ScreenFish

where faith and film are intertwined

journalism

Day 2 at AFI Docs

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The films I’ve chosen for today are very much focused on issues that touch the lives of many people. These are films that in many ways are “ripped from headlines”. It’s worth noting that two of the films include coverage of issues dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, even though that is not the main point of the films.

Pray Away, the feature debut from documentarian Kristine Stolakis, looks at the history for the “pray the gay away” movement in the church (mostly the evangelical church) over the last several decades. The film focuses on some of the founders and leaders in the movement who have now denounced that approach because of the injury they saw they had inflicted on so many people. These are people who were very visible on TV and active politically. Those that we hear tell their stories have now all discovered fulfillment by embracing their sexuality, but they also deal with guilt over the pain they created through their actions over the years. The film also includes a look at a current ex-gay leader, but those sections are a bit less engaging, in part because it is hard to give credence to his story.

More than 700,000 people have undergone conversion therapy seeking to change their sexual orientation. That process has been nearly universally rejected by the medical and psychiatric fields. This film allows us to see how that became so popular within many churches. It also shows how that has harmed not only the happiness, but the spiritual life of many LGBTQ people. Pray Away is a Netflix Original Documentary and will be available to stream later this summer.

Journalism is recognized as a key element of a democratic society. Yet in many places around the country there are huge “news deserts”, places with no local news source. Beth Levison’s and Jerry Risius’s Storm Lake shows a little over a year in the life of the Storm Lake Times, a twice-a-week newspaper in rural Iowa with a circulation of about 3000. The editor of the family run paper, Tom Cullen, won a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing in 2017. The paper covers local life in this rural, but increasingly diverse community. It covers high school sports, city council meetings, and hosts Presidential Forums ahead of the Iowa Caucuses. The film continues into the paper’s coverage of COVID-19 and the financial difficulty that brought.

While the film is a very personal portrait of the Cullen family as they strive with deadlines and looking for advertising, it is really about the ways journalism touches the lives of the community and what is lost when there is no local journalism. In the last fifteen years one out of four newspapers has closed. There are over 300 news deserts with communities of 20,000 or more with no newspaper. While there are regional news outlets, they pay little if any attention to life in smaller communities. In the Q&A following, Tom Cullen noted that they were having to find a new paradigm that was reader support rather than advertising support. That is true of many newspapers. Storm Lake will be in the upcoming season of “Independent Lens” on PBS.

White Coat Rebels, from Greg Barker, seeks to make the case (and does so very well) that the for-profit health care system, especially as manifested in Big Pharma, has not provided good care for many people. The film begins with a group of medical students in a White Coat ceremony as they take the Hippocratic Oath, promising to put their patients’ needs first always. Much of the film looks at the work of medical students who are part of Universities Allied for Essential Medicine, which seeks to have schools make ethical commitments about the drugs they help develop. There are also practicing doctors who make the point that the medical care that many people need is not available to them because of the way the US health care system is structured.

The conflict that comes up frequently in the film is if the system should be about patients or profits. The film began in the fall of 2019 and continued into the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, which only served to exacerbate and illustrate the rich/poor and racial dichotomies involved in health care. The film seems to circle around on itself from time to time, but it is an important and highly timely examination of key issue.

For today’s shorts, I have put together something of a double feature. Under the Lemon Tree, from Noor Fawzi Alasswad, shows us an older Palestinian woman living in exile as she makes a simple breakfast under a lemon tree and lovingly remembers her lost home and land after she has been away for many decades. A companion piece is Mission: Hebron, from Rona Segal. This film has interviews with six former Israeli soldiers as they talk about their tours in Hebron, a town of about 30,000 Palestinians and 1000 Israeli settlers. The soldier’s job is to protect the Jewish citizens. All speak with a bit of guilt for the things they did (and didn’t do).

Photos curtesy of AFI

Wednesday at AFIFest 2020

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My cat has enjoyed AFIFest 2020 Presented by Audi a great deal this year. She rarely has a chance to spend a whole afternoon on my lap when I actually have to go to movies. I doubt she realizes the qualities of movies she’s sleeping through. She’s missing out on some very good stuff.

The documentary Collective, by German-Romanian filmmaker Alexander Nanau, arrived at AFIFest with a load of festival awards. It takes place in the aftermath of a tragic 2015 nightclub fire that claimed 27 lives. The corruption that that fire exposed led to the fall of the government, and a new temporary government of technocrats. Yet, another 37 victims of the fire died over the next four months, mostly from infections. All the while the Minister of Health claimed the hospitals were among the best in Europe. When journalists discovered that the disinfectants being sold to hospitals were blatantly diluted, a new scandal erupted. This film takes us inside the controversy, the investigation, and the attempts at the new Minister of Health to create a better medical system.

The key quote I found in the film: “The way a state functions can crush people some of the time.” This is one of many films I’ve seen this year that portray the need of an independent and trustworthy press for democracy to function. Collective not only speaks to that need, but is clear that the power of government can be overwhelming. This film is Romania official submission for Best International Feature Film Oscar consideration.

In Ekwa Msangi’s Farewell Amor, an Angolan immigrant in New York is reunited with his family after seventeen years apart. Walter came to America following the Angolan Civil War, his wife Esther and daughter Sylvia went to Tanzania. It has taken all this time for Walter to get permission for them to join him. Meanwhile, their lives have gone in different directions. Esther has become quite religious. Walter has made a life for himself—with another woman. Sylvia, in high school, has her own dreams. There are chapters in the film that give us the perspective of each of these characters. It is interesting how dancing keeps coming into play within the film. The characters find identity, both separately and as family, in dancing. At times that dancing may be a source of conflict, but it can also be the beginning of healing.

You may wonder if there are ever any comedies at festivals. Yes, in fact I took one in yesterday with My Donkey, My Lover & I by Caroline Vignal. Antoinette, French fifth grade teacher, is having an affair with Vladimir, the father of one of her students. When he cancels a romantic getaway to take a hiking trip with his wife and daughter, Antoinette decides she will do the same hiking adventure and surprise him. Totally unfamiliar with hiking, she hires a donkey for the journey. Naturally, it becomes a comedy of errors as Antoinette must deal not only with Patrick the donkey, but with her total lack of hiking ability. When she does manage to run into Vladimir and his family, the awkwardness and revelations become a bit more than she expected. The trip turns out to be a way for Antoinette to come to better understand herself and opens up new possibilities for her.

Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World

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The search for truth is at the heart of Hans Pools documentary Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World. It tells the story of a group that searches out the truth in news stories, even when powerful nations seek to hide behind lies.

Bellingcat is a multi-national collective of citizen open-source investigative journalists. They are people with expertise in various subjects. They use online information in amazing ways to ferret out the truth of world events. This ranges from identification of perpetrators of violence in Charlottesville, verifying bombings in Syria, the poisoning of a Russian dissident, and more.

Much of the film involves Bellingcat’s investigation of the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airline flight MH-17 by Russian (or pro-Russian) forces in Ukraine. It is amazing the amount of evidence about the incident and the weapons systems involved  these people were able to find online, such as seeing the movement of the convoy the day of the attack. But it is not just finding the information, it is also a matter of interpreting the information.

As professional journalism continues to struggle to stay afloat, the role of citizen journalist is expanding. Of course, that raises questions of professional standards and reputation. For professional journalism, trust is often based in the institution and our perception of its reliability, whether that is BBC, Fox News, or the New York Times. But citizen journalists establish trust through transparency, showing the evidence they have accumulated and verifying its accuracy.

