By C.J. Hirschfield
(November 2, 2023)
At a recent San Francisco gathering Bobi Wine (Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu) said he would like you to know that the United States gives $1 billion a year to support Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni’s 30+ year ruthless and dictatorial rule.
Ugandan opposition leader, former member of parliament, activist, and national megastar musician Wine would very much like for you to “stop paying for our oppression.”
By C.J. Hirschfield
It’s not only the key to our own personal happiness, but it is also what will save our democracy.
So get off your butt and join a club, damn it!
By C.J. Hirschfield
(Updated January 17, 2023)
Shanina and Noah
Shanona Tate is one of the frontline workers we have come to revere as of late—a pediatric emergency room nurse who works the overnight shift at a New York hospital. We can bang pots and pans to acknowledge her service and that of other employees within essential industries who must physically show up to their jobs—at whatever hour–but until we really see the economic and psychic toll it takes we can’t begin to understand how our current system is not working for them.
By Gaetano Kazuo Maida
October 16, 2022
“The drum is like a heartbeat.” —John Santos
I grew up in the Bronx in the ‘50s. This was in an old Italian neighborhood, full of grape arbors and fig trees (even a goat!), but by the time I was eight our neighbors on one side and across the street were from Puerto Rico, and on the other side were African Americans; it’s mostly Caribbean now. My public school was a ten block walk from home and most of my classmates there were Jewish. My parents were a mixed couple (Japanese/Sicilian) and most of their friends were mixed in one way or another as well, so I had a strong sense of a wonderfully polyglot community that ill-prepared me for the rather homogeneous and affluent population of my elite public high school. But it did open my ears to a wide variety of music. The soundtrack at home was folk, blues, soul (long story), flamenco, and opera, but in the streets it was doo-wop and Afro-Caribbean.
By C.J. Hirschfield
October 8, 2022
For a documentary to even-handedly and adroitly cover a complex, painful and controversial subject in just 52 minutes requires not only talent, but a clarity of vision, and cinematic compassion.
Award-winning Bay Area filmmakers Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman have accomplished just that in their timely Town Destroyer, with its world premiere at the Mill Valley Film Festival Saturday, October 8.
Continue reading
By C.J. Hirschfield October 8, 2022
Xavier. Amin. Andrew. Blood Sugar X. Oakland’s Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter, born Xavier Dphrepaulezz and now known as Fantastic Negrito has had many names, and even more lives. The new documentary Fantastic Negrito: Have You Lost Your Mind Yet?, which has its world premiere at the Mill Valley Film Festival, traces his remarkable and unlikely journey, telling the story in chronological order, interspersed with song tracks and jam sessions that feature his unique blues/R&B/roots music. It all comes together beautifully. Continue reading
By C.J. Hirschfield
Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
In Oakland, a remarkable woman warrior for social justice has worked hard–and successfully– to bend that arc over a ten-year period, and a new documentary reminds us just how powerful one passionate person can be.
Part Two- What I Will Be Seeing
By Meredith Brody
May 4, 2022
I learned my lesson early with the San Francisco Silent Film Festival: GO TO EVERYTHING.
The first year I attended, I cherry-picked only the movies I hadn’t seen before. The ones I went to were such a revelation – both in the presentation and the group experience – that my heart hurt as I walked away. What a MAROON I was. Even a movie I thought I knew well would be a fresh experience, featuring as it did not only live music, but one of the world’s great audiences. There’s a kind of euphoria that sets in when you commit to seeing everything on offer.
Continue reading
By C.J. Hirschfield
April 21, 2022 (updated April 23)
Just as the Academy Award-nominated feature documentary ATTICA effectively used historical footage and interviews with key participants to illustrate our country’s history of systemic racism, so too does the excellent new documentary AMERICAN JUSTICE ON TRIAL. 
By Ashia Solei
It’s true – in 2016, I went to vote at the same polling place where I’d voted for a decade and had received a postcard in the mail confirming I was registered. This time when I went to vote, I was told my name wasn’t on the voter rolls and was asked if I wanted a provisional ballot. Reluctantly, I voted with a provisional ballot because I knew a dirty little secret about us voting: provisional ballots do not have to be counted. Whether a provisional ballot is counted varies according to county practices, and some practices can be biased.
By C.J. Hirschfield
March 14, 2022
Cinema junkies forgive iconic documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman for the length of some of his works that venture deep into American institutions; his most recent City Hall covering the government of Boston clocked in at four and a half hours. We absolve him because he is so good at taking us inside worlds that we don’t know, as his camera disappears and we learn so much by listening and observing, happy to have made the journey.
Comparisons to Wiseman’s work are inevitable as we describe the numerous joys of Maria Speth’s new documentary, Mr. Bachmann and his Class, the closing night film at Berlin & Beyond 2022, at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive. It is now streaming on MUBI. Continue reading
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