Tag Archives: ifc center

WHAT’D WE MISS?

Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow is among the first films IFC Center will be screening inside for in-person audiences

IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Friday, March 5 – Thursday, April 1, 2021
www.ifccenter.com

On March 5, IFC Center opened its doors to limited, masked, socially distanced audiences, allowing film lovers inside for the first time in nearly a year. They are kicking off this new chapter with four weeks of movies that have been available for streaming but could not previously be seen in a theater in New York City. “What’d We Miss?” consists of nearly two dozen films, each group being shown for one week. Through March 11, you can catch Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round, Alexander Nanau’s Collective, Sam Pollard’s MLK/FBI (followed by a prerecorded Q&A with the director), Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always, and David France’s Welcome to Chechnya. The March 12-18 lineup comprises Francis Lee’s Ammonite, Kelly Reichardt’s gorgeously moving First Cow, Darius Marder’s hard-hitting Sound of Metal, Michael Almereyda’s Tesla, Garrett Bradley’s poignant Time, and Karen Maine’s Yes, God, Yes.

Seating choices are limited as theaters such as IFC Center reopen

From March 19 to 26, you can settle in for Bill and Turner Ross’s Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, Kirsten Johnson’s bizarre, mesmerizing comedy-documentary Dick Johnson Is Dead, Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden, Natalie Erika James’s Relic, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s stunning To the Ends of the Earth, and Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s The Truth. And the roster for March 16 to April 1 is Kitty Green’s powerful The Assistant, Kleber Mendonca Filho and Juliano Dornelles’s beautifully strange and violent Bacurau, Miranda July’s eclectic and gripping Kajillionaire, Chad Hartigan’s Little Fish, Channing Godfrey’s Miss Juneteenth, and Sean Durkin’s The Nest.

DOC NYC 2020

Army and NYPD vet Corey Pegues shares his surprising tale in A Cops and Robbers Story

DOC NYC
November 11-19
DOC NYC Live! free, individual films $12, ten-film pass $80, All Access Film Pass $199
www.docnyc.net
www.ifccenter.com

Forget about TV, newspapers, magazines, and online sites; if you want to know what’s going on in the world, just check out DOC NYC, the annual festival of nonfiction films that keeps getting bigger and better every year. Instead of being held at the IFC Center as usual, the eleventh edition will be virtual, running November 11-19, consisting of nearly two hundred shorts and features that explore timely issues as only documentaries can. Individual films are $12, and many come with a prerecorded Q&A with the filmmakers. In addition, DOC NYC will be hosting free, live discussions every day on Facebook, from noon to 4:00. Below is a look at some of this year’s highlights and the full Facebook Live schedule; keep watching this space for more recommendations as the festival continues.

ASHES TO ASHES (Taylor Rees, 2020)
www.docnyc.net
Vivian Ducat’s 2011 documentary, All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert, introduced the world to the extraordinary story of outsider artist Winfred Rembert, who shares his hardscrabble life through his intimately personal leather works. In the twenty-six-minute short Ashes to Ashes, Taylor Rees focuses on Rembert’s friendship with Dr. Shirley Jackson Whitaker, as the Star Wars fanatic talks about when he was nearly lynched as a teenager and she prepares for a special memorial. The close-ups of Rembert’s tired, weathered face and exhausted eyes speak volumes about the legacy of slavery in the United States.

Betye Saar takes care of business in short film screening at DOC NYC

BETYE SAAR: TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS (Christine Turner, 2020)
www.docnyc.net
Last year, MoMA hosted the powerful exhibition “Betye Saar: The Legends of Black Girl’s Window,” a retrospective of the work of the California-born African American artist whose assemblages explore racism and feminism, including the controversial 1972 piece The Liberation of Aunt Jemima. Saar, who turned ninety-four this past summer, now has another moving show, “Call and Response,” that continues at the Morgan Library through January 31. In Christine Turner’s nine-minute short, Betye Saar: Taking Care of Business, made for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the artist discusses her process, which involves incorporating found objects into her sociopolitical constructions; several works in the documentary are on view at the Morgan, an added bonus for those in New York City.

A COPS AND ROBBERS STORY (Ilinca Calugareanu, 2020)
www.docnyc.net
“I really wanted to tell my story,” Corey Pegues says in Ilinca Calugareanu’s A Cops and Robbers Story, making its world premiere at DOC NYC. “I was, like, people gotta know that you could make a bunch of crazy mistakes, even criminal mistakes, and then revamp and reinvent yourself. But I know I couldn’t do that.” A twenty-one-year veteran of the NYPD who believed in giving back to the community, Pegues held on to a secret that whole time: that he had previously been a street-corner drug dealer, a fact he knew would ruin everything he’d accomplished. Calugareanu speaks extensively with Pegues, his 1980s crew, and NYPD colleagues as the tale plays out one piece at a time. Be sure to stick around for the credits for a dazzling surprise about the film’s re-created 1980s scenes.

