Tag Archives: film forum

STRAY

Keytin takes Elizabeth Lo on an amazing journey in Stray

STRAY (Elizabeth Lo, 2020)
Film Forum Virtual Cinema
Opens Friday, March 5
filmforum.org/film/stray
www.straymovie.com

You can have Sounder, Old Yeller, and Lassie, cheer on Balto, Benji, and Beethoven. But the best movie dog ever is Keytin, the extraordinary golden mutt who is the star of Elizabeth Lo’s masterful feature-length debut, Stray. Lo follows the remarkable canine as she wanders through the streets of Istanbul and other parts of Turkey, living a dog’s life, in a place that until fairly recently would regularly round up strays and euthanize them mercilessly. Everywhere she goes, she meets up with people she knows and who love her, from a dock to a dangerous construction site; she also plays with such puppy pals as Nazar and Kartal. Keytin scavenges for food, cuddles up with homeless refugee children from Aleppo, relaxes amid traffic, and chases a cat, all with a look in her eyes that reveals great depth and understanding that humans can only dream of. The film was born out of loss; Lo notes in her director statement, “The impetus for Stray is personal. When my childhood dog died, I felt a quiet need to suppress my grief at his passing. I was shocked that something as personal as how my heart responds to the death of a loved one could be shaped by an external politics that defined him or ‘it’ as ‘valueless.’ As my grief evolved, I also saw how our moral conceptions of who or how much one matters can be in constant flux. This transformative moment is what propels Stray’s exploration into value, hierarchy, and sentience.”

The pandemic has only increased the meaning of pets in our lives, as if we needed more reasons to worship them. For many people, their dogs and cats have been their sole companions while sheltering in place, and it is devastating every time someone posts on social media that their dog or cat has passed — to say nothing of friends and relatives who have been stricken with the coronavirus and did not survive. Crouching down to get the dog’s perspective, Lo filmed the independent, purposeful Keytin for six months, with no choice but to let the confident canine guide the action as they encounter class, ethnic, and gender differences while making deep connections with everyone Keytin comes into contact with — a connection the audience will make as well, especially if they are watching the film at home, all alone. The soundtrack mixes a splendid score by Ali Helnwein with snippets of poignant conversation overheard on Keytin’s journeys, accompanied by occasional intertitles with wise, relevant quotes by Diogenes and Themistius, including “Human beings live artificially and hypocritically and would do well to study the dog.” As I said, Best. Movie. Dog. Ever. Stray begins streaming March 5 via Film Forum Virtual Cinema, complete with a conversation between Lo and filmmaker Rachel Grady and a Q&A with Lo and Joanne Yohannan from the North Shore Animal League, moderated by film critic Tomris Laffly.

TWO OF US (DEUX)

Martine Chevallier and Barbara Sukowa star as secret lovers in Filippo Meneghetti’s Two of Us

TWO OF US (DEUX) (Filippo Meneghetti, 2019)
Film Forum Virtual Cinema
Opens virtually Friday, February 5
www.twoofusfilm.com
filmforum.org

“You and I have memories / longer than the road that stretches out ahead,” the Beatles sing on the 1970 Let It Be song “Two of Us,” continuing, “Two of us wearing raincoats, standing solo / in the sun / You and me chasing paper, getting nowhere / on our way back home / We’re on our way home / We’re on our way home / We’re going home.” The concept of home is at the center of Filippo Meneghetti’s heartbreakingly beautiful Two of Us, France’s official submission for the Best International Feature Film Oscar. Two of Us begins in a park around Montpelier, where two little girls are playing hide-and-seek until one mysteriously disappears. It’s a park where Nina (Barbara Sukowa) and Madeline (Martine Chevallier), affectionately known as Mado, get to enjoy being together in a way they cannot in front of Madeline’s family — the two senior citizens, who live down the hall from each other on the top floor of an apartment building, have been lovers and traveling companions for decades, secrets they have kept from Madeline’s daughter, Anne (Léa Drucker), and son, Frédéric (Jérôme Varanfrain). Madeline promises to finally tell her children about their relationship and that she and Nina are planning to move to Rome, but tragedy strikes, forcing the two women apart, both physically and metaphorically like the girls in the park, but their deeply intense and honest connection isn’t about to relent under the circumstances, which include a villainous caregiver portrayed by Muriel Bénazéraf.

