“Bach, Before and Beyond,” a music series directed by Walter Klauss, will present its second concert of the season at the Old Whalers Church in Sag Harbor on Sunday at 3 p.m.

Titled “Beacons,” the program features the Accord Treble Choir, a group of nine women whose repertoire ranges from medieval chants to Renaissance madrigals to the vast array of 20th and 21st-century composers who wrote specifically for upper voice a cappella ensembles. 

The program includes pieces about stars and the Virgin Mary, a Norwegian folk song trilogy, a spiritual, and a civil rights-era freedom song. Tickets are $20 at the door and can also be purchased at the Romany Kramoris Gallery in Sag Harbor.

The final program in the Madoo Conservancy’s winter lecture series will feature Christopher LaGuardia on “Our Waterways” on Sunday at noon in Madoo’s recently restored 1740 barn in Sagaponack.

Mr. LaGuardia, whose eponymous landscape architecture firm is located in Water Mill, will discuss what sustainability means within various coastal environments, present alternative methods to garden design using case studies from coastal areas, and formulate principles of design that guide the process of working in sensitive coastal habitats.

Tickets are $25, $20 for members. The talk will be followed by a reception.

Like a lion, the Hamptons International Film Festival is coming in strong this month, with a variety of programs ranging from rock documentaries to a master class on film interpretations of “Romeo and Juliet” to animated family fare.

The festival’s Now Showing series will resume on Saturday at 6 p.m. with a screening of “Concert for George” at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor. The film captures the November 2002 tribute to George Harrison staged at London’s Royal Albert Hall a year after his death.

Directed by David Leland, the documentary includes performances by Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney, Tom Petty, Billy Preston, Ravi and Anoushka Shankar, Ringo Starr, and many other rock luminaries.

“Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami” focuses on both the public and private worlds of the pop culture icon whom the Hollywood Reporter critic Stephen Dalton labeled an “art-rock glamazon supreme” in a review that described the film as “a sumptuous sensory treat.”

Directed by Sophie Fiennes, the 2017 film follows Ms. Jones to her home in Jamaica, into the studio with longtime collaborators Sly and Robbie, and onstage with performances of “Slave to the Rhythm,” “Love Is the Drug,” and other hits. “Grace Jones” will be shown at Bay Street on March 18 at 1 p.m.

The festival will present a free screening of “The Breadwinner,” Nora Twomey’s award-winning animated feature about Parvana, an 11-year-old girl growing up under the Taliban in Afghanistan, on March 25 at 1 p.m. at the Southampton Arts Center.

When her father is arrested, Parvana disguises herself as a boy so she can work to support her family. Peter Debruge, a Variety critic, wrote, “ ‘The Breadwinner’ proves nothing short of exceptional, celebrating as it does a young woman who faces adversity head-on.” 

As part of the Hamptons Arts Weekend Festival, a.k.a. THAW Fest, HIFF will present a master class at Guild Hall on March 24 at 4 p.m. on the cinematic interpretations of “Romeo and Juliet” by Franco Zeffirelli and Baz Luhrmann. Guild Hall’s own production of the play, which runs from Wednesday through March 25, will be on the stage that night at 7 p.m. 

In Process @ the Watermill Center, a series that encourages engagement between the center’s resident artists and the community, will feature presentations by artists working in four different disciplines on Saturday afternoon between 2 and 4. A tour of the center’s facilities and grounds will be offered between 1 and 2. 

Jayoung Chung is a Korean multimedia artist whose work embraces performance, film, computer graphics, sound, and movement. During her residency she is developing “Empathy,” a dance-performance that illustrates the story based on Martin Buber’s philosophy of engaging with each other and the world.

Using a literal definition of empathy — putting oneself in someone else’s shoes — the piece will end with an open-structured scene during which the audience will be encouraged to physically interact with the primary performer.

Molly Joyce is an American composer and performer who will develop her first full-length album, “Breaking and Entering,” while at the center. The music will be performed entirely on a vintage toy organ that she bought on eBay. 

The instrument has become a primary focus in her work not only because of its unique sound and tuning, but also because it fits her physically impaired left hand. With the organ and the music she composes for it, Ms. Joyce aims to engage and challenge her impairment.

