AIFF 2014: Features In Competition - My voice rocks 6 unicorns in my pockets; I come, Ambassador, to Bern in hell I believe: in-appropriate behavior.

Trying to make a sentence using all the words from the titles of the feature films in competition taught me that verbs and conjunctions are scarce in the titles. I had to change some nouns to verbs. Left on the table:  'bullets' and 'the'. 

But if you remember this sentence - My voice rocks 6 unicorns in my pockets; I come, Ambassador, to Bern in hell I believe: in-appropriate behavior. - you should be able to remember all the features in competition.  Now go find the titles this came from.

Features are films that are fiction (even if based on a true story) and over 55 minutes long.  

In Competition means that after the initial screeners "selected" the films to be in the festival, the juries picked what they thought were the best of those selected.  Those films are 'in competition" for festival awards.

I'm sure there are other outstanding features - there always are - that don't make it into competition.  If I learn about any I'll let you know.

Fourteen Features were selected and six  are in competition.  They represent eleven different countries. 

• Australia/USA 
• Canada 
• France/Germany/Turkey  
• Hungary
• USA
• Spain/USA
• United Kingdom/Poland
• USA/Latvia 

One more film, Kurmanjan Datka [Queen of the Mountains] from Kyrgyzstan was selected and in competition when the Features were first announced, but it's no longer listed.  In that past that has meant a more prestigious festival won't take it if it's been shown elsewhere or some such situation.

  Our loss according to someone who saw the film.

6 Bullets To Hell
Tanner Beard
Spain/USA √
80 m
10:00 PM    Tue, Dec 9  Bear Tooth
10:00 PM     Sat, Dec 13  AK Exp Small

An excerpt from the Planet Spaghetti-Western:

"Opening with the sturm-und-twang of Ennio Morricone’s ‘Seconda caccia’, from The Big Gundown, and the killing of a cowering priest, 6 Bullets to Hell signals its intentions even before the rotoscope-style credits gambol across the screen. Assembled on a miserly budget by a coterie of genre aficionados and shot entirely in Almería and its environs, this US-Spanish co-production is an unabashed love letter to the overheated vendetta westerns that rolled in this region in the Sixties.”

The Ambassador to Bern (A Berne Követ)
Attila Szász
Hungary ✓ 
77m

5:30 PM Tue, Dec 9 Bear Tooth
5:30 PM Wed, Dec 10 AK Exp Small

The English poster for this film reflects the USA's obsession with guns.  The violence in the Hungarian poster is much more subtle.  I hope this means that violence in the trailer is all the violence in the film and the rest will be more drama.  I'm leaving the trailer off here because the quality of the youtube video is much poorer than the video on the movie's website.




The video quality on the Ambassador to Bern website is much better.  By the way, I found a copy of an Hungarian language trailer.  It's similar to the English language one, but shorter and no subtitles.  Apparently it showed on Hungarian television earlier this year.


It's taken from a true story about Hungarian immigrants in Switzerland, after the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956, who take over the Hungarian embassy in Bern.


The film won the Bronze Zenith for the First Fiction Feature Film at the Montreal Film Festival in September this year.  












Appropriate Behavior
Desiree Akhavan
USA √
90m
5:30 PM Mon, Dec. 8 Bear Tooth
8:00 PM Sat, Dec 13 Alaska Exp Small


Anchorage is Appropriate Behavior's 13th film festival this year - including Sundance - according to the film's website. 

From a New York Times piece on Desiree Arkhavan:

"For her part, Ms. Akhavan is quick to play down any suggestion that she is pursuing an agenda in her work as writer, director or performer. “I see where the funny lies and where the story is, and I chase the story wherever it leads me,” she says. “And it usually leads to a very personal place and my life just happens to involve all these hugely political things — being bisexual, being Iranian, and now being a woman is inherently political, too. But I don’t consider those things at all while I’m doing it.”

The underwear shopping clip at the web site will definitely get most people's attention.

