ReelAbilities Film Festival 2020

On Friday March 13, 2020, CounterPunch published my review of the Socially Relevant Film Festival 2020. Before the day was up, I learned that the festival was being postponed because the COVID-19 pandemic had forced the closure of the festival theater venues.

From that day onward, my film reviews have dried up to a trickle. Five very promising films were cancelled, including one on Thomas Piketty’s new book and another on the radium girls who contracted radiation poisoning from painting watch dials. As might be obvious from my interest in such films, I see covering them as a political obligation.

On the same day I learned that the Socially Relevant Film Festival was postponed, I received an invitation to cover the ReelAbilities Film Festival that takes place between March 31 and April 6. The festival will still be taking place but “virtually” as the N.Y. Times noted in a March 25^th article:

ReelAbilities Film Festival: New York

This annual festival shows movies that raise awareness of the perspectives of the disabled, like “Code of the Freaks,” a documentary  examining representation in Hollywood movies, and “25 Prospect Street,” about a Ridgefield, Conn., theater that  hires  people with disabilities. The festival will  take place on its original dates, March 31 to April 6, but it has moved online at reelabilities.org. Screenings  can be watched at their scheduled times or for 24 hours afterward, and Q. and A.s will be available as well.

Yesterday, I watched three of the films online and found all to be first-rate. Tickets to the films appear to be entirely voluntary and generally in the interest of raising consciousness about disability rights that are under threat right now. ProPublica just reported that “Advocates for people with intellectual disabilities are concerned that those with Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, autism and other such conditions will be denied access to lifesaving medical treatment as the COVID-19 outbreak spreads across the country.”

Code of the Freaks

https://vimeo.com/55730170

This is the opening night feature and a great one at that. Like “The Celluloid Closet” that documented the homophobia in Hollywood films, this documentary does the same thing for the objectification of disabled people going back to the silent film era. It was written by Susan Nussbaum who is also interviewed throughout the film. After an automobile accident made her wheelchair-bound, Nussbaum became a disability rights activist. In helping to make this film, she will help anybody who sees it to take a fresh look at any film with a major character who is either blind, deaf, wheelchair-bound, intellectually challenged or deformed. “Code of the Freaks” is a survey of some of the best-known films in this genre, including the Helen Keller biopic “The Miracle Worker”, with mordant and penetrating commentary by disabled people.

Among the most interesting observations made by the interviewees had to do with the differences between how blind people were represented. For blind women who have to deal with a home invasion by a rapist or killer, there’s an obligatory scene of the heroine taking a bath while being stalked by the intruder. Needless to say, the female is played by a beauty queen like Audrey Hepburn but never a real blind woman. Generally, except for Marlee Beth Matlin, the actresses are fully abled. By representing these women as both vulnerable and sexually attractive, it is a way to tantalize the audience through a combination of horror and desire.

On the other hand, blind men are often portrayed as assertive and risk-taking. No better example of that is Al Pacino behind the wheel in “Scent of a Woman” refusing to slow down by his front-seat companion. This is not to speak of all the action films featuring a blind man who has mastered some martial art or swordsmanship. In either case, male or female, there is little interest in making a naturalistic film that depicts disabled people dealing with the same sorts of issues that abled people face.

As a genre, films about the disabled often show women serving disabled men sexually as a kind of charity. In “The Sessions”, Helen Hunt plays a professional sex surrogate helping a man in an iron lung lose his virginity. One of the film’s highly capable commentators wonders why can’t a film be made about a disabled couple getting it on?

One of the more unsettling moments of the film comes with its analysis of “Gattaca”, a film that concludes with its disabled main character committing suicide in order to become “one with the universe”. You get the same sort of send-off in “The Elephant Man”, when after the main character kills himself, you get an “inspiring” panorama shot of distant stars in the heavens as if his soul has joined them.

You get a feel for the snarling intensity of this film from an article Susan Nussbaum wrote for the Huffington Post:

When I became a wheelchair-user in the late ‘70s, all I knew about being disabled I learned from reading books and watching movies, and that scared the shit out of me. Tiny Tim was long-suffering and angelic and was cured at the end. Quasimodo was a monster who loved in vain and was killed at the end, but it was for the best. Lenny was a child who killed anything soft, and George had to shoot him.[A reference to “Of Mice and Men.] It was a mercy killing. Ahab was a bitter amputee and didn’t care how many died in his mad pursuit to avenge himself on a whale. Laura Wingeld [in Tennessee Williams’s “Glass Menagerie”] had a limp so no man would ever love her.

Our Time Machine

With a 100 percent Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and deservedly so, this 2019 documentary is about the efforts of Chinese artist Maleonn to connect with his father, an elderly former director of the Shanghai opera company suffering from Alzheimer’s.

Maleonn works in various media, but his most ambitious medium is making extremely life-like puppets. He decides to create a puppet show depicting the relationship between a father and a son that mirrors his own relationship. In the play, the father is a pilot rather than an opera director. To help his ailing father, the puppet son constructs a time machine that allows the man to go back into the past to regain lost memories. The puppets made for father and son are phenomenal but the most breathtaking realizations are the time-machine and airplane that are a combination of Rube Goldberg and Jean Tinguely.

Toward the end of the film, Maleonn is barely recognized by his father. Each time he shows his newborn granddaughter to the old man, he is asked who she is. When he replies that this is his granddaughter, his father beams in pleasure. Maleonn quips that this is maybe one saving grace of Alzheimer’s that the victim continues to enjoy each moment as if for the first time.

Kinetics – Where Parkinson’s Meets Parkour

Written and directed by Sue Wylie, this narrative film casts her in the leading role as a drama professor learning that she has early onset of Parkinson’s. Wylie’s script is based on her own experience dealing with the trauma of dealing with a loss of balance and motion.

In this two-character film, she meets a student who has his own issues with mind and body. Lukas almost falls on top of her as he has jumped from a wall alongside the sidewalk she is navigating with some difficulty. Lukas suffers from ADHD and used parkour as a way of feeling more control over his life and emotions. Wikipedia describes parkour as a “training discipline using movement that developed from military obstacle course training”. Its practitioners seek to get from one point to another in a complex environment, without specialized gear.

As someone who lost a best friend to Parkinson’s in 2018, Sue Wylie’s travails were familiar to me. Her ability to extract some hope out of her experience is in line with the other two films discussed above. All three are first-rate films and worthy of your support at a time when filmmaking, like most other group experiences, is under siege.

The Tribe

In my freshman year at Bard College in 1961, I took a writer’s workshop with celebrated beat poet Robert Kelly who gave an assignment that all of us had trouble with, namely to write a short story without any human beings as characters. It was obviously some sort of technical challenge that we had trouble wrapping our heads around, even if it perhaps was designed to get us to think outside the box.

That was my first reaction to “The Tribe”, a Ukrainian film that opens tomorrow at the Film Forum in NY. I knew that the characters are deaf teenagers in a boarding school in Kiev but I hadn’t anticipated what was in store for me as the film started at a press screening. It began with this announcement:

This film is in sign-language. There are no subtitles or voice-over.

What could possibly have made the director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiiy decide to take this approach? To rise to a technical challenge of making a “silent movie” that defied the audience to not understand a single word being exchanged by the characters? My initial reaction was to bolt from my seat and return home but since I had traveled almost an hour from my Upper East Side apartment to the Film Forum in Soho, I sighed and decided to stick it out.

Not only did I stick it out for the entire 133 minutes, I found it to be a most compelling drama that draws you into the lives of its characters, all of whom are nonprofessionals and deaf.

Although the story is centered in a boarding school, the film will remind you of any number of those that take place in reformatories such as “Dog Pound” or “Bad Boys”. In such films, there is always a newcomer to the prison who despite himself ends up in a struggle with the alpha males who bully and steal from those beneath them in the hierarchy.

“The Tribe” begins with its hero Sergei showing up at the boarding school, where he is shaken down by the gang that runs the institution with the blessings of the administrators. They take him behind the school where out of sight he is forced to strip and surrender any money that he has brought with him to the school. Sergei takes this in stride since he understands that he is outnumbered.

A few days later, the same gang members summon him to a clearing near the school where he is forced to defend himself from their blows. Despite once again being outnumbered, he fights back effectively and nearly throttles the leader of the pack. His fighting skills are so impressive that they recruit him into the gang. Always accepting things almost fatalistically, Sergei accepts their invitation and joins them in nightly excursions to a nearby truck stop where two girls from the school are prostituted to the drivers with the full cooperation of the administrators who get a cut of the proceeds.

Complications arise when Sergei falls in love with Anya, one of the two girls he has been pimping. She is so hardened by her experience in the school that she finds his affection almost incomprehensible. Mostly it is lust that opens her up to him rather than love.

