April 24, 2019
Page 7
Films Explore Race
and the Environment
C ontinued froM P age 4
I found “American Factory” interesting
but a little unsatisfying. The film follows
what happens when a Chinese auto glass
manufacturer, Fuyao, opens a plant at the
location of a closed GM plant in Dayton,
Ohio. (Directors Julie Reichart and Steven
Bognar previously were nominated for an
Academy Award for their short film, “The
Last Truck: The Closing of a GM Plant,”
which told the story of the closing of that
plant.) The Chinese-American venture,
however outwardly successful, devolves
into successive misunderstandings and
culture clashes; the Chinese bring in some
of their own workers to bring their way of
doing business to Ohio, and the U.S. work-
Ethan Rice is a young artist dying of
cystic fibrosis who navigates an end
of life journey in the new documentary
“Exit Music.”
force of former autoworkers have entirely
different ideas of what a functioning and
viable workplace looks like. It’s an Ameri-
can film, so I suppose it’s not surprising to
sense a bit of American bias in this film’s
depiction of the attitude of the Chinese to-
ward employees and toward American en-
vironmental and labor laws, as if a similar
disregard is not also evident among Amer-
ican manufacturers. That said, this is an in-
teresting window into the current dilemmas
facing American and global industry, one
that doesn’t fill one with confidence in the
quality of communications and decisions
that will drive whatever changes come
next. As of February, a Netflix release was
in negotiations, so the film should be ac-
cessible to a broader audience soon.
A broad audience will be harder to come
by for “Exit Music,” a sensitive explora-
tion of the life and death of Ethan Rice,
a young artist suffering with cystic fibro-
sis--but that’s only because death is so hard
to sit with. Director Cameron Mullenneaux
set out to make a film about the difficulty
of dying, and what she has assembled here
reflects months of patient trust-building
and ministry of presence, as 28-year-old
Rice and his devoted parents struggle with
what it means to affirm him and his life as
the pain and struggle that attends his life
become more and more difficult. Rice far
surpassed all predictions for his life span,
in part because his father (a Vietnam vet-
Offering a take on racial injustice, “Where the Pavement Ends,” explores the
relationship between the historically all-black town of Kinloch, Mo., and its formerly
all-white neighbor Ferguson, where the police killing of Michael Brown sparked
protests and national outrage in 2014.
eran suffering from PTSD) made it his
personal mission to keep his son alive. So
how does one let go, when the body does
not ease the process? What does it mean
to love and care for someone who is suf-
fering? What is a good death? This com-
passionate film sits with those questions,
buoyed by the music and animation which
Rice created to express what he had to say
within the parameters that his physical
limitations afforded him. You can look for
screenings and follow the film’s progress at
exitmusicfilm.com.
With the backing of distributor National
Geographic, “Sea of Shadows” won’t be
hard to find in the near term. It’s a well-
shot and slickly produced eco-thriller
about endangered animals off the Mexican
coast. A complicated story told well begins
with the totoaba fish in the Sea of Cortez,
whose bladder is a highly prized commod-
ity in China; black-market poachers have
decimated the population of not only that
fish but a rare porpoise, the vaquita, that
is very near extinction, caught in the gill-
nets aiming for the totoaba. Mexican car-
tels and institutional corruption make the
urgent efforts to prevent extinction of the
vaquita complicated, dangerous, and quite
possibly futile. The filmmaker juggles all
these elements well for a compelling and
ongoing story that likely mirrors other
greed-driven crises across the globe. The
film garnered an audience award at the
Sundance Film Festival
Finally, “Grit” is another environmental
story that has caught attention on the festi-
val circuit, including at the Ashland Inde-
pendent Film Festival, where it won Special
Mention. It’s the devastating story of a tsu-
mani of mud that destroyed an Indonesian
village in 2006. The disaster resulted when
an oil company, Lapindo, struck an under-
ground mud volcano. A decade later, despite
abundant evidence establishing the cause of
the disaster, villagers whose jobs and homes
C ontinued on P age 14