[Editor’s Note: LFM is currently covering a series of provocative films debuting this week and next at The Los Angeles Film Festival.]
By Joe Bendel. For China, the earthquake that devastated Sichuan province on May 12, 2008 has been like Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf oil spill combined. It has laid bare public corruption and put the local and national authorities on the defensive. Like Katrina, it has also been widely documented in films like the Oscar nominated short China’s Unnatural Disaster and Du Haibin’s feature 1428 (the winner of the 66th Venice Film Festival’s Best Documentary Award), which screens tonight at 8:00pm at the 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival. See the trailer below.
At 14:28 hours (2:28 pm) China was hit with what is considered the nineteenth worst earthquake in history, just three months before the Beijing Olympics were scheduled to open. The Communist government’s official response has been controversial to say the least. Despite the quake’s severity, many suspect it would not have been as deadly had government construction been less shoddy, particularly at schools. Promises have been made to Sichuan survivors, usually by politicians orchestrating media ops, but the delivery of relief has been slow and problematic.
Du focuses his lens on the haunted faces of Sichuan’s dispossessed. They live in shanty towns and temporary housing, enduring shortages of food and power. Many would like to return home, but following a truly perverse plan of action, the government has begun demolishing houses that withstood the quake. Such is the efficiency of China’s emergency management. For many survivors, it appears all the authorities have to offer is an opportunity to wave at the Premier’s tour bus as his motorcade blows through town.
Stylistically compatible with China’s so-called D-Generation (D for Digital) filmmaking, Du eschews conventional documentary techniques, like formal interviews and voiceover narration. Instead, he lets the camera roll, capturing the unfiltered reality of the quake’s aftermath at intervals of ten and two hundred ten days after the disaster. It is not pretty.
There is clearly a lot of anger in Sichuan that survivors do not seem to know how to express. One frustrated old man offers perhaps the most direct censure of the government, complaining: “The policies of the Communist Party are good in essence but they have been carried out wrongly.” In fact, the survivors seen in 1428 are much more guarded in their grievances than the grieving parents featured in Unnatural. Of course, it is worth bearing in mind Du’s footage was shot a mere nine years after the Tiananmen Square massacre, so he might well have been more circumspect in what he choose to include, for his subjects’ sake.
Like many of the D-Generation films, 1428 obliquely criticizes the Chinese Communist government from a perspective that would be considered left of center in the west. One elderly Taoist mystic (with much prompting) links the earthquake to the lack of observance of the Earth-God (perhaps implying a corresponding paucity of respect for the Earth by extension). However, the most heartbreaking footage of 1428 involves bereaved parents searching for the remains of their missing children amid the wreckage of their schools.
1428 is an eye-opening dose of reality, straight-up without any external editorializing. It is not the popular image of contemporary China the government has worked to cultivate. In truth, it does require some patience (though not as much as Du’s previous film Umbrella) because it so scrupulously represents life as it is for the Sichuan survivors. Consistently illuminating, it is definitely recommended to anyone in the City of Angels when it screens tonight at 8:00pm at the LA Film Fest (6/21).
[Editor’s Note: LFM is currently covering a series of provocative films debuting this week and next at The Los Angeles Film Festival.]
By Jason Apuzzo. Why, exactly, did the West win the Cold War?
There are many theories. Most of them identify Ronald Reagan’s proposed Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or ‘Star Wars’ missile defense system as having been the final tipping point in that epochal conflict, after which point the Soviet Union was no longer capable – militarily, economically, or perhaps even psychologically – of sustaining its Cold War arms race with the United States.
This is certainly true, so far as it goes – and Jaak Kilmi and Kiur Aarma’s extraordinary new documentary Disco & Atomic War certainly credits Reagan’s bold proposal as having had its desired psychological effect on the Soviets. But that isn’t really the story their film exists to tell.
What if the Cold War was instead won … by David Hasselhoff? What if American TV shows like Knight Rider and Dallas, or movies like Star Wars and Ninotchka – or lurid, 70s soft-core erotica like Emmanuelle – played an equal (and perhaps even greater) role in bringing down the communist system? This, essentially, is the subject matter of the compelling and drolly amusing Estonian/Finnish documentary Disco & Atomic War currently showing at The Los Angeles Film Festival (6/20).
