Citizen Jane: Battle for the City at Real Art Ways

In 1960 Jane Jacobs’s book The Death and Life of Great American Cities sent shockwaves through the architecture and planning worlds, with its exploration of the consequences of modern planners’ and architects’ reconfiguration of cities.

Jacobs was also an activist, who was involved in many fights in mid-century New York, to stop “master builder” Robert Moses from running roughshod over the city.

This film retraces the battles for the city as personified by Jacobs and Moses, as urbanization moves to the very front of the global agenda.

Many of the clues for formulating solutions to the dizzying array of urban issues can be found in Jacobs’s prescient text, and a close second look at her thinking and writing about cities is very much in order.

This film sets out to examine the city of today though the lens of one of its greatest champions.

SPECIAL EVENT – Tuesday, May 9, after the 6:30 PM screening.

Panel Discussion
“Jane Jacobs Today: Hartford & Beyond”
The panel will explore how/why Hartford’s urban renewal projects have changed and how this affects us today. 

Moderator

Sara Bronin – Thomas F. Gallivan Chair in Real Property Law and Faculty Director, Center for Energy and Environmental Law at the University of Connecticut. Her research examines property, land use, historic preservation, green building, and renewable energy law.

Panel Members

Xiangming Chen – Dean and Director of the Center for Urban and Global Studies Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of Global Urban Studies and Sociology at Trinity College

Norman W. Garrick – Associate Professor at University of Connecticut. His research focuses on sustainable transportation, urban planning, transit planning, bicyclist and pedestrian facility design and planning and urban street networks, urban streets and shared spaces.

Tyler Smith, FAIA – urban and historic preservation architect, Managing Principal of Smith Edwards McCoy Architects

Renee Tribert – Project Manager: Making Places: Connecticut Mills Survey at Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

Cynthia Nixon delivers a triumphant performance as Emily Dickinson as she personifies the wit, intellectual independence and pathos of the poet whose genius only came to be recognized after her death.

Director Terence Davies (House of Mirth, The Deep Blue Sea) exquisitely evokes Dickinson’s deep attachment to her close knit family along with the manners, mores and spiritual convictions of her time that she struggled with and transcended in her poetry.

NOTE that the Cinema will be closed on Wednesday, May 3 and will reopen on Thursday, May 4.

Set in Germany and France in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, (1914-1918), Frantz recalls the mourning period that follows great national tragedies as seen through the eyes of the war’s “lost generation”: Anna (21 year-old Paula Beer in a breakthrough performance), a bereft young German woman whose fiancé, Frantz, was killed during trench warfare, and Adrien (Pierre Niney, Yves Saint Laurent), a French veteran of the war who shows up mysteriously in her town, placing flowers on Frantz’s grave.

Adrien’s presence is met with resistance by the small community still reeling from Germany’s defeat, yet Anna gradually gets closer to the handsome and melancholy young man, as she learns of his deep friendship with Frantz, conjured up in evocative flashbacks.

What follows is a surprising exploration of how Ozon’s characters’ wrestle with their conflicting feelings – survivor’s guilt, anger at one’s losses, the overriding desire for happiness despite everything that has come before, and the longing for sexual, romantic and familial attachments.

Ozon drew his inspiration from a post-WWI play by Maurice Rostand that inspired the 1932 film adaption by Ernst Lubitsch under the title Broken Lullaby.

On April 4, 2017, almost 90 art house movie theatres across the country in 79 cities and in 34 states, plus one location in Canada, will be participating collectively in a NATIONAL EVENT DAY screening of the 80’s movie 1984 starring John Hurt, who sadly died last month.

This date was chosen because it’s the day George Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith begins rebelling against his oppressive government by keeping a forbidden diary. These theaters owners also strongly believe in supporting the National Endowment for the Arts and see any attempt to scuttle that program as an attack on free speech and creative expression through entertainment. This event provides a chance for communities around the country to show their unity and have their voices heard.

Orwell’s novel begins with the sentence, “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” Less than one month into the new presidential administration, theater owners collectively believe the clock is already striking thirteen. Orwell’s portrait of a government that manufactures their own facts, demands total obedience, and demonizes foreign enemies, has never been timelier.

The endeavor encourages theaters to take a stand for our most basic values: freedom of speech, respect for our fellow human beings, and the simple truth that there are no such things as ‘alternative facts.’ By doing what they do best – showing a movie – the goal is that cinemas can initiate a much-needed community conversation at a time when the existence of facts, and basic human rights are under attack.

