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      The ‘Rust’ Shooting Spurs a Debate Over Using Guns on Film Sets

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      Alec Baldwin, who fatally shot a cinematographer with a gun he had been told was safe, has called for productions to hire police officers to monitor gun safety.Ever since the actor Alec Baldwin fatally shot the cinematographer of the film “Rust” last month with a gun he had been told, incorrectly, contained no live ammunition, the debate on the use of firearms on sets has been growing.Dwayne Johnson — the action star whose production company has made gun-filled films like the “Fast & Furious” spinoff “Hobbs & Shaw” — told Variety last week that the company would no longer use real guns on set. Dozens of cinematographers have signed a commitment not to work on projects using functional firearms. And a state lawmaker in California is drafting legislation that would ban operational firearms from sets.Mr. Baldwin, who was a producer of “Rust” as well as its star, weighed in this week with his own suggestion: that productions should hire police officers to monitor safety. Mr. Baldwin posted Monday on his Twitter and Instagram accounts: “Every film/TV set that uses guns, fake or otherwise, should have a police officer on set, hired by the production, to specifically monitor weapons safety.”But many in the film industry see the tragedy more as a problem of failing to adhere to existing firearms safety protocols than of requiring new, stricter protocols, and it is unclear if any of the proposed changes will have the momentum to come to fruition.The “Rust” shooting happened on Oct. 21, after an old-fashioned revolver was placed in Mr. Baldwin’s hands and proclaimed “cold,” meaning that it should not have contained any live ammunition. But it did: As Mr. Baldwin practiced drawing the gun for a scene, it fired a real bullet, law-enforcement officials said, killing the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, and wounding its director, Joel Souza. There should not have been any live ammunition on the set at all, according to court papers, and law-enforcement officials are investigating how the gun came to be loaded with a lethal bullet.The backlash to Mr. Baldwin’s proposal to have police officers monitor on-set gun safety included comments from industry veterans like David Simon, the creator of “The Wire,” who tweeted that “the average cop is no more a totem of gun safety than a trained film armorer.”Then there are those calling to ban the use of functional guns — which are supposed to be loaded only with dummies or blanks — on sets. They say that technology has advanced to the point where special effects can be used to create the illusion of convincing gunfire. After the shooting in New Mexico, Craig Zobel, the director of the HBO whodunit “Mare of Easttown,” noted that all of the gunshots on that show were digital. But some studio executives say that there are times when visual effects are not sufficient, and that some actors struggle to make fake weapons that cannot even fire blanks appear convincing.The calls for systematic change are complicated by the fact that it is still unclear exactly why the tragedy occurred.Some crew members voiced concerns about the experience level of the film’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, whose lawyers have defended her training and commitment to safety and faulted the production. And the film’s first assistant director, Dave Halls, told a detective investigating the case that he should have checked the gun more thoroughly before Mr. Baldwin handled it, according to an affidavit. (His lawyer later said in a television interview that checking the gun was not his job.) But the central question, of how a live round got into the revolver in the first place, remains a mystery.Despite the remaining questions, the fatal shooting has spurred calls for change inside and outside of the film and television industry..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}The governor of New Mexico, Michelle Lujan Grisham, said days after the shooting that “if the industry doesn’t come forward with very specific accountable safeguards, they should expect that we will.”Stephen Lighthill, the president of the American Society of Cinematographers and one of the prominent signatories of the statement — first reported by Variety — pledging to avoid operational firearms on sets, said that there had not been a wide-scale conversation around what the industry standard should be before the “Rust” shooting. Cinematographers including Bill Pope of “The Matrix” and Mandy Walker of “Mulan” have signed on to the pledge. The statement was posted with a hashtag:#BanBlanks, calling for an end to the use of blank cartridges, which contain gunpowder and paper wadding or wax.Another signatory, Reed Morano, a cinematographer who directed episodes of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” wrote in an Instagram post that she had once been hit by a blank at close range while operating a camera and wished she had thought more about large-scale change then.