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Women's Docs at DOC NYC

Two unique documentaries on important women’s issues from the fourth annual DOC NYC, held November 14 – 21, are succeeding to wider distribution, in theaters and on such video-on-demand platforms Netflix and iTunes, as well as special screeningss.  Both films make clear that what affects women impacts everyone else in their lives.


Breastmilk
 
The World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health have declared that breastfeeding is the most normal and optimal care for infants.  Sure there were past scandals of huge corporations pushing formula profits.  So it should be standard to successfully breastfeed a baby in New York, as I did over 30 years ago while working (one son for nine months and the other for eighteen months), right?  But just as I was surprised to see in executive producer Ricki Lake’s 2008 documentary The Business of Being Born that my natural childbirth experience was now more atypical, a biological process that evolved so even cave people could thrive is endangered.  My mother thought I looked “tribal” breastfeeding, yet the how-to seems to have been forgotten.

There’s plenty of explanations here, from comic to didactic, feminist, historical, sociological, sexual, and symbolic (even breast as phallus), with various lactation experts (not only the dogmatic La Leche League).  But what makes Dana Ben-Ari’s first documentary so fair and thoughtfully absorbing is how she follows an economically and racially diverse group of New Yorkers – married with husband, unmarried, lesbian, with another child, supportive family or not, straight-laced to hippie, from student to working professional.  Counting down to the due dates of the planned and unplanned pregnancies at private and public clinics, doctors’ offices, and hospitals, she first charts their prenatal preparation (what the PBS series Call the Midwife calls antenatal), and the expectant mothers’ hopes, fears, and expectations of breastfeeding.

Unfolding over time as a suspense story from late pregnancy through newborn and beyond, Ben-Ari visits at regular intervals of weeks, then months, as the bodies of mothers and babies change.  Each woman is honestly unpredictable as to who can withstand all the surprising pressures to stop breastfeeding when they are at such vulnerable points of fatigue, worry, and insecurity (“I feel like a cow”), just when they need the most sympathetic support.  (Frequent calls to my midwife for practical advice were very helpful for me.)  

Discouraging for any advocate, their plans pretty much go out the window.  Instead of being convinced by the convenience and mutual comfort, they are constantly barraged more with how to “overcome difficulties” and warned by medical professionals of dubious issues such as “enough milk” and (incredibly) nutritional deficits as formulas and milk substitutes are dangled.  Shockingly, there is not a word of the warnings I got on how to cope with the expected growth spurts (at three weeks, around eight weeks, three months, six months, and nine months) until both synced bodies adapt and are not identified here as the key risk points for anxiety and risk for discouragement. 

Instead, the ease of expressing milk (albeit within the luxury of private, relaxed time) has been replaced by guilt-induced harping about mechanically-assisted pumping, with appliances costing up to $3,000, that raise other discomfort issues, though the pro’s and con’s of breastmilk co-op sharing banks are covered as well.  At the Q & A after the “Mommy & Me” screening I attended along with many nursing babies, the director emphasized the solution rests with women themselves “fighting back”.  Released by CAVU Pictures in theatres in time for Mother's Day, this important lesson for parents, parents-to-be, and health providers is also streaming on iTunes.


BraveMissWorld PosterBrave Miss World

Think the Miss World pageant is just a superficial display of pretty women?  Watch what was really behind the winning tears of the lovely Miss Israel 1998 and how she has used that platform not only as an extraordinary bully pulpit to inspirationally help women around the world, but in the process transform herself, too.  

Director Cecilia Peck (Shut Up and Sing) first travels back with Linor Abargil to her thrill at winning the competition as an 18-year-old, and her excitement at being sent on modeling gigs in Milan, a dream of so many (gullible) young women.  But they also revisit her awful path back to the airport, where her travel agent violently attacked and raped her.  She managed to get to a phone and call her mother who (this is key) sympathetically advised her to go to a hospital for a rape kit, tell the Italian and Israeli authorities to catch the culprit, and get back home to get herself together to win the international competition in the Seychelles Islands a month later – all before the public found out what happened to her.  Her determination to follow through at the trial the next year became a cause célèbre in Israel, and other women there drew on her strength to report this notoriously unreported crime, even as she struggled with her own recovery.  