Reminiscent of Michael Haneke’s gorgeously told Amour, in which an elderly couple played by Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva deal with dementia, Two of Us, which does not involve Alzheimer’s, is a magnificent love story and a gripping psychological thriller. Sukowa (Berlin Alexanderplatz, Lola) gives a sexy, harrowing performance as Nina, a determined woman who refuses to give up despite mounting obstacles, while longtime Comédie-Française star Chevallier is a revelation as Madeline, her every movement exquisitely choreographed; Aurélien Marra’s camera seems to be magnetically drawn to her eyes as they search her changed world in silence.

In his debut feature film, the Italian-born, France-based Meneghetti has crafted a love story for the ages, written specifically for Sukowa and Chevallier by Meneghetti and Malysone Bovorasmy with Florence Vignon. Nina spends much of the first part of the film darting across the hall into Mado’s unlocked apartment, no one aware they are a lesbian couple; it is like the hallway is their own red carpet ushering them into their own private fantasy. At certain angles, it appears that they are younger versions of themselves, their passion for each other helping them stay youthful. But after the event, forces conspire to keep them apart, a separation that Nina fights against, resolved to make a home for the two of them. Two of Us is an unforgettable film about place, about belonging, about a love that knows no bounds. As the Beatles also sang on the Let It Be album, “The long and winding road / That leads to your door / Will never disappear / I’ve seen that road before / It always leads me here / Lead me to your door.”

The film opens virtually at Film Forum on February 5; each forty-eight-hour link comes with a conversation with Meneghetti and Sukowa, moderated by Julianne Moore. In conjunction with Two of Us, the French title of which is simply Deux, Film Forum is streaming three other Sukowa films, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Lola beginning February 12 and Margarethe Von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt February 19 and Rosa Luxemburg March 5.

PJ HARVEY: A DOG CALLED MONEY

PJ Harvey traveled to Kosovo, Kabul, and Washington, DC, to inspire 2016 album The Hope Six Demolition Project

A DOG CALLED MONEY (Seamus Murphy, 2019)
Film Forum online
Opens virtually Wednesday, December 9, $12 for 48-hour rental
filmforum.org

Irish photojournalist Seamus Murphy lays bare English musician PJ Harvey’s creative process in the irresistible documentary A Dog Called Money. Polly Jean Harvey initially hired Murphy to take photos for her 2011 album, Let England Shake, after having seen Murphy’s 2008 exhibit and book, A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan. Murphy ended up making twelve short films with her, one for each song on the record, and in 2012 he asked Harvey if she wanted to accompany him on his trips to Kabul, Kosovo, and Washington, DC, where they would work separately, he on a book, she on a record. But the journeys led to a creative cornucopia that also resulted in their collaborating on the book The Hollow of the Hand, featuring his photographs and her poetry, as well as the 2016 album The Hope Six Demolition Project and the documentary, which opens virtually December 9 at Film Forum.

Murphy follows Harvey, dressed all in black, as she goes through old photos and other detritus in a looted, destroyed home, sits on the rocky shore of a lake writing in her journal (with voice-over narration of her thoughts), hangs out with Corny’s crew in Anacostia, wanders into a theater in ruins (“I’ve heard twenty years ago, you could pay to get into the cinema with bullets,” she says), has tea with a group of children, and visits with local musicians in Kabul’s “Tin Pan Alley.” Murphy cuts between these scenes and Harvey and her band recording new songs in a specially constructed studio in the basement of the historic arts center Somerset House in London. Harvey, who burst onto the alternative music scene in the 1990s with such seminal records as Dry, Rid of Me, and To Bring You My Love, turns the sessions into an art installation by allowing people to watch from behind a one-way mirror; they can see her, but she can’t see them. It’s a genuine treat to observe Harvey’s process as she works with such musicians as John Parish, Terry Edwards, Kenrick Rowe, Enrico Gabrielli, Mike Smith, Alessandro Stefana, James Johnston, Alaine Johannes, Adam “Cecil” Bartlett, Jean-Marc Butty, and Mick Harvey (no relation) on melody, vocalization, and instrumentation, the songs taking shape right before our eyes and ears.

Murphy draws direct parallels between what Harvey witnesses and the songs she is writing. She meets a woman walking with her hands behind her back, holding a chain with two keys, who says, “I would kill them with my own hands if I knew who was responsible”); in “Chain of Keys,” Harvey sings, “The woman’s old / The woman’s old and dressed in black / She keeps her hands / She keeps her hands behind her back / Imagine what / Imagine what her eyes have seen / We ask if she / We ask but she won’t let us in.” After playing with the Kabul musicians, she transforms their sounds into the powerful “Homo Sappy Blues.” She uses some of Corny’s crew’s exact words and actions in her lyrics for “A Dog Called Money.” She also captures the overall feeling of her experience in such tunes as “The Ministry of Defence” (“Those are the children’s cries from the dark / These are the words written under the arch / Scratched in the wall in biro pen / This is how the world will end”) and the stunning “I’ll Be Waiting” (“They swept across the land / They did not leave a thing / They did not leave a person / A stone or a tree / They did not leave anything / They did not leave anything / All that’s left is sand / All that’s left is sand”).