Throughout it all, you understand everything that is going on even though you have no idea what they are saying to each other (unless you understand sign-language.) As a mixture of pantomime and silent film without the titles, the story is communicated by the actions of the characters and amplified by the body language and facial expressions that accompany the “dialog” as the director points out in the press notes:

I never considered the idea of making this film with hearing actors. It would have been an entirely different kind of film. The body language, the sign language they use is natural for them, and it is very individual; much more individual than French, Russian or German spoken by a particular person. People who speak out loud use only facial muscles to pronounce their speech, while deaf people use their entire body to communicate. To me, this is what makes this group unique and extremely interesting.

The press notes also indicate that “The Tribe” resonated with the Euromaidan protests that were taking place just under 10 miles from the filming.

Most of the shooting took place on the outskirts of Kiev, in the district where I spent my childhood. Previously, it was named after Stalin, and even now it’s called “Stalinka”. Most of the buildings here were built by German POWs after WWII. This proletarian district, built mainly of red brick, resembles some of the buildings in New York. Shooting began prior to the protests in Ukraine and completed after the Russian invasion in the Crimea. Our work was quite tense. Some cast members, including actors, participated in protests and street clashes in their spare time. Some days we had to cancel shooting because of road blockades, as the cars with our equipment simply could not get through to the set. Ironically, the producer and I live just four kilometers away from the Maidan.

Finally, as was obvious to anybody familiar with the history of Ukraine, the story had a lot to with the protests even though it never alluded once to the hierarchy that obtained under oligarchic rule:

A boarding school is better than just a school because it is a closed system, which––like a prison––can be perceived to be a metaphor of the state even if that isn’t the intention. The Tribe is, to a certain extent, a metaphor of the arrangement of the Ukrainian state, at least the pre-revolutionary Ukraine. And the arrangement of the state of Ukraine was based on the principle of a Mafiosi group.

For those with an appetite for the fresh and the challenging film (ostensibly those who tend to agree with my reviews), my strongest recommendation for “The Tribe”, a sign of the indomitable character of the Ukrainian artist.

Finally, and once again from the press notes, biographical information on the two lead characters:

Grigoriy Fesenko (Sergei)

Fesenko was born in 1994 in Kiev. His mother is a cleaner, his father is unemployed, and there are three children in their family. Fesenko will graduate from a school for children with hearing impairments this year. He’s interested in everything associated with street culture, and is a graffiti artist, parkourist, and roofer. Currently, his future plans remain unknown. He had previously spent some time playing on one of the Kiev sports society’s deaf football teams, but abandoned football when he was cast in The Tribe.

Yana Novikova (Anya)

Novikova was born in 1993 in a village near the small Belarusian town of Gomel to hearing parents. She became deaf at the age of two weeks due to illness, and her younger sister also became deaf in early childhood. She studied at a boarding school for children with hearing impairments, and loves to dance, draw, and practice pantomime. After graduation, she went to Gomel, where she enrolled in the College of Engineering. After studying for a year, she realized that engineering was not for her. Novikova loves cinema and has dreamed of acting since her childhood. After she heard about the casting call for a small quota of deaf actors from Theater Rainbow (Ukrainian Society of the Deaf) at the Kiev Theatre Academy, she dropped out of college and went to Kiev for the audition. Theater Rainbow did not accept her application, but she was noticed by director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy, who invited her to the casting call for The Tribe. During the audition, Novikova utterly eclipsed all other participants.

After she was cast, Novikova lived in Kiev in a rental apartment for three months. She took part in the pilot shooting of The Tribe, despite the fact that she didn‘t know whether or not she was approved for the leading role until shooting began. She is currently living in Kiev and pursuing acting full time.

 

You Don’t Need Feet to Dance; Benda Bilili

A new film opening day in New York and one that opened last year focus on African musicians who overcome disabilities—polio in particular—to make a life for themselves. They succeed both as inspiring testimonies to the ability of the disabled to surmount steep odds as well as the irresistible charm of African music and culture.

Opening today at the Quad Cinema, Alan Govenar’s documentary “You Don’t Need Feet to Dance” is a portrait of Sidiki Conde, a 52-year-old man from Guinea, West Africa who was stricken by polio in 1975. Initially almost completely paralyzed by the virus-borne ailment largely a thing of the past in richer countries, he regained the use of his entire body above his waist through strenuous exercise so much so that he gets around in most places by walking on his hands. When he was confronted by the need to dance in an initiation rite, he satisfied the requirements by by dancing on his hands rather than his feet.

