The Human Rights Film Festival 2015 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center has been spotlighting both art as a tool in consciousness raising and the role of women in confronting or changing oppressive governments or laws. No Land's Song documented the role of an Iranian woman, Sara Majafi , in changing the Religious government's banning of women's voices from being soloists in public concerts (official government approved)
One more screening Thursday june 18 IFC NYC
In Trials of Spring Gini Reticker looks at what happened after the burst of hope that we all shared those first few months in Egypt. As she did in her Oscar nominated documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell (essential viewing) she focuses on women as a filter to what goes on , We ride a roller coaster of events and surge with the excitement, fear and energy of a young arab woman and pulls no punches Here is the trailer ;
and here is the very engaging post screening Q&A at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival at the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater which has includes a HUGE surprise
The Burden of Peacedirected by Joey Boink May be the biggest surprise for me because I knew little ot the civil war that took place in Guatemala and the over 200,000 Mayan indigenous people tortured and murdered by a military dictatorship. The film documents the role that Claudia Paz y Paz, Guatemala's first female Attorney General in bringing to trial the highest heads of government and getting a guilty verdict despite the media and the powerful elite attacking her, her staff and her family. It also documents the role a liberation theology Bishop not unlike El Salvador's Romano played until murdered, Modest and relentless if with a smile it is a remarkable story that shows you can change history even when your victory is snatched back .
here is the trailer
and here is the very informative Q&A at the IFC during the HRWFF NYC .. and yes the film maker and his dutch NGO head in Guatemala have movie star good looks !
there is one more screening thurs 6/18 Film Society of Lincoln Center
It’s been called “the most homophobic place on Earth.” Jamaica is known for its beautiful beaches but to be gay in Jamaica means an ugly truth: your life is at risk. The Abominable Crime, a documentary by Micah Fink, exposes the endemic violence against gays and lesbians on the island nation and closes out season seven of the AfroPoP: The Ultimate Cultural Exchange TV series. It introduces you to a lesbian mom, shot twice for her sexual preference. And to Maurice Tomlinson, one of Jamaica’s most prominent human rights activists forced to flee after he was outed and received death threats.
Please join us (and spread the word to your readers/listeners/viewers) for an online screening and chat with the director Micah Fink and Maurice on Wednesday, February 18, at 5:30 PM ET. The event is co-sponsored by Human Rights Watch. Here is the link to sign up: https://ovee.itvs.org/screenings/xx0ov Please also let me know if you do plan to attend.
The film premieres on Monday, at 8 pm ET/10 pm PT and will be available at blackpublicmedia.orgfor a month. A press release on the film/episode is attached as is a press kit with details. If you’d like to interview the director or Maurice, please let me know.
Jim Fouratt’s REEL DEAL: Movies that Matter June 2014 Ida, Night Moves, Before You Know it,Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, Human Rights Festival, BAMcinemaFest 2014
June brings summer breezes and vacation nights! hey catch a movie in a THEATER! We can recommend quite a few: I do recommend the new Spiderman movie for sheer fun with an undertone of humanity personalized in the performance of . an unbulked out Andrew Garfield
Bryan Singer’s X-MAN : DAYS OF FUTURE PAST
is a spectacle at story-telling trickster best.
Polanski's Venus in Furs
sizzles with kind of sexual tension that sm games can generate,
HBO has a couple of excellent films for lGBT month, THE CASE AGAINST THE 8
which shows how a Republican conservative and Liberal Democrat joined forces to argue successfullyor same sex civil marriage and win at the SupremeCourt. Watch a Q&A from HOT DOCS Festiva
Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart,first performed at the Public Theater in 1985, was a brilliant AIDS wakeup call! It has finally made it to the HBO screen.
The transformation of the strident, yet timely, advocacy play tittering on melodrama into a deeply moving, historically correct, nuanced representation of how human beings, in particular gay men, were confronted by a pandemic that found little sympathy or concern in halls of government, the pulpits of churches and the homes of most Americans is remarkable. Kramer’s screenplay, in the hands of director Ryan (Glee) Murphy and a superb cast including Mark Ruffalo (playing Ned Weeks the character based on Kramer) and Julia Roberts, has opened up the play in the way that only narrative cinema can. Having lived through the period myself and having personal knowledge of all the characters based on real people, the movie left me suspicious at first. However, it completely brought me back to a time and place of much pain, death, grief, anger, and the awakening of the silent majority in the gay male community to the horror of a plague and the restraints of the closet. Highest of praise for Kramer and the integrity of his script; to HBO for allowing Murphy and his accomplished actors 0..to fearlessly representing gay sexuality and relationships authentically; to expose homophobia and to role model how the lesbian and gay community grew up in the darkest days of AIDS because of demanding activists like Kramer. It all takes place in the years before Kramer and others founded ACT UP. Like Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, the Normal Heart throws its wings wide and embraces all human beings confronted with loss, grief and anger. Kudos to all involved. The Normal Heart is a must watch.