“How many more deaths do we need to mourn to prove that this must change?” Ms. Morano wrote.In California, a Democratic state senator who represents Silicon Valley, Dave Cortese, has been drafting legislation that would ban operational firearms from sets, which he said would effectively also ban blanks. Mr. Cortese said in an interview that the current system for safety protocols around handling guns on sets — guidelines outlined by unions and production companies — were not sufficient to ensure enforcement and accountability.“Right now what’s missing is the consequences,” he said. “Life and death is not an OK consequence of an error or omission.”Another legislative approach that is being considered, Mr. Cortese said, is a restriction on certain kinds of blanks. But his preference is for an outright ban on operational firearms and blanks, which he thinks can be replaced with special effects.“Some people say, ‘Why get rid of them?’” Mr. Cortese said. “Why have them? What’s the point in this day and age?”He said he has scheduled a meeting this week with members of the union local that represents armorers, and a bill would likely be considered in February.Those in the film industry who warn against making such rapid and wholesale changes to the industry say safety protocols are usually clear, and usually closely followed.Michael Sabo, who was propmaster on “The Wire” and oversaw the use of operational guns on the set, said he thinks nonfunctional guns would appear fake to viewers. Instead of a ban, he favors tighter restrictions on who can handle them.“You can have some of the best actors in the world, but if they pull a trigger and nothing happens, it’s not real,” he said. “That’s my biggest problem when they say we should ban guns on sets.”Brooks Barnes contributed reporting. More

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      New Initiative Aims to Change How Movies Portray Muslims

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      An advocacy group has created a worker database with help from Disney to bring more Muslims into the filmmaking process.A new initiative to promote the inclusion of Muslims in filmmaking has been created by an advocacy group with the support of the Walt Disney Company — following a report issued this year that found that Muslims are rarely depicted in popular films and that many Muslim characters are linked to violence.The project, the Pillars Muslim Artist Database, was announced on Tuesday by the Pillars Fund, an advocacy group in Chicago. It produced the earlier report on depiction along with the University of Southern California Annenberg Inclusion Initiative and others.Kashif Shaikh, a co-founder of Pillars and its president, said that when the group discussed the findings, those in the industry often said they did not know where to find Muslim writers or actors.The database, Shaikh said, aims to give Muslim actors, directors, cinematographers, sound technicians and others, who could help create more nuanced portrayals, the chance to compose online profiles that can be reviewed by those hiring for film, television and streaming productions.That way, “Muslims around the country would be able to opt in and talk about their talents, talk about their expertise,” Shaikh said. “It was really meant to be a resource for studios, for the film industry.”The report on depiction, “Missing & Maligned,” was issued in June and analyzed 200 top-grossing movies released between 2017 and 2019 across the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand.Of 8,965 speaking characters, 1.6 percent were Muslim, the report said. It added that just over 60 percent of primary and secondary Muslim characters appeared in movies set in the historical or recent past. Just under 40 percent appeared in three movies which took place in present-day Australia, the report said, and most of those characters — including “the only present-day Muslim lead” — appeared in one movie, “Ali’s Wedding,” released in 2017.Pillars, along with the Inclusion Initiative and the British actor Riz Ahmed and his production company, Left Handed Films, also released a companion report titled “The Blueprint for Muslim Inclusion” that was intended to “fundamentally change the way Muslims are portrayed on screen.”Before the reports were issued, Shaikh said, Pillars had begun conversations with Disney, which supported the creation of the database with a $20,000 grant.Latondra Newton, senior vice president and chief diversity officer of Disney, said in a statement that the support was part of an ongoing effort “to amplify underrepresented voices and untold stories,” adding: “We are honored to support the new Pillars Muslim Artist Database.”This follows the announcement last week of a guide, “The Time Is Now: The Power of Native Representation in Entertainment,” that was the result of a partnership between Disney and IllumiNative, a nonprofit group that works to raise the visibility of “Native Nations and peoples in American Society.”That guide was created “to help move beyond the outdated, inaccurate and often offensive depictions of Native peoples in pop culture,” the group said in a statement. It includes sections on “Combating Negative Stereotypes,” “Avoiding Cultural Appropriation” and “Supporting Native Storytellers.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      How a 55-Year-Old California Teacher Became a Bollywood Actor

