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      Read Halle Berry’s #SeeHer Award Speech

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      On Sunday evening, Halle Berry accepted the Critics Choice Association’s #SeeHer Award, which honors a woman who pushes “boundaries on changing stereotypes” and furthers “authentic portrayals of women across the entertainment landscape.”In doing so, the Oscar winner referenced her recent drama “Bruised,” her directorial debut. First, she said, she asked the producers why she couldn’t act in it. Then, she asked why she couldn’t direct it. Both times, they answered, “Why not?”“And then finally, when the film came out, I got the courage to ask someone what he thought of the movie,” Berry said. “And he said, ‘I have a hard time watching a woman get battered and beaten. It made me feel uncomfortable.’”“And in that moment, I knew exactly why I had to tell this story. I knew exactly the power of the story,” she continued. “Because I said, ‘If you had a hard time, if it made you uncomfortable watching that story, imagine being that woman living that story.’”That, she said, was the power of storytelling: It can help people consider others, find compassion and empathy for them. Berry said she used to aspire to roles typically played by white men.Now, she has realized that “for those roles to work, they would have to be substantially changed,” she said. “It would have to be written with the reality of my journey, in all of its beauty and all of its pain.”That, the actress and director said, is why she is grateful to be creating in the moment, when women are telling their own stories. She concluded: “We will use our emotional intelligence and we will tell stories that don’t fit preconceived notions. No, we will tell stories that see us fully in all our multitudes and contradictions, because we are confident and we are scared. We are vulnerable and we are strong. We are beautiful and we are abused. We are everything and all of that, and all at the same time. Because if we deny our complexity, then we deny our humanity.We won’t always be pretty, and we will never be perfect, but what we will be is honest and true, no matter how uncomfortable that makes you. These are the stories we have to fight to tell, and these are the stories that the world needs to see. So to every little girl who feels unseen and unheard, this is our way of saying to you, ‘We love you and we see you. And you deserve every good thing in this world.’” More

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      Dominique Morisseau Asks: ‘What Does Freedom Look Like Now?’

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      Her new play, “Confederates,” straddles two eras, exploring what liberation means to a present-day academic and an enslaved woman in the 1860s.In 2016, Penumbra Theater and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival commissioned Dominique Morisseau to write a play as part of the American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle. The remit: to create a work about the Black experience of the Civil War.Morisseau had one question: “What were the Black women doing?”“Confederates,” her new play at the Signature Theater, is one answer. Toggling between the present day and the 1860s, the play — now in previews, with a premiere on March 27 — follows Sandra, a superstar academic played by Michelle Wilson, and Sara (Kristolyn Lloyd), an enslaved woman who spies for the Union Army. While the title evokes the Confederacy, it also teases a bond between the two women.“This is what it means to be at this institution,” Sandra says. “To know deep in your core that there will never be justice for you here.”From left: Andrea Patterson, Kristolyn Lloyd and Elijah Jones in “Confederates,” opening March 27 at the Signature Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSara echoes her: “This what it means to be in a peculiar institution. Under its boot, everybody yo’ enemy.”Even as “Confederates” evokes dramatic works as varied as Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s postmodern drama “An Octoroon,” Adrienne Kennedy’s devastating tragedy “The Ohio State Murders” and David Mamet’s academic two-hander “Oleanna,” Morisseau renders each scene in her distinctive empathetic, tragicomic style.Rather than focusing on oppression, the play explores Black women’s agency and the different forms that liberation can take from one era to the next.“Getting free in the past, it’s just getting free,” Morisseau said. “Like, you’re literally in bondage. Getting free in the present is a very different thing. What does freedom look like now?”Morisseau was speaking from an apartment in Midtown Manhattan, near both the Signature and Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater, where her play “Skeleton Crew,” part of a trilogy of works set in her native Detroit, recently wrapped. Her 15-month-old son napped in the next room.During a 90-minute video call, she discussed “Confederates,” which will also be presented at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in August, as well as microaggressions, macroaggressions and what empowerment looks like for her. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.In “Confederates,” Sandra and Sara are living about 160 years apart. What joins them?They’re united in the history of Black women fighting for freedom. They’re united in being the most socially expendable.Sandra, the professor, is subject to frequent microaggressions. For Sara, the enslaved woman, the danger is physical and more overt. Do you understand these threats as related?The kind of racism that Sara experiences — you could be hanged, you could be dragged, you could be murdered — that overt racism is not most people’s experience of racism. There is the kind of racism that breaks the body, that attacks the body. Then there’s the other kind that kills the spirit. The one I engage with the most often is the latter. But the micro always leads to the macro. Microaggressions lead into aggressive actions.Eventually, all of these are harmful and deadly.In your research, did you find many examples of Black women spying for the Union?I did not find lots of examples. I would find little pieces. Those kinds of stories are under-told. But they tell me that we were not passive. We were never passive.Brandon J. Dirden and Phylicia Rashad in Morisseau’s “Skeleton Crew,” whose run just ended at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYou have written plays set in the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s, the ’00s. Did you know that you would eventually write about the 1860s?I never thought about it, to be honest. When I was approached to specifically write about this era, I said to myself, I don’t want to just write about slavery. That’s not what I’m interested in. I am, however, interested in Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, the phrase coined by Dr. Joy DeGruy, which is the impact of being descendants of the enslaved and the traumas that have happened since, without treatment or healing.When you accepted the commission, were there certain stories or stereotypes that you wanted to avoid?I didn’t want to show defeat or agreement with the enslaved culture. There is no agreement.As an undergraduate, did you experience institutional racism?My experience at school taught me that no one’s here to protect me. There’s no agency for me here. I’m going to have to do for me in school, if I want to not be squashed, if I want to see myself as an artist.Theater can also be a racist space. I remember an essay you wrote in 2015 about white privilege, with the headline: “Why I Almost Slapped a Fellow Theater Patron, and What That Says About Our Theaters.” Has theater changed since then?I have actively worked to shift that culture at least around my own work. I have a Playwright’s Rules of Engagement insert that I put inside the program of every show that I do. Because I was policed for my own laughter. [The insert includes instructions such as, “You are allowed to laugh audibly” and “This can be church for some of us, and testifying is allowed.”]I have seen attempts to diversify boards, to have a wider outreach to donors. Then there’s the bottom-up approach: I would like to see more artists taking more agency over themselves and their art. There’s a culture of silence that has been perpetuated. There’s this feeling of expendability that artists get. Like, you cannot speak up, because you will then not have jobs anymore. And that’s crazy.“There are young artists looking at me, watching me. I’m trying to bring up those artists,” Morisseau said, referring to efforts she’s made to counter harmful behavior in the industry.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesLate last year, you spoke up. You pulled your play “Paradise Blue” from the Geffen Playhouse, saying that Black women who worked on the show had been “verbally abused and diminished.” What empowered you to do that?I’ve always been an activist. I just inherently have not ever been OK with things that aren’t right. What made me feel even more empowered in this moment is that I am now visible. And there are young artists looking at me, watching me. I’m trying to bring up those artists. So there is not a chance in hell that I can watch harmful behavior happen and be unaccountable. I will not write about Black women being harmed and learning to take agency for themselves — that’s what “Paradise Blue” is about — I’m not going to have that onstage and the opposite happening for them offstage.I’m not trying to create a culture of people pulling their plays. This is one of the hardest decisions you should have to make as a playwright. It was brutal. It was exhausting for me. I never want to have to do that again.Before the pandemic you made your Broadway debut, writing the book for “Ain’t Too Proud.” Did that change anything for you?“Ain’t Too Proud” happened, a MacArthur happened, quite a few things happened, right at the same time. It’s brought more faith about me as an artist from institutions. I don’t know if I’m a safe bet. I don’t think I’m a safe bet. But I’m worthy of a bet in general. I’m enough of an interesting voice. I’m definitely asked to write more musicals.And what did it mean to have “Skeleton Crew” move to Broadway?With Broadway comes more resources behind your work. I remember when I first saw “Ain’t Too Proud” staged, I was like, everybody deserves all those resources behind their imaginations, just once in their life. To be able to get it twice in my life is amazing.“Skeleton Crew” will always be one of my favorites because I know where it came from. I know where I was when I wrote it and I know who I wrote it for. The biggest thing for me, as a Detroiter, is to make Detroit visible. We had Detroit night on Broadway. It was like a family reunion up in there. It was the most Detroit behavior I’ve ever seen on Broadway. It was epic. More

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      ‘On Sugarland’ Review: A Nameless War, and Too Many Wounds to Count

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      Inspired by Sophocles’ “Philoctetes,” Aleshea Harris uses poetic language, songs and symbolism to explore the trauma of being alive, especially for Black people.Let’s begin with the war. Not the war that’s in the headlines. Not Iraq or Vietnam. I’m talking about war as metaphor. And in the realm of metaphor, anything can happen: A veteran’s wound may incessantly — and inexplicably — bleed for years, and a slain soldier’s daughter may have the ability to raise the dead.This allegorical war, along with an impaired officer and a junior necromancer, are of the world of “On Sugarland,” a beautifully produced play that struggles to follow through on its ambitions. “On Sugarland,” which opened Thursday night at New York Theater Workshop, is the latest from the Obie-winning playwright Aleshea Harris (“Is God Is,” “What to Send Up When It Goes Down”), whose work often lifts the everyday trauma of being alive, especially as a Black person, to the plane of poetry through heightened language, songs, rituals and symbols.Speaking of symbols, that’s how the heavy-drinking Odella, played by Adeola Role with delicate vulnerability, describes Sugarland, a makeshift memorial of odds and ends that sits among the cul-de-sac of mobile homes where she lives with her teenage niece, Sadie (KiKi Layne, most exquisite at her most understated). Sugarland is just a symbol, Odella reminds Sadie, though not everyone agrees; a neighbor, tired of mourning, dismisses it as “some kind of horrifying carnival graveyard.”In an early scene, Odella and Sadie are on their way to a funeral for Sadie’s mother, Sergeant Iola Marie, who died in the nameless war. She’ll be commemorated at Sugarland, where a helmet, scarves, dog tags, bottles and other items are arranged into upright posts to remember locals who have died in the war. Every funeral is honored with what the locals call a “hollering,” a ritual of wooting and wailing that’s led by Staff Sergeant Saul Greenwood (Billy Eugene Jones, perfection). He had enlisted with Iola and now suffers trauma that’s both psychological and physical: on his right foot is an unhealing wound.Stephanie Berry is a comic delight as the vain and irreverent Evelyn.