Films I Recommend Highly

Iranian

The Color of Paradise

          A blind boy returns after a year of study to the countryside home of his family where his father is ashamed of him but his grandmother and sisters love him.  The breathtaking scenes of the Iranian countryside are the media through which the filmmaker portrays the emotional life of the characters, the boy who is intimately connected with the natural world and his father who is disconnected both from it and his own nature.

The White Balloon

          A young girl’s persistence in gaining the object of her desire launches an adventure on the day of the Persian New Year.  It has been said that the test of a society is how it protects its most vulnerable members.  A girl leaves her home to gain her desire, her brother and a foreigner, an Afghani refugee help her.

Under the Skin of the City

          This film depicts the life of a working class Iranian family as it copes with economic extremity.  The strength of the family's bond is contrasted with the weakness of the family next door, whose son regularly abuses the female family members and eventually banishes the daughter because she is suspected of having a boyfriend.

The Circle

The filmmaker takes on one of the core problems of Iranian society, women's lack of social freedom.  Several women have escaped prison and are desperately trying to accomplish some task in the course of a day.  The camera focuses on street scenes where women have no legitimate place in the public sphere as they try to make their way.

Chinese

Raise the Red Lantern

          A girl is married as the fourth wife of a rich man in the old China , becoming essentially a concubine.  She soon finds that despite her intelligence and strength of character, she has little control over her fate in the world of patriarchy.  This film uses the architectural features of the old Chinese compounds to portray the enclosure which women suffered as they were confined in these arrangements.  The power dynamics, in which the wives fought each other instead of directing their resistance against the power that ruled them, could be applied to any system of power which divides and conquers its subjects.

Latin American

Central Station (Brazilian)

          An older woman makes money in her retirement writing letters for illiterate people in the subway station.  She makes a connection with an orphaned boy that takes her with him across Brazil in search of his father.  The connection between these two unlikely characters becomes life-enhancing for both of them. 

Strawberries and Chocolate (Cuban)

          A gay man in Castro's Cuba tries to live the life of an artist despite the constant threat of exposure and imprisonment.  A young college student is sent to spy on him as a way to prove his communist credentials.  The connection between them becomes so human that the college student learns to question the fascism of the totalitarian state. 

US

La Ciudad (The City)

          A series of seemingly unrelated scenes of immigrant life in New York depict the frightening and security-less reality of life of immigrants from Latin American countries.  The camera gets close enough to each set of characters that the viewer becomes attached to them, wanting to see them find a solution to their intractable problems, but then the camera moves on to the next group.  It is only in one scene in a sweat shop that the filmmaker provides a clue as to a possible solution to the deprivations of life as an undocumented laborer.

Real Women Have Curves

          A girl is graduating from high school with all the promise of someone who could get into Columbia, but her family doesn't see the point in her going to college, especially when her sister needs her help as she starts her clothing business and her mother wants her to stay close to home.  The film depicts the struggle of an individual to make it in the world of mainstream US successful life while also keeping her heritage and her family connections.  It also touches on the problem of internalized racism, wherein people whose genes do not create the standard European beauty image feel badly about—and also learn to accept and embrace—their full and round bodies.

Bread and Roses

          A Mexican immigrant woman comes to Los Angeles in the van of a man whom she has paid an exorbitant amount of money to get her illegally across the border.  When she doesn’t have the money to pay him more, he threatens to rape her.  This is just her first trail in a series of difficult steps toward getting a job that pays a decent wage.  The film deals with the janitorial workers of Los Angeles who finally went on strike after many years of substandard pay and no benefits.  It's a moving and heart-wrenching experience.

Lone Star

          A community on the US/Mexico border is split along ethnic lines and also crosses the lines daily as people interact in school, work, and in love.  The filmmaker provides a clear view of the history of Texas and the contentious boundaries that the state of Texas crosses in just being in existence.  The relationships between the central characters, a sheriff's son who was kept from his love because she was Mexican American, and that Mexican-American woman who has grown up to become a strong intellectual fighting for recognition and change in her community, is memorable and endearing.

Twilight: Los Angeles

          Anna Deveare Smith, actor and performance artist, takes on the voice and roles of many of the people who witnessed and participated in the LA uprising/riots of 1990.  In watching one person speak the words of many people, the viewer can't help but identify with the anguish of each person's own particular struggle and the wisdom of each person's own particular viewpoint.

The Laramie Project

          An acting company goes to Laramie, Wyoming to interview the people of the small western town where Matthew Shepherd was brutally beaten, tortured, hung on a wire fence and left for dead for the simple fact that he was a gay man.  The people are permitted their own voices with little editorial commentary by the acting company.  The story that comes together is unsettling and moving.

Native American/Canadian

Dance Me Outside

          Life on an Ojibwa reservation in Canada is filled with the dreams of the younger generation for making a better life, punctuated by the encroachment of racists within the European American community that threaten to keep everyone in jail or in poverty.  The filmmaker shows the native community's ways of defending itself with both humor and resistance.

Skins

          Not everyone finds Mt. Rushmore awe-inspiring.  Some native people who live near that land find it offensive.  In this heart-warming drama, a native police officer copes with the alcoholism that is rife on his reservation, including that of his beloved brother.  The relationship of the family in this film is beautiful and the ways of accessing community strength heartening.

European

La Promesse

          A working class French teenage boy learns about responsibility when he works with his abusive father on a construction job.  His father uses the labor of undocumented African workers and when one is killed, he disposes of the body without considering the needs of the man's family.  The boy must decide how to deal with the man's wife. 

Europa Europa

          A Jewish boy ends up passing as a member of the Nazi youth in Hitler's Germany where he is exposed to the eugenics education that the youth of Germany got in schools—learning that Aryans were superior to Jews and other races.  His harrowing experience inside the enemy's camp teaches one of the insanity of the constructions of "race."

Ma Vie En Rose

          A boy who likes to wear pink is harassed by neighbors and teachers.  This film shows the difficulty of life as a member of a sexual minority and the lengths to which the society will often go to make its members conform to gender norms.