A 2018 Inga Maren Otto Fellow, the Japanese visual artist Masako Miki has shown her immersive installations and detailed works on paper throughout the Bay Area and Japan. While at the center she will prepare a new body of work including a large ink drawing and sculptural pieces for a 2019 site-specific installation at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

Hugh Ryan, an American writer, historian, and curator, is writing a queer history of the Brooklyn waterfront, which will be published by St. Martin’s Press next year, and developing an accompanying exhibition for the Brooklyn Historical Society. 

His work sheds light on the poets, sailors, undercover cops dressed as sailors, brothels, sideshows, communes, rough trade, Nazi spies, trans men, dancers, machinists, and many more who thrived in Brooklyn until being systematically erased by conservative forces in the 1950s and 1960s.

Film Trilogy

Lotte Nielsen, a former Watermill Center resident, will present three short films on Sunday afternoon at 3 at the Southampton Arts Center. “YAOI Copenhagen” was filmed in an abandoned movie theater on the outskirts of Copenhagen, “YAOI Istanbul” was shot in a dilapidated wooden house in Istanbul, and “YAOI Long Island” was created at the Watermill Center. All films include fictional elements in an otherwise true-to-life narrative, whose participants were culled from local LGBT organizations in the three cities.

All the above programs and the tour are free, but registration is required through the center’s website.

A tribute concert to the music of Johnny Cash will be performed by Philip Bauer at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor tomorrow at 8 p.m. Mr. Bauer has performed with such renowned country music stars as LeAnn Rimes, David Frizzell, Vince Gill, and Toby Keith and has taken his Johnny Cash tribute show across the country and to Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, and Australia. Tickets to the show, which will include such hits as “Walk the Line” and “Ring of Fire,” are $35 in advance, $45 tomorrow.

The Stowaways, an improvisational comedy group described on Bay Street’s website as “a crew of hilarious, irreverent goofballs who simply refuse to utilize a script,” will return to the theater for two more shows, Saturday and March 17, both at 8 p.m. Tickets range from $10 to $35.

Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, a British landscape architect, will present the fifth annual Madoo in Manhattan lecture on Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. at the Cosmopolitan Club. Titled “The Dramatic Potential of Landscape,” his talk will cover recent projects in Britain and the West Indies.

As gardens adviser to Historic Royal Palaces, Mr. Longstaffe-Gowan’s responsibilities include the five royal palaces in greater London. He recently created and implemented a new garden in Chapel Court, redesigned the new Royal Kitchen Garden at Hampton Court, and completed the design of Kensington Palace Gardens.

Tickets are $150, $125 for Madoo members. A reception will follow the talk. Jackets and ties are required for men.

“The Americanization of Emily,” a widely praised 1964 antiwar film starring Julie Andrews and James Garner, is next up in the Sag Harbor Partnership’s American Values film series. However, the presence of Ms. Andrews at Sunday’s 2 p.m. screening of the film at Pierson High School in Sag Harbor has resulted in a sellout. Ms. Andrews will will be interviewed by the film historian Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan. A waiting list has been established at sagharborcinema.org.

It’s not too late to secure a ticket to Guild Hall’s annual Academy of the Arts dinner, which will take place Monday evening from 6 to 10 at the Rainbow Room in Manhattan. This year’s honorees are Audrey Flack (visual arts), Gail Sheehy (literary arts), Harris Yulin (performing arts), and Sheri Sandler (leadership and philanthropy). Dinner tickets start at $1,500, $500 for patrons 21 to 40

Sure, the brightly hued wall sculptures and paintings of Mary Heilmann looked more fitting at Dia’s Dan Flavin Art Institute during the summer, but the shot of infectious cheerful color is just what we need on these gray days. The fact that they harmonize with Flavin’s fluorescent sculptures upstairs doubles the dosage of this balm for seasonal affective disorder.

This group of pieces, mostly from the past year or so, include the lively “A Row of Cups and Saucers” and several two-dimensional works. The artist works small, but her choice of acrylic colors packs a powerful Post-Minimalist punch.

