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      in Music

      Sono Fest! Freely Dips Into Jazz and Classical Music

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      In its opening days, Ethan Iverson’s Sono Fest! in Brooklyn was already showing promise.Update: Ethan Iverson announced on Monday that the rest of Sono Fest! would not proceed as scheduled because the owner of the Soapbox Gallery, responsible for running the theater, had tested positive for Covid-19.This past week, I did something with a classical music concert that I have often enjoyed at jazz clubs: I hung back to hear the same program again when it returned for a second set.It was opening night of the inaugural Sono Fest!, founded and programmed by the jazz pianist and composer Ethan Iverson, and running through June 23 at Soapbox Gallery in Brooklyn. (The space, in addition to hosting audiences in its 60-seat space, is also offering ticketed livestreams of the events.) Iverson was wrapping up a concert with the violinist Miranda Cuckson when he casually noted that anyone who wanted to hear the same pieces again could remain for the next gig.Their performance — of works for violin and piano by Peter Lieberson, Louise Talma and George Walker — had been among the best chamber music shows I’d heard all season. (Another delight: Iverson’s jaunty and lyrical Piano Sonata, which he’d performed alone.) Rapport between players sometimes develops as a night progresses, so why not stick around?That decision paid dividends quickly — particularly during Talma’s Sonata (1962), a choice rarity that pairs mid-20th-century harmonic modernism with forceful rhythmic drive. In the first set, Cuckson had devoted a range of expressive talents to the violin writing: carefully shading some drier moments of muted playing, and later deploying her silvery sound to underline the singing qualities embedded in an otherwise complex idiom.Cuckson and Iverson had been enviably coordinated during the furious passages in the earlier set — if sometimes a touch stiffly so. Later, though, they achieved a give and take that was something else: At select junctures, she powered slightly ahead of his beat, allowing an almost-rushed climactic phrase in the violin to decay dramatically over his rhythmically precise piano.Afterward, Iverson told the audience that they were experiencing “the deep set.” Those of us who had sat through knew just how right he was.“The truth of the matter is, I love it all,” Iverson said. “And I think we all should love it all. I’m really trying to dig deep.”Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesPermission to linger and experience multiple sets is just one aspect of Iverson’s merging of jazz and classical traditions at his new festival. Last Wednesday, as skies darkened in New York because of Canadian wildfires, he played mostly jazz standards — including, pointedly, Jerome Kern’s “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” — with Chris Potter, the storied tenor saxophone player. (I caught that performance the next day on video.)On Thursday, you can catch multiple sets by Aaron Diehl, a first-call jazz pianist who also plays the music of Gershwin with symphony orchestras (and the music of Philip Glass on recordings). Other nights trend more toward more traditional chamber fare. But rarely too traditional: On Tuesday, the vocalist Judith Berkson — who sings adaptations of Schumann as well as her own electroacoustic pieces — will bring her visionary practice to the Soapbox.In an interview between sets last week, Iverson said of his festival’s organizing principles: “The truth of the matter is, I love it all. And I think we all should love it all. I’m really trying to dig deep.”After mentioning that the composers represented on his program with Cuckson were all American, Iverson noted, “There’s syncopation in the Walker and the Talma,” adding that in the latter case, the extent of the rhythmic exuberance makes him think of Harlem Stride piano legend James P. Johnson.Johnson, as it happens, gets a tip of the hat in Iverson’s Piano Sonata, which he premiered last year at the New England Conservatory in Boston, where he teaches.That piece is structured like a sonata in the model of Haydn and other classical forebears, but first-movement explosion of rhythm in the bass receives the indication “a la James P. Johnson” in the score. And it’s not the sonata’s only jazz-world nod: After a snatch of Mozartean melody in the second movement, Iverson revels in descending licks redolent of the soul jazz tradition, marked “a la Bobby Timmons.”This is no less referential than another charming classical piece of Iverson’s, “Concerto to Scale,” which he premiered with the American Composers Orchestra in 2018. But to its credit, the sonata is less jokey — and thus more secure — when dealing with its layered source materials. To my ear, that makes it a new advance in his engagement with fully notated writing.Playing the sonata last week, both times, Iverson dived right into his own crunchy, chromatic figures with a ferocity that was absent in video from the New England Conservatory premiere, in which he was “a little bit nervous,” he said.But at Soapbox, “I was certainly warmed up,” he said, having played the Talma piece before his sonata. Always, though, he has been confident in the work, which he has tinkered with and recorded for his next release on the Blue Note label, scheduled for 2024.In terms of the sonata’s spirit, he said: “I do think when people who don’t swim in the world every day hand in formal composition, they often are too serious. I’d actually rather be rambunctious.”“I feel James P. with me,” he added. “I feel Erroll Garner with me. And I feel Ralph Shapey.”The language Iverson uses when discussing his upcoming compositional premieres — including more sonatas, as well as orchestral arrangements of Ellington — enjoys a reprise whenever he discusses the balance of the Sono Fest! programming. In both cases, he is looking for new paths. And for Iverson, all routes move within what he calls “this very American phenomenon.”Before hopping back onstage for his second set last week, he observed: “It’s not happening in Germany or England. There’s still something I like so much about all of this: these are American composers I’m playing. Scott Joplin is part of it. And Henry Mancini is part of it. There’s a whole thing, there, that’s our language. If you really love it all, there’s incredible room still, to find a way.” More

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      in Movies

      Can the Tribeca Festival Make Audio Appealing?

