Advice Me

11 Pieces of Relationship Advice We Learned From Pope Francis

On Friday morning, Pope Francis released an extensive document titled “Amoris Laetitia,” or “The Joy of Love” in Latin, which was celebrated for its inclusivity and understanding toward divorced couples, gays, and couples living together before marriage.

While many criticized Pope Francis for his continued opposition toward gay marriage, “Amoris Laetitia” made more headlines for its groundbreaking signal that may allow divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion again. In the past, those who had divorced, regardless of the circumstances, were considered ex-communicated from the church. Beyond Pope Francis’s new position on divorced members of the church, the document was chock-full of sensible words of advice on relationships and marriage. Below, we highlight the most inspiring relationship advice from “The Joy of Love.”

Always keep your eyes open in a relationship.
“A look of appreciation has enormous importance, and to begrudge it is usually hurtful. How many things do spouses and children sometimes do in order to be noticed! Much hurt and many problems result when we stop looking at one another,” he wrote. “Love opens our eyes and enables us to see, beyond all else, the great worth of a human being.”

Don’t be so quick to swipe left.
“I think, for example, of the speed with which people move from one affective relationship to another. They believe, along the lines of social networks, that love can be connected or disconnected at the whim of the consumer, and the relationship quickly ‘blocked,’ ” he wrote. “We treat affective relationships the way we treat material objects and the environment: Everything is disposable; everyone uses and throws away, takes and breaks, exploits and squeezes to the last drop. Then, goodbye. Narcissism makes people incapable of looking beyond themselves, beyond their own desires and needs. Yet sooner or later, those who use others end up being used themselves, manipulated and discarded by that same mind-set.”

Being polite makes a huge difference.
“In the family, three words need to be used. I want to repeat this! Three words: ‘Please,’ ‘Thank you,’ ‘Sorry.’ Three essential words!” he wrote. “Let us not be stingy about using these words, but keep repeating them, day after day. For ‘certain silences are oppressive, even at times within families, between husbands and wives, between parents and children, among siblings.’ The right words, spoken at the right time, daily protect and nurture love.”

Love is like a fine wine: It takes time to become its best version of itself.
“It is not helpful to dream of an idyllic and perfect love needing no stimulus to grow. A celestial notion of earthly love forgets that the best is yet to come, that fine wine matures with age.” Later, he added: “Just as a good wine begins to ‘breathe’ with time, so too the daily experience of fidelity gives married life richness and ‘body.’ Fidelity has to do with patience and expectation.”

Listening is an art form.
“Take time, quality time. This means being ready to listen patiently and attentively to everything the other person wants to say. It requires the self-discipline of not speaking until the time is right. Instead of offering an opinion or advice, we need to be sure that we have heard everything the other person has to say. This means cultivating an interior silence that makes it possible to listen to the other person without mental or emotional distractions. Do not be rushed, put aside all of your own needs and worries, and make space. Often the other spouse does not need a solution to his or her problems, but simply to be heard, to feel that someone has acknowledged their pain, their disappointment, their fear, their anger, their hopes and their dreams.”

Sometimes an opposite point of view is not a bad thing.
“Keep an open mind. Don’t get bogged down in your own limited ideas and opinions, but be prepared to change or expand them. The combination of two different ways of thinking can lead to a synthesis that enriches both.”

How you say things is just as important as what you are saying.
“The ability to say what one is thinking without offending the other person is important. Words should be carefully chosen so as not to offend, especially when discussing difficult issues. Making a point should never involve venting anger and inflicting hurt. A patronizing tone only serves to hurt, ridicule, accuse, and offend others. Many disagreements between couples are not about important things. Mostly they are about trivial matters. What alters the mood, however, is the way things are said or the attitude with which they are said.”

Looks fade, but the heart remains true.
“In the course of every marriage physical appearances change, but this hardly means that love and attraction need fade. We love the other person for who they are, not simply for their body. Although the body ages, it still expresses that personal identity that first won our heart. Even if others can no longer see the beauty of that identity, a spouse continues to see it with the eyes of love and so his or her affection does not diminish.”

Compromise, compromise, compromise.
“As love matures, it also learns to ‘negotiate.’ Far from anything selfish or calculating, such negotiation is an exercise of mutual love, an interplay of give and take, for the good of the family. At each new stage of married life, there is a need to sit down and renegotiate agreements, so that there will be no winners and losers, but rather two winners. In the home, decisions cannot be made unilaterally, since each spouse shares responsibility for the family; yet each home is unique and each marriage will find an arrangement that works best.”

Don’t act defensively during a fight.
“Faced with a crisis, we tend first to react defensively, since we feel that we are losing control, or are somehow at fault, and this makes us uneasy. We resort to denying the problem, hiding or downplaying it, and hoping that it will go away. But this does not help; it only makes things worse, wastes energy, and delays a solution.”

