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

INHERITANCE & THE AMERICAN DREAM: DEATH & TAXES AT IFC

Harvey Schein, Joy Schein, Justin Schein, and Mark Schein pose for a family photo in 1978 (courtesy Schein Family Archives)

DEATH & TAXES: MY FATHER, OUR FAMILY, AND THE COST OF THE AMERICAN DREAM (Justin Schein, 2024)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
July 17–24
www.ifccenter.com
www.deathandtaxesfilm.com

“If more and more wealth can be accumulated and provided to heirs without ever paying any taxes, then we are on the way to a permanent aristocracy in America,” Clinton Labor secretary Robert Reich says in Justin Schein’s Death & Taxes, a heartfelt and passionate film opening July 17 at IFC.

More than twenty years in the making, the documentary focuses on Justin’s father’s obsession with the estate tax. Harvey Schein was a successful executive in the music industry, landing top jobs at Columbia, Sony in Japan, and Warner, although his famous temper often got him in trouble. Born in 1927 in the Bronx and raised in East New York, Harvey joined the navy, then went to school on the GI Bill and graduated from Harvard Law. He married Joy Gitlin, a dancer and social worker from toney Jamaica Estates, and they had two sons, Mark and Justin.

The film begins in 2003 as the Scheins are in their country home in Connecticut; Harvey has gathered them there to discuss what to do after he is gone.

“Welcome to a Schein family meeting,” Justin narrates in voice-over. “That’s my dad, holding forth on his favorite subject: keeping his hard-earned money from the taxman when he dies. It’s not a bad problem to have, as long as you don’t let it drive you crazy. But unfortunately it did.”

Justin, codirector Robert Edwards, and editors Purcell Carson and Brian Redondo intercut archival news footage, home movies and photos, animation, and new interviews with family members, friends, Harvey’s colleagues, and numerous economists and consultants who offer their thoughts about Harvey and taxes and how things have changed over the years.

Mark Schein talks about how saving money was a “military dictate.” Harvey’s executive assistant Yvonne Johnson calls him “frugal. . . . Everybody knows he had a very, very difficult personality.” Former CBS Records president Clive Davis notes that Harvey “had one Achilles heel in his tendency to be argumentative.”

Harvey’s parents left him nothing, so he was proud of what he built, but he wasn’t about to just hand over millions of dollars to the government to use for welfare and other programs he disagreed with. His disdain for the estate tax even led to his moving to Florida to avoid paying it, jeopardizing his marriage when Joy wanted to head back north and live in New York City.

Meanwhile, Justin, acknowledging the privilege he was born into, speaks with experts on both sides of the estate tax controversy. Republican pollster and strategist Frank Luntz, who renamed the estate tax “the death tax,” considers it “confiscation.” Americans for Tax Reform founder Grover Norquist argues, “I think the death tax does violate people’s sense of the American dream. . . . It’s up to you, and as long as you don’t hurt anybody else, nobody cares.” Heritage Foundation senior fellow Stephen Moore defends Harvey, explaining, “The evidence shows that giving money to the people is not a formula for economic success.”

Justin points out that the estate tax affects only those who are worth at least $13.6 million, a tiny minority of Americans. Institute on Tax and Economic Policy director Amy Hanauer says, “It is 0.1 percent of estates in America that have been subject to the estate tax. It is really the very, very, very wealthy.” Institute for Policy Studies senior scholar Chuck Collins, referring to “the wealth defense industry,” asks, “Should we be ruled by small numbers of wealthy families? Should they dominate our system? So it’s a very American idea to limit the concentration of power.” ProPublica journalist James Bandler posits, “The wealthy have found all sorts of legal ways to reduce their taxes, in some cases to zero.” Discussing government programs, Princeton University sociologist Matthew Desmond offers, “We’re all on the dole.” And Bootstrapped author Alissa Quart contends, “If you think you’re self-made, call your mother.”

While the right-wing news media claims that the death tax is a form of double taxation, Roosevelt Institute president and CEO Felicia Wong, Maven Collaborative economist Anne Price, and New School economist Darrick Hamilton delve into the racial wealth gap. “That kind of passing down of inequalities end up crystalized in wealth inequality,” Wong says. Hamilton adds, “Taxes are used to strategically direct resources in ways to promote economic activity; a big question is for whom.”

