Monk in Pieces
A film by Billy Shebar
COMING TO THEATERS JULY 25
Meredith Monk – composer, performer, and interdisciplinary artist – is one of the great artistic pioneers of our time, yet her profound cultural influence is largely unrecognized. With Monk’s music at its center, and featuring interviews with Björk and David Byrne, Monk in Pieces is a mosaic that mirrors the structure of Monk’s own work, and illuminates her wildly original vocabulary of sound and imagery. As a female artist in the male-dominated downtown arts scene of the 1960s and ‘70s, Monk had to fight for recognition and resources. Early reviews in The New York Times were vicious and sexist: “A disgrace to the name of dancing,” wrote Clive Barnes, and “so earnestly strange in a talented little-girl way,” wrote John Rockwell. Yet as her celebrated contemporary, Philip Glass, says, "she, among all of us, was – and still is – the uniquely gifted one." In the film’s final chapters, Monk faces mortality. We see her warily entrust her masterpiece, ATLAS, to director Yuval Sharon and singer Joanna Lynn-Jacobs for a new production at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. For 60 years, Monk has directed and performed in all of her music theater works; now she must learn to let go. What will happen to such singular work after she is gone?
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Köln 75
A film by Ido Fluk
COMING TO THEATERS THIS FALL
Keith Jarrett’s legendary performance in January 1975 nearly didn’t happen. Based on a true story, Köln 75 follows how the concert was conceived and orchestrated by the efforts of a teenage up and coming concert promoter, Vera Brandes, (played by German actress Mala Emde). Her enthusiasm set her to multitasking – from organizing the concert venue (the Cologne Opera House), promoting the event, and selling the tickets, to convincing Jarrett to perform when he almost dropped out when the Bösendorfer Imperial Grand piano he was promised was nowhere to be found. John Magaro plays Jarrett with his own intensity, a sublime counterpoint to Brandes’ joyful and unstoppable enthusiasm at every situation she encounters. Köln 75 captures the compelling, entertaining and, until now, unknown back story about Jarrett’s one-hour, entirely improvised concert, which became the best-selling solo album in jazz history.
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A Photographic Memory
A film by Rachel Elizabeth Seed
NOW IN THEATERS
Winner of the Truer Than Fiction Award at the 2025 Film Independent Spirit Awards and a New York Times Critic’s Pick, A Photographic Memory is an intimate, genre-bending portrait of the filmmaker’s trailblazing mother, Sheila Turner Seed – a vibrant and pioneering journalist, photographer, and filmmaker, who died suddenly and tragically when Rachel was just 18 months old. Uncovering the vast archive Turner Seed produced, including lost interviews with iconic photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bruce Davidson, Cecil Beaton, Lisette Model, and Gordon Parks, and others, Rachel attempts to build a posthumous relationship with her mother through her interviews, photographs, journals, films, and the stories of those who remember her. The result is an unlikely mother-daughter conversation that evades time and space, exploring universal themes of memory, loss, and legacy.
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Holy Cow (Vingt Dieux)
A film by Louise Courvoisier
NOW IN THEATERS
After the tragic death of his father, 18 year old Totone is thrust into the unexpected and very adult role of looking after his younger sister and their failing family farm in the Jura section of France. He assumes even more responsibility when he enters a cash competition for the best Comte cheese made in this western part of the French Alps. A “verité” look at the hardscrabble life of French agriculture, it is simultaneously a coming of age story and above all an ode to the love of cheese.
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