⁣The interconnected epidemics of anxiety, chronic illness and substance abuse are, according to Dr Gabor Maté, normal. But not in the way you might think.
One in five Americans are diagnosed with mental illness in any given year [1]. Suicide is the second most common cause of death in the US for youth aged 15-24 [2], and kills over 700,000 people a year globally [3] and 48,300 in the USA [4]. Drug overdose kills 81,000 in the USA annually [5]. The autoimmunity epidemic affects 24 million people in the USA [6]. What is going on?
“So much of what we call abnormality in this culture is actually normal responses to an abnormal culture. The abnormality does not reside in the pathology of individuals, but in the very culture that drives people into suffering and dysfunction.”
— Gabor Maté

In The Wisdom of Trauma, we travel alongside physician, bestselling author and Order of Canada recipient Dr. Gabor Maté to explore why our western society is facing such epidemics. This is a journey with a man who has dedicated his life to understanding the connection between illness, addiction, trauma and society.
“Trauma is not what happens to you. Trauma is what happens inside you, as a result of what happens to you.”
— Gabor Maté

Trauma is the invisible force that shapes our lives. It shapes the way we live, the way we love and the way we make sense of the world. It is the root of our deepest wounds. Dr. Maté gives us a new vision: a trauma-informed society in which parents, teachers, physicians, policy-makers and legal personnel are not concerned with fixing behaviors, making diagnoses, suppressing symptoms and judging, but seek instead to understand the sources from which troubling behaviors and diseases spring in the wounded human soul.

⁣Near-Death Experience, Awareness, Mental stability, psychology, mind games, documentary, Interview

Jeffery Olsen explains how he had a near-death experience, and why it has changed his vision of life and death.
An interview by Anthony Chene

RESOURCE : http://www.anthonychene.com

⁣Award-winning journalist John Pilger investigates the discrepancies between American and British claims for the 'war on terror' and the facts on the ground as he finds them in Afghanistan and Washington, DC.

In 2001, as the bombs began to drop, George W. Bush promised Afghanistan "the generosity of America and its allies". Now, the familiar old warlords are regaining power, religious fundamentalism is renewing its grip and military skirmishes continue routinely. In "liberated" Afghanistan, America has its military base and pipeline access, while the people have the warlords who are, says one woman, "in many ways worse than the Taliban".

In Washington, Pilger conducts a series of remarkable interviews with William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, and leading Administration officials such as Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and John Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security.

These people, and the other architects of the Project for the New American Century, were dismissed as 'the crazies' by the first Bush Administration in the early 90s when they first presented their ideas for pre-emptive strikes and world domination.

Pilger also interviews presidential candidate General Wesley Clark, and former intelligence officers, all the while raising searching questions about the real motives for the 'war on terror'.

While President Bush refers to the US attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq as two 'great victories', Pilger asks the question - victories over whom, and for what purpose? Pilger describes Afghanistan as a country "more devastated than anything I have seen since Pol Pot's Cambodia". He finds that Al-Qaida has not been defeated and that the Taliban is re-emerging. And of the "victory" in Iraq, he asks: "Is this Bush's Vietnam?"

REVIEW RESOURCE: http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/break.html

⁣Anthony Summers, the author of the book Goddess (1985), explains he began researching Marilyn Monroe after he learned that the Los Angeles County District Attorney was reopening the case of her death. Summers subsequently spent three years collecting 650 tape-recorded interviews with people who either knew Monroe in her lifetime or had knowledge concerning her death. The audio of the interviews is original, but actors perform lip-synced reenactments.

As Monroe began acting, she had affairs with multiple powerful men who helped advance her career. Fellow actor Jane Russell notes Monroe had a particularly strong work ethic. However, Monroe suffered from poor mental health stemming from a troubled childhood.

Monroe's third husband, writer Arthur Miller, was affiliated with communism. Both he and Monroe were observed by the FBI, and the couple was known to socialize with communist American ex-pats while abroad. As their marriage deteriorated, Monroe abused prescription drugs and she became increasingly difficult to work with. In 1961, she and Miller divorced.

In 1954, Arthur James, who knew Monroe from Charles Chaplin Jr. in the late 1940s, saw Kennedy with Monroe, walking on the shore, near the Malibu pier, and drinking at the hangout, Malibu Cottage. Monroe met the Kennedy family in the early 1950s, through Hollywood connections that likely evolved from the founding role of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. at RKO Pictures during the 1920s. In the early 1960s, actor Peter Lawford and his wife, Patricia Kennedy Lawford, had a beach house in Malibu, California, where they hosted many social gatherings. Monroe had affairs with both President John F. Kennedy and United States Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, often meeting them at the beach house.

Summers pieces together that Monroe was in a risky political position, as the Kennedy brothers would discuss with her current events including nuclear weapons testing. This was in 1962, during the height of the Cold War. Because of Monroe's leftist politics, the FBI worried she could pass along or make public anything the Kennedys told her. As a result, the Kennedy brothers eventually attempted to cut off all contact with her.

Monroe died on August 4, 1962, and it was ruled a probable suicide. The official timeline reports Monroe's housekeeper, Eunice Murray, checked on Monroe around 3am and found the bedroom door locked. Murray called Monroe's psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, who arrived around 3:30am, broke in through a window, and discovered Monroe was dead. Paramedics and police arrived at 4:25am. Her death was ruled a probable suicide due to a drug overdose.

Summers discounts this timeline, as multiple interview subjects corroborate a rough sequence of events, although there are discrepancies. In this version, Monroe's medical emergency began earlier that night. Her public relations manager, Arthur Jacobs, arrived at Monroe's residence as early as 11pm. An ambulance was called, and Dr. Greenson rode with a comatose Monroe as she was transported to a hospital. She either died at the hospital or on the way. Her body was returned to her house, where she was placed in her bed and "discovered" in the early morning hours. Private investigator Fred Otash and surveillance expert Reed Wilson claim they were hired by Peter Lawford to clear Monroe's home of any evidence that connected her to the Kennedy family before police and reporters arrived.

