Documentary – Page 2 – Bitch Flicks

‘Starless Dreams’ Offers an Intimate Look at Iran Through Its Juvenile Detention Centers

In ‘Starless Dreams,’ we learn about the lives of teenage girls inside Iran’s juvenile detention centers, but we also learn how director Mehrdad Oskouei attempts to change hearts and minds in his own country. It’s an attempt that’s packaged for his fellow citizens rather than foreigners and, watching the film as an outsider is a complicated, multilayered experience.

Written by Katherine Murray. | Starless Dreams is screening at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.

You can learn a lot about a culture by listening to the way its inhabitants discuss their disagreements – what they do and don’t say; how they couch their arguments; which topics are tacitly understood to be out of bounds. In Starless Dreams, we learn about the lives of teenage girls inside Iran’s juvenile detention centers, but we also learn how director Mehrdad Oskouei attempts to change hearts and minds in his own country. It’s an attempt that’s packaged for his fellow citizens rather than foreigners and, watching the film as an outsider is a complicated, multilayered experience.

The documentary, which has won multiple awards since its release, including the Amnesty International Film Prize, follows a group of girls who live in a correctional center outside Tehran. For the most part, the girls who appear in Starless Dreams could just as well be living in many other parts of the world. The stories they tell are all too familiar – they come from poor families where there faced violence and substance abuse; they got into crime through their husbands or boyfriends; they were molested, raped, or assaulted at some point; their futures look bleak and “pain drips from the walls.”

The detention center is, in some ways, an oasis from a world they don’t want to return to. Living communally in a dormitory-style room, the girls Oskouei interviews laugh, sing, and build snowmen together. They comfort each other and bond over their shared experiences, good and bad. Most are afraid to go back to their families or back to the street when they’re finally released. All of them harbor a dark, painful story about how they got to this place.

One by one, they open up to Oskouei with incredible candor, revealing that the brave face they put on masks a terrible loneliness and pain. They regret what they’ve done and what’s happened to them – what they’ve become because of what’s happened to them – and they speak to the camera as if this is the first time anyone has asked how they feel. Based on what we hear, it may very well be.

Oskouei doesn’t interview the guards or correctional workers, but we occasionally hear them speak off-camera, or see them drift across the screen. In one scene, one of the girls who’s just been released, tells a female guard that she’s afraid to go outside and see her father – afraid of what he’ll do, afraid she’ll have to run away again, afraid she’ll get back into drugs. The guard tells her, in a frustrated, exasperated tone, that she’s no longer their responsibility, even if she kills herself.

It’s not a very nice thing to say, but it’s reflective of the way prison systems work in many countries, including Canada and the United States. Prisons aren’t built to address the social, systemic factors that lead people to commit crimes in the first place – they’re just meant to punish criminals and send them on their way. The transition plan we see in Starless Dreams could be described as “putting child abuse victims back in the hands of child abusers,” since the rules require that someone from the detainee’s family come to retrieve her. One of Oskouei’s subjects initially refuses to identify herself because she doesn’t want her family to find her again – she says that she ran away because her uncle molested her and that, when she told her mother, her mother called her a liar and beat her. When she eventually relents and the guards contact her family, an off-camera voice says, “I’ll tell them they have to be nice to you,” which is the kind of intervention that doesn’t help at all.

It’s clear that most of these girls need a social worker more than they need a detention center, but that’s not what the system is equipped to provide them. I understand the guards’ frustration – they can’t be everything to everyone; it’s not their job – but there’s something heartbreaking about the way these girls hope the adults in their lives will help them, only to be disappointed each time. There’s a sense in which Oskouei, who they call “Uncle Mehrdad,” may be the only adult to take a genuine interest in their welfare. While he’s doing important work with this documentary, he also packs up his camera and departs after a few weeks, leaving us with the question of what happens after.

There’s a strange scene in the latter half of the film, where the girls are visited by an unidentified religious official. He leads them in prayer and then begins a discussion about “human rights.” We don’t see the whole discussion, but the girls ask him very politely – considering the circumstances – why it is that women have so few rights in Iran. He seems to respond by saying that we can’t do whatever we want in life and need to do what society expects of us. But the record scratch moment for me is when one of the girls, who’s been sentenced to death for killing her abusive father, asks why, if a child kills her father, the child is sentenced to death but, if a father kills his children, it isn’t even a crime.

Starless Dreams doesn’t explain or debate Sharia – or any part of Iran’s judicial system – directly. The problems faced by the girls Oskouei profiles seem – and on some levels, are – universal, but, for a foreign audience, there are occasional reminders that these universal experiences take place in a different social and political context. According to Amnesty International, Iran’s criminal justice system is a terrifying web of torture, mutilation, and execution – sometimes of minors – and women and minorities have few protections under law. Oskouei asked the government to let him make this documentary for seven years, and his stated aim is not to overthrow the judicial system, but to generate a greater feeling of compassion for the girls inside of it. This is how you couch an argument about the prison system in Iran.

One of the truths I’ve learned over the years is that you can’t change someone’s culture from the outside. You can’t do it without speaking the language – not just the literal, actual language of words and sentences and conjugations, but the tacit language; the language where you know how to talk about things within a certain political context. Mehrdad Oskouei speaks Persian better than I do, but I trust that he speaks Iran better than I do, too. Starless Dreams is a much more gentle, and gently melancholy film than I’d expect to see in this context, but maybe it’s the film we need. Maybe it’s one that will actually change the way Iranians see women and girls.

Starless Dreams is screening internationally as part of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. If you miss the festival, this is a documentary to keep on your list in the upcoming months. It’s isn’t an easy thing to sit with, but it provides a rich entry point into some very complex questions about the state of human rights in Iran and the state of correctional systems internationally.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.

‘Making a Murderer,’ ‘Fantastic Lies,’ and the Uneasy Exculpation Narratives by Women Directors

What is most remarkable and perhaps most subversively compelling about both ‘Making a Murderer’ and ‘Fantastic Lies,’ and about the intentions and directorial choices of their respective creators, is that neither documentary endeavor chronicles the sagas of particularly defensible — or even, to some, at all likable — men.

This guest post written by Eva Phillips appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape and sexual assault]

Within the first five minutes of both Fantastic Lies (directed by Marina Zenovich) — the most recent, methodically investigative installment of ESPN’s documentary film series, 30 for 30 — and Making a Murderer (directed by Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi) — the outlandishly popular and blisteringly sensational Netflix original series — impressively grand, birds-eye-view tracking shots are presented of the respective towns that played stage to the respective crimes at the center of the documentaries. Quietly idyllic and quaintly derelict, these introductory shots of Durham, North Carolina — home to Duke University and the young men of the Duke Lacrosse team accused of rape in 2006 — and Manitowoc County, Wisconsin — otherwise unknown home of Steven Avery, accused and exonerated of sexual assault in 1985 and re-indicted for first degree murder in 2007 — are not unfamiliar documentary tropes. However, solidifying their provocative and distinct styles and points of view, the ways in which these women employ their aerial shots of small towns, soon to be ravaged by controversies, are testaments to their acumen, and the disturbingly contentious nature of their films.

The shots would be otherwise unremarkable were it not for the stark juxtapositions and establishing of voice that the cinematic techniques achieve, and what they subtly intimate about the women helming each project. For Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, the sweeping captures of Manitowoc County and the labyrinth-esque junkyard owned by Avery’s family (and alleged site of the 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach) are part of the opening sequence of every episode of Making a Murderer, and are interposed with childhood photos of Avery, extreme close-ups of the decaying Avery home, and portentously ironic court documents and police officers. In the series first episode, these tracking shots nestled in the opening credits come directly after home footage of Avery’s release after his exoneration in 2003, that is jubilant, liberated, but haunted by his cousin’s premonition that, “Manitowoc county is not done with you…they are not even close to being done with you.” In Marina Zenovich’s opening frames of Fantastic Lies, the tracking shots of Durham are prefaced with videos of the Duke men’s lacrosse team suffering an emotional championship loss to Johns Hopkins, and embedded with interviews of parents lauding the boys determination to succeed, and North Carolina Central University professor Shawn Cunningham anthropomorphizing Durham as a city desperately trying to find its identity.

