prisoner
Since I Been Down proves that sometimes real change can come from within and the resources we are given to work with.
Ava DuVernay returns to the documentary format with 13th, a look at the amendment of the United States Constitution that simultaneously abolished slavery and established a loophole for denying rights to targeted groups. The troubling wording in the amendment has to do with convicted criminals, who are the only people exempt from the abolishment of slavery and involuntary servitude. That exemption, while small at the time, has snowballed into a huge issue thanks to America’s system of mass incarceration.
Because the Internet can take a person virtually anywhere in the world and provide potentially infinite vats of knowledge, raising children in a dictatorial environment nowadays seems more ridiculous than ever. The mechanics of detaining an adult with an existing awareness of the outside world is even more bewildering, because chances are they’ve read about the Josef Fritzl case and have at least some idea of how to escape. Alas, cinema, ever the portrayer of such cultural terrors, has provided startling means with which to explore such a phenomenon.
Over at our official Facebook page, we are currently posting daily film recommendations, with each week being a different theme. This is a collection of those recommendations! This week’s theme is prison films.
Many filmmakers have made movies about the Holocaust, yet so few are able to portray the atrocities without either becoming exploitative by staging fictionalised versions of some of the worst scenes in recorded history, or by sanitising the events in order to ensure that audiences aren’t left shocked and devastated. Austrian director Michael Haneke has frequently gone on record to claim that the idea of making a film about the holocaust is “unspeakable”, criticising the way a movie like Schindler’s List emotionally manipulates the audience when the subject matter alone should leave every sane person feeling depressed that something like this happened in recent history. Haneke argues that Steven Spielberg staging a sequence where concentration camp prisoners are marched to the shower and then building suspense from whether or not water will come out of the shower heads is the most offensive kind of exploitation; it trivialises a shocking moment of history in order to create nothing more than an action set piece.