Photo caption: Hélène Lambert and Juliette Binoche in BETWEEN TWO WORLDS. Courtesy of Cohen Media Group.
The workplace drama Between Two Worlds, starring Juliette Binoche, is based on a recent French bestseller that explores workers scrambling for precarious, crappy employment amid rampant job insecurity. It’s a harsh new reality in France, felt even more keenly in a nation where robust employment protections were the norm until recent “reforms”.
Binoche plays a character new in town, purportedly starting her life over from scratch after a bad break-up. She’s looking for a job – any job – and navigates the unwelcoming world of employment office job fairs to get a minimum wage gig with a cleaning company. That job goes so NOT well, that she ends up on everyone’s job of last resort – on the cleaning crew of the vehicle ferry between Ouistreham, France, and Portsmouth, England. (The movie’s French title is Ouistreham.)
This ferry job is acknowledged by everyone – even the supervisor – to be a hellish job. 230 en suite berths must be serviced, with bed linens changed and the toilets cleaned, in the 90 minutes between voyages. It’s physically taxing and disgusting drudgery – and it’s a race against the clock. Our protagonist is accepted and guided by more experienced local women on the crew and forms friendships.
At the beginning of the second act, there is a significant revelation, which explains some vibes we have picked up and adds another element of tension through the rest of the story, to its perfectly modulated ending.
I’ve been watching Juliette Binoche movies since The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Binoche is always glorious. That’s true here, too, in a role where she is often concealing her thoughts and feelings from the other characters.
Remarkably, director Emmanuel Carrère has surrounded Binoche with first-time actors who play her colleagues in the underclass; they are great, particularly Hélène Lambert, who is effectively the second lead, Léa Carne and Emily Madeleine.
Between Two Worlds is two movies in one – a political exposé and a relationship melodrama. At the ending, I couldn’t help thinking of the Pulp song Common People (and the William Shatner/Joe Jackson version is my fave).
The US release of Between Two Worlds is rolling out; it’s opening at San Francisco’s Opera Plaza this weekend.
Jakki Jandrell and Phillip Andre Botello in FALLEN DRIVE. Courtesy of Cinequest.
The neo-noir thriller Fallen Drive begins with some 20-somethings congregating in a suburban Airbnb ranch house, having returned to their hometown for a high school reunion. It looks like the successful Liam is really more interested in reuniting with his mysteriously estranged younger brother Dustin. Tightly wound Charlie (Jakki Jandrell) and her boyfriend Reese (Phillip Andre Botello) arrive, and it’s apparent that they have an agenda that could be more grim than drinking with high school buddies.
Soon we are enmeshed in revenge noir, in a variation of the perfect crime film. Things get more intense – and more unpredictable – as the story evolves. There are Hitchcockian touches – he suspects us.
Fallen Drive is written and directed by Nick Cassidy (who also plays Liam) and David Rice; it’s the first feature for both. A very strong screenplay elevates Fallen Drive from the paint-by-numbers thriller we see so often. Here Cassidy and Rice have made the characters complicated and added some ambiguity to the back story. There are subtle hints about the relationships of Liam and Dustin and of Reese and Charlie, and the audience is asked to fill in the blanks. You’ll never guess the two characters driving off together at the end.
There’s also a minor character who still parties too much, who could have been written merely for comic relief; but Cassidy and Rice make it clear that his alcoholism has left him immature – that’s why he behaves like a jerk.
The performances are strong. Jandrell is superb as the coiled Charlie. Donald Clark Jr. is also excellent as Dustin, who the others have always found creepy. Cassidy makes for a sufficiently smirky Liam.
An uncommonly textured revenge thriller, Fallen Drive should be a crowd-pleaser. Cinequest is hosting the world premiere of Fallen Drive.
Chelsea Bo and Ava Acres in NO RIGHT WAY. Courtesy of Cinequest.
In Chelsea Bo’s affecting family drama No Right Way, Harper (played by Bo herself) is a 27-year-old go-getter in LA. She gets a call from child protective services in Las Vegas, informing her that her 13-year-old half-sister Georgie (Ava Acres)can no longer stay with her mother. Because their father is away on a work assignment, Harper drives to Vegas to pick up Georgie herself.
