Screening venues to include local art houses, theaters and concert halls throughout the city
NYFF61 brings America’s preeminent festival experience to theaters, art houses and concert halls in all five-city boroughs to further create a broader and more diverse audience than ever.
Oscar-winning British director Steve McQueen, whose 12 Years a Slave elevated the artistic level of Black storytelling through film, brings to NYFF61’s Spotlight selections the searing four-hour-and-a-half-hour documentary Occupied City. A joint U.K. and Netherlands production, the film mounts an unflinching visual commentary on the disgraceful legacy of the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam during World War II. Rather than relying on archival footage and historical interviews, McQueen takes the ingenious step of constructing the film using a mix of newly captured images of the city, many shot during the COVID lockdown, linking them to the words and reflections of modern-day actors and journalists, reading poems and journals written during the period and today. McQueen’s penetrating work draws a sobering parallel between the horrors of yesterday’s Nazi atrocities and the current rise of White Nationalism, anti Semitism, and Right-Wing ideology.
Bradley Cooper’s Spotlight Gala is Maestro, the dramatization of the intense private and public lives of America’s most towering musical figure of the past century, Leonard Bernstein. It was Bernstein who brought classical music into the living rooms of ordinary Americans through his long-running TV lectures and concerts on PBS and CBS in the 1950s and ’60s. His Young People’s Concerts brought to the attention of the world a 16-year-old prodigy named Andre Watts, who became the world’s first major Black piano soloist on the concert stage.
Cooper’s directorial follow-up to A Star Is Born, Maestro plunges the viewer into the tumultuous world of a newly regenerating post World War II America, with its crosscurrents of newfound prosperity and opportunity for minorities, such as Bernstein, who was a left-wing, Gay Jew and the contradictory forces of anti Semitism, anti-Communist McCarthyism and violent Homophobia. At the center of this emotional whirlwind is the deeply personal devotion within the decades-long relationship between Bernstein and his stunningly beautiful and equally brilliant wife, Felicia. Their complex and tightly woven relationship was compounded by the competing demands of his fame, outspoken social commentary, and his overriding desire for personal sexual expression. Like its subject, Maestro is a tour de force of dramatic and musical exuberance.
Opening Night Main Slate is the North American Premiere of director Todd Haynes’ May December starring Natalie Portman as a popular television star attempting to insinuate herself into the lives of the tabloid sensation couple of Gracie (the esteemed Julianne Moore) and her nearly decades younger husband Joe (Charles Melton). The film examines the complex flashpoints of modern culture fueled by a media obsessed with celebrity and the personal trauma it brings.
Oscar winner Sophia Coppola brings to the Main Slate the North American Premiere of her latest film Priscilla, an intimate portrait the love affair and marriage of the teen-aged Priscilla to America’s most famous and enigmatic heartthrob, Elvis. The film explores the complexity of their marriage within the unblinking eye of tabloid paparazzi publicity and a young woman’s struggle to secure a foothold in the world of celebrity at a time when she was barely on the threshold of adulthood.
Also, among the Spotlight presentations is Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project. This absorbing Sundance-awarded documentary follows the legendary Black poet, playwright, and activist as she approaches 80. Directors Joe Brewster and Michele Stephenson delve into her philosophical journey into Afrofuturist-feminism and her deeply rooted relationship with her family. It is a film that is at once bodacious and elegant, just like its subject.
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is the genre defying directorial debut of emerging U.S. film voice Raven Jackson. In a visual collage, Jackson combines strikingly beautiful images of rural Mississippi with sounds that reflect the inner monologue of a young, Black woman struggling mightily to tell her story against all odds.
Mack tries to forge connections between the disparate elements of her personal life as it vacillates between moments of profound grace and deep despair. With almost no dialogue between the central characters, All Dirt Roads manages to deliver a powerful message that speaks directly to the audience through the language of the heart.
Screenings of this film are entirely sold out at NYFF61. The best opportunity to see this gem of cinematic art is in Black Perspectives at the upcoming 59th Chicago International Film Festival October 11-22. Visitchicagofilmfestival.com for information.
Among the more charming films I previewed at NYFF61 is the Cameroon/Belgian Currents offering Mambar Pierrette. This touching cinematic portrait, shot entirely in the city of Douala in Cameroon, charts the heart-rending ups and downs of a local seamstress trying desperately to survive in a world in which almost everything; economic circumstance, family life, love relationships and even Lady Luck itself seemed to have turned their collective back to her. One particularly heart-rending scene shows her sweeping up the remnants of fabric show was using to craft ceremonial gowns for her customers that had been ruined by flood waters that invaded her humble shop.
This exquisitely woven tapestry of local life, tells the story of Mambar, played by director Rosine Mbakam’s cousin, the charming novice Pierrette Aboheu Njeuthat, in her first acting role. As Mambar, she creates elaborate, colorful gowns she for local women to celebrate engagements, weddings, births, Coming of Age, and other milestones in their lives. This lofty calling is in direct contrast to the drabness and uncertainty of the life she leads. Her existence is literally and figuratively hanging by a thread.
Burdened with caring for an aging, disabled mother, and trying to raise three growing adolescent boys with a neglectful, deadbeat common-law husband in the middle distance, Mambar struggles to fend for herself and provide for her family. At every turn, the deck is stacked against her. At one point, she arrives at her shop penny-less, only to discover that her sewing machines, her only lifeline, had seemingly been stolen.
Victimized by an uncaring, faceless system, which reduces her to begging for a few dollars to buy her children’s school supplies, to the local hustlers who prey upon she and other women of her lowly stature, to the abusive father of her children, who cares nothing for their well-being unless forced by local authorities, her life is an unabashed mess.
Yet, out of this mired stew of mishaps and thwarted opportunities, Mambar manages to find a glimmer of hope and inner strength, which she happily shares with her sisters who are kindred spirits.
Her humble shanty of a shop serves as a sort of refuge, confessional and empowerment zone for the local women who are similarly thwarted by lost hopes and shattered dreams.
Mambar’s empathetic words in which she finds life- lessons in their shared experience, serves to mend together their tattered souls, just her shop-worn hands seam the scraps of fabric she sweeps up from the floor into things of beauty. To learn more about this and other films in NYFF61 visit filmlinc.org.