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      The Tribeca Festival and audio artists each have something the other wants. Can they make it work?When Winnie and Alex Kemp submitted their first original fiction podcast “The Imperfection” to the 2021 Tribeca Festival, they set their expectations near the curb.The couple, co-founders of the podcast studio Wolf at the Door, believed in the project. Making the nine-episode series — a surrealist caper about two impaired friends whose psychiatrist goes missing — had been a nearly yearlong labor of love, but early signals from the market had been humbling. An agent the couple hired to find distribution for the show had come back empty-handed, and emails to 200 journalists generated just one reply — a rejection.At the Tribeca Festival, which dropped the word “film” from its name that year and expanded its focus on video games, virtual reality, music and audio, “The Imperfection” received a warmer reception. It was among the inaugural slate of 12 officially selected podcasts to premiere at the festival.Being chosen by Tribeca meant “The Imperfection” was featured with the other festival selections on the Apple Podcasts and Audible home pages, helping it reach the top 20 of Apple Podcasts’ fiction chart. The show was later nominated for best podcast of the year and best fiction writing at The Ambie awards, the industry’s answer to the Oscars. And the Kemps got new representation with the Creative Artists Agency; last year, they sold the television rights to the show, and they will co-write the pilot script.“It was a huge boon to us helping our first show get found,” Winnie Kemp said. “There are so many shows out there; the hardest thing to figure out is, ‘How do I cut through the noise?’”Winnie and Alex Kemp submitted their original fiction podcast “The Imperfection” to the 2021 Tribeca Festival.n/aThough it has never equaled the most prestigious galas of the film world, the Tribeca Festival, which began last Wednesday and will feature audio selections this week, has emerged as a uniquely appealing showcase for podcast creators. The demand for credible curatorial organizations is high in podcast land, where an explosion of titles — over two million have been created since the start of 2020, according to the database Listen Notes — has made it hard to break out even as overall listenership has increased.While other festivals exist specifically for audio storytelling, and some documentary festivals include podcast selections, Tribeca’s history — it was founded in 2002 by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff — and association with Hollywood talent have made it an instant player in the audio community.“This is the next frontier of interesting, creative, independent storytelling — so much so that discoverability has been a challenge for audiences,” said Cara Cusumano, the director and vice president of programming at the Tribeca Festival. “That’s our forte; there was a place for us to play a role in this ecosystem and deliver an experience that you won’t find anywhere else.”This year, 16 podcasts are competing for various awards in fiction and nonfiction categories. The selections include Alissa Escarce, Nellie Gilles and Joe Richman’s “The Unmarked Graveyard,” a documentary series about the anonymous dead of New York’s Hart Island cemetery; Georgie Aldaco’s “These Were Humans,” a sketch comedy series that imagines the artifacts of an extinct human race; and Glynnis MacNicol, Emily Marinoff and Jo Piazza’s “Wilder,” a nonfiction series about the life and legacy of the “Little House on the Prairie” author Laura Ingalls Wilder.The festival will also host live tapings and premieres of several podcasts that are not in competition, including “Pod Save America,” Crooked Media’s popular political talk show; “Just Jack & Will,” the actors Sean Hayes and Eric McCormack’s new “Will & Grace” rewatch podcast and “You Feeling This?” an Los Angeles-centric fiction anthology from James Kim.Davy Gardner, the curator of audio storytelling at Tribeca, said the festival aims to demonstrate that podcasts deserve a comparable level of “cultural recognition” to films.“Tribeca is giving these creators the full red-carpet treatment,” he said. “This is its own art form and we want to help elevate it and push it forward.”Film festivals have long been the envy of audio artists. In the early 1990s, Sundance helped create a vogue for independent and art-house films that blossomed into a booming market. Filmmakers who entered the festival with few resources and no name recognition could exit it with the backing of a major studio and a burgeoning career.No similar infrastructure exists for independent podcasters. As major funders like Spotify and Amazon have consolidated around easy-to-monetize true-crime documentaries and celebrity interview shows — a trend that has intensified amid industrywide economic woes and a series of layoffs — many artists have struggled to find support for less obviously commercial work.“If you don’t have a promotional budget or aren’t attached to a big network it’s really hard to find an audience,” said Bianca Giaever, whose memoiristic podcast “Constellation Prize” was featured by the Tribeca Festival in 2021. (She is also a former producer of the Times’ podcast “The Daily”). “It’s a vicious cycle, because then less of that work gets made.” Bianca Giaever’s memoiristic podcast “Constellation Prize” was featured by the Tribeca Festival in 2021.n/aOf course, even award-winning films at the biggest festivals don’t always become hits. And podcast creators at Tribeca have to compete for audiences and prospective business partners accustomed to filling their schedules with movie premieres.Johanna Zorn, who co-founded the long-running Third Coast International Audio Festival and presented audio work at multiple documentary film festivals in the 2010s, said the payoff sometimes fell short of the promise.“We went to some fabulous film festivals and we were happy to be there,” she said. “But did they help us get real press coverage? Get us into a room with people who could lead us to the next thing? Give us something that we could really build on? Not so much.”To cast the podcast selections in an optimal light, Gardner and his colleagues have had to learn how to exhibit an art form not customarily experienced in a communal setting. They have planned around a dozen events at theaters and other venues around Manhattan that will pair excerpts from featured work with live discussions or supplementary video.One thing they won’t include? Quiet rooms with only an audio track and an empty stage.“I’ve tried it,” Gardner said wearily. “It’s incredibly awkward.” More