Never ignore a person’s emotional baggage.
“Many people leave childhood without ever having felt unconditional love. This affects their ability to be trusting and open with others. A poor relationship with one’s parents and siblings, if left unhealed, can re-emerge and hurt a marriage. Unresolved issues need to be dealt with and a process of liberation must take place. When problems emerge in a marriage, before important decisions are made it is important to ensure that each spouse has come to grips with his or her own history.”

The Trailer for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Is Here

Just four months after The Force Awakens hit theaters, a new Star Wars trailer has now been released. But before you start worrying about the whereabouts of Rey and Finn, remember, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is actually a “spin-off” of the original George Lucas saga.

Directed by Gareth Edwards, the film will take place in the time between the end of Lucas’s much-criticized prequels and before the original trilogy. Rogue One centers around Jyn Erso, played by Felicity Jones, a rebel who is plotting on stealing the plans for the Empire’s Death Star. Jones’s character will surely join the ranks of other sci-fi heroines such as Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen, Shailene Woodley’s Tris, and Daisy Ridley’s Rey. Rogue One is the first of many planned Star Wars spin-offs, including a Han Solo origin film, which will hopefully satisfy your lightsaber and Stormtrooper fix until Star Wars: Episode VIII is released at the end of next year. Watch the trailer below.

From the Hogwarts Express to the Orient Express: 5 Movie-Inspired Train Trips You Can Take in Real Life

With the prevalence of Uber and the promise of commercial space flights in the near future, the idea of traveling on a train may seem a bit antiquated. Seeing a country or continent from a club car used to be one of the most luxurious ways to travel, and thanks to iconic scenes in classic films—the steam rising from the engine at platform 9 3/4 in the Harry Potter movies or a glamorous Lauren Bacall dressed up in the candlelit dining car in Murder on the Orient Express—the train endures in our imagination as a magical and romantic way to see the world. In real life, there happens to be several ways to experience these on-screen journeys, through rail itineraries that are as indulgent as they are thrilling. Here, five sensational train trips straight from the big screen.

The Jacobite
The 84-mile round-trip route of the Jacobite train between Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Britain, near Fort William, and Mallaig in Scotland was used in the Harry Potter films during many of the sweeping scenes of the Hogwarts Express. The ride offers stunning views—the green, hilly countryside seen while crossing the Glenfinnan viaduct and the water of the deepest freshwater loch in Britain, Loch Morar. The traditional locomotive was built in 1949 and has first-class and standard-class coaches (you can even book a compartment where the children in the movie sat). The interiors of the train have not changed much since the ’50s and ’60s, with first-class carriages featuring cushy, upholstered seating; proper table lamps; and tieback window shades.

Maharajas’ Express
Sadly, the train taken by Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman in Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited doesn’t actually exist. There is, however, a much more luxurious route to travel if you’re itching to see India on the rails. The Maharajas’ Express lives up to its regal title, with luxuriously outfitted carriages inspired by the country’s royalty. There are 14 guest cabins with one presidential suite that includes two bedrooms, a dining/living room, and bathroom with a tub. All rooms are carpeted and furnished with precious antiques, and if the views aren’t enough for you, there are also LCD TVs in each space. There are five journeys that depart from New Delhi or Mumbai, some eight days and some four, all with specially tailored activities, like seeing an elephant polo match or local artist performances in the sand dunes.

Venice Simplon-Orient-Express
The Murder on the Orient Express is perhaps the most famous train film of all time starring Lauren Bacall, Anthony Perkins, and Ingrid Bergman. The real Orient Express train service was actually created in 1883, the routes of which changed throughout the years, but the original ran from Paris to Istanbul. Today, the European luxury train is called the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express and offers trips like the original Paris to Istanbul, as well as Venice to Paris to London and Berlin to Paris. The cabin interiors reflect the 1920s and ’30s style of the original “golden era of travel” trains, with dark wood paneling and mosaic-tiled bathrooms.

Golden Eagle Luxury Trains Silk Road
The Golden Eagle train journey on the old Silk Road route from Moscow to Beijing is one that mirrors the rail journeys seen in the 1965 film Doctor Zhivago, except much nicer. (In the movie, Victor Komarovsky kidnaps Lara Antipova on a private, trans-Siberian train.) The company’s Silk Road adventure lasts 21 days and chugs through the Karakum Desert, Bukhara, and Xian among others. The train cars feature king-size beds, en suite bathrooms with heated floors, and a well-stocked minibar. For an especially old-school train ride experience, retire to the bar car in the evening for a piano player at the on-board baby grand.

Gluten-Free? These Heritage Grains Will Lure You Back

If you’ve been abstaining from carbs or wallowing in gluten-freedom for a while, you might not have noticed that the country is experiencing something of a grain revolution. Chefs and bakers are working directly with farmers to obtain heritage varieties, milling them in-house, and turning much of the recent rhetoric about gluten and carbs on its ear. It’s good news for bread lovers who have sworn off the stuff for health reasons. It turns out that baked goods and cereal sides might not be the enemy after all.

