Global

The 35th Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, which runs from May 2-10 mostly at Downtown L.A. venues, focuses on features, shorts and documentaries from and about Asia and the Pacific Islands. LAAPFF is presented by Visual Communications, which, according to VC’s mission statement “is the first non-profit organization in the nation dedicated to the honest and accurate portrayals of the Asian Pacific American peoples, communities, and heritage through the media arts… Our mission is to develop and support the voices of Asian American and Pacific Islander filmmakers and media artists who empower communities and challenge perspectives. ” (See: https://vcmedia.org/.)

Since I specialize in the screen image of Polynesians, Micronesians and Melanesians and have co-authored three movie history books about Pacific Islanders in the cinema and on TV, my LAAPFF coverage zooms in productions made by and/or about Oceania and its people.

Bujar Alimani’s award-winning The Delegation is set in 1990 Albania. 

The 77-minute feature opens at a Gulag-like camp for political prisoners. Televised propagandistic news watched by the inmates reveals that this is a time of great change for the hard-line Stalinist nation. The following morning bearded dissident professor Leo (Viktor Zhusti), who has been serving a 16 or so year sentence as a supposed enemy of the people and has never met his teen aged daughter, is awakened by guards, shaved and transported to the capital. The true purpose of Leo’s summoning via an arduous jeep journey through the mountainous nation to Tirana eventually unfolds - and turns out to be of international significance.

Like most of the other countries participating in the South East European Film Festival Albania was located behind what we Yankee Doodle Dandies blithely called “the Iron Curtain.” However, unlike, say Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary or Poland, Albania was a lapsed member of the Warsaw Pact (Tirana withdrew from that military alliance in 1968), while former Yugoslavia never joined this East Bloc treaty largely designed to counter NATO.

I don’t know if most people in the United States ever knew what Fallujah meant. It’s hard to believe the U.S. military would still exist if they did. But certainly it has been largely forgotten — a problem that could be remedied if everyone picks up a copy of The Sacking of Fallujah: A People’s History, by Ross Caputi (a U.S. veteran of one of the sieges of Fallujah), Richard Hill, and Donna Mulhearn.

Most film festivals are categorically determined - by the type of production (Toronto’s Hot Docs only showcases nonfiction films); genre (TCM Classic Film Festival screens vintage pictures); time

(LA Shorts International Film Festival won’t show feature-length movies); and perhaps most importantly, by subject matter (the Pan African Film Festival highlights Black-themed works). The South East European Film Festival mainly focuses on those countries that were formerly part of the so-called “Iron Curtain,” as well as former Yugoslavia.

Go right now and get yourself and the nearest house with a flag in front of it a copy of Roberto Sirvent’s and Danny Haiphong’s American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News — From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror.

If this book had existed when I published Curing Exceptionalism, I would have said that reading it was part of the cure. The authors provide a rich survey and analysis of how people in the United States manage to believe themselves not only exceptionally qualified to break rules and commit crimes but also exceptionally innocent of all such behavior.

Thursday, May 2nd, 2019

The day before he died, Martin Luther King said these words at a packed church in Memphis:

“Men for years now have been talking about war and peace. Now no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world, it is nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.”

That’s where we are today . . . half a century later!

Here in the U.S., we have a military budget pushing a trillion dollars annually, which is a hell of an investment in nonexistence. But we also have a growing peace consciousness that cannot and must not stop until it changes the world.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently recounted to an audience at Texas A&M University that when he was head of the Central Intelligence Agency he was responsible for “lying, cheating and stealing” to benefit the United States. “Like we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”

The Secretary made the comment with a grin, noting that when he was a cadet at West Point he subscribed to the Academy honor code, which stated that “You will not lie, cheat, or steal or tolerate those who do.” The largely student audience clearly appreciated and irony and laughed and applauded, though it is not clear what they made of the “glory of the American experiment.” The normally humorless Pompeo was suggesting ironically that yesterday’s Pompeo would be required to turn today’s Pompeo into the appropriate authorities for lying and also conniving at high crimes and misdemeanors while at the Agency.

We are in the battle for the soul of this nation…. But if we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation, who we are, and I cannot stand by and watch that happen.
 

BANGKOK, Thailand -- King "Maha" Vajiralongkorn crowns himself monarch
on Saturday (May 4) during a three-day multimillion-dollar coronation
steeped in ancient Hindu and Buddhist rituals confirming he is Rama X,
10th in the Chakri dynasty after his father died in 2016.

In a surprise on Wednesday (May 1), Vajiralongkorn married his consort
Suthida Tidjai, a general who commanded his bodyguards, and announced
she was now Queen Suthida Vajiralongkorn na Ayudhya in Thailand's
constitutional monarchy.

The coup-installed military-led government expects dissidents and
politicians to show respect during the coronation's May 4-6 ceremonies
and silence their confrontations over the disputed results of last
month's elections.

Thousands of people are expected to line Bangkok's sweltering streets
on Sunday (May 5) when Vajiralongkorn is carried on a palanquin
followed by officials and a band during a four-mile, post-coronation
procession from the Grand Palace past Buddhist temples.

The king meets foreign diplomats and government officials on Monday