Pink Ribbons, Inc. (2012)

Run Time: 98 min.
Director: Léa Pool
Call Number: RC280.B8 P56 2012

"According to this 2011 documentary by Lea Pool, a woman's likelihood of contracting breast cancer has almost tripled since 1940, which has prompted private organizations like Susan G. Koman for the Cure to take an active role in funding cancer research. But the film raises the question of whether branding the disease has taken precedence over preventing it. Doctors, writers (including Barbara Ehrenreich, whose 2001 Harper's story related her own experience with cancer), and a support group of terminal patients plainly and coherently critique survivor-centric marketing campaigns as insensitive toward those won't make it and myopic in stressing cure over prevention. In one striking image, actress Elizabeth Hurley pouts at cameras in a skimpy pink dress as an Estee Lauder vice president announces that the Empire State Building will be lit up pink (the company, Pool later reveals, uses suspected carcinogens in some of its products)." 
—Asher Klein, Chicago Reader

Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment (2012)

Director: Toby Perl Freilich
Run Time: 89 min.
Call Number: HX742.2 .I58 2012

"In 1910 a dozen young Eastern European Jews moved to the Jordan Valley, then under Ottoman rule, and began to build an agrarian community based on a utopian socialist vision. Men and women were treated equally, everyone shared all they had, and no one had more than anyone else. 

That collective, called Degania, was a kibbutz, the first of a communal movement that symbolized aspirations for a Jewish homeland and became, after Israel’s statehood, an influential force that eventually was overwhelmed by the capitalistic society that it had helped to foster. 

As 'Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment,' an engrossing documentary by Toby Perl Freilich, shows, the kibbutz movement, now more than 100 years old, has been under constant siege of one form or another. The film meshes interviews with first-, second- and third-generation kibbutzniks— including those from Sasa, the first kibbutz founded by Americans—and commentary from Israeli scholars with tours of numerous kibbutzim today and vintage footage from as far back as the 1920s."

—Daniel M. Gold, New York Times