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  • Courtesy of FilmRise

    A tough yet poignant film, Gaysorn Thavat’s The Justice of Bunny King is the story of a New Zealand mother who battles the country’s social services bureaucracy to regain custody of her children. Bunny (Essie Davis), a funny, resourceful woman who refuses to be beaten down by the system, is the film’s motor—charming and scheming her way through various obstacles, all to fulfill her promise to celebrate her young daughter’s upcoming birthday.

    We first see Bunny energetically cleaning windshields in a parking lot for cash with a posse of fellow squeegee operators. Gradually, we learn of her difficult situation, beginning with a visit to a social services office, where she is reminded that in order to get her children out of foster care—or to spend time with them at all—she needs to have a home. Unfortunately, she’s currently living with her sister’s family during a severe housing shortage.

    Things get worse when Bunny witnesses a disturbing scene involving her teenaged niece Tonyah (Thomasin McKenzie) and the former is subsequently kicked out of her brother-in-law’s house. As Bunny faces and is defeated by one hurdle after another, with Tonyah as accomplice, she becomes even more determined, and the film spirals into a suspenseful race against time as the stakes get ever higher. Thanks to Sophie Henderson’s script, and Thavat’s pacing and tone, we’re never quite sure what will happen next, while Davis’s terrific performance guarantees that we stay riveted to Bunny’s plight.

    Courtesy of FilmRise

    Though dark, The Justice of Bunny King — like its protagonist—never loses heart. It’s an impressive debut feature that deserves a wide audience.

    The Justice of Bunny King opens in theaters on Friday, September 23, and is available on VOD platforms on Sept. 30.

    Also opening on September 23 is DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema, located in a landmarked Chinatown firehouse building. Founded in 1972, DCTV has grown into one of the country’s leading documentary production and film education centers. The center’s Cinema for Documentary Film is a place for both filmmakers and film lovers, with a program of first-run, curated repertory; masterclasses; family programs and more. Opening at the Firehouse in the next few weeks are:

    • Abigail Disney and Kathleen Hughes’ The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales (Sept. 23 – 29), a personal essay documentary in which Disney grapples with America’s profound inequality crisis, after encountering workers at the company that bears her name struggling to put food on the table.

    • Reid Davenport’s I Didn’t See You There (Sept. 30 – Oct. 6), in which the visibly disabled Davenport illustrates how he sees the world, forcing the viewer to confront the spectacle and invisibility of disability.

    • Nina Menkes’ Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power (Oct. 20 – 27), which explores the sexual politics of cinematic shot design, using clips from hundreds of movies we all know and love – from Metropolis to Vertigo to Phantom Thread.

    For additional info about these films and other events, visit: www.dctvny.org/s/firehousecinema 

    Marina Zogbi

  • Alas, summer has come to an end for students. Nevertheless, even though it has come to an end for them, the energy and momentum of progress that took place this year continue to move forward for Art for Progress, its team of professionals and the champion spirit passed on to each student who was part of our program. We built many memories around the program this year, seeing that it was our first face-to-face since the pandemic hit in March 2020.

    Kid Crew, AFP 2022

    From having guest speakers like Bill Claps, to enjoying live music sessions with Dezron Douglas, to viewing Gabriel Bullion’s star-studded portfolio of clients ranging from Jay-Z to North Face (a special edition puffer jacket designed exclusively for TNF). The line-up was electric, and every guest could share their retrospective of work and speak authentically from the heart. Their lived experiences- success or failure- were shared via storytelling and were a golden opportunity for the students to receive such heartfelt insight. It was extremely comforting to hear every professional speak earnestly of their mishaps and victories, making the pedagogical experience so close, personal, and authentic. I remember being an art student and sitting through talks where art professionals and designers seemed egocentric, chatting away about their successes but never delving deep into their failures and how they paved the way for success. Failures are the most prominent markers we tend to remember in life. We wanted the students to understand how those failures teach us to pivot in new ways, which may even lead us to reinvent our practice. Artist Bill Claps gave a great example when he presented his first works of art- abstractions of nudes. Claps’ work began in the most traditional form-nudes and human figures- but ended up exploring gilt, fashion and video.

    a good old jam session

    The students were keen on the conversations and workshop, and we spotted a group that exhibited great natural talent in the arts. We had a core group that attended the music or art workshops every day.

