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

NEW DIRECTORS / NEW FILMS 2014: OF HORSES AND MEN

Human nature is explored through the eyes of horses in wildly entertaining Icelandic tale

OF HORSES AND MEN (HROSS Í OSS) (Benedikt Erlingsson, 2013)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Monday, March 24, 6:30
Series runs through March 30
212-875-5050
www.newdirectors.org

Iceland’s entry for the 2013 Academy Awards, Benedikt Erlingsson’s black comedy, Of Horses and Men, takes an absurdist look at the relationship between humans and horses, incorporating love, sex, pain, responsibility, friendship, religion, and death in darkly comic and heart-rending ways. In a tight-knit community spread across a sweeping rural landscape in Iceland, horses are far more plentiful than people. One morning, Kolbeinn (Ingvar E. Sigurdsson) goes for a ride aboard his gorgeous white mare as men, women, and children come outside to watch him pass by like it’s a parade. But a shocking, unexpected encounter with Solveig’s (Charlotte Bøving) black stallion sets into motion a series of interconnected vignettes, each successive one featuring a minor character from a previous scene. Lust, land disputes, gender distinction, and other agreements and disagreements lead to either tragedy or joy, but, of course, this being Iceland, the former is far more prevalent, especially as more and more Brennivin (Black Death) and other drink is consumed. Writer-director Erlingsson’s debut feature is gorgeously photographed by Bergsteinn Björgúlfsson, whose camera moves lovingly over the green fields and mountainous valleys, treating the horses like Hollywood sirens, zooming in on their eyes to show the reflection of the people who seek to control them, equating the basic animal instincts of both species. The horses in the film are no mere props; Erlingsson, who grew up in a theatrical family and has directed numerous stage productions (in addition to owning a horse, whom he called his “life companion,” for thirty years until recently having to put her down), treats the animals like characters in their own right, revealing their, dare we say, humanity. Produced by Icelandic cinema legend Friðrik Þór Friðriksson (Children of Nature, Mamma Gógó), Of Horses and Men is a dark, wildly entertaining treatise on human nature among a rather quirky and unusual equestrian set. The film is being shown March 24 at 6:30 at the Walter Reade Theater as part of Lincoln Center and MoMA’s annual “New Directors / New Films” series, with Erlingsson on hand to participate in a postscreening Q&A.

CHOICE EATS 2014

THE VILLAGE VOICE CHOICE EATS SEVENTH ANNUAL TASTING EVENT
Basketball City at Pier 36
299 South St. at Montgomery St.
Tuesday, March 25, $60 general admission, 7:00 – 10:00
21 and over only
www.villagevoice.com/choiceeats

The seventh annual Village Voice Choice Eats festival, taking place March 25 at Basketball City on Pier 36, has added yet more restaurants and special activities, bringing the total number of participating eateries to eighty-three. New to the list of restaurants that will offer tastings of signature dishes and other treats are Banana Leaf, Deccan Spice, Distilled, Jacob’s Pickles, La Slowteria, Mai Sushi, and Morgan’s Brooklyn Barbecue. There will also be food demos by Allison Kave, author of First Prize Pies, and Andrew Fernandez of Morgan’s, with more to be announced. Ticket holders can relax in the Stella Artois Beer Garden and the Choice Eats Social Media Lounge and pose for pictures in a photo booth. VIP tickets are sold out, but $60 general admission entrance is still available; in addition, you can pick up a money-saving dual Choice Eats / Choice Streets combination ticket for $89, which also gets you into the third annual food truck celebration, being held May 7 on Pier 86 of the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum. Individual tickets for Choice Streets, which will feature dishes from more than twenty food trucks, go on sale April 2 and are $70 for VIPs, $60 for early entry, and $50 for general admission, so you save a bundle by getting both events at once.

RATED SR SOCIALLY RELEVANT FILM FESTIVAL NEW YORK: THE THROWAWAYS

Ira McKinley fights for justice and peace with a camera in THE THROWAWAYS

THE THROWAWAYS (Bhawin Suchak & Ira McKinley, 2013)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St.
Tuesday, March 18, 3:00
Festival runs March 14-20
212-255-2243
www.distribfilms.com
www.throwawaysmovie.com

Ira McKinley has had plenty of opportunities to give up on life and turn his back on society. His father was shot and killed by the police when Ira was fourteen. He suffered through a crack addiction, has PTSD after serving in the Air Force, spent three years in prison for attempted robbery, and has been homeless and jobless for virtually all of his adult life. But he was determined to not end up just another throwaway, someone with no present and no future. “They look at you like you’re nothing, like you’re, like I said, a throwaway. And they expect you to fail,” McKinley says in the powerful hour-long documentary The Throwaways, which he codirected with Bhawin Suchak. “That’s when I started my activism. I told people, ‘Listen, you’re in here messing with the wrong person.’” McKinley went to Northampton, Massachusetts, where he learned about filmmaking at a public access station. He then went out with his camera, using it as a “tool,” a “weapon,” and an “equalizer” as he talked to people in the abandoned streets of Albany, attended press conferences by Van Jones, mayor Jerry Jennings, and police chief Steven Krokoff, and met with such activists as Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, a book that has had a profound influence on McKinley. He also visits places from his past that are filled with a mix of painful and poignant memories. The documentary was initially supposed to be about social justice in the state capitol, but the focus turned to McKinley when Suchak couldn’t line up enough talking heads — and, perhaps more important, because McKinley, a big bear of a man, proved to be such a fascinating character, one who the camera is naturally drawn to. McKinley has been through it all, so he’s not afraid to get up in people’s faces, which is not always the best way to try to implement change, but he’s determined to show the government and society at large that human beings should not be thrown away like yesterday’s trash and that something can be done about it.

The Throwaways is screening March 18 at 3:00 in the Documentary Competition section of the inaugural Rated SR Socially Relevant Film Festival; it will be preceded by Mariel Waloff and Rachel Waldholz’s A Confused War, a short about combating gun violence, and will be followed by a Q&A. The festival runs March 14-20 at the Quad and includes such other socially relevant films as Alessandra Giordano’s Coney Island: Dreams for Sale, Bared Maronian’s Orphans of the Genocide, Elizabeth McIntyre’s The Lost Children of Berlin, and Richie Sherman and Judy Maltz’s From the Black You Make Color. In addition, SVA will host a special panel discussion on March 17, and Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! will deliver the keynote address on March 18.

EXPOSED

Bambi the Mermaid gets emotional in Beth B’s intimate and revealing documentary

EXPOSED (Beth B, 2013)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Thursday, March 6, 7:45, and Monday, March 10, 12:45
Series runs March 5-13
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.exposedmovie.com

In Exposed, visual artist Beth B, who got her start in the 1970s underground scene in New York City, invites viewers into the inner world of burlesque, going behind the scenes with eight current performers who share intimate details about their lives and their shows. Beth B (Two Small Bodies, An Unlikely Terrorist), who wrote, directed, produced, edited (with Keith Reamer), and photographed (with Dan Karlok) the seventy-six-minute documentary, goes backstage at such New York venues as the Slipper Room, Le Poisson Rouge, the Cutting Room, Dixon Place, P.S. 122, Galapagos Art Space, and Coney Island’s Sideshows by the Seashore as burlesque performers discuss issues of gender, control, freedom, disabilities, power, nudity, femininity, personal and professional identity, and more. “What the world projects as normal, it’s just such an illusion, it’s such a fantasy,” Bunny Love says, “and I love that fantasy.” UK comedian and cabaret performer Mat Fraser, who was born with “flippers” for hands, explains, “If you can make them laugh and make a political point that fuels your outrage, all the better.” And Rose Wood adds, “I’ve tried to present my audience with an indelible picture of the body seen in another way, seen in a way that’s different than they see themselves. They have ideas of what’s normal — what a man does, what a woman does, what a heterosexual does, what a gay person does — and I try to present them with another way of seeing the body.” Among the other performers who share their stories are Tigger!, who uses burlesque as a kind of sexual political theater; Dirty Martini, who pays tribute to such early stars of the wordless art form as Dixie Evans and Vickie Lynn; Bambi the Mermaid, who produces Coney Island’s popular Burlesque at the Beach series; Julie Atlas Muz, who honors Pina Bausch in her performance art; and World Famous *BOB*, who points out, “I never lie to people. People would say, ‘Are you a man or a woman?’ And I would say yes. That quick wit was something that I learned from my drag family, that quick wit, that ability to turn anything that hurts you inside into something that’s funny.”

