Director Germán Kral’s fine “Adiós Buenos Aires” is a realistic and sensitive look at the lives of working-class Argentines desperately trying to survive and even prosper in the face of a government that does little for their welfare and, to top that, suddenly in 2001 limits withdrawals from their own bank accounts. All true. But the film is not depressing. It’s warm and appealing.
“Phantom Parrot’ is an alarming film about a repressive UK law aimed at individuals the UK government doesn’t like because they support victims of repression by countries the UK does like. It was directed by Kate Stonehill and produced by Steven Lake and presented by The Double Exposure film festival in Washington in November.
I visited Russia twice, before and after the collapse of Communism and even attempted to learn Russian, not getting much beyond waiter and taxi talk, though I can pick up film and political speakers with the help of subtitles. So as an investigative reporter, not a film critic, to understand this film about a Russian editor who won a Nobel Prize, I sent a screening of this film to world-class Russia expert, Richard Sakwa. He is Emeritus Professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent (England). He was also the head of the University’s Politics and International Relations department, has lived and taught in Russia and has published sixteen books on Soviet, Russian and post-communist affairs.
“All Static and Noise” is what its title says, lots of static and noise, not much clarity, an anti-China propaganda film about claimed repression of the Uyghurs, Muslims living in Xinjiang in the northwest of China.
May 17, 2022 – The “money quote” in the documentary “Gaming Wall Street” by Tobias Deml, premiered on HBO MAX, is former stock trading executive Tobin Mulshine saying, “I would illegally naked short sale stocks every day. As long as I was collecting commissions, the bank did not care.”
April 30, 2022 – April 30th is the 51st anniversary of the extraordinary 1971 Town Hall New York gathering of feminists (and a prominent antagonist). It was billed as a women’s liberation dialogue. D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hagedus filmed it and called their documentary “Town Bloody Hall,” after a comment by Germaine Greer.
Feb 21, 2022 – John Helmer, a journalist in Moscow since 1989, has published a brilliant comic graphic-text primer about Russia, its outside enemies and corrupt insiders. In just over 100 pages of comment and vivid cartoons you will learn the stories of the major deep state inventions of most of the last decade or so: faked stories about Navalny, the Skripals, the downing of the MH17 in Ukraine, media propagandists, esp Russophobes Anne Applebaum and Canadian deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland. Also Russian inside-dealing including Putin’s gifts to some bigtime oligarchs. No surprise that Helmer got a death threat after that one.
Oct 16, 2021 – “United States vs. Reality Winner” directed by Sonia Kennebeck is a fake documentary that opened the Double Exposure Film Festival October 13th. It is a deceptive and dishonest film that carefully avoids telling the true story of this phony “heroine” who leaked an unverified document that said the Kremlin hacked U.S. voting machines and was sentenced to prison under the Espionage Act.
April 18, 2021 – I met Bob Zellner in 1960 at the Shaw University, Raleigh NC, conference that founded SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the youth shock troops of the 1960s civil rights movement. This compelling docudrama, “Son of the South,” by Barry Alexander Brown, is based on Zellner’s 2008 memoir, The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement.
March 26, 2020 – As stocks are in free fall, a scam run by the big banks/broker-dealers for the benefit of themselves and their hedge fund clients threatens to worsen the situation of large and small American companies and investors.
March 23, 2020 – Knockout details about how Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky used transfer-pricing in sales of Yukos oil to cheat the Russian government and minority shareholders of massive amounts of money are found in this seemingly staid business-academic book by Mikhail Glazunov.
The Nation, Jan 22, 2020 – Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky, MBK in his homeland, is the most famous Russian “oligarch,” the name given by their compatriots to a handful of men who, when communism fell, turned it into gangster capitalism. With an estimated $16 billion fortune, he became the richest man in Russia. When the rules changed, he didn‘t adapt and spent a decade in prison.
