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      Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock Resident Artists Are Named

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyKehinde Wiley’s Black Rock Resident Artists Are NamedMembers of the global group share the painter’s passion for using art to explore social change.Kehinde Wiley at the Black Rock artist residence he founded in Dakar, Senegal, in 2019. It is welcoming its second group of artists, filmmakers and writers from around the world. Hilary Balu’s “Voyage vers Mars 5,” explores the flight of populations to other continents.Credit…Jane Hahn for The New York TimesFeb. 2, 2021Updated 2:59 p.m. ETA Congolese painter whose art reflects how globalization and consumerism have transformed African society. A Nigerian-American filmmaker whose work focuses on cultures and experiences of Africans and the diaspora. A visual activist from Texas who forces her viewers to confront issues that are deemed difficult to tackle.These are among the 16 artists selected for the 2021 residency at Black Rock Senegal, the seaside studio in the West African capital city of Dakar belonging to Kehinde Wiley, the painter best known for his portrait of former President Barack Obama.The artists, who will spend several weeks at the lavish studio along a volcanic-rock-lined shore, express themselves in a variety of formats and come from across the globe. But many in this year’s group share Wiley’s passion for using art to explore social change.His most recent works include the stained glass fresco of breakdancers in the Moynihan Train Hall and his “Rumors of War” statue in Richmond, Va. — a Black man with ponytailed dreadlocks on horseback in the style of monuments to Confederate war generals. Wiley is not part of the Black Rock selection committee, which aims to consider the class of artists as a whole and tries to pick a diverse group of residents, including personal identities and nationalities and the medium they work in.Among the residents is Hilary Balu, from Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, whose recent brightly colored yet sorrowful series “Voyage vers Mars” explores the tragedy of contemporary migration — in this case the flight of a population to another continent, like astronauts leaving a destroyed earth for another planet.Hilary Balu’s “Voyage vers Mars 5,” explores the flight of populations to other continents.Credit…MAGNIN-AAbbesi Akhamie, who lives in Washington, is a Nigerian-American writer, director and producer whose latest short film, ​“The Couple Next Door” from last year, premiered at the Aspen Shortsfest and won the Audience Choice Award at the Reel Sisters of the Diaspora Film Festival.Irene Antonia Diane Reece from Houston uses her family archives as a form of activism and liberation, with some of her work exploring family history and racial identity.Other residents include Delali Ayivor, a Ghanaian-American writer; Mbali Dhlamini, a multidisciplinary artist, and Arinze Ifeakandu, a Nigerian writer who recently graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and writes about queer male intimacy. The residents will each spend several weeks at a time in the studio, with coronavirus restrictions in place, in staggered stages, beginning this month.Some might overlap with Wiley, who has spent much of the past year in Dakar, using the global pandemic as an opportunity to pause and paint, sometimes working with Black Rock residents who have helped him in his work.“I’m learning to view, discuss, and critique art that often depicts the Black body from a range of perspectives that span the globe,” Wiley said in an email exchange. “There’s an unending variety of rubrics through which artists are pushing the possibilities of representation.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Theater

      ‘Blood Meal’ Review: Just Us, Locked Down in a Dollhouse

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeExplore: A Cubist CollageFollow: Cooking AdviceVisit: Famous Old HomesLearn: About the VaccineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Pick‘Blood Meal’ Review: Just Us, Locked Down in a DollhouseCleverly edited and darkly funny, the latest Theater in Quarantine show finds a nervous couple afraid to go out or let anyone in. Sound familiar?Lee Minora, left, and Joshua William Gelb in Scott R. Sheppard’s “Blood Meal,” which is shot and edited live with the actors in different settings.Credit…Katie Rose McLaughlin, via Theater in QuarantineFeb. 2, 2021The bugs have made Sam and Lindsay prisoners of their own home. To battle the invasion, the couple live in bare rooms, the furniture wrapped in plastic. They don’t leave the house and don’t welcome anybody in, either: They refuse entry to Girl Scouts selling cookies and after drinks with friends on the porch — in the middle of winter — they throw their clothes in garbage bags.Any resemblance to a certain pandemic is entirely not coincidental, and in just 32 minutes Scott R. Sheppard’s darkly funny new play, “Blood Meal,” captures our zeitgeist with satirical accuracy.What makes the show even zeitgeistier is that it is the latest salvo from the prime purveyor of inventive stagecraft in the age of Covid: Joshua William Gelb and Katie Rose McLaughlin’s Theater in Quarantine.For the past 10 months, the pair have turned a small closet in Gelb’s apartment into a performing space that has hosted everything from an “expressionistic musical portrait” of Mother Teresa (“I Am Sending You the Sacred Face”) to an adaptation of a Polish science-fiction story (“The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy”).In creating Theater in Quarantine, Gelb (with Minora) has shot many pieces from a closet in his apartment.Credit…Katie Rose McLaughlin, via Theater in Quarantine“Blood Meal” ups the ante: Gelb (who directed and plays Sam) and Lee Minora (Lindsay) are performing live from separate closets — hers was built in the basement of La MaMa. The magic of technology brings the actors together so Sam and Lindsay can have sex and share a bath. We even watch them move about a cross-section of their home, as if it were a dollhouse. (Gelb and Stivo Arnoczy did the video design; Alex Hawthorn was responsible for the software that synced the action.)The setting itself creates a strange combination of the mundane and the surreal that perfectly suits Sheppard’s sensibility. He co-wrote the Off Off Broadway hit “Underground Railroad Game,” about children and adults re-enacting slavery scenarios, and last June contributed “Topside,” a claustrophobic, unsettling play inspired by the Donald Barthelme nuclear-cloud short-story “Game” to the growing Theater in Quarantine catalog.The zippy “Blood Meal,” which is free on YouTube, is an even better piece than “Topside” because it so skillfully maps a familiar world where an invisible danger lurks everywhere. McLaughlin’s matching costumes for Lindsay and Sam, black with red accessories, make them look like two mimes flailing in paranoid domesticity at the end of the world.Sam is at the end of his rope and desperately wants to believe the infestation has run its course so they can get back to normal and maybe even stop sleeping in the kitchen.Editing technology allows the viewers to watch Minora and Gelb, being filmed separately, take a bath together.Credit…Katie Rose McLaughlin, via Theater in QuarantineLindsay has a more jaundiced attitude. “If we are serious about fighting these bugs, we must always doubt that we are free of them,” she tells him. “Do you understand that? It’s about doubt.”But she starts having the wrong kind of doubt as she increasingly suspects Sam of surreptitiously meeting people outside. Her nagging suspicions and his equivocations drive a wedge in the heretofore united couple. Eventually, Sam pleads for Lindsay to join him in an escape: “Let’s get in the Jetta and take the mountain,” he pleads. “Let’s drink black Manhattans and cuddle like bobcats.”Watching this live play on a screen, at a remove, it’s hard not to think, “Can I come too?”Blood MealOn the Theater in Quarantine YouTube pageAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Jazz at Lincoln Center Focuses on Music’s Role in Social Justice

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeExplore: A Cubist CollageFollow: Cooking AdviceVisit: Famous Old HomesLearn: About the VaccineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJazz at Lincoln Center Focuses on Music’s Role in Social JusticeA new season of video concerts will feature a tribute to renowned jazz vocalists and include new compositions created in collaboration with Bryan Stevenson.This season, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, led by Wynton Marsalis, will feature programs like “Freedom, Justice and Hope” and a concert focusing on John Coltrane.Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesFeb. 2, 2021With in-person concerts unlikely to return this spring, Jazz at Lincoln Center on Tuesday announced a full season of video presentations, all centered on jazz’s role in the fight for social justice.The spring programming will feature four shows, each one streaming on the center’s website for $20 a ticket. (Prices are lower for members and subscribers.) Each show will remain available for streaming over a period of days.The first concert, “Legacies of Excellence,” will premiere on Feb. 20. Featuring the vocalist Catherine Russell, it explores the contributions of jazz legends through an educational lens, and is presented as part of an initiative called Let Freedom Swing.For the remaining three shows, guests will join the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, led by Wynton Marsalis. On March 26, the ensemble will present “Voices of Freedom,” a celebration of four eminent 20th-century jazz singers: Betty Carter, Billie Holiday, Abbey Lincoln and Nina Simone. A lineup of contemporary vocalists, including Melanie Charles and Shenel Johns, will offer renditions of these figures’ famous works.The orchestra returns on May 21 with “Freedom, Justice, and Hope,” a program featuring new compositions by two rising musicians: the bassist Endea Owens, who will debut a suite honoring the pioneering Black journalist Ida B. Wells; and the trumpeter Josh Evans, who will present a work in response to the 1919 Elaine massacre in Arkansas. The compositions were written in collaboration with the racial-justice activist Bryan Stevenson, who will participate in the concert.The season concludes with a show on June 10 devoted to the music of John Coltrane, including a big-band rendition of his landmark “A Love Supreme.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Television

