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      A Pioneering Orchestra Boss Had ‘Unfinished Business,’ So She Returned

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      Deborah Borda led the New York Philharmonic in the 1990s, and was frustrated by its subpar hall. After a 17-year run in Los Angeles, she “finally saw a path forward,” she said.When the musicians of the New York Philharmonic gathered inside what was still very much a construction site in mid-August to hear for the first time how they would sound after the $550 million renovation of their home, David Geffen Hall, Deborah Borda, the orchestra’s president and chief executive, handed out roses to the arriving players.“This is a historic moment,” Borda, who had barely slept the night before, told them from the conductor’s podium. “Welcome to your new home.”It was a homecoming that Borda, 73, has been working toward for decades.She first led the Philharmonic in the 1990s, and left partly out of frustration that there was no will to rebuild its perennially troubled home, known then as Avery Fisher Hall, which had long been plagued by complaints about its look and, especially, its sound. She spent 17 years at the helm of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, ushering the orchestra into the acclaimed Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall and signing Gustavo Dudamel as music director. Then, just as she began to consider a new chapter, perhaps teaching, she was lured back to New York five years ago: a $100 million gift from the entertainment mogul David Geffen had revived plans to remake the hall, but momentum seemed to be stalling.“It was unfinished business,” she said. “I had been dreaming about this since the 1990s. And then I finally saw a path forward.”So there was a lot on the line that afternoon in August, when she listened intently as the orchestra tuned up and then, under the baton of its music director, Jaap van Zweden, played excerpts from Bruckner’s elegiac Seventh Symphony. She felt reassured.“It sounds terrific,” she told the small crowd in attendance, including leaders from Lincoln Center, board members, sound experts and construction workers.When Borda returned to New York in 2017, arts leaders had real concerns about the health of the Philharmonic, the oldest orchestra in the United States. It had top-flight musicians and a storied tradition — over the years it has been led by giants like Mahler, Toscanini and Bernstein — but it ran deficits every year, its audience was aging and it faced competition from the many international ensembles that tour New York. When she arrived, its endowment fund had less money than when she been in charge in the 1990s.It was the Geffen gift — secured in 2015 by Katherine G. Farley, the chairwoman of Lincoln Center, which owns the hall and is the Philharmonic’s landlord — that finally put a revamped hall within grasp. But there were still serious obstacles. Lincoln Center was going through a period of management churn as top executives came and went. The renovation plans under consideration were growing too expensive and hard to build, not to mention impractical (glass walls?) for an orchestra. Soon after Borda arrived, she and Lincoln Center officials announced they were going back to the drawing board.Undeterred, Borda kept working toward the ultimate goal. “She is a force of nature,” van Zweden said. “What she wants, she gets.”In 2019 Lincoln Center tapped Henry Timms, who formerly led the 92nd Street Y, as its president and chief executive. He returned stability to the organization, rethought the mission of the arts complex — which produces work on its own while serving as the landlord of independent constituent groups including the Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, and New York City Ballet — and got the renovation project moving forward.The Reopening of David Geffen HallThe New York Philharmonic’s notoriously jinxed auditorium at Lincoln Center has undergone a $550 million renovation.Reborn, Again: The renovation of the star-crossed hall aims to break its acoustic curse — and add a dash of glamour.‘Unfinished Business’: After a 17-year run in Los Angeles, Deborah Borda returned to the New York Philharmonic, which she led in the 1990s, to help usher it into its new home.San Juan Hill: Etienne Charles’s composition for the reopening of the hall honors the Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center.Timeline: From a troubled opening in 1962 to a full gutting in 1976 to the latest renovations, here is a brief timeline of the long road to the new hall.He and Borda worked to turn the historically acrimonious relationship between Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic — which reached a low point in 2003, when the Philharmonic tried to leave and return to its old home, Carnegie Hall — into a collaborative one. That message was driven home by stickers and tote bags about the project that proclaimed, perhaps aspirationally, “Working in Concert.”Henry Timms brought stability back to Lincoln Center after a period of management tumult when he became its president and chief executive in 2019. That year he and Borda unveiled plans for the renovation of Geffen Hall, and surveyed the old hall. Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesTimms recalled meeting Borda at her home for coffee shortly before he took office, when they vowed together to finally finish the Geffen project.“It was a priority that I think we both signed up for,” he said. “But what we needed to do was make our relationship a priority.”“She could have stopped before this job and gone down in history, but she chose not to,” he said. “She went the other way and chased this final triumph.”Borda said the hard work and support of Timms and Farley at Lincoln Center, as well as the co-chairmen of the Philharmonic’s board, Peter W. May and Oscar L. Tang, had been critical. “They had the heart and the hunger and the vision to do this,” she said.Borda, whose mother was a lobbyist and whose father immigrated from Colombia and worked as a salesman, grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens. She attended her first New York Philharmonic concert when she was 4, and from the balcony she watched Leonard Bernstein conduct. Her parents divorced when she was 6, and when she was 12, the family moved to Boston, where they lived with Borda’s stepfather, a psychiatrist, and she played in a youth orchestra. She initially envisioned a career as a performer, studying violin and attending the Royal College of Music in London for graduate studies, and working as a freelance musician in New York. But she was drawn to management early on.In 1979, when she was 30, she landed her first major job, as general manager and artistic administrator of the San Francisco Symphony. Her appointment caught attention: She was one of the first women to lead a major orchestra in the United States. But because of her gender and sexual orientation — she is gay — she sometimes faced obstacles in the male-dominated classical field. She recalled the surprise she felt losing out on a job managing the Pittsburgh Symphony in the 1980s after being told that its maestro, Lorin Maazel, would be uncomfortable working with her because she was a woman.“It didn’t even occur to me that my gender and sexual orientation might be an impediment,” she said. “I never even thought of it.”After stints at the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, she came to New York in 1991 for her first round as the Philharmonic’s chief. She balanced the orchestra’s budget and led efforts to attract more young people to concerts with innovations like short evening “rush-hour” concerts. But her tenure was also marked by feuds, including acrimonious negotiations with the orchestra’s musicians over a labor contract, and persistent tensions with Kurt Masur, who was then its music director.Borda with the music director Kurt Masur during her last stint running the New York Philharmonic, in 1991. Jack Manning/The New York TimesShe first tried to remedy some of the hall’s stubborn acoustic problems in 1992, when Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic placed curved wooden reflectors around the stage — their shape inspired her to dub them “the bongos” — to help spread the sound. But the problems persisted.She left for the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1999, in part, she said, because she did not believe cultural leaders in New York were committed to a full-scale renovation of the hall.“I didn’t think there was the heart or the vision to get it done at that time,” she said. “It was frustrating and that’s why I left.”She flourished in Los Angeles, leading the orchestra to new heights. She more than quintupled its endowment, earned the orchestra a reputation for creative programming, helped make Dudamel a superstar and started an ambitious youth orchestra program for the city’s underserved communities. Then, just when she was thinking about retiring from orchestra management to teach or start a think-tank, New York beckoned her back.She returned in 2017, energized by the opportunity to finally remake Geffen Hall. “It was sort of like a karmic circle,” she said. (She also wanted to be closer to her longtime partner, Coralie Toevs, who oversees development at the Metropolitan Opera; the two maintained a long-distance relationship when Borda was in Los Angeles.)Back in New York she worked to balance the budget, raising $50 million to help the orchestra stay solvent. She built up its endowment, which was valued at $195 million when she arrived, lower than it had been when she led the orchestra in the 1990s, and which is now valued at around $220 million. And she championed innovative programming: she commissioned works from 19 female composers to honor the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which barred the states from denying women the right to vote, and one work, “Stride,” by Tania León, won the Pulitzer Prize.Then the pandemic hit. The orchestra canceled more than 100 concerts — losing more than $27 million in anticipated ticket revenue — and laid off 40 percent of its staff.“I genuinely thought we could go out of business,” she said.But Timms and Borda pressed ahead, seizing on the long pandemic shutdown period to accelerate the project, which was originally scheduled to take place over several seasons.Now Borda, having made good on her promise to usher another Philharmonic into another modern home, has announced plans to step down at the end of June, when she will hand the reins of the Philharmonic to Gary Ginstling, the executive director of the National Symphony Orchestra, in Washington. (She will stay on as a special adviser to assist with fund-raising and other matters.)But she still has work to do: planning enticing seasons to lure concertgoers to a new hall.“A hall can’t just be a monument to itself,” she said.And a critical decision looms: before she departs, Borda hopes to name a successor to van Zweden, the music director, who will leave his post in 2024. A 12-person committee of Philharmonic staff, musicians and board members is sifting through candidates. Among the likely contenders are Dudamel; Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, the former music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra; Susanna Malkki, the music director of the Helsinki Philharmonic; and Santtu-Matias Rouvali, principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra. Borda said she was looking for a leader who “clicks with the orchestra” and “clicks with New York.”On a recent day, as she led a tour of the hall for the Philharmonic’s board, her cellphone often sounded, filling the hall with her ringtone: “The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba” from Handel’s “Solomon.”Standing before a new digital wall in the lobby, she smiled, saying she was moved that the Philharmonic would finally have a home to match its artistic caliber.“It energizes me completely,” she said. “It’s like a dream.” More

