It’s common for lefties to lament the rightwing dominance of talk radio, FOX News’ ratings (and rantings) on cable TV and the like. But in the mass media wars, progressives seem to be winning hearts, minds -- and eyes -- in at least one crucial realm and among coveted key demographics: Left-leaning news is arguably number one in New Media.

On May 9 Cenk Uygur celebrated the billionth view of his “The Young Turks” YouTube Channel program in style, with a high-spirited party at YouTube Space LA, a spanking new high-tech studio complex.

Prior to the reception, guests were invited to watch that evening’s “TYT” show in the facility’s theater or on a huge screen in the lobby just outside of the studio set, where the feisty host held forth on a series of topical subjects. In the first segment, which streamed live at 6:00 p.m. (PST) to 887,919 subscribers, Uygur tackled the thorny topic of Christian cleansing in the military.

This was followed by Cenk defending the father of a Sandy Hook school-shooting victim, who was purportedly being slimed by Connecticut Carry, a pro-gun lobbying group.

The third segment dealt with bankers, and then Uygur was joined by 26-year-old “TYT” co-host Ana Kasparian, who launched into a discussion on pop culture -- with a lefty twist. Taking on the sexist issue of female body image, they defended celeb Kim Kardashian, who was being raked over the coals for her weight gain -- while pregnant!

Uygur and Kasparian proceeded to go global, denouncing a Christian school in South Africa for threatening to expel a student unless his legally married lesbian parents divorced.

This punchy, progressive programming has propelled “The Young Turks” to a top spot on the Google-owned YouTube’s channels. (While Uygur is going strong in the YouTube universe, his daily “The Young Turks” program on Current TV -- which Al Gore sold to Al Jazeera -- continues to air. However, according to Steven Oh, “TYT’s” future on Current remains uncertain, as Al Jazeera retools and rejiggers the cable TV network.)

At the party at YouTube Space LA, Jed Simmons, co-founder and COO of Next New Networks, an independent producer of online video networks acquired by YouTube, spoke beside the giant screen, where he was joined by Uygur and “TYT” Chief Operating Officer Steven Oh.

“What YouTube does is to build an eco-system of channels,” explained Simmons. “It took only seven months to build YouTube Space LA, which opened in November 2012. It’s free. Come here and innovate. Bring little in terms of tools -- we supply [the equipment]. It’s yours to create programs with.” Touting “TYT”, Simmons added, “Tonight was the first night a live news program [originated] in YouTube Space LA.” (“The Young Turks” is usually presented at a studio near Culver City, but to mark “TYT’s” billionth view, Google opened up its space and helped foot the celebration’s bill.)

Steven Oh went on to declare that the “TYT” network has “undergone tremendous growth, with 20 million unique viewers and almost 1 million subscribers of ‘TYT’ shows

‘The Point,’ ‘Nerd Alert,’ ‘Pop Cultured,’ and ‘TYT-Plus,’ which launched today,” and is a premium channel with bonus content for a subscription fee of $4.99 per month.

Lauding the New Media outlet, Oh declared: “YouTube created a platform where people with dreams can make dreams come true. YouTube is a place of opportunity. And none of this would have been possible without our talented, fearless leader.”

At this, an ebullient Uygur took the stage to address the so-called “TYT Army,” thanking associates such as Oh and “Point” Executive Producer Malcolm Fleschner, then proclaiming: “When somebody tells you something can’t be done, it’s not true.” Recounting his bumpy media career, Uygur said, “In 2002 at every point we ran into roadblocks. But it turns out it can be done!... Today we are the largest online news show in the world. We started as young progressives looking to overthrow the established system. FOX is propaganda for the Republicans. MSNBC is propaganda for the Democrats. CNN is propaganda for both.”

Uygur insisted that instead of following party lines, viewers “look for someone to tell the truth… It’s about change. … No one has a monopoly on the truth, but if one is honest and not a news actor -- we do our best to be as honest as you can be. You can’t buy us. As a company we turned down lots of offers to stay true… It’s not the strength of the personalities but the ideas -- be honest. Serve the audience, change the media. That’s why our grand goal is to change the government and get money out of government,” Uygur proclaimed, referring to www.wolf-pac.com, a “TYT”-backed initiative to reverse Citizens United and safeguard representative democracy by passing a constitutional amendment that would enact public financing of elections.

“We don’t have the resources of Rupert Murdoch or the Koch brothers,” Uygur said, noting that skeptics wonder how the left can compete. “I’m here to tell you it can be done and we’ll do it,” he said. “If you dare to try for change you can do it. I don’t view 1 billion views as a culmination -- we’re just getting started… If it takes 10 billion views to change the government, we’ll do it.” At this Uygur and everyone in the crowd raised champagne-filled glasses as Cenk said: “Here’s a toast to the next billion.”

A new film is picking up where Charles Ferguson’s “Inside Job” left off. However, German director Uwe Boll’s indie is not a thoughtful documentary aimed at intellectuals. As its name implies, “Assault on Wall Street” is a low-budget action movie -- but one with a twist, as it puts an all-too-human face on high finance’s victims, dramatizing the low-life banksters’ crimes against the working class.

This B-picture’s lead characters are hit by capitalism’s double whammy: New Yorkers Rosie (Erin Karpluk) and Jim (Aussie actor Dominic Purcell, who looks like a cross between Steven Seagal and the Rock) are a salt of the earth couple who play by all the rules as they pursue the American dream. A veteran, hard-working Jim is an armored car security guard, but Rosie is jobless due to illness that requires expensive medical treatment. The cost of eliminating her tumors exceeds the couple’s health insurance coverage.

Just when they need their savings most, they are told by Jim’s broker that due to the 2008 Wall Street crash his investments -- which the broker had advised Jim to put his money into -- have been wiped out. The mortgage meltdown leads to foreclosure on their home and the couple’s credit cards get maxed out. A slippery, slimy pricey attorney portrayed by Julia Roberts’ older brother, Eric Roberts, is all too happy to take a steep retainer from Jim, but fails to dam the financial flood that is drowning the couple (although he keeps their $10,000 anyway). As Jim’s armored car company can’t employ a high--risk worker with money woes, he is let go.

Realizing that playing by the book has gotten him nowhere, “Assault on Wall Street” becomes a proletarian revenge fantasy, just as Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” is a gun-slinging wish fulfillment for ex-slaves (and their descendants).

His life savings down the drain, Jim goes rogue. Falling back on his military training, he wages guerrilla warfare against Wall Street. His campaign of sniper attacks and bombings culminates when Jim confronts “master of the universe” Jeremy Stancroft (John Heard of “Home Alone,” “The Sopranos”), the über -capitalist who opens “Assault” by ordering his employees to perform underhanded transactions in order to save their company at the expense of the investors.

Jim has been listening to lefty media pundits throughout the film who mention Occupy Wall Street and who rage against capitalists guilty of “criminal acts.”

As Jim takes Stancroft hostage in his Wall Street suite, he asks the businessman at gunpoint: “What’s the difference between a gangster and a bankster? You cooked the books for your bonuses. Why should I let you live? You’re a salesman -- sell me.” Snarling, Stancroft launches into a justification of “competition in a capitalist economy,” wherein “white trash and ghetto kids” fight “endless wars” for the benefit of the power elite. Stancroft’s diatribe about pillage, plunder, profit, and privilege seems ripped right out of the pages of what is reportedly Boll’s favorite book, socialist muckraker Gustavus Myers’ “History of the Great American Fortunes.”

Interestingly, offscreen, John Heard -- who similarly played the racist sheriff in Denzel Washington’s 2007 “The Great Debaters” -- is actually one of Hollywood’s most progressive activist actors.

“Assault on Wall Street” opened in Los Angeles May 10 and is now available on VOD and will be released July 30 on DVD and Blu-Ray.

CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin is at it again.

On Thursday, she repeatedly interrupted and even got into a back-and-forth exchange with President Obama, during his speech at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C.

Benjamin, a veteran antiwar activist who is about five feet tall, has made a career of disrupting high ranking officials and forcing them to confront uncomfortable truths.

The author of Drone Warfare, Killing by Remote Control, Benjamin is particularly concerned about of the U.S. use of unmanned aerial vehicles for “targeted killings.”

Because drone warfare is so secretive it’s difficult to tally the casualties.

In February Senator Lindsay Graham estimated that there have been 4,700 fatalities.

According to the London-based Bureau for Investigative Journalism up to 1,727 people have been injured and up to 4,379 people have been killed by U.S. drone strikes between 2002 and 2013 in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. (These numbers don”t include the injured and dead in Afghanistan and Iraq.)

Of the dead, up to 209 have been children.

Medea Benjamin with Emmy award winning actor/activist David Clennon. Photo by Ed Rampell

I caught up with Medea Benjamin on April 10 after she spoke at an Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace luncheon in Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles.

As Obama said when Benjamin repeatedly interrupted him: “The voice of that woman is worth paying attention to.”

Q: Tell us about the drone policy.

MEDEA BENJAMIN: There were between 46 and 52 drone strikes under the Bush administration. And now there are over 400 – that’s not counting Afghanistan. So this has been tremendously increased under the Obama administration. If you look at Afghanistan the numbers are even more astounding -- the last year where have figures for is 2012, and that’s 506 drone strikes, whereas there were very few drone strikes under Bush… The CIA runs the drone program in Pakistan solely, not with the military. Then there’s a joint CIA-military program in Yemen, then the CIA is involved in a lot of use of spy drones around the world and in the proliferation of bases.

Q: How are the subjects of the targeted killings selected?

Benjamin: They’re supposed to be high-level Al Qaeda operatives that pose an imminent threat to the U.S. and American personnel and citizens. There’s supposed to be no way to capture them. We have not been told how they try to capture them or what constitutes a “high level Al Qaeda operative”… The “kill list” is calculated in the “terror Tuesdays” at the White House every week, where the President and his advisors -- including CIA -- “nominate” people to be on the kill list. Ultimately, the President has to sign off on the kill list. From what we know it looks like there are two separate but overlapping kill lists: One is the CIA kill list, the other is the military kill list. It’s speculated that [having two lists] makes it more difficult to have Congressional oversight and the executive is not thrilled about having that.

Q: How much does drone warfare cost?

Benjamin: There are hidden costs, such as hellfire missiles costing $75,000 each and the requisite personnel, the expenditure is up to $20 million per drone and maybe 800 drones have been bought… It’s not as “cheap” as it’s put out to be. One predator drone in one day of activity supposedly needs 168 people… to carry out the day’s operations… They crash a lot. So when you calculate their costs, consider that the Air Force has said about a third of their drones have crashed.

Q: On February 7 CodePink disrupted the Senate hearings considering Obama’s nominee to become the CIA Director. Why?

Benjamin: John Brennan has been the mastermind of the drone program. He’s the one who’d convene the terror Tuesday meetings at the White House… He was high up in the CIA during the Bush years, the chief of staff in the CIA to George Tenet during the years when torture, extraordinary rendition and indefinite detention were used… I thought it was quite astounding that he’d even be nominated and I was flabbergasted when so many Democrats got on board behind him.

Q: While Brennan’s confirmation process was going on, during the live Academy Awards ceremony Mrs. Obama announced that Argo, a movie glorifying the CIA, won the Best Picture Oscar. What did you think about that?

Benjamin: There is a real attempt to sanitize the CIA killings and to glorify the CIA and to give it a new face. That’s what happened with Zero Dark Thirty, that’s what happened with Michelle Obama… When she appeared my jaw dropped; I couldn’t believe it… These were really a disgusting propaganda films, glorifying the role of the CIA… The fact that this was happening while the CIA is in one of its darkest periods ever in the history of this country -- there have been several times in our history when the CIA has gone rogue, and this is one of them… The CIA is absolutely out of control. The CIA has been on a killing spree… The CIA has become a death squad and to see these films get so much acclaim at the time when the CIA is in its rogue killing phase is very disturbing.

Q: What do you think about the fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture remains classified?

Benjamin: It’s horrible. That information, those 6,000 pages, should be released to the public. It’s our right as U.S. citizens to know what our government has done in our name just as I think that these memos about the U.S. of drones should be released to the public.

Medea Benjamin with CodePink co-founder Jodie Evans. Photo by Ed Rampell

Ed Rampell is an L.A.-based journalist who writes regularly for The Progressive and is the author of "Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States."

Cinema without politics is like junk food. That’s proven yet again by the nutritiously fulfilling LA Film Festival, which is taking place June 13-23 in downtown Los Angeles.

This year, the festival is presenting films by two giants who emerged out of 1960s European leftist cinema and are still making movies that matter: Italian director Marco Bellocchio and Greco-French helmer Costa-Gavras.

Sure to be a festival attention-getter is Bellocchio’s “Dormant Beauty,” starring Isabelle Huppert in a feature about the right to die. Bellocchio rocketed to fame in 1965 with “Fists in the Pocket” and 1967’s “China is Near,” which daringly dealt with Maoist subject matter.

In 1969, Costa-Gavras’ unforgettably gripping masterpiece “Z”—about the assassination of Greece’s peace candidate and the Greek colonels’ coup—not only won a Cannes jury prize and Oscars for editing and Best Foreign Film, but was one of the rare subtitled movies ever nominated for the Best Picture Oscar.

French director Costa-Gavras at LAFF's “An Evening with Costa-Gavras.” Photo by Ed Rampell

The LA Film Festival honored him by presenting “An Evening with Costa-Gavras,” which Festival Artistic Director David Ansen introduced by saying: “ ‘Z’ not only changed the world, it changed cinema itself.” A montage was screened with clips from Costa classics, such as 1970’s anti-Stalinist “The Confession” about a Czech dissident; 1972’s Uruguay-set urban guerrilla warfare and anti-CIA saga “State of Siege”; and 1982’s “Missing” about Gen. Pinochet’s mass murder after the Chile coup, for which both Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek received Oscar nominations.

