What to Watch

Summer of Soul, is a fantastic 2021 music movie mostly filmed in the summer of 1969 in Mt Morris Park in Harlem, New York City. The live concerts were free for the public and took place over six Sundays in the summer of 1969 and featured predominantly Black musicians and singers including Stevie Wonder (as a teenager), Mehalia Jackson, Gladys Knight and the Pips — among dozens of other fantastic singers and acts. It’s a delight because there are interviews with some of the stars years later… Read more about it here — Here’s the delightful trailer –who’s missing? Diana Ross and the Supremes!!

The final season of Succession on Crave is –in a way– predictable.  What I didn’t expect is the sentimental nonsense around the death of the patriarch – who was frankly a very nasty, punitive and grasping billionaire.  The tears from his grown children (not grown at all) were a bit of a side show to the plot.  Of course production values are high. They reveal the lives of the uber-rich are at times tawdry, vengeful and the late-in-the-day feminism of daughter Siobahn (Shiv) is too little and too late. It gets her nowhere.

Victim/suspect is a must-see 2023 film by Reveal (the Center for Investigative Reporting in the US which sponsors justice podcasts and blogs) is on Netflix.  The 1.5 hr documentary tracks some women who were arrested, and some jailed, for daring to report a sexual assault or a rape.  It is when police interrogators – and prosecutors — turn the tables, and deliberately trap the women in random details that don’t match, or in inconsistencies that the women are themselves arrested.  Most of the women are college age, and under age 25.  Never in trouble with the law before, when they report a rape – the police treat them as suspects.  You can watch the trailer here.

Movie Stills, from left: Official Secrets, Succession, Victim/Suspect, La Grande Bellezza and The Sopranos

The Sopranos.  I started watching the series again.  Made more than 25 years ago, this series takes on new meaning all these years later.  Tony Soprano’s relationship with his psychiatrist, his love-hate connection with his wife, his mild threats to his bored and idle children – are sarcastic and bits of humour that made me laugh out loud.  However Tony as the tough guy, the Mafioso, the sociopath – that’s the real Tony Soprano.  His bitter relationship with his mother and uncle is a wonder to behold – I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. You can watch it on Crave.  Here’s the trailer from Season One.

Official Secrets (2019), a movie Netflix, is about Katherine Gun, who worked for UK’s GSHQ as a translator.  In 2003, she leaked top secret documents to The Observer newspaper. In them  was a request by the US for compromising intelligence on diplomats from a handful of member states of the UN Security Council.  The Council was to vote on a second UN resolution to invade Iraq to fight US imperialism’s dirty war.  It’s a good film made about a serious subject and welcome relief for any of us who  see the member states of the “Five Eyes” as hateful thugs.  Here is the trailer.

For a lot of fun and glimpse of glamour –you should watch La Grande Bellezza: The Great Beauty, on Kanopy. This Academy Award winner from 2013 is about the incredible nightlife and rooftop parties of writers and artists of beauty and means in Rome.  In Italian (with subtitles) it’s delightful, precarious, unpredictable and fast.  Great music… A must watch.  Here’s the trailer

“It’s time for journalists to start doing their jobs by centering Palestinian voices instead of being stenographers and state secretaries to the Israeli regime.”

DDN (Double Down News)

In 10 minutes you can watch a very good mini-doc, The Banned Video Israel Doesn’t Want You to See on what’s going on today in the West Bank—illegally and brutally occupied by Israel since 1967.  In the video, Double Down News (DDN) asks the question what would you do you were sitting in your living room and a foreign military broke down the door, walked in and threw your belongings around, smashed your furniture and destroyed your home?  The narrator says, “Opposition to atrocities has not been met with applause. People who oppose injustices, who opposed  colonialism, who opposed slavery were not met with congratulations, red carpets and awards.  The video urges journalists to stop being “stenographers to power”. Here is the 10 min video.

Who doesn’t know some soul searcher who has gone on the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage? I know several people, women as I now think about it, who wanted to live their spiritual side on the trek through northern Spain.  The scenery is pretty.  Nadine presents a 6-minute version of the hours and hours of walking in her youtube video here Nadine Walks   In subsequent videos she gives pointers on money, where to stay and how to walk.  Whatever you do, don’t imitate the gait in the Ministry of Silly Walks with John Cleese.

The Invitation is a 2015 feature film you can watch on Kanopy.  A man crashes his wealthy ex-wife’s dinner party in the Hollywood hills – with terrifying results.  It’s half horror with a sprinkling of jealousy and outrage.  Not bad, but not for the faint of heart.  Here’s the trailer

What to Read…

There are two books about Palestine which are both easy to read and really pack a punch. I just finished Fida Jiryis’ Stranger in My Own Land: Palestine, Israel and One Family’s Story of Home.   Fida’s father, Sabri Jiryis, is a Palestinian lawyer who was born and raised in Fassouta, a small Christian village in The Triangle area of northern Israel.  In other words he was—in the old lexicon an Israeli Arab – and is a Palestinian. 