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      in Television

      Jennifer Bonjean, the Lawyer Who Defended R. Kelly and Bill Cosby

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      Jennifer Bonjean has become known for her aggressive approach as she has defended men accused of sexual misconduct in several of the highest profile cases of the #MeToo era.Jennifer Bonjean, a defense lawyer who has the words “not guilty” tattooed on her right arm, called one woman who accused R. Kelly of sexual abuse a “pathological liar.” She accused another of extortion. She tried to pick their accounts apart, and attacked prosecutors for stripping her client, the former R&B star, of “every single bit of humanity that he has.”Ms. Bonjean, who was Mr. Kelly’s lead lawyer during the criminal trial in Chicago that ended with his conviction last week, has become known for her aggressive tactics in representing men accused of sexual misconduct in several of the highest profile cases of the #MeToo era.She helped Bill Cosby get his sexual assault conviction overturned last year, which led to his being freed from prison. She has also represented Keith Raniere, once the leader of the Nxivm sex cult, as he appealed his conviction on sex trafficking and other charges, for which he was sentenced to 120 years in prison.“Everyone’s entitled to a vigorous defense,” Ms. Bonjean, 52, said in an interview last week shortly before Mr. Kelly’s conviction on sex crimes involving minors was announced.Her theatrical, knock-down-drag-out style is hardly atypical in the world of criminal defense, but it has attracted attention at a time when #MeToo-era cases are reaching trial, as she has urged jurors to be skeptical of women who have testified, often through tears, about being sexually abused.“We are in an era of ‘believe women’ and I agree, but not in the courtroom,” Ms. Bonjean said during closing arguments in the Kelly case. “We don’t just believe women or believe anything. We scrutinize. There’s no place for mob-like thinking in a courtroom.”That perspective and her relentless cross-examination of accusers, which typically involves drilling them on any inconsistencies in their accounts and questioning their motives, has drawn criticism from those who say it could scare abused women from coming forward.Ms. Bonjean accompanied Bill Cosby when he returned to his home in Pennsylvania last year after she worked to overturn his conviction, and he was freed from prison.Mark Makela/ReutersLili Bernard, who has sued Mr. Cosby and accused him of drugging and sexually assaulting her in 1990, said she was upset by Ms. Bonjean’s behavior earlier this year where she defended Mr. Cosby in a civil case brought by a woman who said he had sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager. Ms. Bernard, who attended the trial in California, called the lawyer’s cross-examination of that woman, Judy Huth, and other accusers “victim blaming and victim shaming.”Originally from Valparaiso, Ind., Ms. Bonjean (pronounced bon-JEEN) is a classically trained opera singer who earned a master’s degree in music and once worked at a rape crisis center in Chicago, advocating for victims of sexual violence — a stint, she said, that some might now see “as ironic.”That job led her to study at Loyola University Chicago’s law school with the intention of becoming a prosecutor, but she ended up going into defense work after gravitating toward “underdog” clients. As a lawyer who views prosecutorial overstep as her driving force, she gained prominence by focusing on so-called wrongful conviction cases.Russell Ainsworth, a staff attorney at the Exoneration Project at the University of Chicago Law School, has worked with Ms. Bonjean on civil rights cases for a decade and said that typically, he plays the “straight guy,” while she “comes out swinging.”“If I needed a lawyer to go to the mat for me, that’s the lawyer I would choose,” he said.Her approach was on display earlier this year in the civil suit brought by Ms. Huth, who accused Mr. Cosby of sexually assaulting her at the Playboy Mansion in 1975, when she was 16.During Ms. Bonjean’s cross-examination of Ms. Huth, she challenged her on why it had taken her decades to come forward with her accusation. At one point she suggested that Ms. Huth had kept quiet about the trip to the mansion, not because she had buried painful memories, but because she was uncomfortable telling people that she had gone there with Mr. Cosby because he is Black. Ms. Huth strongly denied that.During the trial, Ms. Bonjean turned her attention to Ms. Bernard, and accused her in court of speaking with a juror during a break. She argued for a mistrial. (The judge denied Ms. Bonjean’s request.)“In that little moment that she tried to falsely accuse me, I felt the wrath of her, the depths she would go to,” Ms. Bernard said in an interview.Ms. Bonjean, whose firm is based in New York, said that she considers herself a feminist, insisting that the label is not inconsistent with her work as a defense lawyer for accused men. Her responsibility, she explained, is to exercise every legal lever at her disposal for her client, noting, “that will not always be consistent with sensitivity to a victim’s feelings.”And she contends that if she were a male lawyer, people wouldn’t think twice about her approach, simply chalking it up to a lawyer doing his job.“I’m supposed to be some type of ambassador — a vagina ambassador,” she said, “Seriously, I get a lot of those questions, like somehow I am traitorous to women by taking on these cases.”During Mr. Kelly’s Chicago case, Ms. Bonjean was boldly combative at every turn. She fought to keep as much of the video footage away from the jury as possible, maintained a steady stream of objections and sometimes kept the fight for her client going on Twitter.At one point, prosecutors complained to the judge about a tweet she posted in which she accused them of playing dirty tricks. Ms. Bonjean offered to refrain from tweeting about the court proceedings, she said, and the judge agreed. A few days later, Ms. Bonjean posted: “I’m not allowed to tweet but I think I can retweet,” sharing someone else’s tweet that quoted her from the trial, calling one of the government’s key witnesses “a liar, a thief and an extortionist.”“I had to find what worked for me,” Ms. Bonjean said of her approach. “My aggressive style — some people call it fiery, some people call it, whatever words you want to use to describe it, that was the way that I could be effective.”Debra S. Katz, a lawyer who has represented high-profile sexual misconduct accusers, said that defense tactics seeking to shred a woman’s credibility or impugn her character run the risk of failing with a jury, citing Harvey Weinstein’s conviction in New York, during which she represented one of the women accusing the producer of sexual assault.“Everybody deserves a defense, but to attack women in this way is, in my view, absolutely unconscionable,” Ms. Katz said.Ms. Bonjean’s highest profile success has been her role in appealing Mr. Cosby’s sexual assault conviction. She and her co-counsels persuaded the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that prosecutors violated Mr. Cosby’s rights by reneging on an apparent promise not to charge him on allegations that he drugged and sexually assaulted Andrea Constand in 2004.Mr. Cosby’s more recent civil trial ended with a jury finding against him that awarded Ms. Huth $500,000 in damages.In Mr. Kelly’s recent case, he was found guilty of some of the most serious charges, including of coercing minors into sexual activity and producing child sexual abuse videos. He was acquitted on several other charges, including that he had sought to obstruct an earlier investigation.In both cases, Ms. Bonjean has pledged to mount a vigorous appeal.Robert Chiarito contributed reporting from Chicago. More

