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Two Gods – Who Will You Follow?

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“Surely we belong to God and to Him we shall return.”

In Zeshawn Ali’s Two Gods we see the struggles of people dealing with violence in their lives and neighborhoods. The documentary set mostly in Newark, New Jersey, focuses on Hanif, a Muslim casket maker and ritual body washer. Hanif knows the dangers of the streets. He ended up in prison at one point. He seems to have found meaning in his work. He approaches it with respect for the dead.

Hanif has taken two young men under his wing to try to mentor them into adulthood. Furquan is twelve years old, and comes from a violent home. Naz is seventeen and getting involved with dangerous activity, which eventually results in his arrest on very serious charges.

The back and white cinematography creates a stark world where violence is a constant presence. From time to time we encounter not only funerals, but the community workers who are trying to end the large number of violent deaths among young people. It is this that Hanif is trying to protect Naz and Furquan from.

It is important to note that Hanif is a religious man. He is frequently wearing t-shirts that say “Pray”. We see him in the mosque praying. And his approach to the bodies he prepares for burial is a form of religious observance. He feels blessed to be able to care for these bodies. Naz speak a bit about religion, but it doesn’t seem to be important to him. Furquan in time finds himself in his aunt’s home in North Carolina and being part of a Christian church there.

The filmmaker’s view is that all three of these men are struggling between the worship of God and of the streets. That is a fair description of what many people deal with each day. It doesn’t necessarily have to mean choosing God or violence. It can be about anything that draws us away from God. It could be money, sex, fame, drugs, success, or power. Those things can be a part of life, but when they dominate, they can become a different god to us.

Ali wants to show American Muslims as a part of our societal fabric. He does not make a case that Muslims are better than others or that Islam is superior, but he does want us to understand that we all share a common humanity. Indeed, he seems just as happy for Furquan finding a place in a Christian community as he with Hanif in his practice of Islam.

Two Gods is available in theaters and virtual cinema. It is coming soon to PBS’s “Independent Lens” series.

Photos by Zeshawn Ali.

Dark Circle – 40 years later, still matters.

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Does a nearly forty year old documentary still hold relevance? A newly restored HD version of Dark Circle is streaming on various outlets. The film, directed by Christopher Beaver, Judy Irving, and Ruth Landry, was shortlisted for Oscar consideration in 1983 and won an Emmy in 1989, when it finally made it to PBS as part of the POV series.

The film’s focus is plutonium—the byproduct of nuclear power generation and a key component of nuclear weapons. Plutonium is also a very dangerous contaminant. Even minute amounts can cause mutations and cancers that may take years to show up. The film moves between the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado and the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant that was being constructed in California. (Since the film was made, the Rocky Flats facility has been closed and is the sight of a massive “superfund” cleanup, and the Diablo Canyon plant is in the process of closing.)

Worker holds highly radioactive plutonium button, the trigger for nuclear
weapons, in glovebox. (stock footage, public domain, still from movie)

The idea in making the film was not to search out experts or politicians, but to turn the camera on some of those most affected. In Colorado we meet a mother who worries about the ground contamination from the nearby Rocky Flats plant. When they bought the house, no one told them about the plant or about the contamination. In California we meet activists who are trying to stop the construction of the plant noting safety considerations.

The film also ventures to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to recall the human toll of the bombings of those cities, and also some of the experiments that the US military conducted with soldiers, many of whom later developed cancers (few of which the government would admit to being responsible for).

In some ways, I see the film as a bit of a time capsule. The world was much different forty years ago. This is in the midst of the Cold War with its theoretical underpinning of mutual assured destruction. We were continuing to build our stockpile of nuclear weapons. The Rocky Flats plant was turning out three new plutonium detonators a day. Nuclear power was not in its infancy, but it was still new enough to raise concerns. (That is not to say it still doesn’t. In fact, we probably have even more concerns now as then.)

Anti-nuclear activists from San Luis Obispo look at Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, under construction in 1980 on an active earthquake fault. © Karen Spangenberg

Yet the film continues to speak, even though the filmmakers may not have been aware at the time of all the issues involved. Although we have reduced our nuclear arsenal, there are now other countries—including North Korea and Iraq—that have developed their own nuclear programs. After Fukushima, the world has a better picture of what kinds of catastrophes nuclear power can bring.

