Home #2

An older entry moaned about the dearth of resources for people re-entering society.  I’ve Loved You So Long shows what kind of support it might take a person to get back on their feet after 15 years in prison.

1. An adoring little sister who’s willing to support you no matter how reticent and angrily you behave. 
2. A nice place to lay your head at night.
3. A sophisticated and patient love interest who happens to have spent 10 years teaching inmates about literature. 
4. A smart niece that wants you to teach her cool stuff.
5. Plenty of cigarettes and time to mull things over.
6. A couple shots at jobs that a non-stigmatized laborer would covet.
7. Redemptive water.

This movie is really moving.  The acting is super good, and if you don’t cry, probably you have bad lachrymal glands.

It feels preachy at times, but that’s probably cuz I’m in the choir.  For example, the protagonists love interest is pretty comfortable talking about the thin line between convicted felons and free people.  He has this nice speech ready about how they’re all people.

It also tends to be an advertisement for how progressive and super cool France is.  At one point this pleasant guitar music comes on and a bunch of care-free guys in wheel chairs race down the street.  Cuz, you know, France is so inclusive and all.

I guess it’s not as cheery and fake as it seems though.  The friendly sister, who goes all out to help the protagonist re-enter society, is portrayed as a total bitch toward one of her students.  Her curtness is totally understandable in the context of a demanding middle class life.  But it’s repeated two or three times in this movie.  I look at it as a reminder that an important part of French society is not represented in I’ve Loved You So Long.  In a sort of round about way this is a movie about the North African immigrants  who live in the banlieues and have the majority of experience with cops and prison.

Cinema in Prison #2

Last night, upon hearing about the authoritarian Iranian regime’s imprisonment of Jafar Panahi, I was tempted to say something stupid.  For example, “Gosh I complain about America’s detention system a lot, but gee, look how much worse it is over in Iran”.  Of course that’s a pointless and self-serving statement.

Tonight I found out via David Bordwell that the US has in fact detained Panahi:

Lest we Americans savor our superior virtue, consider this: Four months before 9/11, Panahi was traveling between Hong Kong and Argentina and stopped over in New York. He had been told he did not need a transit visa, but he was detained by American authorities at JFK Airport for lacking one. Here is Stephen Teo’s account in Senses of Cinema:

On his way to the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema on 15 April, 2001, after having attended the Hong Kong International Film Festival, Panahi was arrested in JFK Airport, New York City, for not possessing a transit visa. Refusing to submit to a fingerprinting process (apparently required under U.S. law), the director was handcuffed and leg-chained after much protestations to US immigration officers over his bona fides, and finally led to a plane that took him back to Hong Kong. As far as is known, this incident was not reported in any major US newspaper, even though The Circle was being shown in the United States at the time (another irony: for that film, Panahi was awarded the “Freedom of Expression Award” by the US National Board of Review of Motion Pictures).

We are in the season in which critics are likely to use the word courage casually, as in “Natalie Portman gives a courageous performance in Black Swan.” The ongoing struggle of Panahi and thousands of his fellow Iranians remind us what real courage, in the world outside the movie theatre, looks like.

How embarrassing.

Google gave me this nice Panahi quote “When a filmmaker does not make films it is as if he is jailed. Even when he is freed from the small jail, he finds himself wandering in a larger jail,”

Cinema in Prison

This sucks.  Jafar Panahi is going  back to prison.

Panahi is near to this blog’s heart because he’s made a really good prison movie. (sorry the trailer is so cheesy.)

The Green Revolution seems dead.

At least Panahi’s celebrity will remind people how much Iran has to offer:

h/t: David Hudson and The Lede.

Earnest Concern

Relax lah.

via fake criterions

 

Aaron Huey

I am very embarrassed to say that did not look very hard when my buddy Matt Lutton linked to Aaron Huey’s  TED talk last May.  Mr. Huey’s pictures are striking.  He uses them to highlight the link between past and present depredation of American Indian lands.

Mr. Huey doesn’t pull any punches.  He calls the reservations “prisoner of war camps”.  I’d always thought of them as ghettos, but I think Huey’s term is much more honest.  Americans took all the good meat.  Check out Huey’s map showing the boundaries of the Lakotah nation following the first Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1851.

