’17 Blocks’ Trailer: A Stirring Examination of the Gun Violence Crisis Through One Family’s Saga IndieWire 2/15/2021
In 1999, filmmaker Davy Rothbart met Emmanuel Sanford-Durant and his older brother, Smurf, during a pickup basketball game in Southeast Washington, D.C. Rothbart began filming their lives, and soon the two brothers and other family members started to use the camera themselves. Spanning 20 years and culled from over 1,000 hours of footage, Rothbart’s feature documentary, “17 Blocks,” illuminates a national, ongoing crisis through one family’s riveting saga. The film takes its title from the location of the Sanford family’s home, just 17 blocks behind the U.S. Capitol.
Indie Film: ‘Commie High’ a lesson in determination and flexibility
The documentary about the success of a Michigan hippie school is streaming through PMA Films.
By Dennis Perkins
Students at Community High School in Ann Arbor, Mich., in a scene from “Welcome to Commie High.”
Photo courtesy of Donald Harrison/7 Cylinders Studio
The documentary “Welcome To Commie High” is a feel-good success story centered on American public education, something you don’t hear often enough these days. Tracing the birth and growth of Ann Arbor, Michigan’s Community High School from its early 1970s inception as one of a raft of alternative “new schools,” through to its current place as one of the most coveted-after public high schools in the country, “Welcome To Commie High” is also a deeply personal appeal from educators, parents, and past and present students of this unconventional, publicly funded school for people to let go of a whole lot of stereotypes, both about