Films This Week 8/20/21
by Gary Palmucci | 20th August 2021 | Gary's Corner
Hello everyone. Producer-director and industry eminence-grise Ira Deutchman has made his new documentary ‘Searching for Mr Rugoff’ available to New Plaza viewers just one week after its downtown theatrical premiere.
He’s been just as generous to us (and to all participating US art houses) with the ‘deal terms’ – 100% of each ‘virtual ticket’ you purchase goes directly to support our ongoing programs.
In his usual droll fashion The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane led off his review, “If you are a New Yorker with catholic tastes and a long memory, it may well be that your life was shaped by Donald S. Rugoff, though his name will ring no bells. Back in the day, whenever you took your seat at a movie theatre like the Plaza, the Paris, the Beekman or the Sutton, you were entering the realm of Rugoff….” This is a richly detailed account of a moviegoing era whose influence still echoes in our ever-cherished tastes, and memories of cinema.
With this week’s tumultuous events in Afghanistan, the documentary ‘What We Left Unfinished’ takes on a mega-jolt of added tragic poignancy. As I wrote two weeks ago: NY Times critic Devika Girish wrote “…five movies started and then abandoned during Afghanistan’s 1978-92 Communist era form a dazzling time capsule of the nation’s political and cultural history. The director (and now Brooklyn resident) Mariam Ghani – daughter of since-departed president Ashraf Ghani – digs into the archives of Afghan Film, a state-run company that endured the whims and demands of various regimes before the Taliban destroyed most of its holdings in the 1990s.” The films excerpted reflect the country’s series of political upheavals – one was commissioned by an Afghan president whose subsequent assassination in the late 70s Russian takeover prompted the end of the project. Each of these five unfinished films display a visual sophistication and production values on a par with many other international productions of the period and suggest a potentially rich Afghan film culture, now buried under decades of censorship and bloody struggle.
Need we say more?
Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema