Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt at Real Art Ways

Forty years after her death, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), one of the 20th century’s most brilliant and influential philosophers, remains a figure of fierce controversy.

A German Jew who fled Europe for New York in 1941, she was the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), Men in Dark Times (1968) and other studies of history, violence, anti-Semitism, revolution, and power. But none were more provocative than Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) in which she coined the phrase, “the banality of evil,” to describe how a man as seemingly insignificant as Eichmann could be responsible for mass murder.

Arendt was pilloried for her criticism of some Jewish leaders (especially Chaim Rumkowski) and criticized for a love affair with her professor, Martin Heidegger, a Nazi supporter.

In this no-holds-barred documentary, Director Ada Ushpiz lets Arendt’s critics have their say, but she also features the woman herself, most dramatically, in a 1964 interview for German television in which she shares fascinating insights into Eichmann: “His inability to speak was connected to his inability to think.”

Rarely has an intellectual, even one as public in her pronouncements as Arendt, incited so much anger, praise, devotion, and scorn.

Jesus is a hairdresser for a troupe of drag performers in Havana, but dreams of being a performer.

When he finally gets his chance to be on stage, a stranger emerges from the crowd and punches him in the face. The stranger is his father Angel, a former boxer, who has been absent from his life for 15 years.

As father and son clash over their opposing expectations of each other, Viva becomes a love story as the men struggle to understand one another and become a family again.

Our Last Tango tells the life and love story of Argentina’s most famous tango dancers Maria Nieves Rego (80) and Juan Carlos Copes (83), who met as teenagers and danced together for nearly fifty years until a painful separation tore them apart.

Relaying their story to a group of young tango dancers and choreographers from Buenos Aires, their story of love, hatred and passion is transformed into unforgettable tango-choreographies.

*Before the 7:30 PM screening on Tuesday, May 31, immerse yourself in Argentine dance and music with The Hartford Argentine Tango Society!

HOCKNEY is the definitive exploration of one of the most important artists of his generation. For the first time, David Hockney has given unprecedented access to his personal archive of photographs and films, resulting in a frank and unparalleled visual diary of his long life.

Acclaimed filmmaker Randall Wright offers a unique view of this unconventional artist who is now reaching new peaks of popularity worldwide. As charismatic as ever, at 77 years old he is still working in the studio seven days a week.

“It’s been said that there was something of the holiday about David Hockney, that, despite personal loss, he sees the world with holiday eyes, as if for the first time. I wanted to capture this attitude without taking away the mystery and magic of a great artist.” Randall Wright

Once upon a time there were three neighboring kingdoms each with a magnificent castle, from which ruled kings and queens, princes and princesses. John C. Reilly and Salma Hayek lead the cast in this baroque fantasy that invites Game of Thrones comparisons.

One king was a fornicating libertine, another captivated by a strange animal, while one of the queens was obsessed by her wish for a child.

Sorcerers and fairies, fearsome monsters, ogres and old washerwomen, acrobats and courtesans are the protagonists of this loose interpretation of the celebrated tales of Giambattista Basile.

Best Feature Film at Annecy 2015

Cesar Awards Nomination for Best Animated Feature Film 2016

It’s a family film for all ages! From the producers of the Academy Award-nominated Persepolis and the mind of renowned graphic novelist Jacques Tardi comes a riveting sci-fi adventure set in an alternate steampunk universe.

Paris, 1941. A family of scientists is on the brink of discovering a powerful longevity serum when all of a sudden a mysterious force abducts them, leaving their young daughter April behind.

Ten years later, April (voiced by Academy Award nominee Marion Cotillard) lives alone with her dear cat, Darwin, and carries on her family’s research in secret. But she soon finds herself at the center of a shadowy and far-reaching conspiracy, and on the run from government agents, bicycle-powered dirigibles and cyborg rat spies.

FRANCOFONIA, directed by master Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov (RUSSIAN ARK), is an urgent meditation on the essential relationship between art, culture, and 20th century European history, set in occupied Paris circa 1940.

Applying his uniquely personal vision, Sokurov paints a fascinating portrait of two real-life characters: the Louvre’s wartime director, Jacques Jaujard, and Count Franziskus Wolff-Metternich, the Nazis’ emissary to the great museum.

The movie is a battle of wits between these remarkable art professionals – enemies, then collaborators – whose unlikely alliance becomes the driving force behind the preservation of one of the world’s great artistic treasure troves.

A playful subplot introduces the ghosts of Napoleon and Marianne, France’s symbol of liberté, égalité, fraternité.

A Nebraskan family reunion couldn’t seem more backwards to a gay Californian teenager. If Ryder had his way, he’d choose a moment just like this to come out. For his mother’s sake, however, he agrees to keep quiet, save parading around in his most audacious pair of short-shorts.

Ryder’s antics raise dubious eyebrows from his hardened cowboy relatives, but 9-year-old Molly can’t get enough. She follows her cool California cousin everywhere, but a strange encounter makes Ryder the sudden target of suspicion, and places him at the center of a long-buried family secret.

Anchored by a breakthrough performance by Logan Miller as Ryder and rich, dramatic turns by Robin Weigert and Josh Hamilton, TAKE ME TO THE RIVER constantly forces one to question any given character’s culpability until the film’s finale. The film, woven together by an omnipresent sense of dread, is the masterful debut from writer/director Matt Sobel.

Two years after her sudden death, the family of famed photographer Isabelle Reed (Isabelle Huppert) is still trying to cope with their loss. Gene (Gabriel Byrne) struggles as a single parent. Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg), the elder son, has just had a baby of his own and finds the transition from child to parent daunting. The younger son, Conrad (newcomer Devin Druid), is a typical teenager, wearing his alienation as a badge of honor and resisting his father’s attempts to connect.

