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Films:
Unhappy with his marriage and unsuccessful as a career puppeteer, Craig takes a job filing documents in a Manhattan office. He meets and falls in love with office worker Maxine, who cares nothing for him. One day Craig finds a tunnel in a wall behind a filing cabinet. He climbs through it, and at the end he can see through the eyes of actor John Malkovich. Craig and Maxine embark on a business venture, charging people to crawl through the Malkovich portal. To woo Maxine, Craig stays within Malkovich, and redirects Malkovich’s career from acting to puppetry. But, Maxine loses interest in Craig, and has a lesbian relationship with Craig’s wife, Lottie. Craig is trapped forever in another portal. The film received Academy Awards nominations for best director & best original screenplay.
Unhappy with his marriage and unsuccessful as a career puppeteer, Craig takes a job filing documents in a Manhattan office. He meets and falls in love with office worker Maxine, who cares nothing for him. One day Craig finds a tunnel in a wall behind a filing cabinet. He climbs through it, and at the end he can see through the eyes of actor John Malkovich. Craig and Maxine embark on a business venture, charging people to crawl through the Malkovich portal. To woo Maxine, Craig stays within Malkovich, and redirects Malkovich’s career from acting to puppetry. But, Maxine loses interest in Craig, and has a lesbian relationship with Craig’s wife, Lottie. Craig is trapped forever in another portal. The film received Academy Awards nominations for best director & best original screenplay.
During the embattled final months of Jean-Bertrand Aristide's second term as president of Haiti, Aristide's allies recruited street gangs from the nation's poorest cities to act as strong-arm men, helping to shut down resistance to Aristide and quiet those who opposed him. Called chimères (or "ghosts"), these gang-bangers became a powerful part of Aristide's forces until the president was removed from office by a coup d'etat in 2004. Dutch filmmaker Asger Leth combines mockumentary reenactments with footage shot in the ghettos of Cité Soleil during Aristide's final days in this powerful drama that follows two brothers and chimères, Billy (James Petit Frere) and 2Pac (Winson Jean). Billy dreams of someday leaving behind the gang life and becoming part of Aristide's political machine, while 2Pac has become disillusioned with politics and wants to become a rap star in the manner of his hero and namesake, Tupac Shakur. In a place where political allegiances shift every day and brutal violence is commonplace, Billy and 2Pac's relationship is already a tense one, but matters become even more difficult between them when they both fall in love with the same woman -- Lele (Eleonore Senlis), a French social worker who understands the power these men hold better than they do themselves. Ghosts of Cité Soleil features a musical score by Wyclef Jean of the Fugees, who also appears in the film in a scene in which he discusses music and politics with 2Pac.
In August 2005, the American city of New Orleans was struck
by the powerful Hurricane Katrina. Although the storm was damaging by itself,
that was not the true disaster. That happened when the city's flooding
safeguards like levees failed and put most of the city, which is largely below
sea level, underwater. This film covers that disastrous series of events that
devastated the city and its people. Furthermore, the gross incompetence of the
various governments and the powerful from the local to the federal level is
examined to show how the poor and underprivileged of New Orleans were
mistreated in this grand calamity and still ignored today.
An anthropologist goes to Haiti after hearing rumors about a drug used by black magic practitioners to turn people into zombies. Dennis Allan is a scientist who visits Haiti on the strength of a rumour of a drug which renders the recipient totally paralyzed but conscious. The drug's effects often fool doctors, who declare the victims dead. Could this be the origin of the "zombie" legend? Alan embarks on a surprising and often surreal investigation of the turbulent social chaos that is Haiti during the revolution which ousted hated dictator "Baby Doc" Duvalier. Often a pawn in a greater game, Alan must decide what is science, what is superstition, and what is the unknown in a anarchistic society where police corruption and witch-doctory are commonplace.
Books:
Frederick Douglass's Narrative is basically an autobiography. It's the story of his life from the time he was born a slave to the time of his escape to freedom in the North. But it's also a piece with a strong political message. When Douglass wrote this book in 1845, slavery was still legal in much of the United States. He became a public speaker and writer to try to stop it. He believed that if he showed people what slavery was really like, they would understand why it needed to be abolished. And who better than a former slave to tell the truth about slavery? So even though he wants to tell us his personal story, he never forgets the larger goal of abolishing slavery
Frederick Douglass's Narrative is basically an autobiography. It's the story of his life from the time he was born a slave to the time of his escape to freedom in the North. But it's also a piece with a strong political message. When Douglass wrote this book in 1845, slavery was still legal in much of the United States. He became a public speaker and writer to try to stop it. He believed that if he showed people what slavery was really like, they would understand why it needed to be abolished. And who better than a former slave to tell the truth about slavery? So even though he wants to tell us his personal story, he never forgets the larger goal of abolishing slavery
A master work of observation and description about the lives and rituals of the Haitian mambos and adepts, and of the history and origins of their religion.
A stunning graphic novel that makes plain the undeniable horrors and humanity triggered by Hurricane Katrina in the true stories of six New Orleanians who survived the storm.
A.D. follows each of the six from the hours before Katrina struck to its horrific aftermath. Here is Denise, a sixth-generation New Orleanian who will experience the chaos of the Superdome; the Doctor, whose unscathed French Quarter home becomes a refuge for those not so lucky; Abbas and his friend Mansell, who face the storm from the roof of Abbas’s family-run market; Kwame, a pastor’s son whose young life will remain wildly unsettled well into the future; and Leo, a comic-book fan, and his girlfriend, Michelle, who will lose everything but each other. We watch as they make the wrenching decision between staying and evacuating. And we see them coping not only with the outcome of their own decisions but also with those made by politicians, police, and others like themselves--decisions that drastically affect their lives, but over which they have no control.
On January 12, 2010, a major earthquake struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Hundreds of thousands of people died, and the greater part of the capital was demolished. Dr. Paul Farmer, U.N. deputy special envoy to Haiti, who had worked in the country for nearly thirty years treating infectious diseases like tuberculosis and AIDS, and former President Bill Clinton, the U.N. special envoy to Haiti, had just begun to work on an extensive development plan to improve living conditions in Haiti. Now their project was transformed into a massive international rescue and relief effort.
This powerful, intensely dramatic book is the definitive account of the Haitian Revolution of 1794-1803, a revolution that began in the wake of the Bastille but became the model for the Third World liberation movements from Africa to Cuba. It is the story of the French colony of San Domingo, a place where the brutality of master toward slave was commonplace and ingeniously refined. And it is the story of a barely literate slave named Toussaint L'Ouverture, who led the black people of San Domingo in a successful struggle against successive invasions by overwhelming French, Spanish, and English forces and in the process helped form the first independent nation in the Caribbean.
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