      Keegan-Michael Key Will Do Anything for a Laugh

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyKeegan-Michael Key Will Do Anything for a LaughHis new 10-part podcast, “The History of Sketch Comedy,” is a surprising and earnest defense of a relatively unsung art form.Keegan-Michael Key in 2018. His new podcast, “The History of Sketch Comedy,” involved a lot of research. “I loved school,” he said, so delving into a subject “kind of lights my fire.”Credit…Benjamin Norman for The New York TimesFeb. 1, 2021Updated 4:33 p.m. ETThere are people who enjoy comedy, people who are nerdy about comedy and then there is Keegan-Michael Key, an actor and producer whose deep and affectionate connoisseurship of jokes puts him closer to the realm of a jurist or sommelier.On Key’s new Audible-exclusive podcast, “The History of Sketch Comedy,” he plays resident historian, taking listeners on a laugh-laden and discursive journey — from ancient Sumer to 16th-century Rome to Abbott and Costello — in a lighthearted but earnest attempt to demonstrate the enduring power and understated complexity of the art form.For Key, who has spent the half-decade since the end of his award-winning TV show “Key & Peele” zigzagging between interesting projects onscreen and off, the podcast was a labor of love. It was directed by and co-written with his wife, Elle Key, last year. On a recent phone call, he discussed the impetus for the show, performing without a true audience and the role his adoption played in his love of comedy.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.When you hear about a celebrity starting a podcast, you generally think of something personality driven, or an interview show with other famous people. You don’t think of an in-depth, 10-part history lesson. What made you want to do this project as a podcast?KEEGAN-MICHAEL KEY Well, one of the things that brought me and my wife, Elle, together is our love of humor and of comedy, even the science of it: What makes a good turn? What makes the joke work? I’m an academically minded person — I loved school. So being able to do research and delve into a subject and turn that around and share with other people is something that kind of lights my fire. For years, Elle has been suggesting that with all of the combined knowledge and passion for this art form that we have, we should figure out a way to share it with others. And when the pandemic started, we used all of our time in quarantine to put it together. Her pitch to Audible was: “If Keegan-Michael Key was a guest lecturer at N.Y.U. doing a 10-week course called ‘The History of Sketch Comedy,’ it would be a very popular class.”Have you always been a student of the history of sketch comedy?KEY That’s something that started in my 20s probably, when I was an undergrad fine arts and acting major [at the University of Detroit Mercy]. I never gave much thought to the history of comedy until I started studying commedia dell’arte. I was like, “Wait a second, you mean there are archetypes? Warner Brothers didn’t just invent the phenomenon of Bugs Bunny? The primary characteristics [of Bugs] have existed for hundreds of years?” When my professor said that, my mind got peeled back. I wrote a paper [in graduate school, at Pennsylvania State University] making a comparison between vaudevillian poster advertisements from the late 19th century and the images that you would see on Greek and Roman friezes from the comedies of Plautus and Terence and Aristophanes, just because that kind of stuff fascinated me.Keegan-Michael Key and Elle Key, who directed the podcast, at the Vanity Fair Oscar party last year.Credit…Danny Moloshok/ReutersHad you done much comedy of your own at that point?KEY Yeah, I think comedy afforded me social currency. You don’t have to be particularly athletic, you don’t have to be super strong and you don’t have to be on the dean’s list to be able to execute a pratfall or tell a funny joke or do a dead-on impression. That was the route that I went as a painfully shy, very skinny kid. That was the only power I knew how to wield. I remember once, when I was a kid, seeing my father, who was this very large, stoic, soft-spoken guy, guffawing at this impression. It was revelatory to me that a person could have that kind of power over somebody who was a thousand miles away, or 10,000 miles away.Did you try and make him laugh yourself?KEY I would try to impress him. If I had gone to see a movie, I would go home to my mom and my dad and act out the movie. Or, if they hadn’t seen a trailer for a movie, I would act out the trailer. Sometimes I would also use that as a kind of pre-Power