Through nationwide participation and strength in numbers, these screenings are intended to galvanize people at the crossroads of cinema and community, and bring us together to foster communication and resistance against current efforts to undermine the most basic tenets of our society.

The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is one of the most influential albums of our time. Rolling Stone described it as “the most important rock & roll album ever made, an unsurpassed adventure in concept, sound, songwriting, cover art and studio technology by the greatest rock & roll group of all time.”

In Deconstructing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, composer, musician, and Beatles expert Scott Freiman looks at Sgt. Pepper from multiple angles, exploring the history behind the music. Mr. Freiman conducts an educational journey into the creative process of The Beatles performances and recording sessions. You are guaranteed to leave amazed at The Beatles’ innovation in the studio and have a newfound appreciation for the talents of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr.

On the Radio
Scott Freiman, along with music critic Steve Metcalf, appeared on the Colin McEnroe Show on WNPR on Tuesday, April 4. They discussed Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Band and its musical and cultural impact. Listen to the show at this link.

2017 Academy Award Nominee, Best Animated Feature

“Zucchini” is befriended by a police officer, Raymond, who accompanies him to his new foster home, filled with other orphans his age.

At first he struggles to find his place in this strange environment. But with Raymond’s help and his newfound friends, Zucchini eventually learns to trust and love, as he searches for a new family of his own.

From its debut in Director’s Fortnight at Cannes to winning audience awards at festivals around the world, this accomplished debut feature from director Claude Barras, based on a script from acclaimed writer/director Céline Sciamma (Girlhood, Tomboy), was nominated for both an Academy Award® and Golden Globe Award® for Best Animated Feature.

Brought to life through memorable character designs and expressive stop-motion animation, the story soars with laughter, sorrow, and joy, and stands as a testament to the resilience of the human heart.

Voices by Will Forte, Nick Offerman, Ellen Page, and Amy Sedaris.

You’re Killing Me Susana centers on Eligio (Gael García Bernal), a narcissistic Mexico City soap actor whose wife Susana (Verónica Echegui) has left him without uttering a word. Discovering she’s enrolled in a writing program at an Iowa university, he decides to go after her and persuade her to return to him, but upon arriving soon discovers she’s already moved on. Eligio soon learns it’s going to take a lot more than his usual boyish charisma and sweet talk to win her back.

Based on the novel Deserted Cities (Ciudades Desiertas) by José Agustín, it’s directed by by Roberto Sneider (Tear This Heart Out) and cowritten by Sneider and Luis Camara. You’re Killing Me Susana also stars Ashley Grace, Jadyn Wong, Björn Hlynur Haraldsson and Adam Hurtig.

2017 Academy Award Nominee for Best Animated Feature Film

Through the story of a man shipwrecked on a tropical island inhabited by turtles, crabs and birds, The Red Turtle recounts the milestones in the life of a human being.

2017 Academy Award Nominee for Best Foreign Language Film.

Tanna is set in the South Pacific where Wawa, a young girl from one of the last traditional tribes, falls in love with her chief’s grandson, Dain. When an intertribal war escalates, Wawa is unknowingly betrothed as part of a peace deal.

The young lovers run away, but are pursued by enemy warriors intent on killing them.

They must choose between their hearts and the future of the tribe, while the villagers must wrestle with preserving their traditional culture and adapting it to the increasing outside demands for individual freedom.

Tanna is based on a true story and performed by the people of Yakel in Vanuatu.

Tanna, an extraordinary Australia/Vanuatu co-production, is a Romeo and Juliet story set in one of the world’s last true tribal societies. It is the first feature film shot entirely in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu, in a village called Yakel.

The people of this remote community, high in the mountain rainforests near a spitting volcano, truly wear grass skirts and penis sheaths and have rejected colonial and Christian influences in favor of their traditional and pure “Kastom” system of laws and beliefs. Their customs and lifestyle have changed little for centuries.

Before Tanna, they had never before seen a movie or a camera, yet welcomed the filmmakers to live with the tribe for seven months where they absorbed stories and observed ceremonies, with the input and collaboration of the local people.

None of the ‘cast’ had ever acted before, but astonishingly, they passionately and naturally re-created this real-life story from recent tribal history as if they had had years of training.

The movie recently won the Directors Guild of Australia award for Best Director. Earlier, the movie premiered at the Venice Film Festival this past fall, where it won the Audience Award in the International Critics Week sidebar as well as the Best Cinematography prize.