Despite Summers having accumulated information that was previously unknown about Monroe's death, he doesn't believe she was murdered. Rather, he maintains Monroe died by suicide or an accidental drug overdose. He suspects any type of cover-up was due to her connection with the Kennedy brothers. In 1982, the Los Angeles district attorney ended its review of the case and upheld the original recorded cause of death.

⁣Billionaire activist George Soros is one of the most influential and controversial figures of our time. Famous for betting against the Bank of England in 1992 and making a billion dollars in one day, he is maligned by ideologues on both the left and the right for daring to tackle the world’s problems and putting his money behind his fight – from free elections and freedom of the press to civil rights for minorities. With unprecedented access to the man and his inner circle, American director Jesse Dylan follows Soros across the globe and pulls back the curtain on his personal history, private wealth, and public activism. Soros reveals a complicated genius whose experience as a Jew during the Holocaust gave rise to a lifelong crusade against authoritarianism and hate.

George Soros, a demon to many right-wing blabbermouths, must be one of the most misunderstood men on the contemporary scene. At least that is the premise of Jesse Dylan’s documentary, Soros, which contains extensive interviews with the billionaire, along with testimonials from some of his admirers and scathing evaluations from his detractors. The film is sometimes clumsily executed, but it does have timeliness in its favor.
The movie opens with blasts from people like Stephen Bannon and Fox News host Tucker Carlson. While they are foaming at the mouth, these angry reactionaries never quite clarify why they so detest Soros. And that is the film’s fatal flaw; it doesn’t fully explain why Soros has aroused more antipathy than other progressive philanthropists. The film does recall how Soros made part of his fortune by betting against the Bank of England during a period of financial instability, so perhaps that partially explains the antipathy of people who view him as an opportunist.


REVIEW RESOURCE: https://www.hollywoodreporter.....com/movies/movie-rev

⁣Werner Herzog, Documentary, Timothy Treadwell, Alaska, Tragedy, Tragicomedy, Home Video, Nature

Tragicomedy is an overworked word. Yet nothing else will do. Werner Herzog, that connoisseur of extreme figures in far-off places, has made an inspired documentary about the gonzo naturalist Timothy Treadwell, who in 2003 ended up as lunch for the bears he lived with in the remote Alaskan wilderness.
It is poignant, it is beautiful, and it is absolutely hilarious. Herzog didn't even have much work to do, what's more, because Treadwell - gifted, untrained film-maker that he was - had done almost everything himself, leaving behind hundreds of hours of videotape that he had shot at extreme and indeed fatal risk to himself. They contain sublime, dramatic shots of the bears and footage of his own mad and posturing rants to camera, wearing combats and a bandana - part surfer-dude, part drama-queen. Poor Mr Treadwell. He loved those bears. And they loved him. Yum, yum!

Timothy Treadwell was a mixed-up kid from Long Island in the US who wanted to be an actor. He auditioned for Cheers, but the shock and disappointment of coming second to Woody Harrelson sent him over the edge into drink and drug crises. He came out the other side clean and sober, but with a new passion: the grizzly bears of Alaska. Every summer, he went camping out there with his video camera and his attitude problem, regularly breaking the US park rangers' rule not to come within 100 yards of a bear. Timothy got up close and personal, giving them cute names like "Mr Chocolate" and "Sgt Brown", patting them on the nose, and becoming obsessed with gaining the bears' respect for his courage in doing so. His opening rant to camera is a comic classic, influenced, I very much suspect, by Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now: "I am a kind warrior! I will not die at their claws and paws! I will be a master!"

Bizarrely, his macho extreme-sports persona often alternates with something screamingly camp. Treadwell yoo-hoos wildly like Robin Williams at the bears who lope up to him: "Oh hi! Hiya! Oh he's a big bear! He's a surly bear!" And Treadwell is often very funny - a reality TV natural who never got his own show. There are too many choice moments to describe here, but among the classics is his sudden zooming-in on an immobile bumble bee on a flower, which he tearfully describes: "Isn't this so sad? A bumble-bee expired while it was doing the pollen thing. It's beautiful . . . it's sad . . . it's tragic . . . it's . . . WAIT! The bee just MOVED! Is it . . . is it just SLEEPING?" Later, Treadwell films a full-on macho-bear fight between Micky and Sgt Brown over a female called Saturn, whom Treadwell describes as the "Michelle Pfeiffer of bears".

His mission was to teach the world about these animals, and this he certainly did, according to his lights, touring schools and giving illustrated talks to kids without accepting a fee. But he also angrily claimed, in some of his looniest soliloquies, that he was "protecting" the bears from poachers or even the federal authorities. The awful truth was that he did not add anything to our knowledge of bears, and that any supposed danger these animals were in, living as they did in a protected national park, existed only in Treadwell's over-heated, self-dramatising imagination.

Treadwell's over-the-top persona is in contrast to the cool, deadpan drone of Herzog himself, who pays tribute to his intuitive skills as a film-maker, but repudiates Treadwell's Disneyfied view of nature, seeing in it only colossal coldness and indifference. Herzog appears on camera just once, listening through headphones to Treadwell's final screams - and those of his luckless girlfriend - as they are both eaten. It is only audio, as Treadwell was attacked before he could remove the lens-cap; in a masterstroke of restraint, Herzog does not let us hear this sound, and sorrowfully advises Treadwell's former girlfriend, Jewel, to burn the tape. I wonder if she has.
Was Timothy Treadwell an inspired radical operating outside the academic naturalist establishment - or a pain in the neck with personal issues? A little of both, of course. He was certainly a brilliant performer and director who, by crossing the taboo line (by as it were impaling himself on the taboo line's barbed wire) vividly demonstrated the alien-ness of nature, and therefore its strange and terrible beauty, more than anything I've ever seen by David Attenborough. It is a superb documentary, because Treadwell has not been coerced or set up; he was enough of an amateur to be relaxed and unselfconscious, yet enough of a professional to generate all this outstanding footage, and quite rightly Herzog declines to patronise or make fun of him. If we didn't already know Timothy Treadwell's awful fate, it would be enough to say: a star is born.

REVIEW RESOURCE: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2006/feb/03/1

⁣The story of Martin Armstrong
Can a computer model predict the world economy?

