Culture Representation: This Disneynature documentary chronicles the journey of a herd of elephants in southern Africa, as they travel across the Kalahari Desert, from the Okavango Delta to the Zambezi River.
Culture Clash: The elephants must navigate their way through several potentially deadly dangers, including predatory lions and crocodiles.
Culture Audience: “Elephant” is a family-friendly film that will appeal primarily to people who like documentaries about nature and animals.
A scene from “Elephant” (Photo courtesy of Disney+)
There’s a certain level of quality that people have come to expect from Disneynature, the nature/animal documentary production arm of Walt Disney Studios. Disneynature films usually chronicle a family of wild animals, focusing on a few family members that have distinct personalities or have leadership positions in the group. And there’s always an adorable “kid” animal who gets a lot of the screen time.
“Elephant” follows this formula too, but it’s a formula that works especially well for animals as intelligent and fascinating as elephants. “Elephant” also has the benefit of being filmed in diverse terrains of southern Africa, which result in the kind of stunning cinematography that’s also become a characteristic of Disneynature films.
Narrated by Meghan Markle (also known as Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex), “Elephant” chronicles the 1,000-mile round-trip journey of a herd of elephants, as they travel from across the Kalahari Desert, from the Okavango Delta to the Zambezi River and back again. The elephants’ habitual migration, which has been going on for untold centuries, is prompted by whichever areas have the most water after flooding. It’s a journey filled with plenty of adventure and danger, which make this documentary more fascinating than a lot of scripted movies. The narration is good enough, even though it’s sometimes delivered in a hokey tone of voice.
“Elephant,” directed by Mark Linfield, keeps the story simple by focusing on only three of the elephants in the herd (they’re the only three elephants who are named in the film): Shani, a 40-year-old elephant; Jomo, who is Shani’s 1-year-old son; and Gaia, Shani’s 50-year-old sister who is the queen of the herd. Everyone in the herd is related in some way to Gaia, who makes the decisions on when and where the herd will migrate. As is the case with most elephant herds, it’s a female-majority group, with the only males being children or young adults. (Adult male elephants usually don’t travel in herds that have children.)
Beyond the basics of food, water and shelter, the key to elephants’ survival is for them to travel in a herd. This documentary shows that elephants, unlike many other wild animals, are very loyal to each other and will rarely leave their children behind unless forced to do so. And the three elephants who are the focus of the film have distinct personalities.
Gaia is the wise matriarch who makes careful and thoughtful decisions in leading the herd. As her respectful younger sister, Shani has the role of second-in-command who learns by observing what Gaia does. Jomo is an energetic and sometimes mischievous kid, who likes to play hide-and-seek or tag with his fellow kid elephants or sometimes other animals(such as warthogs) that the herd encounters along the way.
The documentary’s writing and narration can be a little melodramatic, with lines such as, “Like blood through arteries, the water sustains all life here” or “Social life is like oxygen for these elephants, and they embrace it face-first.” However, there’s also some humor in the documentary too, including a fart joke when one of the elephants is shown passing gas. Meghan asks in the tone of a mother catching her kids in the act, “Oh, who did that?”
The movie also uses a technique multiple times in the movie to simulate an elephant’s memory, by showing a close-up of an elephant’s eye (usually Gaia’s) and then cutting to a dazzling montage of images of life that an elephant experiences and sees in this part of Africa. And although many people might be aware that elephants use their trunks like a human would use a hand, seeing it in action in this documentary is sure to impress. Because elephants are herbivores, sensitive viewers won’t have to worry about seeing elephants preying on other animals to eat.
However, it wouldn’t be a Disneynature documentary without at least one life-or-death experience. There are definitely some heart-pounding moments in the film, especially when the elephants encounter a hungry pride of lions. The documentary also shows what happens when the elephants encounter buffalos and crocodiles. There’s also a very suspenseful moment when a baby elephant gets stuck in quicksand-like mud and is in danger of suffocating to death.
“Elephant” will also educate people on what types of plant life are preferred by elephants in this region. Elephants love mopane, but so do mopane worms, so these worms (as small as they are, compared to elephants) are competitive food rivals for elephants. Also important to the elephants’ survival are baobab trees, which have the ability to store more water than most other trees, and are welcome sustenance after long treks in the desert.
The documentary also shows how emotionally sensitive elephants are when it comes to family. When the herd encounters a set of elephant skeletons, they touch the skeletons in such a way that it evokes mournful respect. And when they walk one by one past the skeletons, it resembles a funeral procession.
One of the most visually stunning parts of the documentary is when the herd arrives at Victoria Falls. The waterfall scenes are enough reason to see this movie on the biggest screen possible. There are also some scenes captured during the sunset that are absolutely beautiful.
Watching “Elephant” will probably inspire more than a few people to want to take an African safari, even though the reality of being in this environment is a lot more dangerous than it looks in this movie. (Disney+ has a behind-the-scenes documentary about making this movie called “In the Footsteps of Elephant,” which is highly recommended viewing, only after you’ve seen “Elephant,” since “In the Footsteps of Elephant” reveals several spoilers.) “Elephant” represents some of the best of what Disneynature has to offer, and the movie accomplishes the goal of both entertaining and educating people of all ages.
Culture Representation: This Disneynature documentary is a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the Disneynature documentary “Dolphin Reef,” with an all-white crew of filmmakers who worked in French Polynesia, Hawaii and Florida to make the documentary.
Culture Clash: The film crew sometimes had to battle the weather and unpredictable nature of ocean life.
Culture Audience: “Diving With Dolphins” will appeal mostly to people interested in documentaries about ocean animals, but it’s not essential viewing for people who see the “Dolphin Reef” documentary.
Didier Noirot in “Diving With Dolphins” (Photo courtesy of Disney+)
Disneynature’s “Diving With Dolphins” is a “making of” documentary about the Disneynature documentary “Dolphin Reef.” And just like “Dolphin Reef,” the movie gives almost as much screen time to humpback whales as it does to dolphins. People who’ve seen “Dolphin Reef” don’t really need to see “Diving With Dolphins” because it seems more like a series of outtakes strung together by narration rather than a documentary with a fascinating storyline.
Directed by Keith Scholey (who co-directed “Dolphin Reef”) and narrated by Celine Cousteau (granddaughter of Jacque Cousteau) has a lot of the same gorgeous cinematography that “Dolphin Reef” has, but the movie doesn’t really give much insight into the filmmakers’ personalities. It’s kind of a tedious repeat of “get to a location, set up cameras, shoot some film, and then go to the next location.”
The documentary takes place in three main areas: French Polynesia, Hawaii and Florida. There are also separate shoots for the dolphins and the humpback whales. “Dolphin Reef” focuses on two bottlenose dolphins bottlenose dolphin mother named Kumu her 3-year-old son Echo), as well as two humpback whales (a mother named Moraya and her newborn female calf Fluke.
The people on the film crew include cinematographers Roger Horrocks, Paul Atkins, Didier Noirot and Jamie McPherson. They are accompanied by scientists Angela Zillener, Laura Engelby and Joe Mobley. And there are some skippers shown in the movie, such as Tad Luckey (whose Luckey Strike boat is in a lot of the humpback whale footage), Carl Ellington and Paris Basson, who’s a jet ski skipper.
Horrock has a clear preference for dolphins, which he’s been filming for decades. He says, “Dolphins are the probably most charismatic mammals that you can get in the ocean. They have a mammalian conscious, so we feel a kinship to them.” Horrock believes that dolphins are the “most welcome” animals he’s ever filmed and adds, “filming dolphins is the most physical because they’re constantly on the move.”
Meanwhile, Noirot, who used to be part of Jacque Cousteau’s crew, is described as someone who’s has more than 30 years of experience of ocean filming. He’s shown in the humpback whale film shoots. Noirot comments, “Hawaii is a good location to film humpback whales because of the whale population. You’re sure to see whales [and] crystal-clear water.”
Most of the filming was underwater, and the scenes that were film outside the water was done mainly by bot, by jet ski and by helicopter. Underwater, a scooter was used with a torpedo-like propeller to get some of the fast-moving shots. But there was a lot of down time during the film shoots, since it took several weeks to get close enough to a humpback whale and a calf to film for the movie.
Although scientist Zillener says that the crew got to know amore than 200 dolphins during the film shoot and that “to understand the animals, you have to be one of them,” there’s no effort made to single out any of the other animals (besides the four main stars) by describing their personalities in “Diving With Dolphins.” The movie would have benefited from more anecdotes about some of the animals who had standout personalities. In the movie, all of the animals appear to be generic. In “Dolphin Reef,” the some of animal personalities of the “supporting characters” seem to be crafted through creative editing.
The narration of “Diving With Dolphins” also tends to take on dramatic, hyperbolic tones, such as the description of the humpback whale courtship competition to become a female humpback’s chief protector: “It’s the most spectacular battle in nature.” Given all the wild animals in the world, that statement seems a bit too broad and subjective for a nature documentary.
One of the strengths of “Diving With Dolphins” is that it calls attention to the coral-reef crisis that desperately needs protection from human plundering and pollution that can cause climate change. The ocean is the foundation of almost every animal’s food chain, so it’s alarming that so much of the essential coral reef is disappearing due to climate change. “Diving With Dolphins” mentions that in the three years it took to make this documentary, one-third of the film locations’ coral reef died. (More on this subject can be found in the excellent 2017 Netflix documentary “Chasing Coral.”)
“Diving With Dolphins” places a lot of emphasis on tiger sharks toward the end of the film, by saying tiger sharks are “misunderstood” and have an “overblown reputation as frightening and deadly predators.” One of the reasons why French Polynesia was chosen as a location to film was because it’s one of the few countries that have laws protecting sharks, which are necessary for the food chain.
And cinematographer Atkins, who has more than 30 years of experience filming in the ocean, calls sharks “extraordinarily beautiful and graceful.” Atkins shows through a demonstration while being surrounded by tiger sharks, that giving them a gentle nudge on the face should do the trick in preventing them from attacking you. (It’s a lot easier said than done, and there should’ve been a caveat that only professionals with animal experience should try this tactic.)
Overall, “Diving With Dolphins” is kind of a scattered film that doesn’t reveal anything surprising about the making of “Dolphin Reef.” And the movie is much more than about diving with dolphins, since the filmmakers’ interactions with humpback whales and tiger sharks also take up a great deal of screen time.
Disney+ premiered “Diving With Dolphins” on April 3, 2020.
Culture Representation: This Disneynature documentary chronicles some of the coral-reef life in French Polynesia, Hawaii and Florida, with an emphasis on dolphins and humpback whales.
Culture Clash: The dolphins and humpback whales are in danger of being killed by orcas.
Culture Audience: “Dolphin Reef” will appeal primarily to people who like movies about ocean animals.
A scene from “Dolphin Reef” (Photo courtesy of Disney+)
Disneynature’s “Dolphin Reef” is a beautifully filmed and unevenly edited documentary about coral-reef life in oceans. Viewers should know in advance that the movie isn’t just about dolphins. Humpback whales get almost as much as screen time in the movie as the dolphins, but since dolphins are “cuter,” that might be why dolphins are made the selling point in the movie’s title. The documentary is a pretty good lesson on the ocean’s ecosystem, but it also serves as a warning that much of the ecosystem is in danger of becoming extinct by the end of the 21stcentury if environmental protections aren’t implemented.