Awards:
Audience Award – Venice Critics’ Week
Best Cinematography – Venice Critics’ Week
Gold Medal, Bentley Dean – Australian Cinematographers Society Victoria Tasmania
Best Director – Skip City International D-Cinema Festival
Longscapes Competition Award – Lake Como Film Festival

Held over for a fourth smash week!

2017 Academy Award Nominee, Best Documentary Feature

In 1979, James Baldwin wrote a letter to his literary agent describing his next project, Remember This House. The book was to be a revolutionary, personal account of the lives and successive assassinations of three of his close friends—Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.

At the time of Baldwin’s death in 1987, he left behind only thirty completed pages of his manuscript.

Now, in his incendiary new documentary, master filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished. The result is a radical, up-to-the-minute examination of race in America, using Baldwin’s original words and flood of rich archival material.

I Am Not Your Negro is a journey into black history that connects the past of the Civil Rights movement to the present of #BlackLivesMatter. It is a film that questions black representation in Hollywood and beyond. And, ultimately, by confronting the deeper connections between the lives and assassination of these three leaders, Baldwin and Peck have produced a work that challenges the very definition of what America stands for.

HELD OVER – Starring Isabelle Huppert, 2017 Academy Award Nominee for Lead Actress

French writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve (Eden, Goodbye First Love) directs the great Isabelle Huppert in this delicate and affecting tale about a middle-aged professor whose carefully structured life is thrown into disarray when her husband leaves her for another woman, and who finds an unlikely new companion in a former student and radical young communist.

Nathalie (Huppert, also appearing in Souvenir and Elle) is a dedicated and demanding teacher, wife, and mother. She runs her relationships with the same rigor she brings to her study of philosophy. But when Nathalie’s husband announces that he’s leaving her for another woman, the meticulously crafted structures on which her existence is founded begin to crumble.

Truly on her own for the first time, except for a less-than-grateful cat, Natalie is daunted by this new world — until she finds an unlikely friend in a former student, the radical young communist Fabien (Roman Kolinka).

The film is infused with a generous patience. Huppert brings a quiet strength to the character of Nathalie, and Hansen-Løve films her tale with elegance and grace.

Things to Come is heartbreaking but never sentimental, wry but never ironic. It shows that, even though life may never get any easier, it nevertheless offers ceaseless opportunities for growth.

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2016 Venice International Film Festival.

From writer/director Tom Ford comes a haunting romantic thriller of shocking intimacy and gripping tension that explores the thin lines between love and cruelty, and revenge and redemption.

Academy Award nominees Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal star as a divorced couple discovering dark truths about each other and themselves.

Hundreds of thousands of Turkish cats roam the metropolis of Istanbul freely. For thousands of years they’ve wandered in and out of people’s lives, becoming an essential part of the communities that make the city so rich.

Claiming no owners, the cats of Istanbul live between two worlds, neither wild nor tame –and they bring joy and purpose to those people they choose to adopt.

In Istanbul, cats are the mirrors to the people, allowing them to reflect on their lives in ways nothing else could.

Critics and internet cats agree – this cat documentary will charm its way into your heart and home as you fall in love with the cats in Istanbul. This film is a sophisticated take on your typical cat video that will both dazzle and educate.

Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.

The latest from legendary director Ken Loach is a gripping, human tale about the impact one man can make.

Daniel Blake (Dave Johns) has worked as a joiner most of his life in Newcastle. Now, for the first time ever, he needs help from the State. Gruff but goodhearted, Blake is a man out of time: a widowed woodworker who’s never owned a computer, he lives according to his own common sense moral code.

But after a heart attack leaves him unable to work and the state welfare system fails him, the stubbornly self-reliant Daniel must stand up and fight for his dignity, leading a one-man crusade for compassion.

He crosses paths with a single mother Katie (Hayley Squires) and her two young children, Daisy and Dylan. Katie’s only chance to escape a one-roomed homeless hostel in London has been to accept a flat in a city she doesn’t know, some 300 miles away.

Daniel and Katie find themselves in no-man’s land, caught on the barbed wire of welfare bureaucracy as played out against the rhetoric of ‘striver and skiver’ in modern day Britain.

Graced with humor and heart, I, Daniel Blake is a moving, much-needed reminder of the power of empathy from one of the world’s greatest living filmmakers.