Her two early works, “The First Vent” from 1972 and “Rio Nido,”  demonstrate an earlier, more detailed presentation than the pure sectors of color in her later work. “The First Vent” even resembles a vent in an abstracted, memory-of-an-object kind of way. The exhibition brochure notes that she loosely drew the vent in the same scale as the vents in her studio. Inspired by Donald Judd, she has said that she found his references to real and domestic objects significant to her practice.

The vent, a piece of metal hardware not far removed from forms the Minimalists used as their subjects, becomes undulated and blurry in her hands, literally, as she used her fingers to paint the lines, giving it a more individualized interpretation. In this early work she chose to paint on a “rectangular plane” to be “placed flat against the wall,” i.e., the main thing Judd found wrong with painting. This decision shows both an adherence to and a thumbing of her nose in real time at some of the stricter Minimalist doctrine. 

“Rio Nido” from 1987 looks much closer to her later work, a divided field but still on one contiguous surface. The blobs of color in its field of black that have traveled over from the surrounding sections were excised in future paintings. Ms. Heilmann comes from Northern California, and her attachment to bright, West Coast-inspired colors seems not to have been dulled by her years of East Coast residency. 

As she told The Star in 2017, she began coming here in the 1960s, first at the invitation of Bruce Nauman, who spent a summer working at Roy Lichtenstein’s house, then rented in Springs and Wainscott in the ’80s and ’90s, before setting her sights on the house and studio in Bridgehampton that she has lived in since. “Rio Nido” refers to a beach town from her home state, but the composition was prompted by her reacquaintance with the ocean here.

Her own house is essentially around the corner from the renovated firehouse (originally a church) that has become the Flavin Institute, which she passes on the way to the beach. Two of the works in the show, “Red Mirage” and “Green Mirage,” were inspired by Flavin’s “Icons,” his early work that began incorporating light fixtures into flat wall pieces that were not quite paintings and not quite sculptures.

Like Flavin’s “Icons,” Ms. Heilmann’s “Mirages” play with strict Formalism, using painted wood pieces placed over painted canvas to give the surface of the paintings an uneven and sculptural quality. The horizontal bands of color that the painted wood additions partially obscure recall Flavin’s later and best-known works, formed from horizontal bands of fluorescent lights, which can be seen in the loft. 

Not afraid to address the religious overtones of the “Icons” in comparison, she has admitted that her Catholic upbringing has infused her work. The building’s original use as a church adds to the resonance. Given all of the associations, these pieces look especially at home here.

There are a few other works on view, including “Red Metric,” a ceramic piece from 2015 that shows the artist’s loyalty to one of her earliest mediums. Unlike the cups and saucers lined up on the wall, this sculpture alludes to no utilitarian function. Its raison d’etre is to explore the visual possibilities of red glazes, challenge the rules of gravity, soften the edges of the square into a more freeform interpretation, and indeed make something intended to be placed flat against a wall. Ms. Heilmann may have matured since her salad days at Max’s Kansas City, but her young turk attitude (“say something rude and clever and scare the shit out of them,”as she told The Star in 2016) still burns bright. 

The exhibition will remain on view until Memorial Day.

In terms of offering an immediate response to major news and cultural moments, filmmakers are at a disadvantage. The medium’s demands — writing a script, hiring actors, building sets and booking exterior locations, filming the scenes, editing the outcome, and then finding a distributor — do not allow for a swift turnaround.

Yet sometimes filmmakers create stories that dovetail with current events or capture the zeitgeist in a way that seems prescient. A number of films shown last year at the Hamptons International Film Festival and now making the rounds of the awards circuit appear to have done this in their portrayal of wronged and often angry women having their say in nuanced or quite vocal ways. The fact that the revelations about Harvey Weinstein’s predatory behavior came out the day the festival opened has given these films a contextual trajectory from those early screenings to their runs in national and international cinemas, which will culminate in Sunday’s Academy Awards.

In a recent conversation over lunch at the Maidstone in East Hampton, Anne Chaisson, the executive director of the film festival and a film producer, said that “it’s time that women’s voices are heard, period.” Addressing the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements that have been galvanizing forces over the past few months, she said she wasn’t certain if more films were addressing aligned topics this year, “but if it felt like there was more of it this year, then I’m all for it.”