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      in Theater

      ‘The Inheritance’ Arrives at a Festival of German Drama

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      A new production of Matthew López’s seven-hour play was among 10 shows chosen for Theatertreffen, a celebration of the best theater from Germany, Austria and Switzerland.Midway through Matthew López’s “The Inheritance,” a character lashes out at E.M. Forster, the British author of “Howards End,” who appears as a spiritual guru to the play’s protagonists.“Why should we listen to you lecture us about fearlessness and honesty? You were never honest about yourself,” the character screams, excoriating Forster for spending his long life in the closet.When “The Inheritance,” a seven-hour intergenerational saga about gay men in New York, opened in London in 2018, it was praised to the heavens. When the production transferred to Broadway a year later, there was far less critical love.This month, a reprise of the first German production of “The Inheritance” kicked off the annual Theatertreffen, a showcase of the best German-language theater, for which organizers selected “10 remarkable productions” from 461 theatrical premieres in Germany, Austria and Switzerland that debuted last year. The ethics of storytelling and of responsible representation emerged as unofficial themes of the lineup.López’s skill as a dramatist comes through in Hannes Becker’s translation, but the lyricism of his prose less so. Despite the impressive plotting and memorable characters, “The Inheritance” often fizzles during its generous running time. And the play’s cliché-riddled depiction of New York — an entire scene consists of little other than a lesson in how to order correctly at Peter Luger, the celebrated steakhouse — often had this New Yorker rolling his eyes.In the end, the production, which hails from the Residenztheater in Munich, is redeemed by heroic performances from the company’s ensemble. It’s a tough call, but for my money Vincent zur Linden gives the evening’s most indelible turn: Playing both the aspiring actor Adam and the hustler Leo, zur Linden shifts between coyness, arrogance and twitching brokenness. As Eric Glass, the play’s central character, Thiemo Strutzenberger fills a bland role with emotional complexity. And Michael Goldberg, one of the troupe’s older members, inhabits the play’s two mentor-like figures, Forster and Walter Poole, with avuncular gentleness and secret sorrow.Theatertreffen loves a good theatrical marathon, like Frank Castorf’s seven-hour “Faust,” seen here in 2018, or Christopher Rüping’s even longer “Dionysos Stadt” a year later. Yet sheer length does not an epic make. Compared to those gutsy avant-garde extravaganzas, Philip Stölzl’s sleek, handsome production of “The Inheritance” felt tame.“The Bus to Dachau” considers how the Holocaust is depicted in art and how it will be taught and commemorated when no survivors are left.Isabel Machado RiosWhen I returned to the festival several nights later, it was for a production much more in line with the formally daring, conceptually knotty theater more commonly found at Theatertreffen: “The Bus to Dachau,” a coproduction between the Dutch theater collective De Warme Winkel and the Schauspielhaus Bochum theater in western Germany.Subtitled “a 21st century memory play,” this absorbing production takes a singular and idiosyncratic approach to confronting the Holocaust through art, and asks what form commemoration and education will take once all of the survivors are gone.Featuring audience participation and live video — including blue-screen effects and Snapchat filters — the production tackles its weighty themes with an off-kilter mix of irreverence and severity. As the actors feel their way through the material, they explore the moral implications of depicting the Holocaust onscreen and how Germany’s culture of memory can carry a whiff of arrogance and even, perversely, of possessiveness.“The Ego and Its Own” was inspired by an 19th-century paean to radical selfishness by Max Stirner, the German philosopher.Arno DeclairYet while “The Bus to Dachau” found compelling ways to dramatize its risky and sensitive themes, another aesthetically bold production at Theatertreffen was ultimately less successful at bringing unlikely material to the stage.That work, “The Ego and Its Own,” from the Deutsches Theater, was one of two shows on the lineup that originated at Berlin playhouses. (The other was the choreographer Florentina Holzinger’s latest freak-out vaudeville-style revue, “Ophelia’s Got Talent.”)Inspired by an 1844 paean to radical selfishness by the German philosopher Max Stirner, the abstract production finds six actors cavorting on a white spiral ramp that resembles the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The play’s director, Sebastian Hartmann, a festival favorite, and the composer PC Nackt fashion a musical revue from Stirner’s opus that is equally arresting and bewildering.The actors intone and belt out slogans from the 19th-century text while Nackt and a drummer accompany them with a wild, mostly electronic score. Stark lighting, live video, fog and even 3-D projections contribute to the trippy expressionistic atmosphere. But despite the constant multisensory stimulation and energetic performances, it quickly grows tiresome. It’s a trip, to be sure — but I’m not sure how it illuminates Stirner’s influential and contentious ideas.One of the festival’s closing plays, “Zwiegespräch” by the Nobel Prize-winning author Peter Handke is an emotionally resonant production about intergenerational conflicts.Susanne Hassler-SmithControversy often attends the works Peter Handke, the Austrian who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019. For many, Handke has been tainted by his sympathy for Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian war criminal. The news of the writer’s Nobel win was met, by some, with disbelief, and his 2020 play “Zdenek Adamec” premiered at the Salzburg Festival under the threat of protest. Still, Handke, now 80, continues to publish and be performed at an impressive clip.His latest text for the stage, “Zwiegespräch,” was published as a book shortly before its world premiere at the Burgtheater in Vienna. The author dedicated the dramatic dialogue to the actors Otto Sander and Bruno Ganz, the stars of the Wim Wenders film “Wings of Desire,” which Handke wrote the screenplay for; much of this brief, poetic text is concerned with the essence of acting and storytelling. There is also a sense of fraught struggles between grandfathers, fathers and sons.At Theaterteffen, “Zwiegespräch” will be performed on Saturday and Sunday as one of the festival’s closing productions. Not long ago, it headlined another one of Germany’s main theater festivals, “Radikal Jung,” at the Volkstheater, in Munich, which is where I caught it last month.The dazzling production, overseen by Rieke Süsskow, a young Berlin-born director, heightens the dialogue’s intergenerational conflicts. She sets her production in a nursing home and distributes Handke’s text to a cast of actors playing frail residents and their sinister caregivers, somehow creating a convincing dramaturgy without clearly differentiated characters or a conventional plot.Much credit is due to her stage designer, Mirjam Stängl, and her ingenious set, a succession of folding panels that expand and contract over the width of the stage like a fan, and Marcus Loran for his hallucinatory lighting design. Thanks to the attentive artistry of Süsskow and her team, Handke’s 60-odd page pamphlet comes to life in an emotionally resonant performance about memory, loss, regret and the nature of art.Separating the art from the artist shouldn’t mean giving artists a free pass. In the context of this sensitively paced and finely wrought production, however, there seemed little doubt that Handke is attuned to the moral responsibilities of storytelling.TheatertreffenThrough May 29 at various venues in Berlin; berlinerfestspiele.de. More