Narrated by Oscar-winning actress Natalie Portman, “Dolphin Reef” focuses on a bottlenose dolphin mother and child, as well as a humpback whale mother and child. (They’re the only animals in the movie that have names.) Kumu is the dolphin mother of 3-year-old son Echo, a mischievous, playful child with a short attention span. Echo has reached a point in his life when he has to learn to be independent from his mother, but he lets other things easily distract him. Echo becomes fascinated with Moraya, a 40-foot humpback whale and her newborn female calf Fluke. The dolphins and the whales sometimes cross paths with each other, as they mingle with other ocean life and try to dodge the deadly jaws of orcas.
Without question, the best thing about “Dolphin Reef” is the gorgeous, immersive cinematography, which is usually the case with Disneynature documentaries. (And the atmosphere of “Dolphin Reef” might look kind of like a real-life version of the Pixar animation classic “Finding Nemo,” but without animals talking like humans, of course.) The vibrancy of the colors and animal life in the documentary’s coral reefs will give viewers the feeling of experiencing the beauty and dangers of the ocean firsthand.
However, unlike Disneynature films, which tends to focus on only one kind of animal, the story in “Dolphin Reef” isn’t as focused and could have benefited from tighter editing. Soon after viewers are introduced to dolphins Kumu and Echo, it veers into an educational narrative about other ocean life. The corals are the foundation, and they are kept from overgrowing by the ocean’s “gardeners”—the animals that feed on the corals. The gardeners are food for meat-eating ocean “predators” (such as dolphins, humpback whales and sharks), who are in turn eaten by “superpredators,” such as orcas.
The movie explains that Moraya the humpback whale has arrived from a cold polar location to give birth in warmer, tropical climate of the Pacific Ocean. A good deal of the documentary then shows how her whale calls attract the attention of male humpback whales, who sing and dance and then compete to become her protector. One only whale can emerge victorious.
There’s also a lot of screen time given to some of the memorable ocean residents who come in contact with the dolphins and whales. Razorfish are popular dining options for dolphins, which look for food by using a highly sophisticated sonar called echo location. It’s a skill that takes dolphins years to develop. Even though razorfish can hide in the sand, they can be detected if a dolphin has a highly attuned echo location.
Other fish who get a spotlight in the movie are humphead parrotfish, which are described as “the single most important protectors of the reef,” since they are essentially the “garbage collectors” of the ocean. In turn, the humphead parrotfish, whose enormous teeth can start to rot if not cleaned enough, are groomed smaller fish and other animals, in a ritual that goes back eons. If you ever wanted to know that humphead parrotfish excrement looks like sand, and they excrete about five tons a year, then you have this documentary to thank.
Cuttlefish are cast as the mysterious “villains” to smaller creatures, since cuttlefish have the ability to disguise themselves by changing the appearance of its scales. Cuttlefish can also transfix its prey by making its scales glow in the dark. It sounds like the kind of villain that you’d see in a Disney cartoon movie.
Also part of this ocean community are peacock mantis shrimp (notable for their obsessive grooming), crabs and sting rays. The editing of “Dolphin Reef” is clearly inspired by “Finding Nemo,” since these different ocean animals are sometimes made to look like they have cartoonish personalities, such as when the camera focuses on a wide-eyed fish that looks around and ducks when predators get into a fight. That footage might not actually be of the fish reacting to the fight, but it’s edited to look that way.
There’s even a “Finding Nemo” moment in the movie when Echo gets separated from his mother, is stuck with a friendly turtle in a very deep crevice. There’s a race against time for the Echo and the turtle to try to find an opening in the crevice, so they can rise to the ocean surface to breathe in much-needed oxygen. Moraya and her daughter Fluke also have a scary moment when they’re surrounded by orcas. Viewers can watch the the movie to find out what happened in both situations.
“Dolphin Reef” (directed by Keith Scholey and Alastair Fothergill) gives the impression that it was filmed mainly in the Pacific Ocean (including French Polynesian islands and in Hawaii), but Disneynature’s behind-the-scenes documentary “Diving With Dolphins” shows that filming of the movie spread all the way to the Atlantic Ocean coast of Florida. Therefore, there’s a lot of editing that looks manipulated to appear that things are happening in the same general location, when in fact they are not.
Portman’s narration is much like a the conversational tone of an elementary school teacher when she has to say lines describing the Polynesian islands’ as providing a “backdrop of an amazing story, with characters as fantastical as a fairy tale, but as real as you and me.” And she has a dramatically ominous tone when she says of the ocean: “This world operates under a different set of rules.”
Because the movie spreads the storyline across two types of ocean mammals—dolphins and humpback whales—as well as various “supporting characters” of ocean life, a more accurate title for the movie would be “Coral Reef,” even though it’s not as eye-catching as “Dolphin Reef.” Although dolphins and humpback whales are very different in many ways, they both have striking similarities, since they are each very intelligent, group-oriented animals that have distinctive languages and show affection through touching.
“Dolphin Reef” is not the best Disneynature documentary, but it can be enjoyed by people looking for a family-friendly film that gives some eye-popping views of ocean life.
Disney+ premiered “Dolphin Reef” on April 3, 2020.
Culture Representation: The true-crime documentary “The Scheme”—about a corruption scandal involving the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and an aspiring manager of basketball players—interviews a mix of African Americans and white people representing the middle-class.
Culture Clash: Christian Dawkins, one of the men at the center of the scandal, says that he was the “fall guy” for widespread corruption in the NCAA and that he was unfairly entrapped by the FBI.
Culture Audience: “The Scheme” will appeal mostly to people who have an interest in true crime and sports scandals, but this documentary is openly sympathetic to Dawkins, the only person involved in the scandal who’s interviewed for the movie.
Christian Dawkins in “The Scheme” (Photo courtesy of HBO)
If high-school basketball stars are paid by people who want them recruited to a college basketball team, is that corruption or is that common sense? In the very slanted documentary “The Scheme,” former basketball wheeler dealer Christian Dawkins says it’s common sense. The law takes the opposite stance, and it’s why Dawkins was busted in a 2017 FBI sting that led to two trials and Dawkins becoming a convicted felon.
“The Scheme,” directed by Pat Kondelis (who won a Sports Emmy for Showtime’s 2017 documentary “Disgraced”), doesn’t even try to be about the filmmakers doing any original investigative journalism. Instead, it’s mainly concerned with being the first TV interview that Dawkins has given since he was arrested in 2017 and later served time in prison for fraud and bribery charges.
Although the epilogue of “The Scheme” mentions that key figures in the wide-ranging NCAA scandal declined to be interviewed for the movie—including others who were arrested; coaches who were implicated but not arrested; and officials from the FBI and NCAA—this documentary instead gives a wide berth to Dawkins’ side of the story. “The Scheme” also relies heavily on interviews with journalists who actually did the investigative work that’s used in the movie, but the filmmakers chose not to do their own further investigations.
Dawkins even says in the documentary, “I don’t even want to tell my side of the story as much as I want to tell the bigger story and my opinion.” And yet, “The Scheme” filmmakers don’t follow up on the widespread corruption claims that Dawkins brings up while being interviewed. This failure to follow up is the equivalent of being handed a ball in a sports game and dropping the ball.
Dawkins was 24 years old when he was arrested in the 2017 scandal, which involved an extensive FBI investigation and federal prosecution by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, since many of the transactions took place in New York City. By his own admission, Dawkins is cocky, because he has long considered himself to be a marketing-savvy entrepreneur who’s destined for greatness. And, as the documentary shows, he has a tendency to stretch the truth or lie if it will make him look good or make him money.
The beginning of the film goes over his upbringing and background to explain how Dawkins ended up serving the longest prison sentence (18 months) out of all of the people arrested in the scandal. “The Scheme” interviews Christian Dawkins’ parents Lou and Latricia Dawkins, seated on a couch together, and they confirm that the family’s life revolved around basketball, because Lou was a basketball coach at top-ranking Saginaw High School in their hometown of Saginaw, Michigan.
All three of the Dawkins kids—Christian and his younger brother and sister—played basketball in school. Their father Lou Dawkins says in the documentary that basketball was the children’s choice of sport and they took the initiative to play basketball, and not because of pressure from him. The skeptical “rolling eyes” reaction of Lou’s wife Latricia puts some doubt on that perspective, and she says, “I don’t know if that’s all true, but I’ll go with it.”
What the parents do agree on is that Christian showed signs of being interested in business from an early age, when he was about 10 or 11. Instead of sports magazines, he would be more likely to read business magazines. Lou says about Christian’s basketball skills as a child: “He was good, but he was stubborn,” and that Christian often had a hard time listening to advice and rules that his father gave him. But his parents lovingly describe him as “intelligent.” And his mother Latricia says about Christian: “My child has always been different.”
According to Christian, one of the biggest influences in his life was the 2000 non-fiction book “Sole Influence: Basketball, Corporate Greed, and the Corruption of America’s Youth,” by Dan Wetzel and Don Yeager. (Wetzel, who covered the 2017 NCAA scandal for Yahoo Sports, is interviewed in the documentary.) Reading the book led to Christian starting a “basketball insider” website called Best of the Best Prep Basketball Scouting, which he started while he was in high school. The website charged $600 per person to get access to information about the best high-school basketball players in Michigan and other parts of the Midwest. Christian’s mother said she didn’t find out about this business until checks started arriving in the mail for Christian.
And showing his tendency to lie in order to make money, Christian admits in the documentary that he once ranked himself as a No. 1 basketball player on the website, even though he was an average basketball player. Christian’s attorney Steve Haney, who says he’s known Christian since Christian was about 10 or 11 years old, laughs when he remembers that Christian even lied about his height on the website, by claiming he was 6’2″, when he’s actually 5’10”. The documentary has archived pages from the website that actually show the rankings with the false 6’2″ claim.
But then tragedy struck the Dawkins family: Christian’s younger brother Dorian, who was a star basketball player in high school, died of an undetected heart condition when Dorian was 14. Christian says that Dorian is still the best friend he ever had. Dorian’s untimely death led Christian to start a charity basketball tournament with the American Heart Association, and the Saginaw hometown team switched its name from Team Pride to Dorian’s Pride. Christian also says he was responsible for getting Dorian’s Pride a hefty sponsorship deal with Under Armour. He claims that Dorian’s Pride was the only Midwest high-school team at the time to get a sponsorship with Under Armour.
Christian makes several other claims in the documentary, such as that he was the “general manager” of the Dorian’s Pride team when he was 16. He says that he “picked all the coaches and players, the tournaments we played in,” but there’s no sense that the filmmakers did any independent fact-checking for many of his claims, and they just took his word for it. All that Christian’s attorney Haney says about Christian’s role in Dorian’s Pride was that Christian “had an eye for talent and, more importantly, he worked.” Because of Christian’s accomplishments while still in high school, and because he was a better wheeler dealer than he was a basketball player, Christian says he decided not to go to college, so he convinced his parents that he didn’t need a college education.
According to Christian, his first real job out of high school was as “managing director of financial services” at a company he doesn’t name. The company name isn’t as important as what Christian claims that he accomplished while working there: He says he became the youngest person to sign basketball players who ended up being first-round picks for the NBA: Elfrid Payton and Rodney Hood. Again, there’s no independent verification that Christian was the official representative of these two players at the time. He could have recommended that they get signed to his company, but that doesn’t mean he was the company’s authorized person to sign and represent these two players.
Whatever his real or imagined responsibilities were, Christian’s prodigy-like success caught the eye of sports agent Andy Miller, who recruited Christian to work for him. Looking back on their working relationship, Christian says in the documentary: “We were like Whitney [Houston] and Bobby [Brown]: We shouldn’t have been together.”