Harper finds that Georgie’s mother Tiffany (Eliza Coupe of Happy Endings) is a hot mess. There may be no one right way to raise a child, but there are wrong ways, for which Tiffany is the poster girl. Addled by a serious drug addiction, Tiffany runs with scary men and can’t even manage to kep the electricity on; as a result, Georgie, very smart with a big personality, is essentially feral.
A fundamentally decent person, Harper is appalled by Tiffany’s failure to provide Georgie with guidance and stability, let alone a safe environment. The dad is comfortable with his current hands-off parenting and gun shy of engaging with Tiffany, so Harper sees herself as Georgie’s last chance and tries to get custody of Georgie from Tiffany.
But Harper is out of her depth dealing with an addict’s denial and sociopathy, and doesn’t reckon that Tiffany, who has no boundaries at all, will explode in manipulative drama and involve Georgie herself in the vortex. Harper makes a mistake that keeps her from gaining control of the situation, and soon Harper is getting a big dose of no good deed goes unpunished. Even neglected kids often prefer to stay with the parent they know, and teenagers relish the freedom of an unengaged guardian.
Chelsea Bo wrote and directed No Right Way, and the exceptionally smart screenplay indicates that she is a perceptive observer of human nature, and her characters are authentically complicated.
Harper is responsible, but she’s naïve and a little judgy. When she observes the untidy household of Tiffany’s friend Amy, we can see Harper aghast at both red flags (the littlest kid is encamped in a closet) and Amy not meeting middle-class norms (we can see her thinking OMG she’s smoking in front of the kids!); but Amy’s teenagers happily play games with the family after dinner – an accomplishment most American parents would envy.
Amy (Sufe Bradshaw of Veep) naturally relates more to Tiffany than to the privileged Harper. But Amy has seen some bullshit in her day, and her sympathy to Tiffany is tempered by a focus on Georgie’s welfare.
Coupe is brilliantly twitchy and volatile as Tiffany, who, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, erupts to make everything someone else’s fault.
Both lead actors – Bo and Ava Acres – are believable and relatable. Acres, who already has 57 screen credits on IMDb, is a force of nature as Georgie.
No Right Way is compelling without any tinge of soapiness. A scene where the dad reams out Harper on the phone as disfunction swirls around her is especially strong. This is a remarkably promising debut feature for Chelsea Bo. I screened No Right Way for its world premiere at Cinequest.
Kaymak follows the relationships of two couples in the same apartment building in teeming Skopje, North Macedonia. Eva (Kamka Tocinovski), a rich banker, lives in the penthouse with her husband Metodi (Filip Trajkovic), who wants a child; Eva, not a candidate for Mother of Year, doesn’t want her life disrupted by the bother of pregnancy and childbirth, so she plucks a young relative, Dosta (Sara Klimoska), from the countryside to serve as a surrogate. Dosta is developmentally disabled and lives with her family in an impoverished, backward village. Soon, Eva and Metodi are getting more than they expected and more than they can handle.
The other couple lives in a modest ground floor apartment. Caramba (Aleksandar Mikic ) is a goofy security guard; Danche (Simona Spirovska) is always exhausted from pulling double shifts at a bakery. Day to day drudgery has drained their relationship of passion, and Caramba is always on Danche’s very last nerve. When Caramba meets the comely and oversexed cheese vendor Violetka (Ana Stojanovska), their lives, too, are upended.
The characters have lots of sex, both joyously kinky and cringingly transgressive. It gets very funny, and Manchevski even drops in a delicious nod to the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone.
Ana Stojanovska and Simona Spirovska in KAYMAK. Courtesy of Kaymak.
However, Manchevski imbues Kaymak with more meaning than a mere sex romp, exploring both the imperative to parent and the elastic strictures of of monogamy. There’s tragedy (and apparent tragedy) here, amid all the absurdity. Manchevski told A Good Movie to Watch, “People usually want their films to have a consistent and predictable tone. Now, my preference as a film viewer, but also as a filmmaker, is more adventurous. I don’t mind disruption. On the contrary, I cherish it.“
All the characters, rich or not, enjoy kaymak, a versatile creamy milk reduction used in the Balkans as an appetizer, a condiment and a fast food breakfast.
Manchevski was Oscar-nominated for his acclaimed 1994 Macedonian feature Before the Rain. That Manchevski debut won the Golden Lion at Venice and was singled out as a masterpiece by Roger Ebert and The New York Times. Since then, Manchevski has been teaching in New York and directed an episode of The Wire.