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      in Music

      How BayouWear Came to Represent New Orleans Style

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      The colorful prints of BayouWear, born at a New Orleans jazz festival, reflect the city itself.It all started with a poster.In 1975, while in graduate school at Tulane University, Bud Brimberg had to come up with a project for a business class. His idea: have an artist in New Orleans create a poster as merchandise for a local music festival.That event, now known as the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, has become one of the city’s cultural staples. This year’s Jazz Fest, held over seven days in April and May, featured hundreds of performers across 14 stages. According to organizers, about 460,000 people (including staff and vendors) attended.Since 1975, each Jazz Fest has been commemorated with an artist-designed poster. Mr. Brimberg, 73, still oversees their production. And since 1981, he has also made printed Hawaiian shirts sold at the festival. After introducing the shirts, which also feature a unique motif each year, Mr. Brimberg started to offer other pieces, including shorts and dresses.The clothes, called BayouWear, have turned into a sort of unofficial uniform for Jazz Fest attendees and performers like Irma Thomas, a soul singer and a festival fixture known for taking the stage in a custom dress featuring the latest print.Bud Brimberg, who started selling printed clothes at Jazz Fest in 1981, wearing a jacket with BayouWear’s alligator print from 1999.Emily Kask for The New York Times“Whenever someone wears the clothing, the festival, along with the culture that created it, lives on,” said Quint Davis, the producer of Jazz Fest, who has helped plan the event since it began in 1970.Lisa Alexis, the director of the Office of Cultural Economy in New Orleans, said the BayouWear clothes have also come to represent the city itself. “Everyone looks forward to the design each year,” she said. “It just seems to give a very comprehensive representation and feel of our New Orleans culture.”On a Friday at this year’s festival, Ann Patteson, 78, from New Orleans, said she was wearing one of the 18 BayouWear shirts in her collection. For her, the shirts represent just about every Jazz Fest she has attended.Austin Hajna, a 36-year-old physician assistant from Washington, D.C., was one of dozens of people browsing the shirts ($59), shorts ($39), dresses ($59) and sleeveless tops ($49) at a tent selling BayouWear. Many pieces featured the 2023 print — an architectural motif inspired by buildings in the French Quarter — and there were lots of clothes from past festivals.Mr. Hajna, who had a drink in his hand, was wearing a blue shirt covered with green streetcars and turquoise palm trees, the 2015 print. He said it was one of two BayouWear shirts he owns, adding that he planned to buy a third that day, “right after a sip of this vodka.”Austin Hajna, center, wore a shirt with the 2015 BayouWear print while shopping at the brand’s merchandise tent at the festival.Emily Kask for The New York TimesFrom left, Zach Meredith in a shirt featuring BayouWear’s red beans and rice print from 1998; Paige Nelson Stypinski, in an alligator print; and Tyler Stypinski, in the architectural print introduced in 2023.Emily Kask for The New York TimesBen DeMarais, who attended Jazz Fest with his son this year, wore a shirt with BayouWear’s 2013 print featuring iris flowers and brass instruments.Emily Kask for The New York TimesJamel Banks at the festival’s BayouWear tent, wearing a shirt with the Pucci-inspired print from 2019.Emily Kask for The New York TimesJamel Banks, a 38-year-old engineer from Houston, was in line behind Mr. Hajna. His shirt featured a colorful Pucci-inspired print of a dancing man that was introduced in 2019. The shirts, he said, “feel very father-ish — but a cool dad.”“I’m ready for the matching shorts now,” Mr. Banks added, “and something for my girlfriend.”Though clothes with past BayouWear prints are still sold, certain designs are harder to find. Original samples and stock of the 2001 print — plates of sugar-dusted beignets next to mugs of cafe au lait — were destroyed during Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Brimberg said.BayouWear garments are made entirely of rayon, which Mr. Brimberg said he chose because it dries fast, hangs loose and displays colors more vividly than other fabrics. “The gradations were missing in cotton,” he said, zooming in on a photo of the 2003 print (a jumble of crawfish) to show how the color of the crustaceans faded from a deep orange into a pale coral.Mr. Brimberg — who grew up in Brooklyn and has the mannerisms, and accent, of Larry David — comes up with ideas for BayouWear prints himself before finding artists to help bring them to life. He said his references over the years have included pointillist and Cubist art, the brand Marimekko and the French glassmaker Lalique.The ideas for the prints themselves, he said, typically strike at random, often while he is roaming around New Orleans. The first print, in 1981, was inspired by a palm-tree-dotted shirt on a man playing an upright piano in that year’s Jazz Fest poster.Kathy Schorr, a textile artist in New Orleans who helped make BayouWear’s 2023 architectural print, said she loves how fluid the