Page 4
April 25, 2018
New Documentaries Worth Watching
o PinionAted
J udge
by
d arleen o rteGa
To close out my report on the
Full Frame Film Documentary
Festival, I offer some thoughts
about the films I saw in the last
two days of the festival in order
of my own appreciation. The first
three, especially, are well worth
seeking out.
“Crime + Punishment” won a
special jury prize at the Sundance
Film Festival and is the product
of some fantastic investigative re-
porting by director Steven Maing.
He follows the NYPD12, a group
of New York police officers of
color who risk their safety and ca-
reers to expose systemic racism in
the police department in the form
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of quota systems that target com-
munities of color. Even after quo-
ta systems were “officially” out-
lawed, they continue in the form
of barely-tacit pressure to issue
the requisite volume of summons
and arrests each month, a practice
which police leadership brazenly
denies each time they are con-
fronted. The officers at the center
of this film are impressive in their
courage, and the film serves as
an excellent and hard-to-capture
depiction of the relentless deter-
mination that it takes to challenge
systemic oppression. It is little
wonder that so few people find
the inner resources to challenge
structural wrongs when it is so
much easier to allow the system to
dictate what is actually happening,
even when the agreed-upon story
contradicts so much other evi-
dence. Both the film and its sub-
jects evince awareness that these
officers are fighting only one piece
of a still-larger system that has
produced mass incarceration and
other devastating effects on com-
munities of color; this documenta-
ry is a primer on the importance
of standing up and telling the truth
about the pieces happening inside
one’s own orbit. Follow the film
at http://crimeandpunishmentdoc.
com/.
“The Jazz Ambassadors” tells
a fascinating and complex story
very well. During the height of the
Cold War in the 1950s, the U.S. and
the Soviet Union were engaged in
propaganda campaigns against
each other, and the Soviets were
all over the ugly facts of Ameri-
can racism. At the same time, the
U.S. sought to win the propaganda
war and curb the spread of com-
munism with a program that sent
American jazz musicians like
Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington,
Dizzy Gillespie, along with their
mixed-race bands, to play all over
the U.S.S.R, Asia, and Africa.
How did this plan originate? Why
did the musicians agree to do it?
The answers are far more com-
plex and inspiring than I imag-
ined; among other things, one of
the first black congressmen, Adam
Clayton Powell Jr., conceived the
plan and sold it in Congress; the
musicians saw how they were
being used, but also grabbed the
opportunity to show up as them-
selves and to let the power of their
music and personalities chang-
es hearts and energy in ways the
power structure scarcely grasped.
They also gained a window on
freedom movements around the
world, and brought back perspec-
tive that impacted the movements
for civil rights at home. The mu-
sic here is amazing (a soundtrack
album is planned) and, supported
by amazing footage and astute ex-
pert commentary, the film offers
Sgt. Edwin Raymond was among a group of police officers of color
who put their safety and careers at risk by exposing systemic
racism in the New York Police Department. The story is told in the
fantastic new documentary “Crime + Punishment.”
is an unexpectedly inspiring sto-
ry of how it is possible to employ
resourcefulness that is not overly
distracted by the agendas of the
powerful. This PBS documentary
is will air on May 4 and hopefully
will have an online release as well.
“Sky and Ground” follows
the journey of one Syrian fami-
ly from a refugee camp near the
Greek-Macedonian border across
seven countries to join family
members in Germany, where they
hope to start a new life after es-
caping Islamic militants and the
Assad regime in Aleppo. But it is
by no means a straight path; this
film conveys a concrete sense of
life in a refugee camp, the danger
of travelling with few resources
while struggling to avoid detec-
tion for fear of being sent back to
the chaos of a camp or, worse yet,
some form of imprisonment; the
heightened stakes that can lead to
assuming the risk of hiring trans-
portation that can lead to other
problems. The filmmakers were
quite resourceful in capturing an
important story of vulnerable peo-
ple; not wanting to expose them to
further danger, they allowed the
family to film themselves a good
portion of the trip, but also spent
enough time with them to build
an intimate portrait of a perilous
journey that far too many people
must make. I was so struck by the
senselessness of what refugees
experience simply trying to find
safety; this film has the potential
to help us become far less com-
fortable with how we treat peo-
ple who have lost everything and
simply want a place to build a
functional life. You can follow the
film at http://www.humanityon-
themove.org/.
“The Pushouts” aims to help
viewers understand and engage
with a segment of kids whom so-
ciety essentially throws away as
impossible to help. We often refer
to them as dropouts but, according
to Dr. Victor Rios, a better term
would be “pushouts,” because the
combination of their challenging
circumstances and lack of any
real effort to meet these black
and brown kids where they are
essentially pushes them out of en-
gagement with education and into
drug use, criminal activity, and
hopelessness. Rios should know;
his own impossible life challeng-
es found him, at age 15, with a
criminal record and no hope. Now
a professor at UC Berkeley, he
is a compelling focus for exam-
ining the forces arrayed against
poor kids of color and the sort of
personal investment that can help
them reframe their lives. Follow
updates about the film at https://
www.facebook.com/thepushouts/.
“12th and Clairmount” - Fifty
years after the 1967 Detroit upris-
ing, it is hard to locate a coherent
story of those events. This doc is
an attempt to examine that history
through those who lived through
it, assembling home movies and
oral histories of many people who
lived through those events to tell
the story as it appeared to them.
The assemblage has some pow-
er, capturing a sense of the signs
that lurked, unnoticed, beneath
the communal story of Detroit and
the misunderstandings that bub-
bled to the surface during those
devastating days in July. Director
Brian Kaufman elected not to at-
tribute any of the voices, which I
found frustrating at times because
it robbed the viewers of the ca-
pacity for assessing the various
social locations at play. Never-
theless, the compilation here is a
powerful one, and an opportuni-
ty for some deep listening to the
perspectives who weathered the
confusion and loss of innocence
in their bodies. You can follow the
film here: https://www.facebook.
com/12thandClairmount/.
“Maynard” is an admiring
look at former Atlanta mayor
Maynard Jackson, the first black
mayor of a major southern city.
c ontinued on p aGe 10