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      Richard Klein left behind his life as a Hebrew day school teacher in California and became an actor in Mumbai, often playing a “mean British officer.”It’s Never Too Late” is a series that tells the stories of people who decide to pursue their dreams on their own terms.By most accounts, Richard Klein had a pretty good life: a solid job as a teacher at a Hebrew day school in Oakland, Calif.; friends that were like family, and a passion for singing and dancing that ruled his nights and weekends. But one morning, at the age of 45, he woke up and realized that he had yet to embrace his full potential. He wanted to break into Bollywood.“I’ve always loved performing, and I was listening to Indian classical and devotional music a lot,” at the time, Mr. Klein said. The 2001 Bollywood epic “Lagaan” inspired him to try and make his passion his profession. “Things have come full circle,” he said, adding that he appears in the 2022 film “Lal Singh Chaddha” with Aamir Khan, who starred in “Lagaan.”Six months after that fateful morning, Mr. Klein, who is divorced and has no children, moved to Mumbai. At first, he lived in the coastal metropolis part time. He alternated between a gig editing subtitles for English-language television shows in Mumbai and tutoring back in California, where he would make enough money to underwrite another six months of trying to make it in the performing arts world in India.Eventually it paid off. Mr. Klein, now 55, has appeared in dozens of Indian films, television shows and commercials, playing such varied roles as a scientist, doctor, chef, spy, and, owing to his ability to nail a British accent, quite often, a “mean British officer.”Making the change was not without strife. Still, he said he would do it all over again. “I’m in India, you know, the land of reincarnation,” Mr. Klein said, “but as far as I’m concerned, I have this one life that I’m dealing with. I want to make the most of it.” (The following interview has been edited and condensed.)“Being here gives me the opportunity to be the best version of myself. I wasn’t feeling that opportunity in the U.S.”Prarthna Singh for The New York TimesWhat was your life like before you made this change?I had been living in the San Francisco Bay Area for about 20 years. Mostly, I was a teacher: math, science, computer lab. My nights and weekends were spent doing some kind of performing arts. I’ve always had an affinity toward music. I remember being a little kid, walking through the park, singing. A stranger walked by, and I sort of got quiet. My mom said: “Don’t be shy. You sing out loud and don’t worry about anybody else.”What was the watershed moment?I was working as a teacher at a Hebrew day school, and one morning I woke up and thought, “If I don’t do something, I could be here for the next 20 years.” That wouldn’t be a terrible outcome, but it wasn’t the one I wanted.I studied India in graduate school, when I was pursuing a degree in religion. Learning about India inspired me to adopt the nickname Bhakti, which I’ve used since 1991, though I never changed my name legally. In a broad sense, Bhakti means devotion and love. The word is a reminder to lead with my heart instead of my head, so every time I hear my name, I think of that.My first trip to India was in 1995 as a backpacker. I absolutely loved it. I went back a few times after that. So I thought: what if I go there, stay, and see what happens? On one of my first nights in Mumbai, I went out to a jazz club. All the performers were foreigners. We got to talking afterward, and I ended up joining their group as a singer, which was my first foray into the performing arts world here.Richard Klein acts out a role from a potential script in his Bandra apartment.Prarthna Singh for The New York TimesPrarthna Singh for The New York TimesWhat was the biggest challenge that you had to navigate?When I first arrived, I was staying in fairly cheap places. A lot of times, there was no hot water in the shower. A lot of times there wasn’t even a shower — most of my time in India, I’ve taken a bucket bath, which is actually great.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      ‘Sooryavanshi’ Review: Cops on a Crusade