In the Nakba 1948, all the villages surrounding Fassouta were destroyed by the Israeli army — but due to the coaxing by some village elders and the church, Fassouta was spared.  Sabri Jiryis attended law school at Hebrew University which, in the early 1960s, boasted barely 50 Palestinian students.  Sabri Jiryis was a PLO leader and a close advisor to Yasser Arafat.  Jiryis is the author of the seminal book The Arabs in Israel (1976), which is prefaced by Noam Chomsky.  In the later ’60s, Jiryis lived under Israeli administrative detention, under crushing conditions of house arrest and also served time in jail, where he organized a hunger strike.  By 1970, he could see that life in Israel would mean longer jail terms and no opportunity to fight for Palestine.  So he and his wife went into self-imposed exile in Beirut.  Though born in Israel, he did not return there for 24 years. 

Jiryis’ daughter, Fida, was born in 1973 in Beirut where the family had relocated.   In Stranger in My Own Land,  Fida traces the richness of their lives in Beirut while under the endless threats of deportation and invasion by Israel.  She writes powerfully about the massacres in the Sabra neighbourhood and Shatila refugee camps in September 1982  – which she meticulously footnotes in her book.  It is a pleasure to read, because she backs up everything she writes. 

Left: Fida and her father lawyer and writer Sabri Jiryis (credit: Fida Jiryis), centre Fida’s book, portrait of Fida (credit Emil Salman)

As we know, Israeli Defence Minister Ariel Sharon was the puppet master behind the murders of more than 2800 Palestinian refugees and Lebanese civilians in the camps.  Israel wanted the PLO and its sympathisers driven out, but instead settled on using the Falange (the Maronite Christian militia in Lebanon) to do the dirty and heinous job.  Though a child at the time, she recalls events in her neighbourhood of Beirut, the newspapers and the terror that gripped the Palestinians.  The book is a treasure trove of a insights about her difficult childhood (Fida’s mother was killed by a car bomb set off by the Israelis in front of her Beirut office), and an unsettled adulthood.  First– Fida, her brother and dad had to flee Beirut and settle in Cyprus where money was tight. She had to learn English. Then she attended a top British university to study computer science.

After the Oslo Accords in 1993, Israel allowed only a few dozen Palestinians to return to Israel proper. She and her father returned to Fassouta.  There she found no solace. Half her neighbours informed for the  Israelis, and the rest were afraid to discuss– let alone challenge– the Occupation. Fida and her then-husband moved to Canada where they dreamed of peace and a “normal life”. Instead they worked at minimum wage jobs in factories, bereft of friends and family.  She details the racism and lack of opportunity the couple found in Kitchener, Ont., then in Mississauga.  On her own, she returned to Fassouta, and decided to move again –this time to Ramallah in the West Bank where she got a job as the executive director of a theatre company. Again she was an outsider – a woman with Israeli citizenship and finally free to live in her family’s hometown in Israel– but at a very high price. 

This book is a must for anyone who wants to understand Palestine (and Israel).  Just published in 2023, it should be an award winner. 

The second book I recommend on Israel and Palestine is a brand new young adult novel Finding Melody Sullivan. Written by Alice Rothchild, a Jewish-American obstetrician, writer, filmmaker and social activist, Rothchild has written two excellent nonfiction books: On the Brink: Israel and Palestine on the Eve of the 2014 Gaza Invasion (2014) and Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience (2010). 

This is her first foray into fiction and what a book it is! Melody Sullivan is a 16-year-old in Vermont whose mother has recently died from cancer. Melody is in a very dark place when her dad insists the two of them take a “bonding” trip to Israel. The two do not get along. An archaeologist attending a conference, her father is not overly keen to spend time with Melody.  Though he is not a Jew, her late mother was Jewish, and has relatives Melody hopes to meet in Israel.  Melody, sullen and depressed, strikes out on her own.  It’s the experience of a lifetime – she buses to East Jerusalem, to Bethlehem and then to visit a friend Hebron – the centre for deadly Israeli aggression on the West Bank. Rothchild portrays Melody in a warm yet an unfiltered light.  Her relationship with her dad is believable and upsetting.  Her Jewish friend from high school is a Zionist and a racist to whom she sends “reality check” photos and texts. These are brilliant way to demonstrate to the reader her new understanding of the situation and what has to be done.