The year is 2014: Europe is stumbling from one emergency summit to the next. America has gone crashing through the 15-billion-dollar debt ceiling. People are taking to the streets across the world because they have realised that something has been thrown off kilter; that the market economy is tearing a vast rift between the super rich and the masses; that the banks have spiralled out of control; that governments have lost their grip on public debt.

And after eleven years off the radar, a man resurfaces in Philadelphia, a man who used a computer model and the number pi in the nineties to predict economic turning points with astounding precision: Martin Armstrong predicted the exact date of the October crash in 1987, the demise of the Japanese bull market in 1990, the turning point for the US and European markets in July 1998 and the Nikkei crash in 1989. He was one of the wealthiest Wall Street market analysts and was named economist of the decade and fund manager of the year in 1998. But he refused to play along with the bankers’ game and warned his customers that “the club” was manipulating currency and silver markets. He quickly made powerful enemies: New York investment bankers, hedge funds managers, Salomon Brothers, Goldman Sachs. The FBI and SEC, US Securities and the Exchange Commission, started to show interest in his computer model. In 1999 he was arrested on charges of fraud which he still disputes to this day. He was incarcerated for seven years for contempt of court. After time in solitary confinement and threats against his mother, he signed a partial confession and was sentenced to a further four years.

This documentary film portrays a man returning to his life after eleven years in prison. It follows him as he meets his old partners for the first time and depicts his first public speech to people who are still prepared to travel from across the globe and pay handsome sums to hear him speak. The film shows him attempting to prove his innocence and expose the power of the New York banks.

Martin Armstrong’s career thus began with a complete error of judgement. Even at this young age, he tried to understand the system, to grasp the logic according to which each boom was followed by a bust. Was Niccolo Machiavelli right in his belief that history repeated itself because man’s passions remain the same? He analysed the financial markets, studied the history of business cycles, stock market crashes and global monetary systems. He visited libraries and collected historical data: gold prices, exchange rates. He played around with figures and dates, he divided the time span between the Rye House Plot in 1683 and the year of the bankers’ panic in 1907 (224 years) by the number of market crashes during this period (26) and ended up with an average of 8.6

Eight point six – the global economy appeared to be based on this 8.6-year cycle. He multiplied the cycle by six which gave him 51.6 years and once again it all fitted perfectly: Black Friday in 1869, the commodity panic in 1920, and the Second and Third Punic Wars. He divided, subtracted and multiplied and established that 8.6 years equalled three thousand one hundred and forty-one days: 3,141, the magic number pi times a thousand. Did pi perhaps also govern the markets or the actions and moods that manifested themselves in these markets?

Armstrong was sure of one thing: there is a geometry of time. He may not be able to explain why, but there is some order to the chaos that exists around us.

Martin Armstrong had just published the secrets of pi when FBI men stormed his office. Soon his accounts and those of his partners in London, Australia and Japan had been frozen. They were not to meet for twelve years. “Is financier Armstrong a Con man, a crank or a genius” asked the New Yorker headline in an eight-page article written as Armstrong was in a maximum security wing in New York. What are the judicial facts, the legal peculiarities and the juristic doubts involved here? And who could have profited from Martin Armstrong’s lengthy sentence behind US bars? And: what does all this say about a system on which we are all dependent in one way or another?

12 years after the demise of Princeton Economics Martin Armstrong is released from prison after he signed a coerced guilty plead. His new life commences with a “World Economic Conference” in Philadelphia. Only three months after his release, he’s back again. As if nothing had happened. As if there’d been no twelve years where he was deprived of the world. Martin Armstrong lectures to 350 people, who travelled especially to Philadelphia to see him. He speaks of his initial approach towards solving the global financial crisis, which he compares to the fall of the Roman Empire. And twelve years later, some of his former partners are back to perhaps resume operations where they’d left off. Will Martin Armstrong and his former partners join forces and re-establish Princeton Economics to make their distinctive mark on the desolate landscape of the financial sector?

WITH
(IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE)
OFER COHEN
VICKY ARMSTRONG
DANIELLE WHITE
LARRY EDELSON
IDA ARMSTRONG
SAM COLAVITA
ANTHONY GODIN
MICHAEL CAMPBELL
BARCLAY LEIB
NIGEL KIRWAN
JUSTIN PFEIFFER
NEILL MACPHERSON
JANA ASPRAY
DAVID GLOVIN
TOMAS V. SJOBLOM
LESSLIE MACPHERSON
GEORG SPERBER
OLIVER BROWN

⁣This documentary looks inside the life of a high-powered music publicist who became a techno-age philosopher.
For the past 20 years, in his second career as a best-selling author, Howard Bloom has been grappling with the big questions, all of which can be boiled down to, as he puts it here, “What does the universe want from you and me?” Bloom has, in the pre-Covid-19 world chronicled in this documentary about him, a strict routine that helps him in this discipline.
It includes morning exercise and consulting a list of reminders of what to take with him when he ventures out of his Brooklyn brownstone. It also involves a staggering number of medications, which he needs to combat his chronic fatigue syndrome, which struck him in 1988 and left him unable to step out of his bed, let alone his apartment, for many years.


Directed by Charlie Hoxie, “The Grand Unified Theory” is a moderately engaging documentary that credibly portrays Bloom’s indefatigability. He speaks of his aspiration to be a “24 hour-a-day information processing device” and defends his auto-didacticism by saying “Grad school looked like Auschwitz for the mind.” That eyebrow-raising simile is emblematic of Bloom’s bluff offhandedness, which likely served him well in his first career as a high-profile music publicist. (Recalling his tenure representing Run-DMC, he says, “We made rap.” Kurtis Blow and others might like a word.)

The movie spends more time on Bloom’s personality than it does on the ideas promulgated in such volumes as “The Lucifer Principle,” for which the actor Jeff Bridges contributes an onscreen blurb. And when Bloom confides his plan to let a Dubai-based fitness instructor and gym entrepreneur handle his archives, we get into what looks like some P.T. Barnum territory.

