by Alexandra Marie Daniels
Arts and Culture Editor

“What’s your dream?” she asks.

I look at my friend Marjon across the table at the little café on Second Avenue, where we regularly go for an affordable bowl of pasta and a glass of wine after work. It is 1997 in New York City, and she is waiting for my reply. I am embarrassed to respond. My face feels flushed to even contemplate my dreams and goals.

I fumble and take a long drag off my cigarette avoiding the question. “I’m not really sure. What is your dream?”

“I want to be in Cirque du Soleil.”

by Alexandra Marie Daniels
-USA-

Through the lens of average teenage eyes, The Forgiveness of Blood captures the contradictions that have hindered Albania’s post-communist development. Specific in context yet universal in theme, Joshua Marston (director of the highly acclaimed 2004 film Maria Full of Grace) has created a high quality artistic production - that educates and powerfully brings us closer to the possibility that, just maybe, as cultures we are not as different as we often like to think.

by Alexandra Marie Daniels
-USA-

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan. For most of us, this is a relatively insignificant fact in our daily lives. We acknowledge our military as distant heroes, doing important work to protect our safety, over there. Yet for every one affected - the soldiers, their families and close friends - this war has been a brutal, life-altering reality. Repeated deployments, traumatic brain injuries, multiple amputees, and PTSD are devastating families and communities.

by Alexandra Marie Daniels
-USA-

Would David McKay and Bradley Crowder have made eight homemade bombs had they not come under the leadership of the charismatic, macho, and at times violent protest organizer Brandon Darby? How much did the United States government’s post 9/11 counter-terrorism efforts influence McKay, Crowder and Darby in what ultimately led to the incarceration of two naïve, idealistic, and impressionable boyhood friends with no prior arrests or criminal records?

by Alexandra Marie Daniels
-USA-

Someone tried to silence Anna Politkovskaya. An investigative journalist with a bleeding heart, she was assassinated on October 7, 2006 at age 48 in her apartment building in Moscow.

As expressed in the opening scenes of the new film A Bitter Taste of Freedom, Anna was Russia’s conscience. Despite fear, earlier assassination attempts and arrests, she exposed the wrongdoings of Russian authorities and became a voice for the innocent victims of the Chechen war.

by Alexandra Marie Daniels
-USA-

So often when people we love pass away too soon, we just want to hear their voices and see their smiles one more time. For Formula One fans and the many people who adored Ayrton Senna, the documentary film Senna is a gift - a gift in the form of an adrenaline-spiking, while tears-may-fall-compelling, drama.

by Alexandra Marie Daniels
-USA-

In a coffee house on Alvarado Street in Monterey, California I sat down with documentary filmmaker Jules Hart to talk about her film Pink Smoke Over the Vatican. Pink Smoke, a story about the controversial movement for women’s ordination in the Roman Catholic Church, is a subject I would normally shy away from. I have actively avoided formal religion for most of my life. But when my friend Rick Chelew, who made the film with Hart, emailed me and said “This is a perfect story for The WIP,” I was intrigued. Pink Smoke Over the Vatican is about the Catholic women and men who have taken a stand, despite excommunication, to put an end to 2,000 years of misogyny, sexism, and silence.

by Alexandra Marie Daniels
-USA-

The Lottery, one of two films about American public education to make the short list for the 83rd Academy Awards, gives hope that public awareness about the dire state of American education will continue to build.

The statistics that cross the screen at regular intervals during The Lottery are difficult to digest. Nationwide, 58% of African-American fourth graders are functionally illiterate and in Harlem, the neighborhood where the The Lottery takes place, 19 out of the 23-zoned public schools have fewer than 50% reading at grade level. Tragically, children who fall behind in elementary school are less likely to graduate from high school and more likely to end up in jail or juvenile detention.

High school dropouts are an economic loss to the entire country. As President Obama points out during the film, the achievement gap “costs us hundreds of billions of dollars in wages that will not be earned, jobs that will not be done, and purchases that will not be made.”

by Alexandra Marie Daniels
-USA-

Can art change lives? Two artists, photographer Vik Muniz and filmmaker Lucy Walker, search for an answer by traveling to the largest landfill on the planet, Jardim Gramacho, located on the outskirts of Rio de Janiero, Brazil. Out of poverty, desperation, and misfortune, a community of catadores - or garbage pickers - lives and works in the landfill plucking recyclable material from mountains of trash.

by Alexandra Marie Daniels
-USA-

While most of the news out of the Middle East is of violence, terrorism, security and protection at all costs, and when conversations rarely move beyond who is right and who is wrong, it is difficult to find hope in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Yet according to Director Julia Bacha, her new film Budrus “shows that there is a way to move beyond, ‘Is this pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian?’”

This past Wednesday in Los Angeles, California, I had the opportunity to sit down with Bacha. Among her credits, Bacha previously wrote and co-directed Encounter Point in 2006 and co-wrote and edited the acclaimed Control Room in 2004. She is the senior producer and media director at Just Vision, an Israeli, Palestinian, and North American organization that emerged in response to the lack of media coverage of Palestinians and Israelis working together to end the conflict. I found the director positive, but not rosy, and dedicated to her work.