At first what seems like it could be cultural appropriation develops into something else, a genuine attempt to understand what is happening in these countries and around the world — as well as in America with the inclusion of DC — and sharing that through music. “Everyone driving in one direction / Everyone driving in every direction / Where to go? / Why? / What to say when I get there?” Harvey narrates near the start of the film, which opens with an extended close-up of a smiling boy with a dirty face, his nose pressed against the window of a car, the sound of traffic all around him. For ninety minutes, we are all that boy, and he is us. And we have a book, an album, and now a documentary to remember that.

76 DAYS

Two essential healthcare workers take a much-deserved brief break in a Wuhan hospital in 76 Days

76 DAYS (Hao Wu, Weixi Chen, and Anonymous, 2020)
Opens virtually at Film Forum at Home on Friday, December 4
Live Q&A Tuesday, December 8, 7:00
filmforumhome.org
www.76daysfilm.com

The prospect of sitting through a ninety-minute documentary about essential healthcare workers in four hospitals in Wuhan fighting in the early days of Covid-19, during the city’s seventy-six-day lockdown, might seem daunting. But what could have been a difficult, emotional, and political roller coaster about fear and anger, government lies and finger pointing turns out to be a deeply affecting film that celebrates our most basic hopes and humanity.

Chinese director Hao Wu was researching a film about pandemics when, in mid-February, he came upon footage being shot by a pair of reporters in Wuhan, Weixi Chen and a man who has decided to remain anonymous. They had been given full access to four hospitals, where they followed doctors, nurses, patients, and family members for several months. There are no talking heads, and no one speaks directly to the camera; instead, 76 Days offers a fly-on-the-wall perspective that manages to be as uplifting as it is frightening.

The film opens like a sci-fi thriller, as an unidentified group of people in head-to-toe protective gear that includes light-blue masks, long face shields, white Hazmat suits, and blue footies comforts a distraught colleague who is prevented from saying goodbye to her father, who has just died from the novel coronavirus. Near the end of the scene, one of her coworkers tries to calm her down, saying, “We don’t want to see you in distress or pain. What will we do if you fall sick? We all have to work in the afternoon.” Moments later, sick people are banging on a door of the hospital to be let in, like a crowd trying to escape a coming zombie apocalypse, while two workers decide who to admit first. Those exchanges set the stage for the rest of the film, in which doctors and nurses go about their business with a relatively relaxed demeanor, displaying endless empathy and compassion as they care for scared patients with uncertain futures.

Wu focuses on a few specific cases that serve to represent the crisis as a whole, following an elderly couple who both have the virus and are not permitted to see each other even though they are on the same floor, and a young couple who are forced to quarantine in their apartment after the woman gives birth to a baby girl, unable to see their newborn for two weeks. While the nurses fall in love with the infant, who must stay in an incubator and whom they name Little Penguin, the workers have their hands full with the old man, who constantly tries to leave the hospital and doesn’t seem capable of wearing his mask correctly, if at all.

Doctors and nurses in Wuhan care for Covid patients, displaying empathy and compassion during seventy-six-day lockdown

The genuine kindness and concern displayed by the hospital employees is, well, infectious. They are risking their lives at every moment; each encounter is fraught with the possibility that they could contract the virus even with all the PPE. It’s hard not to cringe when they feed the old man, wipe the face of the infant, or use a patient’s phone to call a relative with news, because the reality is that people die from this disease, and Wu is not afraid to show that. It’s a riveting film that immerses you in this global emergency that started right there, at that time; if this doesn’t make you wear a mask, wash your hands, observe social distance protocols, and avoid gathering with others indoors, I don’t know what will.

We also see the empty streets and highways of Wuhan, a city of eleven million people, deserted, with signs advising, “Staying home makes a happy family.” All the action is happening in the hospitals, where the doctors and nurses bond with themselves and the patients, decorate their white Hazmat suits with drawings and sayings (“Clay Pot Chicken: I miss you”), and caution everyone to “be extra vigilant.” As the crisis continues to surge around the world and here in America, where politics trumps safety, those are indeed words to live by. Winner of the Best Cinematography award at DOC NYC 2020 and nominated for a Best Documentary Gotham Award, 76 Days launches virtually at Film Forum on December 4; Wu will share more about the documentary and his process in a free, live Q&A on December 8 at 7:00.