But perhaps the most relevant part of the film is the look at the business behind the nuclear power and defense programs. The film shows how the military-industrial complex worked to override concerns citizens had. The government, supposedly responsible to the people, was unresponsive to those who raised issues about contamination or construction problems. If the film were made today, it might talk of “corporatocracy” and the way corporations wield power over the government. (Note: one of the reasons it took seven years for the film to make it to PBS was that the filmmakers refused to remove a section that named the companies involved.)

It would have been helpful for the filmmakers to make a short update to tack on the end of the film to show the ways things have changed and remained the same. One of the new issues is that as we try to move away from fossil fuels, there is a new push for more nuclear power. It is hard to be completely anti-nuke, but it is also hard to accept it.

Dark Circle begins streaming on Apple TV, iTunes, and Amazon March 30,

Photos courtesy of First Run Features.

The People vs. Agent Orange

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“[It] doesn’t go away. It goes away politically/”

Most of us associate Agent Orange with the Vietnam War. The defoliant was used extensively in that war, both to eliminate the cover of jungle and to destroy crops. It also became a major veterans’ issue, when many veterans contracted cancers. But The People vs. Agent Orange, a documentary from Alan Adelson and Kate Taverna, show us the ways Agent Orange continues to affect life, both in Vietnam and the US.

The film touches on the use of the chemicals in the war, and briefly on the veterans’ issues involves. But a good part of the film focuses on the use of Agent Orange by the timber industry in Oregon. After clear cutting, in order to replant whole hillsides, the logging companies would spray with Agent Orange before replanting. For the wildlife and the people who lived in that area, serious health and reproductive problems followed. People organized and sought to end it, only to face intimidation. But eventually the courts ordered a stop to the use of one of the two chemicals that made up Agent Orange.

The film also focuses on the price that is still being paid in Vietnam. Because dioxin, part of Agent Orange, does not go away—either in the land or the body—Vietnam continues to have a very high rate of serious birth defects. As a result, Tran To Nga, a Vietnamese woman, is suing the manufacturers in a French court, in order to seek accountability. (The U.S. courts have not allowed such a suit.)

This film is a look at a very important issue, but it failed to create a significant emotional response in me. In part that is because so much of the film seems to be ancient history. The events in Oregon took place forty or more years ago. There are still effects, and one of the key components is still being used there, but the film doesn’t really bring the problem to the present, except with the children with deformities in Vietnam.

The film also fails to provide all the links needed to fully make its case. For example, the chemical that includes dioxin is not longer used in Oregon, but the film fails to provide sufficient evidence that the remaining chemical being used is also damaging to the environment. (I don’t doubt it is, but the film doesn’t prove it.)

Because it is so much based in the past, the film can’t really serve as a call to arms against an injustice. Nga’s attempt to hold companies accountable is a noble effort, but it’s not really something we can get behind. The real problem, which the film doesn’t really get into, is an overall inability to hold companies liable for the harm they do. This is really a political issue as much as a legal one. That is an area that people can seek change. But that’s not where the film leads us.

The People vs. Agent Orange is available via virtual cinema through local theaters.

Through the Night – Much Needed Daycare

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What are parents to do when they need to work long shifts or multiple jobs? Through the Night by documentary director Loira Limbal takes us into a 24-hour daycare center in New Rochelle, New York. There Deloris (Nunu) Hogan and her husband Patrick care day and night for several children up to 12 years old.

We see the day care through a good part of the year. We see bits of Hallowe’en, Thanksgiving Christmas, spring, and summer. There is a lot of cooking, cleaning, playing, helping with homework, comforting planting vegetables. Since it is around the clock care, it has no end. Nunu has been at this for 22 years. She and her husband are very much in sync with all that has to happen to care for these children. But it has a cost. Nunu and Patrick don’t get time away. They often manage on minimal sleep. The question arises as to who takes care of the caregivers. As Nunu says in the film, “We need our spirits lifted up too.”