Harvey Schein and Joy Schein’s retirement in Sanibel, Florida, did not go as planned (photo by Justin Schein, 1994)

At the heart of the film is the concept of the American dream, something that Justin wants to be available to everyone but is distressed by people like his father who refuse to pay their fair share. Remembering his daily trip to private school, passing through minority communities in disrepair, he recalls, “Looking out the bus window as a kid, I could see that people were hurting.” Showing a map depicting the redlining of New York City, he continues, “My school bus drove right through one of these red areas; each one marks a nonwhite neighborhood excluded from loans. And without a loan, a whole segment of the population was prevented from buying into the American dream of building family wealth.”

Under the current administration, the wealth gap is likely to grow, based on projections surrounding the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, and the bickering over the Trump tax cuts will remain as heated as ever. Republicans will battle with Democrats, red states will feud with blue states, the rich will fight with the poor, and fathers will clash with sons.

Since this is Justin’s film, he gets the last word: “When the wealthy are able to avoid paying their share of taxes, the rest of the country gets left behind.”

The US theatrical release of Death & Taxes takes place July 17–24 at IFC. Justin Schein will be on hand for several Q&As, on July 17 at 7:00 with Patriotic Millionaires chair Morris Pearl, New York City comptroller Brad Lander, and New York Working Families Party codirector Ana María Archila, moderated by Strong Economy for All Coalition executive director Michael Kink, on July 18 at 6:35 with Collins, on July 19 at 6:35 with Desmond, and on July 20 at 1:35 with Hamilton and Stronger Together deputy director Charles Khan.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

CLOUD OF THE SERPENT: KIYOSHI KUROSAWA AT JAPAN CUTS FESTIVAL

A disengaged online reseller (Masaki Suda) gets more than he bargained for in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud

JAPAN CUTS — FESTIVAL OF NEW JAPANESE FILM 2025: KIYOSHI KUROSAWA
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
January 10-20
www.japansociety.org

The annual summer Japan Cuts festival is underway at Japan Society, eleven days of new and restored works that began July 10 with Yasuhiro Aoki’s debut feature, ChaO, and continued with Yuya Ishii’s The Real You, Kenichi Ugana’s The Gesuidouz, and Kichitaro Negishi’s Yasuko, Songs of Days Past, prime examples of the wide range of works at the fest, many of them North American premieres and followed by Q&As. Upcoming highlights include Daihachi Yoshida’s Teki Cometh, Takashi Miike’s Blazing Fists, Masashi Iijima’s Promised Land, and the closing night selection, Joseph Overbey’s documentary The Spirit of Japan, complete with a shochu reception.

The 2025 edition celebrates the career of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who will participate in Q&As and introductions at several screenings. “The very base of cinematic expression is to film the reality in front of you using cameras. So, the similarity with the reality would be the feature of a movie,” Kurosawa told Dirty Movies in 2018. “This could be also its limitation, but anyway, I am particularly interested in the fact that a movie is almost the same as reality, but at the same time is slightly different than reality. This difference or unreality is always my starting point when I create my work.” That quote can be applied to the two Japan Cuts films that are reviewed below.

CLOUD (『クラウド』) (KURAUDO) (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024)
Wednesday, July 16, 6:00
japansociety.org

Kobe-born suspense master Kiyoshi Kurosawa returns to Japan Cuts with a pair of intense revenge thrillers that are not for the faint of heart. Both were made in 2024, both feature torture and violence, and both are tons of fun.