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      in Music

      Jorja Fleezanis, Violinist and Pioneering Concertmaster, Dies at 70

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      “Being a concertmaster is terribly demanding,” she once said, “but women can handle the job as well as men can. I know that.”Jorja Fleezanis, a dynamic violinist and dedicated teacher who was one of the first women to serve as concertmaster of a major symphony orchestra in the United States, died on Sept. 9 at her home in Lake Leelanau, Mich. She was 70.The Minnesota Orchestra, in which Ms. Fleezanis played from the first chair for two decades, said the cause was “a cardiovascular event.”The concertmaster holds a key position with an orchestra, with considerable responsibility for defining its sound. Ms. Fleezanis was “a cornerstone player” in the Minnesota Orchestra, Osmo Vanska, its music director from 2003 to 2022, said in a phone interview.“You need to be hearing the whole score and acting as second in command to the conductor,” Ms. Fleezanis explained to The Boston Globe this year. “You need to understand all the possible interpretive ways the conductor can go at that moment, so you’re prepared to make a sharp left, or a gentle left. And you create that unification, that sense of ensemble, almost instantaneously.”Concertmasters often take solo turns, too, playing concertos with their own orchestras. Ms. Fleezanis used those opportunities to advocate for works that audiences were otherwise unlikely to hear from guest violinists — by Benjamin Britten, say, or Roger Sessions — and to promote new scores. She gave the premiere of John Adams’s Violin Concerto, in St. Paul in 1994, collaborating on a pathbreaking piece that won the Grawemeyer Award for composition a year later.For much of the history of the professional orchestra, the post of concertmaster had been reserved for men. Ms. Fleezanis, a “rebel with a violin,” as The Pioneer Press of St. Paul called her, sought to change that from early in her career.“Being a concertmaster is terribly demanding,” she told The Cincinnati Post in 1976, “but women can handle the job as well as men can. I know that.”Ms. Fleezanis at first looked likely to break barriers at the San Francisco Symphony, which she joined as a second violinist in 1980, becoming its associate concertmaster in 1981. Sharing the first stand with Raymond Kobler, she played so “splendidly,” the critic Robert Commanday wrote in The San Francisco Examiner in 1988, that she struck observers “as the stronger of the two, and often the real leader of the section.”In a decision that Mr. Commanday described as “not very defensible,” the San Francisco Symphony’s music director, Herbert Blomstedt, stuck with his man, even after it became clear that the cost would be Ms. Fleezanis’s departure. She accepted the overtures of Mr. Blomstedt’s predecessor, Edo de Waart, who was eager to bring her to his new ensemble, the Minnesota Orchestra.Hired as acting concertmaster in 1988, she was technically not the first woman to hold the full title of concertmaster at a major orchestra; by the time her position was made permanent early in 1989, Emmanuelle Boisvert had begun work as the concertmaster of the Detroit Symphony. But Ms. Fleezanis was a trailblazer at a time when the gender composition of American orchestras was starting to become more equitable.With her frank personality and her palpable intensity onstage, she was in large part responsible for the resurgence of the Minnesota Orchestra, which came to be widely regarded as one of the finest in the nation early in Mr. Vanska’s tenure, not least for the crisp precision and risk-taking sensibility of its strings. Like its concertmaster, the orchestra performed “with the kind of furious finesse that every composer prays for,” the critic Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker in 2005.“Early in my career I was told, ‘If you play like that in every concert, you’ll burn out,’ but I knew that wasn’t right,” Ms. Fleezanis said when she left the orchestra to become a professor at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music in 2009. “Playing with full commitment gives back: It revitalizes me.”Ms. Fleezanis during a rehearsal for a weeklong Minnesota Orchestra program in 2006 presenting the work of then-emerging composers. Missy Mazzoli, left, was one of them. Greg Helgeson for The New York TimesJorja Kay Fleezanis was born on March 19, 1952, in Detroit. She was the younger of Parios and Kay Fleezanis’s two children. Her parents, who were Greek immigrants, were not musicians but loved music.She began learning violin at age 8, studying in Detroit with Ara Zerounian and Mischa Mischakoff, the former concertmaster of Arturo Toscanini’s NBC Symphony. She later attended the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she played for the young James Levine in his University Circle Orchestra, and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.It was still rare for women to be admitted to major orchestras when Ms. Fleezanis finished her studies. The Chicago Symphony’s music director, Georg Solti, required her to win three separate auditions and to play concerts right under his eye before he was willing to hire a “girl,” as he called her, for his second violin section in 1975. Her kinetic style did not match the staid demeanor of her colleagues, though, and she was all but alone among men. She left after a single season.“A solid musician with a big sound and surprising reserves of energy,” as The Cincinnati Enquirer described her in 1976, Ms. Fleezanis returned to Ohio to lead the newly formed Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra. There she founded the Trio d’Accordo, a string trio. She later started the FOG Trio with the cellist Michael Grebanier and the pianist Garrick Ohlsson. An inspirational pedagogue, she held posts at the San Francisco Conservatory, the University of Minnesota and a variety of other institutions. She retired from the Jacobs School in 2020.While at the San Francisco Symphony, Ms. Fleezanis met Michael Steinberg, a former critic for The Boston Globe who was that orchestra’s publications director and artistic adviser. They married in 1983; he died in 2009. She is survived by her brother, Nickolas.In a 2009 conversation with Sam Bergman, a Minnesota Orchestra violist, Ms. Fleezanis said her husband had stoked her interest in unusual and new works. She recorded Beethoven’s Violin Sonatas, but she also recorded pieces by Stefan Wolpe and Aaron Jay Kernis. Nicholas Maw wrote a sonata for her, and John Tavener made her the “Divine Eros” in his vast, mystical “Ikon of Eros,” written for the Minnesota Orchestra’s centennial in 2002. After her husband’s death, she started a commissioning fund in their joint names.“There is a huge body of genius out there,” Ms. Fleezanis told Mr. Bergman, reflecting on the repertoire as she found it. “It’s just a question of how limited you want to choose to be.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Terra Femme’ Review: How Women Have Seen the World

