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      ‘The Place That Makes Us’ Review: Rebuilding, Brick by Brick

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      This documentary offers a brief look at a handful of people trying to revitalize Youngstown, Ohio.Cities devastated by industrial closures should never be written off for dead. “The Place That Makes Us” looks at a handful of people trying to revitalize Youngstown, Ohio, where the shuttering of steel mills led to an exodus of residents, a rash of vacant homes and an ebb of civic engagement.The movie, directed by Karla Murthy, substantially, perhaps even too narrowly focuses on the work of the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation, a nonprofit that rehabilitates empty houses, with the goal of turning ghost blocks into desirable neighborhoods. The subjects profiled include Ian Beniston, the group’s executive director, and Tiffany Sokol, its housing director, who removes plywood from a door and takes us through the process of surveying an abandoned home’s potential. By the end, we’ve seen it sold, to a new owner we’ve gotten to know.Elsewhere, Julius T. Oliver, a city councilman, concentrates on investing in Youngstown’s youth by pushing to reopen a once-thriving basketball arena. With the filmmakers, he visits the former sites of the two houses he grew up in. (After speaking of violence around the first location, he says that the problems eventually traveled to the second.) Early on, he talks about how, as a businessman, he found that a simple perception that a neighborhood “looks scary” can deter potential customers.The families’ stories help turn “The Place That Makes Us” into more than a policy proposal in motion. Ian’s father, a former steelworker, says, “If I had to do it over again, I would not have been in Youngstown.” Ian and his sister, Abby, who have chosen to stay, have a more optimistic outlook.The Place That Make UsNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. Watch on PBS platforms. More

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      A French Monument Remains Every Bit as Grand on Film