Variety's review sees a good, but imperfect film, with lots of promise for its director:''

"It would probably be horribly reductive to describe Desiree Akhavan’s “Appropriate Behavior” as a lesbian Persian-American “Girls” knockoff, but it wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate, either. A debut feature from the writer-director-star, this tart, sexually frank portrait of a disintegrating relationship — and its long, bitter aftermath — packs plenty of punch in its best scenes, but it also frequently tests audience patience with its relentless deadpan affectlessness and insistence on leaving no Brooklyn cliche unmined. Pic should be a natural for future festival play all the same, and its auteur ought to be well worth watching once she starts to find her own voice."

Come to My Voice [Were Dengê Min][Sesime Gel]
Hüseyin Karabey
France, Germany, Turkey √
90m
8:00 PM Thu, Dec. 11 Bear Tooth
11 AM Sun, Dec 14 Alaska Exp Large


From the Hollywood Reporter:

"Raiding a Kurdish village after a tip-off, a Turkish military unit fails to find the weapons suggested by the informer; enraged, the captain (Nazmi Sinan Milici) orders all male villagers to be taken away for detention and questioning at the barracks, and told the remaining folk - elderly and children mostly - they would have to hand over 15 rifles and 20 guns within a week in exchange for the release of the men."

According to the review, this is just the starting point; the film shows the wider ripples of the Turkish military's action, but it appears that the main characters are a Kurdish grandmother and granddaughter.  

The review says it won the audience award at the Istanbul International Film Festival this year. 










I Believe In Unicorns

Leah Meyerhoff
USA √
80m
5:30 PM Sat, Dec 6 Alaska Exp Small
8:00 PM Tue, Dec 9 Bear Tooth


I can't tell much about this one.  The website has too many balloons and unicorns for me, but the reviewers see promise in filmmaker Meyerhoff. Dear Lemon Lima had cutesy teen stuff too, but turned out to be a very good film, if you could suspend reality enough for kids to wear shorts and go swimming in Fairbanks in December.  But it did win the audience award, so people here looked past those things.

 Ryan Lattanzio at Indiewire wrote:

". . . While the film gets kudos for carefully unpeeling the psychology of its young (anti-)heroine, "Unicorns" also contains a few fairly graphic sexual encounters between 16-year-old Davina, played with startling grace by Dyer, and Sterling, seething with the handsome Vack's silent menace. Nothing like being bent over a bail of hay and fucked doggie-style to cap off an affair to remember.

"Unicorns" is so narratively thin, it could be a short, and Meyerhoff's scrapbook style will irritate some, and enrapture others. But in a world of increasingly stentorian female filmmakers, she's one to watch."

Rob Dickie at Sound on Sight at the Edinburgh International Film Festival wrote:

. . . Even the live action sequences are scattered with moments of sublime and wistful beauty, notably when Davina and Sterling come across a group of circus performers in the dark. This scene is imagined, as are others in which Davina walks through a forest with a pair of wings, but they’re revealing nevertheless. The film becomes totally immersed in Davina’s way of thinking, using her own myths and metaphors to elucidate her deepest feelings.

As the title suggests, I Believe in Unicorns is a film about using fantasy as a means to escape the world. For Davina, this leads to excitement and new experiences but her belief in her visions blinds her to what’s really going on. Despite taking its structure and aesthetic from the American road movie, the film avoids all the usual pitfalls and clichés of that gnere. Instead, it uses nostalgia and familiar imagery to highlight just how far from that kind of situation this really is. These are ordinary teenagers in a dysfunctional relationship, grabbing half-heartedly at the chance for another life.

Both these are much longer reviews.

From Rocks In My Pocket website

Rocks In My Pockets
Signe Baumane
USA/Latvia √
88m
3:00 PM Sat, Dec. 6 Museum
5:00 PM Sun, Dec  7 Alaska Experience Large


Can you tell this story might involve mental health?  Peter Dunlap-Shohl is a local cartoonist (and AIFF film maker) whose blog on Parkinson's uses animation to help others understand what it's like to have Parkinsons.  And to remind others with Parkinsons that they are not alone.  I'm hoping this film will prove as enlightening and as funny as Peter's work.  Here's a short interview with filmmaker Signe Baumane from Rooftop Films, back in February 2013, before the film was complete:

Usually people want to make and see films about fantasy.  They want to have these romantic comedies, scenarios of which could never take place in real life. Since early age I was always wondering how come the things that I read in books about and the things I see in movies never take place in real life. And why is no one trying to depict or tell how it feels from inside. I wanted to focus on how the living process feels inside.