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      An assemblage of travelogues shot by women from the 1920s through the 1950s, this experimental essay film can be seen with either live or prerecorded narration.Blurring the line between experimental essay film and performance piece, Courtney Stephens’s “Terra Femme” can be seen in two versions. Most screenings will have regular voice-over, but at the Thursday screening and at one of the screenings on Sunday, Stephens will deliver the narration live, in the spirit of how some of the material in the movie was originally screened.“Terra Femme” compiles amateur travelogues shot largely by women from the 1920s through the 1950s. The footage filmed by Kate and Arthur Tode, a couple who circumnavigated the globe, for example, was shown at cinema clubs in the 1930s and 1940s, and as with Stephens’s presentation, the films would be narrated while they unspooled.Although the two versions are said to be similar, the live edition — the one I saw at a press screening — conceivably adds something extra, because “Terra Femme” is partly about Stephens’s own relationship to the material. At one point, she discusses trying to recreate certain shots from India and not quite framing them correctly.Stephens asks whether these travelogues might reveal that women, who at the time had few opportunities to direct movies professionally, see the world differently. She considers the lives of the camerawomen, like Annette Dixon, of Philadelphia, whose films were archived under her husband’s name; Adelaide Pearson, who captured what may have been the first color cinematic footage of Gandhi; and Armeta Hearst, who filmed in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Seattle in the 1950s. The first reel of Hearst’s footage was accidentally scanned backward, making it look as though subjects who were exiting their homes were instead being absorbed back into them, inescapably.“Terra Femme” addresses many more issues: changing domestic roles in the 20th century, self-consciousness in amateur filmmaking, women’s potential access to historic moments and even — obliquely — climate change. Stephens’s ideas and presentation make for a dense, continually absorbing hour.Terra FemmeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 2 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Movies

