'The 40-Year-Old Version' Is An Ode To Black Womanhood And Putting Yourself On

Grief has a way of highlighting time and forcing us to face mortality. It directs us to examine our dreams, aspirations and life's journey. In Radha Blank's outstanding debut feature, The 40-Year-Old Version, the writer, director, producer and star grapples with defining success, fearlessness and the limits we put on ourselves. 

Shot in crisp 35mm black and white, reminiscent of classic 1970s New York films, The 40-Year-Old Version introduces us to Radha, a fictionalized version of the filmmaker. A once-acclaimed playwright who made it onto a prestigious "30 under 30" list, Radha is now struggling to find her voice and her power in the wake of her mother's death. With her 40th birthday approaching, Radha spends her days teaching a crew of rambunctious high school students dramatic writing and taking long sips of a disgusting diet drink in a futile effort to lose weight. 

Though she's written a promising new play, Harlem Ave, its only hope of being accepted into the very white New York City theater scene will be after extensive rewrites and thrusting a white woman at the center of the plot. These are changes that Radha isn't sure she can live with. Determined to shatter the struggling artist stereotype, Radha becomes reinvigorated by her long-forgotten passions; hip-hop and rapping. Embolden by the dazzling beats of a twenty-something Brownsville producer, D. Possible (a stoic and brilliant Oswin Benjamin), Radha begins channeling her pain and frustration through the rhymes and flows of her alter-ego, RadhaMUSprime.

Her raps like, "Poverty Porn" and "Black Woman Ass On a White Man," along with D's quiet encouragement, make Rhada feel alive. Yet she's increasingly aware of the absurdity of her new passion. Trying to keep what he believes is a mid-life-crisis at bay, Rhada's life-long best friend and agent, Archie (Peter Y. Kim), convinces her to rewrite Harlem Ave to regain her former glory as a darling of the New York theater scene. Under the direction of an absurd white producer, Josh (Reed Birney), whose latest claim to fame is a Harriet Tubman musical, Radha casts rapping aside for a white-washed Harlem Ave at a cost she never expected to pay. 

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Kenyan Documentary 'Softie' Unpacks The Hefty Personal Cost Of Revolution [REVIEW]

Softie opens with 1,000 liters of blood, and the carnage doesn't stop there. Kenyan filmmaker Sam Soko's bold and emotionally visceral documentary follows photojournalist and activist Boniface Mwangi, on his quest to change the corrupt political system in Kenya. It's a system that has choked the country since colonialism and continues into its near-60 years of independence. Despite the corruption and the high cost of human life, two political dynasties have clutched onto the most powerful political offices in Kenya. At the same time, the blood of Kenyans continue to pool at their feet. 

Though the film opens on the cusp of the 2017 elections (government elections in Kenya happen every five years), Soko takes the time to give his audience a history lesson. Using propaganda from the British occupation, Soko explains how Kenya was divided into tribes by the British. Today, those tribes that have been pitted against one another for power and greed. More than an assessment on the political state of Kenya,  Softie is a crash course on the man, who, though not yet 40, witnessed the corruption in his country first hand.

A young photojournalist during the violent aftermath of the 2007 elections which led to the country's leaders being tried in the International Criminal Court, Mwangi turned his camera lens on what was happening to his people. Men were being sliced apart by machetes, people were being dragged through the streets and beaten to death . with impunity. Fed up with the press and the government's apathy, when he had the literal evidence to back up his claims, Mwangi quit his job and took to the streets in protest. 

Now, a decade later, Mwangi is still working tirelessly to expose the country's corrupt political system. Soko's Softie unpacks what it costs Mwangi to speak up and force change. 

