Intent on shaking up the ultimate 'sacred cow' for Jews, Israeli director Yoav Shamir embarks on a provocative - and at times irreverent - quest to answer the question, "What is anti-Semitism today?" Does it remain a dangerous and immediate threat? Or is it a scare tactic used by right-wing Zionists to discredit their critics? Speaking with an array of people from across the political spectrum (including the head of the Anti-Defamation League and its fiercest critic, author Norman Finkelstein) and traveling to places like Auschwitz (alongside Israeli school kids) and Brooklyn (to explore reports of violence against Jews), Shamir discovers the realities of anti-Semitism today. His findings are shocking, enlightening and - surprisingly - often wryly funny.

Yoav Shamir tries to take a witty & satirical approach to a deadly serious issue - anti-semitism in today's world. His film & title focus almost exclusively on the unprecedented access he was given to Abe Foxman and the NY-Based Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Shamir tries to document one of the ADL-reported cases of rising anti-semitism, and this leads him to Crown Heights in Brooklyn, where he interviews black youth. He accompanies students on a March of the Living visit to Poland. He is invited to join Foxman on an ADL delegation to Europe, where he discovers that the ADL is closely aligned with the policies of the Israeli government. He then interviews two American academics who have written about this issue (Mearsheimer & Walt) and concludes that Israel's past is preventing it from moving forward. This singular focus on the US-Israeli lobby as a lense with which to view contemporary anti-semitism means that Shamir ignores more sinister forms, such as Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

How did Hollywood manage to fit so many of our must-see projects into one year? 2012 features Nolan's last Batman, Whedon's Avengers, Ridley Scott's return to science fiction, Andrew Stanton's John Carter, the Hunger Games movie, and Alfonso Cuaron's space epic. And that's just scratching the surface.

This year, there are 58 genre movies already on the calendar, with another dozen awaiting release dates. Here's our complete guide to science fiction and fantasy movies to watch (or avoid) in 2012.

This particular blog entry is going to focus on the comparisons and contrasts of Stieg Larrson’s original book, Niels Arden Oplev’s 2009 adaptation and David Fincher’s 2011 adaptation. This entry will therefore be very spoiler-laden, with conversation meant for those that have either read the original book, seen the respective adaptations or all three. If you haven’t done any of those things, and wish to not have the story ruined for you, I suggest you stop reading now.

A 90-minute film, A Life Apart: Hasidism in America, is the first in-depth documentary about a distinctive, traditional Eastern European religious community. In an historic migration after World War II, Hasidism found it most vital center in America. Both challenging and embracing American values, Hasidim seek those things which many Americans find most precious: family, community, and a close relationship to God. Integrating critical and analytical scholarship with a portrait of the daily life, beliefs, and history of contemporary Hasidic Jews in New York City, the film focuses on the conflicts, burdens, and rewards of the Hasidic way of life.

@mellemusic @drublood yup 99

Eyes on the Prize is a 14-part series which was originally released in two parts: Eyes I in 1985 and Eyes II in 1988. This series, which debuted on PBS stations, is considered to be the definitive documentary on the Civil Rights Movement. “Eyes on the Prize” won more than twenty major awards and attracted over 20 million viewers. These interviews are part of the Henry Hampton Collection housed at the Film and Media Archive at Washington University Libraries. Each transcript represented the entire interview conducted by Blackside including sections which appeared in the final program and the outtakes. For more information, on the various formats of each interview, please contact the Film and Media Archive.

You may also browse and search the Eyes on the Prize Interviews I (1985) and Eyes on the Prize Interviews II (1988) individually.

1st little group of #Honk #film #photos @abbyladybug was right: not disasters, “cool and filmy”

“The myth is that blaxploitation ended in 1973-74 [...]" @dailybruin #film #cinema

The first section of the new documentary NESHOBA: THE PRICE OF FREEDOM, from filmmakers Micki Dickoff and Tony Pagano, is so gut-wrenchingly sorrowful that it's an oddly mixed blessing when, as the movie prog-
resses, it becomes both easier to take and less effective. This may have more to do with the way in which events have played themselves out over the 46 years since the original murders around which the film is organized than with the skill of the filmmakers themselves. Still, had Dickoff and Pagano been able to maintain the passion and immediacy of their first third, they might have ended up with one of the most powerful, ground-breaking documentaries of modern times. (Or perhaps one so upsetting that viewers would squirm and head for an early exit.)

In 1964 when she was only 17, Micki Dickoff asked her father if she could go to Mississippi to work with the volunteers  of  Freedom Summer, registering black voters. Her father, a Mississippi native, refused to allow her to go. His was the only Jewish family in a small Mississippi town, and he feared what she would find there. Not long after, his worst fears were confirmed when three of the volunteers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were murdered by local Klansmen, all of them deputy sheriffs of Neshoba County. 

The Jazz Baroness by Hannah Rothschild (2009, 82 min.). Although Baroness Pannonica “Nica” Rothschild was born into British royalty, she left it all behind to move to New York City in 1951. Known as the “bebop baroness,” Nica became a friend and patron of jazz musicians of the time, particularly mesmerized by the work of Thelonious Monk. Introduced to him in 1952, she championed his work in the US, leading to a relationship that lasted the rest of their lives.

This handy, point-and-shoot 35mm camera is a dream product for analog lovers who love lowlight and indoor photography. Equipped with the NP (‘natural photo’) mode which calculates the subject’s brightness and adjusts the exposure according to the available light, it’s so light-sensitive that you’ll never need to use flash again. Pair it with a fast film, preferably the Natura Classica 1600 (NP mode only works for ISO 800 and above) and you’ll get natural-light images with sharp, faithful colors, fine details, and a very smooth grain. Say goodbye to washed-out effects of the harsh flash!

I have created this web site to aid amateur photographers who would like to produce their own Black and White photographic prints from film. The addition of darkroom experience to your talents as a photographer should increase your overall photographic enjoyment and aid in the maturity and excellence of your final prints.

i am a 27 year old filmmaker and doctoral student currently stationed in chicago.

Anyway, Paranormal Activity is good if you like ghosts. I like ghosts. I also like zombies and psychotic killers with chainsaws—I had a fairly traditional American education—but I’m not bored by low-resolution long shots of rooms in which nothing happens but a door opening six inches, apparently by itself. If you like ghosts, that’s practically the money shot.

After a chance meeting with the captivating Shulman, filmmaker Eric Bricker set to work directing the first feature-length documentary on the national treasure: Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman. Narrated by Dustin Hoffman and starring a litany of design stars—architect Frank Gehry, designer Tom Ford, artist Ed Ruscha, publisher Benedikt Taschen, and Dwell's own LA editor Frances Anderton—the film was the winner of the 2009 Palm Springs International Film Festival Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature. It even got rave reviews from master lenser Shulman himself (he has seen the film four times, and says he never tires of it). Visual Acoustics will screen at this year's Dwell on Design: A Night at the Movies on Saturday, June 27, at the Geffen Contemporary in downtown Los Angeles, followed by a Q&A with Bricker himself. In the meantime, we caught up with Bricker at his home in Austin for a few Q&As of our own.

still black, a feature length documentary, is an experimental portrait of six black transgender men living in Chicago, Mass, Ohio, and Missouri. The black-and-white film shot with multiple cameras and accompanying visual effects, offers viewers a complex

After being trained in filmmaking at the Northwest Film Center in Portland, Dorr saved $15,000 from her work as a nurse's aide and embarked on a two-month road trip to 50 cities in 23 states.

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via Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast - http://blog.lib.umn.edu/perry032/impossible/

Yes, there are books and photographs about the struggle. But those alone can't tell the story the way "Eyes on the Prize" did, Lewis says. The series is no longer available in stores and can't be shown on television or released on DVD until the filmmakers

a feature length documentary about the gray area of the Civil Rights movement in St. Augustine, Florida. The film’s goal is to examine the movement and its outcomes forty years later. We will not only examine continued social

review in Freedom Socialist of Showtime made for cable movie

"Strangelove" is far more than a satire. In its own loopy way, the movie is a remarkably fact-based and specific guide to some of the oddest, most secretive chapters of the Cold War.

Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire examines how a radical fringe of the Republican Party has used the trauma of the 9/11 terror attacks to advance a pre-existing agenda to radically transform American foreign policy while r