Up first for Kurosawa, who has made such horror faves as Cure, Pulse, and Creepy as well as such psychological dramas as Bright Future and Tokyo Sonata, is Cloud, the centerpiece selection. Masaki Suda stars as Yoshii, a quiet, disengaged young man who works at a cleaning factory, supplementing his income as an online reseller, purchasing goods at cut rates — unethically taking advantage of people — and selling them online at exorbitant prices, with no care whether the items are actually legitimate or fakes. He is upset when the owner, Takimoto (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa), offers him a promotion; Takimoto sees promise in Yoshii, but Yoshii has no interest in taking on more responsibility. When one of his deals makes him a lot of money, he quits his job and dedicates all his time to reselling whatever products he can get his hands on, from designer handbags to anime figures. Yoshii alienates his business partner, Muraoka (Masataka Kubota), and moves with his girlfriend, Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), to a house in a small, faraway town, where a young local man, Sano (Daiken Okudaira), insists on being his assistant. As his deals get more and more lucrative and dangerous, Yoshii builds a well-deserved bad reputation as a ruthless operator, and soon a group of men, armed to the hilt, come after him, determined to get even.

Cloud is a fierce, propulsive trip down the internet rabbit hole, where anonymity might feel safe but reality threatens to blow it all up. Yoshii ruins every relationship he has, with clients, customers, Sano, Akiko, Takimoto, et al., seemingly without any care or regard; he spends hours staring at his computer screen, waiting for his items to start selling, with more concern and passion than he has for any human being. And when the posse finds him, he has no understanding why they want him dead.

Suda (Kamen Rider, Cube) is terrific as Yoshii; we are initially offput by his herky-jerky movement and disengagement from society, but as everything closes in on him, we also feel compassion for his potential fate. The film is beautifully shot by Yasuyuki Sasaki and expertly directed by Kurosawa, who knows just how to make the audience squirm, especially at unexpected moments.

“Grudges, revenge, they’ll only drag you down,” one member of the posse tells another. “Think of this as a game.” It’s a wry comment on how too many people look at the real world these days.

Cloud is screening July 16 at 6:00 and will be followed by a Q&A with Kurosawa, who will also receive the Cut Above Award at a reception afterward.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s remake of his own Serpent’s Path is another suspense gem

THE SERPENT’S PATH (『蛇の道』) (HEBI NO MICHI) (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024)
Thursday, July 17, 6:00
japansociety.org

When Kiyoshi Kurosawa was asked by a studio in France to remake one of his earlier films, he opted to revisit his 1998 straight-to-video thriller Serpent’s Path, which was written by Hiroshi Takahashi (Ringu, Sodom the Killer) and starred Show Aikawa and Teruyuki Kagawa. He cowrote the new script with French journalist Aurélien Ferenczi, who passed away in October 2024 at the age of sixty-one. The result is a brutal, gripping white-knuckle shocker that you won’t be able to turn away from, no matter how much you might want to.

Albert Bacheret (Damien Bonnard) is a disheveled, distraught man who is determined to find whoever murdered and dismembered his eight-year-old daughter, Marie (Hélène Caputo). He is helped by Sayoko Mijima (Ko Shibasaki), a calm, composed hospital psychiatrist who is treating Yoshimura (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a Japanese man having trouble adjusting to life in France. Sayoko has also moved from Japan to Paris, leaving behind her partner, Soichiro (Munetaka Aoki).

Albert and Sayoko are not criminal masterminds, but they expertly kidnap Laval (Mathieu Amalric) and chain him to a wall in an abandoned warehouse. Albert accuses Laval of having killed Marie, but Laval adamantly denies he had anything to do with it, claiming he is just an accountant at the Minard Foundation, an institution that we slowly learn more about, none of it good. Deprived of food, drink, and a bathroom, Laval eventually gives up his boss, Pierre Guérin (Grégoire Colin), who Albert and Sayoko decide to capture as well. Like Laval, Pierre is not forthcoming at first, but torture has a way of making people talk, whether it be truth or lies, and the plot thickens, offering more and more surprises along with more and more violence.

Throughout the film, Albert, who became estranged from his wife, Lola (Vimala Pons), after the tragic incident, shows a short video of Marie playing the piano and roller skating as he reads a newspaper report that details exactly what happened to her, making Laval, Pierre, and, later, Christian Samy (Slimane Dazi) watch it — but the audience as well, as if inuring us to the atrocity while also feeling Albert’s torment. Kurosawa and cinematographer Alex Kavyrchine have created a fascinating dichotomy between the kind of violence we see onscreen, whether a movie in a theater or a video on a smartphone or laptop, and the kind we are not shown but only have to imagine, especially when it involves children. We cringe every time Albert narrates the video but not at what Albert and Sayoko do; in fact, we are rooting for them. As the body count rises, so do humorous shots of the victims, eliciting uncomfortable yet necessary laughter.

