Arts Express

• *Alexander Ludwig Talks National Champions -
• *The Unforgivable: A Conversation With Director Nina Fingscheidt                                                      &a -

*Alexander Ludwig Talks National Champions
*The Unforgivable: A Conversation With Director Nina Fingscheidt

** "What I loved about my character Emmett Sunday, is that he's the guy who isn't going to make it to the NFL, he's the guy who has to live with all these injuries for the rest of his life with no help. So he's got nothing to gain, paving the way for those behind him. And I've seen that again and again with any momentous change that's happened in this world - that there are so many lost leaders who took the bullet on behalf of the people coming up behind them."

National Champions: A Conversation With Alexander Ludwig. Much more than a sports movie during this football season, the film takes on an uprising and mass strike action by a college football team financially exploited by the millionaire managers and corporations that own all of them.

The young actor who has starred as well in The Hunger Games and Vikings, delves into the issues that matter in this movie. And connections to Malcolm, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, hashtag fix the system - and his own millennial generation as living in greater poverty than the generations preceding them.

** "Homeless, they have a hundred homes - transients forever..."

Arts Express Playhouse: A Solo Performance From The Works Of O. Henry.

** "This is a perspective of society we usually don't see in Hollywood films - and working against the beauty of Seattle, we tried to make everyday life as harsh as it is for real people"

The Unforgivable. Nina Fingscheidt discusses directing Sandra Bullock as a broken woman, a convicted cop killer and pariah struggling for her humanity after two decades in prison for shooting the sheriff evicting her family.

The German director's raw and real sense of Italian neo-realism and social realism derived from her roots in the GDR, captures Bullock's defiant ex-con -seemingly going full Mao in this complex dramatic portrait.

News From Strange Places...Alien meditation under late stage capitalism...

• Nina Fingscheidt, director -
• Alexander Ludwig, actor -
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• Hidden Gems - The Best Films 2021
  

• Small Time
  
• Director Niav Conty

• The finest example of regional filmmaking, Small Time traces the odyssey of a young rural Pennsylvania working class girl struggling to grow up in a broken contemporary world. And one that includes all the damaged adults around her, caught in the downward spiral of the national opoid epidemic and endless US wars with their discarded, dazed and disoriented soldiers returning home. Like her own PTSD father she sees for the first time, by way of describing his confounded existence, 'I've seen terrible things that I can't unsee.'

• Audrey Grace Marshall as preteen Emma, takes us on a journey through her life from a child's alternately dazed and dazzling perspective, a circular and abbreviated series of impressions that never cease to fascinate. And interspersed among the frightening when not confusing or simply odd adult lives around her, are moments even of humor mixed with intimations of muted horror.

• And at one vividly realized moment when confronted by a Muslim schoolmate she abused, influenced by the war on terror propaganda permeating the culture, he asked to know why she was mean him. And though that idea still resonates around her, she has no reply to offer.  

• Emma's belly of the beast strange sanctuary may not be your own, but those plastic couches, grilled cheese suppers, constant 'praying hard' to Jesus for who knows what inexplicable salvation, and the tv set always dominating the doomed landscape above the dinner table could not be more palpable.

• Prairie Miller