The Tale, directed by distinguished filmmaker and writer Jennifer Fox, is one of those rare bold films that breaks from a narrative template. In this fictionalized autobiography, Fox sets a new direction away from the usual path of survival instincts that points instead at the complexities of sexual assault by identifying stages of sexual grooming … Read more
In the harsh cacophony of the debate about immigration and refugees, facts and statistics rarely move the needle in changing opinion. And, there’s plenty of research available, especially longitudinal data collected over many years. It’s easy to summarize. Sources such as the Migration Policy Institute provide data that show education and income level are among … Read more
Utahns will recognize a good sampling of their state’s unparalleled scenery in two films – both containing unconventional elements to represent their respective genres — that premiered during this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Hereditary, directed and written by Ari Aster, an unusual horror film that has attracted much attention in Sundance’s Midnight program slate, and … Read more
Seven years ago, online audiences drew close to the experiences of Amina Arraf, who described herself as a Syrian-American lesbian. Web traffic exploded on her blog A Gay Girl in Damascus and Arraf engaged in cyber relationships with political activists who identified as lesbian. Then Arraf disappeared, leading her readers and online friends to believe … Read more
To some, the events of July 12, 1917 that culminated in one of the most bizarre and humiliating responses to labor unrest in U.S. history made the once thriving copper-mining town of Bisbee, Arizona, just seven miles from the Mexican border an “American tragedy”, “an ethnic cleansing” or a “corporate gulag.” Others saw the dramatic … Read more
In Of Fathers and Sons, director Talal Derki picks up where he ended Return to Homs, the 2014 winner of the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival. Derki, who was born in Damascus but now lives in Berlin, offered a small yet still visible glimmer of hope in the … Read more
Two feature-length animation films – both stunning in their visualizations of classic stories and thematic interpretation – and a documentary about the trials and successes of competing in an international science fair comprise this year’s Kids section of the Sundance Film Festival. The 2018 edition of the Kids program is a five-year milestone for its … Read more
The new documentary film Believer, which premieres today at the Sundance Film Festival, is a much different film from what Don Argott, director and a guitarist who plays in a proto-metal band, intended. The film is presented by Live Nation Productions that will soon be part of HBO Documentary Films. The original intent was a … Read more
For most of the 1980s, “officials in the state of Utah did nothing but sit back and watch people die of AIDS. That is not a hyperbole,” Ben Williams, one of Utah’s best known gay historians, wrote in a QSaltLake magazine several years back. Unfortunately, Utah was no exception at the time. Few people across … Read more
Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. – Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon … Read more