You’ve probably seen spelt at the health food store, but what about emmer, einkorn, and Kamut? These ancient grains are staging a comeback. The emergence of “gluten-free” as a lifestyle choice has helped motivate cooks and researchers to seek answers that dispel popular misconceptions about how gluten behaves both in the kitchen and in our bodies.

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“People tell me all the time: ‘I don’t eat bread,’ ” says Adam Leonti of the Brooklyn Bread Lab, which began offering its loaves, pasta, milled-to-order flour, and baking classes late last year. “But this stuff you can eat because it’s completely different. A lot of information [about wheat and gluten] has just come out in the last few years. A major misconception is that gluten makes you feel bad. But we’re finding that it’s what’s been processed out of the wheat—the bran, the germ—that can make it hard to digest.”

The Bread Lab uses rustic wheat varieties like Red Fife, once North America’s favorite variety. Leonti became convinced of the virtues of fresh whole-grain flour after experimenting with it. He found he could eat a whole bowl of pasta that left him feeling “light as a feather.”

“Think about it,” he says. “Bread sustained Europe for so long. And suddenly, it’s making people unhealthy?”

The grains our forefathers ate may well have been better for the body than today’s store-bought wheat products. When the roller mill replaced stone milling in the late 19th century, it allowed for white flour to be mass-produced. But it was soon discovered that the process stripped the flour of essential nutrients. So, a handful of these nutrients were added back in—hence, the “enriched” label on bread in the grocery store. Unfortunately, adding a few vitamins back to the flour doesn’t quite measure up to what nature produces. Researchers now believe this may be why so many people report gluten sensitivity: Key components of the grain that help the body metabolize it are missing.

“We put einkorn on the menu because it’s delicious!” says chef Gabe McMackin of the newly Michelin-starred The Finch in Brooklyn. Einkorn is an ancient variety of wheat, one of the first plants to be cultivated some 10,000 years ago. The taste can be described as nutty and rich but clean. At The Finch, it stays on the menu year-round, served with roasted trumpet royale mushrooms, tatsoi, and a puree of bright, bitter greens in the cooler months and sea scallops, golden chanterelles, and sun gold tomatoes come summer.

“Einkorn does have some gluten in it, so for someone with celiac we’d 100 percent steer clear,” McMackin explains. “But for people with sensitivity to processed, modern, industrial wheat, I’d say it’s safe to enjoy. In general, eating whole heritage grains couldn’t be more different than eating processed, bleached, enriched bread . . . When I eat einkorn, I get energized.”

Emmer & Rye, which opened last fall in Austin, Texas, to much acclaim, has used its namesake grain, a wheat variety almost as old as einkorn, in everything from pasta to cookies. Chef Kevin Fink, a professed “grainhead,” also works with other heritage grains, including purple barley, Blue Beard durum, and White Sonoran wheats. He believes heritage grains provide us with a window into mankind’s relationship to food.

“Way back when, these were the wild grasses we foraged for,” he muses. “Then, we started cultivating them, which led to increased brain development and comfort. We built civilization around farming wheat.”

For Fink, the beauty of these cereals is not unlike that of wine. Industrial mills aim for consistency in their product. But heritage wheat, like grapes or even tomatoes, varies from harvest to harvest. Chefs and bakers must not only learn how to work with it in the kitchen but about its lifecycle in the field as well. Fink points to black winter emmer, which once thrived in Texas. Today, to his dismay, it’s difficult to find anyone who knows how to grow it.

“It’s hard to grow certain heritage varietals,” he says. “They don’t have high yields, or they require special care. In the wine world, you would just charge more for that. In the wheat world, what consumer is going to buy a $12 bag of flour? There are no wheat sommeliers to explain why it’s worth more.”

One of the country’s original grainheads is Chad Robertson, the baker behind Tartine in San Francisco. He introduced his customers to ancient grains like spelt and Kamut (a wheat variety associated with the Fertile Crescent) years ago and has now added Nordic cultivars like øland to the roster. When his latest venture, The Manufactory, opens this summer, it will feature these grains and more, milled in-house for breads, pastas, and pastries, as well as sprouted and cooked grains in porridges and grain salads.

“Like tomatoes or alliums or heritage pigs before it, grain is the current breaking category in this renaissance of discovery and exploration,” says Robertson. “Chefs for so long considered flour just a commodity. When we started to look for more diverse ingredients, we inevitably zeroed in on grains. Now we see that the diversity is virtually infinite, opening up a world of flavors to us.”

Flavor is key, says Bob Klein, a Bay Area restaurateur who started Community Grains in 2007 when he got frustrated with the quality of flour available to chefs. Once he began sourcing grain directly from farmers, he felt everyone should have access to it. Since 2010, the company has sold fresh-milled hard red winter and hard amber durum wheat flours and pastas online. Klein believes their flavor is directly linked to the nutrient richness of the farmers’ soil.

“Wheat went brain-dead 100 years ago,” he says. “When it become part of a commodity system, the farming knowledge went away. If you talk to someone’s old Russian grandmother about it, she’ll remember that wheat once had character. Farming in nutrient-rich soil is bringing that back.”