CROCK OF GOLD: A FEW ROUNDS WITH SHANE MacGOWAN (Julien Temple, 2020)
www.docnyc.net
DOC NYC is hosting the North American premiere of Julien Temple’s Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan, a portrait of music legend Shane MacGowan, the Irish punk leader of the Pogues who is renowned for his heavy drinking. MacGowan, who will turn sixty-three on Christmas Day, is now confined to a wheelchair because of a 2015 accident in which he broke his pelvis, and his speech is so slurred, from years of alcohol and drug abuse and perhaps the worst teeth in rock-and-roll history, that the film includes subtitles whenever he speaks. He hangs out with former Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams and actor Johnny Depp, talks about his childhood and his songwriting process, shares fabulous old footage and family photographs, and tells us how much he hates “Fairytale of New York,” which plays way too much during the documentary. I’ve seen the Pogues a few times, including a 2007 show at Roseland in which MacGowan disappeared for a while, so the band kept playing until he eventually returned, a new bottle in hand, just days after he had fallen off the stage in Boston and tore ligaments. Crock of Gold is a difficult film to watch, especially for fans who have seen Shane perform live with the Pogues or the Popes; he is now a shell of what he once was, a sad testament to what should have been a much more successful career.

Bill Shannon asks audiences to abandon assumptions in Crutch

CRUTCH (Sachi Cunningham & Vayabobo, 2020)
www.docnyc.net
in June 2010, I witnessed a mind-blowing participatory work, Bill Shannon’s Traffic: A Transient Specific Performance, in which Pittsburgh native Shannon, who has the degenerative bilateral hip deformity Legg-Calvé Perthes disease, glided through the Financial District on his specially designed crutches and skateboard as he interacted with people on the street while the audience watched from a bus that followed him. In Sachi Cunningham and Vayabobo’s Crutch, making its world premiere at DOC NYC, Shannon delves into the nature of the disease, which he contracted in childhood, explores his working methods as a dancer, choreographer, and multimedia artist, and visits a summer camp for kids with Legg-Calvé Perthese. “Everybody has crutches,” Shannon says in the feature-length film. “Some of them you can see; some of them are invisible.” (And yes, that is me on the bus….)

HER NEW YORK (David Gross, 2020)
www.docnyc.net
www.davidlgross.com
Since the 1960s, artist Jill Gill has been preserving the memory of long-gone aspects of the city in her “Lost New York” ink-and-watercolor paintings. In David Gross’s nine-minute Her New York, Gill discusses her process of photographing street corners, buildings, and movie theaters, then committing them to paper in a cartoony, playful, yet detailed style reminiscent of Red Grooms, Ben Kantor, and Roz Chast. But Gill does not lament the past; instead, she enjoys the what was as well as what is and what will be, acknowledging that things change, and not always for the worst, which is not a bad way to look at the city, and the world.

NINE DAYS A WEEK (Maliyamungu Muhande, 2020)
www.docnyc.net
Part of the DOC NYC U — New School shorts program, Maliyamungu Muhande’s Nine Days a Week is a black-and-white portrait of now-eighty-year-old street photographer Louis Mendes, who hangs around Grand Central Terminal, B&H, the Audubon Ballroom, and other locations with his vintage 1940 press camera and takes pictures of people who come up to talk to him, for a price. Mendes shares bits about his life, which includes living in shelters, and invites Muhande into his crowded studio, where he shows off his photos. The film is screened with Amrit Cheng’s OK Boomer, Lillian Xuege Li’s Parklife, and Claire Haughey’s Hidden Costs in addition to a Q&A with the directors.

THE SOCIAL DILEMMA (Jeff Orlowski, 2020)
www.docnyc.net
Available on Netflix, Jeff Orlowski’s The Social Dilemma is a frightening look into the algorithms used by such platforms as Facebook to keep users clicking away, seeing exactly what the site wants you to see. Social media experts go deep into detail, accompanied by fantastical yet goofy staged scenes that reveal how we are all trapped. No matter how bad you might have thought it was, it’s worse.

SONGS OF REPRESSION (Estephan Wagner & Marianne Hougen-Moraga, 2020)
www.docnyc.net
Part of the Winner’s Circle section of DOC NYC, Estephan Wagner and Marianne Hougen-Moraga’s Songs of Repression takes viewers inside Colonia Dignidad (Colony of Dignity), a private community in southern Chile established in 1961 by German ex-pats led by Paul Schäfer. Rebranded Villa Baviera, it is now a tourist destination, not so much for its expansive beauty, but for the horrible things that happened there, particularly the physical and sexual abuse of children, some of whom are now raising their kids there and exploiting the evils perpetrated by Schäfer for profit. One returnee and one resident decide to tell the full truth, but nearly everyone else wants to either remain silent or “forgive and forget,” resulting in a gripping tale that will often have you gasping at what you see and hear.

