INDY Selects: What to Do in the Triangle This Week

Here’s a job you probably didn’t know existed: an infidelity expert or “mistress dispeller” who is hired—by the wronged party, most likely—to go undercover, break up an affair, and restore a marriage. In China, this delicate profession is apparently a booming industry, such that filmmaker Elizabeth Lo decided to embed herself in the work for three years, resulting in an intimate documentary that, per Full Frame’s website, “offers a nuanced exploration of contemporary Chinese culture, gender roles, morality, and navigating betrayal.” Mistress Dispeller screened at last year’s Full Frame and is the last installment of the festival’s free screening series before the festival itself kicks off in April. A Q&A with documentary producer Emma Miller will follow the screening. —Sarah Edwards

Sometimes, forgetting the fragmented nature of our modern media landscape, I’ll casually reference Channel 5 or All Gas No Brakes in passing, expecting my interlocutor to naturally know what I’m talking about. This is, after all, a YouTube channel with more than 3 million subscribers, whose longform, gonzo-esque investigative pieces—spanning from unvarnished street interviews, to dispatches from gun nut conventions and White Lives Matter rallies, to hours-long sit-downs with national figures like Hunter Biden or Pete Buttigieg—yield some of the wildest clips on the internet. And with a regularity that still stuns me anew every time, this person will stop me and say they’ve never heard of it. 

Channel 5 may not be known to everyone just yet, but in recent years, the outlet has grown in scale and cult status not only for its highly attuned sense of entertainment value, but because of a deceptively committed approach to serious journalism—a combination that in our contemporary context comes off as novel, and at times even enlightened. This week, C5 comes to Carolina Theatre as part of its “Carnival” tour, and I have about as much clarity as to what will happen as I do about what video will pop up on their YouTube next. The flyer promises “magic,” rap battles, and a secret documentary screening—a characteristically eclectic Channel 5 medley that says pretty much everything I need to know, and nothing at all, at the same time. — Ryan Cocca

Brooklyn-based nonprofit theater ensemble The TEAM, comprised of actors of all ages, makes “radical revisionist American history in play form,” per its Instagram. The shows that TEAM puts on are authored and produced collectively, creating an experimental blend of fact and fiction, past and present, that challenges many of the dominant narratives about United States history being pushed right now. Here’s the nonprofit’s description of Reconstructing, which makes a Carolina Performing Arts stop before heading to Dartmouth College: “As a house becomes a plantation becomes a college campus mainstay, the show’s tour-de-force cast shepherds us through these legacies, real and imagined, to ask how, in the aftermath of slavery, we might move through history together.” Tickets are $25-$55. —SE

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In tandem with the exhibition, Bill Bamberger: Boys Will Be Men—the newest segment of a coming-of-age portrait series that Durham photographer Bamberger has been doing for decades—the Ackland is hosting a series of events on adolescence. For consideration: A 2 p.m. February 22 talk with Bamberger, curator Lauren Turner, and students from Durham School of the Arts who are subjects in the photos  (free, RSVP required) or a screening of Aftersun, the following day, at the Chelsea Theater.

Shot on 35mm, Aftersun follows a daughter’s memory of a formative trip with her father, played by Paul Mescal, and by most accounts, is all but guaranteed to make you cry. I haven’t seen Aftersun, so I can’t vouch for that; I can, however, attest to the tearjerky quality of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, another film in the Ackland series, which screens at The Lumina Theater on March 9. —SE

sdfdSpring Council grew up watching her mother—the late legend Mama Dip—taste and tweak dishes without measuring a thing, learning to cook by smell and sight and feel. In Southern Roots, Council’s new cookbook-slash-memoir, that sensory attention carries into the prose: cornmeal-coated porgies hit hot oil, and you hear the pop; a cake is done when its surface springs back under a gentle touch; a country ham sizzling on the stove fills the house with a salty, smoky stench. The book pairs recipes with essays about growing up in Chapel Hill’s Northside neighborhood, not far from the library where Council reads Monday evening. —Lena Geller

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