REVIEW RESOURCE: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/0....7/21/movies/the-gran

⁣Raoul Peck’s outstanding, Oscar-nominated documentary is about the African American activist and author James Baldwin, author of Go Tell It on the Mountain and The Fire Next Time. Peck dramatises Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript Remember This House, his personal memoir of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr and civil rights activist Medgar Evers, murdered by a segregationist in 1963. Baldwin re-emerges as a devastatingly eloquent speaker and public intellectual; a figure who deserves his place alongside Edward Said, Frantz Fanon or Gore Vidal.

Peck puts Samuel L Jackson’s steely narration of Baldwin’s words up against a punchy montage of footage from the Jim Crow to the Ferguson eras, and a fierce soundtrack. (It’s incidentally a great use of Buddy Guy’s Damn Right I’ve Got the Blues, which never sounded so angry or political.) There is a marvellous clip of Baldwin speaking at the Cambridge Union Society, and another on the Dick Cavett Show – the host looking sick with nerves, perhaps because he was about to bring on a conservative intellectual for balance, whom Baldwin would politely trounce.
Baldwin has a compelling analysis of a traumatised “mirror stage” of culture that black people went through in 20th-century America. As kids, they would cheer and identify with the white heroes and heroines of Hollywood culture; then they would see themselves in the mirror and realise they were different from the white stars, and in fact more resembled the baddies and “Indians” they’d been booing.
The film shows Baldwin refusing to be drawn into the violence/non-violence difference of opinion between King and Malcolm X that mainstream commentators leaped on, and steadily maintaining his own critique – although I feel that Peck’s juxtaposition of Doris Day’s mooning and crooning with a lynch victim is a flourish that approximates Baldwin’s anger but not his elegance. There is a compelling section on Baldwin’s discussion of dramatist Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun. It is vivid, nutritious film-making.

REVIEW RESOURCE: https://www.theguardian.com/fi....lm/2017/apr/07/i-am-

⁣This documentary from Jeff Orlowski explores how addiction and privacy breaches are features, not bugs, of social media platforms.
That social media can be addictive and creepy isn’t a revelation to anyone who uses Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like. But in Jeff Orlowski’s documentary “The Social Dilemma,” conscientious defectors from these companies explain that the perniciousness of social networking platforms is a feature, not a bug.

They claim that the manipulation of human behavior for profit is coded into these companies with Machiavellian precision: Infinite scrolling and push notifications keep users constantly engaged; personalized recommendations use data not just to predict but also to influence our actions, turning users into easy prey for advertisers and propagandists.

As in his documentaries about climate change, “Chasing Ice” and “Chasing Coral,” Orlowski takes a reality that can seem too colossal and abstract for a layperson to grasp, let alone care about, and scales it down to a human level. In “The Social Dilemma,” he recasts one of the oldest tropes of the horror genre — Dr. Frankenstein, the scientist who went too far — for the digital age.

In briskly edited interviews, Orlowski speaks with men and (a few) women who helped build social media and now fear the effects of their creations on users’ mental health and the foundations of democracy. They deliver their cautionary testimonies with the force of a start-up pitch, employing crisp aphorisms and pithy analogies.

“Never before in history have 50 designers made decisions that would have an impact on two billion people,” says Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google. Anna Lembke, an addiction expert at Stanford University, explains that these companies exploit the brain’s evolutionary need for interpersonal connection. And Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook, delivers a chilling allegation: Russia didn’t hack Facebook; it simply used the platform.
Much of this is familiar, but “The Social Dilemma” goes the extra explainer-mile by interspersing the interviews with P.S.A.-style fictional scenes of a suburban family suffering the consequences of social-media addiction. There are silent dinners, a pubescent daughter (Sophia Hammons) with self-image issues and a teenage son (Skyler Gisondo) who’s radicalized by YouTube recommendations promoting a vague ideology.


This fictionalized narrative exemplifies the limitations of the documentary’s sometimes hyperbolic emphasis on the medium at the expense of the message. For instance, the movie’s interlocutors pin an increase in mental illness on social media usage yet don’t acknowledge factors like a rise in economic insecurity. Polarization, riots and protests are presented as particular symptoms of the social-media era without historical context.
Despite their vehement criticisms, the interviewees in “The Social Dilemma” are not all doomsayers; many suggest that with the right changes, we can salvage the good of social media without the bad. But the grab bag of personal and political solutions they present in the film confuses two distinct targets of critique: the technology that causes destructive behaviors and the culture of unchecked capitalism that produces it.

Nevertheless, “The Social Dilemma” is remarkably effective in sounding the alarm about the incursion of data mining and manipulative technology into our social lives and beyond. Orlowski’s film is itself not spared by the phenomenon it scrutinizes. The movie is streaming on Netflix, where it’ll become another node in the service’s data-based algorithm.

REVIEW RESOURCE: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/0....9/09/movies/the-soci

⁣When the 13th amendment was ratified in 1865, its drafters left themselves a large, very exploitable loophole in the guise of an easily missed clause in its definition. That clause, which converts slavery from a legal business model to an equally legal method of punishment for criminals, is the subject of the Netflix documentary “13th.” Premiering tonight at the New York Film Festival, “13th” is the first documentary to open the festival in its 54 year history. Director Ava DuVernay’s takes an unflinching, well-informed and thoroughly researched look at the American system of incarceration, specifically how the prison industrial complex affects people of color. Her analysis could not be more timely nor more infuriating. The film builds its case piece by shattering piece, inspiring levels of shock and outrage that stun the viewer, leaving one shaken and disturbed before closing out on a visual note of hope designed to keep us on the hook as advocates for change.

“13th” begins with an alarming statistic: One out of four African-American males will serve prison time at one point or another in their lives. Our journey begins from there, with a slew of familiar and occasionally surprising talking heads filling the frame and providing information. DuVernay not only interviews liberal scholars and activists for the cause like Angela Davis, Henry Louis Gates and Van Jones, she also devotes screen time to conservatives such as Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist. Each interviewee is shot in a location that evokes an industrial setting, which visually supports the theme of prison as a factory churning out the free labor that the 13th Amendment supposedly dismantled when it abolished slavery.