Keytin takes Elizabeth Lo on an amazing journey in Stray

STRAY (Elizabeth Lo, 2020)
www.docnyc.net/film/stray
www.magpictures.com/stray
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 kids 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 soundtrack mixes a splendid score by Ali Helnwein with snippets of poignant conversation overheard on Keytin’s journeys, accompanied by occasional intertitles with relevant quotes by Diogenes and Themistius. (“Human beings live artificially and hypocritically and would do well to study the dog.”) As I said, Best. Movie. Dog. Ever.

A THOUSAND CUTS (Ramona S. Diaz, 2020)
www.docnyc.net
www.athousandcuts.film
Around the world, freedom of the press is under attack like never before, as authoritarian leaders and dictators attempt to silence their critics and control the narrative by casting the media as the enemy of the people. In A Thousand Cuts, filmmaker Ramona S. Diaz focuses on the Philippines, where President Rodrigo Duterte’s violent war on drugs has widened to include threatening journalists who do not support him: particularly Maria Ressa, the dedicated and relentless founder of the online news site Rappler, which has refused to submit to Duterte’s brutal authority. It’s a frightening film about a remarkable woman who is prepared to fight for the freedom of the press at any cost. You can read my full review here.

TINY TIM: KING FOR A DAY (Johan Von Sydow, 2020)
www.docnyc.net
www.tinytimfilm.com
“When you look at where Herbert Khaury begins and Tiny Tim ends, nothing was ever normal from top to bottom, from start to finish, Tiny Tim biographer Justin A. Martell says in Johan Von Sydow’s Tiny Tim: King for a Day. Through archival footage, interviews with friends and family, animated re-creations, and diary narration ready by “Weird Al” Yankovic, Von Sydow relates the strange tale of Tiny Tim, once the biggest star in the world, plucking away at his ukulele as he sang familiar songs in his unique vibrating falsetto. A friend of mine recently asked on his Facebook page, “Tiny Tim: Good, Bad, or Unimportant?” This documentary might change many of the responses he received.

Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer will discuss Fireball: Visitors from a Darker World live on Facebook on November 11

CONVERSATIONS WITH FILMMAKERS
During the festival, there will be free live half-hour discussions on Facebook, featuring filmmakers, subjects, and other experts digging into the issues explored in the works.

Wednesday, November 11
Fireball: Visitors from a Darker World, with Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer, 1:00

Inside the DOC NYC Short List, with Thom Powers, Basil Tsiokos, and Opal H. Bennett, 2:00

Focus on Shorts, with Opal H. Bennett and Samah Ali, 3:00

Thursday, November 12
Truth to Power: Barbara Lee Speaks for Me, with U.S. Congress members Rep. Barbara Lee (CA), Rep. Karen Bass (CA), and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (MA), moderated by Abby Ginzberg, noon

Los Hermanos/The Brothers, with violinist Joshua Bell, Harlem Quartet member Ilmar Gavilán, and filmmakers Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider, 1:00

Zappa, with filmmaker Alex Winter and film editor Mike J Nichols, 2:00

Dope Is Death, with acupuncturist Juan Cortez and filmmaker Mia Donovan, 3:00

Friday, November 13
The Reason I Jump, with novelist David Mitchell and filmmaker Jerry Rothwell, noon

The Walrus and the Whistleblower, with Phil Demers, Jeff Ventre, and Natalie Bibeau, 1:00

Television Event, with filmmaker Jeff Daniels, 3:00

Saturday, November 14
The Dissident, with chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and filmmaker Bryan Fogel, noon

Through the Night, with director Loira Limbal and Stanley Nelson, 1:00

Restaurant Hustle 2020: All on the Line, with restaurateurs Antonia Lofaso, Marcus Samuelsson, Maneet Chauhan, and Christian Petroni and filmmakers Guy Fieri and Frank Matson, 3:00

Since I Been Down explores incarceration, mandatory sentences, trauma, and rehabilitation through the case of Kimonti Carter

Sunday, November 15
Chasing Childhood, with Long Island superintendent of schools Dr. Michael Hynes, author and Let Grow cofounder Lenore Skenazy, clinical psychologist Catherine Steiner-Adair, and filmmaker Eden Wurmfeld, 1:00

A La Calle, with Acting Americas deputy director of Human Rights Watch Tamara Taraciuk Broner and the Promise Institute for Human Rights executive director Kate Mackintosh, 2:00

Since I Been Down, with philosopher Angela Davis, prosecuting attorney Dan Satterberg, and filmmaker Gilda Sheppard, 3:00

Monday, November 16
The Big Scary “S” Word, with philosopher Cornel West, filmmaker Yael Bridge, and author Astra Taylor, noon

The Mole Agent, with filmmaker Maite Alberdi, producer Marcela Santibáñez, executive producers Julie Goldman and Christopher Clements, and Carolyn Hepburn, 1:00