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      The Palais Garnier, which inspired the first “Phantom” in 1910, is silent at the moment, but it continues to hold the imagination.PARIS — Wearing heels and an off-the-shoulder evening dress, Emily Cooper arrives at the Paris Opera for a big performance. She hurries up the grand marble staircase, pauses to gape at the painted ceilings, and runs into a suave young Frenchman she knows.“Did you know they were performing ‘Swan Lake’ tonight? Is this a joke?” he asks her. “‘Swan Lake’ is for tourists.” After a terse exchange, Emily scurries off to take her seat in a velvet-lined opera box.The scene is from “Emily in Paris,” the popular Netflix series — one of dozens of productions for which the original Paris Opera building, the Palais Garnier, has provided a backdrop. In the nearly century and a half since its inauguration, the Garnier has been featured in everything from documentaries (Frederick Wiseman’s “La Danse,” on the Paris Opera Ballet), to live-action/animation movies (“Smurfs 2”) to motion pictures: Sofia Coppola’s 2006 “Marie Antoinette” and the 2018 biopic of Rudolf Nureyev, “The White Crow,” directed by Ralph Fiennes.The pandemic may have shut down house performances in the last year, but on-location shoots have continued, in accordance with strict Covid-19 protocols. Two movies have recently been filmed inside the Palais Garnier: “Couleurs de l’Incendie” starring the French actress Fanny Ardant, and “Le Ténor,” with the tenor Roberto Alagna.Jean-Yves Kaced, the opera’s commercial director, said the coronavirus pandemic had made it easier for the house to accommodate film and television crews. Under normal circumstances, the Garnier has a full slate of opera and ballet performances that cannot be interrupted by outside projects. In normal times, the building also welcomes visitors for daytime tours.“The absence of audiences at the moment is a sad reality, but it does allow us to be a bit more flexible in hosting outside productions,” Mr. Kaced said.With or without a pandemic, filming at the opera requires a hefty budget. A daylong shoot at the opera (for eight hours) costs roughly 30,000 euros (about $35,000), according to Paris Opera management. “All things rare are expensive,” said Mr. Kaced, adding, “Look at it this way: You don’t have to pay for set designs, and it’s less polluting!”Mr. Kaced said he had appeared in one production himself — “La Danse,” in a “supporting role,” a meeting-room discussion about selling sponsorship packages to American patrons.François Ivernel, whose company, Montebello Productions, produced “The White Crow,” confirmed that filming at the Palais Garnier was “not cheap,” and that the fee was not something to be negotiated, as is the case at other French cultural landmarks like the Louvre. “You take it or leave it,” he said.“The White Crow,” a biopic of Rudolf Nureyev starring Oleg Ivenko, featured three scenes shot at the Palais Garnier.Jessica Forde/Sony Pictures ClassicsMr. Ivernel listed three scenes in the movie that were shot at the Palais Garnier: the arrival of the Russian troupe, filmed in the grand foyer; a conversation between Nureyev and a French dancer, shot on the Garnier rooftop, with panoramic views of Paris; and shots of the performance hall, filmed from the stage. Filming of “The White Crow” coincided with the opera’s glamorous annual fund-raising gala, to which Mr. Ivernel was invited.The shoot was, on the whole, a “wonderful experience,” Mr. Ivernel said. Before filming, the team was allowed to spend three half-days backstage with the Paris Opera Ballet where, interestingly, Nureyev would become ballet director in 1983. They met dancers, watched rehearsals and visited the costume-making ateliers, where tutus hang from the ceiling. It was “all very useful for the director,” Mr. Ivernel said, “because it gave him a much better sense of what it was like to be a principal dancer,.”There was just one minor misstep, recalled Marie Hoffmann, who is in charge of rental of public spaces at the opera. While the crew was busy filming inside the opera house, Mr. Fiennes, who plays a ballet master, settled into a recently restored fauteuil, a period armchair usually kept behind a protective barrier. “We asked him, in the politest way possible, to give up the seat,” Ms. Hoffmann recalled.Filming inside the opera is a complex process. Before the pandemic, shoots had to happen at nighttime, when there were no more performances or visitors, and they were all-night affairs, running from 11 p.m. until 9 a.m., when the premises were cleaned for morning tourists.Because the building is a listed national monument, every corner of it is guarded and protected. As at Versailles and other French heritage sites, equipment cannot be placed directly on the floor: There must be a layer of protection such as a strip of carpeting. There are weight restrictions on camera equipment as well, and crews are followed everywhere by security.Have there ever been any accidents? “No, touch wood,” Ms. Hoffmann said.There has, however, been the odd anachronism.In the 2006 movie “Marie Antoinette” starring Kirsten Dunst, a masquerade ball scene was set inside the Palais Garnier, despite the fact that the building was built a century after the reign of Antoinette.Leigh Johnson/Columbia PicturesIn “Marie Antoinette,” the lavish masquerade ball scene is set inside the Palais Garnier. A masked Queen Marie Antoinette (played by Kirsten Dunst) twirls around a crowded dance floor — in the famous “Rotonde des Abonnés” (the circular hall under the stage), with its elaborate mosaics — and is later seen slithering down the opera’s curving marble staircase, flirting incognito with a handsome young count.There’s just one slight problem: The Palais Garnier was built a century after the reign of Marie Antoinette, who was executed in 1793. The anachronism is listed under “Goofs” in the Internet Movie Data Base: “The masquerade ball held in the Paris Opera is clearly seen to take place in the Palais Garnier in Paris, built between 1861 and 1875 during the reign of Napoleon III.”The Garnier also serves as the backdrop in the 1910 novel “The Phantom of the Opera,” by the French writer Gaston Leroux, who tells the melodramatic story of a disfigured musical prodigy who lives underneath the palace and kidnaps a glamorous young soprano.“Phantom” first captured the public’s visual imagination in 1925, in the film version of the novel starring Lon Chaney, and the story has been retold repeatedly, perhaps culminating in the 1980s stage musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber.Oddly, none of the film adaptations of the novel are listed as having been shot on location in the Palais Garnier. Yet they have fueled a rumor that persists to this day: that there is a lake underneath the edifice.“When we take visitors around the basement area, they come expecting to see the lake,” Ms. Hoffmann said. “In fact, it’s a reservoir that’s the size of the main stage, and located right underneath it.”“We have no access to it,” she added. “It’s accessible only to Paris firefighters, who use it for diving training.” More

