Sundance Film Festival
Screenshot via sff/Youtube
Reserve the hashtag #Oscarssoblack for next year’s awards. That’s because if viewer response is any indication, “The Birth of a Nation,” an independent biopic about a black slave, preacher, and rebel-leader, seems destined for Academy Award nominations in 2017.
Production still via fruitvalefilm.com
I tend to keep my heart under lock and key. I am not prone to Merton-esque revelations. My conscious mind is a far safer vantage point from which to view life’s experiences, so when a friend invited me to go see the newly released Fruitvale Station last night, I thought that was the perspective from which I would see it: my logical mind, my heart under wraps. It was about a subject with which I have no experience and only vaguely remembered from the papers a few years back. I thought it would be a perfect film for my head to be educated while my heart remained safe. I was wrong.
Fruitvale Station broke my heart open.
An image from the film "Circles." Photo courtesy of the Sundance Institute
PARK CITY, Utah — It’s been said that Hollywood films comfort the afflicted while Sundance films afflict the comfortable. Film offers a vicarious entry to the world the way it is, and the films I saw at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival left me longing for a different world — the world the way it ought to be.
It ought to be a world in which Muslims and Christians love, serve, protect, and forgive each other. Circles is based on a 1993 incident that took place in Trebinje, a small town in the Serbian region of east Herzegovina. Three Serb soldiers were brutally beating Alen Glavovic, a Muslim shopkeeper. When Srdjan Aleksic, a Christian Serb intervened to stop the soldiers, they turned their attention on him and beat him to death. The film explores the impact of this incident on the Muslim who survived the beating, Srdjan’s fiance and his father, on the children of the perpetrators, and on the whole village.
Take a roller coaster ride on a classical music score, and see a voilionist respond to a cell phone interruption. See a visual of the day the internet went dark, and generate your own SuperPAC name. Plus, for the first time, Disney employees can grow facial hair. Take a look at today's links of awesomeness!