We’re told that, after the Civil War, the economy of the former Confederate States of America was decimated. Their primary source of income, slaves, were no longer obligated to line Southerners’ pockets with their blood, sweat and tears. Unless, of course, they were criminals. “Except as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted” reads the loophole in the law. In the first iteration of a “Southern strategy,” hundreds of newly emancipated slaves were re-enlisted into free, legal servitude courtesy of minor or trumped-up charges. The duly convicted part may have been questionable, but by no means did it need to be justifiably proven.
So begins a cycle that DuVernay examines in each of its evolving iterations; when one method of subservience-based terror falls out of favor, another takes its place. The list feels endless and includes lynching, Jim Crow, Nixon’s presidential campaign, Reagan’s War on Drugs, Bill Clinton’s Three Strikes and mandatory sentencing laws and the current cash-for-prisoners model that generates millions for private bail and incarceration firms.
That last item is a major point of discussion in “13th”, with an onscreen graphic keeping tally of the number of prisoners in the system as the years pass. Starting in the 1940’s, the curve of the prisoner count graph begins rising slowly though steeply. A meteoric rise began during the Civil Rights movement and continued into the current day. As this statistic rises, so does the level of decimation of families of color. The stronger the protest for rights, the harder the system fights back against it with means of incarceration. Profit becomes the major by-product of this cycle, with an organization called ALEC providing a scary, sinister influence on building laws that make its corporate members richer.

Several times throughout “13th” there is a shock cut to the word CRIMINAL, which stands alone against a black background and is centered on the huge movie screen. It serves as a reminder that far too often, people of color are seen as simply that, regardless of who they are. Starting with D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”, DuVernay traces the myth of the scary Black felon with supernatural levels of strength and deviant sexual potency, a myth designed to terrify the majority into believing that only White people were truly human and deserving of proper treatment. This dehumanization allowed for the acceptance of laws and ideas that had more than a hint of bias. We see higher sentences given for crack vs. cocaine possession and plea bargains accepted by innocent people too terrified to go to trial. We also learn that a troubling percentage of people remain in jail because they’re too poor to post their own bail. And regardless of your color, if you’re a felon, you can no longer vote to change the laws that may have unfairly prosecuted you. You lose a primary right all Americans have.

“13th” covers a lot of ground as it works its way to the current days of Black Lives Matter and the terrifying videos of the endless list of African-Americans being shot by police or folks who supposedly “stood their ground.” On her journey to this point, DuVernay doesn’t let either political party off the hook, nor does she ignore the fact that many people of color bought into the “law and order” philosophies that led to the current situation. We see Hillary Clinton talking about “super-predators” and Donald Trump’s full-page ad advocating the death penalty for the Central Park Five (who, as a reminder, were all innocent). We also see people like African-American congressman Charlie Rangel, who originally was on board with the tough on crime laws President Clinton signed into law.

By the time we get to the montage of the deaths of Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner and others (not to mention the huge, screen-covering graphic of names of African-Americans shot by law enforcement), “13th” has already proven its thesis on how such events can not only occur, but can also seem sadly like “business as usual.” It’s a devastating finale to the film, one that follows an onscreen discussion about whether or not the destruction of Black bodies should be run ad nauseum on cable news programs. DuVernay opts to show the footage, with an onscreen disclaimer that it’s being shown with permission by the families of the victims, something she did not need to seek but did so out of respect.

Between the lines, “13th” boldly asks the question if African-Americans were actually ever truly “free” in this country. We are freer, as this generation has it a lot easier than our ancestors who were enslaved, but the question of being as completely “free” as our White compatriots hangs in the air. If not, will the day come when all things will be equal? The final takeaway of “13th” is that change must come not from politicians, but from the hearts and minds of the American people.

Despite the heavy subject matter, DuVernay ends the film with joyful scenes of children and adults of color enjoying themselves in a variety of activities. It reminds us, as she said in her Q&A with NYFF director Kent Jones, that “Black trauma is not our entire lives. There is also Black joy.” That inspiring message, and all the important, educational information provided by this excellent documentary, make “13th” a must-see.

REVIEW RESOURCE: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/13th-2016

⁣14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible’ - Climbing at a Breakneck Pace
A documentary follows the Nepalese mountaineer Nirmal Purja as he tries to add cultural depth to the sport’s highs.
As the mountaineering genre continues its ascent into the mainstream, there’s a thesis awaiting a graduate student about male climbers and their mothers, wives or partners. Touched on in the Oscar winner “Free Solo” and summer’s “The Alpinist,” those relationships get screen time in “14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible,” about the Nepalese climber Nirmal Purja, known as Nimsdai, and his attempt to summit the world’s 14 highest peaks in seven months. (The previous record was seven years.)


While his wife, Suchi Purja, charmingly attempts to explain her husband’s embrace of risk to civilians, it’s his ailing mother who underscores more tender lessons about her son’s drive but also about the mortality we all face.
As a young man, Purja enlisted in his country’s legendary armed forces, the Gurkhas, and later joined the United Kingdom Special Forces. He seized on the climbing endeavor, which he called “Project Possible,” as a way to highlight the contributions of Nepalese mountaineers, who are more than the Sherpas to Western expeditions.


Early on, the project’s four other climbers — Mingma David Sherpa, Geljen Sherpa, Lakpa Dendi Sherpa and Gesman Tamang — get introduced as vital characters. They are as devoted to Purja’s seemingly mad mission as he is.
Much of the documentary’s climbing footage was taken by Purja and his team. The director Torquil Jones uses those images, as well as fresh interviews (the alpine legend Reinhold Messner waxing beautifully existential) and some vivid animation to craft a documentary exploring themes of generosity, danger, drive and national character.
In widening its aperture — from the ascents to visits to Purja’s childhood home as well as brief dives into Nepal’s history — “14 Peaks” expands a genre often focused on the feats of individuals to celebrate lessons about vast dreams and communal bonds.


REVIEW RESOURCE: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/1....2/01/movies/14-peaks

⁣Himalaya of the hypocrisy!!!
⁣I am aware that most of the materials on this channel are very pessimistic and always worse news from the world. I because of that I decided to put this movie not on DocumentaryArchive but here to make my followers laugh until their stomach aches.