In yet another example of Christian having a tendency to exaggerate or embellish the truth, he claims in the documentary that while he worked for Miller, he was an “agent or a junior agent.” But Christian’s own attorney contradicts this claim, by saying that Christian was just a “runner,” an industry term for a person who cultivates relationships with athletes but doesn’t have the authority to sign or represent them. (Miller was not interviewed for this movie.)
During his tenure working for Miller, Christian ran into his first major legal scandal, when he was accused of misappropriating funds. In the documentary, Christian calls the scandal “Ubergate” because he was accused of running up a $42,000 Uber bill while working for Miller. In the documentary, Christian admits that his expense accounts were abused, but he puts most of the blame on unnamed people whom he claims had access to the accounts. Christian wasn’t arrested or sued over the scandal, but he was fired and his reputation was severely tarnished.
It was around this time that Christian said that he met a man named Marty Blazer through a mutual acquaintance: a banker named Munish Sood. Christian told them that he wanted to start his own sports management company specializing in representing high-school basketball players who would be recruited by colleges, but Christian needed investment money.
The company was going to be based in Atlanta, but Christian frequently made trips to New York City to meet with potential investors. Christian called his management company Loyd Management Inc., because “loyd” was an acronym for “live out your dreams.” Knowing that Christian was looking for investors, Blazer (a shady character who turned out to be an informant for the FBI) introduced Christian to a man named Jeff D’Angelo, who was described as a wealthy guy who made his fortune in real-estate. Christian was also introduced to D’Angelo’s right-hand person Jill Bailey.
D’Angelo gave Christian hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to bribe college basketball coaches and certain Adidas executives to recruit high-school basketball players, who would also be steered to Christian’s fledgling management company for representation. Christian didn’t like this idea because he says he wanted to pay basketball players directly, instead of adding an extra unpredictable set of people to the mix.
“Paying players is the cost of doing business,” Christian says. He also repeatedly mentions in the documentary that he thinks all sports players (including those in school) should be paid salaries for playing sports. (It’s currently illegal for players in U.S. non-professional basketball leagues to be paid salaries for playing basketball.) Christian says that he was initially very uncomfortable with this business model of paying coaches and other officials, but D’Angelo kept pressuring him to do it, and Christian eventually went along with it since D’Angelo was paying for all of it.
But, by his own admission, Christian said he got greedy and kept most of the payment money for himself and spent a lot of it on “entertainment” (including strip clubs) for himself and the coaches that he was supposed to be bribing. Unbeknownst to Christian until it was too late, D’Angelo and Bailey were FBI agents. (Those names were aliases.) And the reason why “Jeff D’Angelo” kept pushing hard for Christian to pay coaches was because NCAA coaches are considered public officials, and it’s a federal crime for them to accept bribes.
In the documentary, Christian and his attorney admit that although Christian took the money (they couldn’t deny it, since many of these transactions were caught on FBI surveillance video), he was not guilty of directly giving any of the money to the coaches and Adidas officials. It’s why Christian pleaded not guilty to the charges, and the case resulted in two trials for him: one involving fraud charges, and the other involving bribery charges. A great deal of the movie is about Christian giving his perspective of being “set up” by the FBI.
Throughout the documentary, Christian’s grandiosity and high opinion of himself are very apparent. He claims to know “everybody in basketball” and brags about being smart when it comes to business. But, for a guy who’s supposedly “smart,” he made a lot of dumb mistakes.
For starters, Christian admits that the sudden appearance of an angel investor (“Jeff D’Angelo”) who spared no expense (deals were done on a yacht and in lavish hotel suites) made him suspicious at first, but he didn’t do a thorough background check on D’Angelo. Christian says he thought about hiring a private investigator, but he decided not to do that because he asked a Drug Enforcement Agency contact (who’s not named in the documentary) to look into D’Angelo’s background, and the DEA contact told Christian that D’Angelo was legitimate.
Another big mistake that Christian made was trusting Blazer, who had a long history of arrests and lawsuits (which were all public record), but Blazer mysteriously wasn’t in prison for his crimes. Any “street smart” person would immediately figure out that Blazer was probably avoiding prison time by being a confidential informant. And, as revealed by Christian’s two trials and journalists’ investigations, Blazer was indeed an informant for the FBI. But Christian, who repeatedly describes Blazer and “D’Angelo” as “idiots” and “stupid,” missed that big red flag. In the end, Blazer spent zero time in prison for his involvement in the scandal. So, who’s the stupid one?
And there was another red flag that Christian foolishly missed: The person calling himself “Jeff D’Angelo” (his real name still remains a secret) suddenly stopped doing business with Christian, and let his right-hand person “Jill Bailey” take over the transactions. The excuse was that “D’Angelo” had to go to Italy to visit his dying mother. But Christian didn’t try to find out if that story was true, because he said he didn’t really like “D’Angelo” anyway, and “Bailey” was easier to deal with on a business level.
In reality, as it came out during news investigations, “D’Angelo” had been removed from the case because he was allegedly stealing the FBI’s cash too. Haney says in the documentary that he tried to subpoena the mysterious “Jeff D’Angelo,” but the subpoena was denied. The documentary also mentions that it’s not known if “Jeff D’Angelo” is still working for the FBI. Even without the testimony of “Jeff D’Angelo,” the bottom line is that as long as the money kept flowing, Christian didn’t really care who was giving him the money. In the end, greed was Christian’s undoing.
“The Scheme” has a lot of re-enactments with Christian, as well as actual FBI surveillance and wiretaps. And the filmmakers are obviously sympathetic to Christian and his attorney Haney, given all the screen time that they have in the movie.
What’s missing from the documentary is any sense that the filmmakers cared about investigating the bigger picture that everyone interviewed in the documentary says exists—the NCAA’s widespread corruption, which includes the participation of major athletic-shoe companies (such as Nike, Adidas, and Under Armour) that pay millions to colleges for star athletes to wear their products. Unlike NBA players, the school players aren’t supposed to be paid to play basketball (a policy called “amateurism”), and the NCAA is a non-profit organization that gets massive tax breaks for the money it earns.
Christian was the one who spent the most time in prison for the scandal, while other people implicated in the scandal who are much higher up in the NCAA food chain did not even get arrested. Although the documentary is basically a platform for Christian and his attorney to complain about Christian’s prison sentence, the filmmakers don’t bother to ask why higher authorities were not held accountable in this scandal. And although the documentary includes statistics about how much money certain colleges and universities get from athletic-apparel companies, the filmmakers fail to detail or investigate how that money is moved around in possibly corrupt ways.
Christian even names some of the NCAA colleges and universities that he says are some of the worst offenders when it comes to misappropriating funds and bribing players to join their teams, yet the filmmakers don’t follow up on these claims. Christian also comes right out and says that it’s not uncommon for college coaches to use college basketball funds to hire hookers for high-school basketball players, as part of the recruiting process. Instead of uncovering anything new or looking into Christian’s claims about corruption and cover-ups, the documentary interviews journalists Rebecca Davis O’Brien (who covered the scandal for the Wall Street Journal) and Wetzel to rehash information that these journalists already covered for their media outlets.
“The Scheme” also doesn’t adequately explore the issue of racial inequalities in criminal justice. Christian frequently mentions in the movie that he was able to be “successful” because of his relationships with college-bound or NBA-bound basketball players and their families. (Toronto Raptors player Fred VanVleet is the only basketball player interviewed in the documentary, and he says he owes his career to Christian.) Because college-level and NBA-level basketball is a sport played by predominantly African Americans, Christian says that gave him an advantage to establish a type of racial rapport with players that agents and head coaches (who are predominantly white) do not have.
However, the filmmakers don’t ask Christian how his race could have been a disadvantage when he got caught in the FBI sting. “The Scheme” completely ignores the glaring fact that almost all of the people arrested in the FBI sting were people of color: Christian Dawkins; banker Sood; Emanuel “Book” Richardson (former assistant basketball coach at the University of Arizona); Lamont Evans (former assistant basketball coach at Oklahoma State University and the University of South Carolina); Tony Bland (former assistant basketball coach at the University of Southern California); and Merl Code, a former Adidas executive who was like a mentor to Christian. Jim Gatto (former Adidas executive) was the only white person arrested.
Meanwhile, the head basketball coaches at these universities (all of the head coaches are white) escaped arrest and in most cases got to keep their jobs. In the documentary, Christian claims that University of Arizona head basketball coach Sean Miller and Louisiana State University head basketball coach Will Wade blatantly lied to the media and the public about not being involved in illegal basketball deals. (Although Wade was suspended from his job, he was eventually re-instated.)
Christian says that Miller should be an “actor” for his performance at a press conference where Miller denied any involvement in the NCAA scandal. And the documentary includes Wade’s public denial of doing business with Christian by juxtaposing it with FBI wiretaps of Wade talking business with Christian. Christian and his attorney say that these head coaches who escaped arrest must have felt confident that they would be protected when they made their public denials.
Despite all this finger-pointing, the documentary does little to appear objective in trying to gather all of the facts. Instead, “The Scheme” is mostly concerned with letting Christian run the narrative. It’s clear that he did the interview to promote the fact that he’s trying to make a business comeback, but this time in the music industry—something that’s mentioned at the end of the film. (At least he’s smart enough to know that his sports career is over.)
Why the music industry? Because convicted felons aren’t as taboo there, says Christian. His attorney said that, in an example of Christian’s hustler mentality, while Christian was on trial, Christian secretly had meetings with people in the music industry to start his own record label.
And now that he’s out of prison, Christian has teamed up with Atlantic Records to fund and distribute a record label he’s founded called Chosen, even though he has no prior experience in the music industry. In the documentary, Christian doesn’t talk about any artists he’s signed to his record label, but he seems very happy with the undisclosed amount of money he’s gotten from Atlantic Records. Given his track record in handling funds, Atlantic might want to closely watch where that money is going.
In the end, “The Scheme” is kind of a reflection of the person whose perspective dominates the movie: There’s a lot of talk, but not a lot of new facts brought to the table.
Culture Representation: Taking place in various parts of the United States, this documentary (which interviews mostly white people and a few Asians) examines the controversies over the medical validity of a debilitating skin condition that’s known as Morgellons, featuring commentaries from patients and medical professionals.
Culture Clash: People in the documentary disagree over whether not Morgellons should be officially recognized as a disease by the Centers for Disease Control and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Culture Audience: “Skin Deep: The Battle Over Morgellons” will appeal mostly to people who want to learn more about what’s being done about Morgellons and will also appeal to people who like watching documentaries about rare medical conditions.
Cindy Casey-Holman (second from right) in “Skin Deep: The Battle Over Morgellons” (Photo courtesy of Gravitas Ventures)
The documentary “Skin Deep: The Battle Over Morgellons” takes an up-close and personal look at what is currently a controversial medical mystery: Morgellons. Is it an undiagnosed skin disease or is it a figment of mentally ill people’s imaginations? The medical community is divided over what is the real answer. This documentary (directed by Pi Ware) responsibly presents both sides of the argument, but the film unquestionably sides with the patients who say that they have Morgellons.
People who say they have Morgellons have similar physical characteristics: They have painful skin lesions and open sores that often have hair or different-colored fibers growing out of these sores. The people with this condition also say that they feel like bugs or small animals are trying to crawl out of their skin. In addition, they also report having memory loss or other signs of neurological degeneration. (These are also characteristics of heavy methamphetamine use, but many of the people who have Morgellons are not meth users.) Because Morgellons seems to be a very rare condition that is not officially recognized by the Centers of Disease Control (CDC), many medical professionals are reluctant to diagnose patients with Morgellons.
