April 12, 2017
Page 15
Opening Eyes to the Struggles of Others
C ontinued froM P age 12
who received an Emerging Artist Award
from Full Frame and a Filmmaker Award
from the Center for Documentary Studies at
Duke University for this film. Ford’s older
brother William was shot and killed 25 years
ago, but the killer was never prosecuted. That
injustice opened a wound in Ford’s family
that can never really heal, not only because of
the grief of losing a loved one to violence but
also because the loss and injustice has been
denied recognition and reckoning. In the
years since, we have watched as countless
other black families have experienced simi-
lar losses at the hands of white perpetrators
who are never prosecuted. Ford sets out here
to grasp for his family’s truth, putting it in the
context of his hardworking parents, who left
the Jim Crow South to pursue better hopes in
New York and who raised Ford and his two
siblings in very segregated Long Island. How
does one tell a story that will always remain
unresolved? Though the film has received
critical acclaim, Ford has received some crit-
icism for waiting until late in the film to re-
veal some information that likely was the ba-
sis for a claim that the shooting happened in
self-defense. I appreciated his choice, after so
many instances of watching stories of black
people being shot followed immediately by
tales of their misdeeds and explanations for
why they brought violence on themselves.
I felt Ford struggling for a more complete
truth here, including how, immediately after
his brother’s shooting, the family sensed that
their lost loved one, who had been unarmed,
was being treated more like a suspect than a
victim of the white perpetrator who shot him
at close range and whose own circumstances
and record were far from clean. Watch this
film not to critique Ford’s storytelling choic-
es but rather to sit for a few moments with
the pain that he and his family must endure
for much longer. A limited theatrical release
is planned, and you can follow the film at
strongislandfilm.com.
“500 Years” is the culmination of a trio of
films about Guatemala by documentarian Pa-
mela Yates, and focuses on a populist upris-
ing that led finally to the resignation of Gua-
temala’s president in 2015 and, eventually, to
his incarceration. It’s a surprisingly remark-
able story; the government in Guatemala is
controlled by a small number of ruling fami-
lies and is manifestly corrupt, and the indig-
enous Mayan population has been horribly
oppressed for 500 years. Yet in scene after
scene, they show up in droves, prominently
led by very fierce women. Even without fol-
lowing all of the nuances here, I was really
amazed by what I saw. The film begins with a
2013 trial of a former president for genocide
and crimes against humanity, which offers a
glimpse of testimony of hundreds of Mayan
people, some apparently quite brave judges
attempting to hold onto the proceedings, and
also terrible government efforts to subvert
the whole thing. Our own government’s his-
tory in Guatemala makes us complicit in so
much that has happened here; this film offers
hope and an important opportunity for bear-
ing witness. In addition to Full Frame, the
film also played at the Ashland Independent
Film Festival on April 8 and you can follow
its future trajectory at 500years.skylight.is.
the city and who clearly doesn’t see Yu. (He
finds her poetry “annoying,” while she finds
him annoying “just sitting there.”). The film
doesn’t overplay her suffering, and yet that
suffering clearly allows Yu to see and to write
with aching honesty. The poems are beauti-
fully rendered against the natural beauty that
surrounds her, which feels both simple and
lush. Definitely worth looking for, though no
word yet about further availability in the U.S.
“Purple Dreams” had its world premiere
at Full Frame, and was the first of three doc-
umentaries I saw depicting a year in the life
of a particular school -- in this case, North-
west School of the Arts, a Charlotte, N.C.
public magnet school that was the first high
school permitted to perform the Broadway
musical adaptation of “The Color Purple.”
The film follows the mounting of that pro-
The new documentary “Whose Streets” looks at how the killing of 18-year-old
Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. inspired a community to fight back and sparked a
global movement.