On the occasion of a major retrospective of Isabelle’s work, Jonah returns home to help his father. All three men are flooded with memories, and secrets are unearthed—most notably the truth behind the mysterious circumstances of Isabelle’s death. Shifting between past and present, LOUDER THAN BOMBS is an intimate portrait of parents and children and the many things that tear them apart and bring them together.

Sweet Bean is a delicious red bean paste, the sweet heart of the dorayaki pancakes that Sentaro (Masatoshi Nagase) sells from his little bakery to a small but loyal clientele. Absorbed in sad memories and distant thoughts, Sentaro cooks with skill but without enthusiasm.

When seventy-six-year-old Tokue (Kirin Kiki) responds to his ad for an assistant and cheerfully offers to work for a ridiculously low wage, Sentaro is skeptical about the eccentric old lady’s ability to endure the long hours. But when she shows up early one morning and reveals to him the secret to the perfect sweet bean paste, Sentaro agrees to take her on. With Tokue’s new home cooked sweet bean paste recipe, Sentaro’s business begins to flourish, but Tokue is afflicted with an illness that, once revealed, drives her into isolation once again.

The new film from Chinese master Jia Zhang-ke (A Touch of Sin) jumps from the recent past to the speculative near-future as it examines how China’s economic boom has affected the bonds of family, tradition, and love.

At once an intimate drama and a decades-spanning epic that leaps from the recent past to the present to the speculative near-future, the new film is an intensely moving study of how China’s economic boom — and the culture of materialism it has spawned — has affected the bonds of family, tradition, and love.

Mountains May Depart opens in 1999 to the strains of the Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West,” and it’s to the West that small-town dance instructor Shen Tao (Zhao Tao) looks when she marries the slick entrepreneur Zhang (Zhang Yi) and soon gives birth to a son, whom Zhang christens Dollar. The chasm between the family’s origins and their new life of Western-style wealth grows ever wider as the film leaps ahead to 2014 and finally to 2025, when Dollar is living in Australia and struggling to relearn the mother tongue with the help of an attractive, older college professor (Sylvia Chang), who embodies the culture, life, and love he has never truly known.

Shooting each of the film’s three time periods in a different aspect ratio, Jia creates a prescient chronicle of his country’s path to the future. Lyrical, moving, and dazzlingly ambitious, Mountains May Depart is one of the year’s most important films.

In this mysterious and beautiful examination of a broken family, acclaimed actors Isabelle Huppert and Gerard Depardieu play thinly disguised versions of themselves as a separated couple who journey to Death Valley after receiving a mysterious letter from their dead son in the expectations that he will appear to them at certain place and time in the desert.

When Apollo astronaut Eugene Cernan stepped off the moon in 1972 he left his footprints and his daughter’s initials in the lunar dust. Only now, forty years later, is he ready to share his epic but deeply personal story.

Cernan’s burning ambition carried him to the spectacular and hazardous environment of space and to the moon. But there was a heavy price to pay for the fame and privilege that followed. As his wife famously remarked, ‘If you think going to the moon is hard, try staying at home.’

This documentary combines rare archive material, compelling visual effects and unprecedented access to present an iconic historical character on the big screen.

The setting is the often starkly beautiful Badlands of South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation; most of the key players are young Lakota Native Americans who attend Little Wound High School. Johnny and his preteen sister, Jashaun, spend time on horseback when they’re not selling illegal liquor or tattoo-designed apparel.

Director Chloe Zhao captures the subtleties of a marginalized existence in which the historic culture of a people can’t compete on a level playing field with the modern problems of poverty, alcoholism, and violence. Amazingly, she embroiders her tale with moments of breathtaking natural beauty that offset the despair her characters struggle against. SONGS is an auspicious debut feature from a director whose superb eye is informed by the sophisticated and nuanced compassion she brings to her story.

HELD OVER AGAIN! Just in time for election season, America’s favorite political provocateur, Michael Moore, is back with his new film, WHERE TO INVADE NEXT. Honored by festivals and critics groups alike, WHERE TO INVADE NEXT is an expansive, hilarious, and subversive comedy in which the Academy Award®-winning director confronts the most pressing issues facing America today and finds solutions in the most unlikely places.

The creator of FAHRENHEIT 9/11 and BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE has returned with an epic movie that’s unlike anything he has done before—an eye-opening call to arms to capture the American Dream and restore it in, of all places, America. Turns out the solutions to America’s most entrenched problems already existed in the world – they’re just waiting to be co-opted.

In a series of interviews spanning four years, leftist social critic Noam Chomsky discusses how the concentration of wealth and power among a small elite has polarized American society and brought about the decline of the middle class.

It’s 1982, and Taeko (voice of Daisy Ridley, Star Wars: The Force Awakens) is 27 years old, unmarried, and has lived her whole life in Tokyo. She decides to visit her relatives in the countryside, and as  the train travels through the night, memories flood back of her younger years: the first immature stirrings of romance, the onset of puberty, and the frustrations of math and boys.

At the station she is met by young farmer Toshio (voice of Dev Patel, Slumdog Millionaire, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel), and the encounters with him begin to reconnect her to forgotten longings. In lyrical shifts between the present and the past, Taeko contemplates the arc of her life, and wonders if she has been true to the dreams of her childhood self.

From Academy Award®-nominated director Isao Takahata (The Tale of The Princess Kaguya) and general producer Hayao Miyazaki, Only Yesterday is a masterpiece of time and tone, rich with humor and stirring emotion, and beautifully animated by one of the world’s most revered animation studios.

Critically acclaimed but never before released in North America, the film is receiving a national theatrical release in a new, Studio Ghibli-produced, English-language version in celebration of its 25th anniversary.