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Posted: 12:43 PM- Three Sundance movies in review:
"Traces of the Trade: Tales of the Deep North"
Rating: 2 1/2 stars (out of four)
Director Katrina Browne examines her rich Rhode Island ancestors who were the biggest slave-trading family in the United States. As Browne and nine of her Ivy League relations tour slavery's "triangle trade," through the slave forts of Ghana and the plantations of Cuba, the liberal guilt is as thick as the mosquitos. Ultimately Browne's earnest sermonizing suffocates what could have been a lively debate about racism and modern white society's culpability for the sins of the past. (U.S. Documentary competition)
"The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo"
Rating: 2 1/2 stars
Alternately subtle and hard-hitting, even sometimes difficult to watch, Lisa F. Jackson's documentary weaves the story of the 200,000 women in Congo raped and tortured in the last decade with her own gang-rape two decades earlier. Jackson's film never devolves into an easy comparison of those women and her own victimization. Rather, she sparingly shares her experience in order to help break the silence of the traumatized women. The film, which also includes disturbing interviews with rapists from Congolese militia gangs, is a close study of how rape can destabilize a person and a nation. Through her unwavering look at the horrific stories of the humiliation and physical mutilation of individual women, Jackson deftly documents rape as a tool in war. Rape is a national pathology, she proves, in which, as one subject says, "if you rape one woman, you rape an entire country."
"Towelhead"
Rating: 3 1/2 stars
Alan Ball's first directorial effort,"Towelhead," combines the existentialism of his screenplay "American Beauty," with the twisted comedy of his HBO series "Six Feet Under." "Towelhead" is the story of 13 year-old Jasira (Summer Bishil), sent by her self-absorbed white mother (Maria Bello) to live with her even more self-absorbed Jordanian-born father (Peter Macdissi). "Towelhead" is about the awakening of Jasira's sexuality on a literal and figurative cul-de-sac in suburban Houston. It addresses the ways in which a young girl's sexuality, particular a young girl of color, can activate in the men around her horror at and fixation on her sensual power, and ultimately, acts of exploitation which intend to control it. In the end, Jasira, with the help of a knowing neighbor (played with deft understatement by Toni Collette), is faced with having to choose what kind of woman she will be: a victim - forever the object of what Edward Said so aptly called "Orientalism" - or the owner of her own body and the teller of her own truths.