Albert Bacheret (Damien Bonnard) and Sayoko Mijima (Ko Shibasaki) hunt for a killer in The Serpent’s Path

Bonnard (Staying Vertical, Les Misérables) is terrific in a similar way as Suda is in Cloud, portraying a laser-focused but perhaps misguided man who has disconnected from society, impulsive and restless, turning to screens to redefine his purpose. His unease is so palpable you just want to give him a giant hug — but maybe not when he’s armed. Actress and singer Shibasaki (One Missed Call, xxxHolic) adds just the right amount of mystery to Sayoko, who might be more than she seems. Meanwhile, the mighty Amalric (Kings and Queen, The Grand Budapest Hotel) once again proves why he’s one of the best actors on the planet.

At one point, when Yoshimura talks to Sayoko about facing the end, she replies, “The end? The end of what? Are you afraid of the end? Isn’t the hardest part when there is no end?”

Or, in other words, be careful what you wish for.

The Serpent’s Path is screening July 17 at 6:00 and will be followed by a Q&A with Kurosawa, who had a busy 2024, directing Cloud, The Serpent’s Path, and the forty-five-minute experimental Chime following a four-year pause at least in part because of the pandemic. In addition, you can catch the North American premiere of the 4K restoration of the 1998 original on July 19 at 9:00 as well as Kurosawa’s 1998 License to Live on July 17, a reconstruction of Sam Peckinpah’s 1970 western The Ballad of Cable Hogue.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

FREE LAND FOR FREE PEOPLE: THE RETURN OF COMMUNE

Restored documentary looks at life at Northern California commune from 1968 to 1979 and beyond (photo by Jock Sturges)

COMMUNE (Jonathan Berman, 2005 / restored 2025)
DCTV Firehouse Cinema
87 Lafayette St.
July 11-17
www.dctvny.org

Jonathan Berman’s twentieth anniversary restoration of his documentary Commune could hardly be more timely. The film details the fascinating story of Black Bear Ranch in Siskiyou County in Northern California near Mt. Shasta, where dozens of people left their traditional lives and started their own community to escape what was happening in the country in the wake of the violent Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968.

“After going to Washington, DC, for a while and thinking, boy, it’s going to be a long time before all these people retire and get out of here and something changes, I don’t think I can stand to wait around,” Mahaj Seeger says in the film.

Actor Peter Coyote explains, “We thought the government was going to be overthrown in two years and there would be a new culture rising from the ashes, and we wanted to have an alternative, a nonmercantile alternative that offered citizens the options of being something other than a consumer or an employee.”

And Cedar Seeger admits, “I moved there to get away from America; I did not want to be an American as defined by the mainstream, although I guess deep down I’ve always felt proud that I’m an American. But to me those values are represented in open-mindedness and free thinking and tolerance and the ability to do what you want.”

The group purchased eighty acres of woods for twenty-two thousand dollars, with contributions from the Doors, the Monkees, Frank Zappa, and others. The goal was to create a society that played by its own rules, not subject to political parties or any existing set of laws and mores. As Michael Tierra declares in the film, their motto was “Free Land for Free People.”

In addition to all the above, Berman speaks with such commune participants as Creek Hanauer, Martin Linhart, Peter Leaf, and Kenoli Oleari. Elsa and Richard Marley share critical behind-the-scenes information. Tierra relates how he tried to get James Coburn involved. Catherine Guerra preaches free love. Osha Neumann, a member of the anarchist Motherfuckers, says that it “felt like coming home.” Activist Harriet Beinfeld brings up the FBI, which in 1970 reported, “Commune might be a training ground for militants planning insurrection in Northern California.” Geba Greenberg and Allegra Brucker discuss becoming self-trained midwives to help women give birth on the ranch.

We learn what they are doing in 2005 and meet some of the children who grew up in the commune, including Aaron Marley, a scientist who works with experimental lab rats, and Tesilya Hanauer, a writer and massage therapist.