Demos and Ricciardi and Zenovich, by using traditional, seemingly innocuous aerial tracking shots of two towns interplayed with foreboding soundbites and poignant videos, achieve a narrative perspective that is as provocative as it is subdued. Creating worlds in which easily reviled or vilified men are at dire odds with (metonymic) towns that detest their very essence, Demos and Ricciardi and Zenovich as occluded intermediaries — they can at once see the entire town and infiltrate its intricacies and complications, and they can expose the inner workings of their subjects, their virtues and foibles. These women not only position themselves as intermediaries, but as exculpatory executors specifically of men otherwise caricatured and reduced.

What is most remarkable and perhaps most subversively compelling about both Making a Murderer and Fantastic Lies, and about the intentions and directorial choices of their respective creators, is that neither documentary endeavor chronicles the sagas of particularly defensible — or even, to some, at all likable — men. The alleged perpetrators in each case are from radically different socioeconomic strata (the small town, meagerly educated Avery would balk at the world of the uber-affluent, high-pressure Duke students), though both suffer fraught relationships with the law — the young men at Duke accused of rape but eventually cleared of any guilt; and Steven Avery, though erroneously charged with rape, is now serving a life sentence for first degree murder. But what the men most noticeably share is their almost archetypal “bad guy” aura, and the simultaneously unflinching and accommodating manner in which Demos and Ricciardi and Zenovich display every facet of their subjects.

Arguably dealing with more of a moral quagmire (despite their now being cleared of the charges), Zenovich, who brilliantly tackled an equally problematic man in her 2008 Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, opens her film with the barrage of soundbites, even from Duke alum Dan Abrams, citing the brash braggadocio of the men on the lacrosse team — their elitism, their “cockiness,” their hulking physiques and awareness of social prestige, their perpetuating “golf culture with an attitude.” Indeed, as the film progresses, unfolding in the manner the news media first exposed the case, Zenovich leaves no factual, disconcerting detail uncovered — the notorious raucousness and drunken offenses the team was known for; the fact that the boys held the party and intentionally hired exotic dancers (though, the detail of the boys requesting white dancers is skirted away from) and in the throes of profound inebriation, brandished a broomstick in a sexually suggestive manner and spewing racial epithets. Even the outrageously inflammatory and derogatory email — in which a player, referencing American Psycho, “jokingly” tells his teammates he is going to murder, flay and desecrate strippers — is discussed.

But amidst the revelations of the perniciousness of the men’s behavior, Zenovich carefully and seamlessly weaves in tearful, anguished testimonials from the parents of three boys (Reade Seligmann, Colon Finnerty and David Evans) falsely identified by the alleged victim, Crystal Mangum, and stalwart admissions of miscarriages of justice by former teammates. As Zenovich masterfully reaches the climax of the film, gradually and organically constructing doubt as she eventually depicts the overzealousness of prosecutor Mike Nifong and the dearth of physical evidence that would exonerate the players, the boys have been valorized. Moreover, the town of Durham, once an aerial shot at the beginning of Zenovich’s film, is micro-analyzed and cast as the embittered and disenfranchised foe of the boys, represented and led astray by the deceitfulness of Nifong. Zenovich presents a fractious clash of worlds in which a team of white, safeguarded men have the names slandered and privileged unhinged, and emerge triumphant victims.

In true subaltern treatment, Crystal Mangum is dissected by friends, and never speaks (though, as Zenovich shows, the prison where she is being held for an unrelated second-degree murder refused to let her speak to Zenovich despite her desire to) except for recorded media confessions and apologies of her false accusations. Her supposed instability is extrapolated upon, coupled with repeated shots of photos of her staggering and falling at the party. However, Mangum still “stands by her story” of surviving sexual assault and ten years later, speaking to Vocativ, “she maintained that she was assaulted.”

Demos and Ricciardi, whose Making a Murderer project was an arduous, ten year, post-graduate venture (rather than Zenovich’s year long, at times thwarted immersion into the lacrosse scandal), understandably present a much more involved, complicated portrait of their male subject, Steven Avery (and to some extent, his imprisoned cousin and alleged co-conspirator Brendan Dassey). Certainly lacking the prototypical self-impressed, egotistical athlete reputation that adulterated much of the Duke handlings, Avery, as Demos and Ricciardi briefly show (through exquisite cinematography, using letters and rare reenactments, one should add) was plagued with his own demons — arrests for animal cruelty, disorderly conduct, aggressive behavior towards relatives (which, arguably, would spur the false rape conviction), and violent, disquieting threats written to his former wife while their marriage dissolved. Yet in the hundreds of hours whittled down to the expertly directed series, Avery, while often maligned, seemingly simple-minded, ill-behaving but not necessarily menacing, is always shot through a sympathetic (often, emphasizing the pathetic) lens. Much of this is testament to the directing duos unfettered commitment to showing the complete multifariousness of the case as they lived each moment with the family, dedicated to Avery’s case for a decade from the moment they stumbled upon the now infamous New York Times front page article. And much of the fixation and implicit empathy for Avery is a result of Demos and Ricciardi’s pursuit to hyper-focus on the failures of the justice system. But much like Fantastic Lies, Avery (and more pitifully, Dassey) is positioned, much more effectively, as a steamrolled victim of law and order run amok, and a town’s collective antipathy for a man and his family (for much different reasons than with the Duke boys) galvanizing the destruction of a man’s life.

Similar to Fantastic Lies, too, is the quiet lionization of these men in the wake of crimes (whether they are irrefutable or exaggerated and falsified) against women who are noticeably underrepresented in the documentaries. Teresa Halbach, whose body is found on Avery’s property after taking photographs at his junkyard for a car magazine, is shown only through aching archival footage; her family, primarily represented by her brother (who, as a rabid Making a Murderer conspiracy theorist, I find to be suspiciously portrayed), is a minimal presence at best. Though the duo beautifully achieve a scornful eye at the fallible justice system and the prevailing sentiments castigating Avery, a looming partiality ripples through Making a Murderer that problematizes the series as an exculpatory venture.

It should be noted that I am an ardent fan of both Zenovich’s and Demos and Ricciardi’s projects. Foremost I am thrilled that not only two women, but two queer women in a relationship helmed the wildly popular Making a Murderer. Furthermore, I was riveted by its reinvigoration of my childhood fascination with crime sagas, with Demos and Ricciardi’s nuanced and meticulous style, analysis of every detail, and penchant for the gorgeously tragic. Their flawless removal of themselves — seemingly something unachievable by the more egomaniacal strain of sensationalized male documentary filmmakers — but consecration of their voices is haunting, and a tribute to their years of investment and toil (through which, I am flabbergasted, they preserved their loving relationship). I too am elated, and to some degree relieved, a woman directed the masterful reflection on the Duke scandal — an imbroglio I witnessed with conflicted emotions, as a teenager beginning to develop my feminism, as a lacrosse player of eight years, as someone who knew players on the team.

Certainly, these analyses of the bungles and undeniable violations on the part of the justice system need to be examined, and it is a boon that these women take part in the burgeoning presence of women documentary filmmakers (though still infuriatingly small compared to male counterparts). Certainly, too, Demos and Ricciardi and Zenovich fastidiously show how individuals’ agency is stripped, and their identities elaborately reconstructed by tendentious external powers (media, the legal system, troubled communities). But the lingering effects of these projects, of the specific focus on men in tempestuous situations, and the resonations of these exculpatory endeavors leaves unease. It is the unease that pinches when the only individual to mention the dangers to rape survivors after a false accusation is a media fiasco is a strong-jawed, former Duke lacrosse player on the team during the incident. It is an unease that is as profoundly discomforting and ambiguous as the elements at play in the discombobulated and life-altering cases these women so extraordinarily portray.

Eva Phillips is constantly surprised at how remarkably Southern she in fact is as she adjusts to social and climate life in The Steel City. Additionally, Eva thoroughly enjoys completing her Master’s Degree in English, though really wishes that more of her grades could be based on how well she researches Making a Murdererconspiracy theories whilst pile-driving salt-and-vinegar chips. You can follow her on Instagram at @menzingers2.

A Joyful ‘Mavis!’ Plus Q & A with Director Jessica Edwards

Director Jessica Edwards includes plenty of the Staples’ less familiar music (which still sounds fresh and striking: I predict most people who see this documentary will quickly add a Staples Singer channel to their Spotify and Pandora selections) as well as photos and TV clips from their appearances stretching back to the 1950s. Although Pops had a smooth, clear voice, Mavis usually had the lead vocal even at the beginning. Like Amy Winehouse her style and virtuosity were already an adult’s when she was still a young teen.

Written by Ren Jender.