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      The latest in Rohit Shetty’s Bollywood cop franchise is both overstuffed and paper-thin.Over the last decade, the Bollywood director Rohit Shetty has built a flamboyant Cop Cinematic Universe with crowd pleasers — “Singham,” “Singham Returns,” and “Simmba” — about righteous policemen with anger issues and physics-defying stunt capabilities. Shetty’s latest installment tries to up the ante (a fool’s errand, given how over-the-top each of the prior movies already is) by smushing them all together: The movie’s titular Anti-Terrorism Squad officer, played by the action veteran Akshay Kumar, is joined by the supercops of the previous films (Ajay Devgn and Ranveer Singh) for a bullets-and-brawn extravaganza.But movies are not math, and three is not always better than one. “Sooryavanshi” is both overstuffed and paper-thin. Its haywire maximalism — including a relentless, deafening soundtrack and cuts so rapid and inconsistent as to make you dizzy — ornaments a patchy bomb-scare plot whose heroes and villains are both numbskulls, making unconvincing gaffes to keep the narrative moving.Even more egregious is the film’s uncritical jingoism. Shetty’s crusading state warriors, whose violence and vigilante tactics are played for laughs and hoots, have always seemed a bit tone-deaf, but “Sooryavanshi” veers into apologism: The film is rife with gleeful scenes of police brutality and pernicious stereotypes about Muslims. Whenever Sooryavanshi is confronted about Islamophobia (an increasingly urgent issue in India), he starts singing the praises of the single Muslim cop on his force as if to remind everyone what a “good Muslim” looks like.“Sooryavanshi” is weighed down by such endless, didactic soapboxing, while the rest of this erratic film devotes itself to juvenile jokes (Sooryavanshi referring to his wife, Ria, as “Hernia” and “Malaria”) and sultry songs that offer the film’s female lead, Katrina Kaif, her only meaningful screen time.SooryavanshiNot rated. In Hindi, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Television

      What’s on TV This Week: Documentaries on Kevin Garnett and Jake Burton Carpenter

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      A pair of new documentaries, one on HBO and one on Showtime, look at two very different sports figures.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Nov. 8-14. Details and times are subject to change.MondayINDEPENDENT LENS: FERGUSON RISES (2021) 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). This documentary about the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown Jr., who was shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, is built around interviews with Brown’s father, Michael Brown Sr. It looks at how the movement that grew in response to Brown’s killing helped pushed forward conversations about policing around the country, and at the elder Brown’s activism in the years since. The documentary, directed by Mobolaji Olambiwonnu, won an audience award at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.TuesdayDEAR RIDER (2021) 9 p.m. on HBO. The life and legacy of the snowboarding entrepreneur Jake Burton Carpenter is the subject of this new documentary. Carpenter, who died in 2019, helped popularize and legitimize snowboarding as a sport through his company, Burton Snowboards, which he started in the late 1970s. The documentary looks at that work and at the later years of Carpenter’s life, which were interrupted by health issues including testicular cancer and a rare nerve disease that temporarily paralyzed him — but didn’t take his lust for life. “Life is not about having a pulse,” Carpenter said in a 2015 interview with The New York Times. “It’s about having friends and experiences and living.”WednesdayA scene from “Attica.”Firelight FilmsATTICA (2021) 7:25 p.m. on Showtime. The filmmaker Stanley Nelson revisits the 1971 prison uprising at Attica Correctional Facility, near Buffalo, N.Y., in this documentary, which debuted last week. Taking advantage of five decades’ worth of hindsight, Nelson speaks to people who took part in or were affected by the events firsthand, including reporters, formerly incarcerated people and family members of law enforcement. The revolt, which lasted several days and ended in a brutal retaking of the prison by authorities, was driven by demands for better living conditions — demands that Nelson emphasizes as he explores the event and its violent conclusion. “It’s law and order carried to its extreme, and I think it’s the start of a whole different turn in American history,” Nelson said in a recent interview with The Times. “You can’t see the film without thinking about where we are today.”THE 55TH ANNUAL CMA AWARDS 8 p.m. on ABC. The singer-songwriter Luke Bryan will host this year’s edition of the Country Music Association Awards from Nashville. The