Don't hassle the Hoff: in Estonia he won the Cold War.
Before proceeding further, let me briefly point out that I had the chance to visit Finland and the old Soviet Union during the time period depicted in this documentary – roughly the late 80s. Finland at that time was a kind of strange, anxious no-man’s land – a Western country that was nonetheless very much within the Soviet sphere of influence. As a teenager I remember taking the train from Finland into the Soviet Union, and idly fretting over the fact that I was carrying a paperback copy of Tom Clancy’s thriller The Hunt for Red October in my backpack. Would it get confiscated? Would I be labelled a spy? Would some Red Army jerk put a boot in my face?
If such fears seem quaint now, Disco & Atomic War brings them all back in vivid detail – because the purpose of this documentary is to examine the so-called ‘soft power’ influence of American and Western culture on the minds of Soviet citizens living in Estonia at that time, who were able through clever means to watch Finnish television broadcasts emanating from just over the border. As the film informs us, American popular culture – especially in the form of glamorous TV shows like Dallas – was deeply feared by Soviet authorities due to the ideas and expectations such programming planted in the minds of Soviet citizens.
If what you’re expecting from this film is a dry recitation of Cold War history, though, think again – because Disco & Atomic War is quite simply one of the funniest and most inventive movies I’ve seen in some time. The film wasn’t at all what I was expecting, or what you should expect from what might otherwise be labelled ‘an Estonian/Finnish documentary about the Cold War’ … which on the face of it sounds rather dull. Disco is actually a riot of surprises, a mash-up of historical documentary and personal narrative that attempts to put you into the mind of a young person living in a closed, totalitarian society – who is suddenly and shockingly exposed by bootleg TV antennas to … sex and disco, Texas millionaires, robot super-cars, and Luke Skywalker.
Nikolai, crafty creator of contraband TV antennas.
As a young person living in California at the time these things were exciting enough to me … but for young people in Estonia, co-directors Jaak Kilmi and Kiur Aarma make it clear that these pop culture phenomena were nothing short of revolutionary. Disco & Atomic War meticulously re-creates the Estonia of the late 70s-late 80s, which was apparently used by the Soviet regime as a kind of laboratory experiment for determining the exact repercussions of having a population subjected to a steady stream of Western influence.
That’s right. [SPOILER ALERT.] The Soviets secretly allowed the Estonian population to be exposed to Western entertainment emanating from Finland, in order to gauge how their people would respond. It was a dangerous experiment – one that would prove fatal to the communists’ grip on power.
As Kilmi and Aarma tell it, Estonia was a kind of quiet, Soviet backwater state at the time that just happened to find itself in close proximity not only to Finland … but to giant TV towers constructed by the Finns (with, it was understood, U.S. backing) in order to broadcast American entertainment directly into the Evil Empire. And what exactly did these daring, constantly-under-threat Finnish TV stations broadcast into Soviet Estonia? Frothy TV fare like Dallas (a show which, in the eyes of the Estonians, featured “men with brilliant white teeth, and beautiful but unhappy women … in a land where everyone is a millionaire … a captivating, spiritual seance”); or shows featuring dancing girls and discos (the Americans’ “secret weapon”); or late night reruns of Ninotchka, the delightful Greta Garbo-Billy Wilder satire on Soviet bureaucrats. There was also Star Wars, George Lucas’ electrifying spectacle that strangely seemed to prefigure both the collapse of the Soviet evil Empire, and the very means (the ‘Star Wars’ missile defense system) by which that Empire was cowed into defeat.
Western siren: Sylvia Kristel as Emmanuelle.
Nothing seems to have had such a great effect on the Estonians, however, as David Hasselhoff’s Knight Rider series … and also the lurid, 70s nudie classic, Emmanuelle. The two most hilarious sequences in Disco & Atomic War involve recreations of how young Estonian kids would gather around foreign cars and begin speaking into their shiny new digital wrist watches, hoping that the cars would come alive like Hasselhoff’s Pontiac. In a later sequence, we see almost the entire nation of Estonia struggle with antennas (some made of simple metal pipes, others made with mercury from thermometers) in order to catch fleeting glimpses of curvaceous Sylvia Kristel writhe in passion in Emmanuelle.