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'Hale County This Morning, This Evening' Is Quiet, But Moving (Sundance Review)

Documentary filmmaking is an intimate act. The subject must trust the director enough to allow the camera to capture their most intimate moments and secrets, laying them bare before a prying and curious audience. It’s not something that should be done casually -- especially when it puts Black, brown, and impoverished people on display, many of whom don’t have any real control over how they are presented to the world. In his debut feature documentary, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, director RaMell Ross immerses himself deep into the Alabama Black Belt, following two young men, Daniel Collins and Quincy Bryant over the course of five years. Throwing away the traditional tropes often seen in documentary film, Ross is most concerned with capturing the purity of Black life, with all of its beauty, joy, and frustrations. A photographer and basketball coach, Ross moved to Alabama in 2009 and decided to shift how rural poor Black people are seen in the media. In doing so, he unravels Walker Evans and James Agee’s 1941 Depression-era study of sharecroppers in Hale County, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In the text, there was not a single close-up of a Black face.

Told non-linearly, Hale County This Morning, This Evening is made up of incredible moments and moving scenes. It’s up to the audience to try and ground themselves in the film, with Ross acting like a guide, providing statements but mostly asking questions about Black life, what the source of our dreams are, and if we can even be contained within the frame of a film.

As we come to know Daniel, who plays basketball at the HBCU Selma University with hopes of making it to the major leagues, we also meet his mother, Mary, whom he is somewhat estranged from because he was raised by his grandmother. We watch scenes from the locker room, Daniel and his teammates roughhousing and preparing for a game, as well as the young man's quiet commentary on his height – he’s not even six feet tall.

Boots Riley And The Cast Of 'Sorry To Bother You' On The Bold, Whimsical Film (Sundance Interview)

There are plenty of films with commentary surrounding race, commodification, self-worth, and what it means to be normal. However, none of those films have been as strange, compelling and masterful as Boots Riley’s debut feature film; Sorry to Bother You. As Riley said bluntly in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, "I'm not good at sounding like somebody else or doing what someone else does." Starring the incredible Lakeith Stanfield as Cassius Green, the film follows a young Black man trying to find his purpose in life in an alternative version of Oakland. Living in his uncle’s (Terry Crews) garage, Cass finds solace in the arms of his artist, sign-twirling girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson) who chooses activism over affluence.Desperate for more in life, Cass finds a job at telemarketing company where after receiving some advice from an older co-worker (Danny Glover) he quickly rises up the ranks. However, what he isn’t prepared for is what he’ll have to sell or how he'll have to sell out to stay at the top. Steven Yuen, Omari Hardwick, Armie Hammer and Jermaine Fowler also star.

At the MACRO Lounge presented by Shea Moisture at Sundance Film Festival, Riley, Thompson, Yeun and Crews lounged on a plush couch and discussed bringing this magical and shocking film to life. For Riley, who is a musician, activist, and poet, the idea for Sorry to Bother You was born out of the desire to break all the rules. “I read all the hack books like, How to Write a Script in 30 Days and What Not to Do When Writing Your Script," he recalled. “I read those purposely to figure out what rules I could play with. And, as I wrote those first few pages, I realized that that's not the way that I create normally. "

More than just creating a story on his own terms, Riley wasn’t interested in being confined to a certain genre. “A lot of times when people decide, even in music or film, that this thing I'm making is this genre, we edit along the lines of what we're told is the genre," Riley explained. “We leave out a lot of real things, a lot of real joys and pains and awkwardness and other ideas and we stick to this pretty formulated thing. If we're gonna truly make something that comes from artists that aren't usually able to get a voice, those artists have also had other experiences.”

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'Crime + Punishment' Reveals Devastating Problems With No Easy Answers (Sundance Review)

With a population of over eight million people, New York City also boasts the biggest police force in the country. Over 36,000 men and women wield badges in the city, and though crime has gone down overall, the most impoverished communities with the highest minority populations and crime rates continually feel the weight and pressure of the police on their backs. In Crime + Punishment, director Stephen Maing tries to get to the root of the issue by going straight to the source. The film follows twelve minority police officers who have been reprimanded for not fulfilling quotas (obtaining a certain number of summonses and arrests each month) that further disenfranchise people of color. Quotas and mandates like these were supposedly outlawed by the NYPD back in 2010. Maing opens the film in 2014 and follows these officers who have been coined the "NYPD 12" through 2017. What the police reveal and what Maing discovers should enrage us all.