The Meaning of Hitler, with writer Francine Prose, Hannah Arendt Center head Roger Berkowitz, and filmmakers Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein, 2:00

No Ordinary Man, with filmmakers Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt and memoirist Thomas Page McBee, 3:00

Tuesday, November 17
Calendar Girl, with fashion designer Nicole Miller, New York Fashion Week creator Fern Mallis, former InStyle editor Eric Wilson, director Christian Bruun, and producer Natalie Nudell, noon

Beautiful Something Left Behind, with Joe Primo, Vivian Nunez, Rebecca Soffer, and Carole Geithner, 2:00

Medicine Man: The Stan Brock Story, with Remote Area Medical CEO Jeff Eastman, healthcare reform activist Wendell Potter, and filmmaker Paul Michael Angell, 3:00

Beyond Resilience, with Sahar Driver, Chloe Walters-Wallace, Madeleine Lim, and Miriam Bale, 4:00

Wednesday, November 18
DOC NYC Awards Presentation, noon

Harlem Rising: A Community Changing the Odds, with Harlem Children’s Zone founder Geoffrey Canada, CEO Kwame Owusu Kesse, graduate Amber Deas, board member Stanley Druckenmiller, and senior manager and executive producer Marlene Fox, 1:00

Nasrin, with journalist Jason Rezaian, Reza Khandan, and filmmakers Jeff Kaufman and Marcia Ross, 2:00

Love & Stuff, with filmmaker Judith Helfand, 3:00

Thursday, November 19
IDFA / DOC NYC Dialogue, with Thom Powers and Orwa Nyrabia, noon

Landfall, with filmmaker Cecilia Aldarondo, 1:00

The Last Out, with filmmakers Sami Khan and Michael Gassert, 2:00

In My Own Time: A Portrait of Karen Dalton, with musician Peter Stampfel and others, 3:00

PREMATURE

Isaiah (Joshua Boone) and Ayanna (Zora Howard) fall in love in Rashaad Ernesto Green’s Premature

PREMATURE (Rashaad Ernesto Green, 2019)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, February 21
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

From the first time their eyes meet, you know that Ayanna (Zora Howard) and Isaiah (Joshua Boone) are destined to fall in love in Rashaad Ernesto Green’s sweetly tender and moving Premature. A Sundance hit that was nominated for two Independent Spirit Awards — the John Cassavetes Award for best film made for less than $500,000 and the Someone to Watch Award for Green, whose previous film was 2011’s well-received Bronx-set Gun Hill Road — Premature is an expansion of Green’s 2008 fifteen-minute HBO Grand Jury Prize-winning short that starred Howard as a Bronx teen facing a crisis. Ten years later, longtime friends Green and Howard, who live in the same Harlem neighborhood, teamed up to write the feature-length version of the story, which opens February 21 at IFC. (Green will participate in Q&As at the 8:20 shows on February 21 and 22, joined the first night by Howard.)

The film was shot on location in Harlem primarily around 145th St., where Ayanna, a poet, is spending her last summer before heading off to college. She hangs around with her close group of friends, Shonté (Imani Lewis), Tenita (Alexis Marie Wint), and Jamila (Tashiana Washington), some of whom already have children and who don’t share the dreams of independence that drive Ayanna. Meanwhile, her mother, Sarita (Michelle Wilson), shows only a mild interest in her daughter, instead taking up with a series of men, searching for her own love. Upon meeting the slightly older Isaiah, a music producer dedicated to the legacy of his late jazz musician father, Ayanna at first plays coy, then heads full steam into a relationship with Isaiah, who appears to be more honest and dependable than most of the other guys in the community, who like talking trash and getting it on with any woman in their path. But when Ayanna suddenly faces an unexpected crisis, she has to decide what she wants for herself, her once bright future now possibly in question.

Cowriter and star Zora Howard (second from right) plays a young woman with a bright future in Premature

Premature is beautifully photographed in 16mm by Laura Valladao, giving the film a kind of timelessness, both modern and a throwback to an earlier era, attempting to capture a Harlem that is quickly undergoing gentrification, losing some of its identity; in some ways it is reminiscent of Horace Jenkins’s recently discovered and restored 1982 indie gem Cane River, in which a young woman about to go to college falls in love with a slightly older man who wants to be a poet, although Premature is far more accomplished in both storytelling and acting, has a feminist perspective, and purposely steps aside from issues of race, politics, and the legacy of slavery. Instead, Green and Howard, a playwright whose Stew closes at Walkerspace on February 22, focus purely on the love story between two black people who are practically living in a private dream world, as if their relationship exists on its own plane.

