Latest News

  • Zeitgeist Films

    We may not be able to see movies in actual theaters these days and the release dates of many films have been pushed back, but some distributors are working around our current COVID-19 lockdown.

    Arthouse and international film distributor Kino Lorber has recently expanded its virtual theatrical exhibition program Kino Marquee into 150 theaters nationwide. This streaming initiative enables local movie theaters shuttered by the coronavirus outbreak to continue serving their audiences while generating some revenue. Film lovers are able watch spring releases while supporting their favorite theater.

    Opening on Friday through the websites of various theaters across the country is Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint, Halina Dyrschka’s documentary about the revolutionary Swedish artist. What a great time to immerse oneself in the fantastical world and stunning visuals of af Klint’s work. On the other hand, it’s unfortunate that the film isn’t get the big-screen release it deserves. (Hopefully in the future?)

    Beyond the Visible is foremost a depiction of af Klint’s unusual life, but it’s framed by the bigger issue of her undervaluation and near-anonymity until recently. Though Vasily Kandinsky has generally been credited as the first abstract artist, the film makes clear that af Klint was creating abstract works years earlier. Yet, many in the U.S. had never heard of her until a retrospective was mounted in 2018 at the Guggenheim, an amazing show that drew huge crowds.

    Zeitgeist Films

    Dyrschka calls upon various art critics, historians and curators, as well as Hilma af Klint’s descendants to discuss her unique (to put it mildly) perspective and the ways in which her art has been ignored by the art world. A repeated theme: Is it possible to re-write art history? The answer isn’t exactly a resounding yes.

    Af Klint was born in 1862 to an aristocratic family of naval officers in Sweden. Supported in her creative pursuits by her father, she attended Stockholm’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where she first channeled her talent into naturalistic, botanical works. Fascinated by the natural world, she breached tradition by painting nudes and refusing to beautify portraits. From early on, she was interested in more than just art; her goal was no less than understanding human existence and life itself. She wanted to show more than the visible. Her extraordinary abstractions were attempts to depict atoms, quantum theory, DNA, and other biological and scientific processes.

    Zeitgeist Films

    Like many of her era, especially women, she became interested in spirituality, attending seances and other gatherings of like-minded seekers. Female artists have traditionally been underrepresented in the art world; the fact that af Klint was inspired by spiritualism pretty much ensured that her work would be kept out of museums. The film disputes various assertions that she did not exhibit in her lifetime, another excuse given by museum curators to ignore her paintings. Upon her death in 1944, af Klint’s nephew Erik inherited an astounding 1,500 paintings and 26,000 book pages of her art. It wouldn’t be until almost 50 years later that the works would come to light and the artist recognized as the pioneer she was.

    Beyond the Visible is generous with af Klint’s eye- and mind-boggling art, presenting a vast array of her paintings both on their own and in gallery settings. From the huge, luminous, pastel-hued “The Ten Largest” series to smaller, monochromatic schematic works, her works are both beautiful and mysterious, spanning decades and themes. It’s clear that she not only had an utterly unique vision—or visions—but she worked tirelessly to bring them to life. Whether she’ll ever get the credit she deserves is another story.

    Beyond the Invisible: Hilma af Klint opens on Friday, April 17. Click here to access the film and support local theaters.

    Marina Zogbi

  • New York City based non profit Art for Progress has launched an online music resource for NYC students and anyone who’s interested in learning how to produce music, play an instrument or vocal instruction.

    In response to the school closures and what seems like the inevitable end of the school year, Art for Progress is taking a progressive approach to providing instruction for our students in both our elective music classes, after school programs and our BREC campus wide after school music program.

    To address this challenge, we will be providing weekly educational videos that will align with what was being taught in the classrooms prior to the school closures- instrument instruction, vocal instruction and music production. New content will be posted along with a narrative for each video, and our teachers will be available to take questions, arrange chats and for follow up meetings.  

    We expect to launch the online program on Monday, March 23rd and as we come up with more creative ideas we will continue to add more to the program.  At this point, we will provide as many resources as possible to be sure that this is the best experience we can provide outside of the classroom.

    We’re excited to do this for our students and for anyone who wants to learn through this new resource.  For any inquiries, please contact admin@artforprogress.org.

    Please subscribe to the channel and follow us here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbEUTEdVVFNtY49A7D01-ZA


  • Sorry We Missed You

    Courtesy of Zeitgeist Films in Association with Kino Lorber

    Ken Loach, Britain’s filmmaker laureate of socially conscious movies, often depicting working-class families, has created an emotionally wrenching, beautifully realized drama with Sorry We Missed You. What better times than this trying era for Loach, whose clear-eyed focus on the underclasses has driven his work since 1967’s Poor Cow.