I come from the communist block, I grew up in the 70s in Poland and this film clearly reminds me of classic Soviet Propaganda. The level of sweetness and exaggerated concern for the public good can make you vomit in this story.

However, there is so much hypocrisy, naive deception, and caricature pride here that all you can do is laugh out loud.

Have fun watching this movie.

⁣Official description :-))))))))))
With his signature blend of scientific acumen, candor and integrity, Dr. Anthony Fauci became America’s most unlikely cultural icon during COVID-19. A world-renowned infectious disease specialist and the longest-serving public health leader in Washington, D.C., he has valiantly overseen the U.S. response to 50 years’ worth of epidemics, including HIV/AIDS, SARS and Ebola. FAUCI is an unprecedented portrait of one of our most vital public servants, whose work saved millions while he faced threats from anonymous adversaries.

Directed by Emmy winners John Hoffman (The Weight of the Nation, Sleepless in America) and Janet Tobias (Unseen Enemy), the film is executive produced by Academy Award winner Dan Cogan (Icarus) and two-time Academy Award nominee Liz Garbus (What Happened, Miss Simone?, The Farm: Angola, USA). The documentary features insights from President George W. Bush, Bill Gates, Bono, former U.S. Department of Health and Human Services secretary Sylvia Burwell, former national security advisor Susan Rice, National Institutes of Health director Dr. Francis Collins, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Tom Frieden and key AIDS activists, plus Dr. Fauci’s family, friends and former patients.

RESOURCE: https://films.nationalgeographic.com/fauci?

⁣Director John Dullaghan's biographical documentary about infamous poet Charles Bukowski, Bukowski: Born Into This, is as much a touching portrait of the author as it is an exposé of his sordid lifestyle.

Interspersed between ample vintage footage of Bukowski's poetry readings are interviews with the poet's fans including such legendary figures such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Joyce Fante (wife of John), Bono, and Harry Dean Stanton.

Filmed in grainy black and white by Bukowski's friend, Taylor Hackford, due to lack of funding, the old films edited into this movie paint Bukowski's life of boozing and brawling romantically, securing Bukowski's legendary status. Born Into This relies on interviews with Bukowski for biographical information instead of cheesy voiceovers, bringing the viewer even closer to the author.

For example, in one amazing sequence, Bukowski rides the viewer around in the backseat of his car, telling us through his rear-view mirror of his stint as a post office worker which inspired the novel, Post Office.
Scenes splicing interviews with Bukowski's ex-wife, Linda Lee, and R. Crumb's comic strip panels portraying Bukowski as a sex-crazed maniac, set the tone for bawdier parts of the film.

Occasionally the film displays lines of Bukowski's poetry on the screen, as reminders that he was not only a raging alcoholic with a fierce sense of humor but also a talented and beloved writer. With so much hilariously shocking footage of "Hank," Bukowski: Born Into This presents Bukowski as a troubled but classic genius.

⁣Koyaanisqatsi is a visual concert of images set to the haunting music of Phillip Glass. While there is no plot in the traditional sense, there is a definite scenario. The film opens on ancient native American cave drawings, while the soundtrack chants "Koyaanisqatsi" which is a Hopi Indian term for "life out of balance".

The film uses extensive time lapse photography (which speeds images up) and slow motion photography to make comparisons between different types of physical motion. In one of the first examples, we see cloud formations moving (sped up) inter-cut with a montage of ocean waves (slowed down) and in such a way we are able to see the similarities of movement between these natural forces.

This technique of comparison exists throughout the film, and through it we learn more about the world around us. The film progresses from purely natural environments to nature as affected by man, and finally to man's own man-made environment, devoid of nature yet still following the patterns of natural flow as depicted in the beginning of the film, yet in chaos and disarray. Through this the film conveys its key message, which is Koyaanisqatsi: life out of balance; crazy life; life in turmoil; life disintegrating; a state of life that calls for another way of living.

Director: Godfrey Reggio
Writers: Ron Fricke(scenario)Godfrey Reggio(scenario)Michael Hoenig(scenario)
CAST: Edward Asner(archive footage)Pat Benatar(archive footage)Jerry Brown(archive footage)

⁣The people interviewed for "Kedi," Ceyda Torun's documentary about the teeming street cat population in Istanbul, are not experts, or talking heads, or academics. They are citizens, moving through their lives, interacting with the cats in their neighborhoods, and their comments are casually contemplative, off-the-cuff and profound. The human beings take it upon themselves to care for the cats, feed them, and—even more tellingly—just enjoy observing them. They note each cat's personality quirks, likes and dislikes. They freely admit what these cats bring to their own lives. I am a cat owner, I admit, but even I was surprised at the power of "Kedi." Where did all that emotion come from? It's because what Torun really captures in her unexpectedly powerful film is kindness in its purest form.

The cats of Istanbul are everywhere. They curl up on stoops, car hoods, and cafe benches, they sit on piers and in doorways. They sneak beneath tables at flea markets and leap on scraps outside the fish markets. Torun's film profiles seven individual cats, each with its own distinct life, routine and personality. Considering the sneaky crepuscular habits of cats, following these beasts must have been quite a feat. The footage is astonishing. The film opens with a tabby cat stalking with purpose down a crowded city street, looking for food to bring back to her litter of kittens (stashed in a stairwell). Torun's camera is low to the ground, on the cat's level, following the tabby's determined progress. Watching "Kedi" is like lying down on a quickly-moving skateboard. Cats are wily creatures, and when they don't want to be found, they are not found. But Torun finds them!