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      ‘Kid 90’ and the Days When Even Wild TV Teens Had Privacy

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      A documentary from Soleil Moon Frye, star of “Punky Brewster,” and a reunion of “The Real World” remind us that Gen X didn’t curate themselves for mass consumption.Sometimes I remember the clunky devices of my youth — the boxy Polaroid cameras, the bricklike car phones, the shrill answering machines, the pagers that could be made to spell an angular, all-caps “BOOBS.” This was the personal tech of the early-to-mid-1990s, in the years before AOL Instant Messenger provided an internet on-ramp, which means it was pretty much the last time an American teenager could behave with some expectation of privacy.Still, camcorders existed back then and Soleil Moon Frye, the child star of “Punky Brewster,” rarely turned hers off. In “Kid 90,” a documentary now streaming on Hulu, an adult, manicured Moon Frye — filmed in the kind of all-white room usually associated with near-death experiences — revisits her endless home movies, as well as related ephemera: diaries, voice mail messages and photographs. If you are a young Gen Xer or an old millennial, “Kid 90” may provide the uncanny and not entirely welcome experience of having your childhood returned to you — the syntax, the celebrities, the fashions that haven’t come back around (the backward baseball cap, the vest as a bustier). Revisiting your youth culture when your own youth has mostly fled is an exercise in estrangement and mild humiliation, like running into your therapist at Victoria’s Secret.In the 1980s sitcom “Punky Brewster,” Moon Frye starred as a girl being raised by a foster father.Gene Arias/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty ImagesBefore I clicked play, I asked an editor how many drinks I might need to make it through the documentary. “A 40 of Mickey’s malt liquor,” she wrote.The early ’90s also reappear on “The Real World Homecoming: New York,” a Paramount + show that reunites the cast members from the first season of MTV’s flagship unscripted series. Seven people, strangers no more, return to the New York loft (well, one is waylaid by a positive Covid-19 test) where their teen and 20-something lives were taped for a few months in 1992. It wasn’t the first reality show, but its wild popularity and subsequent franchise profoundly influenced what came after. “We didn’t know what it was going to be,” the journalist and activist Kevin Powell, one of the original roommates, says in the first episode of “Homecoming.” “We were just ourselves.”To watch the series and the documentary is to dilate, helplessly, on what has changed (or not) in the past 30 or so years. It’s to realize that Moon Frye, by cheerfully surveilling her own life, and those first Real Worlders, by agreeing to the constant presence of producers and cameras, were the harbingers of today’s culture, in which self-image is shaped in the expectation of a lens and personhood collates with brand identity.“The Real World Homecoming: New York” reunited the cast of the hit reality show, which premiered on MTV in 1992; from left, Norman Korpi, Kevin Powell, Julie Gentry and Heather B. Gardner, with Andre Comeau looking on.Danielle Levitt/MTVMoon Frye seems to have known every other child star in Los Angeles and its outlying counties: Sara Gilbert, Emmanuel Lewis, Brian Austin Green, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Joey Lawrence, Jenny Lewis (hilarious) and at least a dozen more. These were children valued less for who they were and more for the fandom and ads they could generate, the tickets they could sell. Today, that’s everyone with an Instagram account, potentially.“Kid 90” also reminds us that until pretty recently, the dumb things teenagers wore and the dumber things they did and said didn’t have an afterlife, because there were few ways to record them and even fewer ways to disseminate those recordings. A crucial aspect of adolescence is performance — trying on different outfits and identities — and seeing if they feel OK. (The comedy of adolescence is that it’s practice for adulthood. The tragedy is that adolescents practice on one another.)I was a teenager in the ’90s, and I’m unutterably grateful that my own mortifications — lines like, “I’m not a feminist, I’m really more like a humanist,” and a grunge-adjacent look that my high school bestie still calls the Lumberjack Sexpot — persist only on the bloopers reel in my head. Until young adults achieve some reasonable sense of self (and style), why get the internet involved?When Moon Frye moved to New York, she fell in with a group of skaters, some of whom were in the movie “Kids.”Soleil Moon Frye/HuluThe kids in “Kid 90” are filmed during their off hours: poolside, at house parties, high on mushrooms in a field somewhere. They sometimes perform for the camera — winking, pontificating, flashing a don’t-tell-mom pack of cigarettes — but they perform confident that almost no one will ever see it. “We never thought, ‘Oh, well, she’s going to use that in a way that’s going to come back and haunt us,’” Gosselaar says in the documentary.Back in 1992, those “Real World” participants knew that MTV would eventually air the footage, but not how that footage would be organized. They didn’t know that the producers would fabricate a will-they-or-won’t-they story line for Julie Gentry and Eric Nies, or that Kevin Powell would be edited to seem like a “politically angry Black man,” as he said in a recent interview. “We all thought it was a documentary about seven artists,” Rebecca Blasband says in “Homecoming.” If she and her loftmates didn’t act entirely naturally, they don’t seem to have spent the series trying to build a marketable brand.The producers and editors did the building for them, giving each a type (naïf, himbo, rock god, firebrand), which the cast members then spent years trying to live up to — or live down. “I had this notoriety, but I had no idea how to utilize it,” Gentry says in “Homecoming.”Moon Frye as a teenager; she is now appearing in a “Punky Brewster” reboot on Peacock.Soleil Moon Frye/HuluMoon Frye seems to have also struggled with her image and with how the industry treated her when her body began to diverge from Punky’s. In an agonizing section of the documentary, she talks about going through puberty, developing breasts and being seen, at 13 and 14 years old, only for bimbo-esque roles. Peers called her Punky Boobster.“It’s hard when you’ve got boobs and you can’t work in this business,” a teenage Moon Frye says. “I just want people to see me for the person I am inside.” Here’s a thought: What if the business is the problem and not children’s bodies?She wanted serious roles, so at 15, she had breast reduction surgery. But the serious roles never came. After years in the entertainment wilderness, she is now starring in a “Punky Brewster” reboot, now streaming on Peacock. “Kid 90” presents this comeback as a chirpy capstone, but it feels darker. The documentary honors a slew of friends who didn’t make it to their 40s (including Jonathan Brandis and Justin Pierce, a star of the movie “Kids”) and mentions the addictions suffered by those who did. Some of that pain must have originated in the space between what the industry (and the fans) told these actors they had to be and who they felt they were. Maybe Moon Frye is Punky once more because “the business” wouldn’t let her be anyone else.I was, unconvincingly, so many people as a teenager — a rebel, a sophisticate, a drama nerd, a go-getter, a witch. I could try on a persona for size and then return it, tags on. There was no social media then and no one wanted me on any reality series, so I never had to curate a self before I had one. But I did stupid things for love. What would I have done for likes? What would that have made me?Like Moon Frye and a lot of girls with big feelings and poetic inclinations, I kept diaries as a teenager. I’ve never gone back and read them. Why? I’m afraid that I might be embarrassed by my younger self or that she might be embarrassed by boring, wine-mom me. But I hope we’d get along. And then we could take a kiss-face selfie together, filter it, Facetune it, post it with some cute caption and watch the little hearts roll in. More

