Kori Cioca shares her shocking story in THE INVISIBLE WAR
THE INVISIBLE WAR (Kirby Dick, 2011)
Barnard College, Diana Event Oval – LL 100
117th St. & Broadway
Sunday, February 10, $12, 12 noon
www.athenafilmfestival.com
www.invisiblewarmovie.com
Kirby Dick’s The Invisible War is one of the bravest, most explosive investigative documentaries you’re ever likely to see. Dick (This Film Is Not Yet Rated) busts open the military’s dirty little secret, revealing that episodes of horrific sexual abuse such as the Tailhook scandal are not an aberration but a prime example of a rape epidemic that seems to an accepted part of military culture. Dick speaks with many women and one man who share their incredible stories, describing in often graphic detail the sexual abuse they suffered, then faced further abuse when they reported what had happened. Their superiors, some of whom were the rapists themselves, either looked the other way, laughed off their allegations as no big deal, or threatened the victims’ careers. Dick includes remarkable Defense Department statistics — the government admits that approximately one out of every five female soldiers suffers sexual abuse and that there were nineteen thousand violent sex crimes in 2010 alone — even as such military officials as Dr. Kaye Whitley, Rear Admiral Anthony Kurta, and Brigadier General Mary Kay Hertog make absurd claims that they are satisfied with the way they are handling the alarming trend. The central figure in the film is Kori Cioca, a former member of the Coast Guard whose face was broken when she was raped by a superior and now keeps getting denied necessary medical services from the VA. Such courageous women as USAF Airman 1st Class Jessica Hinves, former Marine Officer Ariana Klay, USN veteran Trina McDonald, USMC Lieutenant Elle Helmer, USN Lieutenant Paula Coughlin, and even Special Agent Myla Haider of the Army Criminal Investigation Command also open up about the physical and psychological damage the abuse has left on their lives and careers. Inspired by Helen Benedict’s 2007 Salon.com article “The Private War of Women Soldiers,” Dick and producer Amy Ziering (The Memory Thief) have presented a searing indictment of an endemic military culture that has to come to an end, and fast. The Invisible War, which earned Dick and Ziering this year’s Nestor Almendros Award for courage in filmmaking at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival at Lincoln Center and has been nominated for a Best Documentary Academy Award, is screening February 10 at 12 noon as part of the third annual Athena Film Festival at Barnard College and will be followed by a Q&A with Dick and executive producers Maria Cuomo Cole and Regina Kulik Scully.
In 2007, Milestone Films restored and released Charles Burnett’s low-budget feature-length debut, Killer of Sheep, with the original soundtrack intact; the film had not been available on VHS or DVD for decades because of music rights problems that were finally cleared. (The soundtrack includes such seminal black artists as Etta James, Dinah Washington, Little Walter, and Paul Robeson.) Shot on weekends for less than $10,000, Killer of Sheep took four years to put together and another four years to get noticed, when it won the FIPRESCI Prize at the 1981 Berlin Film Festival. Reminiscent of the work of Jean Renoir and the Italian neo-Realists, the film tells a simple story about a family just trying to get by, struggling to survive in their tough Watts neighborhood in the mid-1970s. The slice-of-life scenes are sometimes very funny, sometimes scary, but always poignant, as Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders) trudges to his dirty job in a slaughterhouse in order to provide for his wife (Kaycee Moore) and children (Jack Drummond and Angela Burnett). Every day he is faced with new choices, from participating in a murder to buying a used car engine, but he takes it all in stride. The motley cast of characters, including Charles Bracy and Eugene Cherry, is primarily made up of nonprofessional actors with a limited range of talent, but that is all part of what makes it all feel so real. Killer of Sheep was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1989, the second year of the program, making it among the first fifty to be selected, in the same group as Rebel Without a Cause, The Godfather, Duck Soup, All About Eve, and It’s a Wonderful Life, which certainly puts its place in history in context. Killer of Sheep will be screening on February 8 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image series “Changing the Picture” and “L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema,” focusing on films that look at the real black experience in postwar America, continuing through February 24 with such other films as Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama, Jamaa Fanaka’s Emma Mae (Black Sister’s Revenge), Zeinabu irene Davis’s Compensation, and Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts.
Going to a hip new overrated Brooklyn restaurant for Valentine’s Day is so, well, 2012. For something completely different this year, Nitehawk Cinema’s monthly Beer, Dinner, and a Movie series is hosting a special presentation on February 13, screening Michel Gondry’s wickedly entertaining Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and serving a three-course meal inspired by the film (and dished out at very specific, related times), featuring drink pairings courtesy of Brooklyn’s own KelSo Beer Co. The brilliant film comes from the warped mind of Charlie Kaufman, the sensational scribe behind Being John Malkovich, Adaptation., and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. (Chris Elliott fans will get a kick out of knowing that Kaufman was a writer for Get a Life, one of the great warped series of all time.) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind stars Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet as a couple looking to erase each other from their memories by . . . ah, don’t worry what it’s about. The less you know, the better. Just be prepared for a visual, metaphysical spectacle that will both exhilarate and depress you, filling you with wonder and amazement. The only thing keeping it from perfection is the ordinariness of the subplot involving Elijah Wood. Kaufman and Gondry (The Science of Sleep) mix in a little Punch-Drunk Love and Groundhog Day, both of which also starred former television comedians in more serious roles, but end up with something wholly original and, quite simply, one of the most romantic movies we have ever seen. As far as the food goes, after a welcoming KelSo pale ale, the dining kicks off with creamy tomato soup, grilled sourdough, and smoked Gouda with KelSo Rauchbier, followed by Blue Point oysters, local striped bass, vermouth, cauliflower, and KelSo pilsner. For dessert there’s Clementine vanilla sorbet, coconut “snow,” and KelSo rye aged pale ale. That frees you up on Valentine’s Day to snuggle with your loved one while everyone else is out eating mediocre food at mediocre restaurants that will not provide nearly the kinds of memories Nitehawk served up the night before.
Based on Canadian author Yann Martel’s 2001 award-winning bestseller, Life of Pi has been adapted into an up-and-down movie that moves between the terribly boring “real” world and a man’s wildly thrilling tale of adventure on the high seas as a teenager. Rafe Sprall plays a novelist desperate for an idea to replace his abandoned book, so he has been pointed in the direction of Piscine “Pi” Patel (Indian movie star Irrfan Khan of Slumdog Millionaire). Pi proceeds to tell the writer about his childhood growing up in his family’s zoo, a time when the young boy (played through the years by Gautam Belur, Ayush Tandon, and Suraj Sharma) explored various religions, including Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam, in his search for a supreme being and meaning. But while his family is on a freighter on their way to a new life in Canada, the ship sinks, leaving Pi alone on a lifeboat with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker from the zoo. As Pi desperately struggles to survive, he develops a unique relationship with the tiger, having been taught by his father (Adil Hussain) that no matter how much he might think the tiger can gain emotional understanding and compassion, he is still a vicious killer.