At one point during Mavis!, the new documentary about legendary soul singer Mavis Staples that is airing on HBO this month, we see an old clip of Staples’ father, Roebuck “Pops” Staples who founded The Staples Singers, the family group that brought fame to all of them. A host of a TV music show asks the tired question: how does he feel about performing secular music after years of performing at churches as a gospel group? With no malice or a second’s hesitation Pops answers that he thinks of the “freedom songs” they sing as exactly the same as gospel: simply “the truth.”

Watching Mavis Staples in the film, still touring at 75, after more than 60 years on the road (she remarks about one of their early records that no one could believe a petite 13-year-old girl was the lead singer: they thought her strong, low voice was a man’s) we can’t help noticing she seems to have inherited both Pops’ good nature (though band members tell us she lets them know when she finds their performances lacking) and his certainty. Her band, now made up of white musicians decades younger than she is, her older sister, Yvonne, and a woman in her late thirties/early forties with a nose ring in a T-shirt that reads “Black Weirdo,” still performs an a cappella gospel song to warm up before going onstage.

Director Jessica Edwards includes plenty of the Staples’ less familiar music — which still sounds fresh and striking: I predict most people who see this documentary will quickly add the Staples Singers to their music selections — as well as photos and TV clips from their appearances stretching back to the 1950s. Pops had a smooth, clear voice, but Mavis usually had the lead vocal even at the beginning. Like Amy Winehouse, her style and virtuosity were already an adult’s when she was a young teen.

Although the Staples family was based in Chicago, Pops had been part of the Great Migration from the South. He grew up in the same part of Mississippi as some of the great blues legends who influenced his own style of guitar playing, making it distinct from other gospel musicians. In the 1950s and 1960s, rock and roll radio stations played gospel music after midnight, which Bob Dylan explains, is how he discovered the Staples Singers, as did other white musicians of the era. Some of the songs we hear with Pops on lead have more than a passing resemblance to more familiar radio hits from white rock and roll bands in the 1960s. Levon Helm, of The Band, tells us their own harmonies were directly influenced by The Staples Singers.

When the Staples and Dylan appeared on the same stages (including on an early TV musical omnibus) Mavis and Dylan had a puppy-love romance — and Pops expanded their repertoire. After first hearing “Blowin’ in the Wind” he told Mavis and the rest of the family, “We can sing that song.” He was particularly struck by the lyric, “How many roads must a man walk down/ Before you can call him a man?” When Pops, a man who had fled the Jim Crow South when Black men were still called “boy” sang those words, they were especially poignant.

Pops also attached the group early on with the Civil Rights Movement, becoming an acolyte of Martin Luther King in 1955, at a time when one of the white experts interviewed tells us, “Very few gospel singers took an interest in Civil Rights.” Pops began to write songs inspired by the movement including “Why Am I Treated So Bad?” one of Dr. King’s favorites.

Like a lot of other performers with a similar background, Mavis traded an audience that was once nearly entirely Black (as in a terrific clip we see of the Staples Singers live performance in Watts Stax, a filmed all-star concert and fundraiser for the pre-gentrified Oakland of the early 1970s) to one that is now, we see at appearances like the Newport Folk Festival, nearly entirely white. Mavis still mentions Dr. King to them and seems to see her continued performing as a way of elevating those who hear her music. She tells them and us, “I’ve weathered the storms. I’ve fallen down and I’ve gotten back up.”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-orbaWz5yRQ” iv_load_policy=”3″]

When Mavis! was shown as part of the Athena Film Festival, the director of the film, Jessica Edwards, fielded questions from the audience. The following is a transcript of that Q and A, edited for concision and clarity.

What was it about this story that made you want to make this film?

Jessica Edwards: It was really Mavis that made me want to see this movie and therefore make this movie. I had seen her perform in Brooklyn, in Prospect Park a couple of years ago and I had known a little about this soul-era Stax stuff, but I went to the show that night and I left feeling rejuvenated. When I went home to watch the documentary, so I could learn more about her, there wasn’t one.

Can you tell us more about what you learned about her as you were making the movie?

JE: The incredible thing that I found about her was that her and her family really touched on almost every genre in the history of American music: anything that influenced the way that music is made now. She influenced all these makers that then became paramount in terms of what American music became, like Bob Dylan. And Dylan himself has influenced so many people. You think about him listening to the family late at night and then what he became, the idea that she was so part of this fabric of music in this country.

One of the things that impressed me is that you portrayed her and her music and kind of the intersection of music, culture and politics. Was that a conscious decision on your part or was it just an outgrowth of who Mavis was?

JE: You know the Civil Rights Movement didn’t end for Mavis in 1968. For her, the Civil Rights Movement is now. For me music is culture. I’m not a very religious person, but music is a spiritual experience for me and always has been. The idea that music can facilitate change in a way that some other things can’t, that was really solidified for me. The message of Dr. King was not completely mainstream in the mid-fifties and Mavis and her family were instrumental in terms of this grass-roots movement of going from church to church to church in the South and bringing these messages of equality.

How much was Mavis involved the making of this film?

JE: Mavis didn’t see the film until it was finished. In fact, it took her a while to get on board. She was like, “I’ve been talking to the press forever. I don’t need to do this. Like, nobody wants to hear about me.” But when we started to talk to her about the kind of film we wanted to make and how it really was not only her legacy, but the legacy of her family and the legacy of their music, she came around. She trusted us. I offered to come to Chicago and screen it for her before it was screened publicly. And she said, “Nah, I’m gonna watch it with the people.” Then she sat in the theater with a thousand people and watched it for the first time. That was a little nerve-wracking for some of us. But she loved it. The first time she watched it, she doesn’t really remember what it was. All these memories just kept flooding back. I sat directly behind her, and the first time Bob Dylan comes on the screen and he says all these wonderful things about the family, she just started giggling like she was 15 years old. She watched it more recently. We screened it in Chicago a week or so ago and she came up to me after and she was like, “I finally saw the movie, this time. It was really good!”

I have a question about process from the inspiration to okay, now how do I get this to really happen?

JE: This movie took about two and a half years to make which in documentary-land is incredibly fast. It’s like a snap of the fingers. And basically, once she agreed I went and visited her and we would drop in on her on the road. We would film the show. We would spend some time backstage. And then we would go back to Chicago when she was home. The way I structured the shooting was, we did it for her 75th year. Otherwise I would still be shooting. The woman is touring all the time and I’d never end the movie. The movie is also self-financed. Luckily, we have HBO as a broadcast partner. They’re like a fairy godmother of documentary films.

I almost like cried at the moment where Mavis is listening to the song Pops played and she’s getting choked up. How are you able to get such intimate, candid moments without feeling like you’re getting in the way?

JE: I think people who’ve made a hundred films will have the same question. This is my first feature length film and I always feel nervous in those situations, but my DP, he was, like, ruthless, so, as nervous as I was, he’d be like, “Just keep filming.” I hired people who have done this way more than I have, so I could learn so much. So the next time I do this, I won’t ever cut either. Whether you’re filming something that’s too intimate or not, ultimately you can make the decision of whether you’re going to use it later. It’s much better to have it, because you don’t know whether you’re going to need it. In that particular scene, I was sitting underneath the soundboard. I wanted them to talk to each other, not talk to me. I knew that I’d have to ask them questions at the same time to get them talking. I was crying my eyes out, bawling under the sound board like a baby. And as soon as we got that scene, I knew that we had a movie.

I just wondered if you could speak to the finances of the movie, how did it work out for you? And what’s next for you?

JE: I have a production company and the executive producer of this film is my partner, like my baby-daddy partner. We work together on a lot of stuff, so he raised a lot of money through commercial work basically while I was shooting. So he would work on commercial jobs which would pay for this film. It opens the question of sustainability especially if you live someplace expensive like Brooklyn. But I knew, if we felt this passionate about Mavis and because she has so many fans, people would want to see the movie. We’ve had such a wonderful response. I feel like we made the right decision to be late on our rent a couple of months. Now I’m doing a lot of work with 360 Video. I really am enjoying the challenge of making something really short and non-linear. There are a couple of documentaries in the pipe, but for every one you make you have to pitch ten, so I think I’m, like, at six. It’ll hit any minute.

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published inThe Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

Moonfaze Feminist Film Festival: Her Story Illuminated

Writer/Director/Actress and Moonfaze Film Festival Founder Premstar Santana has taken on the challenge of not waiting for Hollywood to feature feminist cinema. She is creating the platform that elevates feminist viewpoints from marginalized voices that rarely get the opportunity to shine.