First Run Features provides some background on Sidiki’s musical accomplishments:

Sidiki ran away to Conakry, Guinea’s capital city, where he and his friends organized an orchestra of artists with disabilities recruited from the city’s streets. They toured the country, striving to change the perception of the disabled. In 1987, he became a member of the renowned dance company Merveilles D’Afrique, founded by Mohamed Komoko Sano. Sidiki became a soloist and served as rehearsal master, composing and directing the company’s repertoire. He also worked as a musician and arranger with Youssou N’Dour, Salifa Keita, Baba Maal and other popular musicians.

In 1998 Sidiki relocated to New York City where he continues his efforts as a professional musician and a trainer to the disabled, especially children. In one of the more intriguing moments of the film, you see him rehearsing with a band called Afro-Jersey that includes Terre Roche on guitar. If that name rings a bell, it is because she was one of the Roche sisters, a fabulous band that developed a cult following in the 1980s. I confess to being a member of that cult and have no regrets—something I can’t say about my membership in the Trotskyist movement.

As a kind of parallel story to Sidiki’s, this is also about the glories of life in New York. As you see Sidiki wending his way through the streets of New York, relying occasionally on the kindness of strangers, you understand that beneath its gruff exterior, there is no better place on earth to live. It is also a deep pleasure to see Sidiki taking part in African customs, going to a mosque, in other words all the things that drive Fox TV nuts. When I think about Golden Dawn terrorizing African immigrants in Athens, it makes my blood boil. If anything like this ever developed in New York, expect to see me going out to confront the fascists even though I am something of a physical coward.

Staff Benda Bilili is a Congolese band made up of disabled musicians just like Sidki Conde. In 2010 Renaud Barret and Florent de La Tullaye made a documentary titled “Benda Bilili” (the words mean “look beyond appearances” in Linglala) that is now available as a DVD from Netflix. Additionally, you can watch the movie on Vimeo although only with French subtitles: https://vimeo.com/48679055

In addition to making music, the band campaigns around the need to bring Congo’s senseless and brutal civil wars to an end. I confess to not having seen the film but plan to watch the DVD from Netflix the first chance I get. That being said, I have heard them play on Youtube and they are terrific. Here is what David DeWitt had to say about the film in his September 29,  2011 NY Times review:

The joy is palpable when Staff Benda Bilili plays the World Music Festival in Oslo. A heart-racing energy pumps the musicians and transports the audience. The band celebrates by sipping wine with the Argentine ambassador, smoking substances in hotel rooms and reflecting on an improbably successful European tour.

The back story of these moments is uplift and then some: the core band members are middle-aged and disabled by polio, performing from wheelchairs and on crutches. Other players are teenagers of the street. All have known nights sleeping on cardboard in the urban misery of Kinshasa, Congo.

The documentary “Benda Bilili!,” in French and Lingala, captures five years in the lives of this intergenerational street band, five years in which the buskers move from practicing at the decaying Kinshasa zoo to performing for enraptured crowds on the strength of their album, “Très Très Fort,” French for “Very Very Strong” — which they are.

Porfirio

When Brazilian director Alejandro Landes saw the headline “Paralyzed Man in Diapers Hijacks Plane to Bogota” in 2005, he was inspired to make the film “Porfirio” that is showing at the Museum of Modern Art until Thursday. (Film schedule is here.) This is the third praiseworthy film I have seen in the past couple of months that features a leading character in a wheelchair and by far the best. Considering the fact that one of them is Michael Haneke’s acclaimed “Amour”, nominated for best picture of the year in the upcoming Oscar ceremonies, it faces stiff competition. Although I thought that Haneke did good work, I would rank it only as a “show” in the wheelchair movie sweepstakes behind the ebullient “The Intouchables” that “placed”. (For more information on win, place and show, Google “horseracing”. I should add that I find the notion of awarding films on this basis rather questionable to begin with as it goes against my communist principles.)

As it turns out, the eponymous Porfirio Ramirez had more than a fleeting connection to horseracing. As a rancher and horse breeder in the southern Colombian city of Florencia, Porfirio had organized horse races for its citizens’ amusement. While one might expect Landes to focus on the ostensible high drama of the hijacking , it is not even shown in the film (Ramirez had smuggled two hand grenades in his diaper– the wheelchair’s wide berth made navigation through the metal detector check impossible.) As the victim of a policeman’s stray bullet in 1991, Porfirio was demanding indemnity from the government. After being sloughed off one too many times, he decided to take direct action. However, the hijacking ended peacefully when government representatives hoodwinked Ramirez into thinking that $43,000 had been deposited into his account back in Florencia. He was put under arrest once he got off the plane.