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd yet Saul extols the virtues of being a soldier and encourages his teenage son, Addis (a profoundly forlorn Caleb Eberhardt), to imagine himself a warrior — while forbidding him to enlist because Addis is intellectually disabled. Tending to Sugarland is Tisha (the underused Lizan Mitchell), a woman in her 60s who speaks to her deceased son through the sacred memorial and lives with her vain, irreverent sister Evelyn (Stephanie Berry, the play’s comic delight). Watching everything unfold mostly from the sidelines is Sadie, who doesn’t speak except for her long soliloquies to the audience. She can raise the dead, she reveals, and summons several generations of ancestors to help her find her mother from beyond the grave.There are a lot of characters and a lot of story lines in this nearly three-hour production. A Greek chorus of neighborhood children called the Rowdy round out the cast of 14. The chorus isn’t the only element Harris borrowed from the Greeks; “On Sugarland” was inspired by the Sophocles play “Philoctetes,” about two soldiers who try to persuade a master archer with a chronically festering foot wound to rejoin the Trojan War. Both works involve an ailing soldier, but whether Harris makes any deeper connections to the Sophocles work, or aspires to some dialogue between her piece and the classic, is unclear.Harris certainly isn’t the only playwright who writes lyrical dialogue with its own internal meter, but she is one of the best navigators of shifts in language and registers, even within a single scene. So we get tasty figurative gumdrops that subtly illuminate the inner thoughts of the characters, like the glamorous Evelyn’s description of the setting sun, which, she says, looks “like a starlet whose solo is over.” But Harris struggles with an overambitious story. “On Sugarland” is unable to adequately unpack its cornucopia of themes: post-traumatic stress disorder, Black masculinity, the history of Black soldiers, Black women fighting racism and misogyny, the ways Black women respond to grief, the choices Black women make about their bodies in a world of prejudice.Layne as Sadie, left, and Adeola Role as Odella, her heavy-drinking aunt.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesEven the opposing force within the play’s metaphorical war is a mystery: Perhaps it’s any country or peoples that the U.S. government calls enemy, or perhaps it’s the racist citizens in the characters’ backyards. The issue isn’t a lack of exposition; it’s that “On Sugarland” is inconsistent in the vocabulary it builds for itself.The characters suffer for it, too; they’re saddled with so many symbolic meanings that their roles become muddled and there’s little space for their actual development. In Evelyn, who talks about pregnancy and at one point sheds tears of blood, I found allusions to the phenomenon of bleeding Virgin Mary statues and the higher pregnancy mortality rates for Black women. I wondered if Sadie, with her supernatural ability and muteness, may be an archetypical prophet figure, like Tiresias, the blind soothsayer from the Greek dramas.In other words, I never knew the bounds of the metaphors.With her direction, Whitney White occasionally dips too far into melodrama, but otherwise nimbly adapts to the tonal shifts and key changes of Harris’s script. Raja Feather Kelly’s electric choreography adds a physical syncopation (stomping, marching, pacing, dancing) that complements the rhythms of the dialogue.Caleb Eberhardt, far right, being taunted by members of the Rowdy, a Greek chorus of neighborhood children.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe play’s most intoxicating moments are when all of those bodies are onstage hollering, each moving in such carefully curated directions in such diligently structured postures that they become like a liberated tableau. (The riotous quality of the noise, the combative moves and the sheer volume of the Rowdy are radical; these performers push back against the notion that Black people must act meek and nonthreatening for the comfort of white people.) The cast’s smart costumes are by Qween Jean, whose designs include the casual streetwear of the Rowdy and Evelyn’s taffy-pink ball gown.Amith Chandrashaker’s lighting design is its own eloquent form of storytelling — from the soft sepia-toned light of a lonely street lamp to the vertical Gatorade-green lights that flank the stage — and, at times, works alongside Starr Busby’s bold original music to transform the space into a club.And Adam Rigg’s dynamic set design cleverly uses a multilayered layout to allow action to happen at different heights: On the top are three mobile homes, windows revealing characters arguing or drinking from their domicile; the middle level is a circular grassy platform, the plot of yard called Sugarland; at the bottom, railroad tracks wind around Sugarland and out of sight.“We strong We brave We quick / We aim and … We don’t never miss,” Sadie says, speaking of the women in her family. The story of “On Sugarland,” however, flounders at times; it’s hard to hit a bull’s-eye when a mess of targets cloud your sightline.On SugarlandThrough March 20 at the New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      French Female Directors Continue Hot Streak at Rendez-Vous Festival

