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Karen Ponzio |
Dec 14, 2020 10:59 am
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S.G. Carlson & The Tines
Sam Carlson has made it one of his personal and professional goals to create new ways to help New Haven’s music scene survive, thrive, and proliferate. His latest endeavor involves video, a media he has used with success before. But this time he’s using it to showcase a live performance of three songs at one of New Haven’s live venues — even if that venue can’t be open for an audience to enjoy them in person.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 3, 2020 10:41 am
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Host Babz Rawls-Ivy beamed from the offices of the Arts Council at the over 100 people gathered virtually Wednesday evening to celebrate the Arts Council of Greater New Haven’s 40th annual arts awards. She noted that it was an historic occasion — but not because pandemic restrictions had prevented the audience from gathering in person at the New Haven Lawn Club, as they have in years past.
“Forty years,” she said, “and all the awardees are Black. I love to see it.”
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 1, 2020 2:24 pm
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Chris Randall Photo
Dest and Green.
There’s a moment in Stephen Dest‘s film I Am Shakespeare that sums up the inspiration for a book about film that Dest is — as of last week — under contract to write. It’s partly about social justice and partly about digital filmmaking, and all about moving into the future.
In the scene, Henry Green, the subject of the film, is “talking to a doctor about how he once looked,” before he was wounded by a gunshot in 2009. “He does this physical gesture, and I remember when I was editing, I wasn’t picking up on it.” Dest said. When he screened the film, “audiences under 30 would react to it and no one else did.”
The gesture was a quick, repetitive flick of the thumb. Green, Dest said, was “scrolling through his mental phone,” bringing back images from the past, “even though he doesn’t have his phone with him.”
“I’m so glad I was stupid enough not to cut it out,” Dest added. “It really was telling, in how people reacted to it.”
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Karen Ponzio |
Nov 23, 2020 10:49 am
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Karen Ponzio Photos
Salwa Abdussabur.
Film, music, theater, art, activism: on Friday night all five were intertwined and illuminated during New Haven’s inaugural Black Haven Film Festival. Presented by CTCORE — Organize Now, the festival was originally planned for that night in person at Science Park. Due to Covid restrictions, it became a virtual event continuing onward with its original intent to celebrate Black art and representation with five short films, interviews with the filmmakers, and a musical performance, each shining its own ray of light on to the proceedings and creating a collective glow.
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Karen Ponzio |
Nov 11, 2020 10:54 am
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Winter may be coming, but Gorman Bechard and NHDocs have no plans to hibernate. Instead, they are debuting a monthly online series offering a new documentary feature to fans hungry for more after a successful online festival this past summer.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 10, 2020 11:19 am
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Titania Galliher, who plays Frankie in the film Northern Shade — written and directed by Chris Rucinski and currently shooting in New Haven — stood at the edge of the water in Fair Haven Monday afternoon, overlooking the Quinnipiac River. The scene was simple: Galliher was to drive up to the shoreline in her car, get out, take a look around, and then head down to the water. She did it once, getting out, taking a glance, then heading where she needed to go.
“Cut!” said Rucinski, standing next to the camera. “We’re going to do it again.”
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Karen Ponzio |
Nov 9, 2020 11:04 am
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When it was announced this past summer that all courses at Yale University would be online and gatherings would continue to be limited due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Margherita Tortora, senior lecturer in Spanish and Portuguese, had to decide what to do about the annual Latino and Iberian Film Festival she organizes. “I said, ‘I have two possibilities: cancel or do it online,’” said Tortora, though in her heart she knew there was only one choice she could possibly make.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 2, 2020 10:30 am
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Arts maven Bitsie Clark welcomed her virtual audience to her 89th birthday party on Friday evening with a cheeky rendition of Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It.” But there was a serious intent behind the festivities: to check in with the 2019 recipients of the Bitsie Clark Fund’s annual $5,000 grants, and to award another $5,000 grant to a new artist for 2020.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 28, 2020 10:29 am
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A sweet, eerie film about teenagers adapting to adulthood also marked Best Video’s first adventure in streaming, as on Monday evening Hank Hoffman, Best Video’s executive director, announced that it was hosting the virtual theatrical release of Ham on Rye, which opened virtually in 22 different venues around the country on Oct. 23.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 20, 2020 9:30 am
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An animation classic with increasingly unhinged narration from actor James Mason. A more contemporary animated take on the same classic story. Which one held up better? Which came closer to capturing the spirit of the original Edgar Allan Poe classic?
On Monday night, a dozen people gathered virtually for the New Haven Free Public Library’s monthly Animation Celebration to hash it out.
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Karen Ponzio |
Oct 15, 2020 10:30 am
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Karen Ponzio Photos
Hocus Pocus!
