Theater Shakespeare scholar in residence James Shapiro writes in the book’s introduction, “Shakespeare’s works allowed Americans to express views that may otherwise have been hard to articulate – or admit to.”

NORTHSIDE 2014: FILM

Brooklyn-based writer-director Onur Tukel’s SUMMER OF BLOOD is part of 2014 Northside film festival

NORTHSIDE FESTIVAL
Multiple locations in Brooklyn
June 12-19, $13
www.northsidefestival.com

With the music section of the Northside Festival concluding on Sunday, the cinema portion is set to take over, running June 16-19 and featuring old and new films with introductions and Q&As. Below are daily highlights.

Monday, June 16
Queer/Art/Film: Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson, 1994) and Dyketactics (Barbara Hammer, 1974), introduced by Adam Baran and followed by a Q&A with event curator JD Samson, Nitehawk Cinema, $13, 9:45

Tuesday, June 17
BAMcinemaFest: If You Take This (Craig Butta, 2014), followed by a Q&A with Craig Butta, Nitehawk Cinema, $13, 7:30

Wednesday, June 18
Factory 25: Summer of Blood (Onur Tukel, 2014), followed by a Q&A with Onur Tukel, Nitehawk Cinema, $13, 7:15

Thursday, June 19
Reverse Shot and Janus Films: Daisies (Vera Chytilová, 1966), Nitehawk Cinema, $13, 9:30

KINO! FESTIVAL OF GERMAN FILMS: NAN GOLDIN — I REMEMBER YOUR FACE

Nan Goldin gets personal in Sabine Lidl’s intimate documentary

NAN GOLDIN — I REMEMBER YOUR FACE (Sabine Lidl, 2013)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St.
June 13-19, 1:00 & 6:30
212-255-2243
www.kinofestivalnyc.com
www.nangoldinirememberyourface.wordpress.com

Thankfully, Sabine Lidl’s Nan Goldin — I Remember Your Face, which kicks off the Kino! Festival of German Films on June 13, is only an hour long. As it turns out, there’s only so much one can take of the justly celebrated photographer in one sitting; she can be a bit abrasive, self-obsessed, and controlling. “Take that f*cking thing away,” Goldin tells Lidl at the start of the film, referring to the camera Lidl brings in to shoot her in a Paris bedroom. Later, when visiting former model Clemens Schick, Goldin rearranges a photo display of her work on his wall while also sharing details of their lovemaking years before. And the now sixty-year-old artist even gets credit as cowriter of the film (along with producer Irene Höfer). In I Remember Your Face, Lidl (Henry Hübchen — My Life / Ma vie) follows Goldin as she visits with old friends, colleagues, and models in Paris and Berlin, intimately discussing various aspects of her life and career. “I’m not modest about it,” she says. “I think in the eighties I created a sea change in photography, that I gave people permission to show their own lives as valuable and as valid as all the other documentary of people they didn’t know, and I think I opened a door.” In the film, she opens a door to her past, talking about her Harvard-educated father, her sister’s suicide, and her own addictions. Along the way, Lidl includes stunning photographs from such Goldin exhibitions as “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” “Poste Restante,” “Fire Leap,” and “Scopophilia” that confirm Goldin’s standing as one of the most important and influential photographers of the last forty years. “She takes the face of a person and photographs it, but what she captures in that face is her own psychological state,” artist and former Goldin model Piotr Nathan explains. “This way it becomes a mirror image of herself.”

Seminal photographer Nan Goldin talks about life, love, and art, with ever-present cigarette

Goldin, who is nearly always smoking throughout the film, also reveals a childlike curiosity of the world as well as a need to be loved as she visits with such people from her past as Joachim Sartorius (“Sartortius the Glorious”), Käthe Kruse, and Christine Fenzl, who all talk about their strong, lasting bonds with Goldin, who even made an extreme impact on Lidl herself. “As soon as I met Nan, I felt such a deep connection,” Lidl says in her director’s statement. “It was almost like falling in love with her.” It can all get rather intense and cliquish, so sixty minutes is just the right amount of time to spend hanging out with Goldin and her inner circle. Nan Goldin — I Remember Your Face is playing at the Quad June 13-19 as part of the Kino! Festival, with Lidl on hand to talk about the film after the screenings. Among the other films being shown are Frauke Finsterwalder’s Finsterworld, about Furries (Google it when no one else is around) and other fetishes; Christian Alvart’s Banklady, set in 1966 Hamburg; Julia von Heinz’s Hanna’s Journey, about a woman who goes to Israel to continue her career helping disabled people; and Grzegorz Muskala’s Whispers Behind the Wall, in which a law student moves to Berlin looking to better his life.