      The Women of ‘Wakanda Forever,’ the ‘Black Panther’ Sequel

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      When Marvel released the trailer for the sequel “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” in July, it garnered 172 million views in its first 24 hours. That was nearly double the viewership of the original “Black Panther” teaser in 2017. In the intervening years, much had changed. The first one, directed by Ryan Coogler, smashed not only box office records but also expectations and stereotypes about whether overseas audiences would watch films with predominantly Black casts. “Black Panther” also became the first superhero movie nominated for best picture at the Academy Awards.At the same time, T’Challa, the king of Wakanda, and his alter ego, Black Panther, both brilliantly inhabited by Chadwick Boseman, became fan favorites in the battle with Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan). The singularity of Boseman’s measured, charismatic yet playful performance helped shape the legacy of “Black Panther,” making role and actor almost synonymous and inspiring millions of children worldwide to see themselves in a Black superhero.But even then, I thought the most obvious rival for T’Challa’s throne wasn’t Killmonger but the Dora Milaje, the women warriors who loyally protect their country’s leader. Okoye, played by the marvelous Danai Gurira, was the chief military strategist for the wealthiest nation on earth. In the teaser for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” we see the Dora Milaje, including Ayo (Florence Kasumba reprising her role) and Aneka (Michaela Coel, joining the cast), taking an even more prominent role and confronting a new enemy, Namor, the Sub-Mariner, played by Tenoch Huerta. Also making an appearance is his cousin, the mutant hybrid Namora, with Huerta’s fellow Mexican actor Mabel Cadena in this role.But, in addition to protecting Wakanda, the Dora Milaje also must secure the throne without T’Challa. After Boseman died in 2020 following a private battle with colon cancer, Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel Studios, announced that the character would not be recast, raising speculation about the destiny of Shuri (Letitia Wright), who is T’Challa’s sister and heir apparent as well as Wakanda’s chief scientist. That seemed to be the thinking until the trailer arrived, and the hashtag #recastTChalla went viral, followed by a Change.org petition with more than 60,000 signatures contending, “If Marvel Studios removes T’Challa, it would be at the expense of the audiences (especially Black boys and men) who saw themselves in him.”From left, Dorothy Steel, Florence Kasumba, Angela Bassett and Gurira in a scene from the new film. Marvel StudiosWhat risks being lost in this debate are the powerful women of Wakanda — Okoye and Shuri, of course, but also Nakia, the spy played by Lupita Nyong’o, and Ramonda, the queen (the legendary Angela Bassett). In the trailer, you can see they are warriors, mourners, healers, mothers, leaders, sisters and defenders of the legacy of T’Challa (and, for that matter, Boseman). They might also expand the meaning of the Black Panther superhero imagery beyond one man or even one moment in time.In advance of the Nov. 11 release of the sequel, with the plot still under wraps, I spoke to several women of “Wakanda Forever,” including Bassett, Cadena, Gurira, Kasumba, Nyong’o and Wright. Though they experienced the making of the film quite differently from one another, they found ways to grieve together, overcome injuries (Wright suffered a critical shoulder fracture and a severe concussion) and forge a real-life sisterhood on-set that mirrors the feminist spirit of the fictional Wakanda.These are edited excerpts from our conversations.Were you surprised by how huge a hit “Black Panther” was in 2018?ANGELA BASSETT I was very pleasantly surprised by the outpouring of love for the story, for the actors, for the representation, for the entertainment of it all. Not being a comic book person myself coming into this project, I expected those who love the Marvel Universe to show up. But for the rest of humanity to show up in droves was mind-blowing.DANAI GURIRA We were able to create very full characters that killed a lot of stereotypes about what a superhero or heroism looks like. We all have stories, but one that jumped out at me was when this 11-year-old white boy would not let go of my hand. His dad was like, “I’m so sorry.” But, that whole experience shattered the larger idea that “Oh, the only way you can resonate is as a white male in these types of roles.”LETITIA WRIGHT It’s been really beautiful to see so many young people be inspired. I always feel really proud when someone says that Shuri has expanded how they think about themselves.Kasumba, right, is reprising her role as Ayo, but Dominique Thorne, left, and Mabel Cadena are new to the franchise. The training was exhausting, Cadena said, but “I was also inspired by these women every day.”Simone Niamani Thompson for The New York TimesGiven that past success, how did you prepare for this sequel, both in terms of its intense fandom and the loss of Chadwick Boseman?LUPITA NYONG’O Let me speak for myself. There was a lot of stillness, reflection, prayer and meditation to bolster me up as emotionally, mentally and spiritually as possible. It was a unique experience to step back into this world without our leader. When you have a sophomore film, there’s a lot of expectation. But I think the loss of Chadwick kind of took all that away. I found myself having to radically accept that this was going to be different, and that showing up with as much openness as possible was key.WRIGHT In addition to what Lupita said, which was perfect, the preparation process coming back into this was definitely a spiritual one. I remember connecting a lot with Danai. When we got to Atlanta [where filming took place], we went for a walk in the park and just sat with each other and processed what it meant to begin again and what it would take. The beautiful thing I found was that I wasn’t alone. Coming back to the world of Wakanda, I felt like I had family that understood.GURIRA There are ways that you as an artist can try to have some control over what you’re stepping into. And for me, a lot of that is the training we do as the Dora Milaje. But it was also clear that there was another journey that we had to take. I remember sitting with Ryan, and he helped me process what felt different this time: It was grief. So grief intermingled with our process. There were things I couldn’t prepare for, like stepping into the throne room and remembering the last time I was there and getting really hit by that. And then, as Letitia said, we leaned on each other.FLORENCE KASUMBA I had to learn that I’m still not ready to speak about everything with everyone. I didn’t know when I was going to be triggered. But if that happened, I knew there were people I could be open with; coming to work felt like coming home. Also, the training helped a lot because we had to be so focused. It was a combination of losing ourselves but also making sure that we move as one again after such a long time.Mabel, you’re the newest member of this cast. What was it like becoming part of this “Black Panther community”?MABEL CADENA It was incredible. I didn’t speak the same language at the beginning, and the fight training was really hard for me, too. There were points when I felt really tired, but I was also inspired by these women every day. I’d say, “If these girls can, I can do more one day.” And then I’d speak to Ryan, and he’d give me the opportunity to build out my character as a Mexican woman. So, I was able to confront my fears and, at the same time, felt entirely safe with and grateful for these women.How intense was the training for your battle scenes?KASUMBA You have to be physically and mentally so sharp. I started training for this role in May 2021 because mentally, you need to understand that your body has to function for about a year. And because we work with weapons and can hurt ourselves, we also had to be confident enough to do our strikes while also making sure we didn’t harm our colleagues. The training from the first movie helped us because there’s a lot of muscle memory.GURIRA The literal training is very dependent on the story we’re telling. In the first film, there was a specific enemy and a specific response. Now, we are telling another story, so there are very specific drills to unify us. And then there’s a lot of individual work. I had a couple of injuries over the course of this one, and I had to fight through them. But I love it because, ultimately, it grounds the world. You have to know how to move and live in sort of an instinct of warriorness that is specific to your character.Cadena, center, said the director Ryan Coogler gave her “the opportunity to build out my character as a Mexican woman,” she said.Marvel StudiosLetitia, you were severely injured on set, right?WRIGHT My experience was different. There were a lot of physical challenges that I faced as well, but alongside that I came away really proud that in the face of adversity, I could bounce back and give that extra life and strength to my character. I think Mabel said it beautifully. Seeing everybody give 110 percent inspires you each day. The journey wasn’t pain-free, but you can stand on top of the mountain and say you did it. Hopefully, that transfers to the film, and people walk away feeling ecstatic and empowered because that’s definitely how we feel after making it.That is such a powerful image. Do you think people are more receptive to Black women as superheroes?BASSETT I think that remains to be seen. “Wakanda Forever” is poised to be the next film to really garner excitement for lots of people. Over a billion dollars’ worth of people hopefully will go to the movies. And who will they see but our faces? Black women’s faces. I love seeing it. In this day and age, you don’t have to wait for a few folks in a few offices at the top of a few buildings to make it happen. You know? Our voices are so compelling that they must be told.GURIRA [The first] film allowed us, as women characters, to gain even more complexity. And it’s important that it’s not just a one-moment thing, but you see Black and women of color characters grow and have more dimension.WRIGHT Today a girl told me, “I came out of the cinema feeling I can do anything after watching the film and seeing what Shuri presented to the world.”GURIRA If putting these characters in a heroic space propels that sense of ownership of self and what one can do with their own potential as young women and girls of color, that’s everything, really.WRIGHT It should become the norm because there are so many women out there that are so heroic and amazing. We just show a piece of that onscreen.“Black Panther” gave us a utopia that we do not necessarily have in real life. What excited you the most about the sisterhood you had as actresses or the female solidarity that your characters had for each other in “Wakanda Forever”?CADENA [It’s been said that] when a woman raises her voice, we all bloom. These words are really inspiring to me, and I think this is the legacy of the first movie. Before this, I had only worked in Mexico City, so working with these women and Ryan completely changed my life and the way I thought about my career. Now, I have new dreams and new expectations about the way I want to make women characters.BASSETT It all played out beautifully that I’ve had a bit more experience in my career and that they are coming up and doing the same great work. There’s a lot of respect. But it’s not only about the work that we do; it’s also about how we work with one another. If we lock arms, then it’s a much stronger piece.NYONG’O The undervaluing of women because of their gender doesn’t exist in Wakanda. We saw that in the first film, which is why it resonated. This new film continues with the conceit that this is a world where those things don’t exist. But the question we’re tackling is not their womanhood. It’s their beliefs, passions, loves and arguments, and it creates a robust drama. Hopefully, the world as we know it watches and is empowered by it, despite itself.What I love about the Wakanda story is that it offers us a version of a world that we are striving to get to. More

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      in Music

      Ingrid Andress, a Nashville Outsider Who Paved Her Own Path In

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      The singer-songwriter almost gave up on country music. Instead, her debut earned her a Grammy nod for best new artist. Now she’s back with an LP about the arc of a relationship.NASHVILLE — When Ingrid Andress answered the door at her home in her hilly Nashville suburb one afternoon in July, feet bare and hair wet as she gamely played host before hurrying off to a tour date, a shiny Yamaha grand piano was visible behind her.There was a moment in 2017, shortly before she signed a label deal, when she fantasized about decamping to Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles and walking the path laid out by Joni Mitchell. Adding the oversized instrument to her living room makes it official: Andress, the 30-year-old pop-versant singer-songwriter, is sticking around to make her home in country music. That doesn’t mean that she’s conformed to genre orthodoxy. What she does, as her manager Blythe Scokin put it, is “pleasantly disrupt the status quo.”“More Hearts Than Mine,” a ballad off Andress’s 2020 debut, “Lady Like,” that showcased the rich detailing of her ruminations, broke through at radio after she fought to release it as her first official single. She excluded her most recent Top 20 hit, the Sam Hunt duet “Wishful Drinking,” from physical versions of her new album, “Good Person,” lest it be a digression. The immersive arrangements on the new LP, out Friday, are meant to set moods, and its narrative arc — gradually grasping that a partner hasn’t been a partner at all and opening herself to something new — is meticulous‌.It’s common for contemporary country artists to emphasize where they come from, and shape their entire personas around it. The Denver suburb where Andress spent part of her youth is more of a footnote in her story. Her father was a coach for the Colorado Rockies, and since the family decamped to Arizona each year for spring training, Andress and her siblings were home-schooled by their mother, who made piano part of the curriculum.“You lived with your piano teacher, so she would know if you practiced or not,” Andress noted, nursing a glass of rosé.Her parents restricted the kids’ access to secular pop culture, but Andress had ways of broadening her horizons — neighbors burned her CDs, and left their labels blank so she could scribble the names of contemporary Christian acts as camouflage. Still, she was aware of missing out.“I think that’s where my outsider syndrome comes from,” she said, “because when you start that young thinking that you’re different from everybody and don’t fit in, it just kind of stays with you.”These feelings fueled her early songwriting, but athletics was the path that held promise. She enrolled in school in eighth grade in hopes that playing soccer and volleyball would land her a college scholarship. A few years later, she was in Boston to see a World Series game when she heard rehearsal sounds emanating from a Berklee College of Music building and ventured inside to investigate: “My whole world just got flipped, to where I was like, ‘I’m going to go here,’” she said. “Luckily, I didn’t know how prestigious it was, because I’d never heard of it.”Andress auditioned to study jazz voice, and found herself among students who seemed to have professional paths on lock. Searching for hers, she joined first one, then another a cappella group, and competed on consecutive seasons of the NBC competition show “The Sing-Off.” After that, a songwriting course taught by the hitmaker Kara DioGuardi steered Andress toward songcraft. Scouting Nashville on a student trip, she seized on its reputation as the “songwriting capital of the world.”Andress lugged her keyboard to writers’ rounds for two years before landing her first publishing deal in 2015 and embarking on a crash course in country songwriting culture, beginning with its primary instrument: guitar. No workrooms at her publisher’s office were set up for keyboards; it was suggested that she learn to strum an acoustic, “like everyone else.”Writing appointments paired Andress with Music Row pros who embodied a combination of clever, commercial craft and rugged, tradition-conscious masculinity that she’d never encountered. Thrown by experiences like being told that cursing didn’t become a woman, she nevertheless resolved to proceed with respect.“‘I have to learn the rules so that I can break them,’” she recalled of her ethos then. “‘I can’t just skip to breaking them.’ Which was a big reality check for me.”There was still tremendous demand for bro country-style songs, with their dirt-road revelry and programmed beats, and thanks to the ongoing inequalities baked into country radio programming, limited room for women. She struggled and began making trips to write and create tracks in Los Angeles. She was developing a personalized way of straddling country and pop, but beyond the occasional Charli XCX single (“Boys”) and country album cut, she was cautioned that her specialties didn’t fit either lane.To prove her songs were worthy of recording, Andress self-released “The Stranger,” a pensive portrait of disintegrating intimacy, in 2017, intending it as her last effort as a Nashville striver. She’d already secured a California apartment, eager to commence her Laurel Canyon phase. Then satellite radio started spinning her ballad, and labels wanted to meet. “It was like the second I gave up on Nashville is when everybody was interested,” she said.“I went from literally nobody knowing who I was to just being plopped front row of the Grammys,” Andress said of her breakthrough.Sara Messinger for The New York TimesBut Andress was determined to be a country-pop artist who wrote and co-produced her material, roles that had traditionally been separate in Nashville: “I almost went out of my way to let people know, ‘This is what you’re dealing with.’”Ultimately, she signed with Warner Music Nashville, with reassurance that she could remain the architect of her sound, and found a manager, Scokin, who had helped steer pop careers and was also working her way into the country music industry’s good graces.Andress recorded much of “Lady Like” in the home studio of Sam Ellis (Hunter Hayes, Kane Brown), who’d become an important collaborator. “There’s no doubt that she has chops, that she knows what she’s talking about,” Ellis said in a video interview. “She’ll bang out an idea on the piano or the synth or guitar or whatever. She has that vocabulary.”What she couldn’t do when her debut album came out in March 2020 was make the promotional rounds. But even without opportunities to win over peers and gatekeepers, she was nominated for her genre’s marquee awards shows and picked up a nod in the Grammys’ best new artist category. “I went from literally nobody knowing who I was to just being plopped front row of the Grammys,” she said though the socially distanced pandemic ceremony she attended felt more like “your dry cousin’s wedding.”During lockdown, Andress ‌grew intensely introspective about relationships in general, and hers in particular. “I realized that I wasn’t happy,” she said, “and that was wild to me, because I’d been with this person for six years. I just couldn’t stop writing about it.” She scrutinized the dynamics and emotions until she had the makings of a song cycle about the realizations, reckonings and the conscious risks of new love.Even with a slightly bigger budget for her second LP, Andress gravitated to the studio in Ellis’s house, no bigger than a spacious bedroom. They farmed out more drum parts to remote recording, but Andress removed some of them, making rhythm a rippling, implied presence; synthesizers mingle with that most molten of traditional country instruments, steel guitar.“No Choice” is her anguished account of why leaving was necessary for self-preservation, while “Blue,” her take on a torch song, exults in the sensuality of romance with the melancholy awareness that it could fade. And late in the title track, an inquiry into religious authority, she implores, “The right hand of God, tell me, what is it like?”‌ It’s her subtle, searching way of engaging with a core country concern: what it means to live uprightly.“Anybody who says country is dumb, that makes me so mad,” Andress said with casual conviction, after close to a decade of studying it. “When done well, it’s smarter than any pop song ever.” More

