Tuesday Nights at the Movies with Andrew Returns!

Yesterday, just hours after Governor Cuomo announced that most COVID-19 related restrictions were eased effective immediately, the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center welcomed audiences back to our summer cinema program: Tuesday Nights at the Movies with Andrew was starting off on the right foot.

The timing was fortuitous. We hadn’t planned on the Governor’s announcement coinciding with the first of our films, but it meant greeting our movie-goers with huge grins that they could actually see for lack of masks on our faces. It meant that there was now no real barrier to bringing Undine and other foreign or independent first run films to East End audiences. The films would stand or fall on their own.

We talked a lot as a staff about the future of the WHBPAC during the shut-downs. We never officially closed, instead pivoting to live streaming, drive-ins, and virtual programs. We watched restrictions and guidelines like a hawk, and (safely) carried on with our Arts Academy programs in person the minute we were able to. To a person, the staff here believes passionately and deeply in our mission to bring new cultural experiences to the area and to inject life into Westhampton Beach.

With that in mind, we expanded our film season this year to include June. Andrew Botsford, who is celebrating 15 years of Tuesday Nights with us this year, graciously will host ten more discussions between now and Labor Day. We looked for films that were relevant, irreverent, absurd, poignant, entertaining, informative, and – most of all – thought-provoking.

This is a summer for passion and dance, for fire and for spoken word, for being true to who you are and looking damn good while doing it. This is a summer for werewolves and giant flies, for monsters as symbols for greater issues. But at its heart, this is a summer for connecting with those around you. Give these films space in your mind; discuss them; dissect them – together.

June 16: Undine– You’ve already missed the discussion, but don’t miss the film itself! Christian Petzold (PHOENIX, TRANSIT) boldly reimagines the ancient myth of Undine in this suspenseful tale of romance and betrayal in modern day Berlin. Undine (Paula Beer) works as a historian lecturing on Berlin’s urban development. But when the man she loves leaves her, the myth catches up with her. Undine has to kill the man who betrays her and return to the water. Will Undine defy fate when she meets a diver (Franz Rogowski) offering her a chance at new love?

June 22 & 23: Summer of 85 - What do you dream of when you're 16-years-old and in a seaside resort in Normandy in the 1980s? A best friend? A lifelong teen pact? Scooting off on adventures on a boat or a motorbike? Living life at breakneck speed? No. You dream of death. Because you can't get a bigger kick than dying. And that's why you save it till the very end. The summer holidays are just beginning…

June 29 & 30: Werewolves Within - A snowstorm traps town residents together inside the local inn, where newly arrived forest ranger Finn and postal worker Cecily must try to keep the peace and uncover the truth behind a mysterious creature that has begun terrorizing the community.

July 6 & 7: Les Nôtres - To the tight-knit community of Sainte-Adeline, Quebec, Magalie appears as a normal suburban high school sophomore surrounded by friends. But this popular teenage girl is harboring a shocking secret: she’s pregnant. When Magalie refuses to identify the father, suspicions among the townsfolk come to a boiling point and the layers of a carefully maintained social varnish eventually crack.

July 13 & 14: Final Account - Over a decade in the making, the film raises vital, timely questions about authority, conformity, complicity and perpetration, national identity, and responsibility, as men and women ranging from former SS members to civilians in never-before-seen interviews reckon with — in very different ways — their memories, perceptions and personal appraisals of their own roles in the greatest human crimes in history.

July 20 & 21: Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones & D-Man In the Waters - Trace the remarkable history and legacy of one of the most important works of art to come out of the age of AIDS –choreographer Bill T. Jones’s tour de force ballet “D-Man in the Waters.” In 1989, D-Man in the Waters gave physical manifestation to the fear, anger, grief, and hope for salvation that the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company felt as they were embattled by the AIDS pandemic. As a group of young dancers reconstructs the dance, they learn about this oft forgotten history and deepen their understanding of the power of art in a time of plague.

July 27 & 28: Mandibles- When simple-minded friends Jean-Gab and Manu find a giant fly trapped in the boot of a car, they decide to train it in the hope of making a ton of cash.

August 3 & 4: Summertime - Follow the intersecting stories of 27 youth spoken word poets over a single day in Los Angeles. The director’s ground-breaking vision began at a poetry showcase where performers from across the City of Angels recited fearlessly personal texts about themselves, their communities, and their relationship to their city. The project was then developed around their individual poems and interwoven into a larger, unified, and gloriously moving narrative experiment — part contemporary musical and part sociological art. Summertime explores themes of identity, community, and intersectionality through the unique perspectives of this diverse ensemble.

August 10 & 11: Swan Song - Retired hairdresser Pat Pitsenbarger (Udo Kier) has given up on life from the confines of his small-town Sandusky, Ohio nursing home. But when Pat gets word that a former client’s dying wish was for Pat to style her final hairdo, he sets out on an epic journey across Sandusky to confront the ghosts of his past–and collect the beauty supplies necessary for the job. Swan Song is a comical and bittersweet journey about rediscovering oneself, and looking gorgeous while doing so.

August 17 & 18: Ema - Ema, a young dancer, decides to separate from Gastón after giving back Polo, the son they both adopted and were unable to raise. In a desperate search through the streets of the port city of Valparaíso, Ema seeks love affairs in order to overcome her guilt. However, she has a secret plan to recover everything she's lost.

August 24 & 25: Cryptozoo - Hand drawn, gritty and fantastical, this parable about society versus the individual is a must-see. A zoo that rescues mythological creatures in psychedelic 1960’s San Francisco races the U.S. Military to find and save a Baku, a Japanese dream-eating cryptid, to prevent the military from using the Baku to eat the dreams of the counterculture and suppress the anti-Vietnam War movement.

August 31 & September 1: All the Streets Are Silent - In the late 80s and early 90s, the streets of downtown Manhattan were the site of a collision between two vibrant subcultures: skateboarding and hip hop. Narrated by Zoo York co-founder Eli Gesner with an original score by legendary hip-hop producer Large Professor (Nas, A Tribe Called Quest), All the Streets Are Silent brings to life the magic of the time period and the convergence that created a style and visual language that would have an outsized and enduring cultural effect. From the DJ booths and dance floors of the Mars nightclub to the founding of brands like Supreme, this convergence would lay the foundation for modern street style. Paris Is Burning meets Larry Clark’s KIDS, All the Streets Are Silent is a love letter to New York–examining race, society, fashion, and street culture.