[NOTE: I wrote this review in 2008 after seeing the film at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, expecting to publish it when it was released in the US. However, the film never got a release. I?ve often wondered what happened to it in all those years. Now it...
In Memory House, Brazilian filmmaker Jo?o Paulo Miranda Maria shows us the way a history of colonialism (even when it?s not officially colonial) continues to be a spiritual burden that many cannot escape. Cristovam is a indigenous black man from Northern Brazil who...
Stephen Wallis?s Defining Moments is a collection of intersecting stories about people who are facing those times in their lives that could well change everything. This is a light-hearted film that at times seems a bit ludicrous, but within that there are morsels of...
?Sometimes, I wish God would just reach down and give the world a big old shake, you know?? One day. One family. And it all gets shaken up a bit. Evan Oppenheimer?s The Magnificent Meyersons is a peripatetic search for understanding what it means to live in a world...
In Jeanette Nordahl?s Wildland, family is the most important thing in life. But is that good? Can a source of love also be a place in which one is broken down? Is the call of family worth giving up one?s sense of right and wrong? And what will we sacrifice to belong?...
Hitler. A name that for much of the world connotes absolute evil. But that name is burnt into history in such a way that we continue to struggle with the legacy that left millions dead. Petra Epperline and Michael Tucker bring us The Meaning of Hitler, a film framed...
David Gutnik?s premier feature film, Materna, consists for four independent stories built around women whose paths will come together in a dangerous situation on a New York subway. Each of the key characters is struggling in different ways with their places in the...
?We were doing what we thought God wanted us to do.? If one constantly hears they are sinful when they go to church, they may quit going?or, they may seek to change. For LGBTQ+ people, for several decades, this often meant trying not to be gay?to change their life....
I recently had a chance to visit via Zoom with Kristine Stolakis, the director of Pray Away, a Netflix documentary about the ?ex-gay? movement and conversion therapy that hundreds of thousands of LGBTQ+ people underwent in the last fifty years. The basis of that...