World Famous *BOB* takes on the Patriot Act and freedom in EXPOSED

But whereas previous documentaries about burlesque, like Leslie Zemeckis’s Behind the Burly Q, examine its history, Exposed delves into the very personal, individual stories that drive these performers’ desire to take the stage and reveal themselves. While some are clearly proud of who they are and what they do, others appear to still be working out deeply felt, raw and painful emotions and memories. The eight subjects hold nothing back in the film as they bare body and soul; many of the performances are extremely graphic, but it is often as freeing to watch the acts onstage as it appears to be for the performers to perform them. Exposed is running March 14-20 nightly at 9:30 at the IFC Center, with a sold-out sneak preview on March 13. Each screening will be accompanied by a live performance by at least one of the cast members, with World Famous *BOB* on March 14, Dirty Martini on March 15 & 17, Bunny Love and Tigger! on March 16, Mat Fraser and Julie Atlas Muz on March 18, and special guests TBA on March 19-20. (In addition, Fraser and Muz are starring in their own unique version of Beauty and the Beast at the Abrons Arts Center through March 30.)

TICKET GIVEAWAY: MY MOTHER HAS 4 NOSES

Jonatha Brooke gets personal in poignant one-woman show, MY MOTHER HAS 4 NOSES

MY MOTHER HAS 4 NOSES
The Duke on 42nd St.
229 West 42nd St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Thursday – Sunday through May 4, $55 – $75
646-223-3010
www.4noses.org
www.dukeon42.org

Three and a half years ago, singer-songwriter Jonatha Brooke put her career on hold as she cared for her mother, a poet and clown who had contracted Alzheimer’s. She has turned that experience into an album and a poignant new one-woman show, My Mother Has 4 Noses, which her failing mother encouraged her to write. “Almost daily she would say, ‘Boolie [my nickname], that’s good!’” Brooke explains on the show’s website. “‘Are you getting this down? We should make a play out of it!!’” Brooke, who has released such records as 10 Cent Wings, Steady Pull, and Careful What You Wish For, adds, “My Mother Has 4 Noses is my story, but it’s everyone’s story.” Among the songs Brooke wrote for the show are “My Misery,” “Superhero,” “Scars,” “Time,” “How Far You’d Go for Love,” and “What Was I Thinking?” all of which you can sample here.

TICKET GIVEAWAY: Directed by Jeremy Cohen, My Mother Has 4 Noses is running at the Duke on 42nd St. through May 4, and twi-ny has four pairs of tickets to give away for free for performances through March 30. (Saturday matinees in March will be followed by a talk back with Brooke and various specialists on dementia and caregiving.) Just send your name, daytime phone number, and all-time-favorite play or movie about a mother and daughter to contest@twi-ny.com by Monday, March 17, at 12 noon to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; four winners will be selected at random.

RICHIE’S ELECTRIC EIGHT — THE BOLD AND THE DARING: SUMMER VACATION 1999

Three boys mourn the loss of a friend in different ways in Shusuke Kaneko’s SUMMER VACATION

GLOBUS FILM SERIES: SUMMER VACATION 1999 (SEN-KYUHYAKU-KYUJU-KYU-NEN NO NATSUYASUMI) (Shusuke Kaneko, 1988)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Thursday, March 13, $12, 7:00
Series runs March 13-29
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