designs are. “You can’t tell what it is until you’re right up on it,” Ms. Schorr said. “They just look like a beautiful pattern from a distance.”The buttons on many BayouWear shirts are no less thoughtfully designed than the prints. To match certain motifs, Mr. Brimberg has had buttons custom made to look like tiny drums (for a percussion-themed print from 2016), guitar picks (for a print from 2006) and water-meter covers (for this year’s architectural print).For garments featuring this year’s architectural print, Mr. Brimberg had buttons made to recall water-meter covers. Emily Kask for The New York TimesThe 2015 streetcar print.Emily Kask for The New York TimesFor shirts featuring a yellow-eyed alligators from 1999, Mr. Brimberg had buttons made to look like the reptiles’ teeth. “I went down to the voodoo museum and bought some alligator teeth,” he recalled. “Then I took them to my dentist, since they were kind of ugly, and asked if he could do some cosmetic dentistry to polish them up. And I had that cast as a button.”At the opening day of this year’s Jazz Fest, Kayla Biskupovich, 26, from New Orleans, was wearing an alligator-print shirt over a dress covered in watermelon slices, the print from 2014. “This dress was my mom’s, she bought it the year this pattern came out,” said Ms. Biskupovich, who graduated recently from Louisiana State University.For a better fit, she tied knots at the dress’s back to tighten it. “I didn’t want to cut it, because that would be sacrilegious,” Ms. Biskupovich said.“I also wanted to wear the gators,” she added as she held out one of her shirt’s triangular white buttons. “Look at the teeth! Could you die?!” More

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      in Movies

      Cannes Film Festival Opens With Divisive Johnny Depp Film, ‘Jeanne du Barry’

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      For its opening film, the Cannes organizers have opted for both star power and potential controversy with “Jeanne du Barry,” a French costume drama that is Johnny Depp’s first major film since winning a bitter defamation trial last year.Directed by and starring Maïwenn, the film centers on a young woman as she climbs from humble origins to become Madame du Barry, the favorite of King Louis XV of France, who Depp plays in a white wig and powdered face.The trial between Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard riveted the world last year as the actress aired allegations of physical and sexual abuse. Depp denied the claims, asserting that she was the true aggressor in the relationship. (A judge in Britain had ruled in an earlier case that there was evidence that Depp had assaulted Heard.)The jury in Virginia largely sided with Depp, finding that Heard had defamed him when she described herself in a 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.” Heard initially appealed the verdict, but then announced last year that she intended to settle the dispute.The announcement last month that “Jeanne du Barry” would be screening after the Cannes opening ceremony sparked division online, with some criticizing the festival organizers (the hashtag #CannesYouNot circulated along with the news), while Depp’s devoted fan base celebrated it as a sign of the actor’s comeback.The festival’s director, Thierry Frémaux, said in an interview with Variety last month that he did not view the film as a divisive choice. “We only know one thing, it’s the justice system and I think he won the legal case,” he said in the interview. “But the movie isn’t about Johnny Depp.”In a news conference on Monday, Frémaux said he had no interest in the defamation trial, noting, “I care about Johnny Depp as an actor,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.On Tuesday, the French newspaper Libération published an open letter, signed by more than 100 actors, that accused the festival, and the broader film industry, of not properly shutting people accused of assault and abuse out of the event. Depp was not mentioned by name.“Obviously, it does not come from nowhere that people who abuse, harass and violate are offered a place on the red carpet of this festival,” the letter reads. “It is a symptom of a global system.”While the movies that have most defined Depp’s career involve eccentric leads who dominate the film (including Sweeney Todd and Willy Wonka), in “Jeanne du Barry” he is taking a secondary role to Maïwenn, whose film “Polisse” won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2011. Depp appeared at the festival that same year in the fourth “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie.During the trial, lawyers for Depp argued that Heard’s op-ed in The Washington Post had destroyed the actor’s film career, saying that after it was published, he was no longer able to book a studio film. Heard’s side countered that his pattern of bad publicity and behavior on sets was at fault for any downturn in his career.After the trial, Depp quickly re-entered the public sphere, playing concerts with Jeff Beck in Europe and appearing in a fashion show backed by Rihanna. But this is his first major return to the film industry.“Jeanne du Barry” will certainly have significant exposure in France, where it opens in theaters on Tuesday and will later appear there on Netflix.No plans have been announced for distribution in the United States. More