Most importantly, he says, his flour is milled in a way that doesn’t remove any part of the grain. The bran, germ, and endosperm are kept intact: “nothing added, nothing taken away..

Rick Famuyiwa on Making Confirmation and Meeting Anita Hill

The filmmaker Rick Famuyiwa was finishing postproduction on his recent feature Dope after its premiere at Sundance in 2015, when he got a call about a very dissimilar project. The actress Kerry Washington (Scandal) was shopping around a script penned by the screenwriter Susannah Grant (Erin Brockovich), about the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas kerfuffle. Washington and some other producers had seen Dope and loved it. Was Famuyiwa interested?

He was. And Confirmation, the new film he’s directed based on Grant’s script, starring Washington as Hill and The Wire’s Wendell Pierce as Thomas, premieres Saturday on HBO.

“It was curious, because they’re seemingly so different,” the director said by phone of Dope, a comedic caper about teenagers in Inglewood, California, and Confirmation, a historical drama set almost entirely in the hallowed halls of the Senate. “But it was something that really sparked a genuine interest and excitement. [The Thomas confirmation hearings] were a big part of my coming of age. I was very familiar with the story when this was all going down in 1991.”

If you can’t say the same, here are the CliffsNotes: After Thurgood Marshall, a civil rights advocate and the first African-American Supreme Court justice, retired from the bench in 1991, President George H. W. Bush quickly nominated judge Clarence Thomas, also African-American and far more conservative, as Marshall’s replacement. During Thomas’s confirmation hearings, various news outlets began reporting that Anita Hill, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, had been sexually harassed by Thomas 10 years earlier, when she worked for him at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Department of Education. Hill was called to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, a body comprised entirely of white men, led by then-Senator Joe Biden. Thomas denied Hill’s accusations, framing the hearings as “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves.” Ultimately, Hill’s testimony did not block Thomas’s path to the Supreme Court—it became a matter of her word versus his, particularly after Biden did not call Angela Wright, another Thomas accuser, to testify—but the hearings were a nationally televised circus that drew major attention to questions of gender dynamics in the workplace.

True to its title, Confirmation focuses narrowly on the hearings themselves, and particularly on how that event, and Hill’s testimony, played out in the media. (Famuyiwa splices in plenty of real news clips to illustrate the way the press had a field day with the story.) He wasn’t, the director told me, interested in investigating or dramatizing what actually transpired between Thomas and Hill a decade prior. “I was very adamant that we were going to go wherever the truth took us, whoever looks good or bad,” he said. “But I didn’t necessarily want to start with a point of view that I know what the truth is.”

Some early reviews have critiqued Confirmation for being wishy-washy about taking sides. And, indeed, the characters who come out looking the worst are neither Pierce’s shell-shocked Thomas, for whom the film reserves a certain amount of compassion, nor Washington’s reluctantly vocal Hill, who gets more sympathy but not, in my opinion, nearly enough. The film is hardest on the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, including Biden, played by Greg Kinnear as a beleaguered peace broker unwilling to go out on a limb. On one end of the spectrum, there are Republican senators too hidebound, hoary, or committed to their candidate to consider the veracity of Hill’s accusations; on the other, there are Democrats too timid about appearing racist or hypocritical (they had, as one fictional female Senate staffer put it, “their own shaky dynamics with women”) to defend Hill against character assassination from the right.

For those utterly fed up with the gridlock and partisanship of present-day politics—particularly in a moment when Republicans are refusing even to acknowledge President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court—Confirmation is sure to strike a powerful chord. “I think we’ve now gotten to this point where we’re growing more and more distrustful of our institutions, be they government or corporations or otherwise,” Famuyiwa said. He attributes our fascination with ’90s news spectacles like the O.J. Simpson trial, and now the Thomas hearings, to our desire to “look back at the beginning of that.”

Famuyiwa and I discussed making Confirmation, how not to handle the current Supreme Court vacancy, and what happened when he finally met Anita Hill.

When you read Susannah Grant’s script, were there aspects of this story that made you think: I can’t believe this actually happened?
There was a lot that was surprising. My memory, along with our collective memory, has sort of faded. I think we lingered on the more salacious aspects—the Coke can, the things that became pop culture. What was fascinating to me was how much I didn’t remember, or thought I remembered a certain way, but then when you go back and look at the record, it was different. And then diving into some of the things I wasn’t privy to: I obviously didn’t know the things going on behind the scenes with the senators. I was not familiar with this other witness, who was potentially going to come forward, even though when I went back to the archive, it was something that was reported on. After I read the script, I went back and started looking at the testimony. It was really surprising how much I had forgotten, even though I was convinced that I knew everything about it. Just that alone was why I felt it was an important story to tell. This was so important in terms of how we deal with each other in the workplace, sexual harassment. But also there’s a sitting Supreme Court justice who was a mere four votes away from not being a justice. How close that was to changing our history and some of the rulings that came after—that was ripe for re-examination.