While neighbor Hoss Bennett remembers fondly about how he helped the commune, local resident Mel Kramer declares, “It was shocking,” and public defender Larry Bacon calls it an “invasion of flower children.”

Berman and editors Michael Taylor and Marisa Simpson interweave archival news footage and photos and home movies taken at the ranch, showing the group renovating a ramshackle barn, growing vegetables, preparing food, and prancing about naked, which they did a lot. Ultimately, it was not as idyllic as was hoped, as the concept of free love led to jealousies, and there was debate over how the children were being raised. The beginning of the end might have been the infiltration of the Shivalila cult in 1979, led by Gridley Wright, who had unique and controversial views of child-rearing. A 1987 reunion offers engaging perspective.

In his 2025 director note, Berman (The Shvitz, Calling All Earthlings) points out, “With the very real modern struggles of Trump’s America, people are seeking solutions of every kind to an increasing authoritarianism. As feminist activist Carol Hanisch wrote in 1969, ‘The personal is political,’ and nothing is more personal than how we live and the who, what, and where of the place we call home. . . . In our modern high-tech world, where an Amazon delivery is moments away and there’s less need to leave our dwellings, we face a plague of loneliness. Is coming together the cure? Or perhaps, as Sartre wrote, ‘Hell is other people’!”

Accompanied by a lovely country-bluegrass-groovy-pop soundtrack by Elliott Sharp, Commune makes a compelling case for living off the grid, at least for a little while.

The twentieth anniversary restoration is screening July 11–17 at DCTV Firehouse Cinema, with Q&As with Berman on July 11 at 7:00 with a live performance by Sharp, on July 12 at 7:00 with Taylor, and on July 13 at 4:00; on July 17 at 7:00.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

INDEPENDENCE DAY AT FRAUNCES TAVERN: THE PATH TO LIBERTY

Henry Hintermeister, Retreat to Victory, oil on canvas (gift of Charles Lauriston Livingston, Jr. / courtesy of Fraunces Tavern Museum)

Who: Scott Dwyer, Lisa Goulet, Peter Hein, Seth Kaller, Charles (Chuck) Schwam, Lloyd S. Kramer, Louise M. Joy, George Bruton Delaney, Moses L. Delaney, Richard Sylla, more
What: Independence Day open house and “The 1700s: The Path to Liberty” symposium
Where: Fraunces Tavern Museum, 54 Pearl St.
When: Friday, July 4, $1 in person, free virtually, 1:00 – 5:30
Why: The Lower Manhattan Historical Association’s It Happened Here turns to the founding of America on July 4 with an Independence Day open house and afternoon symposium at Fraunces Tavern Museum, home to a banquet on June 18, 1776, honoring General George Washington’s military victories. “The 1700s: The Path to Liberty,” which can be attended in person or online, features members of the Sons of the Revolution, the American Friends of Lafayette, history professors, collections managers, military veterans, descendants of James Armistead Lafayette, and others. Visitors can explore such exhibitions as “Path to Liberty: The Emergence of a Nation,” “Fraunces Tavern: Over 300 Years of Building History,” and “Lafayette: A Hero’s Return” before attending the symposium prelude “Liss and the Culper Spy Ring in Historic Lower Manhattan” at 1:00, followed at 1:30 by the symposium itself.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

“THE CAMERA WAS ALWAYS PRESENT”: RACHEL ELIZABETH SEED’S A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY

Rachel Elizabeth Seed turns the camera on her mother and herself in A Photographic Memory (courtesy of Capariva Films and Zeitgeist Films in association with Kino Lorber)

A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY (Rachel Elizabeth Seed, 2025)
New Plaza Cinema @Macaulay Honors College
35 West Sixty-Seventh St. between Central Park West & Columbus Ave.
Friday, June 27, through Sunday, June 29
newplazacinema.org
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Monday, June 30, 7:00
www.ifccenter.com

“I have no memories of my mother. And when I set out to find her a few years back, she was basically a stranger to me,” Rachel Elizabeth Seed explains in her award-winning debut documentary, A Photographic Memory. “My dad never talked much about her except to tell me that she was an accomplished writer and photographer way ahead of her time. But it wasn’t until I became a photographer myself that I started to become curious about the work she created and whether in the pages of her transcripts and contact sheets, her journals and her audio tapes, I might also find her.”

