Eighty-seven year old Claude Lanzmann's Le Dernier des Injustes, which screened in the Out of Competition section at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, was the most important film I saw this year—a monumental, groundbreaking masterpiece that digs right to the core of Germany's darkest period from 1938-1945, revealing new aspects of the Final Solution. Using 20 hours of personal testimony that he filmed in 1975 of the last and only Jewish "Elder" to survive, Lanzmann adds new scenes in 2012 of his return to the scenes of the crimes. His three-and-a-half hour story goes by swiftly. "I kill the Nazis
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Robert West, Co-Founder, Working Films Robert West, who, with filmmaker Judith Helfand, co-founded Working Films, the nonprofit dedicated to building an activist infrastructure around a documentary's release, died June 6 at his home in Wilmington, NC, after a nine-month battle with brain cancer. He was 60. Working Films, launched in 2000, was among the early pioneers in instilling an engagement and activist philosophy around the release of a film. Among the documentaries that West and his team took on include Helfand and Daniel Gold's Blue Vinyl and Everything's Cool; Marco Williams and
'Gideon's Army' premieres July 1 on HBO.
'A Band Called Death' opens in theaters June 28 through Drafthouse Films.
'Nine for IX' premieres July 2 on ESPN.
Cultural diplomacy has served as a vital component of the US Department of State's overall foreign policy apparatus for the past 50 years. One can trace these efforts back to the founding of the United States Information Agency (USIA) in 1953, in the throes of the Cold War, as a means to both confront anti-US propaganda coming out of the Soviet Union and present America in a more positive light. The USIA sponsored tours of performing artists such as Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie; oversaw cultural exchange programs such as the Fulbright Scholarship program; managed the Voice of America
'The Act of Killing' opens July 19 through Drafthouse Films.
'Twenty Feet from Stardom' opens June 14 through RADiUS-TWC.
"My name is Alanis Obomsawin. I am an Abenaki woman from Odenak, Québec," she proclaims. Her life reads like a storybook legend. She was born on August 31, 1932, in Lebanon, New Hampshire, in Abenaki territory, during a lunar eclipse. Soon thereafter, her mother returned to her roots and brought Obomsawin to Odanak, Québec, on the Abenaki reserve northeast of Montreal, where she would live with her aunt and uncle and their six children. Barely six months old, Obomsawin was afflicted by a mysterious disease, and she lapsed into a coma. One night, it was said that she would die. The doctors
For decades both documentary filmmakers and lovers of the documentary art form have relied on the Public Broadcasting Service to provide a forum where the best nonfiction work can reach the audience it deserves. PBS has become our nation's electronic commons—a space relatively free of commerce and commercialism, where diverse American voices can be heard over the for-profit media's roar. But despite its vital role in our cultural life, PBS has always had the same perennial problem: how to pay the bills. Public funding was supposed to keep it independent, impartial and commercial free. But