There's one cat who hangs out at a restaurant by the water, taking care of the mice. (There's a hilarious night-vision section showing the cat creeping through a drain pipe, eyes ablaze.) There's a cat who dominates the area in front of a busy cafe, fighting off interlopers, harassing her "husband" (pushing him out of the way so she can eat first), and chasing off the floozy cats vying for her man's attention. ("She's the neighborhood psychopath," says a neighborhood resident.) One woman spends a day cooking fresh chicken and then wanders her neighborhood, leaving food for the cats, who swarm around her. She says that she has a lot of pain and the cats are helping her heal. There's one cat who sits outside a bakery, and bats on the windows frantically when it gets hungry. There's a freeform style of communication between cats and humans. They share space. Some cats adore being petted. Others can't abide it. A man who owns a textile store demonstrates that the cat who hangs out in his shop likes pats only when they're rough. Gentle pats drive her crazy. "She gets so much pleasure she almost passes out," he says, and then there's footage of her sprawled on the floor, lost in the sensations. One cat shows up at a woman's window every day for a visit. She lets him in, he strolls around, he eats, and then he clambers back down the tree.


The focus is on the cats, but "Kedi" is really a portrait of community. Torun gives a sense of life in Istanbul, its diversity and beauty, its storefronts and waterfronts, its people. Why there are so many cats in Istanbul, and how they all came to be there, is not explained (except for a casual comment from an interview subject). Political upheaval and turmoil is not addressed at all, although there are disturbing signs everywhere, thrumming underneath the everyday routines. One woman says that it is very difficult to be a woman in Turkey, and that the cats in her neighborhood remind her of what is good in being feminine. There is a lot of concern expressed about the brutal knocking down of old neighborhoods to make way for high-rises. Gentrification disrupts entire ways of life, and the residents worry about that but they also worry about the cats. Where will they go? What will become of them? It can be a heartless world. Caring for one another and caring for animals may seem like a small thing, but Torun's affectionate portrait of these cats—and the people who love them—makes it seem like the most important thing in the world. A restaurant owner keeps a tip jar on the counter, and the money goes into a fund for vet visits for the cats who hang around outside. Imagine that. Torun combines her up-close-and-personal footage of the cats with transcendent drone shots of Istanbul in all its moods and weather.

⁣Dick Johnson Is Dead is a 2020 American documentary film directed by Kirsten Johnson and co-written by Johnson and Nels Bangerter.

A lifetime of making documentaries has convinced award-winning filmmaker Kirsten Johnson of the power of the real. But now she’s ready to use every escapist movie-making trick in the book — staging inventive and fantastical ways for her 86-year-old psychiatrist father to die while hoping that cinema might help her bend time, laugh at pain and keep her father alive forever.


The darkly funny and wildly imaginative DICK JOHNSON IS DEAD is a love letter from a daughter to a father, creatively blending fact and fiction to create a celebratory exploration of how movies give us the tools to grapple with life’s profundity. DICK JOHNSON IS DEAD was filmed, produced and directed by Kirsten Johnson (Cameraperson), produced by Katy Chevigny and Marilyn Ness, co-produced by Maureen A. Ryan and executive produced by Megan Ellison.


Cast:
Kirsten Johnson
Charles Richard "Dick" Johnson


Development:
Director Kirsten Johnson at the Miami Film Festival


Kirsten Johnson was inspired to make the film after having a dream in which "there was a man in a casket and he sat up and said, 'I'm Dick Johnson and I'm not dead yet'". When she pitched the idea to her father, she asked him, "Dad, what if we make a movie where we kill you over and over again until you really die? And he laughed".
The film incorporates Johnson family photographs and home movies, including that of Richard Johnson's wife who died from Alzheimer's disease in 2007.


Release:
The film premiered on January 25, 2020 at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. It was released on October 2, 2020 via Netflix.
RESOURCE: www.dickjohnsonisdead.com

⁣Johan Soderberg and Erik Pauser examine world culture, using multimedia art and flash-cuts of varied speakers and artists, all set to music.
World culture gets the channel-flipping treatment in this oddly named docu, which has more in common with “Baraka” and “Powaqqatsi” than with regular travelogues or music-and-dance pics. Irreverent eclecticism is geared to computer-literate age groups, and it already has some buzz on the club circuit.
Using the name Lucky People Center, co-helmers Erik Pauser and Johan Soderberg work as multimedia artists in Stockholm. In “International,” they apply their mixmaster mentality to cinema, slicing and dicing innumerable clips, shot over several years of intense world touring, into a bouillabaisse of art pieces, rapping rants, straight-on conversations and impressionistic images of urban flux.
The flash-cut result is enough to send some viewers into mild catatonia (remember “Max Headroom”?), but when things slow down enough to let you hear from a good-natured Tibetan lama on the American fear of death or a bunch of tattooed Maori warriors chanting in unison about the evils of ATM cards, it drives home their point that the world has already left many people behind.
Other highlights include Russian troublemaker Alexander Brener, seen reading poetry and throwing a brick through a window; gray-suited Tokyo banker Toshiji Mikawa, who moonlights as a screechy electronic performance artist; gorgeous Indian dancer Pragati Sood, in sacramental form; and New Mexico shaman Franklin Bearchild Eriacho, whose common-sense recipe for religion includes “no blind faith, but intelligent devotion.”
These segs, united by thumping electro music provided by the helmers, seem to have little in common (except exhilaratingly varied, color-rich lensing), but themes of spiritual renewal and embrace of the strange keep coming up. Pic may look formless to over-40s, but it’s well-geared to MTV-saturated youth, especially those hungry for something positive but not Polyanna.


Initial release: March 27, 1998 (Sweden)
Directors: Johan Söderberg, Erik Pauser
Running time: 85 minutes
Producer: Lars Jönsson
Music composed by: Bub Wehi, Dr. Nobody, Johan Söderberg, Erik Pauser,
RESOURCE: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0148428/
REVIEW RESOURCE: https://variety.com/1998/film/....reviews/lucky-people

⁣What’s it like to be cajoled, threatened and blackmailed by a sexual predator who has power, history and society on his side?

Untouchable: The Rise and Fall of Harvey Weinstein (BBC Two), directed by Ursula MacFarlane, is a film of halting testimonies, long pauses, lips pressed tightly together and eyes filling with tears. Of women struggling to articulate what they have left unsaid sometimes for decades, and what has gone unsaid by our sex – en masse – throughout history, until now.
You probably know the basic story – by osmosis if nothing else - so heavily was the media mogul’s eventual fall covered when the weight of evidence finally became too much for a man of even his resources to withstand.