In a curious bit of “casting,” Costa was then interviewed live in front of the sold-out Regal Cinemas theater by Mark Boal, who not only won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for “The Hurt Locker,” but was also nominated for the pro-CIA, pro-torture agitprop “Zero Dark Thirty.” At the beginning of the Q&A, Costa seemed to jab Boal by telling the screenwriter/producer: “You are a political filmmaker.” But Boal and Costa were generally courteous, even cordial, although Boal—literally half his European counterpart’s age—seemed dismissive of state subsidy for the arts, whereas Costa is currently President of Cinémathèque Française, that renowned bastion of film culture. Boal apparently doesn’t consider the special treatment he and “Zero” director Kathryn Bigelow received from the CIA for their Bin Laden manhunt movie to be state support of the arts.

Right vs. Left: Mark Boal, screenwriter/producer of the pro-CIA propaganda pic "Zero Dark Thirty", interrogates French leftist director Costa-Gavras during LAFF's “An Evening with Costa-Gavras. Photo by Ed Rampell

The U.S. premiere of Costa’s latest film followed questions from the packed audience. “Capital” is a thriller about wheeling-dealing in the world of high finance, a sort of fictionalization of Charles Ferguson’s Oscar-winning 2010 documentary “Inside Job” crossed with Karl Marx. Full of sharp dialogue and an even sharper critique of capitalism, the well-directed movie moves along at a brisk pace with a great soundtrack, revealing that the 80-year-old filmmaker is at the top of his game.

The festival’s other progressive pictures include the documentary “American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs,” about the Chinese-American woman whom Angela Davis declares onscreen to have “made more of a contribution to Black people than most Blacks.” The ninety-seven-year-old subject of the biopic attended the screenings in a wheelchair and participated in Q&As. As Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky put it, “There’s no grey hair in [her] soul.”

There's no grey hair in her soul: Grace Lee Boggs makes a personal appearance at the LAFF screening of the biopic about her, "American Revolutionary." Photo by Ed Rampell

Every decade or so, a pivotal film comes along that redefines America’s indigenous people. In 1989, there was the deliciously defiant “Powwow Highway,” followed by 1998’s “Smoke Signals,” based on Sherman Alexie’s fiction. Alexie has an associate producer credit for the latest member of this select cinematic “tribe,” “Winter in the Blood,” which co-stars Gary Farmer, the great aboriginal actor who also appeared in the two other seminal movies. Andrew and Alex Smith’s Montana shot and set adaptation of James Welch’s novel provides a poignant, powerful portrait of America’s troubled Natives.

During a Q&A, this reviewer asked if the movie’s crucial dialogue was shouted by a Native character in a drunken rage: “This is our land! This is our land!” "Winter" co-star Casey Camp-Horinek, who has appeared in movies such as “Geronimo,” raised a clenched fist and said, “You got it!” Then, she put her hands beside her mouth and asked: “Are you listening, Obama?”

“Our Nixon” is a compilation film by Penny Lane about the man who was U.S. President. The documentary is largely composed of and culled from 500 hours of never-before-publicly-seen Super 8 home movies shot by three Nixon aides that were seized by the FBI during the Watergate investigation. Lane has sculpted out of this forgotten footage an eye-opening insider’s glimpse of the only President to resign from office, and of his Administration.

The documentary’s most jaw-dropping moment takes place not behind closed doors in the Oval Office but in the White House’s East Room on January 28, 1972. Nixon—presiding over a dinner marking the fiftieth anniversary of Reader’s Digest—introduced the decidedly unhip Ray Conniff Singers by defiantly snarling: “And if the music is square, it’s because I like it square.” But then, one of the singers did something cool enough to give Nixon indigestion. Canadian alto Carole Feraci pulled a Medea Benjamin, holding up a banner saying, “Stop the Killing” and proclaiming to the astonished crowd that included aviator Charles Lindbergh, astronaut Frank Borman and Alice Roosevelt Longworth: “President Nixon, stop bombing human beings. … You go to church on Sundays and pray to Jesus Christ. If Jesus Christ were here tonight, you would not dare to drop another bomb.” As the bandleader tried to snatch Feraci’s banner, the thirty-year-old held onto it and added: “Bless the Berrigans and bless Daniel Ellsberg.” “Our Nixon” is a pointed reminder about the U.S. surveillance state run amok as America grapples with another presidential snooping scandal.

Other highlights of the LA Film Festival include “My Stolen Revolution,” a documentary about Iran. There is also Jacob Kornbluth’s doc “Inequality For All,” which features ex-Secretary of Labor Robert Reich holding forth on America’s growing income gap. One of the festival’s twelve Black-themed films is “Fruitvale Station,” Ryan Coogler’s Sundance-winning dramatization of the 2009 police shooting of Oscar Grant at a Bay Area train station.

There are some truly tasty treats at the LA Film Festival. (For more information, go to www.LAFilmfest.com.

Ed Rampell is an L.A.-based journalist who writes regularly for The Progressive and is the author of "Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States."

August 28 is the 50th anniversary of the historic march on the U.S. capital, and Hollywood was well represented. Actors such as Sidney Poitier, Gregory Peck, Harry Belafonte, Burt Lancaster, Lena Horne, Sammy Davis, Paul Newman, Josephine Baker, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and a pre-NRA Charlton Heston joined Dr. Martin Luther King, SNCC’s John Lewis, A. Phillip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and other civil rights leaders for the epochal “Jobs and Freedom” demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial. Marlon Brando told a reporter, “We’re here as Americans to give the full support that we can in every way to the legislation that is now pending before Congress because we believe it to be right.”

American movies have played their part in the civil rights struggle.

Here are the Top 10 civil rights films:

1. Set not in the segregated South but Southside Chicago, the 1961 screen adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s social realist play “A Raisin in the Sun,” produced by liberal TV talk show host David Susskind, revealed the institutionalized racism still afflicting Blacks in the supposedly enlightened North, especially in terms of housing. Sidney Poitier arguably delivers his greatest performance as Walter Lee Younger, an emasculated chauffeur yearning for more. Ruby Dee plays Walter’s long-suffering wife Ruth. The family’s matriarch Claudia McNeil (who scored a 1959 Tony for portraying Lena in the Broadway version of “Raisin”) fights to keep the Youngers together, as they seek to move from the “hood” to the suburbs. Louis Gossett Jr. co-stars with Ivan Dixon as Asagai, a Nigerian student who woos the nationalistic Beneatha Younger (Diana Sands), providing “Raisin” with some “back to Mother Africa” consciousness.

2. As crusading attorney Atticus Finch in 1962’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Gregory Peck personified the noble Caucasian of conscience who defends persecuted Blacks and won a well-deserved Best Actor Oscar for doing so. Although set in the Depression-era South, Harper Lee’s story -- cleverly told from a child’s perspective -- had deep resonance for moviegoers experiencing the Civil Rights movement. “Mockingbird’s” compassion for those different from most vanilla townsfolk -- the possibly mentally-impaired Boo Radley (Robert Duvall) and the unusual Dill (John Megna plays Lee’s childhood neighbor Truman Capote as a lad) -- extended to empathy for the racial underdog in the Southern pecking order. As the Finches’ maid Calpurnia (the name of Julius Caesar’s wife), Estelle Evans provides maternal comfort for the motherless Scout (Mary Badham). Unfortunately, Brock Peters as Tom Robinson, wrongfully accused of raping a white girl, is a passive courtroom character while Peck’s protagonist propels the saga. Nevertheless, “Mockingbird’s” condemnation of bigotry still packs an undeniable wallop.

3. 1962’s “The Intruder,” produced/directed by Roger Corman is among the most powerful Civil Rights movies. Before planet-hopping in “Star Trek’s integrated spaceship with Chekov, Sulu and Uhura, William Shatner played a racist rabble-rouser who travels to a Southern town undergoing school desegregation to stir up trouble in this low budge pic using incendiary vocabulary, including the N-word. “Intruder” includes riveting scenes of an MLK-like minister preaching nonviolent resistance to Black students who march through bigoted picketers into their new high school. A mass rally with the demagogic Shatner denouncing the NAACP as “nothing but a Communist front headed by a Jew who hates America,” claiming “commies” seek to “mongrelize” the country, whipping the “redneck” crowd into a frenzy. Afterwards a mob besieges a Black family in an auto; Shatner leads a caravan of Klansmen to a cross burning; a Black church is dynamited; a white co-ed falsely claims a Black student rapes her but then confesses, saving him from a lynch mob. According to Camp Corman shot “The Intruder” on location in the South, recruiting non-actors as extras who enthusiastically responded to Shatner’s white supremacy rants.

4. In indie director Sam Fuller’s lurid “Shock Corridor,” released about two weeks after the March on Washington, a Pulitzer Prize-seeking newspaperman (Peter Breck) voluntarily commits himself to an insane asylum where, among other demented inmates, he encounters Trent (Hari Rhodes), one of the first “Negroes” to attend a segregated Southern college. However, the deluded Trent -- diagnosed with “acute schizophrenia” -- fantasizes he’s a Klansman whose white power ravings rile other patients up, inspiring a race riot. “Shock’s” revelation of Trent’s Black skin beneath his white KKK robes is, well, shocking.

5. Released one month after the March on Washington, with its title wittily spoofing “Gone with the Wind,” Ossie Davis’s 1963 “Gone are the Days!” pokes fun at racial tropes and a paternalism way down yonder in the land of cotton that’s rapidly disappearing. Davis wrote and starred in the movie based on his play “Purlie” as Reverend Purlie Victorious. The preacher returns to the Georgia of his birth with fiancé Lutiebelle (Davis’s wife Ruby Dee), intent on upending Simon Legree-like plantation owner Ol’ Cap’, Stonewall Jackson Cotchipee (Sorrell Booke). In his screen debut, Alan Alda is hilarious as Ol’ Cap’s liberal son Charlie, who gets socked in the eye for quoting Jefferson’s declaration that “all men are created equal.” “Days!” co-stars Beah Richards and Godfrey Cambridge, who was Tony-nominated for uproariously playing on Broadway Uncle Tom-like Gitlow, to whom Purlie quips: “If slavery comes back I want to be your agent.”

6. As LBJ launched “the Great Society” and “War on Poverty” 1964 was a banner year for Civil Rights Cinema. “Black Like Me” is based on John Howard Griffin’s (James Whitmore) real-life undercover expose, wherein the journalist darkened his skin to “pass” as Black so he could report on his experiences in the Jim Crow South. Blacklisted actor Will Geer, Al Freeman Jr., Roscoe Lee Brown, Raymond St. Jacques, and Sorrell Booke co-star in this harrowing eye-opener about bigotry’s indignities.

7. Since D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” sex between a Black male and white female has been among screendom’s biggest bugaboos, yet the 1964 indie “One Potato, Two Potato” tackles this taboo topic far more honestly than Stanley Kramer’s big studio production “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” did three years later. The film candidly deals with the hot potato subject of an interracial marriage between Frank Richards (Bernie Hamilton, who’d appeared in the 1950s movies “The Jackie Robinson Story,” “The Harlem Globetrotters” and “Carmen Jones”) and white divorcee Julie (Barbara Barrie, who scored a Cannes Film Festival Best Actress award for the role and went on to co-star in the 1970s sitcom “Barney Miller” and to be Oscar-nominated for 1979’s “Breaking Away”). Claiming it’s inappropriate for a mixed couple to raise a child, Julie’s ex-husband Joe (Richard Mulligan of the 1977-1981 TV sitcom “Soap”) contests custody of their daughter; the ensuing court battle will strike a chord with today’s same-sex marriages.

8. In Michael Roemer’s 1964 “Nothing But a Man” Duff (Ivan Dixon) and Josie (jazz vocalist Abbey Lincoln in her acting debut) play a Black couple confronting discrimination in Dixie. This is a simple, poignant drama with a moving performance by Dixon (who co-starred in the 1960s POW sitcom “Hogan’s Heroes”) as a man seeking dignity, against all obstacles.

9. 1970’s “Watermelon Man” turns the old minstrel blackface trope upside down, when prejudiced Caucasian Jeff Gerber (Godfrey Cambridge) somehow wakes up Black, much to the horror of wife Althea (Estelle Parsons). With the tables turned, Gerber experiences American bigotry firsthand. By the end of “Watermelon Man” he has become so embittered -- and enlightened -- by the realities of racism that Gerber participates in self-defense training taught by Black militants to fight the man.

“Watermelon Man’s” finale signaled the end of the passive resistance espoused by the Civil Rights movement. Once Dr. King was assassinated, assimilation was challenged by nationalism, nonviolence morphed into Black Power and increasingly militant movies reflected this change.

10. The tension and division between civil disobedience and militancy, Civil Rights and Black Power, is at the heart of the just-released “Lee Daniels’ The Butler.” With its imagery of Jim Crow sharecropping, lynching, Freedom Riders desegregating Woolworth’s lunch counters and being attacked on a bus and jailed, Klansmen, et al, this epic spans almost a century of social injustice as seen through the eyes of the ultimate House Negro. Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) is a White House butler who serves presidents from Eisenhower (Robin Williams) through the Reagans (Alan Rickman as Ron and the cannily cast Jane Fonda as Nancy, who enters deriding “foreign policy hawks”). Cecil is the classic “go along, get along” sell-out who uses his skillful servility and obsequiousness as a means for social mobility. But the manservant to the Man clashes with son Louis (David Oyelo), who evolves from Freedom Rider to Black Panther. After they argue over Sidney Poitier, whom beret-wearing Louis derides as an Uncle Tom, Cecil throws him out of the house, his mother Gloria (Oprah Winfrey) smacks him, and his father foolishly banishes his militant son. Over the years Gaines comes to question his subservience and ill-gotten “gains”; there’s finally a father-son rapprochement at a pro-Mandela rally in front of Washington’s South Africa embassy, resulting in the jailing of both Louis and Cecil.