    Commitment was the A-game word in 2022, and our kids exemplified it. Each workshop was carefully tailored to cater to areas of interest, such as fashion (pattern-making) or composing sounds on Garageband. Every workshop offered the student a new hands-on approach, allowing them to explore the technique while having collaborative discussions. We provided workshops focused on skill sets they may need in the workforce and skills that could potentially land them an internship. For example, in fashion, the students learned how to create patterns. We took vintage garments, sprawled them out and used each piece to trace out a section of the garment. The idea was to motivate the student to take what they already own and find ways to understand and reinvent it. Knowing that Bullion was debuted to a younger audience whose interest circulated in fashion and were able to learn pattern-making techniques could potentially facilitate an internship at Bullion’s atelier for them. It is one of our goals to make opportunities accessible to the next generation of creatives. My students demonstrated exceptional interest and commitment over the summer, so I confidently recommend several for transitional and formative projects and employment. I challenged them in the mural-making course, which asked the student to begin with an individual idea board that would become a collaborative design, a preliminary sketch for a more significant project. We had a drawing ready to propose at the end of the six weeks. Now we have a preliminary sketch available to submit to any public art open call in the city of NYC. It was exciting to see what we achieved, individually and collaboratively, in 6 weeks.

    Finally, to celebrate, I arranged a field trip to the Whitney Biennial to motivate them to keep working on their practice. The field trip was fun and a great way to relax after all the hard work and focus we had collectively invested. It was a bittersweet moment to bid everyone farewell, and realizing it was time to return to Miami made me cringe. There is no other city in the U.S.A. like NYC. Magic and creativity are everywhere. I know I brought that energy back to Miami. It is needed here. I also know NYC is pulling me back to nurture, evolve and develop my artistic practices and students. Where do we go from here, AFP?

    More to come….…stay tuned, and watch this space! 

    by Beláxis Buil

    edited by Rachael (Global English Editing)

  • Barry Komitor addressing students at orientation.

    It is a great moment to witness the progress we’ve made over the last two years. When the pandemic hit in 2020, Art for Progress (AFP) transitioned its summer program to a virtual platform, as did most folks, institutions, and non-profit organizations at the time. But this year, our in-person comeback is even more solid as we offer an amazing assortment of workshops ranging from pattern-making to music theory, and New York’s young art enthusiasts are soaking it all in.

    Although we are running traditional-style workshops, the program is running slightly differently. AFP’s summer program starts every week off with open arts on Mondays. Open arts was devised as an interdisciplinary lab where every student is encouraged to float between workshops or work on specific skills requested by the student. The arrangement was conceived to assist students in taking on a more fluid approach in their practice and garner inspiration from one genre to the next. By providing them with an allowance of space and fluidity to experiment with mediums and engage in collaborative discussions with one another, all possibilities to spark the creative mind, commence exploration, and conceptualize innovative ideas begin. We want to motivate our children to play again. Playing is where genius is born.  

    Ayden and La Vie working on their collaborative preliminary sketch.

    During one of the music composition workshops led by Barry Komitor, and a fiber assemblage art workshop led by me, a question was brought up by one of the students. The question pertained to the relevance of art and music, and how mediums so “far” from one another could be integrated as a tangible art form. The following day AFP was joined by special guest artist and speaker Bill Claps, whose art installation ARTSpeak Incinerator Project has been exhibited at the Guggenheim. His works have also appeared in many prestigious galleries and art fairs, including the Salomon Arts Gallery, Aspen Fine Arts Gallery, Art Monaco, and Art Basel in Miami. Claps presented a retrospective of his work and shared a video portfolio that demonstrated the evolution of his practice, beginning with his abstract drawings evoking svelte silhouettes of the female form to his latest work that draws on textures, sound, textiles, and fashion. The latter was part of a collaborative effort with fashion designer Sophie Bonvin, whose purses are embellished in fine sheets of gilt shaped into circles and ovals, similar to the floating shapes found in Claps’ morse code work CODE, and the beautifully placed gilt on the surface of his photographs in his work Natural Abstractions.

    Bill Claps (left), Barry Komitor (center), Beláxis Buil (right).

    Komitor circled back to the student’s prior inquiry on how an artist can integrate two varied mediums into one practice, observing that it does require discipline, practice, and an ability to bounce back from failure. Then, I seized the moment and gave the students another example to help them understand how a creative mind can capture inspiration from workshops and other artists as techniques and experiences are shared. I described a potential collaboration between Komitor’s music course and my fiber assemblage art course. This involved creating a fiber/textile installation with sound—one that could later become an interactive installation for the audience to engage with, developing the work on a much broader scale. I caught the Ah-ha gleam in their eyes once they understood how an artist must not only think creatively but also cohesively. By having Claps present his body of work, drawing on examples of cross-disciplined approaches and workshopping during the week (to experiment), the students are provided the proper dose of mentoring instead of having them go figure it out. This approach simply sets a student/person up for failure, which can discourage anyone from pursuing their passion. We want to break away from this approach and apply a rectified pedagogical method that closes gaps. It does not help anyone entering a competitive field, especially within the arts, to be abandoned. I believe our approach also supports how the community should look: a desire to see everyone succeed. 

    This is a special year for AFP. Thanks to The Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation, AFP is able to expand its program and offer New York’s youth culture a knockout series of workshops. It offers what many art schools lack: innovation, play, business models and strategy, trade skills, support, and the cross-pollination of mediums and knowledge. Between Claps, Komitor, myself and all the scheduled guest artists appearing over the next three weeks, we plan to continue disseminating the wisdom, tools, and nurturing needed to cultivate, inspire, and embolden the brightest minds of our future.  

    Susanna cutting her pattern in class; fashion 101.

    By Belaxis Buil

    Edited by Graeme (Global English Editing)

  • Courtesy of Obscured Pictures

    It’s probably safe to say that Jono McLeod’s documentary My Old School isn’t quite like anything we’ve seen before, both in subject and format. This inventive and charmingly told tale about a renowned Scottish hoax is probably not familiar to most Americans, all the better for us to watch it unfold and deliver its surprises. Using current interviews, old footage and news reports, and many animated sequences, McLeod puts together a fascinating portrait of Brandon Lee (not the late actor), his former classmate at the posh Bearsden Academy in Glasgow. Though Lee agreed to be interviewed, he declined to appear on camera, resulting in one of the film’s most interesting elements: venerable Scots actor Alan Cumming “stars” as Lee, expertly lip-synching his story. (All of the other film’s characters appear as themselves, as animated versions of themselves, or both.)

    The tale begins in 1993, when Lee enters fifth form at Bearsden Academy, located in one of Glasgow’s fancier neighborhoods. Tall and somewhat odd-looking, he stands out from his 16-year-old classmates in several ways, including his deep voice , unplaceable accent, and formal clothes.

    Courtesy of Obscured Pictures

    His fellow classmates soon find out that Lee had previously lived in Canada with his late opera-singer mother, toured with her extensively, and had been privately tutored, which explained his accent and advanced age. His ”mask-like” appearance was due to plastic surgery after a tragic car accident that left his face disfigured. He now lived in a not-so–posh section of Bearsden with his grandmother.

    We learn all of these details through cheerful interviews with several of Lee’s (and McLeod’s) former classmates (now in their 30s) and teachers, who recall their first impressions and subsequent relationships with Lee. Their memories are illustrated by colorful 1990s-style animated scenes that are stylistically reminiscent of that decade’s sitcom Daria.

    Eventually, this strange newcomer—a wiz in biology and an expert in 70s and ’80s punk and new wave music—becomes less a figure of ridicule, achieving popularity with his relative sophistication and driving skills (apparently one can get a driver’s license earlier in Canada). He also befriends and changes the lives of two bullied kids, both of whom as adults reminisce about him affectionately. Lee is eventually cast in a school production of South Pacific, blowing everyone away with his singing and stage presence. All the while, there are tantalizing clues to his mysterious past, but his real story is so far out that no one picks up on it.

    Courtesy of Obscured Pictures

    Things start to unravel, however, after a vacation with a couple of classmates, and we finally learn his real, incredible story. We also (finally) get to see his actual face in old footage and photos, a highlight that McLeod almost teasingly builds up to.

    My Old School is a mostly light-hearted, entertaining film, its tone set by the amusing interview snippets with Lee’s former classmates and the use of droll animation. It’s true that no crime was actually committed nor was any real harm done by Lee’s hoax, though certain aspects of his behavior were certainly unseemly (and he himself clearly has some psychological issues). In someone else’s hands, this story could have been shown in a harsher light. As it is, My Old School should not cause viewers to lose any sleep about the ever-surprisingly weirdness of human beings. And that is not a bad thing.

    My Old School opens theatrically on Friday, July 22, at Film Form in NYC.

    Marina Zogbi