French Director And Paris '68 Uprising Leader Roman Goupil On The Hot Seat: In Other Words, What's Up With The Left Lately. Goupil phones in from Paris on this 50th anniversary of the May '68 Paris Worker And Student Uprising, to explain why his films with prominent comrade in arms and co-director Daniel Cohn-Bendit, have been mired in social activist disappointments, despair and suicides since then.

And in a life journey then and now, from being awarded by Steven Spielberg with the Camera D'Or at Cannes back then with Half A Life, to the duo co-starring unfathomably with austerity-minded French President Macron in their Cannes debut this year, of the cynical mass movement outing 'On The Road In France' - a critique by our on location Cannes correspondent which Goupil reacted to with displeasure, as noted above. Weighing in as well about contradictions on the left today, is political cartoonist Ted Rall.

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** "I grew up on welfare in Philadelphia, and racism, injustice and poverty have always been a part of my experience. So it has certainly inspired my music - all my music has some political meaning."

Jazz Legend Archie Shepp Phones In. Talking music, politics and activism, and  his unique sax fusion of jazz and poetry in performance. The multi-talented composer, pioneer of free jazz and playwright as well, discusses the importance of historical memory and meaning in his music.

And, what his many decades of musical invention have to do with Coltrane, the politics of spirituals, Harriet Tubman, Duke Ellington, Count Basic and Artie Shaw; Chopin, Beethoven, capitalism and banjos; T.S. Eliot, E.E. Cummings, Ezra Pound and Rockefeller; and what's up with having had to change the name of one of his plays from The Communist, to Junebug Graduates Tonight.

** "I'm an artist, I am a turtle without a shell, and I have the scars to prove it...I am pulling myself from the magician's hat night after night, and I have the scars to prove it - I am leaving fragments of my body in every dusty corner of this country, and I have the scars to prove it..."

Poetry Corner: Minnesota activist and spoken word slam poet Guante reads from his work.

**Bro On The World Film Beat: The Best Of The Rest On Location At Cannes 2018. Arts Express Paris Correspondent Professor Dennis Broe, with a look back at what films are likely to make it here later this year. With movies referencing Bonnie and Clyde in Kazakhstan; a world where businessmen and gangsters look and act alike; the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia recalling the truck drivers in Cluzot's The Wages Of Fear back in 1953, with an inner sadness for the breakup of Yugoslavia; Camus, Noel Coward, and the calling out of male critics and Me Too.

Arts Express: Dare To Be Different Radio

THE CLEANERS: Policing Snuff Spectacles In Cyberspace

Move over, Dark Web. Beyond the apparent infinitely murky inner layers of the Internet underbelly lurks, as outed in the simultaneously illuminating and creepy doc-noir The Cleaners, a stressed out army of outsourced cyber-serfs who may have more power than heads of state. And tasked with expunging pathological posts ranging from child pornography videos, genitals, beheadings and suicides, to whatever multi-billion dollar corporations counting Google, Facebook and Twitter may deem politically offensive. Cell phone movement activists in particular - you get the idea.

Told mostly through the words - and eyes - of Filipino worker contractors without benefits who it seems would otherwise be faced with the option of toiling as garbage pickers at a Manila dump, owing to the draconian terms of their employment, and primarily played here by actors standing in for them. And as they drudge away through the hours at work, making decisions about a far away culture they may be cluelss about, while endlessly reciting their required robotic refrain: 'Delete, Ignore, Delete, Ignore.' Along with the threat hanging over them that three errors will result in termination - and that dreaded Manila garbage dump anticipating their future.

And ironically, for some a pink slip may signify a preferred fate, as others succumb to traumatic revulsion, depression, despair, mental breakdown and even suicide. In other words, while being forced for a paycheck to watch real time human horrors on screen playing out across the planet.

A German production directed by Moritz Riesewieck and Hans Block, The Cleaners is evasive on several counts, not surprisingly that as a film sponsored by Human Rights Watch and its film festival promotion in this country, the US gets a routine political pass when delving into their global crimes. Likewise a cyberspace blame game is in progress within the documentary, regarding charges that the Internet as a rapid communication vehicle incites human carnage - as if mass slaughter and genocide haven't existed long before the invention of the telephone or printing press.

And while it's strange if not bizarre to applaud The Cleaners as recommended viewing, it certainly is exceptional investigative filmmaking. Even if inferring at uncomfortablly intimate, too much information intervals, a debasing second hand experience by proxy.

Though The Cleaners is not without instances of chilling dark humor. As when one worker far removed from the Western media over in the Third World, is triumphantly certain that she's just deleted that notorious photo of ISIS unleashing an attack dog on a terrorized prisoner at Abu Ghraib.

The Cleaners is a feature at The Human Right Watch Film Festival, running June 14-20th in NY, and The Cleaners will screen June 17th and 18th.  More information about the Festival is online at https://ff.hrw.org.

Prairie Miller

Romain Goupil, Daniel Cohn-Bendit: Half A Life