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      ‘Miracle Fishing: Kidnapped Abroad’ Review: Harrowing Home Videos

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      The documentary is a unique record of the abduction that inspired the Hollywood thriller “Proof of Life.”The 1994 kidnapping of Thomas R. Hargrove, an American agricultural journalist living in Colombia, already inspired a Hollywood thriller (“Proof of Life,” with Russell Crowe and Meg Ryan). But there’s more suspense in watching the real thing.Miles Hargrove, one of Hargrove’s sons, shot video throughout the year he and his family spent trying to secure his father’s safe return. Out of those home movies, he has assembled “Miracle Fishing: Kidnapped Abroad,” a documentary that is able to show the Hargroves and a close group of friends and abduction experts as they live through that ordeal.The footage captures them as they negotiate the ransom, wait out long periods of silence from the kidnappers and even drive bundles of cash around. Poor radio reception interferes with the talks, and decisions have ongoing ramifications. (Was a friend of Miles’s the best spokesman? Is ambiguous evidence that Thomas is still alive good enough?) The kidnappers, subject to broader upheavals in the country, aren’t in a stable position themselves.Like the best home movies, “Miracle Fishing” is also a psychological study. During waits for news, the family guiltily carries on with dinners and music. When the kidnappers indicate that they will go silent for two months, Hargrove cuts to black and holds it, giving viewers an infinitesimal taste of that agony.Retrospective voice-over from the participants helps fill out the picture. Few people in this position would think to pick up a camera, let alone keep filming for so long. That makes “Miracle Fishing” a unique and harrowing record.Miracle Fishing: Kidnapped AbroadNot rated. In English and Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Watch on Discovery+. More

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      ‘Tina’ Review: A Music Icon Looks Back With Grace

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      The documentary about Tina Turner, who is now in her 80s, is not just a summing up of her life, but a kind of farewell.In 2009, Tina Turner gave her final public performance. After which she did something that only a few mega-famous musicians actually succeed at: she retired. With her second husband, the former record company executive Erwin Bach, she took up a life far from both the country of her birth and the bustle of the music industry, in Zurich.But Turner continues to inspire. In 2019 a Broadway musical based on her life, made with her cooperation, became a hit. Her songs, both in partnership with Ike Turner and solo, are staples of classic radio stations. For this documentary, directed by Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin, she sat down for a stocktaking interview; this film is not just a summing up but a kind of farewell.Turner’s life was a hard and complicated one. In the 1980s and beyond, the telling of that story became a defining part of her subsequent life. She began in music in the late 1950s as a wide-eyed teenager in St. Louis, admiring the R&B bandleader Ike Turner and hoping to sing for him. He dismissed her again and again, but when a bandmate insisted he listen, Ike was stunned. He initially groomed her in a way that both Tina and former colleagues here describe as “brotherly.” But the short shrift Ike had gotten in the music business fed his paranoia, and once he realized the one-time Anna Mae Bullock could be his ticket to the big time, he took control of Tina in terrifyingly abusive ways.The documentary gives Ike his due as a musical force while also providing a cleareyed portrait of a monster. Tina’s recounting of a suicide attempt is juxtaposed with a clip from a 2000 interview with Ike in which Ike speculates that his then-wife was “upset” about his “womanizing.”Tina Turner fought to keep her name after leaving Ike. And after doing whatever gigs she could get to pull herself out of debt, she forged a solo career bigger than she had possibly ever dreamed. She accomplished this over the resistance of racist record execs and journalists who only ever wanted to ask her about the past. And eventually she found love — not again, she says, but really for the first time — with Bach, who’s also an executive producer of the movie.Because of her autobiography, “I, Tina” (written with Kurt Loder, who is interviewed here) and the feature film “What’s Love Got to Do With It” (starring Angela Bassett, who speaks here with fervor on Tina’s talent and strength), you may believe you know Turner’s tale. And you may be right. It is retold well here, but the most moving portions — and they could bring tears to your eyes — come as Turner, almost 80 at the time of this interview (and as beautiful as she has ever been), wearing a tailored black suit, sits and discusses where she’s at now. “In not forgiving, you suffer,” she reflects. “I had an abusive life … that’s what you got. So you have to accept it.” The grace she shows here is almost overpowering.TinaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms beginning March 27. More

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      ‘Francesco’ Review: The Pope, Up Close, but Not That Close

