Gary's Corner

In addition to our “last chance” screenings of Plan A, Dead for a Dollar, and Last Flight Home, and a “holdover” of Argentina 1985, New Plaza Cinema has four filmmaker personal appearances on tap this weekend in our comfortable screening room at Macaulay Honors College.

One of those filmmakers many of you know well — Lisa Hurwitz joined us several times last spring for Q&As following her warm-hearted, incisive documentary The Automat. On Sunday she’s taking a quick break from early award-season campaigning to join us again, accompanied this time by composer Hummie Mann, a Mel Brooks collaborator (and Simpsons orchestrator) who scored the film. Get your tickets early!

Julia Mintz’s Four Winters is, like Lisa’s, a first feature that just finished a long run downtown, and also one that she’s personally shepherded from the cutting room into the marketplace. She will join us on both Saturday and Sunday afternoon to discuss her documentary portrait of WW2 Jewish resistance fighters, both male and female. The NY Times critic noted, “The men and women in this harrowing but spirited film took up arms in the forests of Eastern Europe to fight Nazis and their collaborators, living to tell tales that could be fodder for movie plots.”

Walter Saxer is a veteran producer who worked alongside Werner Herzog on many of his indelible classics including Aguirre the Wrath of God, Nosferatu the Vampyre and Fitzcarraldo. In the mid-80s he made a film of his own, a doc titled Sepa: Nuestro Senor de los Milagros (Sepa: Our Lord of Miracles) which borrows a fair amount of Herzog’s fascination for decimated landscapes of both the earth and the spirit. Chronicling the forty-year history of a Peruvian jungle penal colony described by the NY Times’  Glenn Kenny in his Critics Pick review as “a dumping ground for political opponents of whatever leadership was in power at the time. Far from so-called civilization and wanting in many resources, it was an environment in which prisoners were obliged to form functioning communities or die.”  Believed lost for many years,  the film was recently recovered and restored, and Mr. Saxer will join us on Saturday afternoon to tell the tale.

And while Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline won’t be joining us — at least to our knowledge — to discuss their third on-screen teaming (after Dave, and Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm)  in the new drama The Good House, we can still relish what Variety’s Peter Debruge called “one of her best performances — the star brings her alpha, own-the-room energy to a character who’s deluded herself into believing that her alcoholism isn’t a problem.”  She’s also rekindled an affair with an old flame (Kline) providing the narrative — and us — with some good, old fashioned American movie star power. Catch it on Friday or Saturday night.

Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema