Youth v Gov (2020 | USA | 110 minutes | Christi Cooper)
I dare you to get to the end of this documentary without getting emotional about these 21 brave, idealistic, and well-spoken young activists fighting their noble and urgent legal fight – one which should not have been left up to them. We follow them through the interminable process of pushing their case, Juliana v. United States, through the courts, in this generation’s best hope to make institutional progress on climate change before it’s too late.
In the Same Breath (2021 | USA | 95 minutes | Nanfu Wang)
This well-composed and infuriating COVID-19 documentary shares similarities with 2020’s 76 Days: Wuhan hospital footage, coordinated by a US-based Chinese-born filmmaker working with on-the-ground videographers – but 76 Days reads more like raw source material, while Nanfu Wang (One Child Nation)’s latest is a more zoomed-out synthesis, making more sense of how we got here, finding parallels between the US’s and China’s mismanagement of containment efforts, and finding plenty of blame to spread around.
Fly So Far (2021 | El Salvador | 88 minutes | Celina Escher)
In this documentary which manages to be both inspirational and crushingly upsetting, Teodora Vásquez finds herself in the position of spokesperson for a group of Salvadoran women who have been imprisoned – most for a sentence in the neighborhood of 30 years for “aggravated homicide” – after having miscarriages, throwing them unwillingly into a highly criminalized and politicized group under their country’s extremely strict laws and overtly religious views against abortion.
Interspersed with talking heads and on-the-scene footage, animation pops up throughout the film to illustrate the deeply harrowing tales told by Teodora and the other women of her cohort, who banded together when they were a group of 17 realizing they were all in the same prison on the same trumped-up charges (and thus earned the nickname “the 17 Women” going forward) but have ranged in actual numbers cited since then from anywhere between 18 and 129.
The position this film seems to take for most of its runtime is more “Teodora and the rest of the 17 Women are innocent because they were not trying to end their pregnancies”, not “none of these women should be imprisoned because abortion should not be illegal”, although it makes some light gestures in that direction – shifting from the personal “I did not commit the crime of abortion” to the more global “abortion should not be a crime” – toward the end. Progress is made, especially once international pressure is applied and word gets out in the press – a common theme throughout this festival’s social-justice documentaries – but it’s not enough.
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