It’s not a place for snarkiness, that’s clear—so Arts Desk readers who cringe when the earnestness heads into the red might not want to stop by. But this year’s Buddhafest, which opens tonight at Artisphere, might be an opportunity to shed your usual work-harder, get-farther stress.
It’s a packed four-day slate of films and talks that focus [...]
Carmen C. Wong and Niell DuVal of banished? productions are bringing Restaurant Week to Fringe Fest. They're the producers, directors, and chefs behind "Tactile Dinner," a celebration of Futurism, violence, industry, and experiential theater served over 15 courses. "Tactile Dinner Car" will serve up this typical CapFringe fare through a food-truck format.
"Tactile Dinner" is a [...]
Perhaps best known for his epic, three-part documentary The Battle of Chile, filmmaker Patricio Guzmás has spent much of his career focused on the reverberations from Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's reign during the 1970s and 80s. Nostalgia for the Light is a mercurial, contemplative document that marries astronomy and metaphysics with the heart-wrenching desperation of the [...]
Famed documentarian Werner Herzog has built a prolific career via his wild-eyed curiosity, bringing an infectious enthusiasm to otherwise didactic and peculiar topics. Happy People is technically not his film—this 90-minute version is condensed from Russian director Dmitry Vasyukov's four-hour, made-for-TV documentary—but the indelible narration ensures this intriguing look at professional Syberian fur-trappers is unmistakeably a Herzog Project.
The happiness of the title refers [...]
The premise behind director Huang Weikai's documentary Disorder makes it sound insufferably fussy. Amassing over 1,000 hours of footage from amateur filmmakers throughout China, Weikai whittled down the mountain of grainy black and white footage guided by the rule that, according to The Atlantic's Hua Hsu, no successive scenes could come from the same source tape. [...]
The Kennedy Center’s just-concluded Maximum India festival was certainly successful from an attendance standpoint, with sold-out ticketed shows and packed free events. A number of music and dance performances received rave reviews, but not everyone was completely wowed by the festival's curating—at least in India.
Outlook India's Seema Sirohi wrote an article criticizing some of the art exhibits as [...]
Performing on the Millennium Stage, Panjabi MC brought the Kennedy Center’s Maximum India festival to a close last night in front of a crowd of about 1,500. With CD turntables for sampled bhangra beats and snippets of melodic vocal melodies (plus a Jay-Z verse from the “Beware of the Boys” remix), the British-raised Indian’s sound also included his [...]
While most of the Maximum India festival's remaining ticketed performances are sold-out (except for the Ishara Puppet Theatre and some film screenings), there are some free events this weekend worth investigating. Tonight, if you can't get tickets on Craigslist for Sunny Jain & Red Baraat (an outfit that blends bhangra with go-go, soca, and jazz), you can catch [...]
The funny little frog to the right can mean only one thing: The Environmental Film Festival is back. Now in its 19th year, the festival has become a massive understaking, where 150 films from 40 different countries–most for free—screen at museums, embassies, libraries, universities, and movie theaters throughout the District. This year's programming is particularly diverse, including countless screeds against our continued mishandling of fossil fuels, the winner of the 2010 [...]
Food Stamped is yet another documentary film in a series that attempts to direct attention to some aspect of the American food system. The focus of the film is fresh–the food stamp system, how much is allocated to low income families, and the challenge of eating healthy on small tab. Yet as if finding their [...]