    He takes on the exploitation and false promises of the gig economy in his latest film, which opens with Ricky (Kris Hitchen), an unemployed father of two from Newcastle, interviewing for a van driver position with a company that’s an unholy cross between Amazon and Uber. As a franchisee he’ll receive no wages, no contract, and no regular hours. “Like everything around here, it’s your choice,” says Ricky’s future boss, Maloney (Ross Brewster), regarding the decision to buy a van or rent one from the company. Ricky opts to own, even though he and his wife Abbie (Debbie Honeywood) are already in debt. There’s the dangling carrot of major money to be made, but we can already see that the couple are on a hellishly slippery slope, and not just because this is a Ken Loach movie.

    Sorry We Missed You (Family)
    Courtesy of Zeitgeist Films in Association with Kino Lorber

    For her part, good-natured Abbie works tirelessly as a home health aide, visiting clients who need to be fed, cleaned and otherwise taken care of. Though the work can be frustrating, grueling and downright disgusting, Loach is careful to show the individual personalities of those Abbie cares for, several of whom are embarrassed and dismayed by their plights, while almost all appreciate her efforts. Similarly, Ricky has a few pleasant interactions with recipients of his deliveries, though others prove difficult and uncooperative, especially frustrating when his every working minute is being clocked.

    Ricky’s workplace garage is horribly stressful, with unreasonable delivery quotas to be filled, no time for bathroom breaks (drivers carry empty water bottles) and a hard-as-nails boss who is unremittingly caustic, often pitting drivers against each other in the struggle for a more lucrative route. Any show of slowness or weakness is cause for harsh ridicule.

    Sorry We Missed You (Ricky and Liza)
    Courtesy of Zeitgeist Films in Association with Kino Lorber

    Meanwhile, the couple are raising two children, the mature and reasonable tween Liza and slightly older Seb. With both his parents working longer hours and too exhausted to really be present when they are home, Seb soon begins staying out late and getting into trouble, making infuriating, typically teen-rebellious decisions that threaten to topple an already fragile family dynamic.

    Ricky and Abbie have an affectionate relationship, but mounting job pressures cause them to snap at each other, mainly about handling Seb. “I never thought it would be this difficult,” says Ricky at one point, doubtless echoing millions of others in similarly difficult economic situations.

    Though there are warm moments when the family comes together, tensions continue to escalate until stakes are so high that we can barely breathe, hoping that somehow they can through this soul-destroying time.

    Sorry We Missed You is both sweet and devastating, the work of a filmmaker who knows exactly how to tell his story for maximum impact.

    Film Movement

    Also opening this week is Diao Yinan’s The Wild Goose Lake, a darkly languid, noir-ish film that packs an unexpected punch. Shot in and around the city of Wuhan (before it was virus-besieged, lending the film an unintended air of melancholy), The Wild Good Lake is a stylish gangster tale that is familiar, yet wholly novel.

    Part of an underworld of gangs and motorbike thieves, Zhou Zenong (a charismatically brooding Hu Ge) is on the lam after accidentally killing a cop. Attempting to elude the gangsters and police that are chasing him while trying to reconnect with his estranged wife, Zhou meets a coolly enigmatic young woman (Gwei Lun-mei) who has her own reasons for helping him.

    The maze-like, rain-slicked streets and neighborhoods of the city are the backdrop for the manhunt, which is punctuated by tense encounters and wittily baroque violence. By the end of this twisty tale, the characters have somehow gotten under our skin; Diao’s film is surprisingly resonant.

    Sorry We Missed You and The Wild Goose Lake open at the Film Forum on March 4 and March 6, respectively.

    Marina Zogbi

  • Artists and people in general should always be very careful when hiring companies from overseas for services online. It’s particularly important when you’re looking for help with costly projects such as building websites.

    There’s been much written about the challenges of hiring companies in India for website and software development. Some of the common problems include:

    1. Lack of Quality Control: When companies pay developers around $1 per hour and they work 10-12 hours a day, the quality of the work goes out the window. The challenge is finding a company with senior programmers and project managers to oversea the quality aspect. Unfortunately, great Indian web development companies are few and far between, as remote work has resulted in many scam artists with no repercussions when your projects fall through.
    2. “Yes” Culture: Indian companies will say “yes” to any project even if they really mean “maybe” or “I don’t know.” They’ll agree to the job even though they’re not capable of doing it.
    3. Difficulty Meeting Deadlines and Taking Responsibility: In the U.S. deadlines are strictly followed, but in India they are just guidelines and never really followed. They’ll give you many excuses as to why they didn’t meet the deadline, and they’ll never take responsibility for it.

