Category Archives: Recommendations

Coming to NYC’s Maysles Cinema as an encore screening for the Harlem International Film Festival next Wednesday, July 6: FREEING SILVIA BARALDINI

Directors Margo Pelletier and Lisa Thomas have won a number of awards from regional festivals with their documentary debut, including the best documentary prize at the Harlem fest.

Their film tells the story of Italian-born, US-based political prisoner Silvia Baraldini, who was sentenced to over 40 years in prison for her revolutionary political activist work in the 1960s-1980s.Copious archival footage illustrate present day interviews that sketch out Baraldini’s background and dawning political consciousness, which included participation in the civil rights movement and later anti-war efforts. Seeing the value in coalition building, she supported the Black Panthers, which ultimately led to her arrest after she helped a Black Panther leader, Assata Shakur, escape from prison. Silvia is a compelling figure whose story should be better known – FREEING SILVIA BARALDINI helps bring her legacy of resisting injustice in multiple forms to new audiences.

Coming to NYC’s Stranger Than Fiction tonight: THE PRUITT-IGOE MYTH: AN URBAN HISTORY

Chad Friedrichs offers an intelligent and well-constructed look at post-WWII urban renewal and its fate as the face of the modern American city changed.

Though I saw the film at True/False, I didn’t include my thoughts on it on this blog until my Silverdocs wrapup yesterday.

Note: Friedrichs will be present for a post-screening Q&A.

Coming to NYC’s Rooftop Films this Sunday, June 26: FAMILY INSTINCT

I wrote about Latvian director Andris Gauja’s mostly-but-not-entirely-unstaged documentary after its international debut at IDFA this fall for indieWIRE, saying:

The fact that Zanda has had two children with her brother Valdis is presented immediately and in the most matter of fact manner in Gauja’s film. This hardly seems to be the main problem faced by the poor, rural Latvians in FAMILY INSTINCT. Valdis is in jail, from which he sends his sister increasingly disturbing and threatening letters. Zanda shares her small home not only with her kids but with other family members and neighbors prone to drinking, disruptive arguments, and violence. A quiet, but also alcoholic, neighbor might be her salvation, but he fears retribution from Valdis, and Zanda fears losing her kids. Stark and at times painful to watch, but always gripping.

Note: Gauja will be present for a post-screening Q&A before the event’s afterparty.

Coming to NYC’s Queer/Art/Film at the IFC Center this Monday, June 27: PARIS IS BURNING

Director Dee Rees, whose narrative film PARIAH (an expansion of the celebrated short of the same name) debuted at Sundance this year, is the guest curator for Ira Sachs and Adam Baran’s Q/A/F this month. Her selection is Jennie Livingston’s seminal 1990 documentary, PARIS IS BURNING. Livingston debuted her film at Toronto in 1990 before bringing it to Sundance and Berlin in 1991, taking home the Sundance Documentary Grand Jury Prize and Berlin’s Teddy Award. Miramax acquired the film, which had an incredibly successful theatrical life, and has in the two decades since its release become a mainstay of university courses on film and cultural studies.

Livingston gained surprising access to the drag ball culture of NYC’s African-American and Latino gay and transgender communities in the 1980s – marginalized subcultures in already marginalized communities who had never before seen any kind of exposure in the mainstream. The film profiles a number of Houses – essentially drag surrogate families who took care of one another and performed together – allowing its members to reveal their backgrounds and aspirations. While there’s plentiful scenes of the drag balls – competitions with a dizzying array of categories celebrating fashion, dancing, attitude, and male or female “realness” – the film doesn’t become a competition doc (a subgenre that of course didn’t truly develop in a significant way until much later). Instead the film offers a remarkable in-depth look at individuals who the white, straight, affluent, male mainstream never considered at all. Decades later, PARIS IS BURNING retains its power and poignancy, able to balance a complex consideration of sexuality, gender, race, class, and community while also being visually extravagant and entertaining. Any documentary fans who have not yet seen this film are doing themselves a disservice.