Capturing the Friedmans
I watched this today, sort of marking the end of the Latin ordeal that the past six weeks has been. I've been meaning to watch this for some time -- it played during a Film Fest back home one year but I didn't get tickets for it. It was a most thought provoking film, exposing thoroughly, the weaknesses of law enforcement procedures, both at the level of detective work and in the whole plea-bargaining process. But more deeply, it showed how mixed up and gray humans are.
Briefly, Arnold Friedman, his wife and three sons life a middle-class American life. This life starts to unravel when Arnold Friedman gets caught with possession of child pornography, then gets accused of sexually abusing young boys (his students). The whole affair, while happened in the late 1980s, is considered by some as symptomatic of the witch-hunt by homophobic conservatives. As the film demonstrates, there were serious problems with the police work and the way the detectives badgered the young boys into making accusations. But making the film even more intriguing is the fact that the Friedmans were real home video buffs and so the documentary is supplemented with lots of footage from their own personal home videos. They even have material from AFTER the arrests, from the night before their father is going to be put away for life. Some amazing stuff. One really needs to watch this.
And a great Village Voice article on the film and whole affair
4 comments:
if you like "capturing the friedmans", a similar documentary with archived footages (and interviews) is "the weather underground" about a radical group of student activists in the '60s.
http://www.upstatefilms.org/weather/main.html
enjoy!
hey yeah thanks for the tip -- I watched that a while back and enjoyed it thoroughly -- I actually think I own it ... must be some cheap VCD I found -- anyway -- another good film that I watched on the anti-war movement was "The War At Home" which takes a more local approach, showing how the protest movement grew at Wisconsin-Madison.
Fix your link
hey you, a heads up- "The Three Rooms of Melancholia"...
Post a Comment