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      The series returns in-person with an especially strong slate of work by Frenchwomen — fitting, given their run of honors at top festivals.Sex and the city, false identities and love triangles feature prominently in this year’s Rendez-Vous With French Cinema, an annual showcase of contemporary French filmmaking held by Film at Lincoln Center.Since last year’s virtual edition, female directors from France have been making headlines, with two major European festivals awarding their top prizes to Frenchwomen: Julia Ducournau took home the Cannes Palme d’Or for her gender-bending love story “Titane”; and Audrey Diwan nabbed Venice’s Golden Lion for “Happening,” about a young woman in the 1960s seeking an abortion. Even the master filmmaker Claire Denis received one of her only competitive awards when she won best director for “Fire” last month at Germany’s Berlinale.“Fire,” a brooding melodrama, will be the opening-night film when Rendez-Vous make its return to in-person screenings on Thursday in New York. A pared-down pandemic production stocked with booming performances by Juliette Binoche, Vincent Lindon and Grégoire Colin, the film is Denis’s second collaboration with the screenwriter and novelist Christine Angot. Unlike their first effort, “Let the Sunshine In” (2018), a sly romantic comedy in which Binoche played an artist drifting through a succession of frustrating relationships, “Fire” is all Sturm und Drang. It focuses on the love lives of a late-middle-age couple with the kind of tempestuous passion befitting an adolescent affair. Though Denis obliquely weaves in broader social commentary with a subplot involving a troubled mixed-race son, the film’s shambolic qualities stoke the erotic follies at its core with transportive delirium.Anaïs Demoustier as the title character opposite Christophe Montenez in “Anais in Love.”Danielle McCarthy-Bole/Année ZéroAt Rendez-Vous, Denis is joined by other established French directors like Arnaud Desplechin (“Deception”), François Ozon (“Everything Went Fine”) and Christophe Honoré (“Guermantes”). But a newer generation of filmmakers is making a strong showing as well, and many of them are building on the great promise of the festival-winning streak for Gallic women.Three of the four feature debuts in the program are by women, including Constance Meyer’s “Robust,” a handsome-looking dramedy about an aging actor (Gérard Depardieu) who strikes up a friendship with his female bodyguard (Déborah Lukumuena). Though significantly less flamboyant, “Robust” takes cues from the 2012 interracial buddy blockbuster “Les Intouchables.”What may be the strongest debut in the lineup is Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s “Anaïs in Love,” which would make a fine double feature with “The Worst Person in the World”; both are about impulsive 30-somethings who fall in love and lust at the clip of a pop song. “Anaïs,” a jaunty summer story full of droll chatter and sparkling countryside vistas, follows its capricious heroine as she enters into an affair with an older man, only to find herself more interested in his novelist wife.Films like “Anaïs in Love” that relish the frisky humor and whimsy of modern romance without moralizing guilt would seem to fit squarely in the sexually liberated tradition that many see as central to France’s artistic heritage. The debate between a younger generation of feminists spearheading the country’s #MeToo movement, which has been gaining momentum after a feeble start, and elite figures who denounce the movement as extreme and puritanical continues to cast a shadow over the French film industry. This year’s Rendez-Vous selection certainly straddles the old and the new — though conspicuously absent is the Rendez-Vous regular Jacques Doillon, whose strong, if thorny, new film, “Third Grade,” concerns the playground intrigue between two children, one of whom sexually harasses the other. Nevertheless, the program keeps in step with the national penchant for sexual audacity.Jade Springer as the daughter of divorcing parents in “Petite Solange.”Aurora FilmsMale directors have rarely had any qualms about examining the intimate lives of women, and Jacques Audiard’s “Paris, 13th District,” a punchy drama in slick black and white about the messy dating lives of young Parisians, continues that tendency. It’s a pleasant surprise, though the auteurist theory explanation for a film’s success (or failure) is particularly questionable here. Consider the compelling performances by the film’s lead actresses: Noémie Merlant plays a law student whose life is thrown into shambles when her classmates mistake her for a popular camgirl; and Lucie Zhang makes her auspicious debut as a first-generation Franco-Chinese immigrant, a punkish, bedraggled young woman with a self-sabotaging romantic streak. Complex and not necessarily likable without falling into the “messy woman” archetype of so many pop feminist characters, the women of “Paris, 13th District” must have benefited from the august scriptwriting team — Audiard, Céline Sciamma (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) and Léa Mysius — who temper the director’s penchant for vacuous stylization with grounded humor and pathos.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Study Finds Sustained Progress for Female Directors and Filmmakers of Color

