February 8, 2017
BLACK
HISTORY
MONTH
Page 5
“I Am Not Your Negro” uses archival footage of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements to explore the racial violence that continues to permeate American culture.
The movie will screen on Thursday, Feb. 9, the opening night of the Portland International Film Festival.
Honoring Black History at PIFF
Citywide festival
puts focus on
world diversity
My favorite time of year is upon us! For
the rest of this month, the Portland Interna-
tional Film Festival (PIFF) will pack your
local theaters – so in addition to honoring
Black History, you can sample or gorge
on a variety of stories that delightfully
outshines the limited fare that Hollywood
serves up.
And gorging is exactly what I have in
mind. Over 160 films will be on display
(98 features and 66 shorts) from over 50
countries, and I am especially excited to
see films from cultures I so rarely get to see
explored on screen, like Romania, Turkey,
Cuba, Kenya, Qasar and Serbia. I revel at
the chance to share space from audience
members who come to hear films in their
native Spanish, French, Tagalog, Farsi,
Swahili and Russian. The experience is as
enriching as travel itself can be.
“I Am Not Your Negro” opens the festi-
val on two screens on Thursday, Feb. 9 (it
opens in broader release on Feb. 17), and
I can’t think of a year when I have been
more excited about the opening night film.
We in the United States have neglected the
realities of racism and shut out so many
voices for so long that we are essentially
operating on the level of “alternative facts.”
Raoul Peck’s passion project compiles the
words of James Baldwin into a meditation
on the history of oppression of black peo-
ple, with a focus on the assassinations of
Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and
Malcolm X.
Baldwin’s perspective is uncannily
sharp and offers such a needed broadening
of focus on the truth of black experience.
The previews have already moved me to
tears, as Peck’s artful juxtapositions of
images, music, and Baldwin’s prescient
words expose harsh realities of violence,
exploitation, dehumanization, and trauma
that characterize race relations in the U.S.
It is time we right-sized our assessment
of these broken places, and Peck’s careful
rendering of Baldwin’s legacy offers a pro-
found step in the right direction.
To get you started on the rest, I recom-
mend all four of the films I have seen in
preview screenings. Here they are in the
order I would rank them:
“Kills on Wheels” is a thoroughly engag-
o PinionAted
J udge
by
d arleen o rtega
ing Hungarian feature about two disabled
teenagers and their danger-filled relation-
ship with a former firefighter, Janos, who is
now paralyzed from the waist down. Janos
works as a hit man for a Serbian crime
boss with a fondness for killer dogs. Zoli,
whose spinal problems require him to use a
wheelchair, and his roommate Barba, who
suffers from cerebral palsy, have a pas-
sion for drawing comics, and are spinning
a story about their adventures. The result
is a comic action film that manages to be
quite perceptive about the invisibility that
people with disabilities endure. Its three
leads offer that rare film about people with
disabilities that neither pathologizes nor
c ontinued on p age 7