What to Watch…

Traces, is a 2019 BBC series with five episodes you can see on Kanopy.   It’s a clever series that focuses on two women academics.  One is a chemistry prof and the other is a forensic anthropologist;  both work in a research lab at a fictional Scottish university.  Emma, their new lab assistant  has returned to the city of her birth to try to find about how and why her mother was killed 20 years earlier.  The acting is good, the dialogue is better – so watch the first episode and see for yourself. All films and series are free on Kanopy. Here’s the trailer,

The Åre Murders (2024). Hanna, a Stockholm detective under internal investigation travels to a ski resort in Åre (pronounced Ore) to take a rest from her work. A young girl’s disappearance peaks her sympathies, so she takes a “locum” to work with the tiny, local police force to investigate.    until a young girl’s disappearance compels her back to work. The trailer’s here.

Protection is a 2024 on Britbox.  Terribly named, this is an interesting police series with six episodes.  It’s DI Liz Nyles, the starring actor (Siobhan Finneran who we’ve seen on Happy Valley), that really carries the series.  Nyles is in charge of witness protection services for the police department in a northern English city – looks like Liverpool.  She finds herself trapped in a web of the criminal underworld.  Nyles herself becomes compromised which means she is always pushing for the truth about several murders–  but pulling back as she does not want to stir an interest in her private life.  Worth watching, watch the trailer here.

A Man Imagined (free on NFB site) is a brilliant one hour documentary about an unhoused man living with little but his memories on the streets of Montreal.  To make money he sells junk he finds in the garbage such as an old glass coffee pot for $5, or an oversized My Little Pony toy for 50-cents to motorists stopped at traffic lights. This is a slow and quiet film just made in 2024, which shows a lot about the underside of city life in Canada. Watch it here.

Emilia Pérez.  In this recent Academy award winner, Zoe  Saldaña (who won for Best Supporting Actress) plays a tense if successful lawyer Rita Mora Castro who lives in Mexico City.  She is abducted by members of a drug cartel and meets the cartel’s boss, Manitas.   He tells her he will pay her a fortune if she helps him get a sex change operation to become a woman and disappear from his life of crime.  Everything is top secret:  Rita must be able to cover his tracks, explain his disappearance and eventual “death” to his family, then act as his conduit for various business and other affairs.  The plot is unique and pretty good. The most astounding thing about this film is the music – it’s like an opera.  The singing of original songs, the dance choreography and the sheer vibrancy of the film is wonderful.  Emilia Pérez is worth watching.  It’s more than 2.5 hours of a kind of a morality play, and it’s on Netflix. The Trailer is here.

Johan Grimonprez’s 2024 documentary Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat on Kanopy reveals the curious link between Black Americans’ fight for civil rights, the Black musicians such as Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie who were sent to Africa by the US State Department to promote US style democracy in the Congo, and the assassination of Congo’s first democratically-elected Black leader Patrice Lumumba.  This is an excellent film: the music, the ambience and the speeches by Malcolm X and Lumumba were inspiring.  Of course the way the CIA and the FBI took advantage of Black performers—or played activists such as Malcolm X–  is chilling.  Fascinating and worth watching. Here’s a trailer.

Several very American-focused  dramas or documentaries I normally wouldn’t watch but somehow I was got hooked into watching these three:   

Marshall (2017) is worth watching; it’s on Netflix.  Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993)  was a Black civil rights lawyer who worked for the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in the US.  From the 1940s on, he  won many cases for Blacks charged with serious crimes who were in fact innocent.  He served as associate justice of the US Supreme Court from 1967-91.  This drama gives a real sense of his impatience and refusal to conform to whites’ low expectations of him.   His treatment of clients and other lawyers around him shows a confidence and rage not typical at the time.  Pretty good. 

McCarthy is riveting. A 2020 documentary on Netflix, it lifts the veil on all kinds of footage of Wisconsin’s senator Joe McCarthy, architect of the anti-communist witch-hunt of the 1950s, as well the rise of the right after World War II.  This was a fascinating portrayal of a man who has been reviled for decades – but whose activities are celebrated and his agenda pushed by many in Washington today.  

The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby is a 2011 American documentary film exploring the life and career of former CIA director William Colby.  This film was made by his eldest son Carl who at first questioned his dad’s role in support of the US’s military.  Colby had been a top CIA agent for decades and then ran the CIA until his ouster in favour of George HW Bush in 1976.  Colby (his wife and children) lived in Saigon in the late 50s. In the 1960s, his family safe in the US, Colby lived in Viet Nam during the height of the war.  But soon in the film, Carl the filmmaker seemed to stop questioning and accepted his father’s role in thousands of murders and dozens of coups worldwide.  The only mystery around William Colby was his death.  An excellent sailor, he went out in his canoe in summer 1996 and never returned.  His body was found eight days later – cause of death was drowning.  Most say it was suicide. 