    Other commons problems include: bait and switch, frequent disruptions and inability to make decisions.

    One other important point- don’t be fooled by the positive reviews you see for these companies. They manufacture and generate their own reviews. So, you can’t trust reviews that appear to come from genuine customers. Ironically, a prime example of many of the above mentioned problems with Indian web developers was experienced by local artists and was brought to our attention. They hired Dean Infotech for a big project and were promised that the project could be delivered. After two and a half years they could not deliver a satisfactory outcome and took zero responsibility for it. After several meetings with the director of the company, Ankit Aggarwal, they were left with total failure. So, don’t be fooled by assurances, testimonials and great reviews.

    When seeking out an overseas developer for your project, you may be est off paying a U.S. company the extra money. Don’t waste your time with scam artists who cannot deliver an acceptable final product.

  • Beanpole_Masha and Iya
    Kino Lorber

    Beanpole, the second feature from acclaimed, young Russian director Kantemir Balagov, is incredibly intense and bleak, almost unbearably so at times. Though its painfully drawn out scenes are sometimes hard to watch, Beanpole is nevertheless a compelling and emotionally crushing film for most of its 130-minute runtime.

    The film revisits a particularly rough time in Russian history—the immediate aftermath of World War II, when soldiers have returned from the front missing body parts and worse. Though this period has certainly been covered before, Balagov’s approach is novel, focusing on two young female machine gunners who became close during the war and reunite in Leningrad. Their fraught, almost animalistic relationship embodies the suffering each has been through; their peculiar bond is demonstrated in several scenes by long stretches in which they seem to communicate by staring wordlessly into each other’s eyes.

    Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko), the tall, pale “beanpole” of the film’s title, is first shown having a kind of seizure, during which she emits short gasps and seems paralyzed. This state is almost casually referred to as “frozen” by the people who work with her in a hospital tending to war injuries. She lives with her young son, Pashka, in a communal living space that is rundown and faded, but (thanks to cinematographer Ksenia Sereda) full of eye-catching bright greens and scarlets, colors that show up in worn but colorful clothes, in addition to curtains, wallpaper and painted surfaces. Sereda’s dark, rich palette is a suitably dramatic backdrop for the movie. The hospital’s male patients–including the young paralyzed Stepan—clearly appreciate Iya’s care, as well as Pashka’s visits; they seem almost desperate to amuse the boy with animal sounds in one scene.

    Beanpole_ line of people
    Kino Lorber

    A horrible accident occurs right before Iya is reunited with her former war comrade, Masha (Vasilisa Perelygina), and we learn that Pashka is actually Masha’s son, left with Iya when the latter was “invalided out” of the war due to shell-shock (a perfect description for her catatonic spells). Watching a clearly distraught Iya try to answer Masha’s repeated questions about Pashka’s whereabouts is the first of many prolonged, uncomfortable scenes between the two women.

    Masha, with her strange, intermittent smiles and mysterious nosebleeds, is clearly as war-damaged as her friend. Her new grief manifests itself in a cheerful, almost deranged desire to bear another child, though her body has been completely ravaged. She soon joins Iya as an aide in the hospital under the supervision of decent-seeming doctor Nikolai (Andrey Bykov), as the film’s brutal, unpredictable plot continues to unfold.

    Aside from the lives of the two women, there is the plight of the paralyzed Stepan, who—along with his traumatized wife—decides he (literally) cannot go on living this way. (He will soon be discharged from the hospital and cannot afford the care he needs.) Though Iya is horrified and resistant, she assists him in a scene that is both excruciating and poignant. Masha uses this act of mercy to further her own desires, forcing the reluctant Iya to go long with her plan. Throughout the film, each woman grapples with power over the other, resulting in a volatile, sometimes affectionate, dynamic.

    Beanpole_ Iya sitting
    Kino Lorber

    As the emotional atrocities pile up, we become almost, but not quite, inured to the devastation. By the time Beanpole arrives at a scene in which Masha and her boyfriend’s mother have a verbal duel and we learn the details of Masha’s past, it’s hardly surprising.

    Beanpole seems classically Russian in its hopeless melancholy. Though there is a lot of talk by various characters about life getting better now that the war is over, we see mostly pain and trauma. Scenes that are set outside the hospital or the women’s living quarters show that the entire city seems to be under a pall of sad numbness.

    Though almost unremitting in its bleakness, Beanpole is a film that is that is as powerful and haunting as it is somber, thanks to the bone-deep performances of its two leads and its creator’s singular vision.

    Beanpole opens on Wednesday, January 29, at Film Forum in NYC.

    Marina Zogbi