Rachel’s mother, Sheila Turner Seed, was a pioneering photojournalist and filmmaker who died suddenly and unexpectedly in June 1979 at the age of forty-two, when Rachel was eighteen months old. While working on “The Motherless Project” (2004–11), in which she interviewed and photographed forty women who had grown up without a mother, Rachel found, in her father’s attic, a box of reels her mother had made, and decided to go on a journey to learn more about her by investigating her legacy while also dealing with her own sense of loss. “I thought that telling their stories would make me feel less alone. But what do you do when your greatest loss is something you can’t even remember?” she says.

A Photographic Memory is not about having total recall but is a moving and cathartic love letter constructed from family pictures and home movies, journals and letters, and personal remembrances centered around Sheila’s “Images of Man,” an audiovisual project for Scholastic in which she spoke with and photographed some of the most important and influential photographers in the world, compiling fifty hours of audio interviews with Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lisette Model, Gordon Parks, Cecil Beaton, William Albert Allard, Brian Lanker, Cornell Capa, Bruce Davidson, and Eliot Porter in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rachel also goes through Sheila’s phone book and calls up her old friends and contacts. “Your mother was a remarkable storyteller,” one instantly says.

Rachel visits with ICP founder Capa, Davidson, and Martine Franck, Cartier-Bresson’s widow, who remember Sheila well and talk about the interview sessions fondly. She meets with Scholastic president and CEO Dick Robinson, who was extremely close with Sheila; he happily recalls when Rachel worked there as an intern and how Sheila decided that she did not need a cameraman accompanying her on her Scholastic assignments. Among the others sharing memories are Sheila’s brother, Barry; Sheila’s ex-boyfriend Gabriel Edmont, who gets teary; her father, Joe Turner, a successful photographer himself; and Sheila’s old friend, author Lael Morgan, who refers to her and Sheila as “lifeaholics . . . Sheila had to see the world.”

Sheila’s relatives, including her father and grandfather, had experienced severe oppression in their native Russia and did not want to leave America once they arrived. “Many members of my family will not travel outside of US borders. It is only there that they feel safe. Maybe that’s one reason why I have an insatiable desire to travel everywhere and to see everything,” Rachel reads from her mother’s autobiography. Rachel also re-creates scenes from the interviews, bathed in mysterious black-and-white and filled with memorable quotes.

“I’m tired of being lonely,” Allard tells Sheila in Virginia in 1972. “Photography, it’s what I do, but it is not totally me.”

In his Paris living room in 1971, Cartier-Bresson offers, “Life is very fluid. Sometimes the pictures disappear and there’s nothing you can do. You can’t tell the person, ‘Oh, please smile again. Do that gesture again.’ There’s no repetition. Life is once forever.”

“You have a lot of your mother in you,” Davidson says in the same New York City apartment where he spoke with Sheila in 1971. He also advises, “I think probably one of the most dangerous things that one can do is to look at themselves.”

Rachel admits, “Revealing myself scares me. What am I hiding?” But she is soon turning the lens on herself, not only discussing her relationship with her boyfriend, Joseph Michael Lopez, and whether she wants to have children but also observing herself in the archival footage she finds. Watching home movies, she says as if addressing her mother, “I saw you moving for the first time, family footage of your childhood, and then of your wedding. And then, at the end, I saw the two of us together. I only remember not having a mother, but here is a little girl who has a mother. And in this perfect arc of time, we’re together.”

It’s an intimate moment that gets to the heart of the film, which Rachel directed, wrote, and produced; it was edited and cowritten by Christopher Stoudt, shot by Rachel, Lopez, and Drew Gardner, and scored with a tender gentleness by Mary Lattimore and Troy Herion. A Photographic Memory is a vivid and poignant celebration of craft, of family lost and found, of film and photography and mothers and daughters. It will have you searching through your own albums, slides, and reels, finding long-forgotten gems. It is sad that, with the advent of the internet, smartphones, and social media, future generations will not have these opportunities to establish and reestablish personal connections with the past, as everyone is now a photographer and a filmmaker, posting away online, each picture fading away as soon as the next one is uploaded.