Not to mention the fact that it made you think about the fallacy of memory, and this whole hearing was based on memory.
Yes, exactly. We forget that the incident happened 10 years before the nomination, and we’re now 35 years from those events. When I went back and started talking to some of the people involved, they’re still so convinced of her truth or his. She was a tool of the left; he was a tool of the right. Everyone had cemented their beliefs. There’s a really telling moment in Thomas’s testimony early on where he says, “If there’s anything I may have done or said in any way to have offended Anita Hill, I apologize.” So before he categorically denied everything, he understood that there was something that happened, something that he was even trying to re-examine in himself, even if he didn’t quite understand or feel like what he did was significant enough to rise to the level of denying him his nomination. But it’s interesting how our memories fail us—our 20/20 hindsight on things changes, not based on what actually happened, but what we wished happened or hoped happened.

It’s interesting that Confirmation is coming on the heels of Ryan Murphy’s O.J. trial series, and that both of these projects are about the intersection of racial politics and gender politics. Why do you think we’re suddenly so interested in those issues and how they played out in the ’90s?
One, because those issues are still alive today. We’ll always be re-examining how we relate to each other in terms of race and gender, in terms of power and access. In the case of the Thomas nomination, it was the first time I can remember that what we would now call the 24-hour news cycle, or mainstream media, was really an active participant in the drama, because the hearings were on and televised for the duration. It was, in some ways, the seed of what would become reality TV. And obviously O.J. and Court TV and his trial being televised: That came afterward and is what took it to the absurd level of coverage, the precursor to today. I think that’s part of it. And then on just a simple level, it’s been 25 years. We’re just getting perspective on these things. You have filmmakers and artists who came of age, like myself, during this era. Whether it’s Clarence Thomas or O.J. or the impeachment of Bill Clinton—

Can’t wait for that one!
That’s the next one, right? That’s sort of how I mark my young adulthood. Now that people of that generation are in positions to tell their stories, we’re looking back on that era. Dope, obviously, was that, too.

The other interesting context for this film is that we now have a female presidential candidate, a contested Supreme Court nomination, and your film depicts politicians who are still in the mix. Did you feel any angst over making a movie about Thomas, a sitting Supreme Court justice, and Biden, a sitting vice president?
Look, you definitely think about it. But I didn’t have any trepidation. I think once you start the process, you quickly get into the mode of just telling a story. You divorce yourself from that history, even though it’s recent. I met a lot of the people who were peripherally involved, but I didn’t want to speak to any of the principals. I made a choice: I wanted it to be about the moment. I didn’t want the point of view to be the omniscient us from the future looking back at 25 years ago and passing judgment. It needed to live in 1991.

We’ve formed caricatures about Anita Hill, about Clarence Thomas, about Uncle Joe Biden, and I didn’t want those things to be the point of view of the film. I really wanted it to be about the people in the moment and not the political-cartoon characters that some make them out to be.

I do think it’s balanced, although I will say I think the Republicans come across as more buffoonish. But that’s probably my bias.
[laughs] Everyone’s going to take from it what they will. I don’t think we were hiding from any of the truth. There was a lot of behavior that I think those involved would look back on and say we’re not necessarily proud of. In being as objective as you can, you also don’t want to gloss over anything.

Grace Gummer and Zoe Lister-Jones play young staffers for Senators Ted Kennedy and Biden, and their characters are instrumental in bringing Anita Hill’s testimony to light. Are they based on real people? To what degree were young female staffers leading the charge?
They’re all composites to a certain extent. There were people in all the senators’ offices who were very instrumental. That was striking: How these senators rely on their staff, and how young that staff really is. Many of them were women. It was also a commentary that I was interested in exploring. Whether it was Judy Smith, who was in the White House, or these young women staffers who were working for Senator Kennedy and Senator Biden, they were thrust into having to do their job even though doing their job might be going against something they believe. Susannah and I wanted to illustrate the challenges of being a woman in the workforce, the choices you have to make, even though those choices sometimes get questioned. That’s what happened to Anita Hill. The senators questioned why she would move to a different office with Thomas, or why she would have conversations with him [after the alleged harassment]. She says part of why she didn’t want to come forward was the sense that she had to think about her career, about her life and how this would affect it. Those are big decisions that women have to make in the workplace that often men don’t.

You said you didn’t meet any of the principal characters. Does that remain true even after the movie was made? Or have you met Anita Hill since?
I met Anita Hill at the premiere. She’s as poised and professional and impressive in person as I remember her during her testimony. And she was a fan of the film, which I was happy with. You never know. She definitely, I’m sure, had some things that she would quibble with, but she said it reflected the challenges of what was going on during that time in her life.

Having immersed yourself in this Clarence Thomas episode, do you have any insight into how we should be handling our current Supreme Court vacancy, and the confirmation of Merrick Garland?
This process has obviously become more and more political. I think that what you hope the film reflects is that we have to continue to challenge the people in power, the people who represent us, to do their job and to serve the American people. Even as contentious as [voted-down Supreme Court nominee Robert] Bork was, as Thomas was, they were put forward. There were hearings. You can be against them or for them, but that’s the way the system works. I don’t know if I’ve seen in the Constitution where it says if there’s an election year, then we take a break until after for us to do the business of the American people.

The Best Documentaries to Watch at this Year’s Tribeca Film Festival

The Tribeca Film Festival came under fire last month after announcing that it would host the world premiere of the anti-vaccination documentary Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe. The festival later pulled the doc and cofounder Robert De Niro took direct responsibility for the selection, explaining that he wanted the screening to serve as an “opportunity for conversation around the issue.”

the unintended media storm, without fail, Tribeca documentaries deliver their fair share of conversation. This year, more than 80 films of various and exciting subjects will premiere in theaters around the city. Below, we share our list of seven documentaries worth seeing at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

The Banksy Job
This art heist documentary follows around one of Banksy’s rivals, AK47, a former porn star turned “art terrorist” who ends up stealing a famous Banksy statue from the streets of London. Unlike the 2010 hit Exit Through the Gift Shop, the enigmatic graffiti artist isn’t backing this new documentary—although he does make an appearance on camera, so you never really know whether or not he’s actually the man behind this curtain, too.

All This Panic
Filmmaker Jenny Gage and her husband and director of photography, Tom Betterton, filmed two teenage sisters for three years as they navigated life in Brooklyn. The fly-on-the-wall-style documentary dives deep into the girls’ relationships, high school, and home life, and provides viewers with a realistic, nonjudgmental portrait of what it’s like to be a girl in today’s world.

Life, Animated
Based on the memoir by Ron Suskind, Life, Animated tells the story of the author’s son Owen, a young autistic boy who hadn’t spoken for years until one day when he finally learns to communicate with his family with the help of Disney movies. The heartwarming documentary was a hit when it premiered at Sundance earlier this year and will certainly appeal to audiences who, like Owen, also grew up reciting every single line of The Little Mermaid and Aladdin.

Do Not Resist
For his directorial debut, Craig Atkinson traveled around the country to explore the absurd militarization of our police force and how arming our cops with army-level weapons could have disastrous consequences for our freedom.

The First Monday in May
The annual Met Gala has been called the “Oscars of fashion” or, as André Leon Talley affectionately says, “the Super Bowl of fashion events.” The new film, directed by Andrew Rossi (Page One: Inside the New York Times), follows Vogue’s Editor in Chief, Anna Wintour, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton as they plan out the 2015 Met exhibition and gala, “China: Through the Looking Glass.” Aside from finding out what goes into throwing the biggest party of the year, viewers also get a glimpse inside the ultra-exclusive party.

Maurizio Cattelan: Be Right Back
Before Banksy, Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan was the one pulling all the pranks in the art world. Maura Axelrod’s documentary looks back on the polarizing artist’s career, beginning with his first solo show in Milan, where he simply hung a sign in front of a locked gallery door that read “Be Right Back,” all the way up to his 2011 Guggenheim retrospective, in which his most famous works weren’t displayed on the walls of the spiraled museum but instead hung from the ceiling.

the bomb
For its closing weekend, the Tribeca Film Festival will be going out with a bang with the premiere of a new multimedia installation called the bomb. Created by Smriti Keshari and Eric Schlosser, this experiential documentary about the world’s continued proliferation of nuclear weapons will be projected onto eight floor-to-ceiling screens at Gotham Hall, while the rock band The Acid performs in the center of the room. The goal is to have the audience feel like they’re in the center of a nuclear testing or attack. Needless to say, this screening isn’t for the faint of heart.

Andrew Rossi’s Documentary About the Met Gala, The First Monday in May, Premieres Tonight at the Tribeca Film Festival

Everyone knows that the Met Gala is the fashion world’s equivalent of the Super Bowl. But what most of us don’t know—how could we?—is what happens before all those celebrities walk up the 150-foot red carpet. How does this night come together?

We get an answer to that question in The First Monday in May, a new documentary by Andrew Rossi (Front Page: Inside the New York Times), premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival tonight and opening in theaters this Friday. Filmed with the cooperation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Vogue, this behind-the-scenes procedural is a celebration of the 2015 gala and the smash show, “China: Through the Looking Glass,” that was its inspiration.

The film carries us through the whole process, from Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton’s original conception of the exhibition through gala night itself, when Rihanna arrives in that spectacular canary-yellow gown by Chinese designer Guo Pei and later performs “Bitch Better Have My Money.” We follow Bolton’s consultations with Vogue Editor in Chief Anna Wintour, her planning for the gala (with helpful advice from Baz Luhrmann), and the choice of the great Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai as the show’s artistic director. Even as we hear from designers like Galliano, Gaultier, and Lagerfeld, we see the seemingly thousands of small decisions that go into making a hit exhibition and a hugely profitable fundraiser like the Met Gala.