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      But women of color are still not getting feature directing jobs in Hollywood, the annual report on top-grossing movies finds.For the first time in a long time, Dr. Stacy L. Smith is feeling optimistic. The director of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has been studying the gender and race breakdown of Hollywood’s top-grossing directors since 2007, and finally has some good news to report. For the first time since her work began, Smith has seen sustained progress for women and people of color working behind the camera.Over the 15 years of the study, which analyzed 1,542 directors, only 5.4 percent were women. In 2020, that percentage rose to 15 percent and in 2021, it stood at 12.7 percent. Despite that recent drop, and despite the fact that the proportion is nowhere close to reflecting the American population, which is 51 percent female, Smith is encouraged that the numbers have stayed in the double digits for a sustained period of time.“I think that the people that are running these large companies that are largely responsible for about 90 percent of the market share are finally starting to diversify,” Smith said in a phone interview. “And we’re not only seeing this with gender, we’re also seeing big gains with race/ethnicity in the second year of the pandemic. Despite the uncertainty around the box office, there seems to be a concerted effort to correct the biases of the past.”The news comes the day after “The Power of the Dog” director Jane Campion made history, becoming the first woman to be nominated twice in the best director category for the Academy Awards. (She was previously nominated in 1994 for “The Piano.”)When it comes to underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, which includes Black and Latino filmmakers, the percentage of directors reached a 15-year high: 27.3 percent. The group with the least amount of traction directing features are women of color, who still make up only 2 percent of the total.“When Hollywood thinks of a woman director, they’re thinking of a Caucasian woman, and when they think of a person of color directing, they’re thinking about a male,” Smith said, pointing to the fact that female directors of color earn the highest reviews according to Metacritic yet most often are given lower production budgets and fewer marketing dollars from their studio beneficiaries.To address this disparity head on, the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative is starting a $25,000 scholarship program for a woman of color during her senior year at an American film school. In addition to the financial aid, the winning student will be advised by a group of Hollywood executives and talent, including Donna Langley, the chairman of the Universal Filmed Entertainment Group, Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel Studios, and Jennifer Salke, the head of Amazon Studios, among others.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      From Chad, a Filmmaker and a Star Committed to Telling Stories of Home

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      In “Lingui, the Sacred Bonds,” the director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun works again with Achouackh Abakar Souleymane, this time on a wrenching drama about abortion.As Chad’s most lauded auteur, the director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun remains committed to portraying his sub-Saharan African homeland onscreen. Early in his career he focused on the fallout from the nation’s multiple civil wars, which forced him to migrate to France in the 1980s. But in the aftermath of the conflict that concluded in 2010, he has shifted his attention to other social ills.With his newest drama, “Lingui, the Sacred Bonds,” which debuted at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival and reached American theaters on Friday, he takes on the topic of abortion through the plight of a Muslim woman, Amina (Achouackh Abakar Souleymane), who is helping her teenage daughter, Maria (Rihane Khalil Alio), terminate her pregnancy after a sexual assault. The film has received rave reviews, with The Times’s Manohla Dargis making it a Critic’s Pick.While abortion is in theory legal in Chad under strict circumstances, the stigma (often associated with religious beliefs) and restrictions around it push some to resort to clandestine clinics or, worse, to carry to term and then kill the newborn.In a joint interview, Haroun, speaking from Paris, and Abakar Souleymane, in N’Djamena, Chad, shared more on the relevance of their second film collaboration. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Why did you decide to make this film at this moment in Chad?MAHAMAT-SALEH HAROUN I read an article about a newborn child discovered in the garbage, and all these situations of unwanted pregnancies. But I was first really traumatized by the same subject when I was a child. I was 7 or 8, and we found a baby in the garbage. Several decades later when I read this article, I said, “That’s not normal. I have to do something.” I started investigating, asking nurses, and I discovered that it was a huge problem women are facing every day, because the fact is that in Chad, in our local languages, the word “rape” doesn’t exist. We know that rape exists, a lot of women are victims of it, but there is no word to express it. It’s always as if it’s the women’s fault, like they are guilty because they are pregnant. Sometimes they deny the pregnancy or sometimes, when they discover it’s too late to even think of an abortion, they keep it secret until they have the kid and then they kill it because they don’t have any solutions. I had to tell that story from a Chadian point of view in a human way that resonates with the same problems in the United States, in Argentina, in El Salvador, and in other countries in Africa.ACHOUACKH ABAKAR SOULEYMANE It’s horrible because if you’re not married and you are pregnant, you cannot talk about it. Sometimes these young women are just on their own. If you’re raped, you don’t talk about it, you just deal with it. As a woman, as a single mom, I was happy to be that person that can show it to the whole country and tell women that if this happened in your life, it’s happening to a lot of other women, and you can do something about it.Achouackh Abakar Souleymane in a scene from the film.MUBIDid you or the film face any pushback from government officials or religious groups?HAROUN When we were in Cannes, people said a lot of things against the film on social media, but they hadn’t seen it. But then when we showed the film in Chad, no one said anything because it’s just the reality. We even have some support from the government. I remember the Ministry of Culture was very happy and we had also a state minister at the screening. He called my assistant the day after and said he wanted to organize his own screening for the whole government because he thought that the film should be shown to all those people who don’t know a lot about this subject. I refused because you never know with politics; sometimes you are manipulated. But it was really well received and even for Achouackh, who being in Chad you might think she could be a victim of hate, she has only received congratulations.ABAKAR SOULEYMANE People would come up to me and say, “You are so brave for being able to do that.” That was shocking.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      How Poly Styrene Broke the Mold

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      A biracial woman in a predominantly white, male scene, the X-Ray Spex frontwoman brought fresh perspectives and sounds to punk. A new documentary explores her impact.Poly Styrene beams out from the screen, smile wide, braces cemented across her teeth. In most images of first-wave punk musicians, their eyes are filled with negativity and contempt. In footage from a new film, Styrene’s are bright with possibility.The singer and creative force behind X-Ray Spex died from cancer in 2011, 34 years after her London band released its seismic first single, “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” The world is still catching up. A new documentary due Feb. 2 titled “Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché” — taken from one of her song titles that mixed self-aware humor and cultural critique — is the latest ambitious project to chronicle her story, following an oral history book and a roving exhibition of her visual art, both from 2019.“My mum believed she was psychic,” Styrene’s daughter, Celeste Bell, who co-directed the film with Paul Sng, said in a video interview. “You can see that in her lyrics. She had this uncanny ability to predict what was going to happen.”Perhaps Styrene saw the future by paying attention. She set dynamite to the patriarchy on “Oh Bondage Up Yours!,” and “Germfree Adolescents,” the band’s sole album released just months before its 1979 split, is filled with blazing anthems that address identity, consumer culture, environmental ruin, information overload and punk itself. (Its title track, a dubby postmodern love song, was her most successful single.) She wore Day-Glo colors and brought in saxophones and science fiction. She could sing cool hooks or turn her voice into a rocket. Over bionic riffs, her lyrics told rich stories, forming a folk music of her own creation. The effect was sonic Pop Art.A biracial woman in a predominantly white scene, Styrene was not a typical punk. And “I Am a Cliché” is by no means a typical punk film. Bell, who was finishing a master’s degree in political philosophy in 2015 when she began to face her role as caretaker of Poly Styrene’s legacy, appears onscreen and narrates her mother’s complicated life — from teenage runaway to punk sensation to Hare Krishna, all while struggling with bipolar disorder, all before her mid-20s — through her perspective as the (frequently neglected) child of a totemic, explosive figure in punk history.Was she a good mother? Not exactly. But while Bell poses the question and answers it early, she spends the duration of the film bearing out what her mother was always searching for in her lyrics — a complexity scaled large enough to show the truth.Styrene and her daughter, Celeste Bell, who co-directed the film.Tony BarrattThe film’s timing is apt: Styrene’s influence on and relevance within culture keeps growing. Where her brash vision once seemed futuristic, it now feels shockingly attuned to reality. Artists from the vanguard of pop, like FKA twigs, and the heart of punk, like the New Orleans group Special Interest and the London trio Big Joanie, cite her as a formative inspiration. Her influence can also be traced through the still-emerging impact of the riot grrrl movement. It spans decades and generations.The singer, songwriter and rapper Neneh Cherry, who appears in “I Am a Cliché,” said in an interview that she found her own voice by singing along to X-Ray Spex, and recalled listening to the band with her parents, the jazz musician Don and the textile artist Moki Cherry, who “absolutely got” Styrene’s fearlessness and honesty.“When we used to listen to her, they would be like: That’s what we’re talking about,” Cherry said. She noted that it was singing along to her father’s piano playing and entering “a Poly place, tonally,” that her voice first emerged. “Inside of hers is how I found my own voice,” she explained. “I also started listening to her when I was at a space in my life where — I knew who I was, but I didn’t always know how to be who I was, or how to feel that great about it. Poly was and still is like medicine for me.”The feminist punk icon Kathleen Hanna first heard X-Ray Spex in 1989 — the year before her band Bikini Kill formed in Olympia, Wash. — and was awed by the breadth of ideas in her writing.“I was really blown away by the lyrics and how much there was a critique of capitalism,” she said in an interview, and how that extended, sometimes subtlety, to critiques of sexism and racism within punk. “Poly obviously is a poet. It was such a perfect marriage of emotion and technique. I was like, How have I never heard of this band before? It seemed better than the Sex Pistols.”Lora Logic and Styrene onstage with X-Ray Spex. The band released one album in 1979 and promptly split.Erica Echenberg/Redferns, via Getty ImagesSTYRENE WAS BORN Marianne Joan Elliott-Said in 1957 to a Somali father and an English mother, who raised Styrene and her siblings alone in a Brixton council estate. In her teenage years, struck with art and rebellion, Styrene fled home to hitchhike to hippie music festivals, stoking an ecological consciousness she would bring to punk. She immersed herself in theater, fashion, poetry and music. A bookish autodidact who left school at 15, she gravitated toward philosophy, the occult, Freud and Jung. As a cinephile she favored the retrofuturism of “Barbarella.” Her rock idols were David Bowie and Marc Bolan. She loved soul and reggae, and Bell said she cited singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Joan Armatrading as huge inspirations.Styrene’s first pre-punk single was a pop-reggae song called “Silly Billy” about