Complicating matters is that fact that people with this skin condition often use extreme measures to try and get rid of it, which might or not not be indications of mental instability. In a medical consultation on camera with nurse practitioner Ginger Savely (who’s a Morgellons patient advocate), one Morgellons-stricken man in the documentary tells her that he’s been using a homemade, medically unapproved “remedy” of a topical paste that includes DDT (the main ingredient of insecticide) to treat his skin condition. The patient swears that this home remedy has been working for him. Savely, who is only consulting with him and is not his main medical professional, literally cringes and says that the DDT ingredient is “toxic.”
This inclination to treat the problem with self-remedies is why many medical professionals think that people who say they have Morgellons are really just mentally ill and should not be coming up with their own medical solutions to a problem that isn’t fully understood yet. People who have Morgellons are often accused of causing their skin sores through self-mutilation.
The documentary points out that there are some people who think they have Morgellons, but they actually don’t, and it’s those misinformed people who are giving the “legitimate” Morgellons patients a bad name. But herein lies the problem: Even if doctors believe that Morgellons is a medical condition, they often don’t agree on what would make a “legitimate” Morgellons patient.
Cindy Casey-Holman, a former registered nurse, is one of the leading activists to get medical professionals and health-related government agencies to take Morgellons seriously. In the documentary, she said she first noticed that she had the characteristics of Morgellons in the mid-1990s. In addition to the skin sores, she had a low-grade fever, swollen feet and a lot of anxiety. Betsy Anderson, one of her friends and a former co-worker, is interviewed and confirms this information.
Since no doctor could diagnose what was wrong with her at the time, Casey-Holman said that she did the best she could to try to get better, and the symptoms eventually went away. However, the symptoms returned about seven or eight years later at one of the worst times imaginable: close to her wedding date. She’s had the condition in varying forms ever since, although she says at the end of the film that it’s nowhere near as bad as it was for her back in the 2000s.
Casey-Holman’s husband Charles Holman (who has since passed away) and an advocate named Dr. Greg Smith teamed up to co-found a nonprofit activist organization called the New Morgellons Order. That organization has since morphed into the Charles E. Holman Morgellons Disease Foundation, of which Casey-Holman is the director. She says in the documentary that she is based in Hughes Springs, Texas, after living in San Francisco for many years.
She is also the chief organizer of an annual Morgellons Conference, which gets a lot of screen time in the documentary. The movie doesn’t specify what year that the featured conference took place, but it’s mentioned that the conference was at a hotel in Austin, Texas. It’s a small event. Casey-Holman says in the film that the conference has less than 100 people attending per year. And in a room for panel discussions and speaker presentations, it looks like there are about 50 people or less in the room at any given time.
Casey-Holman says that people who believe they have Morgellons began to find each other through the Internet, beginning in the late 1990s/early 2000s. It was around this time that the media began reporting that people had this skin condition. People who say that they have Morgellons were once relegated to just Internet chat rooms to share their stories with others, but then they were starting to be interviewed on national television in news reports about Morgellons. And that’s when this skin condition started to get even more media attention.
The medical skeptics about Morgellons say that the publicity over Morgellons is one of the reasons why they think Morgellons is a medical hoax. Dr. Timothy Berger, a University of California at San Francisco dermatologist who used to be Casey-Holman’s doctor, comments on Morgellons: “I believe this was an Internet-associated situation. I hadn’t seen patients with the fiber complaint until the fiber story got universally spread.” Berger then compares people who say they have Morgellons to Vietnam War veterans who blamed their sicknesses on Agent Orange.
Another medical skeptic about Morgellons is Dr. Steven R. Feldman, a dermatologist based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He gets the most screen time in the documentary’s presentation of anti-Morgellons viewpoints, and he’s the closest thing to a “villain” in this movie. For starters, Feldman comes across as arrogant and condescending. He freely admits that in dealing with patients, what he says isn’t based on the individual but is often pre-rehearsed, canned talk. He also admits that he can appear to have a cheerful demeanor with patients, but it’s actually forced. “It’s for show,” he says.
When commenting on Morgellons, Feldman says, “Doctors can’t find anything objective causing these sensations … Morgellons and delusions of parasitosis, to many physicians, are exactly the same thing.” And to further drive home the point that Feldman is the “jerk” of this story, during his lecture presentation at the Morgellons Conference featured in the documentary, he tells the attendees that they’ll get better results in doctors’ cooperation if they are polite and nice to their doctors.
But what really sets off some of the attendees to respond angrily is when Feldman makes this outrageous statement more than once during his lecture: “I don’t believe that there are any bad doctors.” (Tell that to state medical licensing boards that have revoked numerous medical licenses for doctors due to malpractice or other reasons. There are also many doctors who have been convicted of medical-related crimes.)
Feldman’s statement that there are “no bad doctors” causes one particular conference attendee, Morgellons activist Kelly Pickens, to shout a rant at Feldman before storming out of the room. She later confronts Feldman again in a hallway after the lecture. Pickens has a tragic story that is told in this documentary, but that information won’t be revealed in this review.
Another Morgellons patient who’s featured in the documentary is Edward Hu, a former attorney in San Francisco whose medical condition became so severe that he had to leave his job as a federal public defender. His medical problems led to a falling-out between him and his younger brother Brian, a doctor who’s been skeptical that Morgellons is a real medical condition. The documentary shows Edward Hu in various states of his condition (some better than others) over time, as well as the two brothers’ attempts to reconcile.
Are there any doctors who believe Morgellons is real? Yes. The documentary interviews some of them. One is Raphael Stricker, an internist who considers himself to be a Morgellons specialist. He says that people who believe that they have Morgellons should try to avoid bringing in their own skin samples (often called “matchbox signs”) for doctors to test, unless those samples are specifically requested. As Stricker says in the movie: “Doctors make fun of the matchbox sign, because they see it as proof that they [the patients] are crazy.”
Another advocate for Morgellon patients is veterinary microbiologist Marianne Middelveen, who teamed up with Stricker to test a hypothesis that Morgellons could be caused by bacteria. The study’s results, which are shown in the documentary, suggested a strong correlation between bacteria and this skin condition.
The documentary also covers the long-held belief that Lyme disease could linked to Morgellons, since the symptoms for Lyme disease are similar. Another theory is that Morgellons is caused by a source within the body (such as a genetic defect) and not from a source that was introduced to the body, such as external bacteria. None of these theories has been medically proven.
In the documentary, Harry Quinn Schone, a medical historian and author of “Contested Illness in Context” mentions that for decades, medical professionals thought ulcers were caused by stress until it was proven that ulcers were caused by bacteria. But it took a lot of controversy, skepticism and scientific research before that conclusion was reached by the medical community. Schone suggests that Morgellons is in a similar misunderstood gray zone that ulcers used to be in, when it was believed that the cause for ulcers was more emotional/psychological than physical.
Another medical expert who is an advocate for Morgellons patients is Randy Wymore, an associate professor of pharmacology at Oklahoma State University. He believes that the CDC conducted a very flawed study that concluded in 2012 that Morgellons had no underlying medical condition or no infectious source. Wymore says that the sample size for the study was too small; he claims as little as 12 people actually participated in the study.
And according to Wymore, the long questionnaire that the CDC gave to people who were potential study participants showed a lot of bias in favor of the theory that Morgellons patients had psychiatric problems. The documentary does not mention if the filmmakers made any effort to contact the CDC for comment. The good news, says Wymore, is that because of continued testing, he’s seen that doctors are becoming less skeptical of Morgellons and are becoming more curious about how to treat this condition.
“Skin Deep” is undoubtedly sympathetic toward the patients, but there’s very little investigation into how authentic their stories are. As viewers, we’re supposed to take their word for it that the sores on their skin just mysteriously appeared with no explanation. While it might be true for some, it might not be true for others. The documentary doesn’t really try to prove the credibility of anyone identified in the film as a “Morgellons patient,” except for Casey-Holman, who has the aforementioned friend backing up her story.
“Skin Deep” director Ware also injects some melodrama by including re-enactments using actors. These re-enactments are borderline manipulative/cheesy and don’t seem very appropriate for a documentary about a topic as serious as people’s medical problems. Despite these flaws, “Skin Deep” does make it clear that even though people can disagree on what causes Morgellons, there are physical manifestations clearly showing that something is definitely wrong with these patients. The issue is what is really causing these skin sores and other problems associated with Morgellons.
As shown in the movie, because Morgellons is such a mysterious condition, patients are often not believed not just by medical professionals but also by family, friends and other loved ones. Several of the Morgellons patients in the movie say that Morgellons has ruined their health and ruined the relationships they’ve had with many loved ones. The suicide rate for Morgellons patients is extremely high, says Savely.
Nurse practitioners Savely and Melissa McElroy Felser, who are advocates for Morgellons patients, stress the importance of having compassion for those who are suffering. Whether or not Morgellons is a real disease, the suffering is real. And, as “Skin Deep” concludes, that suffering in and of itself is cause for alarm and for the medical community and other concerned people to do their part to address this problem.
Gravitas Ventures released “Skin Deep: The Battle Over Morgellons” on digital, VOD and DVD on March 31, 2020.
Culture Representation: This science-intensive documentary about human genetics includes interviews with a racially diverse group of scientists, medical professionals, entrepreneurs and people affected by health conditions who are mostly in the United States.
Culture Clash: The ethical dilemmas over altering human genetics continue to be debated in scientific communities.
Culture Audience: “Human Nature” will appeal mostly to people who like documentaries that go into great details about human genetics, but the movie might bore other people who have no interest in this topic.
A visual representation of Cas9 in “Human Nature” (Photo courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment)
Should people have the right to alter their own genetics? And should they also have the right to decide how their children will be genetically engineered? Those are the dilemmas presented in the fascinating but very slow-paced documentary “Human Nature,” which bites off a lot more than it ends up chewing.
The movie (directed by Adam Bolt) ambitiously examines this very broad and wide-reaching issue by taking a deep dive into all the scientific breakthroughs and progress that have had led up to where scientists are now—having the capability to alter human genes before someone is born. It’s a step that most medical professionals aren’t willing to take yet on humans (it’s been done for years on plants and non-human animals), but the step has reportedly already been taken with unidentified twin girls born in China in 2018, according to the documentary’s epilogue.
Most of the documentary’s experts believe it’s only a matter of time when genetic engineering will become a possibly widespread option that people will take for themselves and for their unborn children. Whether it’s genetic cloning, selecting the genetic qualities that a living being should have, or removing unwanted genetic qualities, it’s now possible for science to do this on humans.
The movie goes into a lot of detail about how the family of DNA sequences known as CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) is the key to the science of altering genetics/DNA in humans. Cas9 (an immune-system protein that helps bacteria fight off DNA viruses) is also mentioned as extremely important in the area of genetic altering that aims to get rid of genes that cause health problems. Without going into all the details that the movie does, the simplest way to put it is that CRISPR is a DNA system that can be programmed to prevent viruses from attacking the immune system, and Cas9 is like the “police inspector” for the system.
But instead of spending so much time covering the “how” of altering human genetics, “Human Nature” should’ve spent more time covering the “why” and answered this question: “What are we going to do about it, now that it’s already happened?” The fact that human genetic engineering is no longer science fiction and there are already at least two known genetically altered people who are living right now (something that should’ve been mentioned in the beginning of the film, not the end) makes much of this documentary look like a long-winded science lecture.
For example, the documentary explains that most people who want to alter human genetics have two main motivations: (1) to stop or prevent life-threatening diseases and (2) to pick and choose which types of genetic qualities they want for themselves or their children. The first reason doesn’t present as many ethical dilemmas as the second reason.
