— by BEV QUESTAD — A 12-year-old Yemeni refugee and an 85-year-old German man, once a refugee himself, meet in Germany. The old widower, Konrad (Jürgen Prochnow – “Das Boot”), and the 12-year old fugitive, Thurba (Milena Pribak), are adversaries at first, but their separate battle[...]
Author Archive
Review: The Human Trial
— by BEV QUESTAD — Lisa Hepner takes us through what it’s like to be a human rodent in a high stakes trial. The pressure is hot. This particular test trial is the first one using humans after a success on mice, but only180 days are left of Viacyte’s funding. Everyone wants the scient[...]
Review: The Last of the Winthrops
— by BEV QUESTAD — I know of four women who decided not to tell their children who their real father was. Lo and behold, when their children got older and needed birth certificates to apply for their respective passports, they saw a new name. Deceit, even with kind intentions, has reperc[...]
Review: Champions
— by BEV QUESTAD — Marcus Marakovich (Woody Harrelson) has a temper and an ambition to be a basketball coach in the NBA. After a televised altercation with a minor-league head coach during a game, he gets drunk, plows into a police car and loses his job. He is given a choice of jail time[...]
Exclusive: Filmmaker’s Solution for Lebanon
Exclusive Interview Part Three: The Solution Daizy Gedeon with Ramez Tomeh, Beirut transcribed and introduced by Bev Questad, IJM writer What is going to happen to Lebanon? Its political and economic systems have collapsed. People can’t get their own money out of the banks and inflation has made t[...]
Exclusive: Filmmaker Exposes Corruption
Exclusive Interview Part Two: The Politicians Daizy Gedeon with Ramez Tomeh, Beirut transcribed and introduced by Bev Questad, IJM writer Daizy Gedeon, an ex-pat in Australia who has returned to Lebanon amidst its political chaos and economic fall, has created a film, “Enough! Lebanon’s Darkest [...]
Review: Refuge
— by BEV QUESTAD — When Chris took over the Security of Georgia for the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, he was told he needed to brand himself. So, he fashioned a tattoo with a fat X because each part makes a K. The white inside signified that white is right. The red […][...]
Exclusive: Filmmaker at Risk
Exclusive Interview Part One: The Film Daizy Gedeon with Ramez Tomeh, Beirut transcribed and introduced by Bev Questad, IJM writer Lebanon has free-fallen from a robust bastion of capitalism and visionary democracy to a corrupt failed state incapable of maintaining a banking system or stable electri[...]
New Daniela Repas film in pre-production
— by BEV QUESTAD — It was a dark, rainy night as I walked into the hollow exhibition building on Portland Oregon’s Eastside, just steps from the cold Willamette River. Hung on repeated clotheslines were notebook-sized hand-drawn pencil sketches, hundreds meticulously crafted in testimo[...]
Review: Triangle of Sadness
— by BEV QUESTAD — 1. “The last capitalist we hang is the one who sold us the rope.” Who said it? Nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, “Triangle of Sadness” is a cutting satire on power and the human condition. The very worst part of the film, which lasted many minutes, was the [...]
Review: The First Step
— by BEV QUESTAD — If you tend to watch CNN then you probably know the handsome, well-spoken Yale Law School commentator whose rich voice speaks with passion. On the night of the 2016 election he somberly intoned: “It’s hard to be a parent tonight for a lot of us. You tell your kids:[...]
Review: After Love
— by BEV QUESTAD — The day after the death of her husband, a British woman, whose home is in Dover, learns about a surprise her husband left behind across the Channel in Calais. This alone is intriguing enough, but the widow is a Muslim, all wrapped up in a hijab … with striking blue [[...]
Review: Navalny
— by BEV QUESTAD — Early on in this remarkable Oscar-nominated documentary, Alexei Navalny is asked, “If you are killed, what message do you leave for the Russian people?” Navalny is the handsome 41-year-old lawyer who campaigned against business and government corruption in Russia. [...]
Review: Motherland
— by BEV QUESTAD — What genocide began on Sept. 27, 2020? I posed that question to a social justice group who tracks this kind of thing. One person was sure of the answer, correctly, but the other 12 disagreed, asserting his answer couldn’t be true because they hadn’t heard of it. Az[...]