nominees for the entertainer of the year award, perhaps the biggest of the night, are Eric Church, Luke Combs, Miranda Lambert, Chris Stapleton and Carrie Underwood. All five are scheduled to perform or present during the ceremony. Other performers on the bill include Jennifer Hudson, Keith Urban, Zac Brown Band and Brothers Osborne.ThursdayPATHS OF GLORY (1957) 6:15 p.m. on TCM. Typical war movies find drama in deadly missions taken on by extraordinary soldiers. Stanley Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory” finds drama in what a group of soldiers can’t — or won’t — do. Kirk Douglas stars as a French army colonel in World War I whose men are sent on an impossible mission. When the mission doesn’t pan out, he’s forced to defend his soldiers against accusations of cowardice from military leadership. The result is a film that “has the impact of hard reality, mainly because its frank avowal of agonizing, uncompensated injustice is pursued to the bitter, tragic end,” Bosley Crowther wrote in his review for The New York Times in 1957. “Kubrick’s sullen camera,” Crowther added, “bores directly into the minds of scheming men and into the hearts of patient, frightened soldiers who have to accept orders to die.”FridayKEVIN GARNETT: ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE 8 p.m. on Showtime. The subtitle of this sports documentary is a reference to words yelled by its subject, the basketball star Kevin Garnett, in an on-court interview in 2008 as confetti rained down. It was a moment of triumph: The Boston Celtics had just won a championship game against the Los Angeles Lakers. (One might worry, rewatching the moment, that he’s going to swallow some of that confetti.) The documentary looks at how Garnett got to that moment, and where he’s gone since, through interviews with basketball figures including Paul Pierce, Doc Rivers and Allen Iverson, and through reams of archival footage.SaturdayCHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (2005) 5:30 p.m. on TNT. Timothée Chalamet devotees ate up pictures of him dressed as a young Willy Wonka last month. The images came from the set of “Wonka,” an upcoming prequel movie that promises to give Roald Dahl’s weird chocolatier a back story. It won’t be the first film to try that: This 2005 take on “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” which was directed by the filmic confectioner Tim Burton and starred Johnny Depp, gave its Wonka a back story through flashbacks to a childhood spent under the thumb of a mean, sugar-averse dentist father (Christopher Lee). In his review for The Times, A.O. Scott called Burton’s adaptation “wondrous and flawed.” While the film’s attempt to give Wonka an illuminating past flounders, Scott wrote, the movie “succeeds in doing what far too few films aimed primarily at children even know how to attempt anymore, which is to feed — even to glut — the youthful appetite for aesthetic surprise.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      An Indigenous Canadian Director Channels Traumatic Memories Into Film

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      Tracey Deer based “Beans” on her experiences as a child during the 1990 Oka crisis, a confrontation between the Mohawk people and the government.Tracey Deer can still remember the sound of rocks hitting the car, her panicked mother’s orders to “Get down!” and the loud smash as a back passenger window shattered, showering glass over her screaming little sister.Deer, an Indigenous Canadian filmmaker, was only 12 on Aug. 28, 1990, when a white mob hurled stones and racial insults at vehicles filled with Mohawk women, children and the elderly, all trying to evacuate a reservation near Montreal. The Oka crisis, a dispute between Canadian authorities and the Mohawk people over land rights, was reaching its height, and the frightened children crouched on the floor until Deer’s mother could drive on.“My sense of safety was stolen from me,” Deer said. “My sense of self-worth, as of that moment, was nonexistent.” But after spending most of her adolescence consumed by anger, she said in a video interview, “I ended up finding a way to channel that instead into my drive to prove all those people wrong.”One result is “Beans,” her first narrative feature, which was named best picture at the Canadian Screen Awards this year and has collected more than 20 prizes on the film-festival circuit. The newly released drama is a long-sought milestone for Deer, 43, a screenwriter, director, documentarian and television showrunner. (She was a creator of the comedy-drama series “Mohawk Girls,” streaming on Peacock, as well as a writer for “Anne With an E” on Netflix.)A fictionalized version of her experiences, the film focuses on a bright, ambitious Mohawk girl, nicknamed Beans (portrayed by the Mohawk actress Kiawentiio). She lives with her family on the Kahnawake reserve, as Deer did, and has applied to enter seventh grade at an elite, mostly white academy that’s similar to the school Deer went to before graduating from Dartmouth.