An American playwright and MLK scholar Dr. Clay Carson takes a choir of seven African American gospel singers to Palestine. There his play Passages of Martin Luther King has been adapted as Al Helm (the dream) by director Kamel El Basha for the Palestinian National Theatre Company.
Omar Robert Hamilton’s entry in the Boston Palestine Film Festival is his third fiction short, but he’s made several other films, dozens, in fact.
They’re mostly brief documentaries he filmed and publicized as co-founder of the Egyptian film collective Mosireen, which played a major role in documenting the 2011 revolution and aftermath. Mosireen became the most-watched nonprofit YouTube channel in Egypt, and even worldwide during one month.
To paraphrase a popular commercial for Chevrolet cars: The new Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum isn’t your father’s museum. With the recently opened Renzo Piano wing, the Gardner is a new Boston destination.
I know that Miss Representation is an important film and I feel bad that I didn’t love it more. Its mission is to explore “how the media’s misrepresentations of women contribute to the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence.” And it makes a strong case. Miss Representation is getting a lot of play at a lot of film festivals as well as through the educational campaign built around it. I just question how crucial the dream of “power and influence” is to most women today.
“The Guard” (shouldn’t that be, The Garda?) is a terrific Irish film that showcases Brendan Gleeson, a wry and splendid actor who plays a small time village cop, Sergeant Gerry Boyle. (The film was a critical and popular hit in Ireland.) When three drug traffickers make their way to his area, he suddenly has to deal with the rather up-tight FBI agent Wendell Everett played with fitting cultural confusion by Don Cheadle.
Adam Curtis’ new documentary, All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, gives hope that at least some of the world is waking up from the mass hallucination of disembodied information. The documentary, which is subtitled, “The Rise of the Machines,” explores how in the later part of the 20th Century, and the first decade of the 21st, much of the world became organized around the old gnostic fantasy that information or souls can be separated from the constraints of the material world, becoming free to circulate through time and space.
So what’s funny about being in my 60s? It’s funny to be at an age where historical documentaries are being made about political actions I was involved in. Am I history?
American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Wars make poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.”
More than sixty years after the war that cemented Israel’s statehood, known both as the War of Independence and The Catastrophe, Jews and Palestinians alike can affirm the truth in King’s declaration. In the film, Little Town of Bethlehem, coming out this October, three men from either side of the concrete wall that now separates Israel and Palestine, talk about growing up under the cloud of this long conflict and how it has shaped each of their lives.
The “Art of the Steal,” which just opened at the Kendall Square Theatre, Cambridge, documents a true Horatio Alger story and how it went awry.
