In the face of impunity, there is a sacred role for the storyteller. We can tell stories which invite people to confront painful truths. To combat the lies of impunity, you are doing the task of the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes.
John Lewis declares that, during the 1960s, he was arrested “a few times.” Then the elder statesman and éminence grise of the civil rights movement pauses before correcting himself in front of the large Dallas crowd he’s addressing: “40 times…"
“Homemade,” a wondrous and mostly satisfying anthology of 17 short films made round the world over the past two months - reveal a scattershot collage of the world in 2020.
"I stand with Black Lives Matter but still, as I watched the obligatory scene of Vietnamese soldiers getting shot and killed for the thousandth time, I thought: Does it make any difference if politically conscious Black men kill us?"
Two recent documentaries, both now streaming, try to unpack the McCarthyite Trump-whisperer—progenitor of the postmodern political world we now inhabit.
Greg Tate explores the shifting struggles for black equality – and identity – presented in the Swedish television archives (filmed from 1967 - 1975) originally released as a film in 2011 and currently streaming on Amazon Prime and YouTube.
'Just Mercy', the 2019 film, which chronicles criminal justice reform in Alabama, stars Michael B. Jordan as lawyer Bryan Stevenson and Jamie Foxx, as the falsely accused death row inmate Walter McMillian, reveals the systematic racism in America.
A new film set in Djibouti City presents a searing class critique of Somali girlhood.
Elliza Hittman’s coming-of-age story about a teenager seeking an abortion is heartbreaking and painfully authentic. Hittman has described her film as “a narrative about a girl carrying around a lot of pain and burden, and the lonliness of it all".
“Capital in the 21st Century” is based on the 2013 book by Thomas Piketty, a French economist. The film, directed by Justin Pemberton, undermines that core power of the world’s elites — shaping how we think — in a particularly wise, sneaky way.
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