What Disco & Atomic War captures is how utterly hopeless Soviet efforts were to counteract these seductive Western entertainments … and if you’re sensing some parallels with our current struggle against the Islamo-fascists, you’re right on the money. If you watch films like the recent No One Knows About Persian Cats (see the LFM review here), you will form the inescapable conclusion that Iran’s youth are exactly where Estonia’s were some twenty years ago … watching bootlegged Western music and movies, copping rebellious youth attitudes (including punk music), ignoring state restrictions in their daily quest for sex and excitement. Disco & Atomic War is a kind of visual treatise on this type of ‘soft’ Western power, as opposed to military modes of power, and how utterly explosive these modes of influence can be on shaping the imaginations of a population. As the film relates, it’s probably no coincidence that the same year Dallas reruns stopped playing illicitly on Soviet TV screens, the Soviet Union collapsed. [In fact, in his only on-camera interview since being ousted from office, the Soviet puppet dictator of Estonia directly blames Finnish/Western TV broadcasts for the collapse of his own regime.]
I can’t recommend Disco & Atomic War enough, and if you’re in LA on Sunday, June 20th – and anywhere near the vicinity of the downtown around 10pm – I recommend you pop in and see it. [Click here for more details.] If there’s any justice in the world, the film will be short-listed for Oscar consideration. It will show you a side of the Cold War we don’t hear enough about … and give you a sense of what remains our most potent weapon in the battle against tyranny: the alluring freedom of our popular culture.
I’ve embedded the trailer below – which, unfortunately, does not quite do justice to the baroque wit and sophistication of this magnificent little film.
[Editor’s Note: LFM is currently covering a series of provocative films debuting this week and next at The Los Angeles Film Festival.]
By Joe Bendel. Over 200 former employees and directors of Yukos, the Russian oil company, have been in some way persecuted by the Putin regime. If that sounds like a coincidence, Prime Minister Putin would like to thank you for your gullibility. Unquestionably, the biggest fish amongst his quarry was Yukos’ former CEO, the visionary Russian entrepreneur Mikhail Khodorkovsky. At one time the sixteenth richest man in the world, Khodorkovsky now resides in a tiny prison cell. How he got there is a chilling story of the not-so-new Russia, compellingly recounted in Cathryn Collins’ Vlast (Power), which screens during the 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival (trailer above).
Collins never confuses Khodorkovsky with a choirboy. She makes it very clear Khodorkovsky’s early years are still shrouded in mystery and unsettling rumors. However, she gives him credit for taking on the decrepit Yukos state enterprise at a time when the price of oil was at an all time low, eventually turning around the company – and yes, making billions in the process.
Khodorkovsky was one of the original so-called ‘oligarchs’ who largely reaped the benefits of Yeltsin’s privatization plan. Yet he was a crony capitalist of a different color, becoming a prominent philanthropist and advocate of democracy in Russia. He also started championing corporate transparency, only to suddenly find himself behind bars shortly thereafter.
Putin's New Russia: same as the old Russia?
First-time documentarian Collins is admirably even-handed in her profile of Khodorkovsky, never overstating her case or simply appealing to emotion. While giving the incarcerated mogul credit for his business acumen, she is most impressed by his ability to identify and recruit smart, talented young people for his team. Of course, the implications of his story are clear. If a man with an estimated net worth over fifteen billion dollars is not safe in Putin’s Russia, nobody is.
Many of Vlast’s on-camera interview subjects participated at not inconsiderable risk to their well being. In doing so, they definitely convey an unvarnished sense of life in Russia today. Providing clear and concise historical background, Vlast provides the proper context for non-Russophiles and non-Russophobes to appreciate Khodorkovsky’s story. Still, given the long history of Russian and Soviet anti-Semitism, the question of whether Khodorkovsky’s Jewish heritage has contributed to his persecution is strangely never really explored.