 

Lakotah Nation

 

 

Reservations 2010

 

It looks like my current city, Billings MT, would be right on the fringe of the Lakotah nation, if not in within it’s boundaries.

In his lecture Huey says:

The last chapter in any successful genocide is the one in which the oppressor can remove their hands and say “my god, what are these people doing to themselves.  They’re killing each other.  They’re killing themselves.”

While we watch them die.

This is how we came to own these United States.  This is the legacy of manifest destiny. Prisoners are still born into prisoner of war camps long after the guards are gone. These are the bones left after the best meat has been taken…

How much of this history do you need to own?

It took moving to Montana for me to realize that American Indians exist.  For me, Huey’s pictures are a welcome peek into the tattered houses that I drive past every few weeks.

In Europe I dutifully went to Dachau and Srebrenica.  In high school I represented Rwanda at model UN .  But I’ve lived in Montana for a year, and still haven’t made it inside a single building on a reservation (not counting the odd convenience store).

It’s really common here to finger-wag.  In fact, it’s difficult not to.  The alcoholism Huey refers to is very visible and frustrating.  A lot of American Indians are in prison or on probation for serious crimes.  It’s hard not to say “They’re killing each other.  They’re killing themselves” when you look over and see it happening.  And if you say something like Huey, people will not trust you because you’re applying west coast values to their land.  They’ll accuse you of bowing to political correctness.  Or think you naive.  Locals know.

Outsiders with degrees, screw them.

Middling as it might be, my current job lets me do something to help, or at least listen.  But it’s gonna end in 9 months, and there’s almost nothing else tying me to this region.  Like a lot of people who might feel like they care about the situation, I’m gonna move back to one of the coasts where I won’t be faced with these realities every day.

Zimring

From the Vera Institute.  Here’s their blurb:

The Vera Institute of Justice’s Neil A. Weiner Research Speaker Series features Franklin E. Zimring, William G. Simon Professor of Law and Wolfen Distinguished Scholar at the University of California’s Boalt Hall School of Law.

In this podcast, Professor Zimring discusses the decline in crime in New York City during the period between 1990 and 2010. He examines the relationship between the drop in street crime and the New York City Police Department’s emphasis on street policing rather than mass incarceration to achieve harm reduction and crime control.

Winter’s Bone

Winter’s Bone is gonna be something you’ll be hearing about for the rest of awards season.  I’ll be rooting for it.

Someone somewhere (sorry, I forgot who) said they liked it because it focused on a world of crime and clans, much like the Godfather or Sopranos gone exotically gothic.  Where those venerable films focused on the men at the center of their syndicates, Winter’s Bone focuses on Ree Dolly, a 17 year old living on the periphery of a seedier syndicate.

The movie starts with a pretty pleasant slice of Ree’s life.  She cooks some food, and quizzes her little sister on how to spell the word “house”.  Things aren’t alright though.  Her mom’s in something of a demented daze.   Early on the local sheriff arrives and lets Ree know that her dad put the house up as collateral for his bail bond, and he’s gone missing.  If she doesn’t find him before the trial date, the bail bond company is gonna take the homestead.

So she goes on this Homeric quest to find her dad and save the fam.

None of the prison is in the movie, but it sets the plot in action.  Everything gets going because Ree’s dad had to pay way more for bail than he could reasonably afford, and way more than was necessary to get him to appear on his own recognizance.  In the movie that results in local government that bullies the people it needs to be protecting.

Bail bonding is pretty much a shady effing racket.   Human Rights Watch just released a report detailing how shady.  Listen to a short interview about the report with Brian Lehrer here.  Earlier this year NPR ran a great series on the same problem.

The gist is that bail bonding helps keep poor people in the toilet-flushing-vortex of poverty.  It’s one more reason to take a plea bargain, even if you didn’t commit a crime.  It’s one more reason to sell out your neighbor, even thought you’ll break the same rule as soon as you get home.  Bail bonding is an anachronism perpetuates the divide between cops and clans.

When the good guys use gimmicks like bail bonding, I kind of start to feel sympathetic for the No Snitching codes that prevail among the clans whether they’re Ozark Meth Cookers or Baltimore kids.