Rachel says, “The camera was always present,” which was a rare thing back then, when each click had to be made carefully, with limited availability on every roll. With A Photographic Memory, Rachel has given us a special treasure grounded in the art forms used by her mother, her father, and her with such joy.

A Photographic Memory is screening June 27–29 at New Plaza Cinema and June 30 at IFC Center; each show will be followed by a Q&A with Rachel Elizabeth Seed, along with Danielle Varga on June 27, Stoudt and Judith Helfand on June 28, Dami Akinnusi, Jill Campbell, and Liz Nord on June 29, and executive producer Kirsten Johnson on June 30 in a special encore from DOC NYC 2024.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

REMAPPING THE UNIVERSE: ENCOUNTERS IN THE MILKY WAY

Encounters in the Milky Way expands humanity’s knowledge and understanding of the universe (photo by Alvaro Keding/© AMNH)

ENCOUNTERS IN THE MILKY WAY
American Museum of Natural History
Hayden Planetarium, Rose Center for Earth and Space
Central Park West at 81st St.
Open daily, $18-$30
212-769-5200
www.amnh.org

Everything I know about space I learned from Star Trek, Stanley Kubrick, Carl Sagan, and the American Museum of Natural History. At the Hayden Planetarium, the institution continues to explore the final frontier and push the boundaries of our knowledge of the universe in its space shows, which have included 2000’s Passport to the Universe, narrated by Tom Hanks; 2002’s The Search for Life: Are We Alone? (Harrison Ford); 2006’s Cosmic Collisions (Robert Redford); 2009’s Journey to the Stars (Whoopi Goldberg); 2013’s Dark Universe (Neil deGrasse Tyson); and 2020’s Worlds Beyond Earth (Lupita Nyong’o).

In the brand-new Encounters in the Milky Way, the ubiquitous Pedro Pascal, of The Mandalorian, The Last of Us, and Narcos, takes audiences deep into our galactic neighborhood as scientists uncover surprising aspects of time and cosmic movement so unexpected that it shocked even the filmmakers. To the everyday museum visitor who just hasn’t been thinking about our universe lately, Encounters is a thrilling, jaw-dropping reminder of exactly how small we humans are in space and time, and how much remains to be explored.

“There was this day that happened, I can tell you it’s an actual day, April 25, 2018. That was the day that the European Space Agency’s Gaia Observatory . . . revealed this massive, amazing map, a map that is foundational in astrophysics. On April 24, I gave a talk in here to a sold-out crowd and I told this audience — I don’t know, they thought that I was on the Kool-Aid or something — I was, like, it all changes tomorrow,” AMNH curator Jackie Faherty said at the press preview of the twenty-four-minute film. “It’s all changing because up until that moment we had about 116,000 stars that we measured the distances to and that we knew their motion really well. But the next day we were getting nearly 2 billion. So to me, the most important thing and why this is happening now is because on April 25, 2018, Gaia dropped a map that all humans should be proud of. We mapped the cosmos in a way, and the Milky Way really was the star of it, we had never been able to do before. And because of that, that was the sheer inspiration for starting the conversations about this show. And we could test out some of the material with audiences in here with open space. But because of Gaia — sometimes I call this show a little love letter to Gaia because that map is so phenomenal.”

Encounters in the Milky Way was a huge undertaking, made with the participation of a wide range of astronomers, educators, science visualization experts, and artists from the University of Surrey, NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute, the Southwest Research Institute, the Center for Astrophysics/Harvard & Smithsonian, Technische Universität Berlin, the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, the European Space Agency, and more than a dozen other organizations. Using the Gaia space telescope, the James Webb Space telescope, and complex digital models, the film features the Kuiper Belt, the Oort Cloud, Gliese 710, icy comets, a local bubble, and the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy like they’ve never been seen before. As with all space shows, the visuals are spectacular, highlighted by a spiral, found in collaboration with the Czech astronomer David Nesvorný, that jolted all involved.

