Film

An Oscar nominee for Best Documentary Short Film, Stranger at the Gate connects as a movie for these times. Against a real-world backdrop of swirling, often over-amplified political and religious extremism, its message of dissipated hatred and communal hopefulness is a welcome one.

Dorothy Emma Arzner, born on January 3, 1897, in San Francisco, grew up in Los Angeles. Hanging out and helping out in her parent’s restaurant, the Hoffman Café in Hollywood, young Dorothy served and observed Hollywood’s elite of her day, mostly silent movie stars such as Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Mack Sennett, and stage legend Sarah Bernhardt.

In 1967’s The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman’s aimless Benjamin Braddock is plied with a piece of one-word career advice: plastics. It’s a quip which has long endured, finding its way onto the American Film Institute’s “100 Years… 100 Movie Quotes” list in 2005.

There is no doubt that Paul Mescal is a popular name in Hollywood right now. The 27-year-old Irish Oscar nominee presented his film Aftersun at the American Cinematheque Aero Theatre in Santa Monica for a full house and with a long line of hopeful attendees outside on Montana Avenue.

Women have always been part of the history of cinema, but only in the last few decades has their presence behind the camera gained relevance, allowing audiences to see a construction or de-construction of what it is to be a woman and a man in society. In Latin America, a small group of pioneering women filmmakers managed to express their talent in a space heretofore reserved exclusively for men.

The heavy weight of history, its almost gravitational pull toward chaos, and the dark intersection of this with both personal trauma and self-betterment are all jointly explored to moving effect in Strangers to Peace. This interesting new documentary examines the attempts of three individuals to leave FARC, a Marxist guerrilla army which has waged a bloody campaign to overthrow the Colombian government for more than 50 years.

He was a 57-year-old Black man, she was six years old and white. Together, they danced into history as the first interracial tap-dancing couple in 1935’s The Little Colonel.

Storytelling is part of Alma Pöysti’s DNA. In Four Little Adults, the Finnish actor portrays a cheated career woman who decides to choose polyamory to save her marriage.

While there remains much progress still yet to be made, younger generations of today can often get a sense of just how much the world has changed just by looking back at movies from 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100 years or more ago. For people of all ethnicities, but especially persons of color, what they generally see — and don’t see — can be both instructive and heartbreaking.