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      in Movies

      Meet the 2023 Cannes Jury: Brie Larson, Ruben Ostlund and More

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      The Swedish director Ruben Ostlund has won the Palme d’Or twice — first for “The Square” in 2017, then last year for “Triangle of Sadness.” This year, he’s the president of the jury that decides who gets that top prize.Ostlund told The New York Times that he planned to have “a very Swedish approach when it comes to running the jury,” adding, “It will be a democracy.”At a news conference on Tuesday, he said that the jury didn’t have many rules. “One thing is that this will be the first year in the history of the Cannes Film Festival when the publicists will have no rumors to tell to each other,” Ostlund said.In Ostlund’s films, which skewer class and social hypocrisies, any character who made a vow like that would wind up doing the opposite. But don’t expect the top prizewinner or any of the other awards to be his choices alone.He has eight fellow jurors. They include the French director Julia Ducournau, who has just one Palme to Ostlund’s two, having won in 2021 for her genre-bending “Titane.” It was, as that year’s jury president Spike Lee remarked at the time, likely the first film in history in which a Cadillac impregnated the heroine.Several other jury members are directors with Cannes pedigrees. Damián Szifron, from Argentina, is best known for his comic anthology feature “Wild Tales,” which showed in competition in 2014. The Zambian-born Rungano Nyoni made “I am Not a Witch,” an absurdist story of an orphan accused of witchcraft; it was a favorite of critics when it played in the parallel festival Directors’ Fortnight in 2017. And the Moroccan filmmaker Maryam Touzani was here last year with “The Blue Caftan,” which showed in the festival’s Un Certain Regard section.Another jury member, Atiq Rahimi, is both a filmmaker and an author. Born in Afghanistan, Rahimi directed film adaptations of his own novels “Earth and Ashes” and “The Patience Stone.” As a book, the latter won the Goncourt Prize, France’s most prestigious literary award.Cannes always likes to have a bit of Hollywood star wattage on its juries, and this year, the American actors Brie Larson and Paul Dano supply it. There was a tense moment during Tuesday’s news conference, when a Variety reporter asked Larson if she would watch the festival’s opening film, “Jeanne du Barry,” which stars Johnny Depp, since she has historically been a supporter of #TimesUp. “You’re asking me that?” Larson said, bristling. Pressed on the issue, she replied, “You’ll see, I guess, if I see it. And I don’t know how I’ll feel about it if I do.”Rounding out the jury’s thespian contingent is the French actor Denis Ménochet, recently seen as a loopy veteran in “Beau Is Afraid.”At the news conference Ostlund said: “If I could choose between an Oscar and Palme d’Or, it’s an easy choice. I’d rather have one more than have an Oscar.”Kyle Buchanan More