Although “Butler” culminates with the dubious proposition that Obama’s election is the fulfillment of the Civil Rights movement, given the Trayvon Martin case, the recent Supreme Court rollback of voting rights and more, the equal rights struggle continues off- and on-screen.

Other recent civil rights films include 2011’s “The Help,” about maids (Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar as Minny, the servant who knows revenge is a dessert best served cold) in the segregated South; 2012’s “Lincoln,” with Oyelo as a Union Army corporal and Daniel Day-Lewis as the 16th president crusading for a constitutional amendment to ban slavery; Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 “Django Unchained” with Jamie Foxx on a shooting rampage against his ex-masters; 2013’s 42 is a biopic about Brooklyn Dodger Jackie Robinson and the desegregation of baseball, with Harrison Ford as a conscientious Caucasian somewhat in the Atticus Finch tradition; Ryan Coogler’s recently released “Fruitvale Station” about the police killing of Bay Area resident Oscar Grant (Michael B. Jordan); plus the upcoming “12 Years a Slave,” about a free Black abducted and sold into slavery in the pre-Civil War South starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Brad Pitt, Paul Giamatti and Quvenzhané Wallis; and the biopic “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom,” starring Idris Elba as the iconic freedom fighter.

These productions prove that the Civil Rights cinema’s truth is marching on -- from Washington to a theater near you.

Ed Rampell is an L.A.-based film historian/critic and screenwriter. He is the author of Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States. His interview with Costa-Gavras is in the September issue of The Progressive. The new book Rampell co-authored, The Hawaii Movie and Television Book, is being released by Honolulu’s Mutual Publishing in October 2013.

Costa-Gavras is arguably the world’s greatest living political filmmaker.

Born in Arcadia, Greece, in 1933, to the son of a blacklisted father, Costa-Gavras immigrated to France when he was a student. Like others of his generation, including François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, Costa-Gavras fell in love with film at Paris’s renowned Cinematheque and studied movies at France’s national film school, IDHEC. After serving as René Clair’s assistant director, Costa-Gavras began directing stylish films known for their dissident sensibility.

His 1969 fact-based film Z, about police repression and the colonels’ coup in Greece, won a Cannes Jury Prize and is one of the rare subtitled movies nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award. Zwas also nominated for Best Writing and Best Director Oscars. It scored Oscars for Best Editing and Best Foreign Language Film, in addition to winning a Golden Globe.

Aside fromZ, Costa-Gavras’s oeuvre includes: 1973’s State of Siege, about urban guerrilla warfare in South America; 1982’s Cannes Palme d’Or-winning Missing in which Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek play Americans searching for a loved one in Chile after General Pinochet’s bloody coup; 1983’s pro-Palestinian Hannah K.; 1988’s Betrayed, co-starring Debra Winger and Tom Berenger as a member of a rightwing militia; 1989’s Music Box, with Jessica Lange scoring an Oscar nomination as a lawyer defending her father charged with committing Nazi war crimes; 1997’s Mad City, co-starring John Travolta and Dustin Hoffman in a drama about media sensationalism; and 2002’s heartbreaking Amen, wherein a German officer and priest try to save the Jews by informing Pope Pius XII about the Holocaust.

His latest film, Capital, is about the financial crisis and the power of banks.

In person, Costa-Gavras looks much younger than his eighty years. He is thoughtful and philosophical and speaks in lightly accented English. I interviewed him in a West Hollywood hotel and reminded him that we had met once before, in 1975, when as a Hunter College film student and aspiring journalist, I wrote my first paid article. It was about him.

Q: Why did you make your new film, Capital?

Costa-Gavras: I decided more than ten years ago now to make a movie about money. I saw money becoming more and more important everywhere. It’s one of the most abstract and important inventions by human beings. At the same time, money is capable of extraordinary corruption in every kind of relationship. I tried to see how and why, more and more, money is becoming a religion. That was the initial idea.

Q: Capital touches upon the economic crisis. Under President Obama, the Department of Justice hasn’t locked up a single banker.

Costa-Gavras: No one anywhere has. This crisis started probably due to the freedom they gave to the banks. First President Reagan and then President Clinton. So, for Obama it is extremely difficult to change now, to find a way to organize this banking system [differently]. In the U.S. more than any other place, the banking system is insane. Millions of Americans lost their houses. Because of what? Because of the banking system. This American banking system is also coming to Europe. We can say today that the banks and high financiers run the world.

Q: One point you’re making in Capital is that there’s a difference between American and European-style capitalism.

Costa-Gavras: The difference used to be very strong. It’s less and less now. When I was preparing the script, I met with some of the most important bankers in Paris. I was told that the American banks became completely free, without any control or any rules, and that they had to imitate them little by little. If not, they would be swallowed by the American banks.

Q: Capital moves very briskly.

Costa-Gavras: Thank you. It’s a story about a part of our society where everything goes very fast. Every morning you have the economic news from all over the world, from television, radio, the Internet, and an hour later the news changes and the numbers change. People run fast from one place to another, which is very risky because they don’t have enough time to think.

Aggressive capitalism leads the world, and we can see the results, especially in Europe: more poverty for the vast majority, and more riches for a few.

Q: Describe your politics today.

Costa-Gavras: It’s a tough question because I’m catalogued as leftwing. What does “leftwing” mean? Because the term is very vague. Sometimes there are leftwing governments I’m very critical of. For me, being leftwing is to live in a society where there’s permanent change. It also means to respect the freedom of everybody, and to not accept big organizations or rich, powerful people holding power. So, it’s to have real democracy and freedom. And, of course, giving everyone a chance at the ballot box. But essentially being leftwing for me means fighting for the dignity of the people.

Q: Your father was in the Greek resistance.

Costa-Gavras: My life in Greece influenced what I am. My father was in the left because he was against the king and his family, who had created a war against the Turks at the beginning of the last century to revive the Byzantine Empire. For three years, there was fighting, and all my father’s friends died. So he hated the royal family. After the war, the king came back, and all the people like my father lost their jobs. Worse, their kids had to furnish a certificate that the family was pro-king. The kids of these people could not pursue studies, so I had to run away to France to study.

I initially studied literature, and then I went to cinema school. I discovered the Cinematheque, and saw not only action movies and westerns, but also lots of serious movies.

Q: Who are some of your biggest cinematic influences?

Costa-Gavras: The first movie I saw at the Cinematheque was [Erich von Stroheim’s] Greed, and I was astonished to see you could do long movies with no happy ending.

Kurosawa, no doubt, was a big influence. Movies sometimes more than directors have influenced me: The Grapes of Wrath, by John Ford, was an extraordinary discovery. Sergei Eisenstein, of course. Later on, [Ingmar] Bergman.

Q: Do you believe cinema can change the world?

Costa-Gavras: Cinema has changed the world. If you go to the beginning of the cinema, you can see that the world started meeting other worlds. It was extraordinary. We saw how other people were living and thinking. How they were sad or happy. We also saw the body—naked or half-naked people, which was prohibited everywhere by religions. This was extremely important. Essentially, filmmakers have to be free and not directed by power or politicians.

Q:Z is arguably the most successful political film ever made, and it seemed to isolate the Greek junta.

Costa-Gavras: The movie in a certain way helped to show what the colonels were, how stupid they were. Some of the traditional, conservative newspapers spoke very well about the junta at the beginning. When Z came out, they saw they were not such good guys.

Q: You’ve directed a number of movies about Nazis (Special Section, Music Box, and Amen) and neo-Nazis (Betrayed). Do you fear Greece’s Golden Dawn party could take over there and that neo-fascist parties can rise to power in other European countries?

Costa-Gavras: Every time you have a crisis in a country you have an extreme wing coming up and proposing solutions. In Z, the Golden Dawn is there already, if you remember—those Christian, rightwing people. The way to fight them is by doing lots of work teaching people that every time these fascist systems gained power they ended up with big tragedies—lots of blood, lots of police, and lots of misery.

Q: On the other extreme, do you think there’s a possibility of a socialist revolution in Greece and/or any of the other European countries?

Costa-Gavras: It depends what you call “socialist revolution.”

Q: In the Bolshevik sense?

Costa-Gavras: No, we saw what happens with Bolsheviks. It was another catastrophe. I don’t have the solution. The moviemaker can ask questions but not give solutions.

Q: You made The Confession in the 1970s. In the end, when the Soviets invade Czechoslovakia, somebody paints graffiti: “Lenin wake up; they’ve gone mad.”

Costa-Gavras: Yes, because it was exactly what the students wrote on the walls of Czechoslovakia at that time.

Q: Having made such a great movie about Eastern European regimes, how do you feel about the collapse of these Stalinist-type states?

Costa-Gavras: It was a normal conclusion. Because they used to make extraordinary promises about the happiness of the people and so forth, but the policies they implemented were completely contrary to that. So those systems collapsed.

Q:State of Siege and Missing are harshly critical of U.S. policy toward Latin America. Were you ever banned from the United States for these portrayals?

Costa-Gavras: No, never. Missing was entirely financed by the Americans, by Universal. And State of Siege, half the money came from the U.S. People say “the Americans” or “the United States,” as if it was a kind of bloc. It’s not. There’s a lot of people thinking differently from other people in the U.S. This is very interesting to me and very important.

Q: What’s the difference between working in Hollywood and Europe in terms of making political movies?

Costa-Gavras: After the success of Z in the U.S., I was asked to come here and make lots of movies. I refused because I had to make The Confession and other movies in Paris, and I didn’t feel comfortable because I didn’t know American society enough to make movies about here.

I finally decided to make Missing for several reasons. One is because I knew the Chilean system. The story did not take place in the U.S. but outside. It was a story of a father looking for his son, which I knew also. So I made it. I also asked the American producers to do it with my French crew and to do post-production in France.

All the American films I have done under those conditions, and it was a good thing because I also had full freedom. If they hadn’t given me full freedom, I would have stayed away.

Q: Is it easier making political films in France than in the U.S.?

Costa-Gavras: In the U.S., some extraordinary movies have been made on politics and social issues. We learned lots of things from American cinema. But in the last ten or fifteen years, this has changed drastically. Today, that kind of movie is much easier to make in Europe.

I was talking with one of the producers of Missing, and he said, “It would be impossible to make Missing today here in the U.S.”

Q: What do you think of the new left-leaning governments in Latin America?

Costa-Gavras: Oh, I think there has been a major change compared to what Latin America used to be thirty-forty years ago.

The American influence is not so aggressive anymore. The American big business influence in Latin America is not as strong, so people can vote and they can have a different life than before. They can have more liberal, more interesting, and more democratic governments.

Q: What are your reflections upon turning eighty?

Costa-Gavras: You know every time you change a decade, it’s a problem, because you approach the end little by little. But my decision is to keep going. The problem is always to know when the head doesn’t work well. Someone has to tell you. I hope my children will tell me.

Ed Rampell is an L.A.-based film historian/critic and the author of “Progressive Hollywood: A People’s Film History of the United States.” The new book he has co-authored about Hawaii’s movies and TV shows will be published by Honolulu’s Mutual Publishing in September. Rampell has interviewed many artists for The Progressive, including Oliver Stone, Ken Burns, Danny Glover, Tom Morello, Ed Asner, W. S. Merwin, Cenk Uygur, and Michael Apted.

If it’s true that “we are what we eat” -- then the new wittily titled documentary “GMO OMG” is no laughing matter.         

In his globetrotting film, which opens today, Jeremy Seifert explores the 21^st century development of Genetically Modified Organisms. He explains what they are, how pervasive they are, and he identifies who invents and disseminates them.         

Most importantly, as the top three seed and chemical companies of DuPont, Syngenta, and Monsanto lead the genetic charge that is transforming agricultural production and consumption, the filmmaker ponders the big question he’s still asking towards the end of this 90-minute doc: “I still don’t know if there are health risks from GMOs,” such as pesticide contamination of the food we eat.         

Like that other nonfiction writer/director/producer Josh Fox of “GasLand”fame, Seifert also puts himself into “GMO OMG’s” action, as he did in his 2010 dumpster diving short “Dive!”         

Through the prism of his young North Carolina family, which includes wife Jen, two young boys and a baby daughter, Seifert embarks on an epic odyssey as he examines how the increasingly all-pervasive high-tech Big Ag will affect his children.          

According to the film, they—and we--are growing up in a brave new world wherein 80 percent of processed foods have GMOs (which, Seifert alleges, are even sold by that supposedly organic bastion Whole Foods), 93 percent of soy and 85 percent of U.S. corn are genetically modified, in a country where 165 million acres are planted with GMO crops, and so ones. Seifert muses that agrochemical companies “play god” with the Earth’s food supply, even though they claim to be “feeding the world.”          

Seifert’s cinematic quest takes him from the tropics to the Arctic as he explores the phenomenon of what foes dub “Frankenfoods.” Like Michael Moore trying to track down GM’s Roger Smith in 1989’s “Roger & Me,” Seifert is repeatedly denied interview access, as the filmmaker is snubbed from corporate headquarters to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C.         