Vlast joins the growing ranks of valuable documentaries doggedly raising alarms about the lawlessness of the Putin regime. Unfortunately, previous related films like Eric Bergkraut’s Letter to Anna and Andrei Nekrasov’s Poisoned by Polonium have largely fallen on deaf ears in the West. Given its reasoned tone and access to Khodorkovsky’s inner circle, Vlast should impress viewers concerned about the current state of the world. Well worth seeking out, it screens next Tuesday (6/22) and Wednesday (6/23) at the LAFF.
[Editor’s Note: LFM will be covering a series of provocative films debuting this week and next at The Los Angeles Film Festival.]
By Joe Bendel. What a disclaimer. Danish director Mads Brügger explains all the footage the audience is about to watch had been thoroughly vetted by North Korean state censors. Yet his suspicion that the post-modern irony he would unleash on the world’s most isolated country would be lost on the Communist authorities proved largely correct. The gutsiest act of cinematic provocation perhaps ever, Mads Brügger’s The Red Chapel (trailer below)is a genuine highlight of this year’s Los Angeles Film Festival.
Ostensively, Brügger came to North Korea with two Danish Korean comedians, Simon Jul Jørgensen and Jacob Nossell, to stage a good will show. However, his real intent was to expose the unrelentingly oppressive nature of the DPRK system. Though submission to state censorship was a given right from the start, Brügger thought he had an ace in the hole: Nossell.
A self-described “spastic” (Nossell’s words, not mine), the subversive director knew Nossell would make the North Koreans uneasy, since those born with disabilities simply do not survive in their socialist paradise. Brügger also hoped Nossell would be able to speak freely on film, because none of the censors would understand his “spastic Danish” (Brügger’s words, not mine).
Mads Brügger and Jacob Nossell 'punk' their North Korean minders.
As soon as the Danes arrived in the North, their minder, Mrs. Pak, fastened herself to them like glue. Her response to Nossell was particularly bizarre, almost smothering him with attention. However, even Mrs. Pak could not fake an enthusiastic response to the program the comedians had prepared. Featuring skits in drag and an unclassifiable rendition of Oasis’s “Wonderwall,” it was not just bad, it was awe-inspiringly awful. It is hard to say which is funnier, their variety show on crack, or the stone-face reactions of their hosts. However, seeing the propaganda potential of the show, the North Korean authorities set about adapting it to their ideological purposes, making it “more Korean.” So much for cultural exchange.
While Chapel is at times a riotous exercise in comedic performance art, the overall film is as serious as a heart attack. The pathological nature of DPRK society weighed particularly heavily on Nossell, causing frequent rifts between him and the director. It all comes to a head when Nossell very publicly refuses to participate in one of the regime’s big, scary anti-American mass demonstrations. It is a scene fraught with its own irony, as Brügger – the rebellious gadfly – tries to cajole his countrymen into professing support for what he calls the regime’s “mother lie,” the Communist myth that American aggression precipitated the Korean War.
Though he makes a noble effort, Brügger fails to capture the smoking gun scene that would utterly lay bare the nature of North Korean tyranny. Of course, he was doomed from the start, because the Communists set all the rules and could change them at their convenience. Still, there are plenty of telling moments (particularly the climactic demonstration), as well as some outrageous humor.
Chapel has been compared to The Yes Men, but that does not do Brügger justice. Unlike the play-it-safe leftist pranksters, Brügger was punking a target that exercises absolute, unchecked power – on its own turf. Based on the DPRK’s apoplectic response to the film, it is doubtful Brügger will ever return to make a sequel. He probably will not miss the place. Beyond surreal, Chapel simply has to be seen to be believed. Enthusiastically recommended, it screens Saturday (6/19) and Thursday (6/24) during the 2010 LAFF.
By Joe Bendel. In New York City, parents who want their children to receive a decent education have to rely on chance. For this sad state of affairs, they can thank the local teachers’ union, the UFT, which consistently places its own special interests above those of New York’s children at every opportunity. Indeed, one can draw no other conclusion after screening Madeleine Sackler’s documentary The Lottery (trailer above), opening today in the city perhaps most in need of its reformist message: New York.