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      in Television

      In ‘A League of Their Own,’ Abbi Jacobson Makes the Team

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      Abbi Jacobson really can play baseball, she insisted. Just not when the cameras are rolling. “I fully get the yips when someone is watching me,” she told me.This was on a recent weekday morning, on a shady bench with a view of the ball fields in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Jacobson lives nearby, in an apartment she shares with her fiancée, the “For All Mankind” actress Jodi Balfour. This morning, she hadn’t come to the fields to play, which was good — the diamonds swarmed with little kids. (It was good, too, because while Jacobson can play, I can’t, though she did offer to teach me.) And honestly, she deserved to enjoy her off season.In “A League of Their Own,” arriving Aug. 12 on Amazon Prime Video, Jacobson stars as Carson Shaw, the catcher for the Rockford Peaches. Carson is an invented character, but the Peaches, a team from the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which debuted in 1943, are delightfully real. For five rainy months, on location in Pittsburgh, Jacobson, 38, had to catch, throw, hit and slide into base. Is some of this computer-generated magic? Sure, but not all. Which means that Jacobson played while plenty of people were watching. And she played well.“She’s really good,” said Will Graham, who created the series with her. “Abbi is constantly self-effacing and self-deprecating but is actually a badass.”Carson, a talented, anxious woman, becomes the team’s de facto leader. As a creator and executive producer, as well as the series’s star, Jacobson led a team, too, onscreen and off. This is work that she has been doing since her mid 20s, when she and Ilana Glazer created and eventually oversaw the giddy, unladylike comedy “Broad City.” On that show, she became a leader more or less by accident. On “A League of Their Own,” which was inspired by Penny Marshall’s 1992 film, Jacobson led from the get-go and with purpose, infusing the script with her own ideas about what leadership can look like.Jacobson plays a talented, anxious catcher who becomes her team’s leader. Her character’s story is one among many in a series that celebrates a range of women’s experience.Amazon Studios“The stories that I want to tell are about how I’m a messy person, and I’m insecure all the time,” she said. “And then what if the most insecure, unsure person is the leader? What if the messy person gets to own herself?”So is Carson’s story her story?“Kind of,” she said, squinting against the sun.Jacobson, who has described herself as an introvert masquerading as an extrovert, is approachable but also watchful, an observer before she is a participant. Even in the midst of animated conversation, she has an attitude that suggests that if you were to leave her alone with a book, or a sketch pad, or maybe her dog, Desi, that would be fine, too.Her favorite pastime: “I like to go and sit in a very populated area with like a book. Alone,” she said.On that morning, she wore a white tank top and paint-stained pants, but the stains were pre-applied and deliberate, sloppiness turned into fashion. The bag she carried was Chanel. She didn’t look a lot like a baseball player, but she did look like a woman who had become comfortable in her own skin, who had cleaned up most of her private mess and put the rest of it to professional use.“She’s a boss,” said the writer and comedian Phoebe Robinson, a friend. “And she knows herself in her core.”Jacobson grew up in a Philadelphia suburb, the youngest of two children in a Reform Jewish family. She played sports throughout her childhood — softball, basketball, travel soccer — until she gave them up for jam bands and weed.“That team mentality was very much my childhood,” she said.After art school, she moved to New York to become a dramatic actress, then veered into comedy through improv classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade. She and Glazer wanted to join a house improv team, but team after team rejected them. So they created “Broad City” instead, which ran first as a web series and then for five seasons on Comedy Central. A “Girls” without the gloss, trailing pot smoke as it went, it followed its protagonists, Abbi and Ilana, as they blazed a zigzag trail through young adulthood. The New Yorker called the show, lovingly, a “bra-mance.”For Jacobson, the show was both a professional development seminar and a form of therapy. Through writing and playing a version of herself, she emerged more confident, less anxious.“Having this receipt of her anxiety in the character allowed her to look at it and grow in a different direction,” Glazer said.Jacobson began developing “A League of Their Own” with Will Graham as “Broad City” was wrapping up.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesIn 2017, when “Broad City” had two seasons to go, Graham (“Mozart in the Jungle”) invited Jacobson to dinner. He had recently secured the rights to “A League of Their Own,” a movie he had loved as a child. He thought it could make a great series, with a few changes. The queerness of some characters — rendered in the movie through blink-and-you-miss-it subtext — ought to be more overt this time. In the film, in a scene that lasts just seconds, a Black woman returns a foul ball with force and accuracy, a nod to the league’s segregation. This, too, deserved more attention.Graham had pursued Jacobson, he said, for her integrity, her smarts, her flustered, nervy optimism. He wanted the experience of making the show to be joyful. And he wanted the stories it told — particularly the queer stories — to convey joy, too. He sensed that Jacobson, who came out in her mid 30s, could deliver.“She’s so funny, and also so emotionally honest — and so unafraid of being emotionally honest,” Graham said.As Jacobson finished the final seasons of “Broad City,” development began on the new series. She and Graham threw themselves into research, speaking to the some of the surviving women who had played in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League or in the Negro leagues. They also spoke with Marshall, via phone, before her death in 2018. Marshall had focused primarily on the story of one woman: Geena Davis’s Dottie. Graham and Jacobson wanted to try to tell more stories, as many as an eight-episode season allowed.