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...
The mission: go into a camp filled with Daesh (ISIS) supporters and rescue Yazidi girls and women held as sex slaves. Sabaya won the directing award for World Cinema Documentary for Hogir Hirori at the Sundance Film Festival. Billed as a docu-thriller, the film shines...
?You are being considered for the amazing opportunity of life.? What were you like before you became you? Is there life before life? Edson Oda?s Nine Days doesn?t so much ask or answer such questions, it plays with the possibilities they present. In the process we...
?The time for apologies is behind us.? Tailgate, from writer/director Lodewijk Crijns, is a psychological thriller built around road rage (and perhaps just rage in general). What begins as a simple road trip turns into a journey into fear and danger. Hans (Joroen...
Mama Weed (La Daronne), from director Jean-Paul Salom?, takes us into the Paris underworld, but from a somewhat different perspective. Our entry into that world is not through a hardened career criminal or long-suffering police officer. It is a woman who stumbles into...
1969. It is the year humankind set foot on the moon. The US is heavily involved in Vietnam. Men were being drafted, but there were growing protests. It is only a year after the murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. It was also the year of Woodstock,...
?If you?re poor, and you have no money, and can?t get yourself a lawyer who really gives a shit about your case, you?re going to die.? Capital punishment continues to be controversial, although more states are moving away from its use, either by law or by practice....
The teen years can be a challenge. It is a time when people struggle with their identity and their place in the world. Even for the most ?normal? of teens, these years can be a struggle. Add to that having to deal with a disability. In Matthew Ogens?s documentary...
Soccer (aka football in the rest of the world) is often called ?the beautiful game?. Next year the world will be watching The World Cup with teams from around the world vying for the quadrennial championship. A less well-known championship is the Clericus Cup, a...