Starting this month, there are two films playing in theaters in NYC that I'd like to recommend: Bari Pearlman's Daughters of Wisdom is screening every Wednesday from July 23 to the last Wednesday in August at the beautiful Rubin Museum of Art. The filmmakers entered the Buddhist Monastery called Kala Rongo in Nangchen on the northeastern plateau in Tibet. An order of nuns lives in this remote, exclusively female, retreat. It's an extraordinary look into a hidden culture and the amazing women who live there. The film won the Audience Award at the Brooklyn International Film Festival last year, and also played at Mill Valley and Full Frame. Click here for more info.
Because I was up at Hot Docs back in April, I missed a lot of the Tribeca fest this year, but one thing I was sure to catch was a special screening of Lou Reed's Berlin by Julian Schnabel. The movie is exquisite, and the other treat that night was getting to listen to Reed and Schnabel talk about the genesis and evolution of this cinematic dream. (The moderator, Vanity Fair's music critic, Lisa Robinson, was apparently on the rag and was rather bitchy to audience members, but Schnabel made up for it in his warm and friendly way.) The back story is that in 1973 when Reed released his haunting and poetic album, Berlin, it was critically panned and disregarded--a commercial flop, in other words. Consequently, it had never been performed for live audiences in the thirty-three years since its release. Then, in December of 2006, at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, the entire album was staged for five consecutive nights in front of sold-out (and pretty damned lucky) audiences.
Musicians Fernando Saunders and Steve Hunter are some of the musicians who played on the original album and they, among others, join Reed on stage at St. Ann's with such unmitigated joy, it's really beautiful. And it looks gorgeous, as well, thanks to Ellen Kuras' lush and intimate cinematography. The Brooklyn Youth Chorus adds angelic backup singing and you can see that most of these kids (born decades after the original release of the album) have the same passion for this music and these songs as Reed and Schnabel do, even though the subject matter is dark, sexual, depressing, some might say, perverse; despite their youth, or maybe because of it, they convey all the pain and the transcendence inherent in these stories. Add to this, a cinematic backdrop of fragile, slow-shutter black and white films directed by Schabel's daughter, Lola, with the stunning and highly emotive, Emmanuelle Seigner (one of the actors in Schnabel's recent work of genius, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) portraying Berlin's protagonist, Caroline. Thanks to Schnabel's long-time producer, Jon Kilik, and producers Tom Sarag, Stanley Buchthal and Maya Hoffman, Schnabel and Reed resurrect Caroline and her lovers, and they live on in a joyous and celebratory film. You cannot walk away from this without falling in love with Lou Reed. And if you've always loved him, you'll love him even more. Reed has plans to tour Europe this summer with the stage show as the film, released by Fortissimo, opens worldwide.
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