Film directed by Maia Wechsler opens in New York April 26 and LA a week later, with national release to follow
On the 100th anniversary of dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham's birth, a clip has been released from a new documentary that celebrates his work.
If the Dancer Dances, directed by Maia Wechsler and produced by Wechsler and Lise Friedman, opens in New York on Friday, April 26 and the following Friday, May 3, in Los Angeles. A national release will follow (more information here). "If the Dancer Dances invites viewers into the intimate world of the dance studio," according to a press release about the documentary. "Stephen Petronio, one of today’s leading dance-makers, is determined to help his dancers breathe new life into RainForest (1968), an iconic work by the legendary choreographer Merce Cunningham. With help from three members of the former Cunningham company, the film tracks Petronio’s dancers as they strive to re-stage this great work, revealing what it takes to keep a dance – and a legacy – alive." The dance studio is a private and mysterious place. If the Dancer Dances grants us rare access, bringing us into the studio to watch the staging of a Merce Cunningham masterwork on the Stephen Petronio Company.
The documentary has won praise from no less a figure than Mikhail Baryshnikov.
"The dance studio is a private and mysterious place. If the Dancer Dances grants us rare access, bringing us into the studio to watch the staging of a Merce Cunningham masterwork on the Stephen Petronio Company," Baryshnikov has said. "It's the tracking of this intimate process, a dance being passed one body to another, that makes this film a great gift." Watch the new clip below. The trailer is posted beneath the clip. Four-hour long film by Anand Patwardhan takes on 'casteism and Hindutva, the ideology of Hindu nationalism' The Audience Award at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles has gone to Reason, a documentary by Anand Patwardhan that directly addresses the disturbing rise of Hindu nationalism in India. The prize was announced as the 17th edition of the festival wrapped on Sunday at Regal L.A. Live in downtown Los Angeles. Patwardhan was present to receive the honor, as was the winner of the Grand Jury Prize, which went to the narrative feature Widow of Silence. "Divided into eight chapters and told over four hours, Patwardhan surveys the history of and contemporary struggle against casteism and Hindutva, the ideology of Hindu nationalism," the festival notes in its program. Since 2014... Indian politicians have normalized hardline Hindu nationalism through draconian cow protection laws, the renaming of cities with Muslim names, and the appointment of extremist Hindu nationalists to powerful positions. Populism and nativism have become an increasingly stark feature of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government, which came to power in 2014. As such, the movement presaged the nativist/populist message of Donald Trump, elected as U.S. president two years later. (The push to define India as a Hindu state, meanwhile, finds an echo in Israeli politics where the subject of how Israel defines itself -- as either a pluralistic democracy or a Jewish state -- is a critical issue). "While many Hindu nationalists claim an ancient history of Hindu ascension and power, Patwardhan examines the political, colonialist roots of this belief and the equally profound history of liberation and commitment to the values of democracy and secularism championed by the leaders and current day activists for a free, non-religious India," the festival writes of Reason. "He shows this conflict as one of literal life and death, from political assassinations to lynchings, for the very soul of the nation, with tentacles that reach nearly every level of life and society." Prize winners at the 17th Annual Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles. L-R Praveen Morchhale, director of "Widow of Silence"; Shazia Iqbal, director of "Babeek (Dying Wind in Her Hair)", and Anand Patwardhan, director of "Reason." Los Angeles, Sunday, April 14, 2019. Photo by Javeed Shaik/courtesy Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles Watch excerpts from Reason here: Uzzle's talent and humanity shine through in film by Jethro Waters A great photograph invites contemplation. Photographer Burk Uzzle's work somehow goes a step further, ushering the viewer into a meditative state. The pulse quiets, the mind clears of distraction when looking at a Burk Uzzle picture. In his photos of mourners after the death of Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, one studies the faces -- of Coretta Scott King and the couple's young sons, but also of the nameless men and women absorbing his loss. That quality of both arresting time and the viewer's attention has remained consistent throughout Uzzle's career, which began more than 65 years ago. The full breadth of his contributions -- from the 1960s until today -- comes into frame in the new documentary F11 and Be There by filmmaker Jethro Waters. It just played at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina, and screens this Saturday at the River Run International Film Festival in Winston-Salem, NC. "He was the youngest photographer hired by Life magazine when he was 23, in 1964 I think it was," Waters tells Nonfictionfim.com. "And he's been working since he was about 12, actually, as a professional photographer, taking pictures for the Raleigh News and Observer. He was delivering the paper while taking photographs for the paper on a little box camera when he was a kid." His work at Woodstock in 1969 helped immortalize that event, and he took powerful images as a war photographer in Vietnam and Cambodia, documenting the impact of the violence on soldiers and civilians. What is even more remarkable about Uzzle is that he has made extraordinary photographs in every area of the photographic medium. "When I met him I realized that he had mastered documentary photography, street photography, waiting for the 'perfect moment' to happen. And that comes as a result of him having a really innate skill for that, for knowing what to wait for, and also him being under Henri Cartier-Bresson and being directly colleagues with people like that," Waters explains. "There's this 'laying in wait' vérité style to him in documentary photography that he just nails." There are fascinating scenes in F11 and Be There as Uzzle closely examines masterworks by famed painters -- ostensibly a different medium than photography, and yet he detects ways in which the masters demonstrated a photographic eye. "There's this side of him that's this conceptual artist where he's studied fine art for a long time and then goes into the studio and it's all conceptual," Waters observes. "There is no 'waiting for something to happen,' until he gets his subject in there... He goes and spends days or a week or something with his subjects, hanging out with them and immersing himself as he learned to do in Life magazine with his subjects, before he brings them to his studio and takes a photograph." Uzzle is likewise celebrated for his landscape photography. "It's these really whimsical compositions and he has spent years, literally, on the road driving his van on small country roads, staying off of highways, just to find those landscapes, and those people that were in those landscapes," Waters comments. "It's intensely colorful and intensely whimsical." My conversation with director Jethro WatersRelated: |
AuthorMatthew Carey is a documentary filmmaker and journalist. His work has appeared on Deadline.com, CNN, CNN.com, TheWrap.com, NBCNews.com and in Documentary magazine. |