Their Harlem is not the one you usually see onscreen; it’s not a spoiler to say that there is no crime or violence in Premature, no side plots of drugs, prostitution, clashes with law enforcement, or other stereotypical sociocultural elements that usually creep into such narratives. Yet the gentle, sensitively told Premature, with a lively score that features Dave Eggar on solo cello and a mix of song styles from diverse musicians, is as much about Harlem and its black community as it is about a man and a woman who might be destined for each other. The film slips as it reaches its conclusion, stretching the limits of credulity as it devolves into a sentimentality and cliché it wisely avoids otherwise, but it also includes an unforgettable scene when the dreadlocked Ayanna takes a pair of scissors to her hair, a defining moment for the character and the movie itself. Green and Howard sought to make a different kind of black love story set in New York City, and that’s exactly what they have done, to all our benefit.

ONCE WERE BROTHERS: ROBBIE ROBERTSON & THE BAND

Documentary explores the history and legacy of the Band from a singular point of view

ONCE WERE BROTHERS: ROBBIE ROBERTSON & THE BAND (Daniel Roher, 2019)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, February 21
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

The opening night selection of the tenth annual DOC NYC festival, Daniel Roher’s Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson & the Band is an intimate, if completely one-sided, look inside one of the greatest, most influential music groups in North American history. The film was inspired by Band cofounder Robbie Robertson’s 2016 memoir, Testimony, offering his take on the Band’s ups and downs, famous battles, and ultimate breakup. “I don’t know of any other group of musicians with a story equivalent to the story of the Band, and it was a beautiful thing. It was so beautiful it went up in flames,” Robertson, sitting in a chair in a vast, empty room, guitars hanging on the wall far behind him, says. The setup puts the focus on Robertson’s individuality, his alone-ness, in what others trumpet as a collection of extraordinary musicians. “There is no band that emphasizes coming together and becoming greater than the sum of their parts, than the Band. Simply their name: The Band. That was it,” fan Bruce Springsteen says. “I was in great awe of their brotherhood. It was the soul of the Band,” notes Eric Clapton, who says he wanted to join the group made up of singer-songwriter and guitarist Robertson, singer and bassist Rick Danko, singer and keyboardist Richard Manuel, singer and drummer Levon Helm, and keyboardist and accordionist Garth Hudson.

When Robertson, who was born in Toronto in 1943, talks about his childhood — his mother was born on the Six Nations of the Grand River Indian reserve, which had a profound effect on him musically, and his biological father was a Jewish gangster, although he was raised by an abusive stepfather — the film is revelatory, with archival photographs and live footage of Robertson’s early bands and his time with Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks. Robertson shares mesmerizing anecdotes about going electric with Bob Dylan, recording the Basement Tapes in a house called Big Pink, and discussing his craft. “I don’t have much of a process of like I’m thinking about this, and now I’m going to write a song and it’s gonna be about that,” he explains. “A lot of times, the creative process is trying to catch yourself off guard. And you sit down and you’ve got a blank canvas and you don’t know what you’re gonna do and you just see what happens.”

Hawkins speaks glowingly of his protégé Robertson, who wrote his first songs for Hawkins when he was only fifteen. Roher also talks to executive producer Martin Scorsese, Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, record producer John Simon, road manager Jonathan Taplin, equipment manager Bill Scheele, photographer John Scheele, Asylum Records creator David Geffen, and musicians Dylan, Taj Mahal, Peter Gabriel, Van Morrison, and Jimmy Vivino, who all rave about Robertson and the Band. “They were totally in love with their music, and they were in love with each other,” photographer Elliott Landy says. “I never saw any jealousy, I never saw any arguments, I never saw them disagree. They were always supporting each other. They were five brothers, very clearly five brothers who loved each other, and I never saw anything but that.”

Of course, Roher cannot talk to Manuel, Danko, and Helm, who are all dead, and Hudson did not participate in the documentary. Robertson and his wife, Dominique, paint a harrowing picture of the Band’s severe strife as drugs and alcohol tear them apart. There’s really no one, aside from a brief point made by guitarist Larry Campbell, to offer an opposing view to Robertson’s tale, which puts him on a golden throne despite some very public disagreements, particularly with Helm over songwriting credit and royalties. Robertson speaks enthusiastically and intelligently throughout the film, but it’s clear from the get-go that these are his carefully constructed, perhaps selective memories about what happened. But Roher doesn’t disguise that conceit; the film is named after one of Robertson’s solo songs, and the second half of the title is, after all, Robbie Robertson & the Band, as if Robertson is separate from the rest.

One of the main surprises is Robertson’s claim that the Last Waltz concert at Winterland in 1976 was not meant as a farewell but just a pause; Roher and Robertson fail to point out that the group continued to tour and record without Robertson. On his sixth solo album, Sinematic, which was released last September, Robertson has a song about the Band, the aforementioned “Once Were Brothers,” that can be heard at the start of the film. “Oh, once were brothers / Brothers no more / We lost a connection / After the war / There’ll be no revival / There’ll be no one cold / Once were brothers / Brothers no more,” Robertson sings. “When that curtain comes down / We’ll let go of the past / Tomorrow’s another day / Some things weren’t meant to last.” It’s a sad testament to a storied legacy, packed with amazing photos and live clips that make it a must-see for fans of the group. Once Were Brothers opens at IFC on February 21, with music photographer Elliott Landy, who appears in the film, participating in a Q&A at the 7:45 show Friday night.