The first part of Japan Society’s tribute to Ohio-born writer, critic, scholar, curator, and filmmaker Donald Richie, who died in February 2013 at the age of eighty-eight, consisted of five classic dramas from Japan’s cinematic elite (Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, Mitsuo Yanagimachi, and Hirokazu Kore-eda). “Richie’s Fantastic Five” is now being followed by “Richie’s Electric Eight: The Bold & the Daring,” comprising eight cutting-edge works by emerging filmmakers. The seventeen-day festival begins March 13 with a rare screening of Shusuke Kaneko’s gender-bending Summer Vacation 1999. Based on Moto Hagio’s shōjo manga The Heart of Thomas, the 1988 film takes place in a boarding school in the near future, as three friends, Kazuhiko (Tomoko Otakara), Naoto (Miyuki Nakano), and Norio (Eri Fukatsu), who are spending the summer alone in their all-boys boarding school, try to recover from the suicide of Yu (Eri Miyajima), who jumped off a cliff after being rejected by Kazuhiko. When a new student, Kaoru (Miyajima), shows up, looking and acting just like Yu, the other boys are forced to face their innermost fears and desires.

Gender identity, homoeroticism, and young love are at the heart of manga-based yaoi film

Beautifully shot in a lush, dreamy 1970s-style palette by Kenji Takama, Summer Vacation 1999 is a prime example of the Japanese yaoi, or boys love, subgenre, focusing on homoeroticism among adolescent boys. Kaneko, who had previously made a pair of Nikkatsu Roman Porno films and would go on to direct monster movies featuring Godzilla, Gamera, and Mothra as well as Death Note and its sequel, explores the students’ growing love and attraction for one another in desexualized yet fetishistic ways, especially in a tender scene in which one boy gives mouth-to-mouth CPR to another, while incorporating elements of the Japanese ghost story as Kaoru continues to evoke Yu. Kaneko also twists the Noh and Kabuki tradition of men performing all the roles, as the four characters are played by females. “One watches these young people, so young that a degree of androgyny is expected, and it is as though one is watching adolescence for the first time,” Richie wrote in his 1988 New Japanese Cinema report for Japan Society. “Given the entire nature of the endeavor, it cannot but help to occasionally teeter on the edge of kitsch (the production looks too French, the music is too Faure, the whole idea also has a flavor of outré) but it never falls in, is never sentimental, and manages to increase its beauty (and our wonder) to the very end.” Plus, the hairstyles are worth the price of admission all by themselves. Summer Vacation will be introduced by MoMA film curator emeritus Laurence Kardish and will be followed by a yaoi party with Ideal Orkestra in which guests are encouraged to dress androgynously. (The Globus Film Series tribute to Richie continues with such other eclectic works as Yoshitaro Nomura’s Chase, Kazuhiro Soda’s Campaign, and Shohei Imamura’s Profound Desire of the Gods.)

MATTHEW PILLSBURY: TALK AND BOOK SIGNING

Matthew Pillsbury, “Sitting on the High Line, Thursday, November 10, 2011,” archival pigment ink print (image courtesy Bonni Benrubi Gallery, New York)

CITY STAGES
Aperture Gallery and Bookstore
547 West 27th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Wednesday, March 12, suggested donation $5, 6:30
Exhibition continues through March 27
www.aperture.org
www.matthewpillsbury.com

In such series as “Screen Lives,” “Time Frame,” and “City Stages,” French-born photographer Matthew Pillsbury has taken pictures of New York and other urban locations (London, Paris, Vancouver, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Miami) with a black-and-white eight-by-ten camera, using exposures ranging from a few minutes to an hour. The results are mysterious, mesmerizing photos that capture several moments in time at once, a kind of past, present, and future rolled together in an often ghostly evocation of an alternate reality mimicking our own. “City Stages” features such locales as Zuccotti Park, the High Line, the Main Reading Room in the New York Public Library, and Washington Square Park in addition to such events as the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the Village Halloween Parade, and the Lunar New Year Parade, while “Time Frame” goes to the Guggenheim, Grand Central, and the American Museum of Natural History; “Screen Lives” features more personal interiors, with shots of people in rooms with a television on. In conjunction with his current show at Aperture, Pillsbury will be at the Chelsea gallery on March 12 at 6:30 to lead a tour of the exhibition and to sign copies of his first monograph, City Stages (Aperture, October 2013, $55.25), which contains works from all three series. The “City Stages” exhibit will remain on view through March 27 at Aperture; in addition, Pillsbury’s “Nate and Me,” which focuses on the photographer and his former partner who still works with him, is running at Sasha Wolf on Orchard St. through April 20.