But even the first reason prompts a major question which the documentary doesn’t adequately address: If genetic alterations can get rid of genes that cause life-threatening illnesses, then that will result in millions and possibly billions more people who can live longer and healthier lives. But is planet Earth prepared for this massive surge in the world’s population? Are there enough resources in the world to sustain this population?
Scientists have been warning that Earth is already overpopulated. Experts are predicting that by the end of the 21st century, the world’s environment and resources will reach dangerous levels of depletion, based on how things are going now. It’s one thing to tout these genetic breakthroughs that will help millions or billions of people live longer. It’s another thing to look at the long-term consequences and discuss how or if the world is prepared for these consequences. Unfortunately, “Human Nature” missed this opportunity by focusing more on the “cause” than the “effect.” (It’s ironic, considering that “Human Nature” is a movie about scientific research, and the “cause and effect” rule is a basic rule of scientific research.)
To its credit, “Human Nature” has an impressive list of people who are interviewed, even if the documentary is a little too overstuffed with these talking heads and should have interviewed at least a few experts in population science. The documentary’s talking heads include Harvard Medical School dean George Daley; Fyodor Urnov of the Innovative Genomics Institute; University of Wisconsin at Madison bioethicist Alta Charo; and University of California at Berkeley scientists Jennifer Doudna (a biochemist) and Jill Banfield (a microbiologist).
Also interviewed are Jorge Piedrahita, who works in transitional medicine at North Carolina State University; Harvard University geneticist George Church; Max Planck Institute biochemist Emmanuelle Charpentier; the Broad Institute bioengineer Feng Zhang; Stanford University sickle-cell researcher Matt Porteus; University of Alicante microbiologist Francisco Mojca; MIT Technology Review reporter Antonio Regalado; and Stanford University archaeologist Ian Hodder.
“Human Nature” does a great job of illustrating (with eye-catching graphics) a lot of the science that’s discussed in the movie. It’s a big help for people who are not scientists. But it won’t be a big help for people who don’t want to feel like they’re stuck in a biology class, because much of the documentary looks like something that would be shown in a school.
“Human Nature” (which is divided into six chapters) also could’ve been edited with better focus. The documentary jumps around from profiling a young sickle-cell anemia patient in the beginning of the film, and then goes into a very long section with the talking heads discussing CRISPR and genetic research. Somewhere in the middle of that, the movie introduces viewers to a couple who has an albino daughter. And then toward the end, the documentary finally explores what should have been the movie’s focus all along: How and why will this genetic science effect the world’s population?
UC Berkeley’s Banfield gives one of the more memorable quotes in the documentary when she says that she sometimes has a nightmare where she dreams that she’s met Hitler, who asks her: “So, tell me how Cas9 works.” Banfield says, “I wake up thinking, ‘Oh my God! What have I done?'” It’s that very real possibility that human genetic alteration will be used for nefarious purposes which is keeping it from being a mass-market science for now.
However, “Human Nature” does interview people who’ve started businesses that are involved in pushing research for human genetic altering for the greater good. They include Synthego co-founders Paul and Michael Dabrowski; Genomia Prediction founder Stephen Hsu; and eGenesis co-founder Luhan Yang.
Of these entrepreneurs who are interviewed in the documentary, Hsu seems to be the most eager to make this science available to the general public. On the one hand, he says it’s “insanity” to think that people might use this science with Hitler-like intentions. On the other hand, he also freely admits in the documentary that people who want to alter genetics on others (their own children, for example) will usually gravitate to choosing genetic qualities that will make the genetically altered people look more like them.
Unfortunately, the movie barely acknowledges what it would mean if humans could preserve DNA of dead people and use that DNA later. (It sounds creepy, but that’s a dark side to this genetic science that “Human Nature” doesn’t really mention it at all.) And the movie only scratches the surface of what the long-term consequences would be if people use science to mess with the natural evolution of the human race. Likewise, the issue of genetic alteration being available to only those who can afford it is briefly mentioned but not adequately explored.
Ultimately, “Human Nature” excels if you want to know the details about what goes on in the science labs that are part of this groundbreaking research. However, the movie falls short if you’re the type of person who wants to know how this research is going to apply to the real world, not only today but also for decades to come.
Greenwich Entertainment released “Human Nature” in select U.S. theaters, on digital and on VOD on March 13, 2020.
Directed by Simon Ardizzone, Russell Michaels and Sarah Teale
Culture Representation: This politically oriented documentary, which examines the effects of cyber hacking on U.S. elections, interviews a predominantly white group of people, including cybersecurity experts, government officials, journalists, university professors and hackers.
Culture Clash: Almost everyone interviewed in the documentary says that there is widespread denial or suppression of information about hacking and other manipulation of voting machines in the U.S. election system.
Culture Audience: This documentary will appeal mostly to people who want to know more about how voting in the U.S. works behind the scenes, even if what’s uncovered might be disturbing.
Voting booths in “Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections” (Photo courtesy of HBO)
When people vote in elections, are their votes really safe from hacking or other illegal manipulation? Absolutely not, say the experts and other officials interviewed in the chilling documentary “Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections.” The movie’s directors Simon Ardizzone, Russell Michaels and Sarah Teale focus on U.S. elections that have taken place since 2016. “Kill Chain” sounds the alarm that sinister forces that are inside and outside the U.S. are working to manipulate elections that are happening in 2020 and beyond.
Ardizzone and Michaels directed another HBO documentary that covered a similar topic—2006’s “Hacking Democracy,” which featured election security expert Harri Hursti (a native of Finland) showing how easy it was to hack into a voting machine. Hursti is prominently featured in “Kill Chain,” to the point where he could’ve almost been the film’s narrator. He’s definitely the star of the movie, since the filmmakers follow him going to various U.S. states to investigate the current state of voting machines used in U.S. elections and probable cases of voting fraud in recent elections.
Because voting methods in the U.S. are usually determined by counties within a state, there are vastly different voting machines that are used across the United States. Most voting machines, even if they use paper, still rely on computers for scanning. In addition, many voting places use computerized machines not just for ballots but also to verify identification and residential addresses of voters. Because the trend in newer voting machines is to become more computerized (including machines that turn votes into barcodes), several people in the “Kill Chain” documentary say these computer revamps will leave these machines more vulnerable to being hacked.
The “Kill Chain” documentary gets its name from the “divide and conquer” concept of how one entity can conquer another through a chain of events. As Hursti explains in the documentary, it’s a five step-process: (1) Reconnaissance, which is gathering information about the enemy’s landscape); (2) Identify, which is seeing who the targets are; (3) Weaponize; (4) Paralyze; and (5) Attack. When voting systems are manipulated and hacked, it means that the attacker is in the “weaponize” phase.
Throughout the movie, Russia is repeatedly mentioned as the country that’s most likely to hack a voting system—and not just in the U.S., but in other countries, particularly in Europe. However, “Kill Chain” also makes it clear that voting fraud can easily be perpetrated by Americans in U.S. elections, from the highest federal levels to the smallest local governments.
Hursti says in the beginning of the film: “This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. This is our common problem, owned by everyone living in the United States. And we have to solve it in order to preserve our way of life, our society, the rule of law, and our right to self-govern.”
He adds, “The key element to restore the votes is a removable medium,” such as flash drives or hard drives, which most voting machines have. Once those drives are removable on a voting machine, says Hursti: “Every step of the way, it’s vulnerable to attack.”
The movie shows that there are certain signs that indicate a voting site has probably been hacked: Numerous people at the site have problems with their ballots being processed. Another red flag is when voters arrive at the site, they are detained or turned away because the computer system at the site shows inaccuracies in the voters’ names or registration addresses. And these problems usually result in long lines of people waiting for several hours to cast a vote, going well beyond an acceptable wait time for casting a ballot. These long lines cause numerous people to either leave or not get a chance to vote before the polling site closes.
“When you prevent people from casting a ballot, you’ve hacked an election,” comments Sue Halper, an author and contributor to The New Yorker. Michael Daniel, who was a White House cybersecurity coordinator from 2012 to 2020, says that a voter registration database is the part of a computerized election system that is the most vulnerable to hacking.
The “Kill Chain” documentary uses the contentious 2018 election of Georgia’s governor as an example of an election that showed signs of being hacked and other voter fraud. For starters, Republican candidate Brian Kemp had a conflict of interest because in 2018, when he was Georgia secretary of state, he moved Georgia’s Center of Election Systems (CES) to his office, where he oversaw CES. Kemp’s Democrat opponent Stacey Abrams and her supporters repeatedly called for Kemp to recuse himself from overseeing the election, due to this conflict of interest. But the protests were to no avail, because Kemp stayed in the position that gave him the power to oversee the voting process of his own election.
Then, on election day (November 6, 2018), there were widespread reports of voting machine “malfunctions” and long lines in districts of Georgia that were heavily populated with people of color and/or registered Democrats. In addition, even before election day, there were reports of thousands of voter registrations being purged from computer systems and thousands of voter registrations not being processed in time for the election, mostly in areas of Georgia where there is a high percentage of people of color and/or registered Democrats.
The voting results were so close that it took 10 days and a recount for the official tally to be announced. Kemp ended up winning by 1.4% more votes than Abrams. The political group Fair Fight Action, which is backed by Abrams, then sued the Georgia board of elections in November 2018, and included allegations of voter suppression in the complaint. As of this writing, the lawsuit has not been resolved.
As a result of these numerous claims that the election was tainted by voter fraud and problematic AccuVote machines, Georgia stopped using AccuVote machines. However, the documentary mentions that Georgia is now using Dominion’s barcode voting machines (which make the votes impossible to count by human eyes), thereby making the vote counting more computerized and more susceptible to hacking. It cost Georgia about $106 million to switch to these new voting machines, according to the documentary.
“Kill Chain” shows Hursti on that 2018 election day in Gwinnett County, Georgia, at one of the voting sites experiencing machine “malfunctions” and extremely long lines. (Many people were waiting up to five to seven hours to vote, according to news reports.) At the voting site, Hursti speaks to Gwinnett County Democratic Party chair Gabe Okoye, who expresses complete surprise when Hursti tells him that the county is using the same type of voting machine that Hursti was able to hack into in 2006.
In a separate post-election trip to Georgia, Hursti meets with Marilyn Marks of the Georgia-based grassroots organization Coalition of Good Governance, who was working at a voting site in Clarke County on that 2018 election day. She noticed that out of the seven machines used on that day at a heavily Democratic precinct, one machine was churning out ballots that were overwhelmingly showing votes cast for Republicans. The voting site’s exact voting results were public information.
For this trip to Georgia, Hursti invited Professor Philip Stark, who works in the statistics department at the University of California at Berkeley, and Stark’s assistant Dr. Kellie Ottobani, to run the statistics to find out the odds of that voting machine’s results being accurate at that polling site on that day. They found that there was less than a one-in-a-million chance that this outlier machine gave accurate results, based on the number of registered Democrats and Republicans who could vote at that voting site on that particular election day.
So with all this real and potential hacking going on, what’s being done about it? According to the people interviewed documentary, the companies in the business of making the machines want to do nothing. (The filmmakers note in the documentary that several of these companies were asked to participate in the film, but declined.) Some of the biggest suppliers of voting machines and/or software are companies such as Dominion Voting Systems, Election Systems & Software (ES&S), VR Systems and AccuVote.
Jake Stauffer, director of operations at cybersecurity firm Coherent Cyber, tells a story about how his company started a testing plan for voting machines, and the plan was approved by the state of California. Coherent Cyber used the testing plan on Dominion and ES&S voting machines and found “multiple vulnerabilities” (his words) that would allow hackers to change an election or shut the system down. But when those vulnerabilities were pointed out to Dominion and ES&S, both companies shut down the investigation and said that Coherent Cyber’s services were no longer needed.
Stauffer says, “How can a vendor sell a voting system with this many vulnerabilities? I can’t find a straight answer.” Jack Braun, who was the Department of Homeland Security White House Liaison from 2009 to 2011, agrees that companies that manufacture and sell voting machines and voting software cannot be counted on to take responsibility for hacking problems, since these companies usually deny that the problems exists. Braun says that these companies are the opposite of transparent when it comes to reporting security breaches with their machines or software.
What are politicians or other government officials doing about this problem? U.S. Senators such as James Lankford (a Republican from Virginia), Amy Klobuchar (a Democrat from Minnesota) and Mark Warner (a Democrat from Indiana) are among the co-sponsors of a bill called the Secure Elections Act, which gives the Department of Homeland Security the primary responsibility within the federal government for sharing information about cybersecurity hacking and vulnerabilities with federal entities and election agencies. “Kill Chain” notes that U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (a Republican) has repeatedly blocked this bill.
Lankford, Klobuchar, Warner and U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (a Democrat from Oregon) are all interviewed in the documentary. Warner says the the U.S. should’ve seen warning signs that Russia would interfere in U.S. elections because back in 2011, Russia’s deputy defense minister Gen. Valery Gerasimov publicly made statements saying that Russia might not be able to compete with Western countries when it comes to military weapons, but Russia could compete when it comes to “cyberwars, disinformation and sowing dissension.”
Ion Sancho, who was supervisor of elections in Leon County, Florida, from 1988 to 2016, gives his own Russian hacking story in the documentary. In an interview with Hursti, Sancho says that sometime in 2016, he and other election supervisors were summoned by the FBI into a top-secret meeting, where on a conference call, the FBI issued a warning that a foreign power had penetrated an election vendor in Florida.
Sancho says, “It didn’t take us long to figure that they were talking about GIU, Russia’s military intelligence service, and the vendor was a Tallahassee vendor (VR Systems), which did all the programming for the majority of the counties in the state of Florida.” (The documentary also notes that VR Systems also supplies voting machines and services to the states of New York, California, Virginia, West Virginia, Illinois and North Carolina.) Sancho goes on to say that Reality Winner—the former National Security Agency intelligence contractor who went to prison for leaking NSA documents that showed Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election—is a “heroine” for leaking the documents.
In order to illustrate how widespread the denial is over hacking of the voting system, the documentary shows a video montage of several government officials—including former FBI director James Comey and Election Assistance Commission chairman Thomas Hicks—giving Senate testimony saying some version of, “The voting system is not connected to the Internet,” as a way of denying that the system could be hacked. But then, after the video montage is played, Hursti shows several examples of exactly how voting machines are connected to the Internet and can be hacked.
In one example, Hursti and his business partner Maggie MacAlpine go to an Ohio business called eCycle Solutions that sells recycled products from a warehouse and on eBay. Hursti and MacAlpine buy some outdated voting machines called the AccuVote TSx, which is a type of voting machine that’s still being used in several U.S. counties. Hursti takes the computers and shows them to Professor J. Alex Halderman from the University of Michigan’s school of computer science and engineering, and they do an on-camera demonstration of how the computers need the Internet to process the information and can be hacked.
An even more dramatic demonstration of how voting machines are very easy to hack comes about midway through the documentary, when Hursti goes to Def Con (the annual computer-hacker convention in Las Vegas) and invites attendees into a room filled with different types of voting machines that are currently used in U.S. elections. With help from hacker Jeff Moss, also known as the Dark Tangent (who co-founded the hacker conventions Def Con and Black Hat), Hursti tells the Def Con hackers that they have free reign to hack into the voting machines and show how it can be done. (The documentary notes that the companies whose machines were used were invited to this demonstration too, but they all declined to attend.) The Def Con “hackathon” test of the voting machines showed that all of the machines in the test were “effectively breached,” according to the documentary.
Douglas Lute, the U.S. Ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization from 2013 to 2017, comments: “We need to shift the mentality away from the Internet being secure and no one is able to tamper with the American election system to the reality that has been demonstrated in 2016.”
One of the most memorable parts of the documentary is toward the end, which features an interview with a hacker in India who uses the alias Cyber Zeist. He does the interview while wearing a disguise and in entirely dark shadows so his face can’t be seen. However, his voice doesn’t seem to be altered.
Cyber Zeist gives a disturbing account of how he was able to hack into the elections computer system for the state of Alaska, and that he could’ve made a fortune (“millions”) from what he was able to find. “I could’ve made any changes to the system,” he brags. Cyber Zeist claims he just “looked around” and didn’t steal information, but Hursti believes that Cyber Zeist dropped enough hints in the interview to admit that a tool was deployed during the hacking session, and that Cyber Zeist might activate this tool later.
The documentary shows Hursti in Alaska meeting with former Anchorage Daily News reporter Nathaniel Herz, who plays excerpts of an audio recording of an interview that he did with former Alaska Elections director Josie Bahnke, who had the position from 2013 to 2018. In the interview, Bahnke says that during her tenure, the Alaska Elections website was hacked by Russians and an IP address from India, but that “there was no breach” because she claims that nothing was altered or stolen. The documentary doesn’t prove that Cyber Zeist was involved in hacking Alaska Elections, and lets viewers draw their own conclusions over how credible this mystery hacker is.
Although “Kill Chain” certainly delivers on presenting several points of view on cyber hacking of elections, what’s missing from the documentary are investigations on what can really be done to combat the problem. The documentary instead wastes some time showing Hursti going back to his hometown in Finland and visiting with his mother. He and his mother look through old photo albums and scrap books together. The only reason this hometown footage seems to be in the documentary is to show the audience that Hursti was a child prodigy in computer science. Instead of this filler and unnecessary footage, the documentary should have shown something more substantial, such as a look into what any grassroots organizations or coalitions are in the U.S. are doing to have voting systems that are the least likely to be hacked, since decisions about voting machines are made on the local level.
The closest the documentary offers to possible solutions is when it shows comments from some of the interviewees (such as statistics professor Stark), who believe that the best voting system to have is a voting system that can leave a paper trail where people can count paper ballot votes by hand, in case there are any disputes. Even though making voting machines more computerized is supposed to make the process easier, the more computerized these machines become, the more likely the election system can be hacked.
After watching this documentary, many people will probably feel the same way that University of Pennsylvania security researcher Sandy Clark feels, when she says: “I feel like we’re in terrible danger of losing what it means to be a democracy. If elections can be altered in a way that’s undetectable, how does one trust the results of their election? Democracy functions on trust. Without that trust, things descend into chaos and anarchy. Those of us who know how vulnerable the systems are in the elections are terribly afraid right now.”
HBO will premiere “Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections” on March 26, 2020.
Culture Representation: This documentary, which interviews mostly white people and a few African Americans, takes a look at how several key members of the U.S. civil-rights movement for disabled people spent their youth having positive experiences at Camp Jened, an upstate New York activities camp for disabled people.
Culture Clash: People in the documentary talk about fighting against discrimination and for their civil rights.
Culture Audience: “Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution” will appeal primarily to viewers who want to see a compelling story about an often-ignored civil-rights movement that happened in the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s.
Denise Sherer Jacobson and Jim LeBrecht in “Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution” (Photo by courtesy of Netflix)
The title of “Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution” is somewhat misleading because the movie is more about the “revolution” than it is about the “camp.” The movie itself is an inspiring but unevenly edited documentary. “Crip Camp” tells the story of how an upstate New York camp (Camp Jened) for disabled youth ended up being a life-changing formative center for several people who went on to become activists in the 1970s and 1980s civil-rights movement for disabled people.
It’s understandable if viewers think that most of the movie is about Camp Jened. It’s not. The story of the camp takes up just the first third of the film. The documentary is narrated by Jim LeBrecht, a Camp Jened alum who co-directed “Crip Camp” with Nicole Newnham. Camp Jened (originally located in Hunter, New York, near the Catskill Mountains) had its first incarnation from 1951 to 1977. What “Crip Camp” doesn’t mention is that Camp Jened re-opened in Rock Hill, New York, and remained in operation from 1980 to 2009. The camp went out of business both times because of financial problems.
LeBrecht, who is a paraplegic because he was born with spina bifida, shares fond memories of the first incarnation of Camp Jened. And so do other former Camp Jened alumni who were either attendees or counselors in the early 1970s, when LeBrecht attended the camp. He first went there in 1971, when he was 15 years old. He says Camp Jened is where he got his first girlfriend, and it was also a place where many of the teenage attendees also had their first sexual experiences, since they were away from their frequently over-protective homes for the first time.
There’s an uneven tone to the film because the Camp Jened part of the movie starts off like an autobiography, but then the latter two-thirds of the movie switch gears, and the film becomes a historical account of the civil-rights movement for disabled people. LeBrecht describes that when he was growing up in New York state, “I wanted to be a part of life, but I didn’t see anyone like me.” When he heard there was a youth camp for disabled people, and the camp was run by hippie types who would probably let the teenagers “smoke dope” with them, Lebrecht says that he thought at the time, “Sign me up!”
LeBrecht says in the documentary that his experience at Camp Jened was the first time in his life that he didn’t feel like an outsider. The disabled attendees were a racially diverse group that included people like LeBrecht who went to schools with able-bodied people, while there were others who were home-schooled or who lived most of the year in institutions.
The camp counselors, also racially diverse, sometimes didn’t have experience with disabled people, but they made up for that lack of experience with compassion and enthusiasm for the job. Two of the former counselors interviewed in the film include Lionel Je’Woodyard and Joe O’Connor, who describes being terrified at first by being around so many disabled people, but he was literally pushed forward by another counselor to get right in the crowd and help as much as he could.
LeBrecht describes how when he first arrived at the camp, he had recently had bladder surgery so he wouldn’t have to wear diapers anymore, but he was self-conscious about having to use a urine drainage bag and he didn’t really want anyone at the camp to find out about it. But his fears subsided when he realized that there were many people at the camp who had much more difficult medical conditions than he had.
The camp part of the documentary has a lot of archival footage (mostly black-and-white) of people at Camp Jened in the early 1970s, including the late Larry Allison, who was the director of Camp Jened at the time. LeBrecht was an aspiring filmmaker even back then, because he’s heard operating the camera and asking interview questions. Some of the other archival footage came from People’s Video Theater, an alternative journalism group.
In the interviews, it’s clear that the teenagers and other young people at the camp have the same interests as any young people would of any era: dating, acceptance and having fun. The only differences are the physical and mental challenges they have and the restrictions placed upon them because of these challenges. Several of the young people who were interviewed talk about feeling frustrated by over-protective parents or by people who underestimate their abilities.
Ann Cupolo Freeman, who was one of the disabled members of the camp in the 1970s, remembers that at the time, it was being like a “Woodstock for disabled people.” Denise Sherer Jacobson, who was also a teenager who went to Camp Jened in the early 1970s, remembers the camp this way: “It was so funky, but it was a utopia.” And funky it was. Some of the archival footage shows how the camp had to be temporarily quarantined because of an outbreak of crabs.