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      The new documentary on Pope Francis is a missed opportunity to demystify elements of the papacy.Discovery+ is billing “Francesco,” a portrait of Pope Francis, as “an unprecedented look at the man behind the cloth.” But while the filmmakers were able to talk to Pope Francis in person, a large portion of the documentary comes from a layer out. The director, Evgeny Afineevsky, includes ample footage of the pope’s public appearances, images of his tweets and interviews with multiple people identified as “longtime friend of Pope Francis.”This approach, focusing on the message and not the messenger, seems consistent with Francis’s modesty, and the film plays like a channel for spreading his ideas on the environment, refugees and religious coexistence. All of that is to the good. But judged strictly as a movie, “Francesco” comes across as shapeless and secondhand — a missed opportunity to present a closer look at the daily work of being pope and perhaps to demystify elements of the papacy.We learn, for instance, that when Francis visited Myanmar in 2017, he did not refer by name to the Rohingya, the Muslim ethnic group persecuted within the country, adhering to the policy of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s government not to use the word (although he did allude to the group, and a Rohingya refugee who met him in Bangladesh says the pope later asked for forgiveness). How are such inherently political decisions made? “Francesco” does not explain.The film is not always glowing. Juan Carlos Cruz, a victim of abuse by a priest in Chile, discusses how hard it was to see the pope dismiss as “slander” accusations that a bishop had covered up the abuse. But the film uses this to illustrate how Francis grew. He met with Cruz and ultimately defrocked the priest.FrancescoNot rated. In English, Spanish, Italian, Armenian and French with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. Watch on Discovery+. More

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      Her Film on Sex Assault Depicts Her Own and Fuels a #MeToo Moment