Point presentation, trying to convince them to let me go see the movie if it was rated R. They were thoroughly entertained, but alas, it did not work.That’s really funny given what you ended up doing for a living, especially all the movie-inspired sketches of the “Key & Peele” show.KEY Exactly. It’s not a surprise at all. Also, I’m adopted; so to say that I spent a lot of time trying to get my parents’ approval is kind of an understatement. I’ve been acting since I was born, you know what I mean? I’ve been putting my tap shoes on for people’s approval for a long time.You chose an interesting starting point for the show, going all the way back to a Sumerian fart joke from 1900 B.C., which I couldn’t believe was real. How did you decide how far back to go?KEY It started with the joke from the film “Airplane.” Lloyd Bridges storms in and he goes: “All right, everybody. I need this piece of information. I need that to happen over there, this to happen over here, and we have to start at the beginning.” And then the guy says to him: “OK. Well, first, there was dinosaurs, and then …” So we actually decided to use that joke as the basis for the beginning. Like, “What would it look like if we start at the beginning? Let’s talk about hieroglyphics.” And then the hieroglyphics brought us to the Sumerians. I think, at our most basic level, the way we captivate each other as human beings is through explaining the journey or the ordeal that one goes through. Literature, cinema, theater — they’re all basically the same at the core, but we express them in a different way.The series begs the question of just what is a sketch. I’m curious how you define it.KEY I think one of the biggest components of sketch is brevity. The modern definition is: premise plus escalation equals sketch, or premise plus escalation equals comedy, which means that a sketch is just kind of an elongated joke that builds on itself. So I was trying to affix that measuring stick to these other pieces of art throughout history. There are lots of scenes in movies and plays where you could move it surgically out of the larger piece, and it could stand as its own piece of comedy. To me, that’s sketch.How did you approach doing all the research for the show? Did you have to brush up on your William Dunlap or your Mathurine de Vallois?KEY Well, a lot of what Elle did is that, as we were putting the structure together, we started to go through history and just say, “What do we know about comedy and where there were comedic performers in history?” Then we just started putting them on the timeline. I discovered through our research about female jesters — was not aware that they existed. There are a lot of wonderful things that I discovered, like the “rural purge” and Beyond the Fringe.Putting all that on a timeline and then being able to kind of zoom out, did it make you see comedy in a different way? Or affirm things you already knew?KEY I think that it probably affirmed things. One of those affirmations was the basics: that people figured out tens of thousands of years ago that it was satisfying to watch someone overcome obstacles to achieve a goal. That is somehow inherent in our programming, to excite us and bring us meaning.Yours is the only voice we hear in the series, and you act out a lot of the sketches you discuss. Was it strange to perform without an audience?KEY Technically speaking, I wasn’t alone: I had Elle in the booth, the engineer and a production assistant. I’d be in the booth looking at them [while performing], and I’d see them start to smile. To me, if I start improvising and I see people start to grin, that’s chum in the water and I’m a great white shark. I’m going to go right the [expletive] off script and do everything in my power to make them burst out in laughter. In certain episodes, you actually hear me talking to Cameron [Perry], the engineer. I go, “Right, Cameron? I mean, it’s a pretty filthy joke, but you’re laughing. Everybody, Cameron’s laughing.”What have you liked most about working in audio?KEY One thing I like is the fact that sometimes it allows you to go bigger. It allows you to be broader, more energetic, because you have to convey something through a microphone. Especially when you’re doing animation work — the figure of what you’re performing with your voice is often so exaggerated that it gives you license to be peculiar or over the top. You can say to the director, “What if I just was like [yodels loudly and cartoonishly]?” And the director will go: “That might work.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Sundance Diary, Part 4: Contending With Snow and Tech Support

