In most cultures today, it is often deduced that people who identify out of regular norms, such as gay or transgender are very untraditional. However, in the documentary Two Spirits: Sexuality, Gender, and the Murder of Fred Martinez, filmmaker Lydia Nibley, shows us how far from true that is. According to the documentary, the term “two spirits” was only recognized in 1990 at an international gathering, as it was a more acceptable term for other cultures, rather than saying gay or lesbian (Nibley, 2009). The documentary focuses on Native American culture, specifically the Navajo culture, where we learn about their beliefs and how their history ties into an inviting culture towards the LGBTQ community.
The documentary the “13th” had shocking statistics on how many people are incarcerated in the United States. The 1970’s was the beginning of the “mass incarceration era,” which started with 357,292 people incarcerated. From there, the prison population has continuously increased and reached a population of 2,306,200 in 2014. Many of these people incarcerated are African-Americans because the criminal justice system has always worked against them. African-Americans in the United States account for 6.5% of the population, meanwhile they account for 42% of the prison population.
When you hear obesity, do you imagine malnutrition or simply an individual who “eats too much?” Well, these health threatening issues go hand and hand. Learning that a large number of obese individuals are low income, it can be concluded that a lack of funds results in cheaper, more fattening and unhealthy food purchases, which ultimately can develop into malnutrition and unsafe weight gain. The eye-opening film, A Place At The Table, provides viewers with a true representation of how the issues of hunger and malnutrition in the United States affect individuals on a daily basis. Throughout this movie, the filmmakers, Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush, examine the lives of three individuals who suffer from hunger and and lack of nutrition.
Sexual harassment is a common problem for women in the workplace. The trauma they suffer as a result is extensive. More than half a million women work in the fields and a majority are undocumented immigrants. The documentary Rape in the Fields, addresses some of the struggles these workers face. Due to their immigrant status the women are powerless, subject to unwelcome sexual advances and unable to seek help from the authorities.
In order to raise awareness of the staggering injustices, oppression and mass poverty that plague many Indian informal settlements (referred to as slum), Katherine Boo’s novel, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, unveils stories of typical life in a Mumbai slum. There are discussions on topics surrounding gender relations, environmental issues, corruption, religion, and class hierarchies, as well as demonstrating India’s level of socioeconomic development. Encompassing this, the following paper will argue that Boo’s novel successfully depicts the mass social inequality within India. With Indian cities amongst the fastest growing economies in South East Asia, it is difficult to see evidence of this in the individual well-being of the vast majority of the nation. With high unemployment rates, the expansion of informal settlements and the neglect of basic human rights, one of India’s megacities, Mumbai, is a good representation of these social divisions.
Rape on the Night Shift is a documentary about the sexual assaults that some of the janitors suffer while working at night. This documentary reveals the injustice that these workers have to go through because most of them are undocumented and they don’t know their rights. The experiences of woman in this documentary is correlated with the feminist theory, the idea of seeing women unequal to men and the idea of the men having the power to control women. Indeed, the documentary let us see the gender inequality, exploitation, and the de-valuing of woman’s work. We see the feminist theory in the documentary when the managers or supervisors sexually abuse of their workers.
To further explain, in the Girl Rising documentary, viewers are taken through the life of a young girl, Suma, in Nepal. She was only six-years-old when her parents exchanged her obedient working hand for money. She was then sent to a home where she would do chores such as washing the dishes, cut firewood and maintain the farm. At her next working home, Suma’s employer’s forced her to eat their scraps, and called her “unlucky girl”. At this home, she was sexually abused, but she did not let that define her.
Fed Up is a documentary made in 2014 that is based on the issues caused by the American food industry. Fed Up, uncovers America’s true secrets about the food people consume every day. More specifically, it reveals the affect sugar has on people’s bodies. As a result, the amount of sugar in food, the bodies consent of glucose, and the satisfying taste it brings, too much sugar could cause certain sicknesses causing the body to not work the way it supposed to. To start off, the amount of sugar put in America’s food is predominately high.
Connection Between Life and Literature Have you ever personally connected with a piece of literature? Maybe the piece of literature too place somewhere you live or lives at a time that relates to you. Going through life you only see things through 1st person narration which is your own point of view. Also with being a teenager in highschool like me it's easy to relate to a real life situation book. Literature and life are connected through characterization, conflict and narration because life is told through literature, and characterization, conflict and narration help the literature connect to our personal lives.
You don’t know it 's Alzheimer’s until it hits you right in the face. Millions of people have Alzheimer’s. This forces other people such as family members or nurses to have to help many hours of the day, because the patients of Alzheimer’s can’t do things by themselves. Since the Baby Boomers of the 60s were born, there will be double the elders by the year 2050.People who haven’t experiences Alzheimer’s don’t realize how blessed they are. Alzheimer’s is a an awful disease.
In the article, “A Million Dollar Exit From the Anarchic Slum-World: Slumdog Millionaire’s Hollow Idioms of Social Justice”, Mitu Sengupta responds to how the slums and its citizens are presented in the film Slumdog Millionaire by Danny Boyle. Sengupta describes the slums as run-down and then goes on to specifically address the poverty that exists in India. When writing about the portrayal of the slums, Sengupta states, “Slumdog depicts the ‘slum’ as a feral wasteland, a place of evil and decay that is devoid of order, productivity and compassion”(599). Sengupta uses imagery to illustrate to viewers the unsanitary conditions that the people of Mumbai experience on a daily basis.
I watched Sound and Fury, a documentary that came out in 2000, centered on the complications of getting the Cochlear Implant, and how Deaf and hearing communities can differ upon the topic. Particularly within one family, brothers along with their wives and parents have a tough time deciding if their Deaf children should undergo such a procedure. They all travel to visit families that are hearing with children who aren’t learning ASL because they have the implant. They visit a Deaf family whose 10-year daughter is the only person in the family to get the implant. They also visit schools focusing on speech to help Deaf children who wear hearing aids and/or got the Cochlear Implant, and visit a Deaf community with a school focused on ASL.
At different points in the film various Indian social elements are reflected. The movie starts off with the Dharavi locality, one of the biggest slums in the world. Everything in the locality, right from the housing, sanitation and hygiene lack standard and are in a very deteriorating state. The presence of slums in India reflects the overpopulation in
In recent years, media growth has exploded in ways unforseen a generation ago. Since media continues to grow and reach every aspect of an individual’s life, be it through the news they receive or social media they follow, media’s influence on our society is largely present and seen everywhere. Additionally, the widening expanse of media options has made documentary film an emerging influencer that is attracting attention from individuals of all generations. The newly popular genre’s ability to combine appealing narratives, striking visuals, and crucial facts has already left its mark on the way we think about controversial topics and critical issues. Activist documentaries - or documentaries aimed at addressing controversial issues or relevant
The documentary ‘Trashed, with Jeremy Irons’ focuses on how the waste management industry is having deleterious consequences on human and animal life on this planet. By using case studies from around the world, Jeremy Irons takes the viewer on a narrated journey from Lebanon, to the UK, to Vietnam, and to the North Pacific, all with the objective of demonstrating how the ways in which humans get rid of waste: through landfills, incinerators, and oceanic dumping, are harming human health, destroying people’s livelihoods, and adversely affecting animals’ welfare. Irons concludes this dismal narration of the anthropogenic harms of the waste industry with an uplifting look at the positive changes that grassroots organizations are effectuating in the disposal of waste. Ultimately, this film is incredibly successful in getting its point across in its 93 minutes running time; that humans must change the way in which we deal with waste. This success can be attributed to how skillfully Jeremy Irons exploits