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      in Movies

      At New Directors/New Films, See the World Through Perceptive Filmmakers’ Eyes

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      “Earth Mama,” “Tótem” and other strong entries offer proof that the art form is flourishing regardless of what’s happening in Hollywood.Like the vernal equinox, New Directors/New Films is a sign that winter and the soul-crushing slog known as awards season have finally ended. Now in its 52nd year, the festival, opening Wednesday, is a great place to recharge and revive. With a slate largely drawn from recent international film festivals — from Berlin and Locarno to Sundance — the 12-day event is also a nice way to travel the world by proxy while previewing work before it begins percolating into art theaters and onto streaming services.Each edition of New Directors — a presentation of Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art — is partly shaped by the competition from other events. It’s also shaped by its programmers’ tastes and orthodoxies, including ideas about what constitutes a festival movie, which, much as at Cannes and elsewhere, tends to mean gravely serious, non-genre work. That can get monotonous, but at its best, New Directors offers enduring proof of cinematic life beyond the corporate bottom line: The festival’s commitment to film art is a galvanizing article of faith.This year’s program consists of 27 features, about half of which are North American premieres, along with some dozen shorts. Among the strongest is the opener, “Earth Mama,” the terrifically assured feature debut from the writer-director Savanah Leaf, a former Olympic volleyball player. Set in the Bay Area, this contemporary drama tracks the heartbreaking, frustrating, at times exasperatingly self-sabotaging daily travails of Gia (a lovely Tia Nomore), a young, single, heavily pregnant woman, as she tries to regain custody of her son and daughter, who are in foster care. Every conceivable odd has been stacked against Gia, including the degradations of systemic oppression.Anchored by Leaf’s empathy and by her precise, confident visual style, the story unfolds during the last stretch of Gia’s pregnancy. With naturalistic dialogue that largely avoids exegesis — as well as with expressionistic flourishes and subtle camerawork that often reveal what the characters don’t or can’t say — Leaf skillfully engages with larger social issues while steering clear of the kind of sermonizing that too often seeps into similarly themed dramas. In Leaf’s hands, Gia isn’t a case study or object lesson. She is instead a woman who’s both singular and much like any other — a human being, in other words, struggling to find a place and a sense of sovereignty amid the onslaughts of everyday life.Cole Doman, left, and Lío Mehiel in “Mutt,” directed by Vuk Lungulov-Klotz.Courtesy of Quiltro LLC“Mutt,” another festival highlight, this one set in present-day New York, follows its heart-stealing title character across a single exceedingly eventful and emotionally fraught day. Written and directed by Vuk Lungulov-Klotz, it centers on Feña, a young man who has recently transitioned (played by the charismatic Lío Mehiel, who, like the filmmaker, is trans), as he crisscrosses the city and through the labyrinthine complexities of his life, including his tricky, sometimes confusing relationships with friends and family. With fluid cinematography, deft narrative pacing and swells of feeling, Lungulov-Klotz creates an urgent, of-the-moment portrait of a young man who’s at once distinct and movingly, rightfully ordinary.Like most movies on the contemporary festival circuit, the selections in New Directors tend to draw on a hodgepodge of different realist traditions (Hollywood, the European art film, Sundance, etc.). This year, more than a few selections also incorporate fantastical interludes — from brief hallucinations to alternative worlds — that productively complicate and on occasion destabilize their realism. One of the boldest, most extensive uses of the fantastic occurs in “The Maiden,” a dreamy, gentle story of loss and mourning from the Canadian writer-director Graham Foy. Set in the hinterlands of Alberta, the movie focuses on several teenagers, both living and dead — a haunting that feels like a generational cri de coeur.I’m still puzzling through the far-out, what-in-the-what finale of “Astrakan,” a drama from the French writer-director David Depesseville about a watchful 12-year-old, Samuel (the appealing Mirko Giannini), who’s been placed in a foster family that seems supremely ill-equipped to deal with his trauma. For most of its running time, the movie embraces a familiar if somewhat stylized realism only to abruptly veer into full-blown symbolism. Like some of the other movies in the lineup, “Astrakan” owes a conspicuous debt to established filmmakers — the boy at times evokes François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel while the filmmaking nods at Robert Bresson via Bruno Dumont — although at its strongest, it stands on its own.The cinematic touchstones are just as obvious elsewhere in the program, which isn’t necessarily a negative. The influence of the Ukrainian auteur Sergei Loznitsa clearly informs the dramatic tumult, political pessimism and elegantly flowing camerawork of “Pamfir,” a visually striking drama from the writer-director Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk about a smuggler who’s recently returned home. There’s certainly some of the Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes’s DNA in “Tommy Guns,” a far-out tale from Carlos Conceição that opens in Angola (where he was born) during the tail end of that country’s war of independence. The movie opens powerfully and gathers dramatic momentum as it begins to blur the time frame, only to lose its sting (and focus on subjugated Angolans) when it drifts into self-conscious surrealism.Naíma Sentíes in “Tótem,” the second feature from writer-director Lila Avilés.Courtesy of Limerencia FilmsEnergetic, sweeping and feminist to the bone, the Iranian drama “Leila’s Brothers,” from the writer-director Saeed Roustaee, traces its title character through the claustrophobic tumult of her life, family and world. Leila (Taraneh Alidoosti, vivid and grounded) is trying to balance her desires with the competing, clamorous needs of her squabbling brothers and impoverished, traditionally minded parents. Organized around a series of encounters, the movie fuses the personal with the political. It opens with a protest that soon turns violent, an overture that sets the tense, fractious mood and telegraphs the story’s trajectory. Then, scene by scene, it lays bare the complexities of contemporary Iran.“Chile ’76,” Manuela Martelli’s visually and tonally meticulous exploration of political resistance and conscience, takes place in the brutal years after the 1973 American-backed coup that brought Gen. Augusto Pinochet to power. Soon after it opens, Carmen (Aline Küppenheim), a doctor’s wife with expensive taste who’s decamped to her family’s vacation home, is asked by a priest for help with a wounded stranger. Before long Carmen is drawn into a shadowy world of passwords and strange noises on the phone, and this unnerving feature has turned into a veritable horror movie. When a body washes up on a beach, Carmen tells her grandchildren to avert their eyes; by then, though, hers have been pried open.There isn’t a false note in the tender Mexican drama “Tótem,” which follows the 7-year-old Sol (Naíma Sentíes, suitably luminous) as she navigates the chaos and indifference of her sprawling family during celebrations for her ailing father. With intricate staging, lapidary camerawork and an expressionistically warm palette — along charming appearances from the natural world — the writer-director Lila Avilés creates a richly textured, deeply compassionate portrait of a family that’s falling apart as one of its youngest members comes into consciousness. “Tótem” is only Avilés’s second feature — her first, “The Chambermaid,” screened at the 2019 festival — but it’s also one of the finest movies you’ll see this year.“Tótem” is also the kind of movie that I think one of the festival’s early programmers, the writer Donald Richie, had in mind when he told The Times in 1972 that the inaugural New Directors “will introduce deserving films that perhaps otherwise might not have exposure here.” It was an honorable idea then; it still is. If anything, the fragility of the art-film exhibition, which has only been worsened by the pandemic, makes the festival’s support of movies like “Tótem” feel even more necessary than it did back then. And if I haven’t convinced you to get off the couch, then consider that this year the festival has sweetened its offerings with a smartly priced package of five movies for $50 — a cinephile carrot that’s as good as it gets.New Directors/New Films runs from Wednesday through April 9. For more information, go to newdirectors.org. More