As in the anti-marine life theme park doc “Blackfish” this stonewalling may explain why there isn’t a strong pro-GMO viewpoint expressed on camera.         

Be that as it may, rank and file farmers and activists to high profile politicians, environmentalists and scientists are not only available, but downright eager to speak on camera with the youthful documentarian.  

While still in office U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (whose wife, Elizabeth, shares executive producer credits) declares: “Of course they should be labeled. I don’t know what consumption of genetically engineered food does to the human body. That’s why they should be labeled. Precautionary principles dictate that you should give people a choice whether or not to consume [GMOs]. If they do so they should do it knowingly.

Swiss scientist Hans Herren, a 1995 World Food Prize recipient and president of the Washington-based Millennium Institute, adds: “In Europe [GMOs] are labeled, so people leave them on the shelf. That’s why they don’t want labeling.” The “they,” but of course, are agrochemical companies such as Monsanto, which, as Kucinich put it, “went to work” to prevent the former Congressman’s pro-labeling proposal.         

The doc claims Big Ag spent $45 million to defeat California’s GMO labeling Proposition 37, the Golden State ballot measure narrowly voted down in 2012 -- although 60 countries around the world regularly label GMOs.         

The film also contends that from 1999-2009 the industry spent $547-plus million on lobbying in the U.S., and that 300 former Congressional and White House staffers went on to work for biotech firms.         

The sprawling documentary visits post-earthquake Haiti, where hard-hit peasants protest a Big Ag company’s offer of 475 tons of genetically engineered seeds -- its distribution to be handled by USAID -- chanting “Monsanto is poison for the people.” The firm, however, is no “MonsantosClaus,” as one U.S. grower cleverly calls the agrochemical company. Concerned by the firm’s patent restrictions, Haitian agronomist Jean-Baptiste Chavannes says: “To defend the seeds of the people is to defend life… The seeds are like the stars, owned by none, shared by all.”         

The private property stipulations accompanying GMOs are a major concern of the film. As an American famer says: “You can’t save the seeds to replant them because they are copyrighted.”         

Author Gene Logsdon, the so-called Contrary Farmer, laments: “They are trying to patent nature. They own it… I don’t think it’s moral but it’s now accepted practice.” The film claims Monsanto sues for patent infringement and is “bullying.”         

While a woman at Seed Savers Exchange strives to “save genetic diversity,” Seifert says: “93% of crop diversity has vanished, replaced by corporate monoculture,” while family farms wane.         

In an interview, 350.org founder Bill McKibben cautions, “Anything too big to fail is too big.”         

Indian environmentalist and author Vandana Shiva exclaims: “There’s something wrong when governments are captive to non-renewable, debt-creating seeds that destroy independence and self-reliance.”     

The director travels to Norway’s Svalbard Global Seed Vault, where 700,000 seed samples are stored to prevent crop extinction and preserve diversity on an arctic isle 810 miles from the North Pole.        

Perplexed and troubled that the jury is still out on the science as to whether or not GMOs are, indeed, hazardous to our health, Seifert alights in France. There he interviews scientist Gilles-Éric Séralini, whose tests regarding GMOs were being conducted while this documentary was being shot. Doctor Séralini discusses his alleged results on camera, contending that rat exposure to the herbicide Roundup created big mammary tumors in the females, while male rodents experienced kidney problems and higher rates of estrogen. 

Regarding humans, the Frenchman opines, “GMOs could contribute to women’s breast tumors… We should request to forbid these products.”         

The film acknowledges that Séralini’s study is disputed, including, allegedly, by scientists with ties to the biotech industry. In any case, as Kucinich warns: “We do not know the effect of this grand experiment that is being visited upon humanity by the purveyors of GMOs.” Herren adds: “Why are we doing this? The answer is because it’s huge money… In the end a few companies will control what farmers grow and the consumer has on his plate.”

“GMO OMG” arguably does for Genetically Modified Organisms what Al Gore’s 2006 Oscar-winning “An Inconvenient Truth” did for climate change.         

Seifert’s thought-provoking documentary opens with Wendell Berry’s poem “The Peace of Wild Things” and near the end, closes with Willie Nelson’s harrowing song “I’ve Just Destroyed the World I’m Living In” to help make its powerful points.

“GMO OMG” premieres Sept. 13 in N.Y.; plays at Hollywood’s Arena Cinema Sept. 20-Oct. 3; and opens in Seattle Sept. 27. For more info see: www.gmofilm.com/.

L.A.-based film historian/critic Ed Rampell's co-authored "The Hawaii Movie and Television Book", which will be published by Honolulu's Mutual Publishing in October.

What makes Barack tick? To find out, The Progressive interviewed Harvard-educated, Washington-based psychoanalyst Dr. Justin Frank, author of the 2011 book “Obama on the Couch, Inside the Mind of the President.” Frank was trained at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. At London’s Tavistock Clinic he had a fellowship in adolescent psychiatry (which presumably came in handy when Frank wrote 2005’s “Bush on the Couch”). Frank is currently Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at George Washington University Medical Center. In this conversation, Frank discusses how the president’s “disconnected self” affects White House policies.

Q: What is your overview of Obama’s psychology?

 Dr. Justin Frank: He is dedicated to uniting his broken family of origin. He had a series of abandonments and losses -- his father left the family when he was a baby. He was uprooted when he was four or five and went to Indonesia. He was uprooted from Indonesia when he was ten. His mother had remarried and he had a close relationship with his stepfather, then he got uprooted and separated from his stepfather who he never saw again -- except once, when he was dying. He’s had a series of being an outcast and uprooted and he wants to belong and be in a family.

Q: Is this what’s behind his tendency to want to placate and please?

 Frank: Yes. It’s to try and placate and please… He also is biracial and is trying to bring together all kinds of different aspects of his personality. So yes, just not placate and please -- it’s an attempt to bring diverse people and ideas together under his own amazing ability to tolerate cognitive dissonance. For instance, even in his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention he talked about having one America, not red and blue states, but United States. This has always been his goal, but he’s never been able to achieve it because domestically he’s always been viciously attacked by the Republicans, who can’t stand having him as their president, whether because he’s Black or god knows why… Whatever it is… so there’s no way for him to really achieve this goal.

The irony is this international situation with Syria is the first time he has ever achieved his goal of bringing opposites together. Only instead of the opposites being Democrats and Republicans who can never get together in the House -- the Republicans just will not pass his bills -- but he’s actually bringing different parts of the world together, like Russia and the U.S. It’s quite dramatic in the sense diplomatically he has achieved the very thing that he always psychologically dreamed of. What he has dreamed of is finding what apparent opposites have in common. He talked about the love between his mother and father as an improbable love…

He has learned to accommodate and please in order to get along and be part of a group. And sometimes in that process he sacrifices the very people who helped him the most and got him there. He’s always done that -- since the fourth grade. He gives many examples of that in his autobiography. He just talks about it -- he doesn’t essentially say he threw his one Black friend in the fourth grade under the bus, but he essentially did in order to stay close to another group of kids. So he’s always done this…

Q: Who’s he trying to placate and please?

 Frank: It’s not placating -- it’s trying to belong. It’s not a specific person as much as he’s trying to find a way to fit in.

Q: Why did he go to Congress to seek authorization to attack Syria? Maureen Dowd almost called him a “wimp” in her Post column for doing so.

 Frank: Because she hates complexity. She hates nuance -- she really hates it… People confuse talking and thinking out loud. Maureen Dowd is a great example of that… They define somebody who thinks as a “wimp.” It goes back to this attraction to non-thought. She’s sarcastic and funny about it but it really is a deep seated anxiety about people who see complexity… We’re talking about how different he seems from himself… 

[Obama went to Congress] because he realized suddenly that he’s not like George Bush. And he realized he wants to find some way to bring people together… Some of his Syria talk and some of his drone behavior was a way -- this is pretty cynical on my part, psychologically -- of ingratiating himself to the Republicans. He has this fantasy that if he just does the right thing the Republicans will work with him. So maybe if he does the “right” thing in terms of foreign policy, being very militant and tough, he’ll get Republicans to respect him and work with him. I think that’s part of why he goes to Congress.

He’s willing to turn his back on lots of Democratic allies in order to get Republicans, to be part of the Republican group. This is what he did when he was the head of Harvard Law Review -- when he was elected by all kinds of liberal people who were very excited by it. He ended up by becoming friends with the most conservative law students in his year when he was president of the Law Review. And that’s who he is.   

Q: Does Obama think he must not only play the role of U.S. president, but as head of the U.S. empire, too?

Frank: Yes, he has more than one feeling about that. He does feel that we have the right to be the policeman of the world, even though he doesn’t want to be the policeman of the world. We have to draw the line somewhere, and for some reason, pointing guns at children is not as bad as gassing them. He has in his mind a hierarchy of murdering and to me murdering children is murdering children. But I’m in the minority apparently, because chemical weapons are far worse than just shooting children…

Now, there’s also a complete avoidance or evasion or non-thought -- just because Obama thinks doesn’t mean he only thinks. He also doesn’t think [laughs]. The non-thought part of him is completely evading the fact that we as a country have used our versions of chemical weapons, with depleted uranium in Fallujah, with all kinds of things like Agent Orange. We have a long history of massive, indiscriminate destruction.

Q: Obama may wring his hands and weep about the slaughtered children at Newtown, Connecticut, but his drone policies have reportedly killed ten times more children than Adam Lanza killed.

Frank: I agree with you. And that is a disconnection that has always been disturbing to me as a psychoanalyst and human being. What he has done -- that’s why he’s so complicated. On the one hand he’s very compassionate and human, and on the other hand to do drone strikes you dehumanize the enemy, you really don’t think about the indiscriminate nature of the drone strikes. It’s a real displacement of his aggression. I think he’s much more angry at John Boehner than he is at Al Qaeda, but I don’t think he knows what to do about him.

Q: You use the terms “cognitive dissonance” and “disconnection.” He was a constitutional law professor and ran promising to be the most transparent president in history. Yet, under his reign, we’ve had this mushrooming of spying and the increase of persecution of leakers and whistleblowers, such as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. He actually talks about himself as being “unworthy” of winning the Nobel Peace Prize and, while he’s threatening to bomb another country that America doesn’t want to be the policeman of the world. He seems to have awareness of these things, but then just acts in a totally opposite manner.

Frank: You have a very astute observation here that could really be the subject of a real long, long, long discussion because there’s a form of a capacity to dismiss his own psychic reality and distance himself from who he is. He knows very much who he is. But there’s this other part of him that can really disconnect. And he learned to do that when he was a child. And he talks about it, about how he can disconnect from his mother, how he learned to disconnect because he was abandoned, how he learned to not express or show feelings because it was very important not to.

The problem with learning those things is that you also start not feeling them inside yourself. So not only is he disconnected in his relations to others, he actually is disconnected from what he’s doing. Every once in a while he can connect and think about it, like he talks about the drone killings and he expresses for a moment some remorse. Then he goes back and does it. It’s like understanding without affect, without feeling.

Q: He’ll even say, when Medea Benjamin repeatedly interrupts him during a speech, this woman has something important to listen to and to say.

Frank: Yes. And he’s right. And he does listen -- and then he does it [drone strikes]. That is what is the hardest thing as a psychoanalyst to deal with. I spent years working with patients who have this problem, where they hear -- and they don’t hear. My first main professor at Boston used to say, “Sorrow is the vitamin of growth.” This is a man who walled himself off from loss at an early age… He also learned to manage but being able to see the good in everyone and everything so he could look at what people have in common. So he has several different mechanisms of self protection, which has really made him an unusual leader…

There’s something self-deceiving about him, more than he’s deceiving us. So when he says, “This is going to be a transparent presidency,” I actually think that that’s what he thinks.… In terms of public figures, often you should take into account the opposite of what they say is what they mean unconsciously. For instance, when Obama says, “change you can believe in,” my first thought was “change you can’t believe in.” Or when he first said “transparency” I thought “opacity,” because you don’t have to say something that strong unless you are also aware of the opposite inside of you. He has more than one feeling about the same thing.

He hates whistleblowers. He hates them because they point out inconsistencies in him. It’s okay for him to point them out -- if he’s controlling it. But if somebody else points them out it drives him crazy -- he can’t stand it.

Ed Rampell is an L.A.-based film historian/critic and the author of “Progressive Hollywood: A People’s Film History of the United States.” The new book he has co-authored about Hawaii’s movies and TV shows will be published by Honolulu’s Mutual Publishing in September. Rampell has interviewed many artists for The Progressive, including Oliver Stone, Ken Burns, Danny Glover, Tom Morello, Ed Asner, W. S. Merwin, Cenk Uygur, and Michael Apted.

Bill Siegel’s hard-hitting yet delightful documentary. “The Trials of Muhammad Ali,” pulls no punches. It tells the true story about the boxer’s greatest fight -- which took place outside of the ring, in the courthouse and the court of public opinion.

The film follows Cassius Clay to Rome, where the 18-year-old Louisville slugger wins Olympic gold in 1960 and goes on to defy the odds by handily defeating Sonny Liston in a 1964 heavyweight match in Miami. As world champion, the Kentucky pugilist pulls an even bigger upset: Clay joins the separatist, militant Nation of Islam, aka the Black Muslims, and changes his name to Muhammad Ali. All this sets the charismatic, loudmouthed champion of Black rights on a collision course with Uncle Sam, when he is drafted in 1967 but refuses to be inducted into the armed forces.

Ali rather famously declared that he had “no quarrel” with the Viet Cong, who’d “never called” him the N-word. On screen he makes a gloriously defiant speech at a college campus, refusing to fight the white man’s war against other dark-skinned peoples, while white supremacists oppress Blacks back home in America. (Will Smith spoke similar dialogue during the induction center scene in the 2001 biopic “Ali.”)