On December 5, 2015 Writer/Director/Actress and all-around badass Premstar Santana created a phenomenal short film festival centering powerful feminist narratives. Presented inside of LA Mother, (a non-profit organization and multi-purpose creative space that is dedicated to nurturing women in business and the arts), Premstar carved out a safe space for diverse voices from around the globe to flourish. By creating this platform in conjunction with LA Mother, Premstar has taken on the challenge of not waiting for Hollywood to feature feminist cinema. She is creating the platform that elevates feminist viewpoints from marginalized voices that rarely get the opportunity to shine.

The one day evening event started off with a mixer where patrons could nibble on fresh popped popcorn, enjoy some libations and partake of tasty bites provided by a Korean BBQ food truck. Premstar introduced herself the moment I walked in and thanked me for supporting her event. I was immediately struck by her warmth and her sincere appreciation for every person who turned out. And there were a lot of people there. When it was time for the short film showcase to begin, every seat was filled, with an overflow audience sitting on the staircase and standing in the back. A packed house.

The opening film, Luna — written, directed by, and starring Premstar herself — immediately set the tone for the rest of the festival. Premstar’s film let me know that she was not bullshitting about her clarion call to elevate the game. Luna, is an experimental film that introduces us to a woman performing a sacred ceremony inside a circle of burning candles in a dark room. There is a blood offering, an incantation that opens another dimension, and the woman finds herself surrounded by nature and facing a mirror image of herself who simply says “Hello, I’ve been waiting for you…are you ready?” Our protagonist then responds by asking “For What?” Her question is answered by her second self, “To dance.” The film ends with a gorgeous shot of Premstar standing on a sunlit beach watching ocean waves, the full moon high above her head. The piece resonated with me emotionally, and I had the rare moment of instantly recognizing a fellow sister/creator. After watching her other work in the festival (the sci-fi tinged Dos Lunas) I understood Premstar to be a thoughtful and gifted artist. Her work is deeply personal, poetic, and at times haunting. She creates compelling cinema, so I felt confident that I would enjoy the films presented. I felt like I was at a cinema tapas bar, nibbling on all the various films she was spreading before us at LA Mother.

The films themselves ranged from comedy, horror, experimental, dramatic thrillers, documentaries and even a Bollywood drenched piece that had a shocking ending that delighted the receptive audience. One of the crowd favorites was a 6-minute French comedy film called Papa Dans Maman (Dad in Mum) written and directed by Fabrice Bracq. In the film two young sisters hear their mother and father having sex. They try to decide if they should go inside the bedroom to investigate when they hear an unexpected arrival downstairs. The humor worked because of the expressive faces of the young actresses, and the tension that was created by the one sister peeking through the bedroom keyhole and telling the other what she sees.

Another standout piece was the aforementioned 12-minute U.S. Bollywood-Punk Musical, The Pink Sorrys, written by Ben Stoddard and directed by Anam Syed. A deadly girl gang seeks retribution after one of their own is sexually assaulted. The graphic ending was pretty bloody and followed the rape/revenge trope popular in ’70s exploitation cinema. I enjoyed the unique mash-up to tell an unpleasant story about violence against women’s bodies. And come on — Bollywood. Punk. Musical. You got me.

Afghan rapper Sonita Alizadeh directed and stars in a music video called Brides for Sale where she spits her own rap lyrics advocating for the end of forced marriages globally. In Diyu (written and directed by Christine Yuan), a teenaged girl is caught between heaven and hell in a strangely hypnotic experimental film that won the Best Director Award at the end of the evening.

The festival found the right balance of showing some serious life-altering narratives alongside lighter fare that was equally compelling in different ways. One of my other comedy favorites was a film starring Moonfaze’s Festival Manager Sarah Hawkins. Roller Coaster (written and directed by Sarah’s father Bradley Hawkins) is a sweet tale about Emily, an aspiring actress who sets out for an audition, only to encounter obstacles that may cause her to miss her big break. The film playfully highlights the plastic-looking homogeneity of casting calls where women feel the need to look a certain way (mainly white, thin, surgically enhanced or bleached in some way). What struck me about Sarah Hawkins as an actor is that her face had that classic oldschool natural beauty that I miss. In fact, that is what struck me about most of the films in the festival. All these wonderful new faces that don’t have the bland manufactured Hollywood “look.”

At the close of the festival, awards were given in various categories for Best Screenwriting, Cinematography, Acting, Best Experimental Film, Best Documentary, and Best Director. I left the festival elated and impressed with the quality and variety of the films I watched.

A few days later, still excited about the festival, I contacted Premstar and invited her and Festival manager Sarah Hawkins to talk about Moonfaze on the Screenwriter’s Rant Room Podcast I co-host. It was important to give these feminist filmmakers another platform to talk about their work. You can listen to the podcast here.

Premstar said she conceived the idea for the festival in the summer of 2015, and less than six months later it came to fruition. Feminist filmmakers are hungry and ready to share their stories and 2016 will see another Moonfaze Film Festival. As I told Premstar and Sarah on the podcast, the work that Moonfaze has done is reminiscent of song lyrics done by the acapella singing group, Sweet Honey in the Rock. The lyrics are, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Simply put, we don’t have to wait for someone else to do this work. Fam, we got this. We really do.

Premstar Santana and all the filmmakers involved in the very first Moonfaze Film Festival are bold, unapologetic, and creating new life-giving narratives. I look forward to the 2^nd Annual Festival. You should too.

For more information about the Moonfaze Film Festival and Premstar Santana, check out these websites:

premstarsantana.com

moonfaze.lamother.com

Staff Writer Lisa Bolekaja is a speculative fiction writer, screenwriter, podcaster, Sci-Fi slush reader for Apex Magazine, and a devoted cinefile. A former Film Independent Fellow and a member of the Horror Writers Association, her fiction can be found on Amazon.com.

Johanna Hamilton’s ‘1971’: A Thrilling Portrait of Activism

Bonnie offers a very different take, one that speaks volumes about her resoluteness, level of engagement and selflessness: “We felt that just because we were parents didn’t mean that we could remove ourselves from responsibility, that that would have been kind of a cop-out. We decided that we weren’t going to be content when we continued to see things that really disturbed us.”

Written by Rachael Johnson.

The documentary 1971 (2014) tells the gripping story of a group of peace activists who broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania on March 8, 1971. They called themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI and their aim was to expose abusive, anti-dissent practices by the Bureau. The activists found what they wanted and were never caught. Making off with a trove of office files, they uncovered an immense and illegal government surveillance program of domestic political groups. One of the stolen documents referred to the now notorious COINTELPRO, a political surveillance program that targeted Black, left-wing, Puerto Rican, and women’s rights organizations as well as the anti-Vietnam war movement. Overseen by FBI head, J. Edgar Hoover, it was both unlawful and un-American as it violated First Amendment rights. The group anonymously dispatched photocopies of the damning evidence to national newspapers. The Washington Post published the story and the FBI was later investigated by Congress.

Directed by Johanna Hamilton, 1971 mixes present-day interviews with members of the group who have broken their silence with footage from the period, photographic stills, documents, and dramatic recreations of the event. Interesting and diverse in terms of personality, age, and background, the group included a married couple with three young children, Bonnie and John Raines; anti-war activist and physics professor, Bill Davidon (the leader of the group); and two younger men, cab driver (and lock-picker) Keith Forsyth and social worker Bob Williamson. The interviews give us a clear sense of what motivated and united them. Keith, still visibly moved decades after, explains that it was his revulsion at the Jackson State shootings that drove him to more “confrontational” political action. “I was done talking,” he says. John speaks eloquently of how surveillance, agent infiltration, and the engineering of paranoia and fear impair both political debate and the morale of activists. “It shrinks the discourse, it shrinks the possibility of resistance,” he observes. It was Bill’s intention to expose the FBI’s anti-dissent aims and practices.

Although very much a committed activist, Bonnie recalls how she was, also, expected to perform a traditionally feminine, domestic role at meetings: “I felt a little bit like I was the den mother for the group…I was fixing meatballs and spaghetti but it was expected that I was going to play that role almost exclusively and I was not real happy about being a little bit marginalized in that kind of way.” It’s a telling reminder that chauvinist, patriarchal attitudes persisted even in progressive circles in the so–called sexually liberated early seventies. John, however, does seem very much a partner and recognizes that Bonnie’s determination to carry out the mission was greater than his. She, also, plays a key part in the break-in.