I can’t say enough good about Finding Melody Sullivan.  I read it as an e-book, the same way I I read the Jiryis book. 

YvesEngler.com is the blog by a left-wing Canadian journalist with an acute sense of injustice which is attributable to Canada’s role overseas.  Engler, who is the author of a dozen books, has keen insights and certainly exposes what the mainstream and legacy media does not.  In this post, One Foreign Government Openly Interferes in Canadian Politics, Engler names Israel as a key country that seems to have undue influence here in Canada. Well worth reading especially in these times in which hostility toward China (and Russia) are the new normal.

Undocumented workers, fighting back…

“I may be undocumented, but I am able and willing.”

Jane in Sara Mojtehedzadeh’s article here

Sara Mojtehedzadeh, the workplace reporter for the Toronto Star, wrote an excellent long article in late May about the life of Jane, an illegal worker in Toronto who hails from Uganda.  In Late-night texts, secret jobs, constant fear: Inside an undocumented worker’s life in the shadows, we learn of the exploitation, the stress, the poverty wages and broken social connections of illegal immigrants who want to stay here and work.  Often rejected as refugees by the powers that be, these workers do the most terrible jobs, spend hours on public transit, have no health insurance or even a decent place to live.  According to Mojtehedzadeh’s article, Trudeau’s Liberals are promising that their government is going to award permanent residency to at least some of the thousands of undocumented workers in Canada.  In 1973, Trudeau’s dad, Prime Minister PE Trudeau, gave an amnesty so those without documents could apply for permanent residency.  

Those without health insurance, like Jane, “are three times more likely than other residents to be suffering from mental health issues, research shows. They are 39 per cent more likely to need urgent triaging. They are also more likely to die.”

–Sara Mojtenhedzadeh

What Podcasts to Listen to…

The Redeye podcast (from Vancouver Co-op Radio) has a nice 18 minute episode about the stigma those with Indian Status cards encounter when they show their cards (so they pay no extra tax on purchases) at stores.  This is detailed in a new study, They Sigh or They Give You the Look: Discrimination and Status Card Usage commissioned by the Union of BC Indian Chiefs. Here it is.

Still photos from selected Ken Loach films, right side two down wearing glasses is Ken Loach.

Famous British left-wing and brilliant filmmaker Ken Loach is in his mid-80s.  He has recently announced he will no longer make films.  His myriad of films include Kes, Cathy Come Home (my favourite and I think his first film), The Wind that Shook the Barley, and I- Daniel Blake. This article in Guardian gives little write-ups about his films and ranks them. There is a nice 30 minute interview with him on the set of his soon to be released final film here: In the Studio: Ken Loach.

Noticed:

A great poem by Hilton Obenzinger.  Obenzinger, an American Jew, published a very useful and clever little book back in 1980 This Year or the Next I will Never be in Jerusalem which is a repudiation of the last words spoken at the end the Passover Seder – “Next year in Jerusalem”.  His anti-Israeli Apartheid stance, his humour and his social conscience is evident in all his work.  Here’s one of his poems about being older in Witness 2017-2020. 

June 12, 2018 by Hilton Obenzinger

I've joined the army
I've joined the club of old men with canes
I hadn't realized it until Mr Pain struck me down
Tossed me in with the wrecks at the junkyard
I never noticed before all the limping hobbling old guys
There are women on crutches and walkers too
Gray-haired travelers sitting on scooters
But it's old men with canes that are my tribe
We wink at each other as we pass
We know what it's like
How all of life has slowed down by necessity
But it's old men with canes that are my tribe
Allowing for an amusing illusion of choice
We shuffle off to Buffalo or Palo Alto
With a cane and the past
None of the kids would believe
What we once did
How we outran the cops
Stood long hours operating machines
Shot at shadows in the jungle
Now obstacles loom like icebergs
Steps and doors and sex and crosswalks 
Standing at a urinal trying to engineer
My fly while holding a cane
Now some old guys with crooked legs and hips
Tilt with their canes
Limp like old sports
Some need to keep balance with a stick
A little vertigo after decades of dizzying gravity
Yanking our spines down to our ankles
Others constantly curse Mr Pain
Bent low over their canes
Horizontal emblems of time gone
Mr Pain visits me just as he does the others
Mr Pain is not mean just does his job
Clutches legs and crushes backs
A companion always loyal
But Mr Pain's no fool he's the glue
He holds all the canes together
He's the sergeant at arms for this club
Welcome to my back, Mr Pain
Can I invite you for a walk?
And beat your head in with my stick?

Featured painting above: Painting of human aging, by Spanish painter Sergi Cadenas, a top optical art artist. To see how the painting image changes as you walk by, see this.