June is also a great festival month, The people behind the ROOFTOP Film Festival have figured out to make a screening of a new film into a great nightclub event indoors and out. Check out the schede rooftop film Festival schedule 2014 which incudes
BAMcinemaFest 2014 (June 18-29) opens with the best movie of the year; Richard linklater’sBOYHOOD.
This festival in just six years has positioned itself because of bold programing choices right next to MoMA’s New Directors here is a compete isting of the filmsbamcinemafest2014 compete program which also includes the funnest movie at Sundance this year The Foxy Merkins the latest from the wild imagination of the lesbian Woody Allen, Madeleine Olnek,
Human Rights Watch Film Festival June 12 -22nd Lincoln Center
In its 25th year, the Human Rights Watch Festival is the essential documentary film festival that travels the world with it fingers on the pulse of change and conflict be it government or in the family home. No where else can one get the insight that disciplined and committed documentary filmmakers contribute. Provocative, insightful, disruptive and dangerous, theses are the films that have the energy of people and society in conflict and change, I recommend a careful look at the descriptions in the online schedule, but will recommend four here:
1 : E-Team . The Sundance award winner takes on a fact finding trip into Syria and into places no journalist officially can go. This is what Human Rights Watch teams do. Neutral and just after facts, not propaganda. We follow three workers including a husband and wife as they refuse to be be intimidated by danger and like the best of action heros fearlessly do their job, But this is real life, real time.
2:
This year's Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner makes personal the battle of Syrians in a fight for freedom from an oppressive government,. Homs has been the center of the resistance and the target of the most serious bombing and military invasion. We follow a small group of Syrians including a charismatic young professional soccer player who walks away from the game to fight for freedom. Documentary filmmaking at its bravest. We actually almost become through the lens embedded with then and experience vicariously what the conflict is like on a personal in your face landscape. World premier Sundance Q&A
3: PRIVATE VIOLENCE
Watch the subjects and director discuss with Amy Goodman Democracy y Now) after world premier at Sundance 2014
Four women a day are murdered in their home each day by their abusive husband or ex or boyfriend. In Cynthia Hill’s film we learn about this hidden fact and meet two women, One is a victim and the other is an advocate for stopping domestic violence by bringing it into public consciousness and out of the shadows. It answers the simplistic question of “Why don’t they just leave?” with an in-depth exploration of a very complicated condition
4: TO BE TAKEI When George Takei, Star Trek’s cult figure and Asian role model, came out in his late 60’s, his fans while not surprised, seemed not to care. He was and remains a Trekkie hero. But George did not just sit back and sign autographs. He became engaged in the fight for lesbian and gay rights. InJennifer Foot’s doc we follow him and his dutiful husband Brad as George puts a famous Asian face on the same sex civil marriage national fight. There seems to be no stopping Takei in this telling of his story of success and the power of the closet. Foot also tells the story of Japanese internment and migration with in the US. Takei himself is a piece of work; TO BE TAKEI ∫is a warm look at social injustice and the Asian immigrants quest for fame.
The Green Prince, I would be remiss if I did not also mention The Green Prince, Nadav Schirman’s film that had people arguing after it screened at the NY Film Festival and at Sundance (won the audience award) . I did not like it, nor have I liked the director’s other work. To me it is highly crafted propaganda here hidden in a sensationalist report on the teen-age son of Hamas leader who is turned by the Israeli secret police while in jail (and that alone deserves a whole separate discussion) and becomes an informer from inside the center of Palestinian resistance movement. Shocking , but ,,,,,,,,
Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning and Peter Sarsgaard play the central characters in the latest film from celebrated US indie director Kelly Reichardt (Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, River of Grass, Old Joy) . Here, in her most accessible film to date , Reichardt takes on an activist response to global warming. Loosely based on actual Earth Liberation Front’s actions in the North West, she focuses on the serious nature of commitment in a time of environmental crisis. Jesse Eisenberg, again, proves he has an uncanny ability to mine the depth of a character's humanity and commitment. He is breathtakingly committed . Principal triumphs inner conflict but at a price,. This is not a documentary. It is a beautifully shot narrative with nuanced writing that takes us not only into acts of eco-aggression but, and this is always Reichardt trump card, into the interior life of her characters, The discipline of her visual palate locates the drama subtext in the language spoken. Serious, yes, Visually stunning, yes!, Likable, well given the subject,no. Important, very.