If you’ve ever grown nervous planning a dinner party, the preparations for the Met Ball will send a chill down your spine. Talk about complex. The New York Times once dubbed the Met Ball “Anna Wintour’s Party,” and to judge from the film, this seems fair. She approaches it with a hands-on meticulousness that I wish the Bush administration had managed during the invasion of Iraq. She’s involved in every decision—including the design of the napkins and the tablecloths and the seating chart for the guests, a group so staggeringly famous that figuring out where to put them is like playing chess with pieces who will walk off the board if they don’t like the square they’re on.

If the gala is Wintour’s party, the exhibition itself is the brainchild of the English-born Bolton, who curated the Met’s blockbuster “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” show in 2011 and spent the next years looking for something to match it. The First Monday in May shows us just how hard it is to pull off a show like “China: Through the Looking Glass.” It’s not simply that the whole thing is massive—three times bigger than any previous Costume Institute show—but that Bolton, Wong, and co. are faced with all manner of turf wars and intellectual complexities.

For starters, there are some at the Met who feel that fashion is frivolous and doesn’t deserve to share the same space as High Art. (These traditionalists seem unaware that they lost this cultural argument well before the 1960s, around the time of Dada.) Then there’s wrangling with the Met’s Asian Art Department, whose head fears that the “Through the Looking Glass” show will overwhelm the “real” Asian art with a Disneyfied version. As if that weren’t enough, the show’s very conception must take into account profound Chinese sensitivity about the West’s historical appropriation, exploitation, and misrepresentation of China. If you put the Mao section of the exhibition in the Met’s room full of Buddhas, Wong tells Bolton, you’ll offend both the communists and the Buddhists.

After all these ideological matters finally get sorted out—not to mention Bolton’s choosing 150 garments, flying to examine the Yves Saint Laurent vaults in Paris, and agonizing over delays in the building of the displays—the exhibition is put together in a mad rush over the final few days. Perhaps because Bolton looks a bit like a grown-up Harry Potter, the show comes together magically in the end. It’s rapturously beautiful.

So beautiful, in fact, that it broke the McQueen show’s attendance record. Of course, this only sets the bar for his next show even higher. And will he reach it? We’ll find out the first Monday in May.

Inside William and Kate’s Whistle-Stop Royal Tour of India and Bhutan

One of the world’s largest, most populous, and undeniably complicated countries, India normally requires weeks to see, best explored by picking a single location and soaking it up over several days. However, when William and Kate visit starting this Sunday, they’re spending only five days in the vast country, as well as a couple in the nearby Bhutan.

If you’re thinking of heading that way, we’ve put together the perfect royal itinerary following in William and Kate’s footsteps—as well as the footsteps of their royal ancestors—where you’ll get to experience the full scope of what the vast and varied country has to offer.

Mumbai
Day one of William and Kate’s tour will find them in Mumbai, a bustling, cosmopolitan city known as the “Financial Capital of India.” Here, stunning historical sites, the Bollywood film industry, some of the country’s most high-end shopping, as well as the sprawling slums all jostle for space in the city’s consciousness. Stay at the fabled Taj Mahal Palace, where the hotel staff—approximately one for every guest—goes overboard to fulfill their mantra: “The guest is God.” Royal visitors have included Edward, Prince of Wales; the Duke of Edinburgh; the king and queen of Norway; and King George V and Queen Mary.

A must-see attraction is mere steps away: the iconic Gateway of India stone arch, constructed to commemorate King George V’s visit to India with Queen Mary. Nearby, the Kala Ghoda neighborhood features scores of boutiques and art galleries. Or head north to Byculla East for the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai’s oldest museum highlighting the city’s heritage and culture. Soak up a little local flavor with a walk along Marine Drive and Chowpatty Beach before going to Crawford Market (now known as Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Mandai), with vendors and stalls selling everything from food to flowers to exotic animals, and Zaveri Bazaar, the gem and jewelry market.

Stop at nearby Banganga Tank, a quiet, holy area featuring temples arranged around a pool and Hindu cremation ground. Take a tour of the Dharavi slum with a reputable guide (Reality Tours & Travel gives 80 percent of profits directly back to the community) to witness how this area is an essential part of the small-scale industry in Mumbai. Cap off a long day of sightseeing with drinks on the rooftop Aer Lounge on the 34th floor of the Four Seasons—it features the best views in all of Mumbai.

New Delhi
New Delhi, India’s capital city, is vast, frenetic, and the perfect place to lose yourself for a day or two. When King George V and Queen Mary visited India in 1911 for the Delhi Durbar, a coronation ceremony proclaiming them emperor and empress of India, the decision to move the capital from Calcutta to Delhi was announced. British architects Sir Edwin Lutyens and Sir Herbert Baker were given the task of transforming the city, and as a result, their fingerprints can be found all over it.

