For a long time Black women have led the way in the cause of equality and justice. The subject of Abby Ginzberg’s spirited documentary “Barbara Lee: Speaking Truth to Power” has been doing so for five decades. She has also led the way in common sense — as a US representative from Oakland, Calif., she was the sole dissenter against the 2001 War Powers Act, allowing the president to wage war without the approval of Congress. She took this brave stand after the 9/11 World Trade Center attack had roused the country’s patriotism and anxiety. Though her vote elicited harsh criticism and subjected her to death threats, Lee’s decision proved a wise one as the Iraq War and other foreign adventures have since proven.
Lee was initiated into the world of racial prejudice at birth, when her mother had to wait for hours in a segregated hospital in El Paso before getting a C-section. They both nearly died. Attending high school in California, she demonstrated her unwillingness to abide by injustice when she was prohibited from becoming a cheerleader. She brought in the NAACP and forced the school to put it to vote by the student body. Lee won handily.
An abusive relationship almost put her on the streets, but government assistance helped her buy a house, raise her children, and get a college degree, experiences she proudly refers to when arguing for government programs for the poor. In Oakland she worked with the Black Panthers in their free breakfast and literacy programs, and saw how community activism got concrete results; and her association with Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress and to run for president, demonstrated to her that to change the system you had to participate in it. Reluctantly, she ran for office, rising from seats in the California State Assembly and the California State Senate to be elected to Congress in 1998, an office she has filled ever since.
Lee’s integrity, determination, and idealism have inspired young activists of color, such as fellow representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley (both are interviewed in the film). Says Pressley: “Whenever I go through my gut-check process, I ask myself what has Barbara done when faced with a similar challenge?”
“Barbara Lee: Speaking Truth to Power” opens Aug. 20 at the Kendall Square and will also be available for streaming on Amazon Prime, Apple TV/iTunes. A Q&A with the director takes place Aug. 20 after the 7 p.m. screening.
Go to www.landmarktheatres.com/boston/kendall-square-cinema/film-info/barbara-lee-speaking-truth-to-power and speakingtruthtopowermovie.com.
Zoo story
Denis Côté's meditative and unsettling “Bestiaire” (2012) opens with close-ups of young artists sketching and staring intently at a model just out of the frame. It is a small deer, motionless, not because it is frozen with fear but because it is stuffed. Close-ups of other, living animals follow, as in Victor Kossakovsky’s “Gunda” (2020), except these are not just farm animals but mostly the denizens of Quebec’s wildlife habitat Parc Safari.
Shot mostly during the winter off-season, the film shows the animals at their least exotic, penned in stark stalls. Lions bang the doors of their locked cells, and the booming racket panics a crammed enclosure of zebras, their striped bodies a flurry of inky patterns like some M.C. Escher print. A hyena looks increasingly nervous as zoo workers squeeze him ever more tightly into a confining cage to administer a medical procedure. An antelope with a missing horn looks out forlornly, like a droopy unicorn.
Côté shoots long takes from a stationary camera to frame images like a stage set onto which something — an ostrich, a giraffe, another giraffe — will enter from outside the frame. This technique encourages patience and a steady gaze in order to be rewarded, often by the return gaze of one if the beasts in the film. They stare with curiosity, or anxiety, or indifference, their eyes reflecting pathos, recrimination, and mystery. Côté has composed a wordless essay on how we regard and treat animals, from artist’s model to amusement park exhibit to taxidermist’s display.
“Bestiaire” can be streamed beginning Aug. 19 on the Criterion Channel. Go to www.criterionchannel.com/bestiaire.
Notes from underground
What with the pandemic, global warming, and the pending breakdown of democracy, those off-the-grid survivalist types seem like they might have the right idea after all.
Arianna LaPenne visits some in her short documentary “The Bunker Boom: Better Safe Than Sorry,” and what she finds is disarming in its normality. The community of xPoint, in the bleak South Dakota outback consists of dozens of former World War II munitions bunkers that poke out of the ground like a prairie dog village. The dwellings are capacious — for $35,000 you can get 3,000 square feet of fortified raw space that you can furnish, stock with years of provisions, even put in a fake window so you can have a simulated view outside. And it offers a supportive community of the like-minded.
“We don’t want any crazy militia nut jobs,” says one resident. “That’s not what we’re about. You gotta help people.” He says they are careful about vetting applicants and there is a certain uniformity to the community — white, middle-class, family people.
Why do these “preppers” as those preparing for Doomsday refer to themselves, leave civilization for this relative desolation? Is the world situation so dire? “If you don’t feel a little weird prepping,” says one, “you waited too long.”
“The Bunker Boom: Better Safe Than Sorry” is available for streaming on CNNgo via CNNgo apps for Amazon Fire, Android TV, AppleTV, Roku, Samsung Smart TV as well as via the CNN mobile apps for Android and iOS, through Sept. 8. Go to www.cnn.com/tv/schedule/cnn.
Peter Keough can be reached at petervkeough@gmail.com.
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