IDA director Pawel Pawlikowski
When Bill Clinton's Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright discovered in her 60’s that in fact she was Jewish, America got for the first time on television the experience that many Jewish people knew about and kept quiet. To survive the Holocaust parents gave up their children and let them be brought up as non-Jews. IDA is set in Poland and tells the story of a young women about to take her vows to become a Roman Catholic nun when she is sent to meet her only relative, a former Communist Party leader who is a Jew and tells the young nun to be she too is Jewish. A journey to discover what happened to her family and how she wound up in a convent is the backbone of what may be the most haunting film of the Year.British film maker Pawel Pawlikowski was Polish born. With touches of Bergman and Goddard he beings to life this revelatory story in black and white, Frame after frame resonate Robert Frank and Bill Brant. Ida is breathtaking to watch If you will only see one film this month, see Ida
BEFORE YOU KNOW IT director PJ Ravel
It happens. One day despite what ever voodoo you use you wake up and you are ...uh ...er .. um ..oh ..well ,,,OLD! It is a particular moment for gay men who lived through the AIDS pandemic. No matter how hard you try not to see the truth, the body does not lie.In any case you feel it. Surviving is an act of courage and wisdom. PJ Ravel is a still young, Filipino-American filmmaker who is gay. Ravel is best know for Trinidad his expose of the sexual reassignment surgery mill in Colorado; for being the cinematographer on the Academy Award nominated Katrina docTrouble in Water and producer /director of the Christeene music videos, He started to think about what happens to gay men when they get old. Not the ageless, rich one’s like SIR ELTON but the old gay men who you don’t see out in the bars or in page 6 spreads That ordinary gay man who just seems to disappear when he turns 66 , So he went looking for old gay men to film. BEFORE YOU KNOW IT is the result. Three old gay men . One owns a bar in a beach town in Texas that caters to older gay men and aging drag queens who perform in the bar, the regulars who consider this their chosen family, A second man in his late 70’s ,who lives in a trailer park in Northern Florida lonely since his wife of 40 some years died ...and he has a secret. And the third is a very energetic black man from Harlem who works as a community organizer for SAGE an organization founded to help elderly lesbians and gay men. But this man refuses to tell his age.
meet the subjects :
No one is rich like in the public imagination and each takes PJ into their intimate life and on their journey of growing old. Funny, it has a very universal appeal about aging , (if we do live that long) and a very specific critique about being an old homosexual in America, And trust me you just might fall in love with one of them.
Stand Clear of the Closing Doors director Sam Fleischne
review and video interview Liza Bear
Sam Fleischner's poignant, well-scripted drama Stand Clear of the Closing Doors won a Special Mention for its premiere at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival. Shot entirely in the Rockaways over a three-week period with a cast and crew of only fifteen, the story is about Ricky (Jesus Sanchez-Velez), a 13-year-old-boy on the autism spectrum who elopes when his older sister Carla (Azul Zorrilla) doesn't pick him up from school one day and rides the subway for an agonizing couple of days--until [the real] Super Storm Sandy intervenes. Capturing Ricky's intense mode of perception through expert point-of view cinematography and editing, the narrative contrasts Ricky's quiet concentration and growing resourcefulness as he learns to fend for himself with the emotional turmoil of his hard-working mother Mariana (Andrea Suarez Paz) ; it also explores the effects of his elopement on the family dynamic. (They are undocumented Mexican immigrants.) An unusually muted color palette, as well as subtle changes of camera focus, greatly enhance Fleischner's portrayal of the special nature of autistic perception. Here is an interview I did with the director followed by the trailer Liza Bear interviews Stand Clear of the Closing Door dir Sam Fleischne
trailer :
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