“I wanted to be the one to tell the story,” Kiawentiio (pronounced Ghee-ah-wen-DEE-o) said via video from Canada, where she was shooting the new live-action “Avatar: The Last Airbender” series for Netflix. Thirteen while filming “Beans,” she felt a personal connection to the history, having grown up in Akwesasne, a reserve not far from the conflict. “A lot of people from my community went there and were helping,” said Kiawentiio, whose own parents were teenagers at the time.Violah Beauvais, left, and Kiawentiio in a scene from Deer’s film.Sebastien Raymond/FilmriseBeans’ journey begins when she is caught up in the real protests that unfolded after the mayor of Oka, a town near Montreal, announced plans to expand a golf course onto land containing a sacred Mohawk burial ground. Devastated by the violence that ensues — she is present when gunfire erupts at a confrontation between Mohawk demonstrators and the police, precipitating the 78-day crisis — Beans falls in with a rough crowd of Mohawk teenagers. They include a charismatic boy who tries to force her to perform oral sex; the scene is based on a sexual assault Deer experienced when she was 20.“It’s a big story,” said Anne-Marie Gélinas, founder of EMAfilms, which produced the drama. “And Tracey’s challenge was to talk about, of course, the bullies outside,” which in the film include the government and real-estate developers. But, Gélinas added in a video call, “she also wanted to talk about the bullies inside her community.”Although Beans’ struggles relate specifically to her time and place, they are likely to resonate with anyone who has raised an adolescent — or been one. When Beans practices profanity in front of her bedroom mirror, smiling proudly when she finally utters a curse, it’s impossible not to notice the doll and stuffed animals still on her bureau. And any viewer will be alarmed when a tough older girl encourages Beans to harm herself so she will be impervious to the pain inflicted by others.“It doesn’t matter if you’ve never heard of the Oka crisis,” Deer said, adding that the character is coming of age “in a tumultuous, unwelcoming world that is indicative of where we currently are.”An incident during filming reinforced that view. Deer shot “Beans” at several spots where the historical events occurred, including the Honoré Mercier Bridge, which Mohawk demonstrators blockaded during the crisis. It’s where the rock-throwing confrontation, recreated in the film, took place as well. When Deer began shooting in 2019, the structure was partly closed for maintenance. But some motorists, she said, assumed the movie crew had shut down the route.“They were beeping and yelling at us and revving their engines,” said Deer, who added that the occupants of one car began shouting racial slurs. Thirty years after the Oka crisis, she said, “the same kind of moment played out.”To show that she was not distorting the historical backdrop, Deer used archival footage throughout the film, in one case inserting an actor into the Mohawk protesters in a 1990 news clip. “Nobody remembered it to be so violent, so negative, so traumatic,” Gélinas said, describing audiences’ reactions in Canada, where the response to “Beans” has been overwhelmingly positive.Although the Oka conflict ended in September 1990 with the cancellation of the golf course expansion, disputes over the land rights continue. But in the Canadian cultural sphere, the concerns of Indigenous people are gaining increased attention, said Jesse Wente, chairman of the Canada Council for the Arts and executive director of the Indigenous Screen Office in Toronto. (The organization supports Native film projects but did not contribute to the financing of “Beans.”)“I think what you’re seeing is maybe an industry that is so ravenous for stories that it’s realized it has to open the gates beyond its usual suspects,” Wente, who is Anishinaabe, said in a phone interview. He added that while Indigenous representation in the Canadian film industry had been largely confined to documentaries until recent years, artists like Deer were now delving into many genres. “What that means is that Indigenous cinema is about to become commercial in a way it never was,” he said.Likening Deer’s film to Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” Wente said, “‘Beans’ is exactly what happens when you empower storytellers from a community who’ve had stories told about them forever, but rarely have had the opportunity to tell them themselves.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Zazie Beetz and Regina King on Their Big Battle in ‘The Harder They Fall’

