documentary – The News Desk

10Apr

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Entertainment

Crashes and Community in “Demolition”

In Alec Sutherland’s short film, upstate New York’s demolition derbies are a loud, brutal, deeply physical antidote to the isolation of digital life.

Coming of Age While Confronting Arab Stereotypes, in “Simo”

16Dec

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Entertainment

Coming of Age While Confronting Arab Stereotypes, in “Simo”

Simo, a typical teen-ager, lives in the shadow of Emad, his older brother, and their domineering dad, in the suburbs of Montreal, where the family emigrated from Egypt. One night, Simo impersonates Emad in a live-stream gaming session. That simple act leads to serious consequences, when a racist false accusation escalates and puts his brother at risk.Bold cinematography and a soundtrack of throbbing Egyptian rap beats set the scene and compound a sense of social alienation that affects these men yet strengthens the family. “Drawing heavily from my own life experiences, I couldn’t ignore the elephant in the room,” the film’s writer and director, Aziz Zoromba, says, regarding “the stereotypes associated with being an ‘Arab’ in the West.”“Simo” premiered at the Toronto International Film Fes...

‘Bad Press’ Shows A Native Tribe’s Fight For A Free Press

30Nov

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Entertainment

‘Bad Press’ Shows A Native Tribe’s Fight For A Free Press

In the fall of 2019, journalists at Mvskoke Media, the news outlet covering the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in Oklahoma, were documenting a dramatic election season while also facing a tough fight to safeguard their right to report the story.When Lucian Tiger III, one of the contenders in the primary election for the office of principal chief, came 10 votes short of advancing to the runoff, he filed a motion for a recount and made accusations of voter fraud. Mvskoke Media reporters Angel Ellis and Jerrad Moore scrambled to report out the details, a scene captured in this HuffPost exclusive clip of the new documentary “Bad Press,” which will have its New York theatrical premiere this Friday.The contested election is just one of several wild chapters of a years-long fight in the Muscogee Nation...

Hulu Documentary Shines Light On LGBTQ+ Families

10Nov

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Entertainment

Hulu Documentary Shines Light On LGBTQ+ Families

For decades, major cities like New York and San Francisco have been seen as safe and supportive environments for the LGBTQ+ community. A new documentary, however, is about to take an in-depth look at the queer folks who have chosen to live outside of those urban bubbles, and the challenges they’ve faced in doing so.On Thursday, Hulu unveiled an emotional trailer for “We Live Here: The Midwest.” Directed by Melinda Maerker, the film is billed as “an authentic portrait of courageous families in America’s heartland,” and is due out Dec. 6.Among those profiled in “We Live Here: The Midwest” are a trans/queer family with five children in Iowa who have been expelled from their church, a gay Black couple and their young daughter in Nebraska, and a lesbian couple who reside on a farm in Kansas, w...

3Nov

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Entertainment

Two Perspectives on One Tragic Raid in Afghanistan

In early 2019, I travelled to Afghanistan to investigate the deaths of my mother and sister three decades earlier—a personal search for answers. While seeking out distant relatives in a remote corner of the eastern province of Nangarhar, I met a widow named Mahzala. Sitting before me with shoulders bowed, her small frame cloaked in black, she quietly relayed a story that completely changed the trajectory of my investigation. She told me that her two sons had been killed in a raid several months earlier by masked men who descended on her small home in the middle of the night. She didn’t know why they had been targeted, or by whom.Our chance encounter spurred me to begin investigating the units that had killed her sons. I learnt that the raid on Mahzala’s home, along with hundreds of others...

27Sep

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Entertainment

“La Isla” Shows the Absences Left by El Salvador’s Mass Arrests

When the government of El Salvador declared a “state of exception” in March of last year, after a sudden spike in gang killings, it was supposed to be temporary. Soldiers and police officers could arrest anyone they considered suspicious. No one was entitled to a legal defense. Each month, the country’s Assembly would have to vote to extend this state of affairs. But the party in power, called Nuevas Ideas, held a super-majority. Their fealty to the President, Nayib Bukele, was total, as was his commitment to an indefinite campaign of law and order based on mass arrests.The state of exception has now been renewed eighteen times. As one journalist put it to me, el régimen de excepción has become la normalidad excepcional, the exceptional norm. In the past year and a half, the government ha...