The vulnerability of the situation becomes clear in the last 15 minutes of the film, when Nunu experiences a medical emergency. How will the center continue if something happens to her?  The film was made prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the film’s website quotes Nunu as saying, “We are staying open until they shut us down because our parents need us. It is a little bit scary because every person who walks in could bring in COVID-19.”

While this film focuses on the day care, it does not ignore the root problem that underlies this need. There are many people who work multiple jobs and late shifts that makes it difficult to find day care for their children. One mother we meet has three jobs, none of them over 29 hours a week (to avoid having to provide health insurance). There is little or no governmental help for those trying to provide for their children.

The film itself is light on activism. It shows us the dilemma that parents face and the need for such caregivers. The film’s website (https://www.throughthenightfilm.com/) offers a variety of resources for parents and caregivers as well as a link to make donations to establish more such daycare centers.

Through the Night is available on virtual cinema through local arthouses.

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

The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández – A Story to Remember

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Corridos are Mexican folk ballads. Sometimes those ballads are used to relate history that is deemed important. The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández is essentially a film corrido that recalls the 1997 shooting of an 18 year old high school student on the US-Mexico border by US Marines. The Emmy-nominated film, directed by Kieran Fitzgerald and narrated by Tommy Lee Jones, originally aired on PBS in 2008, but is now arriving on VOD.

Esequiel Hernández lived with his family about 200 yards from the Rio Grande. He and his siblings were born here. One evening while herding his family’s goats, he came under suspicion of a group of Marines who were assigned to observe the border as part of the War on Drugs. It should be noted that their mission was to observe and report to law enforcement, not to interdict drug trafficking. But as Esequiel cared for his goats he carried a .22 rifle to deal with coyotes. The fully camouflaged Marines believed he fired at them. They did not immediately return fire, but tracked him over wide area before one of them shot him. Esequiel Hernández became the first American citizen killed by US military on American soil since Kent State in 1970.

The ensuing investigation never led to any charges against the Marines. The film allows us to hear from Border Patrol officials, local law enforcement officials, government officials, and three of the four Marines involved in the incident (only the one who fired the shot failed to take part). The perspective of the film is that justice was not served in this case. It points out that the Marines were probably acting outside their rules of engagements. It also shows that the government and the military quickly closed wagons to prevent what could have become a very bad public image problem. This incident brought an end to the military involvement at the border until recently as the military works on building a border wall.

It’s important to note that the film looks back ten years after the fact, and we are now seeing it another decade later. But even though the events recounted are so far in the past, the themes that are involved continue to be timely. That is where the corrido nature of this story comes into play. We are asked to remember this event—this piece of history—for what it tells us of the ongoing issues we face today.

The most obvious issue is immigration, even though Esequiel Hernández was not an immigrant and the Marines were not tasked with dealing with immigration. They were only there to try to identify drug trafficking. But people of Hispanic heritage anywhere near the border continue to face assumptions about their place in society.

Questions are also raised about the failure of the legal system to bring justice in situations of armed force being used improperly. Neither the civilian legal system or the military system was able or willing to confront the problems involved in this incident. Some in the military even sought to give the shooter a special commendation.

But what struck me as a much more appropriate question for us to consider is the way the Marines tracked Esequiel for a long period. It brings to mind the illogical extensions of stand-your-ground laws that have led to various killings of people of color in recent years. For me, the part of the story that is most disturbing is that this could have been avoided if the Marines had simply stayed where they were.

Some corridos and their stories speak to us through the years. The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández is such a story.

The film is available on iTunes and Amazon.

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

American Masters: Andrew Wyeth

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“He painted the soul, not just the image.”

The PBS series American Masters is airing an episode focusing on the painter Andrew Wyeth. Wyeth was one of the 20th century’s most famous magical-realist painters. He had both popular and critical success. But the popular success also led to a time of critical rejection as abstract expressionism came into vogue.

Andrew Wyeth. photo credit: Bruce Weber

The episode provides an overview of his life and work. His life revolved around two rural communities, one in Pennsylvania, the other in Maine. Here he painted the landscapes and people that he knew. This often included neighbors such as the Kuerners in Pennsylvania and the Olsons in Maine. (His most famous painting, “Christina’s World”, features Christina Olson on the ground in a field in front of a house.) He also had a long series of paintings of his secret muse, Helga.

