Publicly funded PBS sponsors a sort of film festival of short films, gathered from their public media partners and PBS member stations nationwide. The festival had an theatrical premier in Manhattan in July before switching to digital streaming.
This year there are 25 entries, mostly documentaries, none of which sound like the next coming of Quentin Tarantino. Painful leftist earnestness reigns over most of the picks profiled on the official festival blog, which tracks with PBS's current preoccupation with gender, race, and abortion.
Paula Eiselt's movie Under G-d railed against the “new Christian conservative majority” that overturned the constitutional right to abortion, or as Eiselt called it, the “reproductive justice movement.”
Following the U.S. Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization in June 2022, people across the country were collectively outspoken and rallied against the decision. Within this national outrage, interfaith leaders came together to challenge the overturning of Roe v. Wade -- on the grounds of religious freedom.
Lucie and Annie profiled an older lesbian married couple in Maine, portrayed as having “done a tremendous amount of work spanning decades for LGBTQ+ rights, and to help make marriage legal in Maine for LGBTQ+ couples.”
Winn "tells the story of Georgia's Pamela Winn, whose harrowing and moving tale of a miscarriage while incarcerated propels us to challenge America's interminable prison industrial complex not just for its systemic racial and economic injustices, but also for its facility and operational inadequacies for people who are pregnant.”
Folk Frontera is about living on the Mexico-U.S. border: “‘A criminal until proven otherwise’ is a harsh statement made in the film, but it feels very in line with the United States’ general approach to immigration matters.” One of the filmmakers made this petulant statement, complete with the already clichéd line about America “demonizing brown people”:
The chaos of the border benefits too many people for it to be fixed. There is a system that could be found, in which people are treated equitably and efficiently, with due process of law, with respect, and which would actually benefit the economy greatly -- but it would mean not demonizing brown people, not exploiting them for political and economic benefit.
‘BeHEARD! I Am Who I Say I Am,’ is a documentary about "gender affirmation" directed by Sophia Clark (“they/them”). Take it away, Sophia:
Whether it’s a conversation about how feminine our athletes need to present themselves, or how masculine our artists need to be -- these conversations, at their core, are about gender affirmation and safety….I think the real culprit for silence is this conversation’s connection to the pain of white supremacist patriarchy.
Sounds entertaining, right? Pass the popcorn.
A reminder that if you’re a taxpayer, you are footing the bill for this public-relations effort and PBS’s other biased programming.