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      Review: Protecting and Defending Ukraine’s Cultural Identity

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      A festival responds to the assaults and insults of war by celebrating the composer who shaped the nation’s contemporary music, Borys Liatoshynsky.The shadow of the war in Ukraine once again hovered over the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival on Friday when it began its three-day tribute to the 20th-century composer Borys Liatoshynsky at Merkin Hall.Hours before the opening-night program, which highlighted composers who influenced Liatoshynsky, the International Criminal Court accused the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, of war crimes, and issued a warrant for his arrest in connection with the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children. Oleksii Holubov, Ukraine’s consul general in New York, recounted that news to the audience on Friday and was greeted with applause.When the 2022 festival took place, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was fresh, with Putin attempting to justify his actions in part by claiming that Ukraine had no independent cultural identity. Holubov, in his remarks on Friday, said that this year’s festival, the fourth, comes at a time “when our cultural identity, our history and our music are at stake.”On Saturday, the second day of programming traced a pedagogical lineage from Liatoshynsky to several living composers. The Sunday afternoon program pairs two Liatoshynsky quartets with works by Bartok and Copland, composers who, like Liatoshynsky, are credited with defining a national style. Again and again, reclamation resists erasure.Born at the end of the 19th century, Liatoshynsky lived through the Ukrainian War of Independence, the rise of Lenin and Stalin and both world wars. He embraced expressionism early in his career and became an influential teacher at Kyiv Conservatory, where his students included Valentyn Sylvestrov, Ukraine’s most famous living composer.Liatoshynsky, a composer with an intensely volatile style, wrote music that didn’t comply with the Soviet Union’s aesthetic of socialist realism. He was dogged by censors and branded a formalist. After Stalin’s death, he found his way back to his original compositional voice late in life and is now remembered as the father of Ukrainian contemporary music.Liatoshynsky’s Violin Sonata (1926), a thorny work full of short bursts of agitation, opened the program on Friday. The violinist Solomiya Ivakhiv gave the piece’s core thematic material — a melody that skitters, scrapes and then leaps upward — a bold arc, and she applied an eerie calm to passages marked sul ponticello (a technique of bowing near the bridge that produces a high, scratchy sound). At times, though, she and the pianist Steven Beck seemed to set aside interpretive matters just to get through a piece of hair-raising difficulty.Following the Violin Sonata, Alban Berg’s Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano (1913) sounded almost lissome, with the clarinetist Gleb Kanasevich shaping long melodies with a full, lovely tone and understated warmth. The violist Colin Brookes and the pianist Daniel Anastasio likewise cultivated the beauty of Liatoshynsky’s Two Pieces for Viola and Piano (Op. 65), with Anastasio painting a dappled night sky in the Nocturne and Brookes hinting at a mixture of solitude and disturbance.The conductor James Baker made perfect sense out of the unusual instrumentation for Liatoshynsky’s Two Romances (Op. 8), which uses voice, string quartet, clarinet, horn and harp. He highlighted Liatoshynsky’s text painting in the first song, “Reeds,” with strings that rustled like paper and then refracted like shards of light. The bass Steven Hrycelak was a genial narrator with an oaken timbre.Liatoshynsky’s avant-garde-minded students inspired him, and they were represented by two pieces. Sylvestrov’s “Mystère” was a symphony of percussion in which the alto flutist Ginevra Petrucci elegantly snaked her way through a battery of timpani, cymbals, glockenspiel, marimba, Thai gong and more. Each instrument cut through the air with its own vibrations — splashes, thwacks, tinkles, knocks — for a cumulative effect that was captivating to experience live. The brief “Volumes,” by Volodymyr Zahorstev, blared forth with a chaotic play of instrumental timbres.The concert closed with Liatoshynsky’s “Concert Etude-Rondo,” a devilish showpiece given a crisp performance by Anastasio. This was a late piece, written in 1962 and revised in 1967, a year before Liatoshynsky’s death. Its stubborn character extends from driving octaves in the bass to shattered-glass effects in the piano’s delicate upper reaches.The transliteration of composers’ names in this review follows a 2010 resolution adopted by the government of Ukraine, according to Leah Batstone, the festival’s founder and creative director. As Holubov said at the start of the concert, Ukrainian language is the heart of the Ukrainian nation — and Ukrainian music, its soul.It was hard not to see — or rather, hear — a symbol for the persistence of the Ukrainian people in the uncontainable, endlessly restless music of a composer who refused to concede his identity to the state. More