Bonnie and John are an interesting, admirable couple. Family life did not turn them insular and self-absorbed. They remained committed to caring about the world around them. John had been a freedom rider in the South and he explains how his experiences gave him an understanding of how power operates. John and Bonnie’s situation was, of course, unique. Both parents could have been locked away for a long time. They made plans for close relatives to look after the children if the worst happened but I suppose many would judge them irresponsible and selfish. Bonnie offers a very different take, one that speaks volumes about her resoluteness, level of engagement and selflessness: “We felt that just because we were parents didn’t mean that we could remove ourselves from responsibility, that that would have been kind of a cop-out. We decided that we weren’t going to be content when we continued to see things that really disturbed us.”

Hamilton’s dramatic recreations of the extraordinary event bring to life this real-life political thriller. They are evocative and quite nail-biting, a good deal less phony than most recreations. We follow the group’s preparations and witness the break-in itself, which took place during the night of the Madison Square Garden Ali-Frazier fight of March 8, 1971.

1971 conveys an understanding of the oppressive nature of the FBI’s power as well as an acute awareness of the nastiness of its methods. For many years, the Bureau dedicated itself to stifling freedom of thought and expression through the spread of fear and paranoia, invaded the private space of American citizens and destroyed personal lives. Their schemes were plain evil. The viewer is reminded of that anonymous letter send by the Bureau to Martin Luther King encouraging him to commit suicide.

1971’s depiction of one of the most politically fascinating eras in modern U.S. history is vibrant and characterful but it doesn’t romanticize its subjects. It doesn’t have to. The activists come across as principled, courageous people. Their transgressive act of daring exposed extraordinary abuses of state power. It is a troublesome truth for conservatives and historical amnesiacs but injustice is not always uncovered by strictly lawful means. Hamilton recognizes the story’s historical parallels with Snowden and Wikileaks (Laura Poitras, interestingly, is one of the film’s co-executive producers) as she underscores its importance in the history of American anti-surveillance activism. 1971 is an informative, exciting documentary that needs to be seen.

‘The True Cost’: An Ethical Look at an Exploitative Industry

Written by Rachael Johnson.

Warning: this post contains a distressing image.

The collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory in Savar, Bangladesh on the April 24, 2013 is one of the tragedies of our time. More than 1,100 garment workers lost their lives and many more were injured. The majority of them were young women. It was, in fact, nothing less than industrial murder. The factory bosses were warned about the cracks in the shoddily constructed building, yet the workers were forced to come to work that day. In June this year, the owner of the factory and 40 others were charged with murder. Multinational retailers could also, of course, be said to have blood on their hands. The poorly-paid workers made clothes for well-known global brands like Primark, Mango and Benetton. Some companies predictably took their time but the compensation fund for victims was also secured in June of this year.

The Rana Plaza tragedy inspired director Andrew Morgan to make The True Cost (2015), an ambitious, wide-ranging documentary about the globalized garment industry. We journey with him to world fashion centres and places where most of our clothes are made- Cambodia, India, China and Bangladesh- to meet garment workers, activists, academics and Free Trade representatives. Global brand bosses are conspicuous by their absence.

The True Cost tackles the exploitation of garment workers and the horrendous impact that the clothing industry has on the health of working communities and the environment. Morgan specifically targets the contemporary fast fashion model- the quick-response manufacturing of affordable clothes inspired by high-cost fashion trends. He explains that High Street fashion brands find Bangladesh a particularly attractive place to do business because of cheap labor and interviews a local factory owner who says that he is pressured by retailers to keep costs low. Reflecting on the exploitative, get-out-of-jail-free part played by global brands should make you quietly seethe. Most of Bangladesh’s garment workers are young women and they earn less than three US dollars a day. Workers are abused, even killed, for demanding better pay and conditions. We see footage of garment workers in Cambodia being shot at as they demonstrate for an increase in the minimum wage. Morgan rightly describes the low-cost, exploitative system of poverty wages and dangerous working conditions as “a perfectly engineered nightmare for the workers trapped inside of it.”

In an effort to personalize and make accessible this complex, multifaceted global story, Morgan spotlights the struggles of 23-year-old Shima Akhter, a Bangladeshi garment worker and union organizer who says she was beaten for trying to improve her and her co-workers’ lot. Her personal situation is tough too as she is forced to leave her young daughter Nadia in the countryside with relatives for long periods at a time while she works in the city. Shima is a strong, gracious woman who wants the best for the daughter she adores. She loves her parents and always sports a warm smile. The shots of Shima and her family in the countryside are beautifully observed but it is her words that haunt you: “I don’t want anyone wearing anything which is produced by our blood.”

Morgan equally addresses the industry’s ruinous impact on the environment and health of people living and working in communities serving the industry. He explains, “Fashion today is the number two most polluting industry on earth, second only to the oil industry.” I doubt most of us are aware of this fact and it underlines the obscene enormity of the problem posed by fast fashion. We see landfills overflowing with textile waste- a strange, disturbing sight- and learn of the appalling effect pesticide and fertilizer use has had on physical and mental health in communities in the Punjab region of India.

Clearly intended as a wake-up call, The True Cost looks at alternative ways of doing business and gives voice to those questioning the existing economic system. We meet London-based Safia Minney, founder and CEO of Fair Trade People Tree and LaRhea Pepper, an organic cotton farmer from Texas. Both advocate ethical and sustainable solutions. The most powerful comments, however, come from economist Richard Woolf. He observes, “So America became a peculiar country. You could criticize the education system…you could criticize the transportation system….but you couldn’t criticize the economic system. That got a free pass…Capitalism couldn’t be questioned.” Morgan, further, takes aim at the consumerist mentality that fuels fast fashion but I’m not sure we learn anything new regarding materialism in the Millenium. I had, however, never seen the nauseating You Tube clothes haul videos Morgan features. They, indeed, denote an epic, soulless low.

The True Cost has moments of power but it is not without its flaws. While Morgan clearly supports their struggle, more garment workers and union representatives should have been interviewed. The documentary, further, does not give an in-depth, gender-aware analysis of the lives of female garment workers. The arguments and images employed to critique consumerism are not, it must be said, particularly striking or original. Morgan should, nevertheless be commended for raising awareness of the acute human suffering behind the production of fast clothes. It prompts serious reflection about the vulturism of the industry and our response to economic violence. While it was widely reported, Rana Plaza did not become a social media cause in the same way as other recent tragedies. We know why, of course. Consumer capitalism reigns and the media, even culturally progressive sites, do not seem all that interested in workers’ rights. Hopefully, documentaries like The True Cost will encourage more to break the shameful silence.

In Which I Attempt to Convince the World to Watch All Things Tig Notaro

I had never heard anything like this sketch; I was enthralled. The timing. The repetition. The silence. Such gorgeous pauses. In a world where it feels like we need to fill every space with some yammering, to hear someone on stage using silence–to be brave enough to use it–made me take notice of this person Tig. And not just me. ‘The New York Times’ ran a piece about her 13-minute paean to Taylor Dane.

Tig Notaro needs your attention. I fell in love with her work in 2012 when I heard a This American Life sketch while driving down a highway.

[youtube_sc url=”https://youtu.be/jSwzYB545hY”]

I had never heard anything like this sketch; I was enthralled. The timing. The repetition. The silence. Such gorgeous pauses. In a world where it feels like we need to fill every space with some yammering, to hear someone on stage using silence–to be brave enough to use it–made me take notice of this person Tig. And not just me. The New York Times ran a piece about her 13-minute paean to Taylor Dane.

Then a barrage of sadness and struggle came for her. Tig had a life-threatening infection. Her mother died suddenly. Then Tig was diagnosed with breast cancer.

And this all became material for her standup. And the basis for the Netflix documentary Tig.

The set she did after her diagnosis is already the stuff of comedy legend. Comedians in the room that night began to bow at her feet.

Louis C.K. was there and he ended up selling her set on his site.

Directors Kristina Goolsby and Ashley York follow Tig through the aftermath of illness and grief. I particularly appreciate two elements of the documentary: the focus on writing as a craft and the attention to the struggle of fertility issues. Neither seems to get much good attention in films, and Tig offers the reader a look inside the mind of a female writer who wants to mother a child.

It shouldn’t be surprising that Notaro allows the filmmakers to go so deep into her world; she has come to be known a confessional comic after the set heard round the world. The film is heartbreaking and funny, just like Notaro’s standup. At times we flinch with her as she hears a verdict on her one shot at in vitro, the next moment we are cheering for her as she finds love.

