Tag: Philadelphia

Tribeca Film Festival 2013: Dire Things

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - FestivalsLeave a comment

Tribeca 2013 002

The 2013 edition of the Tribeca Film Festival, which runs through this weekend, is starting off well. The planners are continuing their trend of paring down the offerings and focusing more on their strengths (on-point documentaries, the occasional high-profile indie drama or comedy) than trying to appeal to everybody with a scattershot program overly reliant on marquee names and red-carpet events.  The result is many stories about grim things, from Oxycontin abuse in Appalachia to the 1985 Philadelphia police’s fatal bombing of a radical group’s rowhouse.

I’ve been covering some of the first weekend’s films for PopMatters, here’s some of what was on offer:

  • The Project and Big Men — Mercenaries stumble in creating an anti-pirate militia in Puntland, while American wildcatters confront pitfalls aplenty in Ghana and Nigeria, in two documentaries examining crises in Africa.
  • Let the Fire Burn and The Kill Team — Two documentary autopsies of violent tragedies, the first in Philadelphia and the second in Kandahar, show the results of systematic dehumanization.
  • Oxyana and Bottled Up — A gritty documentary and fluffy comedy bring a similarly hardheaded sensibility to the invisible epidemic of pain pill addiction.

More to come.

New in Theaters: ‘Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

mumia1Sometimes a film has a strong point to make. Sometimes that point is worth repeating for emphasis. And sometimes a film does little but repeat itself for two hours or so. That’s essentially what happens in Stephen Vittoria’s documentary Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary.

My full review is at Film Journal International:

The film’s thrust is that Mumia Abu-Jamal, a Philadelphia journalist currently serving a life sentence without parole for the 1981 shooting death of a Philadelphia policeman, is one of the great radical voices of our time. To prove this, Vittoria trots out everybody from actor Giancarlo Esposito (who staged a controversial performance of Abu-Jamal’s writing in the 1990s) to firebrand intellectuals like Cornel West and Angela Davis to state their case. Abu-Jamal may be what Vittoria and his interviewees think, but this is not a film that will convince anybody of it…

Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary is playing now in limited release.

You can see the trailer here:

 

New in Theaters: ‘The Anderson Monarchs’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

In the Philadelphia neighborhood where the Anderson Monarchs girls’ soccer team plays, the bright wall murals exhorting a positive outlook (“Dare to Dream”) exist in stark relief to the limited opportunities available to those who grow up there. The practice field itself is a patchy thing, something of a Charlie Brown Christmas tree compared to the verdant greens where they play games against teams from wealthier suburban neighborhoods. During one practice, police cars and ambulances race past, lights flashing; the camera zooms in but the girls, likely used to it all, pay almost no heed. But Eugene Martin’s film about the Monarchs isn’t much interested in delivering another tale of urban woe, preferring instead to accentuate the positive…

The Anderson Monarchs is playing now as part of the Docuweeks festival in New York, but should expand to more cities later. My full review is at Film Journal International.

The trailer is here: