SF FILM FESTIVAL SATURDAY APRIL 13, 2019
RED JOAN AND KNOCK DOWN THE HOUSE
Saturday afternoon at the Castro. I don't usually see movies that will be widely distributed but I was invited to be my friend Jim Shaw's guest for Red Joan and the Academy Award Nomination for one of his film was there afterwards for discussion.
Red Joan and the Real Star "Leo"
Description
Legendary theater director Trevor Nunn and the incomparable Judi Dench combine their efforts to tell a riveting espionage thriller with the ethics of science at its core. Dench plays Joan, arrested late in life for her activities as a spy during Britain’s quest to become an atomic power. Once a promising scientist brought into the nation’s war efforts, young Joan (played by Kingsman’s Sophie Cookson) is horrified by the information she inadvertently absorbs and is ultimately swayed by a German Communist rake and his magnetic sister into passing along secrets to the Soviet Union.
“A good old-fashioned British spy thriller in the scientific mold of Enigma (2001), with a bewitching female heroine (or anti-heroine, if you will) played by the excellent actresses Judi Dench and (as her younger self) Sophie Cookson, Red Joan revisits the incredible real-life spy case of Melita Norwood … Zac Nicholson’s cinematography is warm and involving like production designer Cristina Casali’s quaint woody laboratories, as behooves the sub-genre of British spy yarns. George Fenton’s romantic score and Charlotte Walter’s charming costumes well describe the mood of the time.” – Deborah Young, The Hollywood Reporter
Produced in partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the conversation following the April 13 screening of Red Joan will allow members of the filmmaking team and special guests, including David Holloway, Professor of International History at Stanford University and expert on the international history of nuclear weapons to discuss the historical context of the film and the ethics of pursuing scientific discoveries that will have incredible consequence to our collective health and survival.
KNOCK DOWN THE HOUSE
5 minute standing ovation. Pictured two other candidates from the film and the director
Rachel Lears on the right.
This film won the two highest awards at the Sundance Film Festival Best Documentary and Festival Favorite. It'll debut on May 1st on Netflix and I think it will win the Academy Award for Best Documentary. The director/cinematographer/producer and her husband/editor/producer were able to follow Alexandria Ocasio Cortez from the beginning of her congressional run. Even when she turned in the 10,000 signatures to put herself on the ballot. It follows up to the end of the journey at her campaign headquarters when she finds out she won and the first images of the look on her face and her supporters. Brilliant, fabulous film.
“We met a machine with a movement,” says Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY 14th District), and thank goodness director Rachel Lears was there to capture it. Profiling four women (including AOC) of disparate backgrounds running grassroots political campaigns against established male incumbents, Lears depicts a fundamental moment when these (and other) remarkable women reminded the country that people really do have the power. Unforgettably depicting the candidates’ unflagging energy and commitment, Knock Down the House is an important and ebullient documentary about reclaiming democracy one seat at a time.
“It’s entirely possible that director Rachel Lears’ decision to follow around bartender-turned-candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as one of four subjects for a film she was making about outsiders challenging Democratic incumbents in the 2018 midterms will go down in film history as one of the most fortuitous, right-time, right-subject, and right-filmmaker combos ever. Because the result, documentary Knock Down the House, is a pretty extraordinary cinematic artifact. It’s not just that it takes a snapshot of the left’s fastest-rising star at the moment she went interstellar. It also limns, both through AOC’s story and those of the other three progressive challengers tracked here — Cori Bush, Amy Vilela, and Paula Jean Swearengin — an extraordinary juncture in American politics when the landscape terraformed in a way that we still haven’t finished mapping.” – Leslie Felperin, The Hollywood Reporter
Click here for interview with director Rachel Lears
Click here - interview with Rachel Lears and A Ocasio-Cortez
Director
Rachel Lears
Rachel Lears has a PhD in Cultural Anthropology and a graduate certificate in Culture and Media from NYU. She made her feature documentary directing debut with Aves de paso (2009) and co-directed The Hand That Feeds (2014), winner of Audience Awards at DOC NYC and the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and a nominee for a News & Documentary Emmy. Says she of Knock Down the House, “After the 2016 election, I wanted to tell a big story about people changing American politics in big ways and about power — how it works and how to achieve it. I wanted to tell a story about people working to build solidarity across social divides, and about the intersections of economics and injustice based on race, gender, and other aspects of identity.”