Much of the work of Bellingcat deals with the disinformation that is spread by official and unofficial channels. It is more than just fact-checking. It often means that they have to find evidence that disputes the message that is being sent out. We see the results of some of the investigations they have done, but we need to realize that it is because of long, complicated investigations. Watching them explain where they found all the evidence is impressive, but more impressive is how hard it must have been to find it all in the enormous cyber universe. At times Bellingcat has determined things to be fact before official investigators have.

We are bombarded by news and fake news every day. It can be difficult to wade through it all and judge where the truth lies. This film takes us inside a group that is working to overcome the lies with truth that they can back up.

Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World is available on DVD.

A Thousand Cuts – Journalism vs. Authoritarianism

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“She believes that shining a light is the most important thing.”

A President who claims news outlets lie. Social media bots that spread misinformation. Intimidation of reporters by both governmental and unofficial sources. A leading reporter arrested multiple times. The government, meanwhile, is conducting its war on drugs by killings across the country. Yet the press continues to strive to bring truth to light. A Thousand Cuts shows us the way the freedom of the press is under attack in the Philippines, and by extension in other places.

Documentarian Romona S. Diaz began to do a film about President Rodrigo Duterte’s deadly war on drugs, which has resulted in nearly 30,000 deaths. Duterte is a populist who pushes a culture of fear and portrays an image that relies on toxic masculinity taken to an extreme. He makes no excuse for the killings. When questioned about the legality of it all, he threatens (without subtlety) reporters who raise the issue. He also uses networks of social network bots to spread his venom toward specific reporters, putting them in danger.

Soon, Diaz shifted to focusing on the reporters who are striving to maintain a free press in a hostile environment. The most obvious focus in Maria Ressa, a woman who was included in the 2018 Time People of the Year group of “The Guardians” (reporters around the world facing persecution and arrest). Ressa heads the Philippine news service Rappler. Even when faced with the power of the state, she and others continue to seek the truth. Ressa is arrested twice during the filming. She posts bail and keeps at her work and travel.

As Americans are in the midst of an election season, we may want to pay close attention to the ways news is shared—and often misused. When Duterte’s propaganda people seek to put out misinformation, they use a network of online bots. It is noted that 26 fake accounts can influence 3 million other accounts. (And you wonder why there’s so much political trash filling your Facebook page?)

While it may be easy to make comparisons between Duterte and President Trump (and there are several parallels), it has to be said that Duterte easily outdoes Trump in terms of vulgarity and overt hostility to the press. But because there are some clear similarities, it is worth taking noted that this is not just an issue half a world away. As implied by Time naming The Guardians to its prestigious recognition, a free press is integral to democratic government. When those in power attack the press, they erode the foundations of democracy.

In one scene in the film, Maria Ressa is questioned by someone from the public of why it should matter to them that the press is being harassed, as long as their communities are free of drug dealers. (They aren’t really, but the government keeps killing the poor under the rubric of a drug war.) Ressa riffs on a famous holocaust poem by Pastor Maritn Niemoller, by adding a line, “First they came for the journalists; we don’t know what happened after that.”

How do we judge our sources for news? Are Fox News and MSNBC just two sides of one coin? Do we trust what the government tells us? Do we trust the fact-checking sites? Do we trust the many claims we find in Tweets and Facebook or Instragram posts? If a lie is told often enough and loud enough does it become its own truth? The role of journalism in keeping us informed is vital to any country’s hope of making wise, informed decisions about government.

A Thousand Cuts is available on Virtual Cinema through local art houses.

Photos courtesy of PBS

Most Wanted – The Cost of Ambition

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What happens when a big, police inspired drug sting goes bad? Most Wanted, from writer/director Daniel Roby, is inspired by a true story of a Canadian man who was used by the police and left hanging in the wind when things turned bad.

Daniel Léger (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) is a recovering heroin addict, who finds himself connected to Glen Picker (Jim Gaffigan), a small-time dealer and informant to the Federal police. He convinces Federal agent Frank Cooper (Stephen McHattie) that Léger can make a big drug deal in Thailand. Cooper, who has been passed over for a promotion, wants to make a name for himself and sets up an extensive and expensive operation in conjunction with the Thai police. It turns out Léger is not the person they all think, and really isn’t up to this task. When things fall apart and a Canadian agent dies in the process, Léger ends up serving a 100 year sentence in a rugged Thai prison.

He would have languished there if not for Victor Malarek (Josh Harnett) an investigative reporter for the Globe and Mail. Mararek is on the outs with the newspaper’s management. He is brash, confident and way too full of himself. But when he goes to Thailand to get an interview with this Canadian citizen that seems to have been abandoned by the Canadian government, he learns that Léger was a patsy who was used by police who want to make this all disappear.

A familiar three-act format might have been a bit more appropriate for the storytelling. Instead we get the story in two parallel timelines, one focusing on Léger and the police operation, the other on Malarek’s investigation. Knowing this going in may make the first quarter of the movie a bit more understandable as it alternates between timelines.

The story is one of ambitions. Léger is an innocent person caught up in a battle of people looking to advance themselves. Picker is in this for the money he’s promised when the operation is completed. Cooper wants to prove that he should have a better position in the RCMP. Malarek enters this fray looking for a big story, but discovers that the person who this story revolves around is more important than the story he wants. Malarek becomes the agent of justice in the story.

It also speaks to the way a person can be seen as expendable to someone’s ambitions. Léger’s life was considered by the police involved to be so unimportant that it didn’t matter that he would spend his life in jail for what they orchestrated. And to protect the institutional integrity of the police, the government was willing to let this one, unimportant, former drug addict suffer what was not really his doing.

The film is set during the time of the US War on Drugs, and Canada’s own version of that. One of the keys that makes that “war” so ineffective was the idea that those involved with drugs were in some way unworthy of the protection of the law or of basic human consideration. It resulted in long, unjust prison sentences with no real consideration of the harm done to people in need. Daniel Léger is only one example.

Most Wanted is available through Virtual Cinema at local art houses and on VOD.

Photos courtesy of Saban Films.

Dateline-Saigon – Fighting the Lie Machine

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“There are these two armies that are going to meet: this tiny little army of journalists—five, or six, seven—and this army of policy.”

The role of a journalist is to share the truth. During the early years of the Vietnam War, a small group of young journalists who were assigned to Vietnam recognized that the official government statements about American involvement were not the truth. Dateline-Saigon provides a history of that early period of American involvement as we hear some of these reporters recall their time reporting from Vietnam.

Reporters, from left, David Halberstam of the New York Times, AP Saigon Correspondent Malcolm Brown and Neil Sheehan of UPI, and later the New York Times, chat beside a helicopter in Vietnam, ca. 1964. (AP Photo)

The journalists involved are Malcolm Browne and Peter Arnett of Associated Press, Neil Sheehan of United Press International, David Halberstam of the New York Times, and photographer Horst Faas of Associated Press. These young men (in their twenties while on their assignments in Vietnam) were perhaps a bit naïve when they arrived. They soon learned that many of their sources in the military and governments would exaggerate claims of victory and damage done to the enemy. They would see Americans involved in combat while the American and Vietnam governments claimed that they were only advisors.

Vietnam 1967 — AP photographer Horst Faas, with his Leica cameras around his neck, accompanies U.S. troops in War Zone C.

Because they worked for different outlets, there was great competition between them, but also a comradery built on their common understanding of their task. They exposed the lies. They were a voice calling out in a world that was dominated by what Halberstam calls “a large lie machine”.

Nearly the entire film is set during the Kennedy Administration. There are only a few thousands American troops in Vietnam. The escalation of the war came later. But even at this point we note that the government was being very dishonest about what was happening. (For those who recall that time as an age of Camelot, this may be a bit of a shock.)

These young journalists did not go there trying to destroy American policy. As Sheehan says, “At this point, we were young Americans who were filled with all the myths of the Cold War. We thought this was the right war, the right time, the right place.” But they understood their jobs to be to bring the truth to the world. However, it wasn’t until TV began covering the war, and bringing these issues into homes through that more powerful medium, that the truth became recognized by the world.

Peter Arnett in the field, 1965

In today’s news environment of claims about “fake news” and near real-time fact-checking, I think it is important to take a look at journalistic ideals. The journalists we meet in this film (all of whom went on to win Pulitzer Prizes) were, I think, a bit idealistic about their role. But that idealism served them well as they all looked for the truth of what was happening. In time it would become clear that the way the policy was being presented through the government was indeed “a lie machine”. We continue to rely on journalists of integrity to protect us from the lie machines that continue today.

Dateline-Saigon is available on VOD and DVD.

Photos courtesy of First Run Features

Joseph Pulitzer: The Voice of the Poeple

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Most people know of Joseph Pulitzer because of the Pulitzer Prizes awarded each year. They may associate him with yellow journalism. But there is much more to this man as we discover in Joseph Pulitzer: The Voice of the People, opening in theaters and coming later to the PBS American Masters series. As Nicholson Baker says in the film, “[Joseph Pulitzer] is probably the most thrilling and important and original and creative mind in American media. He’s the person who thought up so much of what we think of now as news and how news is conveyed.” The film sets Pulitzer out as essentially creating journalism as we know it today.

Pulitzer was born in Hungary and migrated to the U.S. to fight for the Union in the Civil War. After the war, he stumbled into a newspaper job in St. Louis. By the time he was 25, he was the publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Journalism at that time was tied to politics. Editors became politicians and vice versa. Pulitzer made his paper free from political affiliation, vowing to tell the truth and to search out corruption. To gain a larger audience, he bought the New York World. He built readership in New York by including stories that would be helpful for immigrants. (As an Jewish immigrant, he understood the needs and desires of others.) Soon The World was a major newspaper with a national readership.

And while Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst tried to outdo each other in beating war drums leading to the Spanish American War, Pulitzer later regretted such sensationalism and vowed to eschew “fake news” (his term, sound familiar?) to concentrate on bringing only the truth. And he didn’t care what powers he might upset. He eventually told of corruption involving the Panama Canal that led to a legal battle with Theodore Roosevelt that eventually wound up in the Supreme Court. The Court unanimously affirmed the freedom of the press.

While the film is essentially a history lesson with experts and some reenactments (voiced by Liev Schreiber as Pulitzer, Tim Blake Nelson as Theodore Roosevelt, and Rachel Brosnahan as Nellie Bly, with narration by Adam Driver), it is an excellent lens for looking at today’s news and news media. It seems that many people choose their sources for news based on their political leanings. There are those who watch Fox and others who watch MSNBC. President Trump often refers to some reporters as representing “fake news”. The President has mentioned the need to change libel laws so that journalists could be sued or prosecuted. (Roosevelt had the government take Pulitzer to court.)

Watching this film reminds us of the importance of a free and active press. And it helps us to understand the role Joseph Pulitzer played in the evolution of journalism in our country as we look at the state of journalism today.

Photos courtesy of First Run Features

Day4 at NBFF

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The interaction of news events and the journalists covering the events made up the focus of the first two films of the day. Another News Story, directed by Orban Wallace, follows the story of immigrants to Europe from the time they land on the Greek island of Lesbos as they work their way through various countries to find new homes in Germany. You may remember the events from the evening news, especially when Hungary closed its borders to immigrants creating a refugee crisis at the border with Serbia. The film also focuses on the news media that is covering the story. For many (most?), they are there doing a job. They’ll go home to a nice hotel each night and come back again tomorrow to film more. For some, it becomes an issue about if they should act as journalists or as humans. To what extent are the journalists using the suffering of people just to get a story? To what extent are they responsible for the suffering?

Playing with Another News Story was a twenty minute short doc, Fight for the First, directed by Sharon Liese. It covers journalism students who work at the Columbia Missourian as they cover a breaking story on the campus of the University of Missouri and a few other stories. This is not just a student newspaper. They are assertive in their role of reporting as a way of making sure facts and truth are available for the people—even if those they are covering want to stop them. Both of these films make reference to claims of “fake news” that have been leveled against the news media by the current American Administration.

Monday evening was the time for the Pacific Rim Showcase which featured films from The Philippines, Korea, Japan, China, and Australia. I chose the Australian film, The Pretend One, directed by Tony Prescott. It’s always nice at this point in a festival to have something with a lighter tone. Charlie lives with her father on a remote cotton farm in Queensland. Ever since she was six, Hugo has been her best friend. Now as a young woman, she and Hugo still do everything together. But Hugo is only an imaginary friend. When a flesh-and-blood rival turns up, Hugo, who is in love with Charlie, refuses to give up easily. He does his best to interfere with the courtship. How can he stop her from going with this man? And how can he not allow her the happiness of real-life romance? An entertaining look at just what love means.

The Post – Releasing the Truth

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“In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government.” (Justice Hugo Black, The New York Times v. The United States)

Steven Spielberg’s The Post is not really about the Pentagon Papers, the leaked secret documents that showed that the American government had lied to the people through four administrations from Truman to Johnson. The publication of those documents in 1971 brought the freedom of the press into the nation’s consciousness. The Post is really about the courage that is sometimes needed to serve the public good and to make sure the government is serving the people.

The film is set at The Washington Post, a paper that aspired to national importance, but hadn’t quite achieved it. When the New York Times published the first stories about the Pentagon Papers, Post editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) sets his staff to work trying to find a way to get a copy. Soon, one of them tracks down Daniel Ellsberg, the former analyst who leaked the documents. After the Nixon Administration was granted an injunction against the Times to stop publication, Bradlee and his team begin to create their own stories. But it falls on publisher Katherine Graham (Meryl Streep) to make the decision—one that could lead to charges of contempt of court and treason.

Bradlee, in this film, is a stereotypical hard-nosed journalist. He is in search of the truth and believes that the truth needs to be known. We get the sense that he and his reporters would easily be willing to face prosecution over the truth and free press. But it is Graham who is the focus for the difficult decision. Katherine Graham became publisher after the suicide of her husband. The paper had been in her family for decades, but she hadn’t really been involved in it. She was a wife, mother, and social hostess in Washington. She is just beginning to establish herself as a business woman (and really not accepted by some on her board). This decision could have devastating consequences for the company—possibly destroying the paper her father and husband had cared so much about. As deadlines loom, legal issues arise, her various advisors give many opinions, her past friendships with people like the Kennedy’s Johnsons, and Robert McNamara weigh on her. But she must finally choose the road the paper will take.

Spielberg is not new to making historical films. (Previous films include The Empire of the Sun, Munich, Schindler’s List and Bridge of Spies). One of the hallmarks of such films is that they are less about the historical events than they are about the personal stories we are seeing. That is true of The Post. The relationship between Bradlee and Graham is one of respect. They each have different priorities. But they each take their responsibilities—to the paper, reporters, and the nation—seriously. As they face the challenge represented in the Pentagon Papers, they push one another, eventually finding ways to help each to reach their bests.

It’s hard to think of a time when a film that highlights the First Amendment is not timely, but it certainly seems especially so with this film. The adversary relationship between the press and government seems to have grown ever more forceful of late. When tweets take the place of serious discussion, the people are not well served. When an administration dismisses negative stories as “fake news”, the people are not served. When governments seek to hide important information, the people are not served. As journalism continues to evolve (and often devolve) in the information age, we need to be able to depend on a free press to (as Justice Black said) “remain forever free to censure the Government.”

Photos Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation