The House I Live In (2013)

Director: Eugene Jarecki
Run Time: 108 min.
Call Number: HV825 .H68 2013


"Instead of peppering the audience with dull facts and figures, Jarecki uses people to illustrate his main thesis, which is that the American legal system has resorted to punishing drug offenders — even casual users — and permanently ruining their lives instead of trying to rehabilitate them. The war on drugs has become too lucrative an industry to rethink or reconsider. Entire towns depend on prisons for employment; the lack of opportunity for young people growing up in projects or slums practically ensures they will eventually resort to drug dealing, feeding the machine; ridiculously excessive sentences ensure there will always be a need for more jails (one man in the film is condemned to life without parole for carrying three grams of meth)."
—Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald

Nicky's Family (2013)

Director: Matej Mináč
Run Time: 96 min.

"Nicky’s Family is a Czech tribute (stirringly deserved) to Nicholas Winton, the Englishman who organized the rescue of mostly Jewish Czech children from Prague when the Nazis invaded. His organization has been active ever since in similar work. Welcome as this picture is, the tribute is only part of its achievement. It has created a cinematic marvel: a reproduction of Prague in 1939. . . . Most of us have seen plenty of film of Nazi devastation, but this film’s director, Matej Mináč, apparently felt that the available footage is not good enough; and so he and his Czech editors proceeded to recreate that crisis. By weaving originals and additions, the film creates the feeling of life in a territory where the Germans could pick up a section of the earth as if it were a blanket and toss it into disorder in the name of their order.

—Stephen Kauffman, The New Republic

Call Me Kuchu (2013)

Director: Katherine Fairfax Wright & Malika Zouhali-Worrall
Run Time: 86 min.

"Directed by Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall, this is a scary but inspiring film with real heroes and villains. Leading the list of heroes is David Kato, a fearless activist and prime mover in Uganda’s gay rights movement. Uganda’s first openly gay man, he was bludgeoned to death in January 2011 at 46. In a brief biography at the beginning of the film, he tells of his coming out during the six years he lived in South Africa, where a more tolerant atmosphere prevails. "
 —Stephen Holden, New York Times

Rise of the Drones (2013)

Director: Peter Yost
Run Time: 60 min.

This NOVA special may be of particular interest to the Boyd community, what with Nevada poised to become a major center for the development and testing of military drones.  From the show's website:  

"From cameras that can capture every detail of an entire city at a glance to swarming robots that can make decisions on their own to giant air frames that can stay aloft for days on end, drones are changing our relationship to war, surveillance, and each other. And it's just the beginning."

(Call Number: UG1242.D7 R57 2013)

The Act of Killing (2014)

Director: Joshua Oppenheimer
Run Time: 122 min.

"In 1965, paramilitary death squads 'exterminated' over a million countrymen. Never prosecuted, these now elderly men live as folk heroes in North Sumatra.

'I felt as though I had walked into Germany 40 years after the Holocaust, only to find the Nazis were in power,' Oppenheimer told Asia Times Online. Screened last April at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, this stunning 'documentary of the imagination' shows Anwar and other thugs staging scenes of torture and murder for the camera. 

Anwar sits his grandsons on his lap to watch him play a communist strangled by wire, the same technique he used hundreds of times. 'It shows exactly what it’s like to be me,' he says. He also plays a man he beheaded."
—Bill Stamets, Chicago Sun-Times 

(Call number: PN1997.2 .A286 2014)