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH FILM FESTIVAL: PRIVATE VIOLENCE

Deanna Walters shares her harrowing story in Cynthia Hill’s gripping PRIVATE VIOLENCE

PRIVATE VIOLENCE (Cynthia Hill, 2014)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Friday, June 13, 7:00
Festival runs June 12-22
212-875-5601
www.privateviolence.com
www.ff.hrw.org

More than thirty years after Faith McNulty’s book The Burning Bed, which was adapted into a powerful and influential 1984 film starring Farrah Fawcett, Private Violence shows that there is still a long way to go in dealing with the very real issue of battered women. In the moving, emotional documentary, director-producer Cynthia Hill tells the story of Deanna Walters, an abused North Carolina housewife working with advocates Kit Gruelle and Stacy Cox to try to put Deanna’s dangerous and abusive husband behind bars so she can have a life with her young daughter. It’s horrifying to see photos of Deanna’s severely beaten face and body, then hear that law enforcement agencies and the legal system still often regard such cases as minor domestic disputes that do not require arrests and imprisonment. At the center of the controversy is the prevailing attitude that it is somehow the woman’s fault for not simply leaving her abusive partner, instead returning again and again for more physical and psychological torture, a premise that is proved wrong in many ways. Hill (The Guest Worker, Tobacco Money Feeds My Family) concentrates on the main narrative, not talking heads and statistics, following the developments procedurally, while more is revealed about Kit as well, who suffered her own torment at the hands of an abusive husband.

Victim advocate Kit Gruelle fights the system to help battered women gain justice in North Carolina

Sharply shot by photojournalist and cinematographer Rex Miller (Behind These Walls, Hill’s PBS food series A Chef’s Life), the award-winning film opens with a gripping six-minute scene that brings viewers right into the middle of a harrowing situation. “I sometimes refer to restraining orders as a last will and testament because battered women are the experts in what’s happening in their relationship, and we need — society — we need to treat them like the experts that they are,” Kit says shortly thereafter in a radio interview. “When she says, ‘He is going to kill me,’ or ‘He’s going to kill my family,’ or ‘He’s going to kill my cousin if he can’t get to me,’ we have got to step on the brakes and slow down and take that whole thing seriously.” A presentation of HBO Documentary Films, Private Violence is having its New York premiere June 13 at the Walter Reade Theater in the “Women’s Rights and Children’s Rights” section of the 2014 Human Rights Watch Film Festival and will be followed by a panel discussion with Hill, Gruelle, Walters, and executive producer Gloria Steinem, moderated by Liesl Gerntholtz. The twenty-second HRWFF runs June 12-22 at Lincoln Center, the IFC Center, and the Times Center and comprises twenty-two films that explore such other themes as “LGBT Rights,” “Human Rights Defenders, Icons, and Villains,” “Armed Conflict and the Arab Spring,” and “Migrants’ Rights” through such works as Khalo Matabane’s Nelson Mandela: The Myth and Me, Jennifer Kroot’s To Be Takei, Sara Ishaq’s The Mulberry House, and Mano Khalil’s The Beekeeper.

AILEY AT LINCOLN CENTER 2014

New production of Hans van Manen’s POLISH PIECES (seen here performed by Antonio Douthit-Boyd and Akua Noni Parker) is part of Ailey’s second consecutive Lincoln Center season (photo by Andrew Eccles)

David H. Koch Theater
20 Lincoln Center Plaza
June 12-16, $25 – $135
212-496-0600
www.alvinailey.org
www.davidhkochtheater.com

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is already an end-of-year tradition, moving into City Center every December. The celebrated company is now reinvigorating the start of summer with its second consecutive June season at Lincoln Center, this time paying tribute to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of the company founder and namesake at the age of fifty-eight. From June 11 to 22, AAADT will present thirteen works in four different programs at the David H. Koch Theater, with a special free bonus on opening night, when former company members Nasha Thomas-Schmitt and Renee Robinson teach how to dance the “I’ve Been ’Buked,” “Wade in the Water,” and “Rocka My Soul” sections of Revelations at 5:30 on Josie Robertson Plaza. Program A (June 12, 14, 18, 22) features Wayne McGregor’s Chroma, the world premiere of Robert Moses’s The Pleasure of the Lesson, the San Francisco-based choreographer and composer’s first piece for Ailey, and Revelations. Program B (June 13, 15, 21) consists of Ronald K. Brown’s gorgeous Grace, the company premiere of Asadata Dafora’s 1932 Awassa Astrige/Ostrich, a solo piece set to African music by Carl Riley, Bill T. Jones’s D-Man in the Waters (Part 1), and Ohad Naharin’s glorious Minus 16. Program C (June 14, 15, 20) honors the collaboration between Ailey and Duke Ellington with the classic Night Creature and Pas de Duke, associate artistic director Masazumi Chaya’s 2013 restaging of The River, and Revelations. Program D (June 17, 21, 22) comprises Canadian choreographer Aszure Barton’s contagious and energetic Lift, new productions of David Parsons’s signature strobe-heavy solo Caught, set to music by Robert Fripp, and Hans van Manen’s Polish Pieces, with music by Henryk Mikolaj Górecki, and Revelations. The family matinees on June 14 and 21 will be followed by a Q&A with members of the company.