DOC NYC 2019: SCHOOL OF SEDUCTION / ELLIOTT ERWITT — SILENCE SOUNDS GOOD / FOR SAMA

School of Seduction: 3 Stories from Russia follows three women learning how to snare a man

SCHOOL OF SEDUCTION: 3 STORIES FROM RUSSIA (Alina Rudnitskaya, 2019)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Saturday, November 9, 9:15
Festival runs November 6-15
www.docnyc.net

In 2009, Russian filmmaker Alina Rudnitskaya made the short film Bitch Academy, about a school where a man taught women of all ages how to attract potential husbands the old-fashioned way, by flaunting their sexuality and playing dumb. She has now expanded that into the full-length feature documentary School of Seduction: 3 Stories from Russia, making its North American debut at IFC Center as part of the DOC NYC festival. Rudnitskaya follows three women over seven years as they take the workshop run by Vladimir Rakovsky and then apply what they’ve learned to their life, with varying degrees of success. Rakovsky, a former 911 hotline worker who is not exactly a smooth-talking Romeo or Don Juan — he actually talks and acts like someone you might avoid on the subway — teaches the women how to bend over, how to wiggle their butts, and how to jump in a man’s arms and turn him on. “What did you think it was about? The psychological aspects of gender politics in modern society?” he says, defending his techniques, which are questionable at best in the twenty-first century (or any time, really). But there is a severe shortage of available men in Russia, so he convinces the eager women that they need to play this game in order to snag a wealthy suitor, that they are not able to survive in this world on their own.

“What a nightmare!” Lida Lodigenskaya declares about Rakovsky’s ideals. Lida lives with her mother and is in love with a married father of two. She is combative and determined, sure that he will eventually leave his wife; surprisingly, he allows himself to be filmed with Lida despite his personal situation. Vika Sitnik is in a lackluster marriage and is in the process of opening a lingerie store in a mall. She suffers from anxiety, sharing her fears with a psychologist. Her mother does not understand her crisis, stuck in the old ways. “I feel bad inside,” Vika says as she reaches a turning point in her life. Diana Belova is a single mother whose parents threw her out of the house so she lives with her grandmother. She makes the most out of the workshop, creating a fake, fanciful existence built on attractiveness and elegance. “I believe in fairy tales,” she says as she meets a series of men, not searching for true love but for someone who will be able to give her the upper-crust life she feels she deserves. “I need to be the best,” she explains.

Rudnitskaya is not making fun of any of these people but rather focusing on the difficulty women are having finding the right person to share their life. They have been reduced to becoming kewpie dolls to catch and keep a man, which is both sad and heartbreaking to watch. The film is screening on November 9 at 9:15, with executive producers Sigrid Jonsson Dyekjær, Eva Mulvad, and Rose Grönkjær in attendance to talk about the film.

ELLIOTT ERWITT — SILENCE SOUNDS GOOD (Adriana Lopez Sanfeliu, 2019)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Sunday, November 10, 4:30
www.docnyc.net

“I hate to give explanations,” photographer Elliott Erwitt says in Adriana Lopez Sanfeliu’s lighthearted Elliott Erwitt — Silence Sounds Good, having its North American premiere November 10 at IFC Center as part of the DOC NYC festival. Sanfeliu, a protégé of Erwitt’s, follows her mentor around the world for two years as he goes through his vast archives; exercises in his Manhattan apartment overlooking the park; returns to Cuba for a new book and exhibition and meets former ballerina and choreographer Alicia Alonso, who passed away last month at the age of ninety-eight; snaps pictures on the street at the spur of the moment; and shows some of his iconic images, including photos of presidents and popes, a series on dogs (especially one that steals his heart in Cuba), a photo of segregated drinking fountains in North Carolina, and others that reveal his innate sense of composition. But he doesn’t have a lot to say about them; “I’m not very good about talking about pictures,” he notes at an illustrated lecture.

Now eighty-nine, Erwitt, who was born in France, moved to Italy when he was three, then came to the United States when he was ten, has a dry, self-effacing sense of humor, although he has a tremendous amount of fun taking unusual self-portraits. Sanfeliu often lets her camera linger on him as he sits quietly, with nothing more to say, preferring to let his work speak for itself. “Photography is about having a point of view, nothing else,” he says. “With calm, but also with passion. But without making too much noise about it. It’s the photo which must make noise.” When he does pontificate, he has a tendency to come up with some doozies. “I don’t think anything is serious,” he says. “Nothing is serious, and everything is serious. . . . Well, it’s one of those conundrums. You might say that I’m serious about not being serious.” Erwitt will be at the DOC NYC screening to perhaps talk about it — he does appreciate his silence — along with Sanfeliu, producer François Bertrand, editor Scott Stevenson, and writer Mark Monroe. Preceding it is Tasha Van Zandt’s fourteen-minute short One Thousand Stories: The Making of a Mural, about JR’s video mural project, The Chronicles of San Francisco.

