Generous and charming

It was a busy weekend which included time visiting family. The busyness was enough to keep me from mentioning recent news stories. A good and enjoyable chunk of the weekend was the Cinetopia Film Festival taking place in Ann Arbor and Detroit. Out of the fifty films I saw four.

On Friday evening I saw Ummah Among Friends. This is a German language film. The central character is Daniel who works for some undercover agency, such as the German equivalent to the FBI. After an incident that causes injury to Daniel and death to someone else he wants out. His boss convinces him to take some time off and supplies him with an agency apartment in one of the not-so-nice areas of Berlin. The apartment is a dump, but soon made habitable, though not great looking. Daniel meets and becomes friends with many of the Arabs in the area. He's invited to a wedding and to a Koran study session. Along the way he finds the local police are targeting his friends, taking any excuse to stop them and hauling them to the station when proper ID isn't produced. Daniel eventually takes action. I've been trying to think of an alternate ending because what he does proves to be disastrous for him as well as ineffectual. I had to look up the first word of the title. It is the Arabic word for community.

The movie Saturday evening was To Be Takei, a documentary about the life of George Takei (rhymes with "gay" not "eye"). We hear about his time in WWII internment camps for those with Japanese ancestry. At one point his father was asked to sign a form that stated he pledged his loyalty to America and renounced loyalty to the Japanese emperor. Since he was never loyal to the emperor, he refused to sign. That meant the last couple years of the war the family was in a high-security center. His experiences eventually turned into the musical Allegiance. We also saw highlights of his acting career (the big break was, of course, Sulu on Star Trek) and the need to be closeted during most of it. Once he realized his advocacy for gay rights was desperately needed he and his partner (now husband) came out and joined the fight. Takei is so generous and charming the film was delightful.

The Sunday afternoon movie was The Better Angels. It is rare for a movie to put out so little effort to explain itself. The dialogue is scant and the narration vague. All I'm really sure (from the movie itself) is that it depicts life in Indiana in 1817. Most of the living is done outdoors, though some in the log cabin. The mother in the family dies, the father leaves (abandoning his son and daughter for the winter?) and returns with a second wife and some step-children. The boy of perhaps 8 years who seems to be the central character tends to tell the truth about boyhood pranks and is punished. The second mother convinces the father the boy should go to school (such as it is on the frontier). Though life that is depicted is hard, the cinematography is great (though in black & white) and the scenes are lyrical. A quote at the beginning of the film -- and all the promotional materials -- imply the boy is Abraham Lincoln. The angels of the title are his mother and step-mother.

The two movies on Sunday were both in the Midtown area of Detroit, near the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Wayne State University campus, an area I know reasonably well. One movie let out at 5:10 and the next started at 6:00 -- and all the restaurants within walking distance are closed on Sundays. Even the café in the DIA closed at 3:00. The festival arranged for a few food trucks to be there, but they packed up early. I finally found a drug store and bought a packet of cashews to supplement the almonds in my pocket.

My last movie of the festival was The Case Against 8, a documentary of Proposition 8 that banned same-sex marriage in California and the court case to repeal it. We see the 2008 ruling for marriage equality, the drive to overturn it, and all aspects of the case at the District, Circuit, and Supreme Courts. It concludes with the weddings of the plaintiffs. Though we know the outcome it remained fascinating because we got to know the people involved. We meet Kris, Sandy, Jeff, and Paul, learn their stories and what they have to go through to be the faces of the case. We see them practice their testimony for the court and preparing for cross-examination. We feel their anxiety suddenly facing the phalanx of cameras and the hateful messages left in their voice mail. We watch Ted Olson and David Boies and see what goes into preparation for such a case. We hear about the backlash in 2009 when gay rights groups thought the strategy was all wrong, since this was a "leftist" cause. We see how the strategy proved to be correct by the time the case was over in 2013. This movie was shown in New York, Los Angeles, and Detroit so that it would qualify for an Oscar. HBO will bring it to the small screen by the end of this month. I highly recommend it.

After the showing Dustin Lance Black was there to answer questions. He won an Oscar for the script for the movie Milk and was a member of the board of American Foundation for Equal Rights that funded the case. He appeared in the movie a couple times. He also wrote a play (which I've seen) based on the transcripts of the district level trial. One thing Black mentioned is how this film helps our cause in conservative circles. Hey, would you like to see a movie featuring your hero Ted Olson, who was the winning attorney in Bush v. Gore? Another is a prediction of 13 months -- the Virginia and Utah cases have been heard at the Circuit level, giving plenty of time for a ruling and an appeal to the Supremes by the time their year begins in October with a ruling next June.

David Mixner is delighted with the movie and urges everyone to see it, though he notes this case has almost become its own industry with plays, movies, documentaries, and books. Are coffee cups and coasters next? But what about Edie Windsor, the heroine of the other big case the Supremes handed down last summer? We should also see more of the lives of the heroes of the AIDS era and other parts of the history of sexual minorities.