URSULA VON RYDINGSVARD: INTO HER OWN (with live Q&A)

Von Rydingsvard in her Williamsburg studio on South 5th Street, surrounded by the cedar cast of katul katul, 2002.

The life and career of Ursula Von Rydingsvard are detailed in intimate documentary

URSULA VON RYDINGSVARD: INTO HER OWN (Daniel Traub, 2019)
Opens virtually May 29, $15
Live YouTube Q&A May 31, free, 5:00
filmforum.org
intoherownfilm.com

I have spent many an hour experiencing the unique work of sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard, walking around her dazzling large-scale wood sculptures at Galerie Lelong and art fairs, outside the Barclays Center, and in Madison Square Park. But it wasn’t until watching Daniel Traub’s hourlong documentary, Ursula von Rydingsvard: Into Her Own — which opens virtually May 29 on Film Forum’s website — that I have come to understand and appreciate her work that much more.

“She is using her own experiences to think about how abstract forms can be evocative and representative of what the human condition is,” arts writer Patricia C. Phillips says in the film. “It’s indisputable that there’s something about Ursula’s process that makes the work incredibly distinctive. And just continuing to pursue that with more and more depth and persistence over the years, it reveals some answers but always this feeling that there is also something being withheld.”

Von Rydingsvard was born in Germany in 1942 to a Polish mother and a severely abusive Ukrainian father; the large family lived in a displaced persons camp after the war, mired in poverty, struggling to survive in makeshift homes where everything was made from wood. “It was just the board between me and the outside world, and I recall my body being right next to the wall, and I could smell, I could feel,” von Rydingsvard remembers about the camp. “And there was a huge difference between what happened within this wooden structure and what happened outside of it, so that there was a kind of safety the wood gave me.”

The family immigrated to a blue-collar town in Connecticut in 1951, where she learned little about art and suffered severe emotional and physical abuse at the hands of her father. She married, moved to California, and had a daughter, Ursie, but left her abusive husband with help from her brother Staś Karoliszyn and moved to SoHo in 1975, determined to become an artist. “Going to New York City woke me up in a way that was jarring and marvelous,” she says. She eventually adopted a labor-intensive process of marking, cutting, and stacking cedar two-by-fours into masterful sculptures with a dedicated team of holders, runners, cutters, and fabricators, forming their own family; they even eat lunch together every day. Traub, who directed, produced, and photographed the film, speaks with such studio personnel as Ted Springer, Vivian Chiu, Morgan Daly, and Sean Weeks-Earp while showing the detailed, grueling yet clearly satisfying work they perform.

Von Rydingsvard drawing cut lines on a 4x4" cedar beam, 2016.

Ursula Von Rydingsvard has built her career primarily working with cedar via a laborious process

“Her process is almost medieval,” says Mary Sabbatino, owner of Galerie Lelong, von Rydingsvard’s longtime New York gallery. Traub traces von Rydingsvard’s career from St. Martin’s Dream in Battery Park and Song of a Saint (St. Eulalia) in Buffalo, both from 1980, through a recent Princeton University outdoor commission for which she would be using copper for the first time. She had seen Traub’s short film Xu Bing: Phoenix and so invited Traub to document her 2015 Venice Bienale installation, Giardino Della Marinaressa. That became a short film, and they then decided to collaborate again, documenting the making of the Princeton commission, which led to Into Her Own.

Such friends and colleagues as artists Elka Krajewska, Sarah Sze, and Judy Pfaff, patrons Agnes Gund and Lore Harp McGovern, and Whitney Museum director Adam Weinberg dig deep into von Rydingsvard’s almost proprietary use of materials, her distinction as a rare woman artist creating monumental sculpture, and the concept of time in her oeuvre. Touch is also key, from the many assistants who handle the wood, bronze, and copper in the construction of the work to the people who approach and feel the final product, something she encourages. There’s a wonderful scene in which von Rydingsvard speaks with her beloved second husband, Nobel Prize winner Paul Greengard, discussing nature, beauty, and her Polish heritage. Her daughter tells stories of growing up surrounded by her mother’s process and art, and Von Rydingsvard and Karoliszyn share intimate, frightening details of their father’s abuse as she explains how she was able to turn that pain around to figure out who she was and what she wanted out of life. “I knew I needed to do my work to live,” she says.

I can’t wait until I get outside and see von Rydingsvard’s work again, in person, with this newfound knowledge and understanding of an extraordinary artist. In the meantime, I’ve already watched the documentary twice, inspired by her continuing story.