Viewers watch her workshopping a bit, practicing it in front of audiences with different rhythms and wording. Rarely do we get to see the hard work of writing in a film (the closest I have seen such work happening is when I watched Fun Home on Broadway). The awareness that writing is hard, that Notaro is producing work that requires time, honesty, attention, and a little bit of bravado reminds viewers that art is hard. Even though on stage Notaro makes it look easy.

So it was satisfying to me to see that one joke–about her breasts revolting against her body–come to fruition in her HBO special Boyish Girl Interrupted. The special serves as a climax to the story of Tig in that it finishes the joke. When Notaro takes on the persona of her grumpy breasts, she nails the timing and the wording in front of the sold out theater.

And she happens to do half of the set without her shirt on, her smooth chest an affront to all constricting ideas about what “woman” means.

I questioned whether I should even post a still from the HBO special since in many ways it is like stealing one of her punchlines. Should I have offered you, dear reader, a spoiler alert? Am I taking something from her by using this picture to represent her text?

Is taking off her shirt salacious? Provocative? Evocative? Confessional? All of the above. I implore you to watch the set and answer that question for yourself. I can tell you this: you haven’t seen anything like what Notaro is doing in the mainstream media.

I thank her for it.

‘A Gay Girl in Damascus: The Amina Profile’: Telling the Story of the Hoax Heard ‘Round the Blogosphere

Directed by Sophie Deraspe, ‘A Gay Girl in Damascus: The Amina Profile’ begins as a love story, turns into a story of fearless resistance, collapses into terror, and then transforms into the investigation of a…man who breaks strangers’ hearts.

Written by Colleen Clemens.

Sophie Deraspe (click here to read an interview with her) wrote and directed this recently released documentary that moves the viewer through a large gamut of emotions. A Gay Girl in Damascus: The Amina Profile begins as a love story, turns into a story of fearless resistance, collapses into terror, and then transforms into the investigation of a sure-to-be psychotic man who breaks strangers’ hearts. All in an hour and a half. The quick pace and the story left me with my mouth agape several times, even though I remember the story of the film’s eponymous blog–and the hoax that ensued.

The film begins as Amina Arraf in Syria and Sandra Bagaria in Canada begin an online relationship. They share stories of their studies, their sex drives, and quickly move to their concerns about the Arab Spring’s impact on Amina’s world. Amina decides to start a blog about being out in a dictatorship and she begins to write. “Gay Girl in Damascus” is born.

Amina and Sandra are unable to meet, so they share the details of their lives over messaging. Amina tells Sandra Skype is blocked in Syria. And then Amina goes unheard from for several days. Sandra gets a message telling her Amina has been kidnapped.

Through interviews with reporters, social activists, and personal friends, the story moves from Sandra’s heart breaking to realizing she has been the victim of a months-long hoax enacted by a dude living in Edinburgh at the time. I won’t give too much away about how they come to learn this information, but watching the story unfold is worth watching.

The part of most interest to me is when the activists discuss how this white male hijacked the story of Syria for an entire week. Instead of focusing on the cluster bombs and mass arrests being recorded by citizen journalists, the news chose to tell the stories of Tom MacMaster, a guy who thought it was fun to create a persona and see how far he could go with it. We watch how a white, Western, male coopts the story of a marginalized woman for his own jollies and takes away the voice of men and women dying in the streets of Syria. If white male privilege needs a metaphor, the story of MacMaster sure seems like the perfect fit.

Women Who Were Actually Jailed and Didn’t Get the Attention a Fictional Woman Did

Once the movie turns on its heels, the viewer watches Sandra come to terms with the humiliation this man has foisted upon her. She works to confront him, and the film climaxes with them in a room together. While the beginning of the film sets the viewer up to think the climax of the film will be Sandra and Amina meeting and climaxing, the end feels creepily analogous as this guy talks about how he uses Sandra. I won’t say too much more because their conversation is a lesson in what-the-fuckery.

So what feels like a film about the triumph of a young woman speaking truth to power morphs into a story of a white, Western male appropriating a marginalized voice for his own whims. Sigh. And sigh again. Watching the films feels like bearing witness to the sufferings of Syrians who want to be heard–and to the Western privilege that silences them.

See it. We all need to be vigilant about listening to those who are speaking. And those who are taking the mic for their own pleasure.

Colleen Lutz Clemens, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of Non-Western Literatures at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania. She earned her Ph.D. in Post-Colonial Literature at Lehigh University and is a Bitch Flicks staff writer.

‘Je suis FEMEN’ (‘I am FEMEN’): The Story of Oksana Shachko and a Movement

While they disrupt a game, we see footage of the cheerleaders and female entertainers dancing and performing for male audiences. There were numerous charges filed against the Femen activists after Euro 2012. The scantily clad women that were in those spaces specifically for the male gaze, however, were welcomed.

Written by Leigh Kolb.

As a young girl, Oksana Shachko became enraptured in her iconography classes and painted intricate portraits of religious figures. She even planned to join a convent at one point. In the documentary Je Suis FEMEN (I Am FEMEN), we see Oksana painting a Madonna and child, and we also see her painting what has become her life instead: bare breasts, masks, murals, and enormous protest signs. Oksana is one of the founding members of the Kiev, Ukraine-based protest group Femen.

While her vocations in life might appear contradictory (nun vs. topless activist), perhaps her calling has always been clear–to surround herself by women and effect change in heavily patriarchal spaces. Oksana is the “Je” (“I”) in the film–her story, as a dedicated artist and activist–dominates Swiss director Alain Margot’s film. I Am FEMEN refers not only to Oksana’s journey, but also a supportive and sympathetic point of view from behind the camera.

I Am FEMEN is a lovely, powerful film. It delves into the complexity of the movement, showing protests against coddled rapists, mistreated zoo animals, Ukrainian politicians, international sporting events, and Vladimir Putin. The audience gets a sense of the humanity of the women in Femen; Margot showcases their parents, and often shows the women in the more mundane aspects of their lives/activist work–paintings signs, cooking dumplings, working on the website.

There were a few moments that the film seemed be shot with the male gaze in mind. This is problematically, ironically reflected in a POV review:

“Veteran Swiss director Alain Margot’s vastly entertaining film I Am Femen offers an entrée into the FEMEN movement through a profile of Ms. Shachko. Looking like a cross between Simone Simon in the original Cat People and Anna Karina in Une Femme est une femme, Oksana Shachko combines an aloof beauty with a lithe physique, marking her as a natural fighter who seems to relish her endless skirmishes with the police.”

Yet I Am FEMEN seems to fully understand the contradictory nature of the male gaze in relation to Femen’s activism. In a poignant part of the film, the women are protesting the Ukraine-hosted Euro 2012 football championship (not the sport itself, they point out, but what goes in to hosting these events–displacing students to set up brothels, etc.). This comes toward the end of the film, when we’ve seen the women beaten, imprisoned, and held captive, and Oksana is concerned her apartment–which was ransacked–has been bugged. While they disrupt a game, we see footage of the cheerleaders and female entertainers dancing and performing for male audiences. There were numerous charges filed against the Femen activists after Euro 2012. The scantily clad women that were in those spaces specifically for the male gaze, however, were welcomed.

At the end of the film, behind-the-scenes activist and leader Anna and a small group appear in Kiev in 2013. She has been beaten, and they say that Russian and Ukrainian secret services have kept them from protesting. Anna joins her sister in Switzerland, and three prominent activists, including Oksana, seek asylum in France to continue their organization and activist training.

As well-shot, complex, and humanizing as I Am FEMEN is as a film, I couldn’t help but be uneasy. Because I’d seen and written about Ukraine is Not a Brothel, I wondered how I Am FEMEN would differ, since the subjects and timelines were similar. Filmmaker Kitty Green embedded herself with Femen–living with them as she shot Ukraine is Not a Brothel–and she famously “outed” Victor Svyatski as an abusive mastermind behind the scenes of Femen, whom the women eventually broke away from. He is interviewed in her film, and tells Green that the women are “weak” and that “getting girls” was part of his motivation for galvanizing the group.

In I Am FEMEN, Oksana flippantly mentions the infamous Victor, saying that he simply “supports our work,” and is a “feminist man.” While Margot told the story in front of him, if an audience member was familiar with Ukraine is Not a Brothel, the fleeting mention of Victor leaves many questions unanswered. Certainly Green’s storytelling was from a different perspective, as she lived with the women and became much more than a director. Green also focused more on Inna Shevchenko‘s journey, and Margot focuses on Oksana.