Waad al-Kateab documents daily life under constant bombardment in Aleppo in For Sama

FOR SAMA (Waad al-Kateab & Edward Watts, 2019)
Cinepolis Chelsea
260 West 23rd St.
Sunday, November 10, 11:00 am
Monday, November 11, 1:25
www.docnyc.net
www.forsamafilm.com

“You’re the most beautiful thing in our life, but what a life I’ve brought you into. You didn’t choose this. Will you ever forgive me?” Waad al-Kateab asks in the extraordinary documentary For Sama. In 2012 during the Arab Spring, Waad, a marketing student at Aleppo University, joined the protests against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. She started taking photos and cell-phone video, then got a film camera as she became a citizen journalist, documenting the escalating conflict, trying to find moments of joy amid the brutal, senseless murders of innocent men, women, and children. She met and fell in love with heroic doctor Hamza al-Kateab, who was determined to keep his hospital running as the bombings got closer. Waad and Hamza got married, and on January 1, 2016, she gave birth to a healthy girl, Sama.

The film, directed by Waad (who also served as cinematographer and producer) and Edward Watts (Escape from ISIS), is a poignant, unflinching confession from mother to daughter, explaining in graphic detail what the families of Aleppo are going through as Russian and Syrian forces and Islamic extremists maintain a constant attack. “We never thought the world would let this happen,” Waad explains as the body count rises — which she intimately shows, not shying away from shots of bloodied victims being brought into the hospital, a pile of dead children, or a desperate attempt to save the life of a mother and a newborn after an emergency caesarean. “I keep filming. It gives me a reason to be here. It makes the nightmares feel worthwhile,” Waad says.

She captures bombings as they happen, films families huddled inside their homes while machine guns can be heard outside, talks to a child who says he wants to be an architect when he grows up so he can rebuild Aleppo. Because she is a woman, Waad gains access to other women that would not be available to a male filmmaker as they share their stories of love and despair. Waad and Hamza plant a lovely garden to bring color to the dank, brown and gray city. A snowfall covers the turmoil in a beautiful sheet of white. The pitter-patter of rain offers a brief respite. But everything eventually gets destroyed as Waad and Hamza struggle with the choice of leaving with Sama or staying to continue their critical roles in the rebellion, she depicting the personal, heart-wrenching images of war — in 2016, her Inside Aleppo reports aired on British television — he tending to the ever-increasing wounded. “The happiness you brought was laced with fear,” Waad tells Sama in voiceover narration. “Our new life with you felt so fragile, as the freedom we felt in Aleppo.” Winner of the Prix L’Œil d’Or for Best Documentary at Cannes among other awards, For Sama is screening at Cinepolis Chelsea on November 10 and 11 as part of the DOC NYC festival, with director Waad al-Kateab, codirector Edward Watts, and subject Dr. Hamza al-Kateab expected to attend to discuss the film.

MOUNTAINTOP

Neil Young goes behind-the-scenes of the recording of Colorado in new documentary

MOUNTAINTOP (Bernard Shakey, 2019)
IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St., 212-924-7771, 7:30
Landmark at 57 West, 657 West 57th St. at Twelfth Ave., 646-233-1615, 7:30
Nitehawk Cinema Williamsburg, 136 Metropolitan Ave., 9:45
One night only: Tuesday, October 22
mountaintopthemovie.com

Neil Young invites viewers behind the scenes of the making of his latest album, Colorado, in the documentary Mountaintop, playing in theaters one night only on October 22 in advance of the October 25 release of the record, the first he’s done with his longtime band Crazy Horse since 2012’s Psychedelic Pill. Directed by Young’s filmmaking alter ego, Bernard Shakey, Mountaintop takes place over the course of eleven days in the Studio in the Clouds in the San Juan Mountains outside Telluride, about nine thousand feet above sea level, where four old white guys come together to make some grand rockin’ music about love and climate change. “You might say I’m an old white guy / I’m an old white guy / You might say that,” Young sings on “She Showed Me Love,” about the attempted murder of Mother Nature. The seventy-three-year-old Canadian legend is joined by seventy-five-year-old bassist Billy Talbot and seventy-six-year-old drummer Ralph Molina — the two surviving original Crazy Horse members, who first played with Young on 1969’s Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere — and sixty-eight-year-old guitar virtuoso Nils Lofgren, who was eighteen when he played guitar and piano on Young’s 1970 solo record, After the Gold Rush. (Coincidentally, Lofgren’s other boss, seventy-year-old Bruce Springsteen, is releasing his documentary about his latest album, Western Stars, on Friday.) Early on, the band says they are having an “oxygen party” to keep them going, passing around tanks like bongs. “It’s old guys; young souls still alive in old souls and the music they make together,” Young writes on his website about the film. It’s hard not to laugh when you see the size of the type on the lyric sheets these old guys are using.

