It’s the last day of the Cine Palium Fest in Palo del Colle, a medieval

village in southern Italy, where I’ve been serving on one of the juries,

and for me the highlight of the week has been the world premiere this

morning of an omnibus feature coproduced by Jay Rosenblatt and

Ellen Bruno consisting of thirteen very diverse but entertaining

pieces of anti-Trump agit-prop by seventeen filmmakers, in the

following order: Sarah Clift (a charming fiction about a Mexican

mother riding on her motorbike to a remote cave to acquire a huge

Trump doll from a mysterious shaman to serve as her little boy’s

birthday piñata), Pacho Velez and Nicole Salazar (the Trump

Inauguration as seen or ignored at the Tijuana border control), Kate

Amend and Pablo Bryant, Shy Hamilton, Ferne Pearlstein, Rosenblatt

(a characteristically Rosenblattian creepy and funny reworking of found

footage), Kris Samuelson and John Haptas, Usama Alshaibi (a scary look

at and listen to what American talk radio sounds like to someone with a

Muslim background who’s driving), Chel White, David Sampliner and

Rachel Shuman, Alan Berliner (a succinct way of summarizing what a

divided country consists of and feels like), Eva Ilana Brzeski (heart-

stopping portraiture of fellow Americans that reminds me of both

Dovzhenko and Costa), and Jeremy Rourke (reminding us of how joy

can be an empowering form of resistance).

 

I hope this can be seen widely in the U.S.; so far, the only other playdate

I’m aware of is a Rosenblatt retrospective in  Leipzig. The arrangement

of the shorts is skillful and inspired (as well as inspiring), and as I’ve

suggested in a Facebook post, this film is far more energizing than Rachel

Maddow enthusiastically crowing like Ed Sullivan about what a big show

she’s got in store for us tonight. Furthermore, this can’t exactly be

regarded as a parallel to either Far from Afghanistan or Far from

Vietnam; a more accurate subtitle might be From the Very Belly of the

Beast That’s Oppressing Us. [11/18/17]