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      Danijela Stajnfeld included her account of being assaulted in a film that has led to contentious debate in Serbia and prompted other women to come forward to say they were sexually abused.Her face graced billboards in Belgrade. She appeared regularly in Serbian movies, magazines and television shows. Trained at the prestigious Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, Danijela Stajnfeld had, by the age of 26 in 2011, won two major theater prizes and was a permanent member with the esteemed Belgrade Drama Theater.The following year, she abruptly and mysteriously dropped from public view. It wasn’t until last summer that she publicly revealed why.In her documentary, “Hold Me Right,” about victims and perpetrators of sexual assault, Stajnfeld said that she too had been sexually assaulted eight years earlier by a powerful Serbian man, which had prompted her move to the United States.When the film premiered last year at the Sarajevo Film Festival, Stajnfeld said she was nervous but could not imagine its causing waves. “I thought no one remembered me, I didn’t keep in touch with anyone in Serbia,” she said in an interview.The media firestorm that erupted within days of the premiere proved her wrong.The film “Hold Me Right” presents possible reactions, some constructive, some not, to sexual assault.   Hold Me RightStajnfeld’s face was suddenly all over the Serbian press again. Television and online commentators praised her for speaking out or savaged her for not disclosing the man’s name.She said she did not identify the man because she wanted the film to focus on survivors and healing, rather than singling out a perpetrator. But the country’s tabloids speculated wildly about his identity. Reporters approached Stajnfeld’s unsuspecting parents in their small village. Critics questioned her motives. “Sick!” read one headline. “Actress made up the rape to advertise her film.”Even for someone who had grown up in Serbia, where sexism and male chauvinism are deeply entrenched, the blowback was stunning, Stajnfeld said. While the country has taken steps to advance the cause of women’s rights in recent years — in 2013 it ratified a human rights convention addressing gender-based violence — in Serbia, as in the surrounding region, sexual harassment and assaults are still only rarely reported, and victim shaming abounds.“After opening up, it was so liberating; I thought the narrative was in my hands,” Stajnfeld said. “But it caused even more unsafety and ridiculous dehumanization.”But in recent months, spurred partly by the film, the mood in some quarters has changed. In January, several other Serbian actresses came out publicly with allegations that they had been raped, and a MeToo-like movement roared to life in this region where the culture of calling out abusers had yet to gain a foothold.Using the hashtag #NisiSama, which means “You are not alone,” and on the Facebook page Nisam Trazila, or “I didn’t ask for it,” which has 40,000 followers, supporters urged that victims of sexual harassment be believed and perpetrators be held to account.“We have followed what was happening around the globe with the #MeToo movement, but I think we needed authentic voices of women from this region in order to have this kind of reaction,” Sanja Pavlovic, of the Autonomous Women’s Center in Belgrade, said in an email.Last week Stajnfeld, who lives in New York, flew to Serbia, met with the police and prosecutors and identified the man who she said assaulted her as Branislav Lecic.Branislav Lecic, a celebrated Serbian actor, has denied that he ever had a sexual encounter with Stajnfeld. Darko Vojinovic/Associated PressHer disclosure refueled the media blitz, in part because Lecic, 65, is a famed figure in Serbia, not only a prominent actor but also a professor and former minister of culture. Only weeks ago, he had spoken out against sexual assault.“When a woman says no, that’s the end of it. I don’t understand that someone can’t control their urges,” he told one Serbian newspaper.Stajnfeld says that statement, in part, was what compelled her to publicly name him.Lecic has denied any sexual contact with Stajnfeld, with whom he acted in a play, “Daily Command,” at the time in 2012 when she says the assault occurred.“I have never had sexual contact with her. Everything else would be a lie!” Lecic wrote in a WhatsApp message.But Stajnfeld provided prosecutors and members of the media with an audio recording of her confronting him in a Belgrade restaurant in December 2016, in which he acknowledges that she said no to his advances. Excerpts of the audio, distilled from a longer tape, with the man’s voice disguised, are included in the film.In the recording, she says several times that she wishes he had respected the fact that she had objected to his actions, but she does not go into detail about what then transpired.“Back then I felt jeopardized. Can you understand that?” Stajnfeld says on the tape.