Shouts and cheers, honking horns, people banging on drums. Oshkosh! No kings – at least not today. I’m with my si  ster and great nephew, attending the nearest national rally, about twenty miles south of their home in Appleton, Wisconsin. I’m up here with them because I’m getting cataract surgery (left eye tomorrow), but what the heck, Saturday is open. Let’s go to the No Kings rally.
   One of multi-thousands of rallies across the country. Oh, yes!
   More than a thousand people are crowded in the park in the center of town. Most of them are holding signs. The collective vibration is enormous. Honk! Honk! Save the country! But as we walk among them, as the cheers and claps reverberate, I can’t stop feeling small and cynical – by myself, a spectator among the participants. Does creating change amount to nothing more than joining the cheers?

People move — is a part of life as old as time, as basic as breathing. But U.S. immigration laws have been written through scapegoating, not sensible debate. They are not logical, and do not work the way they did over a century ago, when my relatives came to this country. They also do not work the way most people think they should, or want them to.

This article first appeared on Reel Time with Richard Ades.

As a documentary about a woman who deals with trauma with the help of exercise, Jeannette reminds me of a movie I wanted to make years ago. The main difference is that my film never got made, probably because I didn’t know how to create a space in which the woman in question felt safe enough to tell her story.

Director Maris Curran, obviously, does know how. She partly accomplishes this by avoiding the kind of probing interviews one generally sees in documentaries. Instead, she allows her subject to simply live her life in front of the camera.

Curran’s subject is Jeannette Feliciano, a survivor of 2016’s horrific mass shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

Besides being a survivor, Jeannette is also a lesbian, a single mom, a Latina, a personal trainer and a competitive bodybuilder. All of these facets of her life are represented in the documentary’s one hour and 18 minutes, though some are given more space than others.

One of the more interesting aspects of the expanding war between Israel and Iran is the way the media and the crowd of “experts” have avoided any discussion of the possible, or perhaps even likely, upcoming decision of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to dig deep into his secret nuclear weapons arsenal to enable the total destruction of Iran’s prime targets. Such targets are likely to include Iran’s own apparently civilian use nuclear develop program, which is protected deep underground in Natanz and elsewhere. Iran’s surviving military and civilian leaders are also now believed to be well protected underground after the recent debacle which saw the Israeli first strike kill a number of generals and other top officials. Netanyahu would like to finish the job by making a leaderless Iran unable to defend itself and maintain sovereignty as an independent nation.