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storySundance Diary, Part 4: Contending With Snow and Tech SupportThe New York weather adds a Park City ambience, but watching online from home presents un-festival-like obstacles.A scene from Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated “Flee,” about an Afghan refugee in Denmark.Credit…Sundance InstituteFeb. 1, 2021A.O. Scott, our critic at large, is keeping a diary as he “attends” the virtual Sundance Film Festival, which runs through Wednesday. Read previous entries here and here.Sunday, 10 p.m. Eastern time: The arrival of snow in New York definitely adds a taste of authentic Park City-in-January atmosphere, except of course that I don’t have to slog through the blizzard to get to screenings. Which is mostly a relief, even as it removes an essential element of self-congratulation from the festival experience. Critics and journalists like to compete over who can see the most movies in a single day. Four is pretty basic. Five gives you something to feel smug about. Six is impressive, though not everyone will believe you.But at home, watching six movies feels less like a rare and heroic feat of journalistic stamina than an all-too-usual, somewhat pathetic exercise in quarantine self-care, akin to taking in a whole season of “The Great British Baking Show” in one sitting. That isn’t something I’d brag about or even admit to having done. Also not something anyone would pay me to do, I don’t think.Anyway, for the record (and for the money): Today’s viewing included four documentaries and two features. I didn’t make it to the end of each one — walking out of movies is one of the guilty pleasures of festival-going. The highlights were two documentaries about contemporary American adolescence: Peter Nicks’s “Homeroom,” which follows a group of Oakland high school seniors through the tumult of the 2019-20 academic year; and Parker Hill and Isabel Bethencourt’s “Cusp,” which observes a summer in the lives of three Texas teenagers, Aaloni, Brittney and Autumn.Michael Greyeyes in a scene from “Wild Indian,” directed by Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr.Credit…Eli BornMonday, 11 a.m. Eastern time: This morning I am unable to log onto the Sundance site to catch up on movies I missed over the weekend, a frustration that mirrors the experience of being shut out of a screening, without the trek through ice and snow. While the tech support people process my plea for help, I’m reviewing my notes from the weekend.“Flee,” directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen, is an animated documentary organized around the memories of an Afghan refugee living in Denmark. It’s reminiscent of “Persepolis” in some ways — a personal, family story of displacement and self-reinvention set against a background of war and political struggle — but with its own tactful, melancholy aesthetic.“Wild Indian” is a strong debut by Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr., the kind of spare, locally grounded, socially conscious drama that is a Sundance staple. “Passing,” Rebecca Hall’s adaptation of the Harlem Renaissance novel by Nella Larsen, is a subtle, somewhat mannered meditation on race, identity and desire, shot in evocative black and white and anchored by the intriguing lead performances of Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga as childhood friends who re-encounter each other as grown women living on opposite sides of the color line.The glitch has been corrected. Back to the screening room, to make up for lost time — as soon as I shovel some snow.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      A Movie Festival for One, on a Tiny Nordic Island