That story alone would be the usual, albeit horrifically unfortunate, celebrity tell-all.  But Abargil goes much further in catapulting her unwelcome notoriety, to travel the world literally touching girls and women to publicly share their experiences-- person-to-person, online, and in this film-- and, just as importantly, to seek justice.  Not only is Peck there to document her miles of hugs over many years, but also reveals Abargil’s inner journey as her protests against her attacker’s parole sets off a downward spiral of PTSD.  Even as she galvanizes a suspenseful search for his other victims to prove a serial pattern, this secular Jew finds solace through religion, and becomes –these are the most surprising images -- ultra-Orthodox (and a law student specializing in abuse cases, interning for the prosecutor on her case).  Her relationships with the men in her life, both as friends (one is a producer on the film) and romantic partners, are also frankly discussed, including that she convinces her fiancé, who is supportive through her crusade, to reluctantly follow her observance into marriage.  (She couldn’t attend the festival as she was giving birth, again). 

While the weakest scenes are already familiar to American audiences, such as her appearance on Oprah and a pile-on of testimonials from other celebrities repeating what’s been in their own shocking memoirs, the rape victims and their loving family and friends at the emotional festival screening I attended did not seem to object.  Now available on Netflix, that festival experience can also be felt by watching this moving documentary with someone who has been in any way affected by a too-common crime that needs this courageous exposure.

Politics at DOC NYC: A Look Back

Citizen Koch

The extended impact of the fourth annual DOC NYC, held November 14 – 21, is being felt as features are succeeding to wider distribution, in theaters and on PBS that raised some hackles as they turned a spotlight on a varied range of grassroots political activists across the American landscape:


Citizen Koch

Directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin open with a barrage of timely claims to explore the impact of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision against restrictions on political spending of corporations and organizations by following the money from the prominent conservative Koch family.  Unfortunately, this close case study of the 2012 recall vote against Wisconsin governor Republican Scott Walker doesn’t carry the weight for an effective case study on this hot topic and is not a revealing investigation.
 
The documentary is effective as just an intimate profile of how a selection of long-time union members (Democrats and Republicans) got energized into hard-working activism by the governor pushing through rollbacks of public employee rights, who are followed through the campaign.  But the information on the organized, well-funded opposition is disappointingly superficial and doesn’t rise much above well-known media coverage.  The most useful background is the charting of the interlocked corporate and family ties of Charles and David Koch.  However, the constant railings against their money as among the millions of dollars raised by the governor from “outside interests” loses considerable credibility two-thirds through when a map shows the several factories and plants that the Koch company owns in the state.  Not that any other data is provided how they function as corporate citizens, whether pro (number of employees, philanthropy, or taxes paid) or con (environmental or labor records), beyond the simplified condemnation of corporations considered as people.  This is a missed opportunity to treat these complex issues seriously.  Variance Films is releasing the documentary in theaters June 2014.


Town Hall

town hallWhere Citizen Koch oh so proudly waves a claim that PBS withdrew financial support because David Koch is said to be a major donor, a fascinating look at the rise of the power of the Tea Party is currently running on the PBS World Channel’s America ReFramed series.Pennsylvania is not just the Keystone State in nickname, but was a battleground for hearts and minds from the 2010 congressional races through the 2012 presidential campaign for its 20 electoral votes.  Directors Jamila Wignot and Sierra Pettengill closely follow two new activists who are inspired to throw themselves into achieving conservative change.  John has retired in urban Reading that was spiraling down even before the recession.  Suburban Katy is channeling stay-at-home restlessness—and momentary media attention after a pointed challenging of a local politician at a town hall session.
 