Sherer Jacobson, who has cerebral palsy, says that even among the disabled, there are prejudices and a hierarchy: People with polio are considered at “the top” and people with cerebral palsy are considered at “the bottom.” But her experiences at Camp Jened were ultimately positive: It’s where she met her husband, Paul Jacobson (who also has cerebral palsy and is interviewed in the movie), and they are still married to this day. Sherer Jacobson also talks about how one of her first sexual experiences as a young woman led her to get her master’s degree in human sexuality, partly because she wanted to break untrue stereotypes that people with disabilities are lesser human beings when it comes to sex.
Archival footage at the camp also includes a very outspoken Steve Hoffman, a disabled person who ended up becoming a transvestite. One scene of him in the film shows him later in his adult life doing a striptease in drag to the “Rocky Horror Picture Show” classic song “Sweet Transvestite.” Another alum of Camp Jened in the archival footage is Corbett O’Toole, who became a writer/activist.
But perhaps the most high-profile alum of Camp Jened is Judith “Judy” Heumann, who went on to become a pioneering leader in the civil rights-movement for disabled people. In 1970, she founded the civil-rights group Disabled in Action. Even in the archival footage that shows her as a camp counselor, Heumann’s “take charge” demeanor is evident when she plans meals for the attendees. In a current interview for the documentary, she looks back on her time at Camp Jened as being important to her because she wanted to make an effort to “be inclusive” to everyone. She also remembers Camp Jened as “being more free and open than what I was experiencing in my day-to-day life at home.”
Heumann is the thread that ties the final two-thirds of the movie together, as the documentary then follows her tireless efforts to push civil rights for disabled people into federal laws, starting with the Rehabilitation Act of 1972, which would make it against federal law for federally funded groups and individuals to discriminate against disabled people. President Richard Nixon initially vetoed the act because he said it would be too expensive for places to revamp buildings to make them more accommodating to the disabled.
But Heumann organized protests that got media attention, including a group of wheelchair users who blocked Madison Avenue in New York City. She also led outreaches to the Vietnam veterans whose war injuries left them disabled. Because of these protests and political pressure, Nixon eventually signed the Rehabilitation Act into law in 1973.
However, this law only covered federally funded groups and individuals, not those operating on the state/local level or privately funded groups and individuals. The fight continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s for laws that would protect disabled people on all levels. Geraldo Rivera’s award-winning 1972 TV news exposé “Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace,” which was about the horrific conditions of Willowbrook State School (an institution in New York for special-needs children) is mentioned in “Crip Camp” as being an important milestone in raising public awareness about civil rights for disabled people.
By the mid-1970s, Heumann and several other Camp Jened alumni (including O’Toole and the Jacobson spouses) had moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, which (along with New York City) became another important hub for the U.S. civil-rights movement for disabled people. While in San Francisco, Heumann and a group activists did a nearly month-long sit-in-protest in 1977 because Joe Califano (who was then the U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare) refused to sign off on specific reinforcements of section 504 of the Rehabilitation law. The sit-in protests occurred in San Francisco, as well as Califano’s office in Washington, D.C., and even outside of his home in the Washington area.
Dennis Billups is one of the disabled people who was involved in these protests. In an interview for “Crip Camp,” he and fellow protester O’Toole remember that their allies were a wide range of people who cared about civil-rights causes, including the Black Panthers, gay-rights groups, then-U.S. Representative George Miller and journalists such as HolLyn D’Lil and Evan White. (The latter two are interviewed in the documentary.)
O’Toole says that Black Panther member Brad Lomax told her in explaining why the Black Panthers helped with things such as donating food for the protesters: “You’re here to make the world a better place, and so are we.” The results of the 504 protests laid the groundwork several years later for the Americans with Disabilities Act, which President George H.W. Bush signed into law in 1990.
LaBrecht was in high school and college during much of these protests (he wasn’t part of the 504 sit-ins), so his perspective mostly takes a back seat to the focus on Heumann that’s in the middle of the movie. However, in the last third of the documentary, he talks about how, after he graduated from the University of California at San Diego, he too moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and became part of an activist community involved in civil rights for disabled people. He also reached his goal of becoming a sound designer in the entertainment industry (there’s late 1970s archival footage of him on the job at Berkeley Repertory Theatre), even if he never did end up in his ultimate dream job: doing sound engineering for the Grateful Dead.
At the end of the film, there’s a mini-reunion of Crip Camp alumni from LeBrecht’s era, at the site where Camp Jened originally was.(The camp was bulldozed years ago. At the time the reunion was filmed for the documentary, the former camp site was under construction and there isn’t much to see.
Along with LeBrecht, other people at the reunion included Sherer Jacobson and former Camp Jened counselor Je’Woodyard. The documentary has a great juxtaposition of archival early 1970s footage of a young Je’Woodyard playfully pushing Sherer Jacobson in her wheelchair, shown with footage of what they looked like at the reunion decades later at the former camp site.
Heumann went on to become assistant secretary of education for special education and rehabilitative services during President Bill Clinton’s tenure. She was also a special advisor for international disability rights for President Barack Obama for most of his presidency. It’s probably why Barack and Michelle Obama are among the executive producers of “Crip Camp,” the second movie that the Obamas executive produced under their Netflix deal. (The first movie was the Oscar-winning 2019 documentary “American Factory.”)
Although the camp footage is certainly interesting and sometimes emotionally moving, directors Newnham and LeBrecht should have kept the film focused on the civil-rights part of the story. Because the camp footage takes up one-third of the film, it just makes “Crip Camp” look like it didn’t know if it wanted to be an autobiographical nostalgia piece from Lebrecht’s perspective or a more objective chronicle of the civil-rights movement with Heumann as the star. And this film is very nostalgic, since most of the soundtrack consists of 1960s and 1970s songs from artists such as the Grateful Dead, Buffalo Springfield and Neil Young.
There’s a “split personality” to “Crip Camp,” but it doesn’t get too much in the way of the film’s important overall message: Even though there’s been progress in civil rights for disabled people, there’s a still a lot more progress that needs to be made in giving disabled people the same opportunities, access and respect that are automatically given to able-bodied people. (Think about how many employers don’t hire disabled people who are qualified for jobs because the employers don’t want disabled people to represent their companies.) Sherer Jacobson said it best in the documentary: “You can pass a law, but until you change society’s attitudes, the law won’t mean much.”
Netflix premiered “Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution” on March 25, 2020.
Culture Representation: Taking place in the area around Ghana’s Lake Volta and featuring an all-African cast, the documentary “The Rescue List” follows a grass-roots group of child-welfare advocates and the children they’ve rescued from modern-day slavery.
Culture Clash: The group faces opposition from the slave masters and has an overwhelming task of rescuing thousands of child slaves in the area, as well as rehabilitating them.
Culture Audience: This compelling movie will appeal primarily to people who have an interest in issues about human rights and social justice, but the disturbing subject matter might make it difficult for some people to watch.
Peter Samuel (front row center) and Edem Akpalu (front row, far right) in “The Rescue List” (Photo courtesy of Collective Hunch)
Slavery and human trafficking are tragically still happening in the everyday lives of an untold number of people around the world. The emotionally raw but ultimately inspiring documentary “The Rescue List” takes an unwavering, up-close look at a grassroots group in Ghana called Challenging Heights that runs a children’s shelter, rescues children from slavery, rehabilitates them, educates them, and then places the kids into homes that pledge to keep the children safe.
Challenging Heights, which is not funded by the government, includes rescue-group leader Stephen Kwame Addo, who used to be a child slave until he escaped, found a safe place to live, and got an education. Challenging Heights also includes social workers Bernice Jaama Akromah and Peter Kwesi Smyth, who help the kids recover from their trauma with therapy. The children who leave the shelter for permanent homes get follow-up monitoring for two years by the group’s social workers.
According to some sobering history and statistics presented in the film: “In 1965, foreign mining companies built a hydroelectric dam on Ghana’s Volta River, creating the largest man-made lake on Earth. Traffickers began to pay families facing extreme poverty to send their children to the lake for short-term work. But the children often disappear. There are now an estimated 20,000 children enslaved to fishermen in remote regions of Lake Volta.”
In addition to suffering abuse, children who’ve become fishermen’s slaves often get trapped with fishing nets and die. And, of course, many of these children are prevented from going to school because they spend most of their waking hours doing slave work.
“The Rescue List” focuses on three of the boys who’ve been rescued: Peter Samuel, who was 17 at the time the documentary was filmed; Edem Akpalu, who was 12 during filming of the movie; and Teye Adi, Peter’s best friend who was 14. At the beginning of the movie, Peter and Edem have already been in the shelter (their rescues are not part of the movie), while Teye’s rescue is shown in the documentary.
In addition to being a rescuer, Addo (who goes by his middle name Kwame) is a de facto private investigator. He and his team spend an untold number of hours finding the necessary information to put on their “rescue list,” which includes the names and locations of suspected slave masters and the children who are enslaved. Addo describes his mission to rescue child slaves as “a calling.”
The movie shows Addo scouring Lake Volta for children to rescue, and it’s clear why he is often successful at his mission: He approaches children who appear to be fisherman slaves with a calm and friendly demeanor that allows them to trust him in a short period of time. Because many of the children are brainwashed into thinking that rescuers will harm them, he immediately assures them that he’s taking them to a safe place where they won’t have to spend long hours fishing anymore. Most are happy to be rescued, but one boy in the film is terrified, and tries to swim away when Addo approaches him and offers him an escape from his life of misery. (The boy eventually goes with Addo and his team.)
Peter and Edem have a story that is common with these children who are sold into slavery. Their mothers were the ones who let them be trafficked, and their slave masters often abuse and starve the kids to do what they want. Peter is a friendly kid but his rescuers notice that he’s distressed because being rescued meant that he had to leave his best friend Teye behind. Peter feels guilty about it and asks the group to rescue Teye.
Meanwhile, Edem, who is shy and insecure, is dealing with the trauma of losing his best friend Steven in a drowning accident. In therapy sessions, Edem describes Steven as someone who supervised him and was a protector who never abused him. During an especially poignant scene, two of the social workers take Edem to the beach and tell him to say a prayer and talk to Steven. Edem’s soul-baring prayer might bring tears to some people’s eyes.
The rescue of Teye is tense, but not violent. It resembles the negotiation of a hostage release. As Teye leaves with Addo, a woman shouts from a nearby house, “My investment is lost!” Teye’s reunion with Peter is one of the most heart-warming moments of the film.
But even after they’ve been rescued, the children still experience a lot of anxiety, because many face an uncertain future, especially if no family members claim them. Peter and Edem do have family members (including their mothers) who come to visit them in the shelters and want to take them home. The movie doesn’t judge Peter’s and Edem’s mothers for essentially selling their children into slavery.
But “The Rescue List” does show the very real emotional damage that these decisions caused, as now the mothers and children are virtual strangers. It’s clear from the guilty and tearful reactions of the mothers that coming home for these boys will not be an easy emotional journey. Although it’s never openly discussed in the documentary, they will all have to come to terms with what whatever they feel about forgiveness and emotional healing. Peter is old enough to decide if he wants to live with his mother or with a village elder who has offered to raise Peter. The documentary shows his decision.
Not all of this documentary is depressing. The shelter’s children (who are almost all boys) are shown to be well-adjusted to their surroundings. And they have a camaraderie that’s evident when they play soccer or when they gather in recreation room to watch TV or a movie. (One of the movies they watch with fascination is “The Gods Must Be Crazy,” the 1980 South African comedy about how the discovery of Coca-Cola bottle set off a chain of events for an African tribe.)
