BRATTLEBORO — After the success of the Backlot Cinema, a series of distanced outdoor movies downtown this summer, Epsilon Spires at 190 Main St. will offer films on demand.
Starting Oct. 16, This Is Not a Movie: Robert Fisk and The Politics of Truth (2019), will be available on demand.
In an era of fake news, when journalists are dubbed “the enemies of the people,” journalist Robert Fisk's resolve to document reality has become an obsessive war to speak the truth.
For more than 40 years, Fisk has reported on some of the most violent and divisive conflicts in the world. “Yung Chang's film captures Fisk in action - feet on the ground, notebook in hand, as he travels into landscapes devastated by war, ferreting out the facts and firing reports back home to reach an audience of millions,” a news release describes.
“The process of translating raw experience into incisive and passionate dispatches requires the determination to see things first-hand and the tenacity to say what others won't in his relentless pursuit of the facts.”
An online film discussion with Chang and Fisk, facilitated by musician/author Henry Rollins, will stream on Oct. 21 at 1 p.m. EDT. For more information, visit epsilonspires.org/event-info/this-is-not-a-movie.
Also available for streaming on Friday, Oct. 16 is The Mouth of the Wolf (La bocca del lupo), a 2009 film directed by Pietro Marcello.
The common Italian good-luck salute, “in bocca del lupo” (“the mouth of the wolf”) also refers to the poor, red-light neighborhood of Naples as well as prison windows whose bars block escape. Marcello employs all of these meanings in this film, which evokes the novels of French novelist Jean Genet.
A man newly released from prison makes his way through the city to be with his true love, a trans woman working as a prostitute until they can be together. Voiceover from audio tapes she sent to him during his prison sentence are the guiding voice of his journey.
The film is described in a news release: “As the film shifts from poetic construction to a stripped-down vérité style, the reunion of these two outcasts becomes one the most raw and absolutely poignant portraits of love ever presented in documentary.”
Commissioned by the Fondazione San Marcellino, a Jesuit order dedicated to helping Genoa's poor and marginalized, The Mouth of the Wolf “masterfully combines documentary with fiction and melancholy home movies from the past century with poetic images, sounds, and music of the waterfront today.”
Winner of major prizes at the Berlin and Turin film festivals, its depiction of queer romance earned the Teddy Award for Best LGBT Documentary-Hybrid Film in 2010.
Visit epsilonspires.org/event-info/the-mouth-of-the-wolf-film-as-poetry for more information.