Friday, July 15th, 2005
8:30 - Live music by Honeychild (details below)
9:00 - Communities on the Edge
On the lawn at Automotive High School
50 Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Dress warmly (it's cooler when you're sitting still).
In the event of rain the show is indoors at the same location.
Caught In Between
For the past 200 hundred years the world has changed as much as in the 2,000 years prior. Many documentarians view it as essential to their mission as filmmakers to create a record of the transitions of our times and to document traditions as they fade into history—or clash loudly against the mores of modern society. With this program we present 5 amazing documentaries about communities on the verge of great change and the ambivalence of the people living on the edge of a new era.
THE FILMS:
Bride Kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan (Peter Lom, 50:13) Courtesy of First Run/Icarus Films
Reporter Petr Lom travels to Kyrgyzstan, where an ancient tradition of bride kidnapping, banned by the Soviets, is resurgent. Lom gets inside families to talk with kidnapped brides—those who have managed to escape from their captors as well as those who are making homes with their new husbands.
One in three married women in rural Kyrgyzstan was kidnapped by her husband and his family and this film documents in harrowing detail four such abductions—from the violent seizures on city streets and the tearful protests of the women, who are physically restrained and persuaded to accept their fate by the women of the groom's family, to the often tense negotiations between the respective families—and either the eventual acquiescence or continued refusal of the young women. Some of the women accept the forced marriages and later seem happy in their new relationships, while others fiercely resist, occasionally with tragic consequences.
Lom sought out families looking for brides to unearth the truth about this highly unusual and occasionally deadly tradition and the film is a remarkably illuminating look at what will seem to most Westerners as a shocking social custom but one that raises provocative questions about the nature of love and marriage.
"Recommended! A well made documentary... It is a shocking practice and the film depicts the agony of the women involved very well." - Educational Media Reviews Online
The Hot 8 (Greg Samata, 30:00) Courtesy of Big Noise Films
An energetic documentation of the tension between the practiced and well trained older jazz musicians and the new generation of undisciplined yet wonderfully charismatic players in modern day New Orleans.
Branson: Musicland (Peter Sillen, 11:00) Courtesy of Washington Square Films
Peter Sillen (co-director of Benjamin Smoke) takes a documentary look at Missouri's glitzy entertainment capital and some of the less-fortunate folks who live there.
Two Hands (Fabio Wuytack, 5:50)
A spellbinding short portrait of a doctor training to become just the 5th cardiac surgeon serving a population of more than three million in war-torn Palestine.
All Right (Aleesa Cohene, 7:00) Courtesy of V-Tape
Carving her surgically precise editing knife into the flaccid arguments of Canadian immigration policy and reassessing vintage training videos, broadcast voices and homegrown horror fantasies, Cohene turns our gaze to the acculturation that creates an inside and out, an us and a them.
THE MUSIC: Honeychild will perform a solo, semi-electric set. Described by Greg Tate as "Miriam Makeba meets Bjork in the Sex Pistols' basement," Honeychild is the lead singer of Audio Dyslexia, Badawi, Spectre, and WE.