Kaymak is his third film to play Cinequest, after Bikini Moon, my choice as the best film of the 2017 Cinequest, and Willow, a triptych that plumbs the heartaches and joys of having children. Kaymak is the raunchiest and most overtly comedic of the Manchevski films I’ve seen
The performances in Kaymak are all excellent. (Klimoska bears a passing resemblance to Kristin Stewart.)
Cinequest is hosting the US premiere of Kaymak. Find the trailer on the Cinequest Kaymak page.
Taylor Joree Scorse in UNDER THE INFLUENCER. Courtesy of Cinequest.
The comedy Under the Influencer is a fable of identity. Tori (Taylor Joree Scorse) is a YouTuber who has built an immense following by appealing to the most frivolous interests of 13-year-old girls. But she’s becoming stale to that audience, and her popularity is tenuous. Having achieved so much success by selling a version of herself, Tori has become very invested, perhaps melded, with her screen persona. Tori is bratty, despite the shallow silliness that she trades in, and she’s ripe for a comeuppance.
Tori seeks to pivot her brand, but her audience is fickle, and she is ambushed by the treachery of two other social media stars. Since her self-confidence rises and falls with the toxicity of on-line comments, she’s at risk of implosion.
This is a glimpse into a professional social media world unknown to some of us, but writer-director Alex Haughey, having spent a year producing for a major YouTuber, knows the scene.
It looks like we’re in for a savage mockumentary until there’s major change in tone when Tori is forced to come to terms with how her own identity is so wrapped up in the validation of views and instant likes or dislikes. It turns out that Tori may not be a ditz after all – she’s just been playing one on YouTube. There’s a revelatory flashback showing how the 13-year-old Tori first dipped her toes into social media (after we have already seen what she’s become).
Taylor Joree Scorse explodes with energy as Tori, completely believable as both the superficial and the more reflective versions of Tori. Spencer Vaughn Kelly is very good as an almost mystically charismatic stranger Tori encounters.
This is the second film by Alex Haughey, whose debut Prodigy, a psychological thriller with paranormal elements, was one of the top films at the 2017 Cinequest.
Under the Influencer is topical, funny and, ultimately, sweet and hopeful. Cinequest is hosting the world premiere of Under the Influencer.
Photo caption: Molly Gordon and Ben Platt in THEATER CAMP. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
The good-hearted and relentlessly funny Theater Camp sends up the world of drama nerds without a hint of meanness. When the beloved founder (Amy Sedaris) of a summer theater camp for kids falls into a coma, the camp staff must run the summer program themselves. One challenge is that the founder’s son Troy (Jimmy Tatro) is now in charge, and he is a bozo brimming with misplaced confidence, one of those guys whose every instinct is enthusiastically wrong.
Because the camp staff are show people and the campers are show people in the making, there’s plenty of grist for comedy. The kids are budding prima donnas and the staff are flamboyant, temperamental and eccentric.
It’s an affectionate skewering by filmmakers who know the subculture well. Theater Camp was written by Molly Gordon, Ben Platt, Noah Galvin and Nick Lieberman. Gordon and Lieberman directed, and Gordon, Platt and Galvin play major roles as the camp’s faculty.
An avalanche of funny bits bury the audience as directors Gordon and Lieberman and editor Jon Philpot keep the laughs coming at a madcap pace. There are big jokes and little jokes; I found it very funny that Gordon’s character is named Rebecca-Diane.
The Big Show at the end, a tribute to their comatose founder titled Joan Still, is destined to surpass Springtime for Hitler in The Producers as the worst musical-within-a-movie until it is rescued by an unexpected tour de force by Noah Galvin.
Galvin’s performance is the showiest, but everyone in the cast is excellent, particularly Gordon and Platt. Patti Harrison is very good as a corporate predator with Troy in her sights, and Owen Thiele sparkles as the camp’s most flamboyant teacher.
And where did they find these kids? Some of the kids who play the campers are unbelievably talented.
Thomas Schubert and Paula Beer in AFIRE. Courtesy of Janus Films.