To compile evidence against the police department, the NYPD 12 use hidden cameras and recording devices in their various precincts from The Bronx to Brooklyn to prove that quotas are still very much in use. As a collective, they decide to file a lawsuit against the NYPD for discriminatory practices. The bottom line is this, $900 million dollars of NYC’s budget comes directly from the police force. Since those dollars are made on the backs of brown bodies, the money is generated by whatever means necessary.

Examining all angles, Maing leaves no stone unturned. Along with the police officers who have chosen to risk everything but speaking out, he follows the young Black and Latino men who are constantly harassed and arrested. We're also introduced to private investigator Manny Gomez, a former cop with a massive personality who is determined to be an advocate for the young people who are continually swept up into the broken judicial system.

One of Gomez’s clients is 17-year-old Pedro Hernandez and his devastated mother, Jessica Perez. Hernandez was falsely arrested for attempted murder and imprisoned on Riker’s Island—it was a scenario that rang eerily close to the tragic story of Kalief Browder. Using these various threads, Maing unravels the racism and impropriety in the police force and court system, laying it all out in the open.

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Sundance Review: 'Quest' Is A Sobering But Warm Welcome Into The Lives Of A North Philly

More often than not, impoverished communities, especially those in inner cities are cast aside and forgotten about. Film, along with the rest of the world rarely pays attention to the people who live in these neighborhoods and the events that occur within them. Unless the film’s narrative is one of unimaginable tragedy or a rags-to-riches tale; one would assume from what cinema shows us, that these communities and these very real people don’t exist at all. With his beautiful and gently paced debut feature documentary “Quest,” director Jonathan Olshefski shatters the stereotypes of the inner city by giving one family a platform. We are introduced to the Raineys, an ordinary family living in North Philadelphia shortly after President Barack Obama’s first election in 2008.

We meet Christopher “Quest” Rainey and his to-be wife, Christine’a “Ma Quest” Rainey a few days before their wedding. Though the duo had been a couple for nearly two decades by that time; with a twenty-one-year-old son, William and a thirteen-year-old daughter PJ; the pair is eager for their impending nuptials. We watch as the couple is bonded in matrimony in a sea of pink and white roses with Christine’a donning a glittery tiara.  The film slides forward, slowly marking time mostly through television broadcasts of Obama as he addresses the nation about various horrific mass shootings. PJ propelling forward into teenhood and her constant growth spurts are perhaps the other only time markers.

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Image: Quest Film

Sundance 2016 Review: 'Jacqueline (Argentine)' Is a Strangely Disjointed Film That Somehow Remains Captivating

Some of the most intriguing films are mysteries. You’re not sure what you’re looking at until the final frame, and sometimes, even then, you’re left questioning what you’ve just seen with your own two eyes. Bernardo Britto’s mockumentary “Jacqueline (Argentine)” left me with this particular feeling. So full of twist and turns, it’s a film that is as fascinating as it is exasperating. Britto was inspired by Laura Poitras’ Academy Award winning documentary “Citizenfour”, about NSA spy Eric Snowden.  However, “Jacqueline (Argentine)” is something else entirely.

The film follows an unnamed struggling film director (played by Wyatt Cenac) who, while house-sitting for a friend in Miami, receives a strange and rather troubling voicemail. In the message, a source claims to have stumbled upon some French national security secrets. Without much more information, and mostly out of boredom, the director grabs his cameraman and sound guy and hightails it to Argentina where the source has gone to seek refuge.

Upon arriving in Argentina, things quickly start off on the wrong foot. The airline has lost the crew’s camera equipment, and we soon learn that the source is actually a young French woman by the name of Jacqueline Dumont (played wonderfully by Camille Rutherford). Jacqueline has run off to Argentina after discovering a plot to assassinate a mid-level Arab politician.  According to Jacqueline, this no-name politician’s death will have irreparable repercussions for countries across the globe. The death does actually occur, even though no reporter seems to take Jacqueline’s claims seriously. However, things don’t happen exactly how this captivating woman says they are going to.

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Image: Jacqueline (Argentine)