In 1998, James Byrd Jr., an African American man, was chained to a truck and dragged to death by three white men in Jasper, Texas. This week, PBS revisited the racially-motivated murder by airing a documentary called "The Two Towns of Jasper." It's the product of a collaboration between two filmmakers - one white, and one African American - who interviewed town residents along racial lines. Brooke spoke to the filmmakers, Whitney Dow and Marco Williams, after the film played at Sundance last year.
Despite the critical hype around some recent foreign films, movies from abroad bring in only a tiny fraction of box-office revenues. Once upon a time foreign films were much more popular in American theaters. On The Media's Paul Ingles looks back at the heyday of foreign films and gives a forecast of their future.
An armload of big-ticket Hollywood talent, including some of the folks who brought us Star Trek and the Shawshank Redemption, have signed on to bring American-style programs, and through them presumably, American-style values to the Muslim world. The programs will be funneled through a non-profit group called Al Haqiqa (which means “the truth” in Arabic). It’s led by former Reagan Administration Ambassador-at-Large Richard Fairbanks, and according to him the creators of Al-Haqiqa have had significant success in Tinseltown.
Filmmaker Michael Moore gained fame with the 1989 movie "Roger and Me," a look at the closing of the GM plants in Flint, Michigan. He was denied an academy award nomination for best documentary either because the film was too anti-establishment (his explanation) or, as it later came out, because it wasn't much of a documentary. OTM Producer At Large Mike Pesca went trolling though Moore's latest documentary, "Bowling for Columbine."
Shot at the actual scenes of the mass murders of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, "100 Days in Rwanda" is a new film about the horror that took place there. Before "100 Days," director and co-producer Nick Hughes had already made documentaries about the genocide—but in this new endeavor, he and co-producer Eric Kabera created a historical fiction, using a love story to humanize the slaughter. Brooke speaks with Hughes about "100 Days in Rwanda."