It shows the uniformity of the women’s responses to suddenly finding themselves in terrifying situations

MacFarlane tells the story well. She gives due recognition to the journalists, especially Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, who broke the story in the New York Times, and Ronan Farrow’s gathering of 13 witness accounts in the New Yorker after painstaking investigations. But, like Dream Hampton’s Surviving R Kelly, Untouchable prioritises the victims’ stories (regardless of their personal celebrity or lack thereof – here “names” such as Rosanna Arquette simply slip in next to those without public profiles) and fills in the perpetrator’s to explain his relative power or position at the time. As with the R Kelly film – thought to have been instrumental in the R’n’B star’s latest arrest on federal sex trafficking charges – a pattern of predatory behaviour emerges, painted stroke by painful stroke by those who found themselves first charmed and cajoled by one version of Weinstein, then confronted with a very different one behind closed doors.

Whether we should be profoundly glad, deeply sad or simply exhausted to be living in a time where “examination of the lives of serial sexual predators unmasked after years of hiding in plain sight” is on the verge of becoming a recognised TV genre, let alone one taking up the slack left by uninterested police and legislative forces, I leave to you to decide. But we are where we are. Which is, waiting to see who gets their Jeffrey Epstein production off the blocks first.
Beyond a specific modus operandi – Weinstein’s involved hotel suites, towelling robes, forcible massages, volcanic rage and threats such as: “Do you really want to make an enemy of me for five minutes of your time?” – as an insight into one man’s apparent prelude to rape or assault (Weinstein denies all claims), such documentaries render a more valuable service in demonstrating, relentlessly and unavoidably, two things.

The first is how perfectly our world is built for predators to function. Of Weinstein’s staff who admit they knew something – something – was happening, a common refrain is that they assumed “some sort of agreement” had been reached between the would-be actors and the mogul. If you live in a society that already believes in the casting couch, because the concept of young women as more-or-less sexual resources to be exploited is so embedded in the psyche, half your work – to normalise your predilections, to secure complicity – is done. With the likes of the gossip columnist AJ Benza out there – “You put a light on the porch,” he says of Weinstein’s power, “you’re gonna get a lot of moths” – the world is yours to do with as you will.


The second, perhaps even more valuable, service it renders is to show the uniformity of the women’s responses to suddenly finding themselves in terrifying situations, and how far they deviate from “common sense” or “natural” expectations (words defined almost entirely by men, who have least need of them). They don’t fight. They compute their chances against a much taller, heavier opponent (“He’s huge, you know,” says Hope d’Amore, who worked for him in the early days and says she was assaulted in 1978) and they go still. “The freeze thing kicks in,” says the actor Caitlin Delaney. “You just want it to be over.” They maximise their chances of survival (“I felt leaving would be worse,” says actor Erika Rosenbaum, when she saw a smashed and bloody toilet seat in his bathroom) and try and leave in other ways instead. Actor Paz de la Huerta remembers “hovering over my body” as, she says, Weinstein raped her. “I definitely went somewhere else,” says Delaney. Rosenbaum remembers hoping that if she kept still enough she would somehow disappear.
Almost every woman watching will understand. Some men will, too. If these films add to their number, maybe we can begin to change the world.

REVIEW RESOURCE: https://www.theguardian.com/tv....-and-radio/2019/sep/

⁣Citizenfour is a 2014 documentary film directed by Laura Poitras, concerning Edward Snowden and the NSA spying scandal. The film had its US premiere on October 10, 2014, at the New York Film Festival and its UK premiere on October 17, 2014, at the BFI London Film Festival.


The film features Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, and was co-produced by Poitras, Mathilde Bonnefoy, and Dirk Wilutzky, with Steven Soderbergh and others serving as executive producers. Citizenfour received critical acclaim upon release, and was the recipient of numerous accolades, including Best Documentary Feature at the 87th Academy Awards. This film is the third part to a 9/11 trilogy following My Country, My Country (2006) and The Oath (2010).

In January 2013, Laura Poitras, an American documentary film director/producer who had been working for several years on a film about monitoring programs in the United States that were the result of the September 11 attacks, receives an encrypted e-mail from a stranger who calls himself "Citizenfour." In it, he offers her inside information about illegal wiretapping practices of the US National Security Agency (NSA) and other intelligence agencies.
In June 2013, accompanied by investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian intelligence reporter Ewen MacAskill,[6] she travels to Hong Kong with her camera for the first meeting with "Citizenfour" in a hotel, who reveals himself as Edward Snowden. Scenes of their meeting take place in Snowden's hotel room, where he maintains his privacy. Shots of Snowden in his bed, in front of his mirror and of the hotel from a distance form the character of Snowden as a trapped political agent.


After four days of interviews, on June 9, Snowden's identity is made public at his request. As media outlets begin to discover his location at the Mira Hotel, Snowden moves into Poitras' room in an attempt to elude phone calls made to his room. Facing potential extradition and prosecution in the United States, Snowden schedules a meeting with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and applies for refugee status. After Poitras believes she is being followed, she leaves Hong Kong for Berlin, Germany.
On June 21, the US government requests the Hong Kong government extradite Snowden. Snowden manages to depart from Hong Kong, but his US passport is cancelled before he can connect to Havana, stranding him in the Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow for 40 days. On August 1, 2013, the Russian government grants Snowden temporary asylum for a period of one year.[8] Meanwhile, Greenwald returns to his home in Rio de Janeiro and speaks publicly about United States' utilization of NSA programs for foreign surveillance. Greenwald and Poitras maintain a correspondence wherein they both express reluctance to return to the United States.
Throughout, the film offers smaller vignettes that precede and follow Snowden's Hong Kong interviews, including William Binney speaking about NSA programs, and eventually testifying before the German Parliament regarding NSA spying in Germany.


The film closes with Greenwald, Snowden and Poitras meeting once again, this time in Russia. Greenwald and Snowden discuss new emerging details on US intelligence programs, careful to only write down and not speak critical pieces of information. Greenwald tears these documents creating a pile of scraps, before slowly removing them from the table.