Eva Moskowitz was one of the few relatively moderate Democrats in the New York City Council (and my local council person). After earning union enmity for holding hearings on the teachers’ contract, she was defeated by a vastly less talented candidate for the Manhattan Borough Presidency. Supporting her opponent might have been the union’s biggest mistake. After the election, she moved back up-town, where she opened the Harlem Success Academies, a series of public charter schools that dramatically out-perform the local zip-code schools. Much to the embarrassment of the union and local administrators, over five thousand parents attended the legally mandated lottery to enroll their children in Harlem Success. The Lottery tells their story.
There are many differences between the parents featured in Lottery. Some are single parents, some are immigrants, and some are union members themselves. However, they have two things in common: they all want their children to have greater opportunities in life than they did, but they do not think that is possible if their children attend their failing zip code-zoned public school. In order for their children to be successful, they will have to be lucky in the Harlem Success lottery.
As a charter school, Harlem Success cannot choose its students. There is no skimming cream off the top. By law, if total demand exceeds their total registration, they must hold a lottery for all new incoming students. Of course, that demand is enormous, overflowing the cavernous Harlem Armory Center.
None of this pleases the union, though they declined to explain why on-camera. The only interview participant willing to shill for the UFT is former New York City Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, but she does not make a good spokesman for their interests. Appropriately, we also see the “community organizers” formerly known as ACORN show up to intimidate Harlem Success parents and staff at public hearings. (Karma seems to have caught up with them.) Continue reading Teacher Unions vs. Kids: The Lottery
By Jason Apuzzo. In June of 2009, at the height of last summer’s anti-government protests in Iran, an innocent bystander named Neda Agha-Soltan was shot by a Basij (government-backed) militiaman thug named Abbas Kargar Javid. Soltan died shortly thereafter, her death captured on video by several protesters armed with cell phones. The videos soon went viral, and aided by Twitter and other social media immediately became the source of a worldwide scandal that threatened to bring down the Iranian regime.
This evening HBO is presenting a documentary by Antony Thomas telling Neda’s story, which is perforce the story of the aborted revolution of last summer. The documentary is called For Neda, and HBO has wisely made it available on YouTube so that anyone can see it. We’ve embedded the English-language version of the documentary above, but it’s also available in Farsi and in Arabic.
Neda Agha-Soltan.
Many of you reading this site are probably already familiar with the circumstances of this story, which received massive worldwide attention last year. Suffice it to say that due to both her beauty – and what we now know to be her inner character, and force of conviction – Neda has become an extremely potent symbol for those who wish to bring down the awful regime that currently rules Iran. For Neda finally brings out the woman behind the symbol – feisty, independent and complex. It’s important that her full story be told. As an aside, it is certainly no consolation to her friends and family, but I hope it brings them some inner satisfaction that Neda continues to haunt the current regime – a regime bent on effacing the role of women in society and all that women represent: love, compassion, beauty, life itself.
It’s worth mentioning that Neda was a fledgling member of Iran’s burgeoning underground music scene – a world captured with poignancy and vitality in director Bahman Ghobadi’s recent film No One Knows About Persian Cats (see the LFM review here). For Neda makes clear, as Persian Cats did in its different way, that women like Neda Agha-Soltan are part of a younger generation that has mentally and emotionally checked-out of contemporary Iran, even while they’re still living there – a development that is both encouraging … and tragic.
The most compelling review that I’ve read of For Neda comes (not surprisingly) from The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz, who writes:
“The power of Antony Thomas’s documentary has all to do with its focus: the rage of a modern people—educated, ambitious, accomplished and now consigned to life under a regime whose enforcement of Islamic law governs every aspect of life. Surrounding Neda’s story is that larger one, related with unforgettable eloquence …”
We hope you find the documentary rewarding, and we congratulate HBO for airing it. Let’s all hope for a better future for Iran, so that such tragic stories as Neda’s need never be repeated again.
At 14:28 hours (2:28 pm) China was hit with what is considered the nineteenth worst earthquake in history, just three months before the Beijing Olympics were scheduled to open. The Communist government’s official response has been controversial to say the least. Despite the quake’s severity, many suspect it would not have been as deadly had government construction been less shoddy, particularly at schools. Promises have been made to Sichuan survivors, usually by politicians orchestrating media ops, but the delivery of relief has been slow and problematic.