Stripped of his heavyweight belt and facing five years in prison plus a $10,000 fine, Ali embarks on a courtroom crusade to win conscientious objector status as a NOI minister and to return to the ring to win his championship title back. Unlike other films such as 1996’s “When We Were Kings” -- which won the Best Documentary Oscar and focused on Ali’s 1974 comeback attempt in the ring against George Foreman in Zaire -- “Trials” concentrates on the political persecution of Ali, his growing Black consciousness, antiwar activism and legal struggle for vindication. The doc makes the compelling case that these were truly “the Greatest’s” greatest bouts, and takes us inside of the Supreme Court’s legal wrangling and complex deliberations.

Bill Siegel -- who co-directed 2002’s “The Weather Underground,” an Academy Award-nominated documentary about the extremist offshoot of the Students for a Democratic Society -- skillfully directs “The Trials of Muhammad Ali.” In terms of archival footage Siegel has an embarrassment of reel riches to choose from. The director, a researcher for the 1994 Oscar-nominated doc “Hoop Dreams,” selects wisely and edits a knockout.

Highlights include the doc’s opening, with a black and white clip of talk show host David Susskind, the archetypal liberal, delivering an excoriating televised verbal assault on Ali during his draft trials and tribulations that is even more vituperative than segregationist Georgia Gov. Lester Maddox’s later remarks. On the other hand, there is a color clip of neocon George W. Bush awarding the athlete the Medal of Freedom in a 2005 White House ceremony. There is much footage of Malcolm X -- before and after his split from the NOI. In other shots, Ali the separatist hugs Martin Luther King and calls the integrationist “brother;” in another clip Dr. King calls on all young men to do as Ali did by filing for C.O. status and lauding his “courage” for refusing to fight in Vietnam. A laughing Coretta Scott King later tells Ali he is “our champion in boxing and in justice.”

We also hear from Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown along with famous African American sports figures. Wilt “The Stilt” Chamberlain and John Carlos, who made a gloved Black power salute during the 1968 Olympics awards ceremony in Mexico, support Ali, while ex-heavyweight champ Joe Louis and baseball’s racial trendsetter Jackie Robinson (who similarly betrayed Paul Robeson in the 1950s) oppose him. Meanwhile, the recently deceased talk show great David Frost takes the blustery Ali to task for calling all white people “devils.”

The documentary also includes lots of original interviews with insiders, from sports columnists to family members to activists. Khalilah Ali, the boxer’s second wife and mother of four out of nine of Ali’s children, who was married to him during his courtroom battles and exile from the ring, supplies intimate details. His younger brother Rahman Ali (born Rudolph) also provides insight and speaks movingly about the champ’s darkest hours. Minister Louis Farrakhan gives context from an NOI and political point of view.

Siegel unearths some surprises, including footage of Ali’s star turn in a Broadway musical “Buck White” while he was banished from the arena. Unfortunately, there isn’t material of Ali reciting his witty original poetry, but the larger than life personality of the brash, charming once and future “People’s Champion” keeps the documentary moving along at a brisk pace. No rope-a-dope or boring history lesson here; thanks to its subject this well-crafted doc packs a wallop as an eye-opener for those old enough to remember and for viewers unfamiliar with what made its title character one of the greatest athletes of all time.

“The Trials of Muhammad Ali” is currently playing in New York, Atlanta and Dallas and opens Sept. 27 in Los Angeles, Denver Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Baltimore and Santa Fe.

Ed Rampell is an L.A.-based film historian/critic and the author of “Progressive Hollywood: A People’s Film History of the United States.” The new book he has co-authored about Hawaii’s movies and TV shows will be published by Honolulu’s Mutual Publishing in September. Rampell has interviewed many artists for The Progressive, including Oliver Stone, Ken Burns, Danny Glover, Tom Morello, Ed Asner, W. S. Merwin, Cenk Uygur, and Michael Apted.

Jason Osder’s “Let the Fire Burn” is a documentary about the only aerial bombing carried out by government forces against American citizens inside the U.S.A. during the 20th century.

Is Tinseltown’s new WikiLeaks feature film fact or fiction?

Is “The Fifth Estate” history, or the character assassination of Julian Assange?

He’s the man who founded the intrepid online outlet that has, according to the movie, released more scoops in three years than The Washington Post has in the past 30 years.

Hollywood heavyweight Bill Condon, who won a Best Writing Academy Award for 1998’s “Gods and Monsters, is the director of “The Fifth Estate. The screenplay is by TV writer Josh Singer, whose credits include “The West Wing.”

The film is cerebral and complex. Unless you’re familiar with the story, you may have trouble following the intricate plot. Especially as this imaginative film deploys creative effects and techniques intended to cinematically express the New Media era.

“Estate” opens with a highly visual rapid montage of images that traces the evolution of communications, from hieroglyphics to the Guttenberg Bible to Morse code to FDR on the radio to CBS newsman Walter Cronkite breaking the news about JFK’s assassination on live TV to satellites in outer space and beyond.

The movie shows Assange (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) saying, “One moral man, one whistleblower, can topple the most repressive system” through creative use of the Internet. “Cyber-punks concealed in clouds of code hide the identities” of leakers, who can fight for global social justice, proclaims Assange, a messianic Marshall McLuhan for the digital age. WikiLeaks’ goals are “privacy for individuals, transparency for institutions, anonymity for sources.”

As WikiLeaks reveals secrets about Kenyan government corruption, internal procedures regarding Gitmo detainees, Swiss bank money laundering, a Peruvian oil scandal, Iceland’s banking collapse, etc., on its website, Assange grows in stature and picks up acolytes (although, according to “Estate,” not nearly as many as he claims).

The Wiki-watchdogs are on a collision course with Uncle Sam, as Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir (portrayed by Carice Van Houten, who was voted Best Dutch Actress of All Time) bravely backs the computerati, although according to “Estate” she was deeply involved in Assange’s operations.

The American actors Laura Linney (“Mystic River,” “Love Actually”) and Stanley Tucci (“Conspiracy”, “Julie & Julia”, “The Hunger Games”) play the Hillary Clinton-esque Sarah Shaw and James Boswell, U.S. government officials hot on the trail of the digital “terrorists,” as Newt Gingrich dubs them in a news clip.

The spam hits the fan in April 2010, when the website courageously posts classified 2007 footage of U.S. choppers killing civilians, including children and Reuters staffers in Iraq. Assange boldly calls it “collateral murder” and unveils it at the National Press Club in the belly of the Bush beast: Washington, D.C. The following month Army Specialist Chelsea Manning is arrested in connection to the release of this video disclosing U.S. forces committing war crimes. By July 2010, The New York Times, Der Spiegel, The Guardian and WikiLeaks publish up to 91,000 secret U.S. military documents about the Afghan War.

Whether or not these classified cables were redacted to conceal informants’ identities and whether any of these sources were killed due to WikiLeaks’ alleged recklessness become bones of contention in this film.

Until now, Cumberbatch may be best known to viewers for playing a decidedly eccentric Holmes in the ongoing BBC TV series “Sherlock”, which sets the world’s most famous detective in modern London. Cumberbatch brings this eccentricity to his portrayal of Assange as an extremely quirky, temperamental egoist who, during a troubled childhood, belonged to a cult called The Family.

The WikiLeaks website denies this and many other accusations, including that he dyes his hair white, and grouses: "These authors had an interest in portraying Julian Assange as dishonest or manipulative for competitive, personal and legal reasons." How was WikiLeaks able to critique a movie that wasn’t even theatrically released yet? Because, but of course, versions of the screenplay (one is posted at its site) were surreptitiously divulged to Assange’s operation -- they don’t call it WikiLeaks for nothing!

On Oct. 9, 2013, WikiLeaks published a January letter from Assange to Cumberbatch explaining why he declined the actor’s request to meet with the man he is incarnating: “There are dozens of positive books about WikiLeaks, but DreamWorks decided to base its script only on the most toxic.”

In its “Talking Points on The Fifth Estate” WikiLeaks derides the movie as “a work of fiction masquerading as fact” that seeks to contextualize “how WikiLeaks is perceived."

"This film does not occur in a historical vacuum, but appears in the context of ongoing efforts to bring a criminal prosecution against WikiLeaks and Julian Assange for exposing the activities of the Pentagon and the US State Department," they insist. "The film also occurs in the context of Pvt. Manning's upcoming appeal and request for a presidential pardon… The US and UK governments are in the middle of a crackdown on whistleblowers and national security journalism. A confrontation between the free press and the secret state is currently playing out.”

Was Assange motivated to release massive databases depicting crimes against humanity because of purported personal peculiarities? If so, let’s hope more members of the Fourth Estate catch these personality “defects” -- after all, as Assange says, “Courage is contagious.”

Meanwhile, Chelsea Manning is behind bars at Leavenworth, Edward Snowden, who was assisted by WikiLeaks during his recent travails, is in exile in Russia, and Julian Assange remains at the Ecuadorian embassy in London as the world’s most famous political refugee.

“The Fifth Estate” opens in the U.K. Oct. 11 and in the U.S. Oct. 18.

This trailer was published to YouTube on July 16, 2013.

Army Specialist Adam Winfield found out the hard way that not only is it tough times for those who dare to blow the whistle, but the first casualty of war is still truth.

The 21-year-old infantryman came forward to reveal that soldiers of the Fifth Stryker Brigade, Second Infantry Division, who were deployed near Kandahar, executed Afghans for sport and then planted weapons beside their corpses to “prove” the casualties were “terrorists.” (They also captured these chilling Kodak moments with a series of photos.) Winfield’s reward for trying to report these crimes against humanity was, the moment he stepped off a plane when he returned to America, to be arrested and charged with committing premeditated murder. He found himself to be in the Kafkaesque trap of becoming a target of a major investigation into war crimes he himself had tried to expose.

Winfield’s wartime experiences and subsequent court-martial disillusioned the young volunteer, who undergoes an epiphany and tells a probing camera lens: “War is dirty. It’s not how they portray it in the movies.” But it is how Dan Krauss depicts combat in “The Kill Team,” a hard-hitting, award-winning documentary where the fog of war mingles with the haze of hashish.

Krauss’s film takes its title from the nickname for the Stryker troops gone wild. But “The Kill Team” is also very much a moving family drama. Backing him up every step of the way are Winfield’s Cape Coral, Florida, parents, Emma and Christopher, an ex-Marine. In 2010 Adam tells his father via instant messenger about the dogfaces’ wrongdoing in Afghanistan and asks him to inform the Army inspector general.

Christopher attempts to alert the military, but to no avail. As Adam confronts the ordeals of death threats, his own death wish and court case, Emma and Christopher stand by their son. Even after he receives a three-year sentence and bad conduct discharge, his mom and dad unwaveringly believe Adam to be not only innocent, but courageous for standing up for what’s right and trying to tell the truth, against all odds.

Although the jury is still out for some as to whether or not Adam -- who did not try to stop the killing of Allah Dad and pled guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter -- is a whistleblower or murderer, Krauss’s nonfiction film paints a sympathetic portrait of its protagonist.

“The Kill Team” also interviews other members of Winfield’s platoon, such as the conflicted Corporal Jeremy Morlock and Private First Class Andrew Holmes, who were both charged with the premeditated murder of 15-year-old Gul Mudin on Jan. 15, 2010. In the course of their horrifying odyssey, both become bolder and wiser than they were when they volunteered/ As part of a plea agreement, Morlock, who hails from Sarah Palin’s hometown of Wasilla, Alaska, received a 24-year sentence, while Holmes, who is from Boise, Idaho, is serving seven years behind bars. Both were dishonorably discharged.

Pfc. Justin Stoner, from Lebanon, Pennsylvania, was assaulted by fellow soldiers after he reported their drug use. Along with the apparently decent Winfield, Stoner is the film’s conscience. Questioning the military’s dehumanization of recruits, the philosophical Stoner ruminates: “Your job is to kill. Then why the hell are you pissed off when we do it?” Stoner alleged that he was shown human fingers -- which triggered the murder investigation of the Afghans -- by Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs

Gibbs is the highest-ranking soldier charged in this sordid, sorry, scandalous affair. He was found guilty of, among other things, three counts of murder. Gibbs, who declined to be interviewed for the documentary and is mainly glimpsed in pictures shot by a photojournalist, looms as a cross between two classic characters from Hollywood’s Vietnam War epics: Marlon Brando as Col. Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 “Apocalypse Now” and Tom Berenger as Sgt. Barnes in Oliver Stone’s 1986 “Platoon.” Like them, the gung-ho Gibbs reportedly goes rogue, instigates the Stryker Brigaders’ renegade mayhem, and cuts fingers off of Afghan cadavers so he can use these bones for a creepy trophy -- a skeletal necklace. Much to his surprise, Gibbs’s running amok on the warpath landed him a life sentence at Fort Leavenworth (where he might have some illuminating tête-à-têtes with fellow inmate Chelsea Manning).

Krauss, who directed, co-wrote, produced, and shot “The Kill Team”, pulls no punches as he tells his saga, which won the Tribeca Film Festival’s Best Documentary Feature and the San Francisco International Film Festival’s Golden Gate awards. The director’s 2004 South Africa themed “The Death of Kevin Carter” received a Best Documentary, Short Subject Oscar nomination plus two Emmys. Krauss was also the cinematographer for other documentaries lefty filmgoers will be familiar with, including 2009’s “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers,” 2012’s “We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists” and 2013’s “Inequality for All,” featuring former Labor Secretary Robert Reich waxing poetic about America’s glaring wealth disparity.

While politically aware audiences will appreciate Krauss’s war-is-hell message, he aims at those young people who -- like an impressionable Winfield -- have bought into military madness. Perhaps by seeing “The Kill Team,” would-be volunteers for Washington’s endless imperial misadventures will wake up and stay home instead.

What would happen if they gave a war -- and nobody came?

“The Kill Team” is currently making the rounds of the film festival circuit. It was recently shown at DocFest in Hollywood’s Arclight Cinema and will be screened at filmfests in London, Warsaw and Zagreb in October. See: http://killteammovie.com/.

The new book co-authored by L.A.-based reviewer Ed Rampell, “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book”, published by Honolulu’s Mutual Publishing, drops Nov. 25.

One may think that the bad old days of colonialism in the developing world are over, but nobody bothered to tell that to the missionaries at the Kansas City-based International House of Prayer (IHOP).

According to director Roger Ross Williams, these overzealous American evangelicals have picked up where imperial poet Rudyard Kipling’s “white man’s burden” left off, spreading their strange concept of “Christianity,” with an obsessive focus on homophobia, throughout Uganda. And thanks to Williams' efforts, now there’s a film to document their bizarre and appalling crusade: “God Loves Uganda.”

In Uganda, these dubious disciples stepped into a power vacuum created by the ouster of strongman Idi “V.D.” Amin’s regime. But instead of bringing kindness and love for one’s neighbor to Ugandans, as some Christians would, they turned the entire nation into a laboratory for America’s religious right.

Following “born again” President George W. Bush’s lead, they run “educational” campaigns about the dangers of AIDS in which they do not advocate the use of condoms. Then IHOP missionaries stand up in front of crowds of Ugandans and rail against the wickedness of sex and homosexuality. Their efforts, ongoing for many years now, have led to an increase in AIDS and homophobia across the country and a new law that imposes life in prison simply for being gay or advocating for LGBTQ rights. Prior to the law’s passage, its sponsors sought to impose the death penalty.

The homophobic hysteria thees American meddlers have whipped up has also predictably resulted in hate crimes, notably the bludgeoning death of LGBTQ advocate David Kato. Not content with murdering the activist, the hate-mongers dared to disrupt his funeral, too.

IHOP’s sex-obsessed cast of Christian crazies includes individuals who, by their own confession, have their own sexual demons that they believe Jesus Christ (who they rarely seem to mention in the film) has set them free of. IHOP leader Lou Engle, who injected himself into the anti-gay Proposition 8 struggle in California before inflicting himself upon Uganda, admits he was a porn addict. Reverend Jo Anna Watson, a fixture on the front lines of the Uganda crusade since 2002, confesses to having experienced same sex attraction when she was an actress. Jason and Rachelle Digges, who operate a training camp in Uganda and frequently visit America to raise funds from fellow evangelicals, married when they were only 18 years old. And Pastor Scott Lively, whose testimony before Uganda’s parliament inspired the so-called “Kill the Gays” bill, is being sued to stand trial in U.S. federal court for inciting the persecution, torture and murder of gays in Uganda, in a case the Center for Constitutional Rights brought on behalf of Sexual Minorities Uganda.

The film’s often-young missionaries and their followers are repeatedly seen displaying bizarre behavior, including vigorously writhing, weeping and speaking in tongues. They proclaim their distorted vision of “the good news” while risking their necks amidst Kampala’s congested traffic. One doesn’t have to be Sigmund Freud to suspect a correlation between their weird habits and the sexual repression they preach. As one might expect, these self-righteous meddlers are mostly white.

“God Loves Uganda” also points out that IHOP’s Ugandan allies are royally cashing in on their crackpot version of Christianity. Robert Kayanja, pastor of Kampala’s biggest churches, just happens to be one of Uganda’s five richest men. Pastor Martin Ssempa, an arch-proponent of the “kick sodomy out of Uganda” movement and legislation that supports it, divides his time between his homes in Kampala and Las Vegas.

But Williams’ film shows that not every man of the cloth in Africa is infected with IHOP’s virulent strain of homophobia. In addition to the hate-exporting missionaries and their local collaborators, “God Loves Uganda” also featured clergymen who believe love is the central tenet of Christ’s teachings. After Reverend Kapya Kaoma spoke out against homophobic zealotry in Uganda, the Zambian Anglican priest was forced to flee that country. Similarly, the Archbishop of the Church of Uganda revoked Bishop Christopher Senyonjo’s titles because of his heroic defense of LGBTQ rights. And when Kato’s funeral was disturbed, Senyonjo boldly delivered an impromptu graveside oration, declaring: “God created you, god is on your side.” For preaching tolerance and a god of love, Senyonjo was awarded the Clinton Global Citizen Award in 2012.

“God Loves Uganda” is the best up-close look at the dangers of the religious right since 2006’s harrowing “Jesus Camp.” If Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s unsettling look at a religious summer camp revealed what flimflam fanatics perpetrate upon American youth, then “God Loves Uganda” discloses what these self-anointed “Christian” conservatives are up to in Africa -- bringing religious colonialism to the developing world by making Uganda a safe haven for homophobia.

Therein lies the biggest feat of Roger Ross Williams’ documentary. "God Loves Uganda" will make American audiences ponder how the right went so wrong.

Watch the trailer:

"God Loves Uganda” will be screened at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles at 10:15 p.m. on Feb. 12 and 3:30 p.m. on Feb. 13.
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Ed Rampell is The Progressive's man in Hollywood and author of "The Hawaii Movie and Television Book," available now

Oscar-winning director Freida Lee Mock’s latest documentary opens with a close-up shot of a telephone. The voice of Ginni Thomas is heard urging Anita Hill to apologize and recant her testimony alleging her husband, Clarence Thomas, sexually harassed her and looked at pornography.

The vocemail that opens “Anita: Speaking Truth to Power” was recorded on Oct. 9, 2010, the 19th anniversary of Hill’s appearances before the Senate Judiciary Committee during Justice Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings. It was a scandal that briefly gripped the nation in October 1991, after President George H.W. Bush nominated Thomas to replace Thurgood Marshall on the U.S. Supreme Court.

In Mock’s nonfiction film, an older and wiser Hill says she initially thought the message left on her Brandeis University office phone was a prank. Not only because it seemed so preposterous that the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice would actually call her, but because Mrs. Thomas urged her “to change sworn testimony,” which could have opened her up to charges of perjury. Mrs. Thomas, a conservative lobbyist, has long caused her husband to be dogged with allegations of a conflict of interest. True to form, however, he’s always refused to recuse himself on touchy partisan matters.

Crucially, the documentary stresses that Hill, who was a professor at an Oklahoma law school when she was called to testify, did not voluntarily approach the Senate for the Thomas confirmation hearings. Instead, Hill was contacted by the Senate because she had worked for Thomas at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Hill’s private, written statement about Thomas was subsequently leaked, leading to her Washington testimony in October 1991.

These pivotal events are what sparked the ensuing media circus, leading some members of the all-white, all-male Senate Judiciary Committee to make destroying Hill’s credibility a top priority. In short order, Republicans made her out to be a self-aggrandizing fame and fortune seeker, with a vindictive thirst for revenge. “Truth” makes an argument to the contrary: That Hill was a private citizen who was reluctantly thrust into the spotlight but rose to the occasion and told the truth from her perspective, no matter the price.

Hill explains in the film that she naively expected the senate to simply vet Thomas to determine if he was qualified to be on the Supreme Court. She was totally unprepared for the extraordinary level of politicking that process entailed, particularly when the committee was led by arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond. Hill quickly discovered, much to her chagrin, that she was being put on de facto trial and subjected to a campaign of character assassination, all of which was designed to keep her from testifying about Thomas on television.

Her eventual testimony was a bombshell of salacious details, mixing race and sexuality in a way the mainstream media rarely encounters at this high a level. Because both Hill and Thomas are African Americans, while Thomas’ wife Ginni is white, the drama captured the nation.

Compelled to “relive an experience and an ugly issue,” with calm and poise, the besieged Hill itemized Thomas’ unwanted advances and sexually provocative comments when he was her boss. She was made to repeat her allegations regarding Thomas’ infamous lewd comments about pubic hair on a Coke can, aspects of sex acts performed in pornographic films that Thomas enjoyed and his penis size.

“Truth” also puts a spotlight on the Judiciary Committee’s Democrats , who did not come to Hill’s defense or show much interest in finding out whether her allegations were true. Sen. Howell Heflin was particularly hard on Hill, grilling her as to whether she’s “a scorned woman,” playing into a gender stereotype to “explain” away why she was coming forward at this time. Not even Vice President Joe Biden, then the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, stood in Hill’s defense or called any witnesses like Angela Wright, who would have confirmed Hill’s allegations. By refusing to help her, Biden set the stage for the Senate’s confirmation of Thomas and he was ultimately voted in 52-48.

However, Mock’s doc does not dwell on Biden’s betrayal. In doing so, “Truth” pulls its punches somewhat and neglects to ask the toughest question of all: Why did the first black president, a self-styled champion of women’s rights, select the same senator who stuck the proverbial knife in Anita Hill’s back to be his running mate and vice president?

The answer seems to be the film’s pro-Democratic Party bias. (Hill currently currently teaches a class at Brandeis called “Social Justice and the Obama Administration.”) In any case, “Truth” does take the 14 white, male senators of the Judiciary Committee to task for being cowed by Thomas. Sen. Ted Kennedy is seen making a rare comment in Hill’s defense. “Truth” also bestows significant credit upon Democratic Congresswomen Nita Lowey, Pat Schroeder and Patsy Mink, along with Sen. Barbara Mikulski, all of whom stood up for Hill as she was being grilled by the male senators.

Almost a quarter century since the events depicted in “Truth,” we can look back and say that Hill put “sexual harassment” on the rhetorical map, leading to major advancements for women in the workplace. The film also shows how Hill’s activism has inspired women across America, including the group Girls for Gender Equality, to stand up for their rights and demand they be treated as equals with men.

Filmmaker Freida Lee Mock won the Best Documentary Academy Award for 1994’s “Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision”, about the artist who created Washington’s Vietnam Memorial Wall and the Civil Rights Fountain Memorial, and has received four other Oscar nominations. In “Anita: Speaking Truth to Power,” which was screened at the 2014 Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles, Mock shows that in 1991 Hill also had a strong clear vision, which the 57-year-old continues to pursue even today.

Though Hill's nemesis on the Supreme Court once complained of the “media circus” her allegations whipped up, this film shows that the fearless Hill did not just survive her brush with power, she thrived -- all by speaking the truth and never wavering.

Watch a trailer:

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Ed Rampell is The Progressive’s man in Hollywood and author of “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book,” in stores now.

Stanley Nelson’s gripping new documentary “Freedom Summer” takes audiences to Mississippi in 1964, telling the tale of the 1,000 young people who poured into the state to register oppressed African Americans to vote.

Organized by pro-civil rights groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the idealistic activists’ immediate goal was a voter registration drive in the state, which was completely segregated in 1964 despite having the highest percentage of African American residents in the entire country.

Just as D.W. Griffith’s 1915 racist epic “The Birth of a Nation” illustrated the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, Nelson’s “Freedom Summer” reveals that the “invasion” of what white Mississippians called “outside agitators” -- many of them Yankees -- and how their rising influence was met with a revival of the Klan. Nelson’s unflinching narrative paints a horrifying picture of America’s second civil war: the battle for civil rights.

As “Freedom Summer” documents, the KKK and White Citizens’ Council swiftly retaliated against integration efforts with brutal violence. By June 21, 1964, three civil rights organizers disappeared near Philadelphia, Mississippi. The organizers, Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, were investigating the torching of Mt. Zion Methodist Church, where the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) had setup a Freedom School, when they went missing.

The trio of organizers was an unusual sight for many Mississippians. Schwerner and Goodman were Caucasian Jews from New York, while Chaney was an African American from Meridian, Mississippi. After they were pulled over and jailed for an alleged traffic violation, all three suddenly went missing. Initially, the FBI dragged its feet on investigating the case, so Attorney General Robert Kennedy stepped in and launched an intensive manhunt. “States rights” advocates who defended segregation claimed the disappearances were merely “a hoax,” but their defense fell apart after their bodies were found 44 days later. “Freedom Summer” makes a point to portray these civil rights martyrs as heroes, unlike in the 1988 Hollywood fictionalization of the case, “Mississippi Burning,” in which the FBI plays the protagonist.

Mickey’s widow Rita Schwerner is interviewed in the documentary, and the footage proves her to be a stoic, stalwart individual of integrity. Archival footage of a funeral service in New York for the organizers shows their devastated mothers arm-in-arm trying to console one another. In that moment of tragedy, Carolyn Goodman, Fannie Lee Chaney and Anne Schwerner transformed themselves into a rare example of the integration eluding America in 1964, where apartheid still reigned south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Even more heartbreaking is footage from James Chaney’s funeral in Mississippi, where his 12-year-old brother Ben is beside himself with agonizing grief. At the funeral, CORE’s Dave Dennis delivers an emotional eulogy that presages the rise of black militancy.

“Freedom Summer” also features news footage of SNCC leader Robert Moses and revered black comedian Dick Gregory, who chartered an airplane to deliver tons of food to black Mississippians after segregationists cut off federal aid for poverty-stricken communities in hopes of crushing the voter registration drive. Indeed, the black comic’s finest moment was no laughing matter.

Then there’s the outspoken sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer, a remarkable woman who dared defy not only Jim Crow but also the Democratic Party establishment, too. As vice chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, she spearheaded the campaign to unseat Mississippi’s segregated delegation and replace them with the integrated Freedom Democrats at the Democratic National Convention in 1964, just a few weeks after the corpses of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney were discovered.

One astounding sequence in “Freedom Summer” even includes phone calls recorded by the White House’s wiretapping apparatus, featuring the self-serving, supposedly liberal President Lyndon Baines Johnson twisting arms to derail Hamer’s efforts, despite having just signed the Civil Rights Act. Suspecting that the Mississippi Freedom Democrats were actually Bobby Kennedy’s plot to disrupt the convention and win the nomination, the paranoid president enlists Democratic and union hacks to stop the Freedom Democrats dead in their tracks. When Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell opposes them, Hamer replies by asking how many bales of cotton the dapper Powell had picked.

With “Freedom Summer,” Nelson has given us an indelible, memorable portrait of America’s pitched struggle with institutionalized racism in the 1960s. The film proves, without a doubt, that even a small but organized cadre of committed activists can change the world. The Freedom Summer of 1964 was a major milestone in breaking the back of Jim Crow. Because of their struggle and sacrifice, today there are more African Americans holding elected office in Mississippi than in any other state.

What the film does not take on directly is the rise of black militancy following the Freedom Summer. The film closes with video footage of SNCC organizer Stokely Carmichael repeatedly crying, “black power!” in an ominous sign of things to come. Following a grand Hollywood tradition, Nelson -- who’d directed “Freedom Riders” in 2010 -- is planning a sequel about the black power movement.

In any case, “Freedom Summer,” which just won the Pan- African Film Festival’s Best Documentary award, is riding atop a surge of powerful films about black history. Along with “12 Years a Slave,” Nelson’s look back at the summer of 1964 is among the very best of these movies. It is a film which reminds us that we owe much to those who gave their very lives so that others may enjoy a greater freedom, even as the battle for a more just society is still being fought.

“Freedom Summer” will air on PBS’s “American Experience” series in June, marking the 50th anniversary of the actual Freedom Summer.

Watch a trailer:

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Ed Rampell is The Progressive's man in Hollywood and co-author of "The Hawaii Movie and Television Book," in stores now.

On Valentine’s Day I was part of a panel discussion about Hollywood’s global influence for the Al Jazeera TV program “Empire” with filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad. The Palestinian director had flown from Nazareth to Los Angeles because his latest movie, “Omar,” is nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. This is not the first time Abu-Assad has been up for an Oscar -- his 2005 film “Paradise Now” was also nominated in the same category.

On the Al Jazeera set, Abu-Assad gushed. “It’s a big honor,” he said. “I feel like I’m privileged to be second time nominated and I hope I will always get a nomination. I must tell you I love it.”

There’s a lot to love, too: The 98-minute feature has already won the Jury Prize Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival, and received special recognition from the New York and Toronto International Film Festivals.

In many Soviet and Chinese agitprop pictures, brawny proletarian protagonists are typically portrayed as gallant and courageous heroes. This is not the case with Abu-Assad’s “Paradise Now,” which portrays Palestinian would-be suicide bombers as mere mortals, putting their foibles on display even as they prepare for a deadly mission in Tel Aviv. Nor is this the case with “Omar,” which focused on flawed Palestinian activists who belong to a cell of an unspecified, fictionalized underground network. These complicated, conflicted characters are beset by deception, treachery and a love triangle. Even as they resist Israeli occupation, Abu-Assad’s West Bank militants are all-too-human.

Watch a trailer:

“This tackles a very interesting point,” he told me. “It’s true, I am showing the freedom fighters as ambiguous or normal people -- they are not superheroes, but they are very close to reality. I see the Palestinians as real, as more complex than a superhero who is noble all the way through. Why then in Western movies the superhero is clear noble from ‘A’ through zed? Because in reality there is no superhero -- in real life in the United States, no one is really ready to offer himself for others, to society for a higher goal. Most people are selfish. You can’t find heroes as they are defined by movies. Most people will not do what heroes do. It’s just your alter ego -- you’d like to do that, but in reality you don’t do that.”

It’s quite different in the West Bank, Abu-Assad explained. “Actually, in Palestine, a lot of people do that,” he said. “There’s a lot of freedom fighters or people ready to sacrifice themselves. ’Cause lots of young guys died in the Intifada or struggle -- there’s almost 11,000 people in jail for being part of the resistance. When you have a reality where there is a lot of heroes, you don’t make them superheroes. You make them real, because there’s a lot of them in reality.”

“In order to make an interesting movie, you either have a superhero caught up in an ordinary situation or a normal person caught up in an extreme situation,” he added. “And I prefer the second, because I feel this is more true to reality. We’re all normal people but sometimes have to face things that are bigger than us or are caught in a very complicated situation. Take anybody in this life. Who is a superhero among us? Nobody. We are all like ordinary people but we have to deal with very complicated things -- politics, society, economy, and in our case, for Palestinians, freedom fighting. It’s all extreme situations and this resembles more reality than the opposite concept of superheroes caught up in an ordinary conversation.”

Abu-Assad was born in 1961 in Nazareth, currently the largest Arab city in the north of what is now Israel, where the director resides today. A Muslim, Abu-Assad said he does not identify himself as an “Arab-Israeli,” but as a “Palestinian.” He also insists this should be his choice as to what he is called and identified as -- a literal form of self determination.

“I was never a member of a political party but I sympathized with the true liberal parties,” he said, adding that he’s always felt kinship with those who advocate for freedom and civil rights. Abu-Assad studied airplane engineering for six years in Holland, but found out that wasn’t for him.

“When I was a kid I watched lots of movies and was intrigued by this medium and exposed to it when I was very young,” he said. “When I worked as an engineer, I knew I didn’t want to spend my life engineering. I went back to Nazareth and by accident I met a Palestinian director called Rashid Masharawi, and he offered me the first job as an assistant. After one year I produced for him his first feature film [“Hatta Ishaar Akhar,” released in 1994]. And later I started to make my own movies. In 1992 I made my first short, ‘Paper House.’”

He estimated that there are currently around 10 Palestinians directing feature films.

For centuries in Eastern Europe, the ancestors of modern Israelis were forced to live in walled-off ghettos that segregated them from Christians. It’s ironic then, that Israel is building walls of its own, creating Palestinian ghettos. That analogy isn’t an easy one for Abu-Assad.

“I don’t like to make comparisons, especially with Europe,” he said. “In every religion, race or color you will find good people and bad people. We learn from research that most people who were hit by their parents will hit their kids; it’s a normal thing. The way you were treated is the way you will treat others.”

Regarding the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli impasse, Abu-Assad mused: “Sure, we are all Semitic people. But still we have different interests. I don’t believe our conflict is a conflict of race or religion… but of interests. I think some of the survivors of the Holocaust, after they were so disappointed in the West, and in humanity, actually, they came with the idea that in order to survive you need to have a state. And they make a link between the state and surviving. And in order for their state to survive they have to protect the interests of the West in the Middle East… I truly believe this is the true conflict -- not a conflict between Jews and Muslims or Arabs and Israelis.”
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Ed Rampell is The Progressive's man in Hollywood and co-author of "The Hawaii Movie and Television Book."

I’m antiwar, but for some reason I love good war movies, especially ones about World War II.

While the Vietnam flicks may have better rock ’n' roll soundtracks, WWII is arguably Hollywood’s most-retold war. Perhaps this is because it was nicknamed “The Big One” -- a genuinely global conflagration of truly apocalyptic proportions, from the Holocaust to Allied firebombings of Dresden, Tokyo, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In addition to being the deadliest armed conflict in human history, WWII was cast by the Allies as an epic battle between good and evil, in keeping with themes straight out of the book of Revelations. The war against fascism has the aura of ancient holy crusades, and to many it remains the last time America’s foreign military adventures landed on right side of history.

But because history is inevitably written by the victors, most WWII films focus on the triumphant Allied forces. That’s where “Generation War” comes in, illustrating the German side of the war from the perspective of civilians, soldiers, partisans, Christians and Jews.

This cinematic saga begins at a party in Berlin, circa 1941, when the Nazis were at the apex of their power. Five young friends gather for a final celebration as Hitler is launching Operation Barbarossa, the fateful invasion of the Soviet Union. Nobody had any idea that at the time that the invasion would prove to be the Third Reich’s undoing.

The five characters include two brothers -- the gung-ho officer Wilhelm Winter (played by Volker Bruch) and his younger, more sensitive brother Friedhelm (portrayed by Tom Schilling), who is skeptical about the regime and its wars and treated as an outcast on the front lines. Charlotte (played by Miriam Stein) is the girl in love with Wilhelm. Deluded by National Socialist propaganda, she volunteers to work as a nurse on the Russian front. Finally, there’s Greta (played Katharina Schuttler), a young woman who yearns to become a Marlene Dietrich-like torch singer. However, Greta’s cabaret career faces immense obstacles. Namely, her lover Viktor Goldstein (played by Ludwig Trepte), who is a Jew. Nevertheless, he is not only beloved by Greta but warmly accepted by the rest of the group as one of their own.

The introductory sequence is rudely interrupted by a Gestapo officer who crashes the quintet’s party, hunting for Jews and demanding to know if they are playing verboten swing music. Narrowly escaping the close brush with Hitler’s enforcer, the five young Berliners bitterly promise to reunite and spend Christmas together in six months, once the U.S.S.R. had been crushed by the Third Reich.

The group’s plans are soon swallowed whole by the all-consuming maelstrom of total war.

The film follows these five protagonists as they travel from the home front to the Russian front, and all the horrors their journey entails.

“Generation War” is largely about shattered illusions. Perhaps the most deluded among the lead characters is Viktor, a tailor’s son who believes that his father’s service during WWI would spare the family the worst of Hitler’s “final solution to the Jewish question.” As history hauntingly unfolds, exposing the depth of the Nazi regime’s lies and brutality, most of these characters finally wise up. Ironically, the most critical of the quintet is ultimately consumed by the war he’d doubted all along, succumbing to the fascist fever.

Philipp Kadelbach’s powerful direction here displays a keen cinematic talent, using handheld cameras and subjective cinematography to take viewers right into the heat of combat. Kadelbach previously directed the 2011 blimp biopic “Hindenburg: The Last Flight,” a two-part miniseries for the Encore TV network. “Generation War” has stirred controversy for depicting German protagonists and a Jewish Nazi sympathizer during WWII, but my main reservation on this film is the narrative’s over-reliance on coincidences. The various characters seem to serendipitously cross paths on the far-flung fronts, or experience miraculous last minute rescues. Both of these devices strain the film’s credulity.

These flukes, however awkward, do not dramatically undercut the veracity of what is ultimately one of the best WWII movies in years. “Generation War” is a well-written, four-hour tour de force. Writer Stefan Kolditz, who was born in East Germany and also co-wrote the 2006 drama “Dresden,” should be commended.

Although originally aired in Germany as a three-part miniseries, “Generation War” is being presented in the U.S. as two distinct features with separate admissions. It is currently being rolled out across the U.S. and opens Feb. 28 in Los Angeles at the NuArt Theatre.

Let’s just hope that “Generation War” is the closest American audiences ever get an inside view of all out war and the tyranny of fascism.

Watch a trailer:

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Ed Rampell is The Progressive’s man in Hollywood and co-author of “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book,” available now.

How to corrupt judges sent profited by sending kids away.

The harrowing new documentary “Kids for Cash” is, among other things, a cautionary tale about where privatization leads.

In excruciating detail, director Robert May lays bare the complex, sinister scheme advanced by two judges and a private prison in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.

Judge Michael Conahan helped shutdown a decrepit publicly owned juvenile detention facility and to get it replaced with a private outlet owned by investors of the Pennsylvania Child Care. This led to a twenty-year lease of Pennsylvania Child Care’s private for-profit Pittston Township detention center for $58 million paid for with taxpayer dollars. As part of this backdoor deal Conahan colluded with his colleague on the bench, Mark Ciavarella.

Having facilitated the establishment of the new facility these judges proceeded to supply the demand for heads in the beds (which, the doc asserts, sometimes came minus pillows). Luzerne County’s imprisonment rate for children and teenagers was 25 percent -- more than two and half times the statewide average. During the judges’ reign of error, thousands of young people were incarcerated.

Cultivating a tough-o- crime image and raising the bar on pomposity, Ciavarella actually bore the title of “President Judge.” The Columbine school shooting provided a pretext for the justices’ “zero-tolerance for crime” campaign against youngsters. Instead of slapping them on their wrists, the hanging judges proceeded to mete out rough justice in the form of stiff sentences, even for minor infractions the juveniles were charged with. More than half of the young defendants and their parents were hoodwinked into waiving the right of legal representation by an attorney, which enabled Ciavarella to impose incarceration upon them.

With archival footage and original interviews, “Kids for Cash” tells the stories of five youths whom Ciavarella threw the book at and how this affected the beleaguered defendants and their families.

After Charlie Balasavage’s parents bought him a red scooter it was discovered that it had previously been stolen. After his visit to Ciavarella’s court, the 14-year-old went on to spend five years in the correctional system.

Twelve-year-old Justin Bodnar’s use of obscenities in a squabble with another pupil’s mother led to seven years inside of the juvenile injustice system.

For making a fake MySpace page ridiculing her high school’s assistant principal, Hillary Transue was sentenced to three months in a juvenile detention center, her First Amendment rights be damned.

And so on.

Some suffer the lasting effects of having had their childhoods and teenage years, as well as much of their educations, robbed from them.

As one tearful mother cries in the film, she points out that instead of these being their “good old days,” their youthful memories will always be marred by having served hard time behind bars.

