What is perhaps most shocking about director Chad Freidrichs’ excellent film The Pruitt-Igoe Myth is how strongly the St. Louis Public Housing Authority’s policies toward the residents of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing projects smack of paternalism and social engineering of the worst sort. As the film shows us, the warped morality exuded by the authority yielded policies that tore fathers from their families, and even denied residents the freedom to own televisions. Part of President Harry Truman’s New Deal program, the Housing Act of 1949 sowed the seeds of the tower block public housing projects like Pruitt-Igoe that began to litter American cities following World War II. Often rationalizing the destruction of slums populated by the destitute as an effort to improve the “hygiene” of a city, the federal Public Housing Authority gave rise to the possibility of massive housing projects constructed according to Swiss architect Le Corbusier’s vein of modernist architecture. The failure of Pruitt-Igoe has often been presented as a failure of that architectural movement, but Freidrichs builds a compelling case that the causes of Pruitt-Igoe’s demise were multiple, complicated and likely unavoidable. Some were certainly the result of botched, top-down policymaking, but others were the fruit of the inexorable forces of economics. While Freidrich shines a light on the too-often ignored macro-level factors, where the film shines is in its dedication to telling the stories of those people whose lives were altered forever by them—the residents of Pruitt-Igoe themselves. Following the screening, Stranger Than Fiction Artistic Director spoke with Freidrichs. Click “Read more” below for the Q&A.
[Photo: Director Chad Freidrichs, courtesy of Simon Luethi]
The specter of Acapulco native Hilario “Long Dog” Martinez looms large over the characters in Carlos Hagerman’s film Vuelve A La Vida (Back to Life), but luckily for all involved, he is a benevolent spirit. A celebration of the late Martinez’s lust for life, the film is instilled with a number of themes that transcend the social constructs of culture and nationality—family, identity and belonging, to name a few. Vuelve A La Vida is also a story about stories, an acknowledgement of the power of communal narrative and the deep and prolonged impact that stories can have, even long after the storyteller is gone. Following the screening, Stranger Than Fiction Artistic Director Thom Powers spoke with Hagerman and Associate Producer Martha Sosa Elizondo. Click “Read more” below for the Q&A.
“I’m not the kind of guy who wants his ship to rot in the harbor. I’d rather be sunk at sea than be timid and meek. Let the show begin.”
The corners of the world populated by Formula 1 adherents were once rife with rumors of efforts to make a biopic of Ayrton Senna, with an actor serving as the famed driver. I, for one, am glad such a film was never made, as it might have prevented the production of director Asif Kapadia’s Senna, a gorgeous portrait of a complex and captivating man. Kapadia and his crew did some incredibly heavy lifting in making the film, combing through hundreds of hours of archival footage of Senna and his races in order to present a seamless edit of his life on and off the track, as well as his untimely death in 1994 during the Mexico Grand Prix. Senna is unarguably a champion—a rare melding of talent, charisma, drive and passion who transmutes himself into a people’s hero through a blending of achievement and circumstance. Following the screening, Stranger Than Fiction Artistic Director Thom Powers spoke with auto sports journalist Tom O’Keefe on the film and Senna’s life. Click “Read more” below for the Q&A.
You can add Bobby Fischer’s 1972 World Chess Championship match against Boris Spassky to the litany of proxy battles waged between the U.S. and Soviet Union during the Cold War. But despite being hailed as a national hero in the U.S. following his victory, one gets the sense from