Kori Cioca shares her shocking story in THE INVISIBLE WAR
THE INVISIBLE WAR (Kirby Dick, 2011)
AMC Loews Village 7
66 Third Ave. at 11th St.
Opens Friday, June 22
212-982-2116
www.amctheatres.com
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, opens June 22 at AMC Loews Village VII after
Inspired by the real-life dilemma of Senegalese refugees illegally arriving on the shores of the Canary Islands seeking a new life, only to be put into internment camps and sent back — if they even survive the harrowing journey at all — Maggie Peren’s Color of the Ocean is a searing examination of poverty and the lengths people will go to achieve freedom. As a boat filled with more dead than living refugees pulls onto a beach, German tourist Nathalie (Sabine Timoteo) tries to help Zola (Hubert Koundé) and his son, Mamadou (Dami Adeeri), but is ordered to leave by cynical border policeman José (Alex González). The jaded José, who is facing his own personal problems involving his twin sister’s (Alba Alonso) drug addiction, is brutally straightforward about his lack of compassion for the Senegalese men, women, and children seeking asylum in Spain, much to the consternation of his more sympathetic partner, Carla (Nathalie Poza). After escaping from the camp, Zola and Mamadou turn to Nathalie for help, but her husband, Paul (Friedrich Mücke), insists she stay out of the potentially dangerous situation. The various stories soon come together in powerful ways as the characters reach deep inside themselves and discover that there are severe consequences to their actions — or inaction. Although it pulls at the heartstrings too much and too often takes the easy way out, Color of the Ocean is a compelling film that tells an important story that’s even more relevant given the current battle over immigration rights and deportation here in America. Writer-director Peren’s (Special Escort) focus on Nathalie lies at the heart of the film, with the character serving as a kind of representative for the audience, making viewers wonder what they would do if suddenly faced with similar life-altering — and life-threatening — decisions. Color of the Ocean is screening June 23 and 24 at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, which runs through June 28 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, highlighting seventeen works divided into five categories: “Health, Development, and the Environment,” “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) and Migrants’ Rights,” “Personal Testimony and Witnessing,” “Reporting in Crises,” and “Women’s Rights,” with this year’s theme centering on how one individual or a small group of individuals can help make a difference.
Genre master and onetime boxer John Huston returned to the ring in Fat City, a gritty 1972 drama about a group of has-beens and never-will-be’s struggling to survive in Stockton, California. Stacey Keach stars as Billy Tully, a down-on-his-luck fighter looking to make a comeback at the ripe old age of twenty-nine. He spars at the local Y with eighteen-year-old Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges) and likes what he sees in the kid, telling him to meet his old manager, Ruben (Cheers’ Nicholas Colosanto), who decides to take on the unseasoned youngster. While Ruben lands Ernie — who seems more interested in bragging about having scored with his girlfriend, Faye (Candy Clark), than training properly — his first few bouts, Tully gets day work picking vegetables and hangs out at a local gin joint with a seedy, whiskey-voiced barfly named Oma (an Oscar-nominated Susan Tyrrell, who sadly just passed away a few days ago). Legendary cinematographer Conrad Hall casts a gray pale over the proceedings as dashed hopes and dreams come falling down on these disillusioned perennial losers. In many ways Fat City, based on the novel by Leonard Gardner — who also wrote the screenplay — is an update of Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, but moved to the hard times of early ’70s America, when so many people had no way out. You do not have to be a fight fan to fall in love with this film. A clear influence on such auteurs as Martin Scorsese, Fat City will be screening June 20 at 92YTribeca as part of the series “Jeff Bridges, Before the Dude,” consisting of such pre-Big Lebowski works as Stay Hungry, The Fisher King, and Cutter’s Way.