teenage pregnancy. It was produced by a man 16 years her senior named Falcon Stuart who would become her boyfriend and the manager of X-Ray Spex. (Bell said she received conflicting stories about Stuart, who died in 2002, over the years, noting in the film: “Sometimes she’d say he was the love of her life; other times, that he’d ruined it.”)When punk hit, Styrene, at 19, was galvanized. Enamored of the Sex Pistols — a previously unseen clip of Styrene dancing in the crowd at one of their gigs recurs in the film — she placed an ad in Melody Maker searching for “yung punx” to “stick it together,” and assembled a crew that included the bassist Paul Dean and, briefly, the saxophonist Lora Logic (until Styrene kicked her out).The band signed with Virgin for the classic “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” — its opening declaration, “Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard/But I think, oh bondage, up yours!” became feminist punk scripture — before moving to EMI for “Germfree Adolescents.” (Styrene was an uncredited producer on the album, Bell said.) The LP took them to “Top of the Pops” and the BBC, which broadcast a television documentary called “Who Is Poly Styrene?” where the singer famously described that she picked her stage name because it is plastic and disposable: “That’s what pop stars are meant to mean, therefore I thought I might as well send it up.”The early BBC film and “I Am a Cliché” both depict Styrene’s mental health struggles, which the pressures of fame exacerbated. In 1978, she was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia; she was in a psychiatric hospital the first time she saw herself singing on television. Bell believes her mother’s condition was worsened by the media’s sexist scrutiny of her body as well as the destabilizing nihilism in punk.“A lot of people think X-Ray Spex were a lot more underground than they were. But my mum did have that brush with celebrity,” Bell said. “There is a kind of fame where you can never escape from it, and that was the kind of attention that my mum had, even though it didn’t last very long. It didn’t last very long because she got out.”Bell and Styrene. “She could have made a lot more money,” Bell said, “but she prioritized her health and her spiritual longings over fame and success.”Fabrizio RainoneStyrene went on to release the gentle, tabla-flecked solo album “Translucence” in 1981, and, around then, met the musician Adrian Bell. They married three months later and she gave birth to Bell. Not long after, Styrene eschewed the material world she had observed in her songs by joining the Hare Krishna movement and moving with her daughter to Bhaktivedanta Manor, a country house George Harrison had donated to the group in 1973. But her mental health struggles persisted. She left the temple, and Bell, then 8, went to live with her grandmother.Bell said her mother never had a steady job after X-Ray Spex. She lived off meager royalties, continuing to write and release music. Heartbreakingly, in the film, Bell recalls her mother saying “being broke and famous is the worst of both worlds.”By the early 2000s, Bell and her mother had reconciled. Styrene moved to seaside Hastings, which energized her, and she began to write a retrospective diary of her punk past. (Excerpts are threaded throughout the film.) Styrene had recently recorded a new solo album, “Generation Indigo,” when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Bell said her mother believed in reincarnation, viewing death as “the next great adventure.”“My mum didn’t have an easy life,” she said. “She had a lot of barriers to break through as a mixed race woman, but she did, and she did it on her own terms. She took the DIY ethic and really lived it.”In her diary, Styrene called herself “an ordinary tough kid from an ordinary tough street.” Her daughter said that she fought back when other children mocked her appearance: “She was always getting beat up. She’d been chased down the street by skinheads.”Styrene explored her heritage directly in early poems, which led to intersectional statements on tracks like “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” — an indictment of the bondage aesthetic in punk fashion, which she loathed, as much as a liberationist rallying cry. She asked, presciently, in the X-Ray Spex song “Identity”:When you look in the mirror do you see yourself?Do you see yourself on the TV screen?Do you see yourself in the magazine?When you see yourself, does it make you scream?WHEN HANNA FOUND Styrene, her forebear’s influence was musical as well as philosophical. “She could do a vulnerable high-pitched voice and also a loud bellow,” she said. “She used the roundness in her voice, the piercing in her voice. There’s not a fear of pop music with Poly.”For Alli Logout, the vocalist for Special Interest, Styrene was thrilling proof that a person of color had helped invent punk while critiquing it; that vulnerability can exist in chaos; and that punk can be incisive but fun.“My original exploration with music in general was a sadness that I didn’t see any Black bodies occupying that space,” Logout, who uses they/them pronouns, said of their earliest experiences headbanging at metal shows in their small Texas town. But leafing through a stolen book on punk history, “I remember very clearly seeing a picture of Poly Styrene and her braces and being like, what?” Watching a live “Bondage” video, “I felt the otherness that she encapsulated by just being fully herself. Whenever I heard that song, I knew that it was the attitude that I have to present myself in every single day.”Styrene’s fashion sense has also proven to be influential.BBC ArenaBeginning in middle school, the singer-songwriter Shamir felt such a connection to X-Ray Spex that by the fall of 2016, he decided to get Styrene’s face tattooed on his thigh. “Poly was one of the main influences on me to keep the spirit of punk alive as a Black person,” he said in an interview. “She’s constantly staring at me when I wake up in the morning.”