“The movie is a story about white women getting to play baseball,” Jacobson said. “That’s just not enough.”Gradually the show took form, morphing from a half-hour comedy to an hourlong dramedy. Then it found its co-stars: D’Arcy Carden as Greta, the team’s glamour girl; Roberta Colindrez as Lupe, the team’s pitcher; Chanté Adams as Max, a Black superstar in search of a team of her own. Rosie O’Donnell, a star of the original movie, signed on for an episode, playing the owner of a gay bar.Chanté Adams, left, was impressed by Jacobson’s leadership on set. “She always makes sure that everyone’s voice is heard and included,” she said.Amazon StudiosThe pilot was shot in Los Angeles, which doubled first for Chicago and then for Rockford, Ill. The coronavirus hit soon after, delaying production until last summer. Rising costs pushed the show to relocate to Pittsburgh, which is, as it happens, a rainy city, a problem for a show with so many game-day sequences. But the cast and crew handled it.“There was kind of a summer camp quality to it,” Graham said.And Jacobson, as Glazer reminded me, spent many years as a camp counselor. So a lot of that summer camp quality was owed to her. And to the incessant baseball practice she insisted on.“There was so much baseball practice, truly months of baseball practice,” Carden said. “We were a team more than we were a cast. That was Abbi. Abbi’s an ensemble person.”Adams first met Jacobson in the audition room. (As a longtime “Broad City” fan, she struggled to keep her cool.) On set, Jacobson immediately impressed her.“I don’t know how she does it,” Adams said. “But even as a leader and the star of the show, she always makes sure that everyone’s voice is heard and included.” After filming had ended, Adams said, Jacobson kept showing up for her, attending the opening night of her Broadway show.“It just melted my heart,” she said. “Abbi is the epitome of what it means to be a leader.”Jacobson doesn’t always feel that way, but she feels it more often than she used to. “Sometimes I can really own that,” she said. “And sometimes I go home, and I’m like, how am I the person? Or what’s happening here?” So she lent that same self-doubt to Carson, a leader who evolves when she acknowledges her vulnerability.“The movie is a story about white women getting to play baseball,” Jacobson said. “That’s just not enough.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesBut Carson’s narrative is only one among many in a series that celebrates a range of women’s experience: Black, white and Latina women; straight, queer and questioning women; femme women; butch women; and women in between. Many of the actors are beautiful in the ways that Hollywood prefers. Many aren’t.Yet the show insists that all of these women deserve love, friendship and fulfillment. In an email, O’Donnell observed that while the movie had focused on one woman’s story, this new version gives nearly every character a rich inner life “in a beautiful and accurate way that brings the characters’ humanity to the forefront.”Carden has known Jacobson for 15 years, since their early improv days. No one had ever seen her as a romantic lead until Jacobson dropped off a glove and a hand-drawn card (“Adorable and romantic,” Carden said) and invited her to join the team. Carden was proud to take the role and proud, too, to work with Jacobson again.“She’s changed none at all,” Carden said. “She’s always been Abbi, but the confidence is different.”Jacobson wears that confidence lightly. Glimmers of uncertainty remain. “I’m never the person that you’re like, She should lead the show,” she told me in Prospect Park.But clearly she is. When no team would have her, she made her own, and now she has made another one. After an hour and a half, she picked up her purse and her coffee cup and she walked back through the park. Like a boss. Like a coach. Like a leader. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Faith’ Review: Training to Fight Demons at a Monastery

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      Valentina Pedicini’s final documentary tracks the “Warriors of Light” — their leader, and their monks and mothers, in Italy.The director of this Italian documentary, Valentina Pedicini, died in November, 2020, of liver cancer. That’s a terrible shame for a variety of reasons. Pedicini was, in her too-short career, a remarkably intrepid documentarian. In her 2010 “My Marlboro City,” she investigated the cigarette smuggling trade in her hometown, Brindisi. For “From the Depths” (2013), she accompanied a female miner who works more than 1,500 feet below sea level.“Faith,” her final film, presented in wide-screen black-and-white, kicks off with an explanatory text, telling of how in 1998 a man the audience will know only as The Master founded a monastery of sorts and peopled it with so-called Warriors of Light. These are monks and mothers trained in martial arts, fighting “against demons,” ostensibly “in the name of the Father.”We see these warriors, 20 years after the formation of the group, all dressed in white, under a strobe light, doing a rave-style dance workout. We watch them intone “The Lord’s Prayer” and “Hail Mary” in unison. We see them sharing a pasta dinner, at the end of which all the diners lick their plates clean. We see their shared bathroom and watch them shaving their heads.It’s not long before one starts to wonder just what “Father” these ascetics are working in the name of. One meeting revolves around Gabriele, a monk who has apparently either flirted with or actually bedded every woman in the group. He declines to resign (his behavior is discouraged by the group) and halfheartedly promises to work on a confession. As for The Master himself, he browbeats the women, telling one, “You don’t deserve to be a warrior.”Pedicini structures the movie as an oblique narrative rather than an exposé. And “Faith” is all the more disturbing for that. Clearly this distinctive filmmaker was just getting started.FaithNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Watch on Film Movement+. More