Beguiling blends of fiction and nonfiction are the highlights of this year’s edition of the New Directors/New Films series, at Film at Lincoln Center and MOMA, April 2-13. “Fiume o Morte!” (April 4-5), by the Croatian filmmaker Igor Bezinović, is a novel approach to historical drama, realized with daring, skill, and sardonic wit. After the First World War, the Croatian town of Rijeka was invaded by Italian nationalists led by the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, who, between 1919 and 1921, turned the city, under its Italian name of Fiume, into a proto-Fascist dictatorship much admired by Benito Mussolini. To recount the regime’s rise and fall, Bezinović gathers archival footage and still photos—and, largely via person-in-the-street interviews, assembles a cast of nonprofessionals to reënact events at the very sites where they occurred. The film’s self-deprecatingly comedic artifice nonetheless captures chilling details of an adventure that starts with a demagogue’s cult-like following and ends with bloody corpses. The movie powerfully conveys the eerie sense of experiencing history in the present tense.

A literary detective story that’s rich in the fine grain of daily life, “Lost Chapters” (April 3 and April 5), by the Venezuelan filmmaker Lorena Alvarado, stars her real-life family: her sister, Ena; her father, Ignacio; and her grandmother, Adela Rodríguez. Ena, who’s twenty-five, is staying with Ignacio, a book collector specializing in the national literature. In one of his volumes, Ena finds a handwritten note about an early-twentieth-century Venezuelan author she’s never heard of, and, undertaking her own investigation, begins to doubt whether he really existed. Meanwhile, Adela, a former poet now showing signs of dementia, creates spontaneous poetry of poignant incongruities. Alvarado and José Ostos did the cinematography, and their keen sense of light, color, and tempo invests Adela’s tender observations and enigmatic digressions with drama and passion.

The documentary filmmaker Courtney Stephens directs her first quasi-fiction, “Invention” (April 5-6), in collaboration with the actress Callie Hernandez, who stars as Carrie, a young woman who visits a small New England town, where she claims the ashes of her late father, a doctor and a spiritual healer whose ambitious schemes came to naught. There, Carrie inherits the patent for his electromagnetic device and, to better understand it and him, connects with his collaborators, and enters the vortex of their conspiracies. The local, face-to-face action is amplified by clips of her father’s infomercials (taken from actual footage of Hernandez’s father) and by wry metafictional touches. With startling views of unspoiled nature, Stephens evokes vestiges of the philosophies of Emerson and Thoreau surviving the din of modern media.—Richard Brody

About Town

Off Broadway

Classic Stage Company’s revival of Alice Childress’s “Wine in the Wilderness,” from 1969, directed by LaChanze, is a character study about a character study: during the 1964 Harlem riots, Bill (Grantham Coleman), a hipster painter, works on a triptych about Black femininity; for his portrait of a “messed up chick,” he chooses the brash, needy, unsophisticated Tommy (Olivia Washington) as his model. She thinks she’s being wooed, only to discover that she’s an object of derision for Bill’s urbane friends. “Forget yourself sometime, sugar,” Bill says, but instead Tommy demands dignity and even love. Bill’s pivot to recognizing her value is wish-fulfillment stuff, but Childress’s own brush moves quickly over him, more interested in the details of a forgotten kind of woman and her beauty.—Helen Shaw (Through April 13.)

Dance

With their mix of authority and recklessness, Sara Mearns’s performances have been drawing audiences to New York City Ballet for almost two decades. She is a restless artist, unafraid to reveal her challenges: depression, hearing loss, burnout. All of this is poured into “Artists at the Center: Sara Mearns.” Part one is “Don’t Go Home,” a dance play, inspired by Mearns, written by Jonathon Young, and choreographed by the Canadian dancer Guillaume Côté. “I needed the piece to be personal. I needed it to be related to what I was going through in my life,” Mearns says of the work. Part two is a première by the former Alvin Ailey dancer Jamar Roberts, who performs alongside Mearns and the incisive Jeroboam Bozeman (also formerly of Ailey), among others.—Marina Harss (City Center; April 3-5.)

Jazz

A few days after his one-hundredth birthday, the saxophonist Marshall Allen began recording his début solo album. Starting in the nineteen-fifties, Allen worked alongside the cosmic jazz explorer Sun Ra, as a member of the Arkestra, and he’s led the ensemble in the creator’s stead since 1995. That is a larger-than-life legacy all its own, but “New Dawn,” released on Valentine’s Day, reveals that the titan isn’t yet done checking items off his bucket list. The music is clearly informed by his service in the Arkestra, but it is also resoundingly personal, culling from and synthesizing more than a half century of experience. As Allen steps out from under a large shadow, his grand solo turn is prime evidence that it’s never too late to set out on a new adventure.—Sheldon Pearce (Roulette; April 5.)

Broadway

First it was a club in pre-Castro Havana. Then, in 1996, a group of virtuosos from its heyday adopted the name for themselves and for their Grammy-winning album. Now “Buena Vista Social Club” is a Broadway musical (transferred from Atlantic Theatre Company). The book, by Marco Ramirez, rigs a narrative between the album’s recording and the club’s last hurrah, and at the show’s heart are songs from the album, many of them pulsating Cuban standards rich in subtext. Their melodies give way to bravura solos, including some flurry-fingered tres playing. Equally formidable, if less spry, is Natalie Venetia Belcon’s imperious, late-career Omara Portuondo, reluctant to sing again. But despite Saheem Ali’s sure-handed direction the storytelling sometimes stalls—a common fate for a jukebox musical, however lively its songs.—Dan Stahl (Schoenfeld; open run.)

Read Vinson Cunningham on the show’s Off Broadway première, in 2023.

Off Broadway