There is much to appreciate in I Am FEMEN, and much to be inspired by. Feminists in general have conflicting views of Femen, but we cannot deny the power of turning the sexual object into the angry subject. The current aim of the movement–an international reach, dubbing themselves as a “sextremist” group– is fascinating. While there are complex, complicated problems that are inherent in any activist group, attempting to subvert the male gaze–which enjoys provocative dancers yet beats and arrests topless activists–is, essentially, a forceful weapon.

Inna chainsaws down a large cross in Kiev before seeking asylum in Paris. — Inna chainsaws down a large cross in Kiev to protest the prosecution of Pussy Riot.

Inna recently penned an op/ed for The New Statesman. She says,

“With Femen’s topless protests, we succeeded in frightening many patriarchal institutions by taking away women’s naked bodies from the shining world of advertising, and taking them back to the political arena. Here, women’s bodies are no longer serving someone else’s demands or pleasing someone else, but are instead demanding their own rights. We revealed and highlighted the double standards of a world which easily accepts the use of female naked bodies in commercials, but roars in anger when topless women bare their political demands.”

It would be most compelling to watch the two Femen documentaries as a complementary pair. Ukraine is Not a Brothel and I Am FEMEN both beautifully delve into the past, present, and possible futures for a group that seeks to push and keep pushing. In an interview with VICE, Inna discusses the Victor revelations, and confidently asserts that they’ve moved on and now they’re independent. All of this–the literal and figurative nakedness of protest, the growth of a movement, the breaking free from the external and internal patriarchal structures–teaches us that in so many ways, the world thinks it owns women’s bodies. I Am FEMEN (and Ukraine is Not a Brothel) show the worth of this organization that’s out to change the world.

I Am FEMEN is available via First Run Features and iTunes.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaVXQVJ1Ct0″]

___________________________

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

‘I Am Ali’ : An Intimate Look At an American Icon

Ali was not, it seems, an uneasy, distant patriarchal figure. His masculinity was characterized by deep emotional expressiveness. Lewins’s employment of beautiful family photos, home movies and those engaging recordings serve to reinforce the impression.

Poster of I Am Ali — Poster of *I Am Ali*

Written by Rachael Johnson.

Only children should have heroes and heroines, but if there is a hero worthy of worship it is Muhammad Ali. Ali was not only a supreme boxer; his extraordinary charisma granted him enormous celebrity outside the ring and he transcended his profession to become one of the most important cultural figures of the ’60s and ’70s. Ali was, and remains, a symbol of Black pride and consciousness in both the United States and abroad. Even today, young people from Cuba to Ghana are familiar with his name and achievements. Ali was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in the early ’80s but it has not prevented him having an active public life. He became an advocate for those with the condition and devoted himself to humanitarian work. Ali is now a revered figure in the United States but this was not always the case. Many in the white establishment and mainstream media hated him. They saw Ali’s conversion to Islam as a threat and despised him for refusing to fight in the monstrosity that was the Vietnam War. The boxer was punished for refusing military service: his heavyweight title was taken away from him and he was banned from boxing for four years from 1967 to 1971. On the sorrowful day Ali leaves us, hypocrites who reviled him will, no doubt, express condolences and the mainstream media will try to depoliticize and deradicalize him like they did with Mandela.

There have been numerous narrative and documentary films devoted to Muhammad Ali. The most well-known biopic of this century is probably Michael Mann’s Ali (2001) starring Will Smith in the title role. There have also been several excellent documentaries on the boxer. The recently released documentary, The Trials of Muhammad Ali (Bill Siegel, 2013) examines the political fight Ali had outside the ring when he refused to fight in Vietnam. Note that the television film Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight, also released in 2013, deals with the legal battle. Many documentaries have studied his legendary fights inside the ring. When We Were Kings (Leon Gast, 1996) examines Ali’s celebrated 1974 fight against George Foreman in the Central African nation then called Zaire (the present-day Democratic Republic of Congo) although it does so much more than anatomize the bout. It is a stirring portrait of an epoch-defining cultural and political event. Although it also examines the public, political Ali, Claire Lewins’s I Am Ali (2014) focuses on the boxer’s private self.

I Am Ali features interviews with people close to Ali, among them his former manager, Gene Kilroy, trainer, Angelo Dundee (who died in 2012), brother, Rahaman Ali and son, Muhammad Ali Jr. Crucially, the documentary gives voice to Ali’s ex-wife, Veronica Porsche, and daughters Hana and Maryum. There are not many profiles of male boxers that feature female public and/or private voices. Lewins has also greatly benefited from access to taped recordings of conversations Ali had with his children. Intended as childhood audio journals, they lend an incalculable poignancy to the film. I Am Ali is, in fact, extremely moving. Hearing the boxer singing Mamas and the Papas songs with 3-year-old Hana makes you cry. Commentary by his daughters indicate that Ali was a great father despite his hectic travelling schedule. Maryum and Hana describe a playful, loving personality. Ali was an inspirational man to his loved ones too. We hear him asking Maryum when she was little: “If everyone’s born for a purpose, what do think you were born for?” Ali was not, it seems, an uneasy, distant patriarchal figure. His masculinity was characterized by deep emotional expressiveness. Lewins’s employment of beautiful family photos, home movies and those engaging recordings serve to reinforce the impression.

As a husband, the younger Ali was, reportedly, more complicated. Although an intimate portrait of the man, the documentary does not examine his marital and romantic life in depth. Lewins, however, rightly allows a tearful Veronica to describe her “fairy tale days” with Ali and more painful ones: “He’s a really good-hearted person, very sensitive, and I guess I’m crying because of his situation now. You know, and I’ll always love him, I mean not like ‘in love’…we’ve always been friends. It became hard to live with him because, everyone knows, the whole world knows, he wasn’t faithful as a husband. There’s a story to that too, but I think but he’s an incredible human being. He has a beautiful heart…” Is I Am Ali hagiography? Perhaps. What is clear, though, is that Ali was, and is, much loved by people close to him.

Clare Lewins not only incorporates private, female voices in her documentary; I Am Ali also features an interview with a boxing fan, Russ Routledge, from Newcastle in the North East of England who once stayed with Ali in his home in the States. In doing so, she exhibits both a feminist and populist consciousness in her portrait of the boxer. The British director, further, examines Ali’s warm relationship with the United Kingdom. Lewins tells the improbable tale of his visit to South Shields (also in the North East of England) where his marriage to Veronica was blessed in the local mosque. This is of personal interest to me as it is the town where I was born.

Although it focuses on the private Ali, the documentary also addresses the public and political aspects of the man. I Am Ali is graced with fantastic iconic shots of the boxer and remarkable archival footage of powerful old interviews and speeches. Ali spoke out against racial injustice and the documentary features a potent, witty speech on white supremacist indoctrination by the boxer. It examines his growing political awareness and chronicles his conversion to Islam as well as his refusal to fight in Vietnam. Ali’s refusal to fight, in my mind, remains the most courageous thing he has ever done in his courageous, wonderful life. I Am Ali features the boxer’s memorable statement about his decision: “Why should me and other so-called negroes go ten thousand miles away from home here in America to drop bombs and bullets on other innocent brown people who’s never bothered us and I will say directly no I will not go ten thousand miles to help kill innocent people.”

I Am Ali is, perhaps, not the finest documentary about the legendary boxer. The fascinating and thrilling When We Were Kings remains a personal favourite. It is is, nevertheless, an insightful and tender exploration of both the public and private Ali. Giving voice to the man himself and those closest to him, it is a deeply emotional ode to both family love and noble ideals.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we’ve been reading this week–and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

Let’s Go Full Crocodile, Ladies (1970s Feminist Political Documentary Year of the Woman Available Now) by Rebecca Traister and Sally Edelstein at The Huffington Post

In “Magic Mike XXL,” the Star of the Show is Women’s Pleasure by Elizabeth King at Bitch Media

OITNB Cast: ‘We Started a Trend’ of LGBT Diversity on TV by Gina Vivinetto at Advocate.com

Netflix’s Tig Notaro documentary is a deeply serious film about a deeply funny person by Dylan Matthews at Vox

Roland Emmerich’s gay rights drama joins the race for the Oscars by Henry Barnes at The Guardian

How Paper Towns Falls Short by Carter Sherman at Ms. blog

Embracing the Female Gaze by Melissa Silverstein at Women and Hollywood

Nelson George’s Misty Copeland Documentary – A Ballerina’s Tale’ – Picked Up by Sundance Selects for Fall Release by Tambay A. Obenson at Shadow and Act

Vice Goes No-Holds-Barred With New Women-Focused Web Channel by Jordan Crucchiola at Wired

Jill Soloway Says “There Is an All Out-Attack” on Female Filmmakers by Ryan Lattanzio at IndieWire

Judd-ging Amy: The Slut-Shaming, Heteronormative Morality of ‘Trainwreck’ by Peter Knegt at /Bent

What have you been reading/writing this week? Tell us in the comments!