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyA Movie Festival for One, on a Tiny Nordic IslandSweden’s Goteborg Film Festival has taken social distancing to the extreme, offering one attendee a week on a barren island, with only the competition films for company.Lisa Enroth, an emergency nurse, will spend a week in an isolated lighthouse keeper’s cottage, watching the 70 movies in competition at the Goteborg Film Festival.Credit…Ines Sebalj for The New York TimesFeb. 1, 2021As they do at the opening of any star-studded film festival, photographers scrambled for position, training their lenses on the spot where audience members would alight. But when the first — and only — guest of honor arrived, she was clad not in a tuxedo or sparkly gown, but in jeans and an orange puffer jacket (designer unknown). There was no red carpet beneath her feet, only bare frozen ground. And instead of sauntering into a plush cinema buzzing with celebrities, she climbed into a speedboat and zipped off across the frigid water to a tiny island where she would settle in for the first premiere.As festivals around the world grapple with the pandemic, the Goteborg Film Festival, which opened in Sweden’s second largest city on Jan. 29, hasn’t so much accepted social distancing as escalated it. Over the course of the coming week, it will hold screenings in two urban venues for just one festival attendee. And it has also sent a single viewer to a tiny, barren island in the North Atlantic to watch the 70 films in competition — alone.Hamneskar, a rocky outcrop some 25 miles from Goteborg, was nicknamed Pater Noster by sailors who would recite the Lord’s Prayer as they neared its treacherous waters.Credit…Ines Sebalj for The New York TimesSome festivals, like Venice’s in September, have faced the pandemic as diminished versions of their normally glitzy selves, with alternately seated theaters and mandatory temperature checks. Others, like Sundance and the Berlinale, now pushed until March 2021, have gone entirely digital, offering streaming access to films and other events. Some organizers are postponing their festivals, crossing their fingers that further down the line pandemic regulations will allow for a more usual festival experience: On Jan. 27, the Cannes festival announced that it would take place in July, rather than its customary May.But at Goteborg, the Nordic countries’ most important festival, organizers have made an unusual virtue of necessity. “So many people who have been home alone, unable to meet friends or family, have turned to cinema for company and comfort,” said the festival’s artistic director, Jonas Holmberg. “We wanted to experiment with that, to isolate that feeling, and take it to the extreme. So we thought, ‘Why don’t we isolate the person on a small island with nothing but films?’”As the only country in Europe to resist a formal lockdown, Sweden has followed its own path through the pandemic, neither recommending mask use nor shutting down schools until December, when a disproportionately high mortality rate from the disease forced it to change strategy.But much of the country has complied with guidelines issued by the government, and after months of even voluntary social distancing and lockdowns, a wintry week alone on an island with only movies for company might seem the last thing most people would need. Yet when an evocative online video announced the contest, over 12,000 people applied for the solo experience. On Jan. 19, the festival selected Lisa Enroth, a 41-year-old emergency nurse from the town of Skovde, in southern Sweden, as the winner.Some of the films Lisa Enroth will have the opportunity to see while on Pater Noster, from left: “Tove,” “Conference” (a film from the Social Distances section), “The Conversations of Donkey and Rabbit” (a short film from the Lockdown Cinema section), “Pleasure,” “Incredible Thoughts of a Woman on a Tier” (a short film from the Lockdown Cinema section) and “Another Round.”Credit…via Goteborg Film Festival Like health care workers everywhere, Enroth has found the past several months stressful. “Every day at the hospital we’ve been dealing with so much,” she said. “With all the patients, and all the new protocols, I’ve never felt so unisolated in my life.”So when she saw the video’s call for applications, she didn’t hesitate. “Alone in nature, on an island? Plus movies? I was like, ‘Yes, I need this.’”The hospital agreed to give Enroth time off (“My boss is a movie buff,” she explained) and on Jan. 30, a boat brought her to Hamneskar, a rocky outcrop some 25 miles from Goteborg that was nicknamed Pater Noster by sailors who would recite the Lord’s Prayer as they neared its treacherous waters. There, she took up residence in the former keeper’s cottage that sits aside the island’s cast-iron lighthouse, and settled in for the movie marathon.During her time on Pater Noster, Enroth will have access to the 70 films screening at the festival, which include the Finnish Oscar contender “Tove,” Thomas Vinterberg’s acclaimed “Another Round” and the Goteborg native Ninja Thyberg’s “Pleasure,” all of which are competing for best Nordic film. International films in competition include Emma Dante’s “The Macaluso Sisters,” set in Sicily, and Charlène Favier’s “Slalom,” about elite downhill skiers abused by their coach. There is also a separate section, called Social Distances, featuring films created in response to the pandemic, and one called Lockdown Cinema for short films made in quarantine.Streamed through the festival’s website and available to the public, all of the films have scheduled premiere times online. But a handful of viewers are also having their own unusually isolated encounters with them. Coinciding with each online premiere, the films will also screen at Goteborg’s Draken movie theater (capacity 708) and the Scandinavium arena (whose 12,000 seats normally host concert goers or hockey fans) for a single viewer who has won a seat through a raffle.A screening for one (in this case, Lova Lakso) at the Draken movie theater in Goteborg.Credit…Ines Sebalj for The New York TimesAt each venue a red carpet leads the viewer to the assigned seat. And although popcorn is not available, other enjoyments may be. “In some cases,” hints the festival director Holmberg, “it may be possible the filmmaker will be there to present the film.”By staging one-person viewings in iconic locations, Holmberg hopes to preserve some of the sense of occasion that an in-person festival generates. But here again, the festival organizers are experimenting. “We want to see, how does being alone affect the film experience? What happens when you’re doing nothing besides watching the film?” he said.Although she will post a daily video diary on a dedicated page of the festival website, Enroth has agreed to eschew all other forms of communication and entertainment — no phone, no books — during her time on Pater Noster. She said that she wasn’t worried about getting lonely, but didn’t rule out the possibility she may “start talking to the furniture.” And, like Holmberg, she was also interested to see how her week on the island changes the experience of watching films. “The first day, it’s just ‘Oh, I’m alone, watching a movie.’ But a few days in, I might be like, ‘OK, these people are my only company. What if I hate them?’” she said.But for the self-professed science fiction fan (her favorite movie is “The Never Ending Story”), even that will be a welcome escape. “I love watching movies, because it makes me let go of work and everything else that’s going on right now,” Enroth said. “It’ll be great to be surrounded by someone else’s reality.”“Alone in nature, on an island? Plus movies?” said Enroth. “I was like, ‘Yes, I need this.’”Credit…Erik Nissen JohansenAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Television

      Groundhog Day Movies

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      Sundance Diary, Part 3: Documentaries That Don’t Despair

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