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      In the Netflix western, the two actresses, playing members of rival cowboy gangs, engage in an epic fight. Here, they break down the scene.“Trudy’s mine,” hisses Stagecoach Mary Fields (played by Zazie Beetz), her eyes blazing.Trudy Smith (Regina King) ducks into a dye barn, its rafters hung with swatches of color.Their eyes lock, Mary empties her shotgun onto the floor. Trudy tosses her pistol to the side.“Let’s go,” Mary spits out. A wild fight scene ensues between the two members of rival cowboy gangs: bodies hit windows, teeth crunch into hands and horseshoes hurl toward heads.Toward the end of the new Netflix western “The Harder They Fall” — a reminder that Black cowboys should be as much a part of the genre as anyone else — Mary and Trudy duke it out in an epic fight that nearly ends in death.Although the director, Jeymes Samuel, is a singer-songwriter known as the Bullitts, he has dabbled in filmmaking, and “The Harder They Fall” is his first feature. In a video interview, he clarified that he wasn’t reimagining the western — he was “replacing” it.“What I was doing with that fight, I’ve done it the whole film,” he said. “The whole film is reverse psychology on what we know as the western and puts up a mirror.”Historians estimate that one in four cowboys were Black, a fact that was hardly reflected in the conventional westerns popular in the 20th century, which were largely devoid of people of color.In creating the film, his aim was to counter two tropes of traditional westerns: people of color shown as less than human; and women appearing subservient and less than men. “Westerns have never given light to women and their power in that period,” he said. That’s why Samuel, who wrote the screenplay with Boaz Yakin, inverted gender roles in the Mary-Trudy battle.“All the men in the film, when they have conflict, they pick up guns,” Samuel said, adding, “It takes the two women to literally throw away their guns and duke it out.”Regina King as Trudy Smith. She, Beetz and their stunt doubles practiced the fight in their off hours.David Lee/NetflixAlthough the actresses, part of a star-studded cast, worked closely with their stunt doubles, Nikkilette Wright and Sadiqua Bynum, most of the final cut features the actresses themselves — because the stunt doubles were simply too good at their jobs. The stand-ins’ work “was too clean,” Samuel said. “In that particular scene, it was perfect and neat, whereas I needed the urgency. When you put Zazie and Regina together, neat went out the window.”Beetz, King, Wright and Bynum practiced the fight on their own time in a hotel conference room in Santa Fe, N.M., where much of the movie was shot. As rough and tumble as the scene may look onscreen, Beetz said in a phone interview that it was all very carefully choreographed.“We also wanted the fight to look scrappy, because we wanted it to look real and intense and how people really would potentially fight,” she said. “I think it’s just a testament in general to the shift in film and the shift in how we see women and their physical abilities.”As part of her preparation, the actress read about Stagecoach Mary Fields, the first African American woman in the United States to be a mail carrier on star routes — routes handled by contractors who were not employed by the Postal Service. (Many of the main characters are based on real historical figures, but Samuel fictionalized the vast majority of the plot.) Fields was enslaved until she was around 30 years old, when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. Then she went on to live a whole new life.“There was a lot of formerly enslaved people who moved to the West, and the culture of the United States wasn’t as established in the West,” Beetz said. “So there was more mobility for Black people. And there really were towns that were all Black, and they were self-sustaining, and it was an interesting place where Black people could thrive.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Watch the 1960s Come Alive in ‘Last Night in Soho’

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      Edgar Wright narrates a dreamy sequence from his film featuring Thomasin McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.A song from Cilla Black and some flashing lights from a French bistro summon a little dreamy 1960s magic in this scene from “Last Night in Soho,” a thriller by the director Edgar Wright.Thomasin McKenzie stars as a fashion student with ’60s obsessions who is, as Wright puts it, “supernaturally switched on.”As she goes to sleep in her new flat, she has a dream that takes her back to her favorite decade, across a busy street in London and into a lavish nightclub. In this video, Wright explains the more-complicated-than-it-looks nature of timing flashing lights to the beats of a song, as well as other practical effects he used to create a mirror-image moment (actually building a “mirror” set and using twin actors on either side of it).Read the “Last Night in Soho” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More