“I can understand that, but it’s a big mistake, because my expression of tenderness indeed means my respect,” Lecic replied, saying it was an achievement “that you triggered my attention and feeling.”Stajnfeld and Lecic in a scene from the play “Daily Command.”Belgrade Drama TheaterLecic said what happened ought to “feel like an honor, not to put you in jeopardy.” “Who do you think I am?” he continued. “As if I don’t respect who I am.”In the recording, Lecic also pushed back on Stajnfeld’s assertion that if she says no, she means no. “It doesn’t work like that,” he said, later adding, “Life is unpredictable, like a game.”In recent days, Lecic, communicating over WhatsApp, said that he and Stajnfeld met at the restaurant to discuss a potential collaboration, and that the audio provided by Stajnfeld was incomplete: A longer version, he said, would reveal the broader context, that they were merely improvising dialogue, and that she was possibly claiming he assaulted her to gain publicity for her film.“Maybe she was expecting something more, maybe it’s because nothing happened that she wants revenge, and maybe she wants to build her story through me,” he wrote. “Bad marketing is also marketing.”But Stajnfeld provided a 77-minute audio file that she says represents nearly all of their roughly 90-minute conversation: The tape cut off, she said, when her phone battery died. Parts of their conversation are inaudible, and drowned out by background noise. Still, there is no indication they were rehearsing dialogue. Though the voices are muffled at times and the banter often seems friendly, Stajnfeld’s voice gets sterner as she describes how hurt she was by his actions. Lecic responds in a way that suggests he believed that what happened was consensual.When they began rehearsing the play, Stajnfeld said she viewed Lecic as a mentor and a friend, until he began propositioning her to have sex. Then, one day, in his dressing room, she said he abruptly shoved his hand up her dress. Stajnfeld said she pulled away and fled, stunned, but opted not to tell the director because she was worried she wouldn’t be believed, and that it could hurt her career. Lecic denied any sexual encounter took place.At the time, she said in an interview, she had already approached Lecic, who she viewed as an influential political figure, for a reference letter to apply for an American work visa. She said she was looking for opportunities in the United States, but never intended to abandon her Serbian career.She said Lecic first insisted they walk in a park nearby. Then, she said, on what she assumed was a lift home, he drove in the wrong direction, frightening her, and telling her he was taking her to see a beautiful view of Belgrade.An image from the film “Hold Me Right” that depicts how sharing stories of sexual assault and receiving support are vital to healing. Hold Me RightWhen they arrived at a house on a hill in the city’s outskirts, she said Lecic undressed her and sexually assaulted her, despite the fact that she was crying and repeatedly said no.“In that moment, I was so tortured,” she continued. “He was asking me to do stuff for him. I wanted to do anything for this torture to stop. I couldn’t move my arms, my mouth, I couldn’t stop crying,” she said.Franz Stefan Gady, who used to date Stajnfeld and was living in Stockholm at the time, said within days she had provided him with an account of having been sexually assaulted by the “older guy” in the play.Stajnfeld said she told police and prosecutors last week the same details of her encounters with Lecic in the dressing room and at the house. But she had not gone to the authorities at the time, she said, because she feared her story would be leaked to the press and her career ruined. Instead, she booked a ticket to the United States where, in New York, she began to unravel. She had panic attacks and later considered suicide, but with the help of therapy and victim support groups, she became determined to overcome the trauma. She began interviewing and filming survivors, and what started as a 10-minute short ended up growing, over the course of three-and-a-half years, into her first feature-length film as a director.Stajnfeld said she never intended to insert her own story into her film, but after seeing the rough cut, she knew she had to include her experience too.“For the sake of justice, for the sake of my healing, for the sake of other victims in the region, I’m speaking out now,” she said in the interview with The Times.The film is scheduled to screen at the Martovski film festival in Belgrade later this spring, she said, followed by a U.S. release.After the premiere of Stajnfeld’s film last summer, media commentators said she should be ashamed, that she had slept with a man to get a role, that she should name him or else be prosecuted, that she dishonored women who had really been raped, and that she looked too happy in a recent televised interview to have been a victim.“The public opinion took a tabloid approach, hungry for blood, public humiliation, shame and guilt,” said Snezana Dakic, a Serbian television presenter. “And that is exactly opposite from how this problem should be treated.”Whatever personal catharsis the film represents, more people are seeing Stajnfeld’s film as a spark for the groundswell of support for sexual assault victims underway in Serbia and the surrounding Balkan region.“Danijela’s case gave wings to other women, actresses, to talk about what happened to them,” said Dragana Grncarski, a former model and public figure. “Coming out in the open, they prevent things like that from happening to other women.”Indira K. Skoric provided translations. More