Traub, a New York-based photographer who codirected the 2014 film The Barefoot Artist (about his mother, artist, activist, and teacher Lily Yeh), and von Rydingsvard will take part in a free, live Q&A with moderator Molly Donovan of the National Gallery of Art on May 31 at 5:00, hosted by Film Forum.

CARMEN & GEOFFREY: A BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE TO CARMEN DE LAVALLADE

The life of Carmen de Lavallade and Geoffrey Holder is examined in low-budget documentary screening at Film Forum

CARMEN & GEOFFREY (Linda Atkinson & Nick Doob, 2006)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Friday, March 6, 6:30
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
firstrunfeatures.com

Film Forum is celebrating the eighty-ninth birthday of the one and only Carmen de Lavallade with a special screening of Linda Atkinson and Nick Doob’s 2006 documentary, Carmen & Geoffrey, along with rare footage of de Lavallade and Alvin Ailey dancing the ballet from Porgy and Bess in Howard Beach for a 1960 television show. Carmen & Geoffrey is an endearing look at de Lavallade and Geoffrey Holder’s lifelong love affair with dance — and each other. The New Orleans-born de Lavallade studied with Lester Horton and went to high school with Ailey, whom she brought to his first dance class. Trinidadian Holder was a larger-than-life gentle giant who was a dancer, choreographer, composer, costume designer, actor, director, writer, photographer, painter, and just about anything else he wanted to be.

The two met when they both were cast in Truman Capote and Harold Arlen’s Broadway show House of Flowers in 1954, with the six-foot-six Holder instantly falling in love with de Lavallade; they were together until 2014, when he passed away at the age of eighty-four. Atkinson and Doob combine amazing archival footage — of Eartha Kitt, Josephine Baker, Ulysses Dove, de Lavallade dancing with Ailey, and other splendid moments — with contemporary rehearsal scenes, dance performances, and interviews with such stalwarts as dance critic Jennifer Dunning (author of Geoffrey Holder: A Life in Theater, Dance and Art), former Alvin Ailey artistic director Judith Jamison, dancer Dudley Williams, and choreographer Joe Layton (watch out for his eyebrows), along with family members and Gus Solomons jr, who still works with de Lavallade. The film was made on an extremely low budget and it shows, but it is filled with such glorious footage that you’ll get over that quickly.

BEANPOLE

Beanpole

Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko) deals with horrific tragedy in Kantemir Balagov’s Beanpole

BEANPOLE (Дылда) (Kantemir Balagov, 2019)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Through February 11
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

Russia’s official submission for the Oscar for Best International Film, for which it was shortlisted, Kantemir Balagov’s Beanpole is an unsparing look at PTSD in women, here specifically in WWII but also more generally as mothers and caretakers. In 1945 Leningrad, Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko) is a very tall, quiet, former anti-aircraft gunner working in a military hospital for men with severe injuries. She is particularly drawn to Stepan (Konstantin Balakirev), who is paralyzed. She has a condition in which her body freezes, as if trapped in a limbo between life and death, and it horrifically leads to tragedy. Iya’s best friend and lover, Masha (Vasilisa Perelygina), returns from the front, bearing a frightening scar. She deviously sets out to have a child, involving the oddball Sasha (Igor Shirokov) and the head of the hospital, Nikolay (Andrey Bykov), which confuses and deeply upsets Iya.

Beanpole

Masha (Vasilisa Perelygina) and Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko) try to put their lives back together after fighting in WWII in Beanpole

Inspired by Belarus author Svetlana Alexievich’s Nobel Prize-winning 1987 book The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of World War II, Balagov’s second film, following his 2017 drama, Closeness, is a thoroughly unpredictable and purposefully uncomfortable journey into the minds of men and, more specifically, women shell-shocked by war. In their film debuts, Miroshnichenko and Perelygina are mesmerizing; cinematographer Ksenia Sereda zeroes in on Miroshnichenko’s head and Perelygina’s face as if they are characters unto themselves. The film’s palette is ochre-based, with explosions of bright yellows, reds, and especially greens — the color of rebirth, renewal, and envy — which pop up in wallpaper, paint, Iya’s sweater, and Masha’s dress. It’s a world in which women, after experiencing such pain and suffering, are expected to get married and pregnant amid all the death surrounding them. Balagov won Un Certain Regard’s Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival for this stark, brutal portrayal of average people looking for love amid the ruins. It might be set in 1945, dealing with the aftereffects of the Siege of Leningrad and what it did to the soul of the Russian city, but its exploration of the physical and psychological trauma of war is as relevant today as it was then.