“So much of the time, what’s considered punk to everyone else is rage, but I don’t think anyone would categorize her as rageful,” he noted, saying Styrene communicated via different emotions. “I learned from that in a lot of ways.” He added, “You’re always going to be in the margins, but that doesn’t mean you have to be quiet. A lot of times we have to be the loudest in order to be heard slightly.”As Bell organized her mother’s archive, she was struck by the intensity of her process, uncovering many drafts of a single set of lyrics, or a mixed-media collage, like a piece that layered various forms of contraception packaging atop feminist comic strips to explore the nature of modern relationships. (Styrene created all of the band’s art herself.) “She walked away at the height of their popularity,” she said. It’s a decision Bell finds gives the film a hopeful message: “She could have made a lot more money, but she prioritized her health and her spiritual longings over fame and success.”Ultimately, Bell said with conviction, “All my mum wanted, musically and artistically, was to be taken seriously.” More

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      These Talkies Star Complicated Women You Might Well Recognize

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      A MoMA series puts the spotlight on a Hollywood era when actresses broke free of stereotypes that would later dominate movies for decades.In that all-too-brief period in Hollywood between the silent era and the summer of 1934, when the puritanical Production Code Administration began to put a stranglehold on the industry, the women of the silver screen came into their own.Sure, this was the stretch of time that saw the rise of legendary leading ladies like Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer and Marlene Dietrich. But female star power in pre-Code Hollywood went far beyond these big names.Take it from “Dames, Janes, Dolls and Canaries,” a fine series starting Tuesday at the Museum of Modern Art that offers a small but rich sampling of pre-Code titles, several rarely screened. This selection, programmed by the writer and film historian Farran Smith Nehme, showcases the abundance of actresses whose singular presences helped stake out complex understandings of womanhood in unexpectedly modern ways.Pre-Code films have a reputation for being salacious. That was not exactly a product of progressive ideals but a business tactic meant to draw in Depression-era audiences with sheer titillation.Hobart Henley’s mesmerizing 1932 ensemble film, “Night World,” is filled with leggy chorus girls, broom-closet makeouts, scandal and murder, while King Vidor’s “Bird of Paradise” from the same year, an adventure romance with a deliriously racist understanding of Pacific native culture, features an extended underwater scene in which a nude Dolores del Río swims away from her white beau.Yet in “Night World,” Mae Clarke, who plays a dancer with a knack for nursing drunkards back to health, cuts through the hedonism and anarchy with her grounded intelligence and low-key charm. And del Río — a Mexican actress regularly handed the role of forcefully sexual foreigner during her time in Hollywood — brings to her island princess a vibrancy and solemn romanticism that deepens an otherwise two-dimensional part.Dolores del Río with Joel McCrea in “Night World.”via The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills ArchivePre-Code actresses no longer played merely vamps or ingénues, those twin feminine archetypes that dominated the silent era. And without the kind of Production Code meddling that would eventually regulate and censor, among other things, the expression of female desire and sexuality, their characters were often ahead of their time, undermining the notion that American movies have gotten progressively more open-minded since then. The women of pre-Code Hollywood were not only more sexually liberated than their Code-bound successors, they were also unapologetically independent and skeptical or outright dismissive of norms and institutions like marriage in ways that went unpunished.Frank Borzage’s 1931 drama “Bad Girl,” for instance, opens with a bait and switch. We see Dorothy (Sally Eilers) in a white gown, nervously clutching a bouquet as a wedding march swells in the distance. But as the procession makes its way through a bustling dining room, we realize Dorothy’s not a jittery bride but a first-time model selling the fantasy of matrimony to an audience of starry-eyed gals and leering bachelors.“The law makes us a bunch of puppets on strings, like Punch and Judy,” says Ruth (Mae Clarke again) in James Whale’s 1932 “The Impatient Maiden.” Ruth is an assistant to a divorce lawyer who regularly witnesses marriages fraught with abuse, abandonment and betrayal. (This is in no small part because of the country’s economic precarity, a reality that factors into a number of films in this series.)A practical gal nevertheless filled with quiet yearning, Ruth suggests a reasonable course of action when she falls for Lew Ayres’s Dr. Brown: wait to tie the knot until his medical practice takes off. Scandal and hardship ensue when Dr. Brown rejects Ruth’s proposition, yet we sense that the root of the lovers’ problems lies not in a woman’s apprehension about marriage, but in the inert ideals that cloud the minds of men.Other films in the series take marriage lightly, to self-affirming and playfully joyous effect.In “One Hour With You” (1932), a musical comedy directed by Ernst Lubitsch with the assistance of George Cukor, the stars Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald play a married couple, Andre and Colette, who are first seen canoodling in a park — a place regularly reserved for illicit lovers. Colette’s bestie, a bona fide homewrecker named Mitzi (a delightfully lusty Genevieve Tobin), takes a liking to Andre, prompting a night of infidelity from both sides that is conclusively brushed under the rug when the couple decide they love each other too much to let such trivial pursuits ruin them. As for Mitzi, she responds to her own husband’s divorce request with suave nonchalance, driving off with a risqué self-portrait in tow.Particularly touching are the moments in these films when women stand up for each other in the face of gendered moralizing.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More