“There’s this huge universe out there, and this show is concentrating on the Milky Way. . . . Because we’re being parochial, local to the Milky Way, there’s that emphasis of time, but it’s brought home to us in a kind of personal way that just as the solar system is our home, so too is the Milky Way,” director Carter Emmart, helming his seventh and final show, said. “And because we can see it organically behaving in great detail like this, there’s an aspect to it that, yes, it’s so far out there, and the time scales are so large, but then when Pedro tells you that we are twenty galactic years old and that it takes us 230 million years to make one orbit — when we were at this last orbit, it was the Triassic, and dinosaurs were just getting their legs — that’s one of the twenty orbits. It makes you understand that our story is a larger story of life and that while we are single instances, that the DNA of your children and the grandparents and so forth that you come from is a continuum, and that goes back into deep time. . . . I really feel that message comes across in this story; I hope it does. I hope that’s the takeaway, that this is a vast story. . . . For me its been a tremendous exhilaration from being ten years old, my mom bringing me to classes in the basement of this planetarium, to having a career working here. It’s been a great, great pleasure to be here across these various shows but end on something that I think is a pretty special production. It certainly is to me.”

In the film, Pascal explains, “By moving through space to observe from multiple angles, Gaia has built a three-dimensional atlas containing nearly two billion stars. That’s fifteen thousand times more than were ever mapped before, and about a million times more stars than we see with the naked eye. Could the ingredients of life be carried from one star system to another, aboard a comet or asteroid? Scientists are studying the possibilities. For us — for our sun and solar system — one orbit takes 230 million years to complete. So far, we’ve made about twenty orbits. We’re twenty galactic years old!”

The Milky Way’s collision with the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy has never been visualized before (photo © AMNH)

It’s also special to Faherty, whose excitement and sense of wonder are infectious, particularly when it comes to the map.

“I want kids coming here and being like, What’s up with this map? I’d like to see more on that map. What else does that map have? Open up the map; look for stuff,” she continued. “I’m showing you the globe, guys — this is the map, the map of your cosmos. It’s your cosmos as well; it’s humanity’s map. Go play with the map. All Gaia data is available for everybody. Look at where these stars are; look at where they’re going. You can make discoveries — so much science to be had. I hope that people walk away wanting to be scientists when they leave this room.”

On Wednesday, June 25, Faherty and Emmart will be back in the room for “Astronomy Live: The Making of a Space Show,” sharing insights into the creation of Encounters in the Milky Way. Be prepared to reconsider your current career and think about becoming a scientist yourself after you experience their unbounding enthusiasm and childlike joy at expanding our knowledge of the endless universe.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

THE WHOLE MEGILLAH: YIDDISH TOUR OF “THE BOOK OF ESTHER IN THE AGE OF REMBRANDT”

Rembrandt van Rijn, A Jewish Heroine from the Hebrew Bible, oil on canvas, 1632–33 (National Gallery of Canada, purchased 1953)

Who: Rukhl Schaechter, Adina Cimet
What: Yiddish tour of “The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt”
Where: The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd St.
When: Friday, June 20, $40.25, 11:30 am
Why: The Jewish Museum exhibition “The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt” is a surprising look at the Dutch fascination with the story of Esther, King Ahasuerus, Queen Vashti, Mordecai, and Haman (boo!!). Artists such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Jan Lievens, Aert de Gelder, and Jan Steen painted depictions of the biblical story that is related in the Megillah, which is read on the holiday of Purim; the show is supplemented with beautifully designed scrolls and contemporary works, including Fred Wilson’s 1992 Queen Esther/Harriet Tubman. Curators Abigail Rapoport and Michele Frederick make a strong case connecting the events surrounding Esther with Jewish immigration to the Netherlands during the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648); as Rapoport writes in the catalog, “The Dutch, who saw themselves as religiously and politically oppressed by the Spanish monarchy, found in the Book of Esther a viscerally apt analogy for their own liberation and associated their war of independence with the Jewish people’s struggle with, and ultimate triumph over, the ancient Persian Empire.”

The exhibit continues through August 10; on June 20 at 11:30 am, Forverts editor Rukhl Schaechter will lead a one-hour tour of the show in Yiddish, along with sociologist Adina Cimet. Tickets are limited and include general admission to the museum, which is also hosting the terrific “Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity” exhibition.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]