Wyeth approached painting as a way to express his vision of the world around him. He said, “Painting to me is a matter of truth and maybe of memory.” As the film shows us many of his works and we hear the background to those works, it provides new ways for us to appreciate his art. For all the realism of his paintings, there is also interpretation and adjustment being made to create something that reflected the real world and the world that Wyeth wanted to show. His paintings often invite the viewer to imagine the story behind the scene we see. In doing so, he created pictures that allow us to connect with them on an emotional level as well as the esthetic.

At times Wyeth’s work evokes a consideration of mortality, even when looking at a scene filled with life. His art can serve as a kind of meditation on life and death, joy and sorrow, community and emptiness. The episode offers us a chance to see all of this in a brief hour.

Abacus: Small Enough to Jail

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In the worldwide banking crisis of 2008, many big banks (Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo among them) were committing fraud in the mortgage market. They paid fines, but they also got massive taxpayer-funded bailouts because they were “too big to fail”, (i.e., their failure could destroy the economy). None of the large banks or their officers were every indicted of crimes. In Abacus: Small Enough to Jail documentarian, Steve James shows us the other end of the financial spectrum, and how the New York City District Attorney decided that a small bank would be a good target in that environment.

Abacus Federal Savings Bank was founded by Chinese immigrant Thomas Sung because he saw that the Chinese community was not being well served by the other banks. As he put it, they wanted Chinese deposits, but didn’t want to loan them money. Through the years the bank has carved out its niche market in Chinatown, where Sung is in many ways a community leader. The bank has since passed on to his daughters’ control. When a loan originator was discovered taking bribes and falsifying records, he was immediately fired and federal authorities were notified. When the DA’s office began investigating, the bank enthusiastically cooperated and hoped that if others were not following the rules they would be found out. But soon, it became clear that the prosecutors thought the whole bank was corrupt and indicted a large number of employees and the bank itself.

The Sung family sees themselves as an honorable part of the community. Indeed, in the cash economy that many in the immigrant community operate in, a bank such as Abacus is the only kind of bank they will trust. This is a small, family-owned bank with just six branches. This bank is the 2531st largest bank in the US, with 1/100 of one percent of Bank of America’s assets. Many small banks would have pled guilty and paid a fine. The Sungs would not. Thus began a five year legal battle that cost them $10,000,000. The film follows the Sungs throughout the trial that lasted about three months.

The film is made from the point of view of the Sung family, but includes many voices of differing views, including Cyrus Vance, Jr., The New York District Attorney and the prosecutor for the trial, two jurors with differing views, the bank’s attorneys for the trial, journalists, and others. Even though we clearly want to side with the Sungs, enough of the prosecution’s argument is given so we can grasp the case against them.

The film opens with a clip from It’s a Wonderful Life. This is a film that Thomas Sung views as his own philosophy of banking and community. He had already established a successful career as a lawyer before starting the bank. But he believed it was his responsibility to give something to his community. He has always seen the bank in that light. As we watch, we get a small glimpse into the Chinese immigrant community (a group that can be very insular). The film offers us a chance to consider what it means to be a community. And we also see what role a bank can play within a community. We may even ask what our own bank may do to be part of the community. (Let’s face it, they all will brag about some community projects, but are the big banks that many of us use really involved?)

Because this also is in part a courtroom drama, it offers us a chance to think about justice. There is no doubt that illegal acts happened at Abacus. The Sungs not only admit that, they point out that they turned their own bank in when it was discovered. But it is fair to ask to what extent justice is served in this costly prosecution, or whether there were some self-serving aspects in the public announcement of the indictment and the perp walk that the DA’s office staged. It also raises a question of if there is a racial component to this prosecution. Would a bank that was not centered around one ethnicity (and one that may have little political clout) have been treated the same And what about the total absence of any prosecution of the larger banks that actively participated in wide-ranging fraud?  (Abacus is the only bank to have been indicted from the 2008 banking crisis.) Is it acceptable to single out a small bank with few resources to defend itself and let bigger, stronger banks never face justice? Perhaps the criminal justice system is on trial here just as much as Abacus Federal Savings Bank.

This film will eventually make its way to TV on PBS Frontline.

Photos courtesy of PBS.