Last night a snuggled up yet safely distanced crowd gathered downtown to watch a movie about three witches who rise from the dead on Halloween and wreak a bit of havoc in their own town of Salem. Pitkin Plaza on Orange Street was the setting for “Movies in the Plaza,” a weekly free event held every Wednesday since July and now being celebrated with spookier films in honor of the season.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 14, 2020 9:39 am
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Two grocery store workers get off work and decide to relax with a couple beers. They come across an unsuspecting shopping cart and take rides in it. Maybe they wipe out a couple times. Things escalate from there, at the expense of the shopping cart. Which is when the shopping cart decides to take its revenge, and mayhem ensues.
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Karen Ponzio |
Sep 24, 2020 8:56 am
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Pizza, A Love Story — the movie that director Gorman Bechard calls “the quintessential New Haven film” — returns to the city for another party in the Sally’s parking lot, this one to celebrate its release on DVD and streaming services on Tuesday, Sept. 29.
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Karen Ponzio |
Aug 21, 2020 8:02 am
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The weekend offerings of the NHDocs festival include two films at two live events — the first in the Park of the Arts on Saturday, featuring a local legend and the literary pursuits that defined her and many others; and the second at Whitneyville Cultural Commons on Sunday, featuring the story of a man and the legendary donut empire he created.
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 20, 2020 7:58 am
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Scenes from These Truths.
There is a “gravitational pull” dragging down Black men in America. “There’s no respect in our community for each other as brothers.” “There are not enough men who are positive role models.” “What can we do as a society to lift Black men up, because y’all did a hell of a job tearing them down?”
These and many other hard truths came to light Wednesday night in the screening of and panel discussion about the short film These Truths: A Documentary on the State of the Black Community, hosted online by The Narrative Project and drawing an audience of about 100.
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Karen Ponzio |
Aug 20, 2020 7:47 am
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When Liberty Burns.
Friday night’s offerings from the NHDocs film festival include “a film under the stars” event in the Park of the Arts on Audubon Street, featuring When Liberty Burns, an incisive and engaging examination of the life and death of Arthur McDuffie at the hands of Dade County police in Florida in 1979, the trial and acquittal of the officers charged with his murder and the subsequent riots that ensued in Miami in 1980.
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Karen Ponzio |
Aug 19, 2020 8:18 am
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Seniors.
Thursday’s virtual offerings of the NHDocs film festival include one from the executive director of the festival himself. Gorman Bechard writes and directs one from the heart with Seniors: A Dogumentary, a touching, invigorating, and inspirational film focusing on older dogs and the people who not only love and care for them but make it their life’s work to give them the attention and spotlight they deserve.
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Karen Ponzio |
Aug 18, 2020 8:14 am
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Mister Wonderland.
Opening Night of the live event portion of the NHDocs festival — happening Wednesday, Aug. 19 on Wooster Street at the legendary Sally’s Apizza — will be celebrated with a film that digs into New Haven’s theatrical past.
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Karen Ponzio |
Aug 17, 2020 8:32 am
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NHDocs
NHDocs: The New Haven Documentary Film Festival — now in its seventh year, a week of films by documentary filmmakers from all over the country — begins on Tuesday, Aug. 18, with two online offerings that have one thing in common: the incomparable country music star Johnny Cash.
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 11, 2020 9:08 am
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Before the latest installment of Animation Celebration! — a film discussion series hosted by the New Haven Free Public Library — a participant beamed as the Zoom meeting for the discussion began to fill up.
“I’m watching all these movies I wouldn’t have watched!” she said. And “talking more about it makes you feel connected to it more.”
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Brian Slattery |
May 21, 2020 9:36 am
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Jason Calogine was tired and prepared. Rehab Rajou was energized and excited. Isabella Fletcher-Violante was happy to be there. They and several other fellow Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet students were on a Zoom chat with Michael Hinton, a teaching artist at Elm Shakespeare, recording a final few scenes for the school’s production of Cymbeline — which pivoted from theater to Zoom film project to keep the program going during the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Karen Ponzio |
May 15, 2020 8:48 am
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Maxine Philavong Photo
Michael Moore and Gorman Bechard at Modern during last year’s festival
Last year at this time New Haven Documentary Film Festival, or NHDocs, was getting ready to fill screens for 10 days — from May 30 to June 9 — with over 100 films from all over the world, including New Haven. This year the festival’s organizers find themselves moving their seventh festival to the end of the summer, adapting and offering more viewing options as the world and their city deal with the ongoing effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and resulting restrictions.
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Allan Appel |
Apr 30, 2020 1:37 pm
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Hannah Cooperstock in the documentary.
Paul Bass Photo
New Haven’s Holocaust Memorial.
When the community of Holocaust survivors in New Haven raised a memorial to their dead – the first on public land in America – they numbered about 250 strong.
That was 1976. The founders went out to the community, especially the schools, to tell their stories to young New Haveners.
