New York. This afternoon, Agnieszka Holland, J. Hoberman, Irena Grudzinska Gross, Lawrence Weschler, and Larry Wolff will take part in Andrzej Wajda: A Discussion of His Life and His Films at the Remarque Institute.
Hoberman also picks out cinema highlights happening in April in the city for the New York Review of Books. Among them is Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present, opening tomorrow at Anthology Film Archives with director Tyler Hubby present.
“Filmed over two decades,” writes William Robin in the New York Times, “Mr. Hubby’s documentary eloquently captures Mr. Conrad’s plain-spoken tirades and irascible wit. His egalitarian ethos extended beyond music to his politically-charged experimental films, his teaching approach as a professor of media studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and even initiatives outside the realm of art: Among the public-access television shows he directed in Buffalo in the 1990s was the call-in program Homework Helpline, an attempt to serve underprivileged youth and draw their attention to the democratic potential of media.”
“House [1977] initiates will be just about the only people prepared for Nobuhiko Obayashi’s School in the Crosshairs [1981] (sometimes more clumsily translated as The Aimed School), a dizzying sci-fi movie exemplary of the genre masters’ utterly bizarre filmmaking and homebrewed special effects,” writes Jeva Lange at Screen Slate. School screens tomorrow as part of the Japan Society’s series, Beyond Godzilla: Alternative Futures & Fantasies in Japanese Cinema.
KINO! 2017, opening tomorrow and running through April 6, brings a selection of German films to the city. Kenji Fujishima in the Voice: “Among this year’s offerings: a biopic of proto-expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker that was a major arthouse hit in Germany; an interactive film experiment courtesy of The People vs. Fritz Bauer director Lars Kraume; and a documentary about Germany’s use of renewable energy. Still, some of the 2017 edition’s most striking find hew closely to [the] Berlin School aesthetic. The oddest is Wild, Nicolette Krebitz’s study of a woman, Ania (Lilith Stangenberg), who develops a romantic obsession with a wolf.”
Los Angeles. Rock N’ Roll Fascism, a series of Saturday Night Specials at Cinefamily, begins this Saturday.
REDCAT presents Julia Heyward and Perry Hoberman’s 29 SpaceTime on Monday.
Seattle. “Before turning to experimental cinema, filmmaker Daïchi Saïto was a student of literature and philosophy in the US and of Hindi and Sanskrit in India, and the influence of these interests can be detected throughout his transfixing body of film work,” Anthology Film Archives programmer Jed Rapfogel has written. Saïto will be at Northwest Film Forum on Saturday to present a program of his work.
Boston. “The 33rd annual Wicked Queer: Boston LGBT Film Festival kicks off this weekend and runs through April 9 with more than 120 features and shorts to be screened at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Emerson’s Paramount Center, the Museum of Fine Arts, and the Brattle Theatre.” Writing for Metro, Sean Burns takes a look at “a few highlights from their characteristically expansive program.”
Cambridge. Arturo Ripstein’s Bleak Street (2016) screens Saturday at the Harvard Film Archive, followed on Sunday by Woman of the Port (1991).
Dallas. “In the secluded town of Mustang Island off the Texas Gulf Coast, Austin-based filmmakers Craig Elrod and Nathan Smith found a gem of a setting for a tenderhearted romantic indie,” writes Sean L. Malin in the Austin Chronicle. “Their new feature—which has its world premiere April 1 at the Dallas International Film Festival—was directed and co-written by Elrod, co-written and shot by Smith, and stars a who’s who of local character actors, including John Merriman, Byron Brown, and real-life couple Macon Blair and Lee Eddy. For Elrod, who has had several shorts premiere at SXSW, including Molly (2014) and the 2010 Jury Award winner Petting Sharks, the journey to Mustang Island‘s completion has been an odyssey: ‘This thing has been going for the longest time.'”
London. The BFI’s India on Film season begins on Saturday.
Berlin. The new restoration of Rainer Werner Fassbinder‘s Acht Stunden sind kein Tag (1972/73), a five-episode series made for West German television will be presented over two evenings—along with Juliane Lorenz’s documentary supplement, Acht Stunden sind kein Tag: Eine Serie wird zum Familientreffpunkt—on Friday and Saturday at the KulturRaum Zwingli-Kirche.
Vienna. From Monday through Thursday at the Austrian Film Museum, films by Hollis Frampton “will be shown in four programs introduced by Bruce Jenkins, curator, and professor of art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.”