Check into the Leela, an elegant Lutyens-inspired property in the heart of the diplomatic Chanakyapuri neighborhood, where King Juan Carlos of Spain has stayed and guests are picked up in a Rolls-Royce Phantom. Visit Gandhi Smriti, where Mahatma Gandhi lived for a few months until his death in 1948. The Martyr’s Column, commemorating the spot where he was assassinated during his nightly prayers, is a particularly poignant memorial. Another affecting monument is India Gate, an Arc de Triomphe–like war memorial where William and Kate will be laying a wreath for Indian soldiers of the First World War and the Third Anglo-Afghan War. Pause for afternoon tea at the Imperial, a 1930s five-star landmark, before continuing the tour of Indian history at Raj Ghat, a memorial for Mahatma Gandhi with additional sites for other historical figures including Indira Gandhi nearby, and Indira Gandhi Memorial Museum.

On day two, visit Jama Masjid, one of the largest mosques in India, with relics of Muhammad, before going to the Qutb complex, home to the Qutb Minar—the world’s tallest brick minaret—as well as the Iron Pillar of Delhi, a 4th-century 23-foot column that has remained relatively rust-free, long baffling scientists. Next, visit the sandstone and marble Humayun’s Tomb, a majestic UNESCO World Heritage site encompassing the tombs of several emperors. Finally, prearrange a visit to Rashtrapati Bhavan, the Lutyens-designed presidential residence (formerly known as the Viceroy’s House), home to a museum, as well as thrones of King George V and Queen Mary.

Kaziranga National Park
British royals have a long and checkered history of hunting big game on safari in India. In 1961, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip were photographed in Jaipur proudly standing by a dead tiger, something that drew protests even then. Decades earlier, after the 1911 Delhi Durbar, Elizabeth II’s grandfather King George V traveled onto Nepal, where he hunted tigers and bears, while in 1921, the Prince of Wales, who would later become King Edward VIII, went on his own tiger-hunting expedition in Nepal.

Times have changed, however, and the Windsors have changed with them. When William and Kate visit the UNESCO World Heritage site Kaziranga National Park wildlife sanctuary, they will aim to bring attention to conservation efforts of endangered species, as well as admire the area’s plentiful Bengal tigers, elephants, swamp deer, Hoolock gibbon, one-horned rhinos, and water buffalos. A significant focus of their visit is drawing attention to the conflicts and complexities of humans and wild animals living in close proximity.

After a long day of game drives, stay in a private thatched-roof cottage at Diphlu River Lodge. Cottages feature large terraces overlooking the surrounding land and river, and guests can book to enjoy festive nightly group barbecues with locals performing dancing and singing rituals.

Agra
When Princess Diana was photographed in front of the Taj Mahal in 1992, it was considered a statement of loneliness, as well as portending the breakdown of her marriage to Prince Charles. Expect William and Kate to rewrite the story with their own photo at “Lady Di’s Chair” (as the bench is now known) during their visit to the UNESCO World Heritage site. Stay at Oberoi Amarvilas, less than half a mile from the Taj Mahal, and with unobstructed views of the iconic mausoleum from every room. Guests are ferried between the hotel and the Taj Mahal on golf carts.

There’s more to Agra than just the Taj Mahal, however. Spend a couple hours wandering the narrow alleyways of the Old City, stuffed with vendors selling spices, antiques, and textiles. And for two alternative but no less beautiful memorials, try the red sandstone Mariam’s Tomb—built by Emperor Jahangir in memory of his mother, Mariam-uz-Zamani—and the carved marble Itmad-ud-Daula, nicknamed the “baby Taj.”

Jaipur
Although William and Kate won’t be visiting Jaipur during this tour, no royal trip to India is complete without exploring Rajasthan, the lush, palace-laden land of the maharajas. Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, has a rich royal history—founded by Maharaja Jai Singh II, the Raja of Amer, in recent decades it has been visited by British royals from King George V, Queen Mary, and who would later become Edward VII to Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Charles, and Princess Diana. Awash in riverfront gilded palaces and sweeping garden courtyards, it’s not hard to understand why royals continue to be drawn to it. Its nickname, the Pink City, is thanks to the British royal family—while Queen Victoria never traveled to India, when the Prince of Wales visited Jaipur in 1878, the streets were painted pink in their honor and the nickname stuck.

Stay at the storied Rambagh Palace, a 47-acre compound built in 1835 as a maharaja’s palace, and eventually converted into a grande dame hotel. Each guest is given a royal reception, with decorated camels and elephants welcoming visitors, while women in traditional Rajasthani garb perform Aarti and Tikka greeting ceremonies. Guests have included Prince Charles and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

The former seat of the maharaja, the City Palace complex now includes a museum, the Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II; another must-see is the 20-foot-high, 10-foot-wide Jaipur City Wall, built in 1727 under the founding reign of Maharaja Jai Singh II. About seven miles outside Jaipur, meanwhile, the stunning Amber Fort, built in the 16th century by Maan Singh I and blending both Hindu and Rajput influences, is an enormous fort and palace complex overlooking the Maota Lake and well worth a visit. Like so many Indian sights, it stirs the emotions, reminding visitors of the country’s undeniable majesty and long history.

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