![]() The community that forms around Dorothea and Greta is inseparable from political activism. When Jan, the editor of the Checkford Journal (played by Glynnis O’Connor), challenges a smarmy consultant, he waxes ironic about her “journalistic integrity.” She responds, “It’s just called integrity, darling, I throw in the journalism for free.” These values of artistic humanism, and of money and power-are both mediated by local journalism. Another is the hard practicality of daily life: domestic troubles and financial worries, covert romances and longstanding grudges, petty corruption and differences of culture and principle. One axis of life in Checkford is the wealth of personal relationships that The Bread Factory has fostered and deepened through decades of common purpose and shared work. ![]() The artistic lessons that they impart to these children spill over into their family lives, drolly but significantly. It stages Euripides and Chekhov it presents opera productions ranging from “La Traviata” to “Lulu” to “Mahagonny” it hosts a poet (Noah Averbach-Katz) and a filmmaker (Janeane Garofalo), who also teach local students. Her company is a beacon of classical artistic culture, from classic to modern. In other words, it’s a story of community, in which Wang, filming a mighty roundelay of encounters and relationships in filigreed detail, displays the deep tissue and secret substance of which a community is made.ĭespite the hostility that Dorothea faces from many of the ostensible pillars of the community, she is the town’s virtual mayor, its fixer and energizer. The subject of the film is the essential moral fibre that is embodied in their every action, that is revealed in each word and gesture, that exerts its influence and replicates its substance in every interactions, however casual. But their attention is diverted from the play by practical troubles: the local school board is planning to defund The Bread Factory and replace it with a troupe called May Ray, which features two avant-gardish Chinese artists (played by Janet Hsieh and George Young) whose connections to Hollywood and to Chinese-backed institutions promise money, clout, and the sheen of celebrity.Ībove all, “A Bread Factory” is a tale of characters, dozens of them, all of whom have their passions and quirks and express themselves vigorously in sharp, insightful dialogue-reverberant aphorisms, dialectical clashes, and florid arias, which are composed by Wang. Her partner, Greta (Elisabeth Henry), is an actress, and they’re currently working on a new production of Euripides’ “Hecuba,” about a woman whose family is destroyed by the wantonly powerful. It shows classic movies and hosts an opera troupe and a theatre company in which Dorothea is a stage director. The space, called The Bread Factory, is thriving. It’s set in the fictitious village of Checkford (the movie was actually filmed in Hudson, New York) and centers on one of its most prominent and admired yet embattled residents, Dorothea (Tyne Daly), who, forty years ago, founded that center for the arts in an abandoned bread factory. This two-part, four-hour film, about the fate of a performing-arts space a small New England town, is a detailed, expansive view of local politics and, for that matter, of the nature of community. The distinctive premise of Patrick Wang’s new film, “A Bread Factory,” is matched by the audacity and the originality with which he realizes it.
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