Instead Landes is far more interested in the daily struggle of being a paraplegic. Most of the action, such as it is, consists of Pofirio being showered, fed, clothed, and catered to by his son Lissen who loves his father but resents being an unpaid care-giver. The household gets by on the income that Porfirio receives for renting out minutes on his cell phone to neighbors even too poor to have their own, something that is ubiquitous to most denizens of the Third World. Landes holds nothing back. Early on, he shows Porfirio defecating from the back of his wheelchair and his son cleaning up after him. Despite Haneke’s reputation for defying the tastes of a conventional middle-class movie audience, he would never have dared show such a scene, especially since the man playing Porfiro Ramirez does not simulate the act but actually does it.

Not everything is so grim. Despite his disability, Porfirio is an irresistible sexual partner for his young and pleasantly plump neighbor Jasbleidy, played by Yor Jasbleidy Santos—a nonprofessional. For those who expect steamy sex scenes on the silver screen to involve people who look like the young Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts, you’d be amazed at how these two distinctly ordinary people can get your blood pumping. Since the sex, like the defecation referred to earlier, happens for real rather than being simulated, its erotic quotient is raised considerably.

Porfirio’s days consist of him sitting in his wheelchair on his front porch watching the world go by. Filmed on location in the sleepy, backwater Florencia, Landes has a brilliant eye for how to make the quotidian compelling. In one scene a door-to-door “medicine” vendor approaches Porfiro with his sample case. For only 50,000 pesos, he will cure him of his disability, just as he has cured AIDS and cancer in others deemed incurable. Porfirio explains that he would be very interested in the product but unfortunately poverty prevents him from actually buying it.

In another powerful scene, Porfirio takes his wheelchair to a local repair shop to be worked on. The master mechanic is a man who is congenitally paraplegic and gets around through what looks like an improvised duck squat. Despite this, he not only is capable of the most challenging mechanical tasks but even helps lift Porfirio up from the chair to be worked on. The subject of dreams comes up as they exchange small talk. Porfirio says that he dreams about running across an open field, as free as the wind. The mechanic shrugs his shoulders and says that is natural since mobility was robbed from him in adulthood but for those like him who were born with a disability, the dreams are always based on one’s permanent condition.

As might be expected, his financial claims with the government are uppermost in Porfirio’s mind. When the public attorney handling his case refuses to return his phone calls, Porfirio wheels himself downtown to the man’s office where he confronts a steep staircase with no wheelchair ramp in sight. This affront is woven into the same blanket of neglect that forces Porfirio to finally take dramatic action.

The real surprise is that none other than Porfirio Ramirez himself plays Porfirio Ramirez. Landes not only had the audacity to make a movie about a man deemed partly crazy and completely uncharismatic in cinematic terms, but to cast the man himself in the leading role. (Jasbleidy is his actual next-door neighbor and lover but a very fine actor Jarlinsson Ramírez Reinoso plays Lissen.)

Given Landes’s decision to make a film about such a decidedly noncommercial subject and seeing how all-consuming the project became, I could not help but think that Werner Herzog might not be the last of the auteurs. It is remarkable that a young Brazilian director can take on a project in the best traditions of the European avant-garde and have such wild success. The press notes for “Porfirio” will give you some indication of the kind of unique esthetic Landes adheres to:

On the 12th of September 2005, I read a headline that lingered with me: Paralyzed Man in Diapers Hijacks Plane to Bogotá. Three months later, I found myself knocking on the door of the jailed man the press had nicknamed the “air pirate.” Porfirio grew out of my time spent with him, his chair, bed, house and family. Though I had my video sketch camera in hand on my first visit, it was of little use; I encountered a closed man. But I kept going back to visit and he thawed, revealing a mixture of bravado and dramatic flair, that, coupled with the fact he was forbidden to leave his house, captured my imagination. I began to video sketch and write but though Porfirio understood I was preparing a film, he did not suspect I would cast him as himself until days before the shoot. “Who will play me?” he kept asking me.

I moved to Florencia and lived in the places and with the people I wanted to work with for five months before shooting the first frame. During that time, I shot sketches of Porfirio, watching him move made me particularly conscious of time as well as the Catholic and Socratic notion of the body as prison to the soul. It was then that I developed the visual identity of the film: the low, frontal, still and symmetrical frame that, with a cinemascope aspect ratio pushing the horizon lines, would speak of the character and his relationship with the world around him.