As the directors described at the festival premiere, they were flies on the wall in the activists’ houses, cars, and meetings, and alongside them on long days of electioneering and voter turnout (and, quite alarmingly, intimidating suppression of minorities), an insightful and sensitive portrait emerges of absolutely committed individuals and the well-funded milieu that both isolates and sustains them.  Their exclusive sources of information about politics and the progress of the campaigns are striking -- they only watch Fox News and listen to conservative talk radio (continuously).  While they see themselves as grassroots activists, they are directed and supplied by national political action committees.  (The housewife becomes a paid campaign worker).  Through it all, the directors never lose their empathy for the Tea Partiers, allowing them every opportunity to show how they came to their narrow view of a changing world that makes them so very uncomfortable

American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs

At the other end of the political spectrum, way at the other end, out of the spotlight of national affairs, and much, much longer in local politics, is the preeminent Chinese-American community organizer of Detroit’s black community.  As she introduced the still-feisty 98-year-old at the festival premiere of her admiring portrait, director Grace Lee described meeting her oldest coincidental namesake through her light-hearted The Grace Lee Project (2005).  She continued to visit in the years since, talk-talk-talking, and pushing for personal, reminisces that would illuminate a life countering the stereotype of compliant Asian women.  A Depression era childhood above her father’s New York store, to Barnard at age 16, where a class in Hegel changed her outlook to achieve a PhD in 1940.  By the next year, she was helping to organize an anti-discrimination march on Washington, D.C., and (somehow) became convinced “You can change the world!”
 
GracePicnicShe moved to Chicago and onto leftist publications aimed at the booming factories that drew southern blacks in the Great Migration to Detroit -- including James Boggs, who became her life-long partner.  (He died in 1993).  While the director wheedled her permission to get her FBI file, it’s not clear how they were able to continue their political activities through the McCarthy years.  (“I didn’t think of myself as un-American.”).  Fellow activists, such as Fox News nemesis Bill Ayers, praise her decades of dedication to grassroots community organizing, and photographs show her with just about every civil and labor rights leader.  (The Boggs don’t seem to have had a life outside The Movement).

Maybe that’s why she’s so interview-resistant, always answering a question with a question or challenging the premise of the question to forcefully insist on the rightness of her philosophical positions as self-evident.  (Ironically, she reminded me of Bible classes.)  The director helped the charmed audience match Boggs’ intellectual knowledge with a clever series of animated concepts “in 30 seconds”.  May she live long enough to bask in the appreciation when this warm, if a bit frustrating, biography premieres on PBS’s P.O.V. series June 30, 2014.

SXSW Review: "Creep"

"Creep"
Directed by Patrick Brice
Starring Patrick Brice, Mark Duplass
Comedy, Horror, Romance
82 Mins
United States

Mark Duplass has had quite a run in the fledgling stages of his career. From small roles in the likes of Oscar baity films, such as Zero Dark Thirty and, le sigh, Parkland, to larger roles in unsung indie hits Humpday and Safety Not Guaranteed, and simply as the reliably affable straight man, Pete, on The League, it's easy to admit that Duplass has got range. He dips his toes in the pools of all different genres and mediums, working as an accomplished dramatic actor and solid comedian to boot. It's then such a surprise that perhaps the greatest work he's done is in a found little footage horror movie called Creep.

Read more: SXSW Review: "Creep"

Talking with Leigh Janiak of "Honeymoon"

When you think of filmmakers from the sci-fi or horror genre, the first thing that pops into your mind most likely isn't a young female director. Leigh Janiak though is here with Honeymoon to challenge that assumption. Crafting a modern sci-fi/horror film actually worth remembering, Janiak showcases her razor sharp ability to cull great performances while demonstating a kingpin-level status of economic filmography.

Read more: Talking with Leigh Janiak of...

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