‘What Happened, Miss Simone?’: A High Priestess Speaks of Rebellion

Dispersed among the footage are archival glimpses into Nina’s journals, where we can read quick sketches of her own thoughts and feelings. And although the particular journal entries are chosen and shaped to fit the narrative Garbus is presenting, it only helps to give us a deeper understanding of the complexity of being a Black woman artist in racist America. Nothing has changed.

What Happpened, Miss Simone Netflix One Sheet — *What Happpened, Miss Simone* Netflix One Sheet

“How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?”

–Nina Simone

Director Liz Garbus could’ve stopped the documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? six minutes into its run time. Nina Simone steps onstage after a lengthy absence from show business. She takes a bow and then stops cold, stares at the audience for what seems like an eternity. Her eyes take in the scene but from my viewpoint, it looks like she is seeing beyond the crowd gathered before her. It’s like she can see the future, what’s coming up for Black people around the bend of time.

Her face is filled with long simmering rage, pain, insolent dark beauty, and unchecked defiance. Here stands an artist struggling to create timely, relevant, serious Black art in front of an overwhelmingly white audience outside of America. She remembers the feeling of isolation and hatred against her for being Black. Nose too big. Lips too full. Skin too dark. Daring to dream of becoming the first Black classical pianist. Denied entry into the Curtis Institute of Music after a short stint at Julliard. Then she sits down. Speaks a few words, and then starts her performance.

"I want to shake people up so bad that when they leave a nightclub where I'Ve performed, I just want them to be to pieces" — “I want to shake people up so bad that when they leave a nightclub where I’ve performed, I just want them to be to pieces”

This small moment, a few seconds really, told me all I needed to know. The documentary could’ve ended right there for me, the look on Simone’s face was that forceful and telling. I have seen that look before. In the eyes of my grandfather when I was little, in the eyes of aunts and uncles and older friends who have been through some shit in America. It’s the eyes of a weary soldier who knows the battle will be long and not finished soon enough.

What makes this documentary extraordinary is that we get to hear and see Nina Simone talk about her life herself. In her own words at the exact times she says them. This is not a typical documentary film where the artist is reflecting back, perhaps shading the truth a little because of time. Garbus uses film footage of Nina speaking, and we are allowed to be time travelers, visiting exact moments in Simone’s life as they are happening. Dispersed among the footage are archival glimpses into Nina’s journals, where we can read quick sketches of her own thoughts and feelings. And although the particular journal entries are chosen and shaped to fit the narrative Garbus is presenting, it only helps to give us a deeper understanding of the complexity of being a Black woman artist in racist America. Nothing has changed.

Nina Simone performing "Mississippi Goddam" in Selma during the historic March — Nina Simone performing “Mississippi Goddam” in Selma during the historic march.

What I enjoy about the documentary is that Nina is bold and Black with no filters, exactly as I imagined her to be. I started listening to her music with serious intent while in college after presenting a paper on protest music in a History for Teachers class. I wrote of folk singers, like Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez, Odetta, et al, moved into James Brown’s seminal “Say it Loud-I’m Black and I’m Proud” and “I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door, I’ll Get It Myself)” and introduced my professor and classmates to Simone’s “Missississippi Goddam.” No one had heard of the song or her. I dug into music archives, listening, learning, trying to imagine being a singer of righteous indignation in a world that only wanted Diana Ross and the Supremes type pop music from Black women. I wondered what Nina Simone thought about her work going against the musical dictates of her time. In this documentary, Simone lays it out there for me. And it’s a heartbreaking motherfucker to watch. I had to pause several times in my viewing to catch my breath and process Simone’s words. A reporter interviews Simone late in her life and Nina laments that all she wanted to be was that cherished classical pianist, and tears swell up in her eyes. I had to stop and cry for her too.

The High Priestess adorning preparing for a show. — The High Priestess adorning hersel for a show.

What Happened, Miss Simone filled me with a lot of anger. I’m angry a lot these days I confess. Angry at the overt racism she lived through, angry at the depression and undiagnosed bipolar disorder she suffered through for so long, and angry at her husband/manager Andrew Stroud. Angry that American racial baggage is still with us as I write these words. The footage of Stroud talking about his life with Nina Simone is a goldmine to have, because we hear directly from the horse’s mouth his adverse reaction to her radicalization during the Civil Rights Movement. In one journal entry Simone wrote:

“I don’t mind going without food or sleep as long as I am doing something worthwhile to me such as this.”

As for her husband’s response to her involvement with the Civil Rights/Black Power Movement, she wrote:

“Andrew was noticeably cold and very removed from the whole affair.”

"Now I could sing to help my people, and that became the mainstay of my life.' Nina on the Civil Rights Movement. — “Now I could sing to help my people, and that became the mainstay of my life.” Nina on the Civil Rights Movement.

While Simone stands on stage shaping her music to reflect the times she lives in, hoping to inspire and encourage young people to recognize they were young, gifted, and Black, in a world that wanted to crush the life out of them, Stroud sits on film stating with disdain, “She wanted to align herself with the extreme terrorist militants who were influencing her.”

Here was a Black man who was calling young Black radicals fighting oppression terrorists. Black People. In America. Getting their asses bombed, beaten, and bloodied in the streets of a country they built. Are you out of your cotton-picking mind?

No wonder Nina Simone left Andrew Stroud.

It wasn’t enough that he was beating her, working her to death, and dominating her life. He was disrespecting the work that she found meaningful which was making music for her people. I found it condescending and – surprise- sexist, that he believed Simone had no agency of her own to think for herself. He really believed that others outside of her own thinking mind were influencing her decision to write and sing radical Black music, to take up the cause of the Black Panthers and to question the utility of non-violence in the face of violent white Americans. Theirs was a complicated, volatile relationship, and I could only feel deep sorrow for their daughter Lisa Simone Kelley who was caught in between them. Lisa discusses how she later suffered physical abuse at the hands of her own mother after her parents broke up. (Side note: One of my favorite performances of Simone’s “Four Women” includes Lisa Simone Kelly. Watch it here.)

Nina Simone's only child, Lisa Simone Kelly. — Nina Simone’s only child, singer Lisa Simone Kelly. She is also an executive producer of the documentary.

Simone explains that she was responsible for the livelihood of 19 people who worked for her. The pressure, stress, and physical/mental fatigue made her suicidal. What happens when your soul can’t do what it needs to do? When the thing that you love doing, slowly turns into the thing that you dread and eventually hate? It eats at you and often your mind turns on itself. Another journal entry during this crisis has Simone lamenting, “They don’t know that I’m dead and my ghost is holding on.”

The documentary showcases the highs and many lows, and it gives the viewer an opportunity to glimpse the genius Black woman that Simone was. Her music catalogue and this documentary are like a grimoire for those of us who need to reach into it to conjure up spells of protection and invocations of remembrance. I had to watch it four times to revel in her magic.

Nina free in Liberia — Simone in Liberia, Africa. The only time she felt free in her life according to Simone in the documentary.

Near the end of the documentary Nina reflects on how singing political songs hurt her career.

“There is no reason to sing those songs. Nothing is happening,” she says. She is so wrong. We need her songs now more than ever. We need that bold, bruising canon of radical Black music. We are calling on old Black Gods during this Black Lives Matter Movement (and the racist, terrorist attack on the Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina that ended nine lives, including that of a State Senator), and this High Priestess of Soul can show us the way.

I hear her influence in the recent works of D’Angelo (the Black Messiah album) and Kendrick Lamar (“Alright”) who are writing protest music for this generation. As writer/cultural critic Stanley Crouch says in the film, Nina Simone is the Patron Saint of the Rebellion. All praises due. The struggle continues. This documentary tells us that. Call upon her name. Nina. Simone.

Amen.

High Priestess of Soul and The Patron Saint of the Rebellion.

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Staff writer Lisa Bolekaja co-hosts Hilliard Guess’ Screenwriters Rant Room, and her latest speculative fiction short story “Three Voices” can be read in Uncanny Magazine. She divides her time between California and Italy. She can be found on Twitter @LisaBolekaja. Follow at your own risk.