Christian Petzold’s Afire is an agreeable slow burn that builds to a revelatory conclusion. The lumpy, dour Leon (Thomas Schubert) needs to polish off his second novel. He and his friend Felix (Langston Uibel) head off for a week at the woodsy vacation cottage owned by Felix’s family, a short walk to the beach on the Baltic Sea. They are seeking artistic inspiration, Leon for his novel and Felix for his photography portfolio. But they’re not even there yet when things start going off the rails.
Felix’s car breaks down and they have to hoof it through the forest. Upon arrival, they learn that Felix’s mother has also invited another guest, Nadja, and the guys will need to share the remaining room. They go to bed without meeting Nadja, but she returns late with company, and the guys are kept awake by the boisterous lovemaking in her room next door.
Focused on their own situation, Felix and Leon are vaguely aware that wildfires are raging inland, but they’re a few meters from the sea and the ocean winds are blowing across them toward the fire, As people at the nearby seaside resort town go about their holidays, faraway sirens and the fire-fighting aircraft overhead are ominous.
Felix rolls with the punches, but each setback makes the grumpy Leon more aggrieved. Each annoyance makes Leon harrumph, roll his eyes and stalk off complaining about the distraction to his work. Leon is creatively blocked, but is it from the distractions?
He’s really afraid that his manuscript is shitty, and his day of reckoning, a meeting with his kind publisher (Matthias Brandt), is this week. Self-absorbed in the best of times, Leon’s insecurities are making him beat himself up and mask it all with offended self-importance.
Leon and Felix meet Nadja (Paul Beer), who turns out to be charming. Felix befriends the handsome lifeguard Devid (Enno Trebs), who has been Nadja’s nocturnal playmate, and soon the four are hanging out together – Leon grudgingly.
Thomas Schubert, Paula Beer, Langston Uibel and Enno Trebs in AFIRE. Courtesy of Janus Films.
As we watch Leon stumble around in his behavioral misfires, it seems that we are watching a comedy of manners. But Afire evolves into a study of creative self-sabotage until a heartbreaking tragedy, a moment of redemption, and a final hopeful glimmer of personal fulfillment. It’s the best final fifteen minutes of any film this year, unpredictable but grounded in reality and humanity, and emotionally powerful.
Afire works because the protagonist doesn’t alienate the audience, even though he is irritable and irritating. Petzold’s writing and Schubert’s performance is such that we don’t give up on this unlovable loser. As much as his thoughtlessness vexes the others, his behavior is really only mean-spirited once. Clearly, he must be talented because his first novel was good enough to get him an advance on his second, and he seems to be a decent person underneath all his fussiness. He just needs to learn how to get out of his own way.
Petzold has also written some segments of novels-within-the-movie, one that is extraordinarily moving and one that is just awful, awful, awful.
Beer, the star of Petzold’s Transit and Undine, is irresistible here as Nadja. Her Nadja teaches Leon that a woman can be sunny and fun-loving without being a ditz.
Petzold is one of cinema’s most significant contemporary auteurs. I loved and admired his simmering paranoid thriller Barbara and his Phoenix, a riveting psychodrama with a wowzer ending. He followed those with the more aspirational but, IMO, less successful Transit and Undine. Afire is his most intimate and funniest film, and I think, his most subtle and his best. Afire won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the 2023 Berlinale.
Afire opens this weekend in theaters, including the Roxie in San Francisco. It’s one of the Best Movies of 2023 – So Far.
Photo caption: Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie in BARBIE. Courtesy of Warner Brothers.
Thanks to a brilliant screenplay by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, Barbie is a spectacular marriage of the intelligent and the silly, and manages to celebrate a commercial brand amid pointed social satire. It’s delightfully funny throughout, and the third act is a crescendo of hilarity.
Gerwig and Baumbach have imagined a world in which the various versions of Barbie dolls, including Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie), live in Barbie land, a female-centered but naïve, utopia. Developments force Barbie to leave Barbie Land on a mission to the human-populated Real World, and Ken (Ryan Gosling) stows away on her quest; because they live in a fantasy world, the two are unprepared for the harshness and ambiguity of the Real World, and their return to Barbie Land sparks disharmony. Will Barbie and Ken figure out their respective places in the universe?
Gerwig and Baumbach have somehow crafted a film that will satisfy those who treasure their Barbie doll, memories, those who are disturbed by Barbie’s impact on women’s body images and sexual objectification, and those who just dismiss the Barbie silliness. (I came to Barbie with one indelibly painful Barbie memory – from my bare feet stepping on Barbie shoes.) The biggest laughs come from Barbie’s relentless skewering of toxic masculinity.
