By Yun-hua Chen. After the Chechen Wars, many changes happened. Refugees and guerrilla fighters from Chechnya had a major impact on the Islamic faith of the Kist people in Pankisi. Leila and her daughter, Mariam, represent these two generations before and after the Chechen Wars.” Adamiani, screened at the international […]
Eye on (and Off) the Ball: William Klein’s The French (1982)
By Thomas Puhr. Beyond just chronicling an event, Klein’s sports doc is a cultural artifact in and of itself – not about the time, but of it. With this year’s French Open making the rounds on the news, now is an ideal opportunity to revisit the tournament’s famous 1981 competition, […]
The Power of ‘Yes’: A Wakefield Poole Remembrance
By Andrew Repasky McElhinney. Poole’s life covers an enviable (at least in retrospect, at least to me) span of the post-WWII 20th century America…. [with] one of the first positive representations of Gay life and Gay sex in the U.S., and a talisman for the then emerging Pride movement.” I […]
An Adrenaline-Fueled Race to The Rescue
By Elias Savada. Unfolding with military precision, enhanced by a steady, determined pacing…. We can be an ingenious species. When bad things happen, there are any number of special people who come up with solutions to seemingly unsolvable, life-threatening problems. The crippled Apollo 13 spacecraft is often called mankind’s greatest feat of improvised […]
The Face of the Female Guestworker Experience: Pınar Öğrenci on Gurbet is a Home Now
By N. Buket Cengiz. I began to explore how the guestworker phenomenon was represented in literature, cinema, and music…. As one of the latest representatives of the new generation migrant artists, I wanted to follow the footsteps of the artists before me and join them by including this kind of […]
Waiting for da Vinci, or Someone Like Him: The Lost Leonardo
By Elias Savada. Danish director Koefoed has created an absorbing gathering of principal players in the scams and schemes at play in the art world, gathering opinions, comments, and stories that could make your toes curl, and rob you blind.” When I say Leonardo, most of you will think either […]
Justice for Alternative Identities: Queer Japan
By Matthew Fullerton. A welcomed addition to a wonderful run, in recent years, of international documentaries highlighting the experiences, struggles, and successes of LGBTQ people in countries not normally associated with sensitivity toward LGBTQ activism.” Queer Japan, from Canadian filmmaker Graham Kolbeins and Altered Innocence, an American distributor of artistic […]
Cherishing the Legendary Haruomi Hosono: No Smoking
By Matthew Fullerton. Charming in that it strikes a fine balance of chronology and intimate, and often amusing, interludes of today’s seventy-something Hosono.” Japan’s Brian Eno, Neil Young, and Mark Mothersbaugh are just a few of the allusions bandied about by diehard fans of musician, singer-songwriter, composer, producer, and all-round […]
American Decay, Viewed Through A Hometown – Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope
By Michael Sandlin. ‘The election of President Reagan in 1980 initiated a mass transfer of wealth and power away from ordinary Americans’ intones Kristof in his voiceover; of course, what Kristof doesn’t tell you is that many of these ‘ordinary’ Americans voted for Reagan, thus essentially voting away their own […]
Frustration in Falfurrias: Lisa Molomot and Jeffrey Bemiss’s Missing in Brooks County
By Elias Savada. The film examines, sometimes in gruesome detail, the unfortunate migrant disappearances and deaths that have occurred in this eponymous region of Texas, about an hour’s drive from the Mexican border….” I’ve watched a lot of documentaries through the years. Among those that make me mad: Blackfish (2013), […]