Page 10
April 11, 2018
Arts &
ENTERTAINMENT
Documenting the Human Experience
C ontinued froM P age 5
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C annon ’ s
r ib e xPress
5410 NE 33rd Ave,
Portland, Or
Call to Order:
503-288-3836
Open (hours)
Sun-Thurs: 11a-8p
Fri-Sat:
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Cannon’s, tasty food and
friendly neighborhood atmosphere.
RaMell Ross began filming af-
ter spending time teaching in the
community and making friends
with two young men who are the
film’s major subjects. The time
Ross spent building those relation-
ships yields him access that would
be hard to come by otherwise, al-
lowing him to capture the small-
est of moments with the greatest
of empathy -- a toddler doggedly
running circles in his living room,
a young man practicing his jump
shot; high school cheerleaders
moving in unison. The result is
a portrait of life among black
people in the rural south that is
uncommonly specific and com-
passionate. The film won special
jury prizes at both Full Frame and
Sundance.
“Owned: A Tale of Two Amer-
icas” examines the story behind
middle-class home ownership in
the U.S., revealing the concept of
the “American dream” to be mean-
ingfully available almost exclu-
sively to white people as the result
of a deliberate program of insti-
tutionalized racial exclusion. Di-
rector Giorgio Angelini connects
a surprising number of narrative
threads, including some clever
use of archival ads and individual
stories, to illuminate the links be-
tween the rise of the suburbs, the
creation of urban housing projects,
and the periodic displacement of
people of color to build highways
and, most recently, to make room
for gentrification. It’s an ambi-
tious and surprisingly entertaining
examination of patterns of struc-
tural bias that aims to bring us to a
more accurate shared history that
might yield better solutions.
“The Judge” offers a fascinat-
ing window into Shari’a law and
life in the West Bank. Judge Kh-
oloud Al-Faqih is the first woman
to serve as judge in the Shari’a
courts in the Middle East, which
cover family law in Islamic so-
ciety. (Women have served as
judges since the 1970s in the civil
courts, which include criminal and
civil matters.). She is a compelling
focus for the current state of life
in the West Bank and Islamic so-
ciety generally, as she walks (with
equal parts joy and courage) a fine
line of fully embracing her culture
and seeing where it needs to shift
in order to confront the most in-
convenient and challenging parts
of its truth. Director Erika Cohn
(an American Jew) does fine and
respectful work here which aims
to help particularly those of us in
the West round out our picture of
a culture about which we under-
stand little, including aerial shots
of the West Bank and the com-
plex perspective of the male Chief
Judge who was brave enough to
appoint Judge Kholoud but is also
a conservative Muslim with three
wives. Fine, mind-expanding
work. It will have a limited theat-
rical release and will also be avail-
able on PBS’s Independent Lens
and Amazon later this year.
‘Of Fathers and Sons” feels
important but is, in many ways,
into a community we understand
very little, and leaves the viewer
to wonder what sort of future chil-
dren like these can envision.
My least favorite film of the
first two days—though I expect I
am an outlier in that regard—was
“RBG,” a biographical doc about
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It is
certainly a well-constructed com-
pendium of her life story and legal
significance, but presented with
an entirely uncritical stance by
two white directors, Julie Cohen
and Betsy West. Taking nothing
away from Ginsburg’s undeniably
RaMell Ross directs “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” a
new documentary that gives an intimate look at life in a mostly
black, rural Alabama town.
almost unwatchable. Director Ta-
lal Derki returns to his former Syr-
ian homeland and imbeds himself
with the family of a jihadist man,
Abu Osama, yielding an intimate
portrait of a person who is both an
extremist and, in his way a fam-
ily man. He dotes on his young
sons while clearly rearing them to
be future jihadists, singing songs
about glorious martyrdom, pun-
ishing them for shows of emotion.
One of his young sons captures
and “slaughters” a bird, compar-
ing its beheading to his father’s
own actions, and his oldest son
is sent off to alarmingly brutal
military training at age 13. In 98
minutes, hardly a woman or girl is
seen at all, until Osama threatens
to bring the roof down on one of
his wives if she doesn’t stop cry-
ing when he comes home with a
serious injury, and you realize that
she (and likely other women and
girls) have been there all along.
Later he jokes of shooting a two-
year-old girl who neglects to wear
a hijab. Derki offers rare insight
significant contributions to wom-
en’s rights and liberal thought, I
was frustrated by the film’s lack
of awareness around Ginsburg’s
place inside of second-wave fem-
inism, its unquestioning eleva-
tion of her vantage point as the
ultimate defender of the rights
of women and minorities, and
its lack of critical analysis of her
failure to seriously consider step-
ping down while President Obama
might have appointed a successor
for her, given her age and the im-
portance of her seat on the Su-
preme Court. There is an under-
lying arrogance in both Ginsburg
and in the liberal dominant culture
view that happily drowns out an
array of perspectives, including
my own.
Darleen Ortega is a judge on
the Oregon Court of Appeals and
the first woman of color to serve
in that capacity. Her movie re-
view column Opinionated Judge
appears regularly in The Portland
Observer. Find her movie blog at
opinionatedjudge.blogspot.com.