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      ‘Seaspiracy’ Review: Got Any Scandals? Go Fish.

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      A Netflix documentary takes viewers on a voyage around the world rooting out the many causes of ocean life decimation, but its rhetorical methods distract from its revelations.The turbulent documentary “Seaspiracy,” streaming on Netflix, takes the form of an intercontinental odyssey filled with discoveries. The director Ali Tabrizi serves as our guide and impassioned narrator, and as he voyages from Asia to Europe and back, he strives to frame each revelation as more shocking than the last.What begins as a study of ocean debris becomes a tour of the numerous agents of marine destruction and corruption, from the millions of sharks killed as incidental catch to the conservation organizations that Tabrizi suggests are motivated by profits. But the film’s rhetorical style often feels like a cheap imitation of hard-hitting investigative journalism. “My only option was to follow the money,” Tabrizi declares, after successfully entrapping one organization’s representatives with leading questions.Throughout, Tabrizi infuses “Seaspiracy” with a sense of urgency and peril. At a tuna port in Japan and a salmon farm in Scotland, the director ducks around corners and sleuths under the cover of darkness. Shark fin markets in China are filmed with spy cameras. And efforts to investigate human rights abuses in the Thai fishing industry are charged with reminders of the risk to Tabrizi and his team’s lives.“Seaspiracy” does present some pieces of reporting — including an inquiry into dolphin-safe tuna can labels — that are surprising and memorable. But even the film’s notable points seem to emerge only briefly before sinking beneath the surface, lost in a sea of murky conspiratorial thinking.SeaspiracyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More