The 50th Dance on Camera Festival: Decades of Dancing

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Thursday, 13 January 2022 16:05

Written by Brad Balfour

The longest running dance film festival in the world just keeps on going as the 50th Dance on Camera Festival hits Lincoln Center. Running February 11 to the 14th, at the Walter Reade Theater (165 West 65th St.) with a slate of 32 films. “This year’s Dance on Camera Festival not only honors the festival’s half-century history, but also looks forward to the vast artistic potential of the festival’s future,” said Co-Curator Liz Wolff. “This year we’ll spotlight emerging artists from around the globe.”

The festival opens with the World Premiere of The Moment Remains directed by Turkish filmmaker Ebru Şeremetli. In the film a dancer returns to her homeland and faces feelings of unease as she works to hone her craft amidst prevailing darkness.

In Mahålang, Chamorro Filipino choreographer and dancer Caili Quan pays tribute to the family and culture of Guam that sparked her love of music and inspired her dream of dancing. Quan explores her own heritage through memories and conversations with her family, with each dance inspired by a different facet of Guam’s culture.

The Nangiarkoothu Artist is a documentary dance portrait of an ethnic artist from Kerala, India. A hybrid piece, this film uses a multi-narrative approach, employing modes of traditional storytelling and a staged dance performance to create a poetic profile of Aparna Nangiar, a young exponent of classical Nangiarkoothu, who practices and teaches the 2,000-year-old

The festival also includes a slate of short films from around the world. Closing the fest is a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Bob Fosse classic Cabaret, with the film being screened in 35mm.

To learn more, go to: https://www.danceoncamerafestival.org/

The 50th Dance on Camera Festival
February 11 - 14, 2022

Film at Lincoln Center - Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St.
New York, NY 10023

History & Humanity at the New York Jewish Film Festival 2022

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Published on Tuesday, 11 January 2022 16:56

Written by Brad Balfour

Now in its 31st installment, the New York Jewish Film Festival 2022 showcases films from around the world that embody the Jewish experience. Running January 12 to the 25th at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater (165 West 65th Street) as well as some films streamed online, the festival mixes narrative features, shorts, and documentaries from around the world.

The Opening film is Neighbours, in which a young boy and his family live in a Kurdish community near the Syrian/Turkish border in the early 1980s. He’s extremely fond of his Jewish neighbors, but perplexed when a new teacher propagates fiery nationalism and antisemitism. Director Mano Khalil (Die Schwalbe) mines childhood experiences with a welcome sense of humor while drawing parallels with contemporary refugee crises.

The Centerpiece film is Sin La Habana, winner of the award for Best Canadian Film at the 2021 Vancouver International Film Festival. In the film, a salsa dance instructor and his girlfriend, a lawyer, seek to escape Cuba by any means, ensnaring an Iranian-Jewish woman in their plot. Writer/director/composer Kaveh Nabatian, himself Iranian-Canadian, offers a lyrical and deeply felt meditation on cross-cultural relationships, with their attendant gulfs of religion and background, further complicated by the hidden agendas of all concerned parties.

As part of a special screening, the NYJFF will also present the World Premiere of the new 4K digital restoration of Steve Brands’ Kaddish, an engaging chronicle of a Hungarian Holocaust survivor’s son that reveals 1980s New York and activist Yossi Klein Halevi in his formative years.

In Rose, by Aurélie Saada, a 78-year-old Parisian woman, played by iconic French actress Françoise Fabian (My Night at Maud’s, Belle de Jour) , rebels against ageist and sexist stereotypes to reinvent herself.

Set on Wall Street in 2008, A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff offers a singularly creative perspective on financial fraud as musician/poet Alicia Jo Rabins plays herself, obsessing over Madoff and the capitalist system that enabled him.

The essay film, The Will to See, grew out of writer, activist, and philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy’s journalistic coverage of places where human suffering predominates. Journeying from Mogadishu, Somalia, “a ghost town abandoned to the warlords,” to Nigeria, where Christians are massacred with impunity, Lévy spotlights locations the world cannot afford to keep ignoring.

In addition, the festival includes the special program: Tribute to Pearl Bowser (presented virtually), focusing on the celebrated film scholar, author, archivist, educator, activist, filmmaker, and independent distributor. Harlem-raised Pearl Bowser is a stalwart champion of independent film and filmmakers of color. Alongside her late colleagues, psychologist and artist Mel Roman, and Charles Hobson, producer-writer at ABC-TV, Bowser researched and curated a landmark retrospective at the Jewish Museum in 1970 called “The Black Film,” igniting a new wave of enduring interest in exhibiting, producing, and engaging with African American cinema beyond borders. She has spent her multifaceted career cultivating audiences for marginalized voices in motion pictures, particularly with her groundbreaking work on early 1900s Black film pioneer Oscar Micheaux. This virtual tribute program includes a recent short-film interview with Bowser and several films, including Body and Soul (1925) by Oscar Micheaux, which features Paul Robeson in his acting debut.

To learn more, go to: https://www.filmlinc.org/festivals/new-york-jewish-film-festival/

New York Jewish Film Festival 2022
January 12 - 25, 2022

Online & The Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St.
New York, NY 10023

Museum of the Moving Image Showcases Currators' Choice Films of 2021

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Published on Thursday, 09 December 2021 21:27

Written by Brad Balfour

Thuso Mbedu in Barry Jenkins's THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD (2021); screening as part of Curators' Choice 2021

The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens will be screening the best films of 2021, hand picked by their curators. The Curators’ Choice 2021 series runs from December 19 2021 to January 16, 2022. The films were  selected by Curator of Film Eric Hynes and Assistant Curator Edo Choi, with 30 selections spanning family friendly fare (The Mitchells Vs The Machines), to the daring and taboo (Benedetta, The Underground Railroad).

“The first iteration since 2019, following a pandemic-dictated hiatus, Curators’ Choice 2021 evidences a year of stunning ambition, excellence, experimentation, irreverence, liberation, and fury. While 2021 was a challenging year for the movies, with Hollywood and audiences gradually returning to theaters, it’s been a wildly exciting time for international, independent, and festival-oriented films,” said Hynes.

The series also offers the opportunity to revisit four films the Museum previously released in Virtual Cinema and present them in a theatrical setting: Shatara Michelle Ford’s Test Pattern (with Ford in person), Midi Z’s Nina Wu, Lili Horvát’s Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time, and Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection.

Films being screened include:

• Terra Femme
  Dir. Courtney Stephens
   
• Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time
  Dir. Lili Horvát.
   
• The Underground Railroad: The Complete Series
  Dir. Barry Jenkins
   
• Benedetta
  Dir. Paul Verhoeven
   
• Undine
  Dir. Christian Petzold
   
• All About My Sisters
  Dir. Wang Qiong
   
• The French Dispatch
  Dir. Wes Anderson
   
• This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection
  Dir. Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese
   
• Drive My Car
  Dir. Ryūsuke Hamaguchi

And more!

To learn more, go to: http://www.movingimage.us/

Curators’ Choice 2021
December 19, 2021- January 16, 2022

Museum of the Moving Image
36-01 35th Avenue
Queens, NY 11106