“Right now it’s a piece of fucking gold. It’s original fucking greatness,” Young says of the big-sounding “Rainbow of Colors.” After the calmer “House of Love,” on which Young plays piano and harmonica and Lofgren tap-dances, he says, “It doesn’t have to be good; just be great. You know, just feel good.” Young lives up to his billing as the Godfather of Grunge on the punk-infused “Help Me Lose My Mind”; Lofgren refers to Young’s singing on the track as “reckless narration with pitch,” which gets a chuckle out of Young, who is serious and ornery most of the time, understandably unhappy with the monitors (ironically, mostly on the song “Shut It Down”) and other details of the recording process, and he lets his longtime producer and engineer, John Hanlon, know it again and again. Hanlon, a coffee addict who is suffering from poison oak on his hand, has a meltdown at one point, screaming, “This is the most fucked-up studio I’ve ever fucking worked in in my life. . . I’m about ready to leave this fucking project, okay?” He demands that all cameras be removed from the studio and that the scene of him yelling and cursing not appear in the film, but. . . .

mountaintop

Young, who as Shakey has directed or codirected Rust Never Sleeps, The Monsanto Years, Human Highway, Journey through the Past, and Greendale, and cinematographer C. K. Vollick leave the studio to show time-lapse shots of the snowy mountains, bright stars, and rolling clouds outside, primarily on “Green Is Blue,” a piano ballad about climate change. There are also snippets of Young performing at one of his solo acoustic concerts, where he surrounds himself with a circle of guitars. He employs split screens, a fish-eye lens (think the cover of Ragged Glory), a handheld camera, and one mounted on the floor to mix things up. Lofgren plays the pump organ and an accordion, Young plays the vibes and a glass harmonica, and the four men gather to sing lofty background harmonies. Amid all the technical problems — “I love singing in a wet sock,” Young says about the sound — he and Crazy Horse prove they still have it after half a century, particularly when they turn it up on the majestic “Milky Way,” which borrows generously from “Cowgirl in the Sands,” and the hard-rocking “She Showed Me Love.” “We’re gonna do it / Just like we did back then,” Lofgren, Molina, and Talbot sing on “I Do.” Mountaintop is an irresistible fly-on-the-wall doc about the creative process, about collaboration and genius, about all the little things that can go wrong — and delightfully right — in the making of great art, in this case by a bunch of old white guys trying to save the planet, one song at a time.

DON’T BE NICE

Bowery Poetry Slam prepare for national championships in Don’t Be Nice

DON’T BE NICE (Max Powers, 2018)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, September 20
212-924-7771
www.dontbenicemovie.com
www.ifccenter.com

“I’m writing as a form of activism,” Joel Francois says in Max Powers’s Don’t Be Nice, an intense and inspiring fly-on-the-wall documentary that follows the Bowery Slam poetry team over nine weeks as it prepares for the national finals in Atlanta. Representing Bowery Poetry Club, Francois, Ashley August, Noel Quiñones, Timothy DuWhite, and Sean MEGA DesVignes, are in it to win it, led by coaches Lauren Whitehead and Jon Sands, who work hard to get the most out of each of them. Sands is more of a cheerleader as Whitehead pressures the multiracial poets to reach deep within themselves to get to the root of who they are as they write about their often tenuous place in a dangerous and difficult world, sharing thoughts and feelings from their core. Filmed in the summer of 2016, Don’t Be Nice explores issues of race, class, sexual orientation, physical and emotional abuse, violence, and gender without apology as the members of the team bare their souls, particularly relating to racial injustice and the whitewashing of black culture as a stunning number of black men are killed by white police officers that year.

It’s not always easy to watch as they confront their demons in the name of their art — and in so doing challenge viewers to face their own biases with such works as “This Body,” “Octoniggas,” “Black Love,” “Black Ghosts,” and “Who Am I.” Powers also includes performances by rival teams from Brooklyn, Jersey City, San Diego, and Dallas, revealing the universality of these feelings and the desire to change things. “Don’t be nice; be necessary,” one of the poets says, while another asks, “What can I do with three minutes, a couple of mics, and a bare stage?” Don’t Be Nice opens September 20 at IFC and will feature a series of nightly postscreening Q&As through September 26 with Powers, producer Nikhil Melnechuk, editor David Lieberman, director of photography Peter Buntaine, casting director Caroline Sinclair, and others, moderated by Sarah Doneghy, John Buffalo Mailer, Randall Dottin, Otoja Abit, Michel Negroponte, and Randy Jones of the Village People. None of the Bowery Slam poets are scheduled to appear, perhaps because, according to a May 2018 New York Times article, they were upset at some of the creative decisions made by Powers involving offensive and misleading material regarding racial divide.