It’s a quiet but quality indie weekend led by documentaries and a few features in limited release as Gladiator 2 and Wicked storm in, other independents hold over, and ahead of anticipated specialty debuts next week like Queer, The Seed Of The Sacred Fig and Maria.
Docs out today follow artists in Ukraine, women in Afghanistan, South African photographer Ernest Cole and Amichai Lau-Lavie, a gay Israeli descendant of rabbis who becomes one himself. Narrative features include Hong Sangoo’ A Traveler’s Needs, animated Flow and The Black Sea.
Porcelain War from Picturehouse, the Sundance Grand Jury/U.S. Documentary Award winner that just screened at DOC NYC, opens at NYC’s IFC Center. Filmmakers Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev and participant Anya Stasenko are on hand for Q&As with award-winning producer Paula DuPré Pesman.
Set amid the chaos and destruction of Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, the doc follows three artists defiantly finding inspiration and beauty as they defend their culture and their country. See Sidorska, Bellomo and DuPre’ Pesmen at Deadline’s Sundance Studio.
The Cinema Guild opens Hong Sangsoo’s A Traveler’s Needs starring Isabelle Huppert at Film Forum and Film at Lincoln Center. A comedy of improbable encounters and unlikely language lessons, A Traveler’s Needs marks the third collaboration between Hong and Huppert (following 2012’s In Another Country and 2017’s Claire’s Camera). This time Huppert plays Iris, a woman who finds herself adrift in Seoul and without any means to make ends meet, turns to teaching French via a très peculiar method. Cast includes Lee Hye-yeong as one of Huppert’s students and Kwon Hae-hyo as her flirty husband.
Sideshow/Janus Films is out with Cannes-premiering animated Flow by Gints Zibalodis (Away) with runs in New York (Angelika Film Center) and Los Angeles (AMC Burbank 16).
The film swept four awards at the Annecy International Film Festival and 29 around the world to date, most recently the top prize at Animation Is Film festival in Los Angeles. Nominated for Best Film and Best Animated Feature at the European Film Awards. Flow follows a courageous cat after his home is devastated by a great flood. Teaming up with a capybara, a lemur, a bird, and a dog to navigate a boat in search of dry land, they must rely on trust, courage, and wits to survive the perils of a newly aquatic planet. A meditation on the fragility of the environment, friendship and community. Expands to top markets Dec. 6. Flow is the Latvian Oscar entry for International Feature.
Magnolia Pictures releases Ernest Cole: Lost And Found in NYC, adding L.A. next week with additional cities to follow. The documentary by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Raoul Peck chronicle’s the life and work of Ernest Cole, one of the first Black freelance photographers in South Africa, whose early pictures, shocking at the time of their first publication, revealed to the world Black life under apartheid. Premiered at Cannes, see Deadline review.
Cole fled South Africa in 1966 and lived in exile in the U.S., where he photographed extensively in New York City, as well as the American South, fascinated by the ways this country could be at times so vastly different, and at others eerily similar, to the segregated culture of his homeland. During this period, he published his landmark book of photographs denouncing the apartheid, House of Bondage which, while banned in South Africa, cemented Cole’s place as one of the great photographers of his time at the age of 27.
After his death, more than 60,000 of his 35mm film negatives were inexplicably discovered in a bank vault in Stockholm, Sweden. Most considered these forever lost, especially the thousands of pictures Cole shot in the U.S. Telling his own story through his writings, the recollections of those closest to him, and the lens of his uncompromising work, the film is a reintroduction of a pivotal Black artist to a new generation.
Sabbath Queen by Sandi DuBowski’s (Trembling Before G*d), a documentary shot over the span of 21-years, follows a queer man’s journey from artist to influential Rabbi and activist. Opens at New York’s IFC Center. It premiered at Tribeca and nabbed awards at the Hamptons International Film Festival and Woodstock Film Festival.
Amichai Lau Lavie is an Israeli descended from an unbroken line of thirty-eight rabbis stretching back a thousand years. Yet as Sabbath Queen opens, Lau Lavie is newly arrived in New York in the late 1990s, a young gay man declaring “Artists are the new rabbis” and appearing around the city in drag as Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross, the widow of six Hasidic rabbis all from the same extended family. As the years pass, Lau Lavie embraces a range of creative spiritual endeavors, including Storahtelling and Lab/Shul — until he shocks everyone with his decision to become a rabbi himself.
Metrograph Pictures debuts The Black Sea, Crystal Moselle and Derrick B. Harden’s award-winning comedy at its sister NYC theater, the Metrograph, for a special engagement alongside a showcase curated by the filmmakers this weekend.
Harden stars as Khalid, a charismatic big dreamer from Brooklyn with no follow-thru who gets stuck in a small Bulgarian resort town and finds unexpected connection.
To celebrate the SXSW-premiering film, the theater has transformed its lobby into the Blue Flowers Lobby Bar, inspired by the cafe in the film, where Harden will be crafting matcha and coffee beverages Fri.-Sun. from 10 am to 3 pm with special guests and merch. After 5pm the Lobby Bar switches to movie-inspired craft cocktails.
Opens at the Laemmle Royal in L.A. on Dec. 13.
Apple’s Cannes-premiering documentary Bread & Roses, from producers Jennifer Lawrence and Malala Yousafzai, opens in NYC, L.A. and other select cities. Directed by Afghani filmmaker Sahra Mani (A Thousand Girls Like Me), Bread & Roses offers a powerful window into the seismic impact on women’s rights and livelihoods after Kabul fell to the Taliban.
The situation for women and girls deteriorated tragically after Taliban retook control of Kabul in August 2021 following the departure of U.S. military forces. Women cannot work or go out in public without a male escort. Schools for girls and women were shut down.