Latest news with #FreeLeonardPeltier
Yahoo
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Oscar-winning director to attend 2025 Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Fest
The MSP Film Society has called "action" on the 44th Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival (MSPIFF). The festival will return in 2025, with the bulk of programming taking place at The Main Cinema from April 2–13. Highlights from the announcement include an appearance from Oscar-winning director Ang Lee and an opening-night screening of Free Leonard Peltier. The opening-night documentary recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, arriving there just a week after Peltier was granted clemency after a nearly 50-year imprisonment. The presentation of Free Leonard Peltier will include appearances from director Jesse Short Bull and producer Jhane Meyers. It'll be followed by a party at Sean Sherman's Owamni. The festival will also welcome Lee for the MSPIFF44 Milgrom Tribute, a celebration of the 20th anniversary of Brokeback Mountain, the film that saw him become the first Asian director to win an Academy Award for Best Director. Lee's appearance will include a conversation on Sunday, April 6, which will be followed by a screening of Brokeback Mountain, introduced by the director. The Milgrom Tribute, named for MSPIFF and MSP Film Society founder Al Milgrom, honors "artists whose talents put a distinctive stamp on every one of their films, who have been instrumental in promoting a higher regard for the art of cinema, and who have consistently made and continue to make critical waves at a global level." Lee has embodied those attributes in his more than 40-year career with moving, personal films like The Wedding Banquet and The Ice Storm, as well as big-budget productions like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hulk, Life of Pi, and Gemini Man. The fest will again include a slate of Minnesota-made and Minnesota-connected films, including Folktales and Speak, both of which appeared at Sundance. Other films on the MSPIFF calendar include Sundance award winners DJ Ahmet, Seeds, Sally, and 2000 Meters to Andriivka; Kim A. Snyder's The Librarians; and Julie Delpy's satire, Meet the Barbarians, among others. As usual, films will also be screened at other Twin Cities area theaters, including the Capri Theater and Landmark Center, as well as the Edina Mann Theatres, a new partner for the 44th installment. The full lineup of films can be viewed on the MSPIFF website. The schedule and presale for those events will be unveiled later this month.
Los Angeles Times
31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
The enigmatic power of ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock,' plus the week's best movies in L.A.
Hello! I'm Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies. The Sundance Film Festival is winding down and we covered the fest from all angles. Photographer Jason Armond created images with the teams behind films such as 'Free Leonard Peltier,' 'The Wedding Banquet,' 'The Ballad of Wallis Island,' 'Atropia,' 'By Design,' 'Twinless' and many more. There are also video interviews with the creators of the festival's most talked-about titles, including 'Sorry, Baby,' 'The Alabama Solution,' 'Oh, Hi,' 'Kiss of the Spider Woman,' 'Peter Hujar's Day,' 'Together' and 'Love, Brooklyn.' Critic Amy Nicholson wrote about her highlights from the early days of the festival, including 'Bunnylovr,' 'Bubble & Squeak,' 'Rabbit Trap' and 'Sugar Babies.' She also reviewed one of the most anticipated films of the festival, 'Opus' starring Ayo Edebiri and John Malkovich. Amy has another dispatch coming soon. I wrote about the documentary 'The Stringer,' which explores whether the iconic image from the Vietnam War known as 'Napalm Girl' was in fact not taken by the long-credited Associated Press photographer Nick Ut but rather an unknown freelancer named Nguyen Thanh Nghe, who has long lived in anonymity in California. There was already strong pushback against the film even before it premiered, coming from the AP and Ut. 'This story challenges my profession and established truth in my profession,' said Gary Knight, a veteran photojournalist and executive producer of the film. 'We were all heavily invested in making sure that we were diligent, thoughtful and treated everybody with respect and tried to get this right. So we're all stakeholders in the story.' Tonight the American Cinematheque will host the West Coast premiere of a new 4K restoration of Peter Weir's 1975 film 'Picnic at Hanging Rock.' The restoration will begin a run at the Laemmle Royal on Feb. 21. Weir, who also made such films as 'Gallipoli,' 'Fearless,' 'Dead Poets Society' and 'Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,' hasn't made a film since 2010's 'The Way Back' but did receive an honorary Oscar in 2022 and a Golden Lion from the Venice Film Festival in 2024. The atmospheric style and boldly ambiguous storytelling of 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' have made it extremely influential over the years. Based on a novel by Joan Lindsey, the film is about a group of schoolgirls who, on Valentine's Day in 1900, go to a remote scenic outcropping to spend the day. But a teacher and three of the girls go missing, setting off all sorts of speculation as to what may have happened to them. Writing about the film in 1998, when it was back in theaters around the time of Weir's 'The Truman Show,' Kevin Thomas praised 'Hanging Rock' as 'outrageously erotic in its symbolism and implications' as well as 'a gorgeous-looking, superbly wrought enigma.' Thomas also noted, 'Throughout a major, remarkably consistent three-decade career, director Peter Weir has invited audiences to peer beyond surface reality to discover different worlds, whether they may be of the imagination or the supernatural, as a route to self-discovery. … The exquisite and seductive 'Picnic at Hanging Rock,' which helped revive the Australian film industry as well as establish Weir's reputation, is cinema at its most evocative.' A new 4K restoration by IndieCollect of Jim McKay's 1996 'Girls Town' will have its local premiere at the Los Feliz 3 tonight, with an encore screening on Monday. McKay and actor Guillermo Diaz will be there tonight for a Q&A. Largely unavailable for many years, the film won two prizes when it premiered at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival and is a welcome reminder of the festival's history and legacy. Starring Lili Taylor, Bruklin Harris, Anna Grace and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (in her film debut), the movie was written by McKay in collaboration with his cast. The story tracks a group of New York City high school seniors as they grapple with the fallout from the suicide of a friend after she is sexually assaulted. In his review, Kevin Thomas celebrated the film for its 'unique denseness and richness,' adding, ''Girls Town' is a serious film, even demanding in the complexity of its people and their relationships, yet it gets a steady stream of laughs. … The film depicts with utter conviction a world in which girls in the process of becoming women have little opportunity to assert themselves or to be understood when they're most in need of support.' Jessica Williams introduces 'Blue Crush' On Sunday, Vidiots will screen John Stockwell's 2002 surfing drama 'Blue Crush' with an introduction by actor and comedian Jessica Williams. Inspired by a magazine article by Susan Orlean titled 'Life's Swell,' the story of female friendship and empowerment stars Kate Bosworth, Michelle Rodriguez and Sanoe Lake as friends on Maui's North Shore who all have dreams of making it as professional surfers. Vidiots' program note describes the film as a 'cinematic comfort food classic,' while Kenneth Turan's original review noted, 'For although director John Stockwell (who did the more successful 'crazy/beautiful') and his co-writer Lizzy Weiss do it right some of the time, 'Blue Crush' ultimately gets away from them. Way longer than it needs to be, overloaded with increasingly strained contrivances, it's a film that feels as if it outsmarted itself by listening to too many 'what if' ideas from too many story conferences.' A Richard Pryor / Eddie Murphy concert double-bill Long before the recent wave of televised stand-up concert specials, there was the comedy concert film. On Monday the New Beverly will have a double bill of 1979's 'Richard Pryor: Live in Concert' and 1987's 'Eddie Murphy: Raw.' Directed by Jeff Margolis, 'Richard Pryor: Live in Concert' captures the comedian at the Terrace Theater in Long Beach in December 1978 and was released within a matter of months. In a review of the film for The Times, Linda Gross noted that the film was released without an MPAA rating. Gross added, 'For most of us, Pryor's use of vulgar language is less threatening than his insights into our own vulnerabilities. In the best sense, Pryor's language and irreverence are subversive — they strike a major blow against hypocrisy.' Directed by Robert Townsend, 'Eddie Murphy: Raw' was filmed at New York City's Felt Forum (the original name of the Theater at Madison Square Garden). Reviewing the film, Michael Wilmington wrote, 'The two best bits in 'Raw' avoid macho. They're both recollections of Murphy's boyhood, one an imitation of himself imitating Pryor. Later on, he tells a story — not funny, but goofy and sweet — about watching his mother make hamburgers with green peppers and Wonder Bread. It's a rare human moment in the film, and it reminds us that all of Pryor's greatest routines came from humanity, the ability to mock yourself as well as the world. Most of the jokes in 'Eddie Murphy Raw' are the kind you regale buddies with to show off. Anyone as good as Eddie Murphy should have outgrown that years ago.'
The Guardian
30-01-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘He's going home': new film documents the fight to free Leonard Peltier
Of all the documentaries at the Sundance film festival this year, perhaps none is as timely as Free Leonard Peltier, Jesse Short Bull and David France's film on the Indigenous activist imprisoned for nearly half a century. Peltier, now 80 years old, is serving consecutive life sentences for the killing of two FBI agents during a shootout at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1975, though he has maintained his innocence. Activists, celebrities and liberation advocates such as Nelson Mandela have called for his release for decades, citing railroaded justice and evidence of prosecutorial misconduct; the FBI and law enforcement, meanwhile, have campaigned vociferously against any commutation of his sentence. Short Bull (Lakota Nation vs the United States) and France began working on the documentary after Peltier had already served 45 years, as a new generation of activists worked to free the longest-serving political prisoner in the US. 'If you're Native American in the United States, you know the story of Leonard Peltier,' says activist Holly Cook Macarro (Red Lake Nation) at the film's outset. The 110-minute documentary underscores Peltier's status as an icon of Native American independence and resistance, connected to more than half a century of Indigenous activism in the US, from the civil rights organizing of the American Indian Movement (AIM) in the 1960s, to the protests at Standing Rock in 2016, to the recent lobbying to free him. Peltier 'fought for many of these things we're direct beneficiaries of – cultural resurgence, Native American Freedom of Religion Act, Indian Self-Determination Act,' says Nick Tilsen (Oglala Lakota), founder of Indigenous-led civil rights group NDN Collective in the film. 'It's just been a part of the lexicon of being in the movement.' It seemed that the arc of the film would not end in change – Free Leonard Peltier captures some of a July 2024 hearing in which Peltier was once again denied parole; the original finished version of the project ended with a clip from a 40-year-old interview with Peltier, who hasn't been allowed to speak publicly since the 1990s, hoping that he would one day be released. But on 20 January, with 14 minutes remaining in his presidential term, Joe Biden commuted his sentence, allowing Peltier to serve the remainder of his time in home confinement – and sending the documentary team scrambling to the edit room with a week until their premiere. The film now concludes with a highly emotional note of triumph, as activists hug and sob outside the federal correctional complex in Coleman, Florida. Notably, the commutation does not admit wrongdoing on behalf of the state. It will enable Peltier, who suffers from numerous health ailments, to 'spend his remaining days in home confinement but will not pardon him for his underlying crimes', according to a White House statement. The film outlines why, weaving a narrative of generational activism and miscarried justice that frames the shootout at Pine Ridge not as blow-for-blow escalation, as it was portrayed by mainstream media at the time, but as government incursion on to Indigenous land. Several elders of AIM, founded in Minneapolis in 1968 by Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt, appear in the documentary, attesting to the injustice of Peltier's incarceration as well as the movement's intentions. Forged by the civil rights protests of the 1960s, AIM targeted the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) for its destruction of culture and identity through oppression and forced assimilation. 'Trying to be an Indian is a daily struggle itself,' said Peltier in the 40-year-old interview excerpted in the film. 'AIM was fighting back, all over the country. We were all living under the same type of oppression.' Peltier helped manage a weeklong occupation of the BIA office in 1972, as part of an effort to address the 'Trail of Broken Treaties', calling for the restoration of the treaty-making process, the legal recognition of existing treaties and the return of 110m acres of land, among other demands. At Pine Ridge, Peltier was defending against what many Native Americans saw as further theft of their land; the film suggests that the FBI was spying on residents and knew that AIM was shifting its focus toward mining practices in the area. The day of the shootout, Dick Wilson, the controversial tribal chairman with a private police force and ties to the federal government, signed away one-eighth of the reservation's land. The shootout killed the FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams, as well as a Native American, Joe Stuntz. No action was taken over Stuntz's death. Three Indigenous activists – Peltier, Robert Robideau and Dino Butler – were prosecuted for the agents' deaths. Robideau and Butler were acquitted on the basis of self-defense. But Peltier was convicted, based on prosecution tactics that are 'enough to make the authorities hang their head in shame', says James Reynolds, a former US attorney who handled the prosecution and has since called for Peltier's release, in the film. No one disputes that Peltier was shooting that day. The FBI has maintained the shootout represented a brazen attack on its agents, and that Peltier shot the agents execution style. The FBI director, Christopher Wray, personally advocated against Peltier's parole in July 2024, calling him a 'remorseless killer who brutally murdered two of our own'. Peltier says he was nowhere near the agents and is being made a scapegoat. He has maintained his innocence, and refused to confess even though it would have helped his efforts at parole. 'People know where my heart's at. I'm not a cold-blooded killer,' he says in the film. Peltier's imprisonment, perceived as injustice at the hands of a callous US government, continues to serve as a metaphor for many Native Americans. 'Everything that's happened to him is really a mirror for everything that's happened to Indian people throughout history,' says Tilsen in the film. Peltier is not yet out of prison; he will be released 30 days after the commutation, on 18 February, at which point he should return to a new home at the Turtle Mountain Indian reservation in North Dakota. His life remains in danger, according to advocates. But the film ends on a note of hard-earned hope – 'we got through!' says Cook Macarro through tears. 'He's going home.' Free Leonard Peltier is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