At the head of the line is Martin McDonagh’s “Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri,” which is a favorite for a best picture Oscar, after winning best drama at the Golden Globes, best film and best British film at the British Academy Film and Television Awards, and best ensemble cast from the Screen Actors Guild. Frances McDormand plays a mother whose prompting of local law enforcement to find answers for her daughter’s rape and murder evolves into an extreme showdown of wills. The role has won her most every best actress award so far this year.

Accepting his award for best original screenplay at BAFTA, Mr. McDonagh said, “What we are most proud of in this Time’s Up era is that this is a film about a woman who refuses to take any shit anymore played by a woman who’s always refused to take any shit. I’d like to thank Frances McDormand for a performance that was as unapologetic as it was fearsome.”

While the daughter of Ms. McDormand’s character was raped and it is the mother seeking justice and revenge, not the father or brother, as is often the case in such stories, Ms. Chaisson wondered if it truly captures the moment. “ ‘Three Billboards’ is more of a murder mystery to me,” she said. The rape is part of the crime, but rape has been the subject or an element of many movie stories. The taboo subject for film has been sexual assault, not rape, she said. “The idea that touching a woman in an unwelcome way is bad, most people were afraid to go there. We’ve done every other taboo subject, but no one talks about this. Now, we are.”

“Three Billboards” joined other titles at the festival such as “In the Fade,” a German film by Faith Akin about a woman taking matters in her own hands to get justice for the murders of her husband and son, and “I, Tonya,” a revisiting of the Tonya Harding story from the subject’s point of view. “In the Fade” won the best foreign film award at the Golden Globes and “I, Tonya” garnered Oscar nominations for Margot Robbie, who plays Ms. Harding, and Allison Janney, who plays LaVona Golden, Ms. Harding’s caustic mother. Ms. Janney has snatched up the best supporting actress award from almost every nominating organization this year and is a favorite on Sunday.

“I, Tonya” is a very dark comedy about people struggling to lift themselves out of their circumstances, but who are always getting in the way of themselves in subversive ways. Ms. Harding suffered emotional and physical abuse by her mother and then her husband. For years, it has been assumed that she was behind a 1994 attack that injured Nancy Kerrigan, a teammate and rival. Ms. Harding was ultimately banned from competitive figure skating for life for her alleged involvement. “She said I didn’t do it, and we didn’t listen,” Ms. Chaisson said. “She had a terrible background and a horrible husband and we blamed her. The film was a wake-up call.”

She noted other films at the festival, including “The Square,” in which a journalist played by Elizabeth Moss confronts a man with whom she has had a strange interlude and who would rather avoid her. “She was saying, ‘We had a date. It was weird. Why can’t you talk to me about this?’ ” It was an awkward but real moment not typically seen in movies. "The Square" is nominated for a best foreign film Oscar.

Noah Baumbach’s “The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected),” which is now streaming on Netflix, was critically acclaimed, but may have been shut out from awards consideration after Dustin Hoffman was accused of prior sexual harassment. 

In a subplot of the film, a reticent woman tells her brothers that when she was a teen, their father’s best friend exposed and touched himself while she was in a bathing suit in an outdoor shower. Her brothers engage in some belated revenge, much to her chagrin, resulting in a resonant exchange between the siblings. The sister corrects her brother when he says the man molested her. He replies “but let’s not minimize this, Jean. What he did was shitty and damaging.”

In terms of a more direct demonstration of the themes of #MeToo and Time’s Up, Ms. Chaisson said it may take some time for films to catch up. “The crop of movies that are out are not necessarily representing it yet,” she said. The New York Times noted that women were ascendant at January’s Sundance Film Festival, but that festival’s director said in the same article that “It usually takes about two years for topics to permeate.”

Ms. Chaisson had just returned from Sundance, where HIFF goes primarily to scout documentaries for its SummerDocs program. She said it had always provided a platform for films by and about women and that women continued to make their mark in independent film. That said, she does see more general interest in stories about women and renewed and increased pressure on studios to give women parity in pay and in positions such as director and cinematographer. 

She said it is time that their contributions and women-centered stories get the same attention and support of Hollywood. “There must be change. Everything that has happened this year demands it,” she said. “Any studio that remains tone deaf will deal with quite a force.”