The first draft of the screenplay read like a stream of consciousness, yet my time with Porfirio brought it down to its essence: the drama of a man’s character without dramatic devices. I decided never to show him the screenplay but rather I read him lines—mostly out of order—and asked him to say them back to me so I could rephrase, making the language his, not mine.

I strongly urge New Yorkers to take a trip over to MOMA to see this striking new film. Hopefully it will be booked at one of New York’s art houses down the road. If so, I will be sure to send out a head’s up.

Late Bloomer; Spinning into Butter

Although they are far apart stylistically, both “Late Bloomer” and “Spinning into Butter” deal with social pariahs. The first movie, now available from Netflix, is a low-budget Japanese shocker about a severely disabled man, played by just such a person, who becomes a serial killer. When the publicist wrote me about the DVD screener becoming available, I said “Great, send it along. It has to be better than the latest idiotic Batman movie”. The other movie is far more conventional and deals with racial incidents at Belmont, a snooty private college in Vermont. It opens at the Landmark Sunshine Theater in New York on March 27th, as well as Washington and Los Angeles. While there are major flaws in “Spinning into Butter”, I can recommend it as a serious attempt to deal with liberal racism at a school with an administration almost as boneheaded as my employers at Columbia University.

“Late Bloomer” sounds at first like it might be an updated version of Todd Browning’s “Freaks”, with its main character taking vengeance at those who have victimized him. Although there is some mayhem toward the end of the movie, with the main character Sumida (Masakiyo Sumida) tooling around in his motorized wheelchair looking for people to stab, it is-at least for me-much more interesting in those quiet moments when Sumida hangs out with friends, especially another disabled man who serves as his guru. Sumida’s dialog is limited by his reliance on a portable speech synthesizer, but every word produced by the device is riveting.

Sumida starts out as an object tended to by his well-meaning care-givers, including a young woman he begins to fall in love with. When he discovers that she is only interested in a heavy-metal rock musician who also serves as a care-giver, he types out on his synthesizer: “I am going to kill you”.

The great thing about “Late Bloomer” is that it defies classification. By making such a powerless figure a serial killer, director Go Shibata subverts our expectations. When the police come to arrest Sumida, I expected the standard dénouement in which the killer’s motivations are fully explained. By omitting such a pat conclusion, Shibata allows his character to live in our mind long after the film has ended-testimony to its power.

“Spinning into Butter” begins with an awful Warner Brothers cartoon based on the Little Black Sambo tale, which is a metaphor for Belmont’s faculty passing the blame from one person to the other. In the eyes of screenplay writer Rebecca Gilman, they create a blur like the tigers turning into butter.

The main character is Dean of Students Sarah Daniels, played capably by Sarah Jessica Parker, mostly known for her comic roles in movies like “Sex and the City”. She has come to Belmont to escape her last job in a mostly Black and rundown college in Chicago, where she had grown to hate not just the students, who she found rude and unmotivated, but Black people in general.

Daniels was hired by Belmont on the strength of her experience working with minority students, who serve mostly as window dressing there. One Black student tells the administrators that the only reason they recruited Black and Latino students was to be able to put them in photos in the college brochure. Despite her efforts to find herself in a preppy, mostly white environment, Daniels does not quite fit in at Belmont. She is patronized by the higher-up’s who perhaps harbor as much of a dislike for Jews as they do for Blacks and Latinos. Although the film does not identify her specifically as a Jew, the name Daniels has a Jewish ring and Parker herself, despite her last name, is Jewish. If I had written the script for “Spinning into Butter”, I would have brought this out but of course I only review movies, not write them.

The movie owes much to Spike Lee since it is an examination of racial tensions, but it is not from a Black perspective. The screenwriter, who adapted her own stage play, is white and made the correct decision not to attempt to speak for Black people.

The plot revolves around some hate crimes that have begun to take place on campus against an African-American student named Winston Garvey (James Reborn). The cops and the media begin to pour into the campus, much to the chagrin of the administration. They’d rather settle things through campus-wide forums on racism that inevitably involve the idiotic President and Dean of Faculty making patronizing and self-congratulatory speeches to the students. Things finally reach the boiling point and the minority students appear ready to blow the place up.

My main complaint with “Spinning into Butter” is its rather pat surprise ending, which I will of course not reveal. Up until that point, you are swept along in some fine dramatic confrontations among people who can’t seem to get beyond their racism, no matter their best intentions. In a way, the “instructive” ending goes against Gilman’s professed intention which was to start a dialog rather than provide solutions.