A Meandering Review About a Meandering Film From the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival (MSPIFF) by Kitty Aal


My Conversation With Jesse Bishop, MSPIFF Programing Director

“GRACE” БЛАЖЬ | BLAZH Dir. Ilya Povolotsky. Russia, 2023

This is a road trip movie – a genre with an existential core. There is a faint plot, but the more compelling aspects of the film are the observations of sublime landscapes and glimpses of other lives being lived along the way. A father and adolescent daughter living in a red van crossing, in no rush whatsoever, vast swaths of rural Russia of today, though outside of the cities (and far from reliable internet), people live as though it is 1995 or even 1960. It is an eerie feeling to time travel like that. The sense of eternity, boredom, and listlessness is uncanny coming from an activity-jammed over-scheduled culture like ours. The relationship between father and daughter is a strange mixture of the impersonal and the intimate. There is minimal dialogue. A lot is just understood – communicated with glances, posture – unnecessary to say aloud. The girl is motherless, the father ill-equipped to give the girl the life she wants (and what does she want? not an aimless life on the road for one). But the father does his best. What else can he do? This is a world of resignation.
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THE HAMLINE TRAGEDY

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the tragedy wasn’t so much the killing of the father; it was the son’s bad decisions that resulted in the end killing of everyone involved: the son, the uncle, and the queen! Here at Hamline University, lots of bad decisions resulted in the tragedy. It started when Erika Lopez Prater, an adjunct professor at Hamline University, showed a 14-century image of the prophet Mohammed in her art class, resulting in a professor losing, as the Times puts it, “her teaching gig”; A student lost her safety. A Muslim community leader lost his focus, and the Hamlin university lost its credential. President Fayneese Miller’s blamed the media for the assault on her institution under the rubric of academic freedom. Not exactly, as is always the case, western media framed the debate as a war between backward Islam and the Modern West binary. As a Muslim and adjunct professor who taught at Hamline.

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My Conversation with Iraqi American Playwright , HEATHER RAFFO, Noura

Heather Raffo

Heather Raffo is an award-winning playwright and actor who was the solo writer and performer of the international and off-Heather Raffo is an award-winning playwright and actor who was the solo writer and performer of the international and off-Broadway hit 9 Parts of Desire, which bridged her Iraqi and American roots and received countless awards and nominations, including the Lucille Lortel Award and Susan Smith Blackburn Special Commendation.

 

 

 

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