Tuesday, June 2
4:30 p.m., SIFF Cinema
Courtesy of SIFF
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William Kunstler was the kind of lawyer who got J. Edgar Hoover's panties in a twist—the FBI even rented an apartment across the street to monitor him. Kunstler represented radicals and disenfranchised parties of every stripe—from Black Panthers in Chicago to Indians in Wounded Knee. But he later went on to defend Leona Helmsley, as well as a cat charged with crimes against humanity. His daughters, Emily and Sarah Kunstler, endured daily protests outside their home and grew weary of their late father's attention-hungry ways. This documentary is their attempt to come to grips with their father's legacy, warts and all (he died in 1995). But the film is less a study of Kunstler's seeming contradictions than an examination of the series of events that radicalized him, turning him from suburban, liberal lawyer to fist-raising revolutionary. And with the help of remarkable archival footage (including white police officers celebrating with shouts of "white power" after killing inmates in Attica), the Kunstlers tell this story quite well. Kunstler was a man of extraordinary talent; few could achieve what he did. But what the film shows, and what he wanted people to recognize, was how ordinary his outrage was; you'd feel the same way if you allowed yourself to see what he saw. Note: Emily Kunstler is expected to attend both screenings. (NR) DAMON AGNOS Also: 7 p.m. Thurs., June 4.
7:30 p.m., Pacific Place
PICK: Laila's Birthday
Toward the end of Palestinian filmmaker Rashid Masharawi's tragicomedy about daily life in his West Bank hometown, the frustrated protagonist shakes his fists at the heavens and blames the 60-year Israeli occupation for his woes. That's the only direct polemic in Laila's Birthday, and this beguiling second feature, after his respectfully received Ticket to Jerusalem, is all the better for keeping its head close to the ground of the surreal business of getting through the day in Ramallah. Veteran Israeli-Arab actor Mohammed Bakri (whose son, Saleh, played the hunky young Chet Baker fan in The Band's Visit and who has a small but significant role here) plays Abu Laila, an unemployed judge eking out a living as a taxi driver, who heads out to work at the beginning of the film, charged with bringing home a gift and a cake for his little girl's birthday. Prickly, unbending, and a rigid follower of rules, Abu Laila is hopelessly ill-equipped for the bedlam of a city plagued by corruption, inefficiency, and the occasional missile from across the border. Part Tati, part Chaplin, part absurdist satire in the manner of Palestinian director Elia Suleiman (Chronicle of a Disappearance), Laila's Birthday is beautifully shot and overlaid with a spare, lyrical score that lends rueful emphasis to Masharawi's exasperated fidelity to a chronically malfunctioning city. (NR) ELLA TAYLOR
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