In the case of 17-year-old Ed Kenzakoski, who was already troubled, his trip to Ciavarella’s kangaroo court led to a downward spiral that resulted in Kenzakoski’s shooting himself in the heart.

In Francois Truffaut’s 1959 French New Wave classic “The 400 Blows,” the troubled Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is sent to reform school because of the boy’s mischievous behavior.

But behind Conahan and Ciavarella’s law and order stance was more than just an overzealous preoccupation with rules, regulations and school safety. These judges had a corrupt motive: Pennsylvania Child Care and a sister company paid them $2.6 million. These payoffs were rationalized as being “finder’s fees.”

However, as the truth emerged and local investigative reporter Terrie Morgan-Besecker and talk show host Steve Corbett, along with the Juvenile Law Center, sounded the alarm, the public perception was that these “finder’s fees” were actually kickbacks and bribes to the judges for helping to close a public facility and replace it with a private for-profit lockup, which they proceeded to supply with cannon fodder in the form of children and teenagers.

Both judges are serving time in federal prison for racketeering.

The documentary’s most powerful, poignant moment is footage of Ciavarella outside of the courthouse. As his legal mouthpiece ballyhoos his client Kenzakoski’s enraged mother, Sandy Fonzo, who is in the crowd, loses it. In front of the cameras Fonzo screams at the judge, “You ruined my life,” denouncing Ciavarella with the kind of language that once landed Justin Bodnar a seven-year stint in the hoosegow.

What makes “Kids for Cash” especially compelling is the fact that, rather remarkably, both Conahan and Ciavarella agreed to appear before May’s camera.

In an instance of falling out among thieves, Ciavarella gripes with astonishment that Conhan sold him out and lied to him. The strict judge reveals that in addition to venality he had another reason for his crime and punishment zealotry. Ciavarella’s own father had been a harsh disciplinarian -- if not an abusive parent, which left its mark on his vindictive son who’d repeat this cycle countless times while sitting on the bench.

May’s documentary is, for the most part, shot in a very straightforward manner. Unlike documentarians such as Moore May does not appear in the film, and there is no narration per se (although an artsy ending sequence includes titles with some shocking statistics about America’s high rate of child incarceration and more). In one of the most effective scenes specifically shot for “Kids for Cash,” Conahan is musing about the punishment he faces while the Pennsylvanian traipses around a tropical beach in Florida, which he loves. The contrast between his words and the beauty Conahan enjoys prior to his imprisonment is very effective.

“Kids for Cash” is May’s directorial debut and living proof that in America, the highest court of appeal is the documentary. Previously May produced nonfiction and fiction films, including Errol Morris’s Oscar-winning 2003 “The Fog of War,” about the Vietnam era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and the award winning 2006 Iraq War documentary “The War Tapes.” May’s features include 2003’s “The Station Agent” with Peter Dinklage, who went on to co-star in the hit HBO series “Game of Thrones.” According to press notes, May stumbled upon the subject matter for “Kids for Cash” by virtue of the fact that he lives where the scandal unfolded.

“Kids for Cash” opens with a startling title stating that along with Somalia and South Sudan, the U.S. is the only member of the United Nations, which has not signed the U.N.’s Declaration of the Rights of the Child. For a nation that likes to pat itself on its own back for purportedly upholding “family values,” as this documentary reveals, American hypocrisy regarding the well-being of our youngest residents -- from cutbacks in food stamps to a corrupt judiciary -- is jaw-dropping. In its own way, Robert May’s dismaying “Kids for Cash” is as much of a haunting portrait of childhood lost as Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows.”

“Kids for Cash” opens in New York on Feb. 28 and in L.A. on March 7.

L.A.-based reviewer Ed Rampell co-authored "The Hawaii Movie and Television Book" (see: http://hawaiimtvbook.weebly.com/).

Great Movies You Won’t Hear About at the Academy Awards

In a sharp departure from establishment Hollywood, two films that weren’t even nominated for Oscars or Golden Globes have won “Progies” -- awards for best progressive films and filmmakers -- in major categories.

The winner for Best Progressive Picture is “Fruitvale Station.”

German actress Barbara Sukowa scored Best Progressive Actress Award for portraying the title role in “Hannah Arendt,” which also won” for Best Anti-Fascist Film.

Longtime independent filmmaker John Sayles plus Hollywood legend and indie stalwart Robert Redford tied for the Lifetime Progressive Achievement Award.

The Progies are annually awarded to films and filmmakers of conscience and consciousness by the James Agee Cinema Circle, an international group of lefty film critics, historians and scholars.

Based on a true story, Ryan Coogler’s “Fruitvale Station,” details the New Year’s Eve 2008/9 killing of Oscar Grant, a young African American, in a case of police brutality. Michael B. Jordan portrays the 22-year-old ex-con and father with dignity, with Octavia Spencer playing his concerned mother and Melonie Diaz as the girlfriend of the young man.

The Best Progressive Actor went to Chiwetel Ejiofor for “12 Years a Slave,” the biopic based on the memoir by Solomon Northup, a free Black man in New York State who was kidnapped and enslaved in the pre-Civil War South. The epic’s depiction of the cruelty and terror of slavery shocks the conscience as a necessary historical reminder of the brutal bondage inflicted upon millions of people as a means of coercing forced labor. Director Steve McQueen’s epic stands in stark contrast to Hollywood blockbusters such as 1915’s “The Birth of a Nation” and 1939’s “Gone With the Wind”, which romanticized the antebellum South. “12 Years a Slave” also won for Best Portrayal of People of Color.

Joshua Oppenheimer’s inventive exploration of the 1965 genocide in Indonesia of up to 1 million people believed to be communists, “The Act of Killing,” won for Best Anti-War Film and for Best Progressive Documentary.

Three movies tied for Best Progressive Foreign Film: China’s “A Touch of Sin,” Italy’s “The Great Beauty” and Slovenia’s “Class Enemy.”

Veteran British filmmaker Ken Loach, who previously helmed 1995’s Spanish Civil War drama, “Land and Freedom” and 2006’s Irish Rebellion epic, “The Wind That Shakes the Barley,” directed “The Angels’ Share,” which won the “Our Daily Bread” Progie for Best Working Class Image. In this comedy-drama ne’er-do-well proletarian Robbie (Paul Brannigan) turns his life around through his expertise in whiskey tasting -- a valuable skill in Scotland. “The Angels’ Share” was written by longtime Loach collaborator Paul Laverty, who also wrote 2010’s “Even the Rain,” about Bolivians rebelling against water privatization, which won three Progies that year.

With its “greed is good” ethos gone berserk, Martin Scorsese’s epic farce “The Wolf of Wall Street” lampooned the financial sector and earned the award for Best Subversive Satirical Film.

The award for Best Gay Rights Picture is shared this year by little and big screen productions. “Behind the Candelabra” -- with Michael Douglas as flamboyant pianist Liberace and Matt Damon as his lover -- was an HBO made for TV movie. “Reaching for the Moon” was a theatrically released biopic about American poet Elizabeth Bishop (Miranda Otto) and her love affair with architect Lota de Macedo, set against the backdrop of the 1960s military coup in Brazil.

Since 1979’s “The Return of the Secaucus Seven” -- a look back at ’60s student radicalism -- writer/director John Sayles has displayed a singular, independent vision. 1983’s “Lianna” dealt with lesbianism long before it was chic to do so; 1984’s “The Brother From Another Planet” tackled racism; while 1987’s “Matewan” was a hard hitting epic about class struggle. The feisty Sayles continues to maintain his autonomy from the Hollywood studio system (although he occasionally writes commercial scripts). His 2010 “Amigo” depicts Filipinos’ struggle for independence (the quality Sayles has always admired) against occupying Americans around 1900 in a rumination on U.S. empire with a contemporary resonance.

The freewheeling Sayles shares his Lifetime Achievement Award with an actor/director/producer who has made his mark in Hollywood with blockbusters such as 1969’s “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and 1973’s “The Sting,” both co-starring Paul Newman. But by establishing the Sundance Film Festival, Robert Redford has also provided an invaluable platform for indie filmmaking. In addition, his work on and offscreen has often evinced a keen social conscience: In 1972’s “The Candidate” Redford played a Bobby Kennedy-type liberal running for the U.S. Senate. 1973’s “The Way We Were” attacks the Hollywood Blacklist, with Redford playing a Waspy war hero and screenwriter who weds Barbra Streisand’s Jewish Communist character Katie. 1975’s “Three Days of the Condor” critiqued the CIA, as did 2001’s “Spy Game.” Shortly after Pres. Nixon resigned in disgrace, Redford produced and acted in the 1976 Woodward and Bernstein investigative reporting classic about Watergate, “All the President’s Men.” Redford produced the 1992 documentary “Incident at Oglala,” about the 1975 shootout between the American Indian Movement and FBI agents at the Pine Ridge Reservation (involving political prisoner Leonard Peltier) and the 2004 Che Guevara road picture “The Motorcycle Diaries.” Redford directed and co-starred in the 2007 Afghan War drama “Lions for Lambs,” and so on. Redford is truly one of cinema’s great progressives.

2013 PROGIE WINNERS FOR BEST PROGRESSIVE FILMS & ARTISTS

1. THE TRUMBO: The Progie Award for BEST PROGRESSIVE PICTURE is named after Oscar-winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, a member of the Hollywood Ten, who was imprisoned for his beliefs and refusing to inform. Trumbo helped break the Blacklist when he received screen credit for “Spartacus” and “Exodus” in 1960.

“Fruitvale Station” (See trailer at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkDr6RmQnOU.)

2. THE GARFIELD: The Progie Award for BEST ACTOR in a progressive picture is named after John Garfield, who rose from the proletarian theatre to star in progressive pictures such as “Gentleman's Agreement” and “Force of Evil,” only to run afoul of the Hollywood Blacklist.

Chiwetel Ejiofor for “12 Years a Slave” (See trailer at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z02Ie8wKKRg.)

3. KAREN MORLEY AWARD: The Progie Award for BEST ACTRESS in a film portraying women in a progressive picture is named for Karen Morley, co-star of 1932’s “Scarface” and 1934’s “Our Daily Bread.” Morley was driven out of Hollywood in the 1930s for her leftist views, but maintained her militant political activism for the rest of her life, running for New York’s Lieutenant Governor on the American Labor Party ticket in 1954. She passed away in 2003, unrepentant to the end, at the age of 93.

Barbara Sukowa for “Hannah Arendt.” (See trailer at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTQNWgZVctM.)

4. THE RENOIR: The Progie Award for BEST ANTI-WAR FILM is named after the great French filmmaker Jean Renoir, who directed the 1937 anti-militarism masterpiece “Grand Illusion.”

“The Act of Killing” (See trailer at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD5oMxbMcHM.)

5. THE GILLO: The Progie Award for BEST PROGRESSIVE FOREIGN FILM is named after the Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo, who lensed the 1960s classics “The Battle of Algiers” and “Burn!”

Three-way tie:

China’s “A Touch of Sin” (See trailer at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUJt_kf7uKQ.)

Italy’s “The Great Beauty” (See trailer at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dyt430YkQn0.)

Slovenia’s “Class Enemy” (See trailer at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsOsFByeR0U.)

6. THE DZIGA: The Progie Award for BEST PROGRESSIVE DOCUMENTARY is named after the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, who directed 1920s nonfiction films such as the “Kino Pravda” (“Film Truth”) series and “The Man With the Movie Camera.”

“The Act of Killing”

7. OUR DAILY BREAD AWARD: The Progie Award for the MOST POSITIVE AND INSPIRING WORKING CLASS SCREEN IMAGE.

“The Angels’ Share”
See trailer:

8. THE ROBESON: The Progie Award for the BEST PORTRAYAL OF PEOPLE OF COLOR that shatters cinema stereotypes, in light of their historically demeaning depictions onscreen. It is named after courageous performing legend, Paul Robeson, who starred in 1936’s “Song of Freedom” and 1940’s “The Proud Valley,” and narrated 1942’s “Native Land.”

“12 Years a Slave”

9. THE SERGEI: The Progie Award for LIFETIME PROGRESSIVE ACHIEVEMENT ON- OR OFFSCREEN is named after Sergei Eisenstein, the Soviet director of masterpieces such as “Potemkin” and “10 Days That Shook the World.”

John Sayles
See a “Matewan” clip with James Earl Jones and Chris Cooper:

Robert Redford
See “The Way We Were” trailer:

10. THE BUNUEL: The Progie Award for the MOST SLYLY SUBVERSIVE SATIRICAL CINEMATIC FILM in terms of form, style and content is named after Luis Bunuel, the Spanish surrealist who directed 1929’s “The Andalusian Dog,” 1967’s “Belle de Jour” and 1972’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.”

“The Wolf of Wall Street”
See the trailer:

11. THE PASOLINI: The Progie Award for BEST PRO-GAY RIGHTS film is named after Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who directed 1964's “The Gospel According to St. Matthew” and “The Decameron” and “The Canterbury Tales” in the 1970s.

TV movie: “Behind the Candelabra”
See the trailer:

Theatrical Release: “Reaching for the Moon”
See the trailer:

12. THE LAWSON: The Progie Award for BEST ANTI-FASCIST FILM is named after John Howard Lawson, screenwriter of 1938’s anti-Franco “Blockade” and the 1940s anti-Nazi films “Four Sons,” “Action in the North Atlantic,” “Sahara” and “Counter-Attack,” and one of the Hollywood Ten.

“Hannah Arendt”

For a complete list of the 2013 Progie nominees see: http://hollywoodprogressive.com/progie-nominations/.