What to Read…

As usual, I ploughed through a couple of books by  John Grisham.  He and Jim McCloskey, a founder of  Centurion Ministries, the first organization in the world devoted to freeing the wrongly convicted, co-wrote an unusual and valuable book  Framed: Astounding True Stories of Wrongful Conviction  (2024). Each author takes a turn writing a different chapter of wrongful conviction.  The styles of the two writers are very different – Grisham is more factual and argumentative;  McCloskey provides details and emotional depth.  Here are my favour cases that are chapters  in the book:  “The Norfolk Four,” “Absence of Motive”, “Ellen Reasonover”, and “Fire Does Not Lie”. 

I read Grisham’s Sycamore Row – I read it first about a decade ago and couldn’t remember much.  Reading it again (and it’s 500 pages) was worthwhile.  Grisham deals with the history of Blacks lynched in a rural Mississippi county in a novel way.  In 1987, an elderly white lumbermill owner, Seth Hubbard, dies; his body is found hanging on his property near a row of sycamore trees. Suicide.  Though they had never met, the suicide note demanded that small town progressive lawyer, Jake Brigance, handle his estate.  The problem is that Hubbard’s holographic will leaves his more than $20 million fortune to his Black housekeeper of just three years.  This is a thriller, or a whodunit, set against the backdrop of race, the KKK and a justice system that seldom works on behalf of Black people. 

“The Frenzy”, is a wonderful new short story by Joyce Carol Oates you can read in The New Yorker here, or listen to it here.  She’s a masterful short fiction writer and this story is brutally funny and a joy to read. 

Tina Fontaine age 15, and book covers.

I listened to the Audible Book of Red River Girl: the Life and Death of Tina Fontaine written and read by British author Joanna Jolly.  In the introduction, Jolly claims that no one in Europe or the UK was aware of Canada’s dirty secret — the hundreds of Indigenous women and girls who had been murdered or had gone missing.  Jolly decided to investigate for herself.  Red River Girl is about the shocking 2014 murder of Indigenous teen Tina Fontaine in Winnipeg .  .  The book relies on words and actions of a top Winnipeg police detective Sgt John O’Donovan, the lead investigator on the case.  As many will recall, police could never get a confession out of 52-year-old suspect Raymond Cormier.  He vigorously denied killing Fontaine who was only age 15 at the time.  The crown used the ‘evidence’ of two jailhouse informants which was obviously not reliable; the crown was then left with only circumstantial evidence which did not convince the jury to find Cormier guilty of second degree murder.  Cormier, the only suspect, had spent two years in jail yet was found not guilty and walked free.

Tracking down green duvet covers

The most astounding part of the book was how Sgt O’Donovan managed to track the duvet in which Tina was wrapped when she was found dead in the Red River in August 2014.   O’Donovan managed to track the pattern (light green with swirling leaves along the trim) to having been sold at Costco in Winnipeg.  Costco only allowed “members” to purchase goods or groceries, so all the duvet purchases had been tracked.  Police officers were dispatched to the homes of all 90 local people who, records showed, had bought duvets sold by Costco in months leading up to the murder.  Once on the people’s doorsteps, the police asked the owner to fetch their duvet and show it so the police could note seeing it.  Sgt O’Donovan’s homicide unit managed to locate about 80 duvets and their buyers.  But a handful of people had given their duvet away, tossed it out or didn’t know where it was.  In addition, 10 duvets had been donated to a charity shop; it was unknown how many of them had been purchased and by whom.  Still this book is worth reading especially against the recent finding of the remains of murdered Indigenous women in the Winnipeg dump.  We know each of these women were murdered and dumped, likely by white men, just as Tina was.   

What about Podcasts?

I highly recommend–

1. What  Do We Want? A Podcast for Movements (& Activism) – written and discussed by my talented son Max Haiven and colleague Sarah Stein Lubrano.  It’s here.
2. The Daily News a Sandy and Nora Podcast  –a roundup of 7 minutes of news you won’t hear even on the CBC. Listen to it daily here.
3. The Take, on Al Jazeera, 20 minutes on an international news story– listen here
4. Al Jazeera True Crime Reports – be sure to listen to The Murder of Malcolm Caldwell.
5. Canadian True Crime; I say Kristi Lee for PM! I know she hails from Australia – but she’s a Canadian citizen! follow her here.

Images at the Top: some of 27 black and white photos of people in the Belgian Congo (now Democratic Republic of Congo DRC ) sold by Rob Michiels’ Auctions. Then watch Sound Track to a Coup d’Etat.