November 2005 | Reel Moments
Interesting indie flicks of the month
by Harriette Yahr
39 Pounds Of Love
When Dani Menkin met a blind date in a bar in Tel Aviv, he never expected to encounter a 39-pound man who would change the course of his life. “I was sitting at a table with my date and I got distracted by something I saw in the corner of the bar. It looked like a plastic doll,” recounts Menkin. “But when I looked again I realized it was actually a real person, sitting in a wheelchair and drinking beer through a straw.” So, as the story goes, Menkin met Ami Ankilewitz—beginning a relationship that four years later birthed the inspiring documentary, 39 Pounds of Love.
Ankilewitz suffers from a rare form of muscular dystrophy that severely restricts physical growth and movement. He was told he would never live past age 6; he’s now 34 and works as a computer animator—despite the fact that his bodily motion is limited to one finger on his left hand. His story is one of beating the odds, overcoming limitations and redefining what is possible. Opens at the Nuart Theater 12/2 for one week.
Votergate
The Internet has become an invaluable tool for activists. It also offers activist filmmakers a way to bypass traditional methods of distribution (think MoveOn.org’s “house parties”). Enter Votergate, a documentary film that, like past political doc successes Outfoxed and Uncovered, has harnessed the power of the web to create a core audience, give voice to an important political issue and find wide distribution. In the style of the best investigative documentaries, Votergate exposes the glaring flaws in the new computerized voting system that “allow a few powerful corporations to record our votes in secret.”
The filmmakers hope to complete the feature length film by year’s end. Meanwhile, you can surf over to PublicInterestPictures.org and download the 30-minute web version for free. Click on the Votergate box, then burn and distribute at will.
To date, the site has received 1.25 million hits, reports executive producer Earl Katz. “We need to bring Votergate to a broad audience because the current privatization of our vote is a grave danger to our democracy,” says Katz. “American citizens should be demanding secure election systems that provide voter verified paper ballots and statistically valid auditing capability.”
Waging A Living
What’s it like to work hard, play by the rules and still have trouble making ends meet? Roger Weisberg asks this question in Waging a Living, a documentary that explores the struggles of America’s working poor. “All of us benefit from the hard work of the janitors in the offices where we work, the bus boys in restaurants where we dine and the maids in the hotels where we sleep,” says Weisberg, “but we seldom get to know much about these people we often take for granted.”
Weisberg follows four low-wage earners in California and the Northeast to bring viewers inside the daily grind of surviving paycheck to paycheck. “My goal is to get people to look at the prevailing American assumption that hard work alone can overcome poverty.”
One-week run at (Laemmle’s) Fairfax Cinemas starting 11/11.
Harriette Yahr is a journalist and filmmaker. Her latest short, Baker’s Men, aired on the Sundance Channel and is currently showing on Logo.
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