Kori Cioca shares her shocking story in THE INVISIBLE WAR
THE INVISIBLE WAR (Kirby Dick, 2011)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Monday, June 18, 8:45; Wednesday, June 20, 6:30
Series runs through June 28
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.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.
Lieutenant Elle Helmer visits the Vietnam War Memorial in shattering documentary
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 is screening June 18 and 20 at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, both of which will be followed by a Q&A with Dick and Ziering, winners of the festival’s Nestor Almendros Award for courage in filmmaking. They will be joined on June 20 by Ariana Klay and her husband, Ben, along with moderator Meghan Rhoad. The festival 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 focus on how one individual or a small group of individuals can help make a difference.
For forty years, Belgrade-born performance artist Marina Abramović has been presenting cutting-edge, often controversial live works that redefine what art is. For her highly anticipated major career retrospective at MoMA in 2010, 
Douglas Sirk and Thomas Mann would be proud. In Todd Haynes’s wonderfully retro Far from Heaven, Oscar-nominated Julianne Moore is amazing as 1950s housewife Cathy Whitaker, who thinks she has the perfect idyllic suburban life — until she discovers that her husband (Dennis Quaid) has a secret that dare not speak its name. Mr. & Mrs. Magnatech they are not after all. When she starts getting all chummy with the black gardener (Dennis Haysbert), people start talking, of course. Part Imitation of Life, part Death in Venice, and oh-so-original, Haynes’s awesome achievement will have you believing you’re watching a film made in the 1950s, propelled by Elmer Bernstein’s excellent music, Edward Lachman’s remarkable photography, and Mark Friedberg’s terrific production design. Far from Heaven is screening at the Museum of the Moving Image on June 14 at 7:00, with Haynes in person to talk about the film in conjunction with the opening of the exhibition “Persol Magnificent Obsessions: 30 stories of craftsmanship in film,” which focuses on artifacts from works by Ed Harris, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Alfred Hitchcock, Douglas Trumbull, Ennio Morricone, Dean Tavoularis, Clint Eastwood, Haynes, and others.
In 1954, the St. Louis Housing Authority completed a massive urban renewal project, Pruitt-Igoe, a thirty-three-building complex for low-income families that was like a city unto itself. Eighteen years later, mired in crime, violence, poverty, and horrifically unsanitary and unsafe conditions, Pruitt-Igoe was torn down, the implosion famously being shown on news channels around the country as an example of the failure of public policy planning. The short, contentious history of Pruitt-Igoe is explored in the revealing documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth. Director Chad Freidrichs (Jandek on Corwood, First Impersonator) revisits Pruitt-Igoe through archival footage, new interviews, and a drive past the site where the iconic housing development, designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki, once stood, revealing the fascinating story of what was first a symbol of the post-WWII boom and then a prime example of the nation’s financial and racial problems of the 1970s. “It was like an oasis in the desert,” Ruby Russell remembers. “I never thought I would live in that kind of a surrounding.” But Brian King, who spent his childhood there, sees it a little differently. “It was hell on earth,” he says. Freidrichs speaks with urban historians Robert Fishman and Joseph Heathcott, sociologist Joyce Ladner, and former residents as they chronologically follow the rise and fall of “the poor man’s penthouse.” Narrated by actor Jason Henry, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth tells a shameful chapter in American history, one that should still be used today as a blueprint on what not to do. “It seemed to me that we were being penalized for being poor,” says former resident Jacqueline Williams. “That caused so much anger.” Named Best Documentary at several festivals and winner of the American Historical Association’s John E. O’Connor Film Award, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth is screening for free at BAMcinématek on June 11 at 6:50, followed by a panel discussion with Freidrichs and urban housing and development experts.