America Ferrera in BARBIE. Courtesy of Warner Brothers.
Robbie and Gosling are both excellent, and there’s a huge cast of familiar stars playing various Barbies and Kens. I think that the real star of Barbie is America Ferrera, who plays Gloria, an actual human woman who befriends Barbie in the Real World. Gloria is a workaday Every Woman struggling to navigate life under the withering scorn of her teenage daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt). Both Ferrera and Greenblatt deliver superlative performances, and Ferrara gets to deliver the pivotal monologue in the film.
Because much of the humor derives from surprising the audience, I am being very careful to avoid spoilers, but I can say that Barbie’s many highlights include:
an inspired use of the Indigo Girls’ song Closer to Fine; it’s very funny to hear Barbie characters singing it, and it has the lyrics of existential inquiry, which is what Barbie is engaged in, as silly as that sounds.
the performance of Kate McKinnon, perfectly cast as Weird Barbie.
a hilarious turn by Michael Cera as Ken’s Friend Allen;
a breaking-the-fourth-wall aside by narrator Helen Mirren that brings down the house.
one of the funniest final lines of any movie comedy.
closing credits with real Barbie toys, including the discontinued ones: Growing Up Skipper, pregnant Midge, etc.
It’s been a while since a movie made me laugh until I cried, but that happened when i watched the campfire guitar serenades and the “battle of the Kens”.
I rarely complement capitalists, but I am grateful to Warner Brothers for assigning a project that could have been simplistic, exploitative schlock to an artist like director Greta Gerwig. And Mattel is a very good corporate sport to have have its corporate culture, its CEO (Will Ferrell) and even its headquarters building thoroughly mocked.
At a minimum, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach certainly deserve Oscar nominations for Original Screenplay and America Ferrara should get an Oscar nod for Supporting Actress. Barbie is one seriously funny movie.
Photo caption: Cillian Murphy in OPPENHEIMER. Courtesy of Universal Pictures.
Christopher Nolan’s epic masterpiece Oppenheimer is a thrilling, three-hour psychological exploration of physicist Robert J. Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), who was brilliant enough to lead the development of the first atomic bomb, but could not grasp that he would then lose all control on its use.
Oppenheimer was a prima donna, but the team he assembled of star academics (31 of which had won or would win their own Nobel Prizes) was filled with prima donnas. Both a natural leader and manipulative, Oppenheimer was smoother, more practical and less politically naïve than the other scientists. But he was no match for real practitioners of politics. One character reminds him, genius is no guarantee of wisdom. The smartest person in the room makes a mistake in thinking that he can ALWAYS outthink everyone else.
Cillian Murphy, with his searing eyes and prominent cheekbones, is an actor with a striking appearance and presence. He’s always good, but he’s not the guy I would immediately think of to carry an epic; but this is Murphy’s sixth movie with Nolan, and Nolan knew that Murphy had the chops. Looking unusually gaunt, Murphy becomes Oppenheimer as he ranges from arrogant self-confidence to a creature in torment. It’s a magnificent, career-topping performance.
Himself a practitioner of the empirical, Oppenheimer, could not conceive of or understand the arena of public opinion, where lies and fear can triumph over fact and virtue. Robert Downey, Jr., in a great performance, plays Oppenheimer’s foil Lewis Strauss, a man who understands influence, political positioning and spin.
Nolan’s screenplay is based on the Oppenheimer bio American Prometheus. The mythological Prometheus brought fire to human, and was punished by the gods with perpetual torment, specifically by an eagle, each day of eternity, eating his liver anew. Oppenheimer gets the heartache of being victimized by the communist witch hunt of the 1950s and the nightmare that his monstrous creation is in the hands of those less ethical, less smart and less virtuous than he.
The Manhattan Project, the mastering of all the scientific and technological challenges in developing the first nuclear weapon, in a race with the worst villains in the history of the world – that’s fodder for an epic movie in itself. Yet that’s the backdrop to this psychological study. Together, the stories of the Bomb and Oppenheimer make for a movie that’s an astounding achievement.