. . . As to depression.  You know, I get depressed sometimes, like twice, three times a year.  It hits me unexpectedly and  I have to deal with with. I don’t know why does it happen, theres no reason. You go through this cloud of foggy thoughts, slow expression, slow speech, you feel fatigued and have pain inside.  I was wondering how would I describe that pain to other people. Not only describe but also visually depict it.

For me, a very honest take on depression is also very funny.  The absurdity of it: here is life and it is wonderful – why would you want to die? Still, every 12 seconds of my day I think of killing myself.

. . . Depression has a stigma attached to it.  You’re not supposed to be depressed, you’re supposed to be dealing with everything.  And you should be dealing with everything but, except, sometimes you cant.  I wanted to communicate that moment of truth when you can’t deal.

The whole interview, which also discusses how the movie was made (by hand) is here.

I need to check on how this made it as a feature in competition without even being selected into the animated category.  I've had disagreements with some of the animated selections and winners in past years.  This looks to be a dark film, but one with lots of imagination.  But no judgments until I see the animated films.   And why doesn't this show at the Bear Tooth at all?  Are they afraid people don't want to see films about depression?  In December in Anchorage?  They would sell a lot of beer.  But I'm just speculating with no actual evidence.  I usually find out that things that seem strange often have a good explanation. 

Here's the official trailer:

Cold in Midwest? It's 50˚F Here In Anchorage Right Now

The thermometer in our backyard says 50˚F (10˚C) right now, early Monday morning. 

Meanwhile, CNN reports:

"The ice man cometh. And does so early this year, after a former Pacific typhoon flew up toward the Arctic and rammed the jet stream.
The stream has whipped south, dragging down frigid air from Canada over the northern Plains and Mountain States and the Upper Midwest, according to the National Weather Service.
It is already plunging temperatures below freezing there and will hammer them into the teens and single digits in many places by midweek, even lower in others."

[UPDATE Monday morning 10am:  It's down to a still seasonably mild 40˚F (4.4˚C)]

Fixing Leeks

And onions.

"Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes . . ." Crawl In This Afternoon at 3:30 At UAA

A group I'm mixed up with, Healing Racism in Anchorage (HRA),  is helping sponsor an event today that I'd strongly recommend, especially if you have kids.  Shirley Mae Springer and her friend, Mary Schallert, will be introducing their new CD's.

I know Shirley, because she is a past board member of HRA and she's a very gifted singer plus she's worked many years with kids in the Anchorage School District.  So if you're just sitting there checking the internet, go out and connect with real people and some great music.

3:30pm  Today (SUNDAY Nov. 9)  UAA Theater/Arts Recital Hall

Here's to promo language:

Join Mary and Shirley Mae for a magical Sunday afternoon of music, music and more music!

 Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness. — Maya Angelou

 This could be the motto for two very different performers in the Anchorage community.  Mary Schallert and Shirley Mae Springer Staten, combined, have more than 60 years of music experience in the Anchorage community. Shirley Mae’s music is rooted in Southern Gospel tradition and Mary’s music is rooted in the traditions of California Folk and other community-based music styles. The music passion each woman has blends into a sweet, magical sound, welcoming to all.

Shirley Mae Springer Staten and Mary Schallert will convene in a magical Sunday afternoon performance to celebrate another milestone of musical accomplishment. Shirley Mae’s new CD “Perfect Love” and Mary’s CD “Short Stories.” Shirley Mae and Mary will engage the audience with a varied musical compilation including some songs from their newest CDs

If you don't know that room at UAA, this is a good way to see one of Anchorage's great performing arts locations.

(Directions:  It's at the far east side of campus.  Go into UAA just east of the library at the light.  Turn right at the Administration building.  Then that road gets you to the theater/arts building.)

Alaska Lags Behind Vermont and New Hampshire in % of 18-60 Year Olds Who Have Smoked Pot

From Live Science:

In addition to the people who habitually smoke pot, there are many others who have at least tried it. Just over half of Americans report that they have tried pot at least once, according to data collected between 2000 and 2011 in the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), which provides national- and state-level data on the use of tobacco, alcohol and illicit drugs. However, the percentage of people who say they have smoked pot at least once varies among states, ranging from 38 percent in Utah to 67.1 percent in Vermont. Here is a map showing the percentage of people in each state who have ever used marijuana:

Just over half of Americans report that they have tried pot at least once
Credit: Anita Rahman/Live Science

View full size image

How Many Blacks In The 114th Congress? And My Feedburner Issues

This post has two goals:

• Get people who come to this blog from other blogs' blogrolls to see this post called How Many Blacks In The 114th Congress?
  
• To let people know a little bit about FeedBurner and feeds in general.

FeedBurner Icon

FeedBurner sends a message out to subscribers that a blogger has put up a new post.  It also updates blogrolls on other blogs.  I get enough hits from other blogrolls that if feedburner doesn't relay my new post, it's noticeable. 

So when the new post was put up about the number of Blacks in Congress after the election, but FeedBurner didn't relay it to other blogs, I tried to repost it.  Sometimes that works.  But it didn't.  When I've looked on line for reasons FeedBurner doesn't work, size is often mentioned.  I've got a Scribed table in that post and I'm wondering if that's the problem.  So I'm sending out this post with the link.

But it seems like a good idea to just talk about FeedBurner as well, for people who really don't know what it is.  It's useful for bloggers who want people to be able to get to their blogs.  With Feedburner, they can find the new blog post on other blogrolls.  Or they can subscribe to the blog and get email notices or have it come to their news reader.  I have to confess that once I got comfortable with how my blog was working, I stopped paying a lot of attention to the technology and focused more on what I was writing.  So here's a video that explains FeedBurner better than I could. 

When I was looking for FeedBurner info, I found a number of posts around July 2013 predicting that Google might be shutting down FeedBurner and what bloggers should do about it. They say the program hasn't been updated for a long time.  Maybe that's why I'm having problems regularly. Here's a post in June 2014 that tells people about alternatives to FeedBurner and why we should use them.  I guess I better start paying more attention to the tech side again. 

How Many Blacks In the 114th Congress?

My first post on this topic came out of frustration that I couldn't easily find the answer. It's sort of easier now, but not really. In any case I've found it necessary to keep updating this information - particularly after an election. From what I can tell, checking the districts of the current Black Congress Members and searching for new ones, the 114th Congress, that begins its two year term next January, will have 45 Black Congress Members.  That's two more than the 113th Congress and includes the first Republican black woman (from Utah).  There will also be two Black Senators - one Republican and one Democrat.  You can find more on Black Senators in the previous post.

This post updates the table I put together after the 2012 election which you can find here.

I've tried to keep some of notes on changes in people between 2012 and now - in some cases people were appointed or elected to fill the terms of members who left between sessions such as Melvin Watt who resigned to become the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

The chart is in alphabetical order by states.  [This chart was updated Nov 7, 2016 to:
1.  add New Jersey District 12 Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman originally overlooked because she was a new African-American represented from a district that was 75% white
2.  corrected spelling of Rep. Marc Veassey in Texas 33rd.]

Black Congress 2014 NovemberUpdated by Steve on Scribd

This is an update of previous lists that I put together when I couldn't find an up-to-date list of Black Members of Congress.  You can get a list of earlier posts here.  Please email me any errors or omissions. Email link in right column above blog archive.  Thanks.




I checked the numbers with the LA Times election results page which is very quick and very easy to use.  I used other sites to get the Washington DC election results. and the
Virgin Island election results.

South Carolina Race- Second Time Two African-Americans Compete For US Senate Seat

Senator Tim Scott was appointed to the US Senate in December 2012 until the November 2014 election to fill the position after Jim DeMint resigned.  This week he was elected to finish the last two years of DeMint's original term. (So there were two US Senate races in South Carolina this year.) Scott, the first African-American to represent South Carolina in the US Senate, defeated Democrat Joyce Dickerson, also an African-American, to become the first elected African-American from South Carolina.  This got me thinking about whether there had been a US Senate race where two African-Americans were the candidates.  It turns out there was one before as people in Illinois will surely remember.

There have only been nine African-American US Senators, beginning with two from Mississippi - Hiram Rhodes Revels and Blanche Bruce.  Both were Republicans, the party of Lincoln. They were both appointed by the Mississippi State Legislature.  (US Senators were not directly elected by the voters until after the 17th Amendment was ratified in 1913.)


In 1966 Massachusetts Republican Edward Brooke became the first African-American to be elected to the Senate.

In 1992 Carol Moseley Braun, Democrat in Illinois, became the second to be elected to, and the first woman African-American in, the Senate.

In 2002 Democrat Barack Obama defeated Republican and also African-American Alan Keyes.  Yes, this was the first time two African-Americans ran for the US Senate against each other.

When Obama was elected President, another African-American, Roland Burris, was appointed to finish his term.

Then came the appointment of Tim Scott to replace DeMint followed by the appointment of Mo Cowan of Massachusetts to replace John Kerry when he was appointed Secretary of State.

Finally, Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, was elected in a special election to fill the vacancy after Senator Frank R. Lautenberg's death.  Booker was reelected in this week's election.

So, a total of nine black US Senators.  Of those,

• two were appointed by the Mississippi state legislature
• three were appointed, one of those going on to get elected for another term (Scott)
• four elected to office the first time

A sidenote to the unexpected Democratic loss of the Maryland governorship is that the Democratic candidate, Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown, is African-American.  You can get more on that story here.


The outlines of this post come from a Wikipedia List of African-Americans in The US Senate, which also puts these numbers into context:

"As of 2014, there have been 1,950 members of the United States Senate, but only nine have been African American."

That Wikipedia entry also had a strange side note of sorts about P.B.S. Pinckback titled:

"African Americans elected to the U.S. Senate, but not seated"

It doesn't say anything more about how that happened, but there are footnotes. 

Google turns up almost nothing on Pinchback.  A footnote in the Wikipedia piece leads to an essay on Black politicians and the post civil war South from the US House of Representatives History, Art, and Archives pages that probably offers the most meat.  Here's most of what they say about Pinchback:

"In a unique case of double contested elections, African-American Pinckney B. S. Pinchback of Louisiana was elected simultaneously to both the Senate and House. Pinchback lost the contested House seat and, citing claims of fraud in the state legislature, the Senate denied him his seat as well. Serving as provisional governor of Louisiana at the time, Pinchback signed his own election certifications."

 I suspect that Pinchback would make a great doctoral dissertation and/or book.


For people wondering how I got into this, I'm updating my older posts on Blacks in Congress to reflect this week's election.  This is one of the sidebars that's delaying posting that one. 

What Election?

This Steller Jay was oblivious to yesterday's election.  Didn't mention it at all when he came to visit today.  Instead he wanted to know about my foot and what the doctor had said.  He had his own foot problems - much worse than mine.  But he seemed to be managing pretty well.

Now, he has wings to help him get around.  But this foot also takes the place, somewhat, of a hand.  Though the beak does a lot of that work too.  So I fashioned him a boot like mine to see if that would help out. 

Did Brat Win In Virginia?

David Brat's the econ professor at Randolf-Macon College in Virginia who knocked off House Majority Leader  Eric Cantor in the Republican primary in June 2014.

Yes, he defeated his Randolf Mason colleague, Jack Trammell  60.9% - 36.9%.  147,897 to 89,793.  [From Politico]

Someone got to my post on the June upset by googling "Did Brat from Virginia win?" and I realized I didn't know and it was a good question.  So I looked it up.

A lot of people are looking up Sherrill Redmon divorce too, which I mentioned as a side comment at the bottom of another post  in 2009.  It's a little out of date.  She retired in 2013.

By the way, here's some background on the June primary when Brat beat Cantor.