“Still Tomorrow” is a profile of a 40ish
woman, Yu Xiuhua, who became an over-
night sensation in China after her poem,
“Cross Half of China to Sleep With You,”
went viral. Some of what makes this film
interesting is that something like that can
happen in China -- and the film suggests that
that could be, variously, because Yu writes
in a (for China) frankly sexual way, because
she is a woman, because she is disabled (she
lives with cerebral palsy), and because she
is a rural farmer. Much more interesting is
Yu herself, who rejects such reductionist
analyses of her while welcoming her new
notoriety. She is a fascinating mix of what
might seem like contradictions: clearer and
more self-assured than most women, yet also
insecure and longing for love and indepen-
dence that her disability has denied her. She
lives with her aging and practical parents,
who married her off at 19 to a much older
man who spends most of his time working in
duction, and especially its effect on six stu-
dents from challenging life circumstances
who experienced some visible healing and
transformation in the act of embodying
the struggle and triumph of Alice Walker’s
characters. The film’s able white director,
Joanne Hock, seems to conceive the film as
a paean to the value of arts education, and
it is indeed wonderful to watch the loving
work of the students’ theater arts teacher
and director Corey Mitchell in coaxing such
beauty and truth out of these young people. I
will say there was a cringe-worthy moment
during the talkback after the film when I
wondered if the director fully realizes what
the students themselves bring to the table;
she recounted an audience member marvel-
ing at how well-spoken the students are and
how she responded, “that’s arts education,”
as though this is a Pygmalion exercise. This
film certainly does illustrate how vital arts
education is, but it also is a window to a few
souls who fight for expression among the
many others just as worthy who never quite
find an opening. I do hope this film finds a
distributor who is awake to those realities;
I’ll be watching its Facebook page for up-
dates.
“Zaatari Djinn” follows the lives of four
Syrian children in a refugee camp in the Jor-
danian desert. The camp holds 80,000 refu-
gees, 80 percent of whom are children. The
film’s Dutch director, Catherine van Camp-
en, spent more than three years visiting the
camp under really challenging conditions,
building trust with the children and their fam-
ilies across deep cultural divides. The rapport
van Campen built with her subjects shows in
the intimacy of the filmmaking; the children
appear quite unself-conscious and convey
quite a few signals of their inner lives. Van
Campen just journeys with them; there are no
talking heads explaining their circumstances
or laying context. What emerges from close
observation and beautifully composed imag-
es is a sense of the resilience of children, and
the glimmers of the impact of their displace-
ment in this stark place. The film is currently
available on Amazon, and more info can be
found at zaataridjinn.com.
“School Life” (originally titled “In Loco
Parentis,” but recently renamed in hopes of
capturing an international audience) is the
second of the three docs I saw following a
year in the life of the school (I’ll cover the
third next week). This one is the only prima-
ry-age boarding school in Ireland, regularly
compared to Hogwarts in press coverage.
The film is pleasant, even delightful, in the
way films about nurturing children generally
are, focusing especially on a couple, John and
Amanda Leyden, who have been teaching at
the school for more than 40 years. Their at-
tentiveness and honed intuition for coaxing
the best from their charges will warm even
the coldest heart. That said, the film evinces
no particular mindfulness about how priv-
ileged these children are compared to most
other children, nor any contextual focus be-
yond the sweetness of it all. Of the three I
saw, this was the least deserving of a large
audience; I’ll be curious how it fares com-
pared to the other two. It’s been acquired by
Magnolia Pictures, which plans a theatrical
release. You can visit inlocoparentis.ie for the
latest information.
Darleen Ortega is a judge on the Oregon
Court of Appeals and the first woman of col-
or to serve in that capacity. Her movie review
column Opinionated Judge appears regular-
ly in The Portland Observer. Find her movie
blog at opinionatedjudge.blogspot.com.
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12
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C ALENDAR
April 2017
Space Shuttle Colum-
bia First Launched
Crewed by John
Young and Robert
Crippen - 1981
3rd President Thomas
Jefferson born, 1743
Lee Bennett Hopkins
born, 1938
R
FRIDAY SATURDAY
14
15
SUNDAY
16
Income Tax Day
Artist/Inventor Leon-
ardo Da Vinci born,
1452
Easter
Garth Williams born,
1912
Aviator Wilbur
Wright born, 1867
Titanic Struck an ice-
berg shortly before
midnight on April
14, then sinking.