The stakes could not be higher – not just life and death, but life and death on a heretofore unimagined scale. Not to mention the primary goal of stopping the Nazis. And the survival of the planet itself.
At the time, physicists could not rule out the possibility that a nuclear reaction would continue until it incinerated the atmosphere. In Oppenheimer, the scientists calculate a “near zero” chance of destroying the entire planet, giving serious pause to the scientists and alarm to lay people.
The bomb needed to be assembled and tested, of course, and the scenes of the fisrt bomb test are harrowing. Imagine putting together an atomic bomb and arming it, with 1940s technology (no robots or laser-precision machining) and THEN waiting out the winds and rain of a fierce desert storm.
There’s an emotionally surreal scene as the Los Alamos team rapturously celebrates the atomic bomb blast at Hiroshima – consumed by pride and relief that their work of over two years was successful and that it would surely end the war more quickly; but unthinking about the very real, inevitable and horrific human carnage on the ground in Hiroshima and the threat of nuclear annihilation that the world would tremble under for the rest of time. Nolan shows Oppenheimer leading the celebration, and then envisioning the horrors.
Oppenheimer is visually thrilling, thanks to Dutch-Swedish cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, who already has an impressive body of work: Nope, Spectre, Ad Astra, Her, The Fighter, and Nolan’s Interstellar, Dunkirk and Tenet. Nolan, Van Hoytema and editor Jennifer Lame will undoubtedly be honored with Oscar nominations for Oppenheimer. Ludwig Göransson’s music is pretty great, too.
The cast is deep, and there are many excellent supporting performances in Oppenheimer, including:
Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty, who doesn’t get a lot of screen time, but becomes a force as Oppenheimer comes under attack.
Florence Pugh as a needy Oppenheimer girlfriend. I have not understood why Pugh is trending toward the A-list, but she’s really steamy here.
Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, the military commander who job it was, while Oppenheimer was managing a town full of divas, to manage Oppenheimer himself., once observing you’re not just self-important; you ARE important.
Benny Safdie as the mercurial Edward Teller, who Oppenheimer keeps inside the tent, so as to not disrupt the Manhattan Project, with autonomy to develop a hydrogen bomb.
Rami Malek is glimpsed, oddly gecko-like, in the middle of the story and then pops up with a surprise near the end.
Mick LaSalle, writing on Oppenheimer, quipped that Gary Oldman “who played Winston Churchill in “The Darkest Hour,” is President Harry Truman here. If Oldman ever plays Stalin, he could do the Potsdam Conference as a one-man show.‘
Christopher Nolan and his collaborators have made a movie that runs for three hours without a single slow or dry moment, despite spending two hours on nuclear physics. I am confident in predicting that Oppenheimer will receive (and deserve) at least ten Oscar nominations and could challenge the record of fourteen.
Over 23 million Americans are living in long-term recovery from addiction. How many (or how few) of us know this, is the core of the thought-provoking 2013 advocacy documentary, The Anonymous People.
We all know about Alcoholics Anonymous, where anonymity makes it possible for alcoholics to work on their recovery without stigma. Anonymity is an integral pillar of AA, but some in AA interpret this to preclude publicizing their own recoveries. The Anonymous People challenges that orthodoxy.
The anonymity of those in long-term recovery also keeps the manifestations of recovery invisible to the general public, including the addicts who need it and the policy makers who need to know about it.
The carnage of celebrity addiction, as with Lindsay Lohan and Charlie Sheen, is high profile fodder for the popular media. But comparatively few of us know the stories of Samuel L. Jackson and Russell Brand, who are open about their own long term recovery.
The Anonymous People is about the open recovery movement (or public recovery movement). We hear from John Shinholser, President of The McShin Foundation, a leader in the movement, and others in long term recovery like actress Kristen Johnson of Mom. They advocate that folks come out of anonymity to say, “I am a person in long term recovery, and for me that means that I have been sober for X years.”
After all, who needs a role model more than someone struggling with addiction?
There is a strong parallel to the AIDS activists in the 1980s who defeated the stigma of AIDS by shedding the secrecy.
I saw The Anonymous People at a special screening, in an audience with over 90% people in recovery, and they loved it; (I am what people in recovery call a “Normie”). The Anonymous People will also resonate with anyone also for anyone interested in public policy issues like treatment and incarceration.
The Anonymous People can be streamed from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.
