About: The story of the ill-fated music festival, promoted to echo the unity and counterculture idealism of the original 1969 concert, but which instead devolved into riots, looting, and sexual assaults.
World Premiere: Human Rights Watch online preview (April-May 2021)
About: An examination of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre on the 100th anniversary of the crime and in the context of other racial massacres and police killings.
Select Festivals: Jerusalem, Deauville, Strasbourg, Rio, Sitges, Haifa, Jewish fests in New York, Atlanta, Miami, Boulder, Toronto, San Francisco, San Diego, and Hartford
About: Cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus relate the unlikely rise and inevitable fall of their legendary independent film company, Cannon Films.
Coming to PBS’s POV tonight, Monday, July 19: STATELESS
Director: Michèle Stephenson
World Premiere: Tribeca 2020 (unscreened)
Select Festivals: DOC NYC, BlackStar, Hot Docs, AFI Latin American, Portland, Halifax Black, Boston Latino, RIDM, Trinidad and Tobago
About: After the Dominican Republic strips the citizenship of residents of Haitian descent, a determined attorney fights to protect the rights of these now stateless people.
The film screened as part of DOC NYC, for which our program notes read: The stunning island of Hispaniola is shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti, countries with a complicated history and tense relations. In 2013, the DR’s Supreme Court retroactively stripped the citizenship of residents of Haitian descent, leaving more than 200,000 people stateless, subject to immediate deportation, and devastating loss. In the midst of staggering intolerance, attorney Rosa Iris fights to protect the rights of these disenfranchised people while leading a grassroots campaign for a better future.
About: The legacy of musician Billy Tipton is brought to life by a diverse group of contemporary trans artists.
The film screened as part of DOC NYC, for which our program notes read: For decades, the life of American jazz musician Billy Tipton was framed as the sensationalistic story of an ambitious woman passing as a man in pursuit of a music career. Now that history gets re-interrogated by trans artists as they try to reimagine Tipton’s life through acts of performance, reclaiming him as a trans icon. Filmmakers Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt join Tipton’s adopted son to reckon with Tipton’s complicated and contested legacy.