“The Rescue List” directors Alyssa Fedele and Zachary Fink take an observational yet empathetic approach to their subjects by allowing them to tell their stories without the annoying interference of voiceovers or talking heads. Although it’s certainly a relief that these children have been rescued, the movie doesn’t least viewers forget that not everyone is that fortunate and there will always be a need for groups like Challenging Heights.
PBS premiered “The Rescue List” on its “POV” series and on POV.org on March 23, 2020.
Culture Representation: Taking place primarily in Vancouver, the documentary “Dosed” advocates for the use of plant-based psychedelics to treat hardcore drug addiction and mental-health issues, with an emphasis on white people from the middle and upper classes.
Culture Clash: This entire movie portrays pharmaceutical medicines as the enemy and psychedelics as the best solution to certain people’s addictions and mental illnesses.
Culture Audience: “Dosed” won’t change the minds of people who already believe the agenda that this movie is pushing, but for other people who need to hear both sides of an issue in order to make an informed decision, “Dosed” falls irresponsibly short.
Adrianne in “Dosed” (Photo courtesy of Abramorama/Mangurama)
“Dosed” is the type of one-sided agenda documentary that needs to be viewed with a healthy amount of skepticism and common sense. It’s clear that the filmmakers (including director Tyler Chandler) are not objective in the least and have no background in journalism, since they’ve deliberately chosen not to present different sides of a very serious issue that can severely affect people’s health. The filmmakers’ agenda is to make people believe that using plant-based psychedelics (such as Iboga and Ibogaine) is the “best” and “safest” way to treat drug addictions and mental illnesses, such as clinical depression.
As “proof,” the documentary follows just one person who goes through this “treatment”: a Vancouver woman in her 30s named Adrianne (her last name is not mentioned in the film), a longtime friend of Chandler who says in the film that she has a long history (more than 20 years) of drug addiction (heroin, cocaine, prescription drugs, you name it). Adrianne also has psychological issues, such as clinical depression, anxiety and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Because Adrianne frequently has suicidal thoughts, Chandler decided to make a documentary about her desperate attempt to get help for her serious medical problems by showing what happens when Adrianne uses a great deal of the psychedelic drug Iboga.
At least Chandler admitted this “I’m filming a movie about my friend” bias upfront in the beginning of the film, but it does not help the movie’s credibility when people see how irresponsibly so many things are handled in this documentary. You don’t have to have a medical background to see there’s almost nothing science-based about the “conclusions” that the so-called psychedelic “experts” in this documentary make about Adrianne’s medical condition when they “treat” her, so it’s no surprise that she ends up in the emergency room. At least the filmmakers were honest enough to not edit out Adrianne’s disastrous trip to the ER, because it shows how this medical emergency was absolutely avoidable and the so-called psychedelic “experts” who were involved in her “therapy” had to take her to get help from real medical professionals in the ER.
Most of the so-called “experts” who are interviewed in the documentary do not seem to have any legitimate medical/scientific university degrees. One of the few exceptions is clinical psychologist Rosalind Watts, who does psychedelic research at Imperial College in London, England, and who is not involved in Adrianne’s “treatment.” Watts talks about how using psychedelics can be a tool (not a crutch) in treating depression, but she emphasizes that psychedelic usage is not for everyone, and it requires a lot more work and practice in therapy for people to overcome problems like drug addiction and mental illnesses. She also doesn’t claim, like most of the non-medical people in this movie do, that taking illegal psychedelic drugs will help keep drug addicts sober, because any fool can see that taking illegal psychedelics is not being “sober.”
Two of the people interviewed in “Dosed” are Mark Haden, who’s identified as a “psychedelic researcher” from Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) Canada, and Mark Howard, one of the people with a dubious background who was involved in Adrianne’s psychedelic usage. (Howard was present during Adrianne’s psychedelic “therapy session” that ended with her trip to the ER.)
Also interviewed in the documentary are Liberty Roots Therapy founder Trevor Millar, who’s identified as an “opioid addiction expert”; Inner Realms Center founder Garyth Moxey, who’s identified as a “psychedelics provider”; and MAPS founder Rick Doblin, who’s identified as a “psychedelic researcher.” Most of the “experts” in the documentary are people with no medical licenses but who have started businesses to administer “psychedelic therapy,” when in reality they’re just glorified drug pushers. We’ll get to that issue in a moment.
Adrianne says in the documentary about her drug use: “I’m always on something, whether it’s prescribed by a doctor or prescribed by a drug dealer.” Based on the long list of drug prescriptions that Adrianne says she’s had over the years (including Zoloft, Lithium and Wellbutrin), in addition to her ongoing use of heroin and methadone, it’s incredibly infuriating that anyone would think she would be an ideal subject to experiment on like a human guinea pig. She has so many drugs in her system that so many things could go wrong. And the ER trip is proof that things went terribly wrong. Adrianne is lucky that she survived that health crisis.
Adrianne willingly participated in these experiments, but considering that she was not mentally or physically well for most of the documentary, her state of mind has to be called into question. And just as importantly, there’s no mention in the documentary that she ever told her doctor(s) that she was undergoing this psychedelic “treatment” (it’s implied that she kept it a secret from any doctors she has), which put her health further at risk. But hey, why worry about serious health dangers like that when you’ve got a documentary to make?
That isn’t the only secret that Adrianne keeps. For most of the documentary, she claims she’s only using heroin “occasionally” (whatever that means) and that the only drug she’s using daily is methadone. But one of the reasons why she ended up in the emergency room is because she lied and was actually still using heroin heavily during her “psychedelic therapy,” which is a type of “treatment” that is only supposed to be done when people don’t have serious drugs like heroin in their system. It’s only after she’s taken to the emergency room that she admits to lying about still using heroin on a regular basis.
Adrianne shouldn’t get all the blame, because the documentary doesn’t make it clear how often she was tested for drugs before her trip to the ER. People who are truly experienced in treating drug addicts know that junkies often tell lies about their drug use. That’s why people who are in legitimate drug treatment get drug tested before any further drugs are put into their system.
The documentary does not show Adrianne getting drug tested every single time before she gets psychedelic experiments that are eagerly administered to her by the people who call themselves “experts” from this non-medical organization called Iboga Soul. One of the Iboga Soul people is identified as “registered nurse” Patrick Fishley, who apparently has no qualms about being seen on camera as someone involved in illegal drug activity, which is a serious violation of a nursing license.
Apparently, the people from Iboga Soul and anyone else who encouraged Adrianne to use illegal psychedelic drugs just took Adrianne’s word for it that she wasn’t doing heroin. And the result was she ended up in the emergency room. In one very telling scene, Iboga Soul manager Geoff Acres has a shocked and terrified look on his face when he finds out that Adrianne had to be taken to the emergency room after she got “dosed” with one of Iboga Soul’s “treatments.” It’s the kind of look where he seems to be thinking, “I hope she doesn’t die and I hope we don’t get sued.”
Not surprisingly, the movie shows Adrianne sending text messages to members of Iboga Soul to go to her home and find her drug stash to get rid of it. And the documentary does show them confiscating the drugs on camera. For the cameras, they make it look like getting rid of the drugs is all about Adrianne’s health. But let’s be real: It’s also about making sure the police don’t find any of her illegal drugs in case they show up at Adrianne’s home, which can happen after a drug addict is taken to the emergency room and tests positive for illegal drugs in their system.
One of the documentary’s many flaws is that it’s so aggressive about pushing its agenda that it doesn’t honestly investigate the things that have gone wrong with this type of psychedelic use. Yes, there could be people who might benefit from using psychedelics, but how many more (or less) people go through the same “treatment,” and it has terrible effects that make their health worse? The “Dosed” filmmakers never attempt to answer this question or try to get the other side of the story from people who’ve had bad experiences from seeking this type of “treatment.” However, the movie goes out of its way to present the pharmaceutical industry as being largely responsible for people’s bad experiences in seeking health treatment. It’s obvious that the “Dosed” filmmakers only want to present a psychedelic usage story with a “happy ending.”
When Adrianne describes some of the nauseating physical side effects that she’s experiencing after taking the psychedelics, “Dosed” director Chandler can be heard asking her off camera something like, “But you still feel pretty good, right? You aren’t depressed anymore, right?” At another point in the movie, she legitimately snaps at him when she tells him that he doesn’t understand addiction. In making this movie, Chandler seems to want to think that this type of “treatment” is a straight line to wellness, when in fact there are some terrifying zig zags that can go south very quickly.
And the disclaimer that the documentary has about how psychedelics like Iboga should be administered under medical supervision is almost laughable, when “Dosed” and other documentaries just like it show that the people making money off of running these “psychedelic therapy sessions” almost always do not have the medical qualifications to administer these psychedelic drugs and monitor their effects. Some of the “psychedelic therapists” might have good intentions to help people get better, but it seems like making money is the real intention. The push to make these treatments legal has a lot to do with people wanting to get rich off of it.
You don’t have to look any further than who’s being targeted for these psychedelic treatments: white people from the middle and upper classes. Time and time again, in documentaries like “Dosed” and “From Shock to Awe” and “Psyched Out,” the participants (the so-called “healers” and the patients) are not a diverse group of people from different races and socioeconomic backgrounds, but they’re almost exclusively white people who can not only afford to buy these drugs but they brazenly put themselves in documentary films that show them (and their real names) as actively participating in illegal drug activity.
If you consider that most people who use drugs in the U.S. and Canada are white (and the numerous documentaries on drug addicts in America prove it), but most people in jail for using drugs are not white and are usually poor, it shows how much of a racial and social divide there is, in terms of who’s most likely to end up in prison for being involved in illegal drugs and who isn’t. Of course, the “Dosed” filmmakers completely ignore this major problem because they wouldn’t have a movie if certain people didn’t feel comfortable flaunting their illegal drug activity and dressing it up as if they’re better than the people who go to jail for also selling or possessing illegal drugs. Adrianne certainly fits that “privileged” profile, since she’s seen taking illegal drugs on camera and she mentions that her divorced mother has paid for Adrianne’s multiple trips to rehab.
This entire movie has a “privileged blind spot” by failing to point out the obvious: If this “psychedelic movement” really cared about helping all drug addicts and all people with mental-health issues (since these problems affect people of all races and socioeconomic backgrounds), it wouldn’t be targeting white people from the upper and middle classes to pay for these “services,” so there’s obviously a biased financial agenda behind this movement.
Ironically, the psychedelics that are being used in this agenda to target white North Americans have been used for centuries in predominantly non-white countries. Iboga and Ibocaine are made from a plant root in found in Africa, in countries like Gabon, and have been used in tribal psychedelic rituals. Mexican mushrooms are also a popular drug that’s being pushed in this psychedelic movement.
The members of the all-white Iboga Soul “psychedelic therapy group” even dress up in African clothing and use the same elements of African psychedelic rituals (tribal horns and incense paper torches) during their “therapy sessions,” which give a whole new meaning to “cultural appropriation.” If any people of color in the U.S. or Canada ever did this kind of illegal drug activity so openly in a documentary, see how fast they would be arrested.
Whether they call themselves “psychedelic administrators,” “psychedelic therapists” or “psychedelic providers,” if they’re encouraging people to use illegal drugs that could have dangerous consequences, they’re really just illegal drug pushers, but they do their drug deals in middle-class and upper-class homes, instead of stereotypical street corners. At one point in the film, Adrianne says something that is very true: Most people think drug addicts are the type of dirty, homeless junkies that you might see in crime-infested areas, when most drug addicts are actually functioning addicts who have jobs and aren’t poor.
“Dosed” also doesn’t properly address the differences in the health-care systems in Canada and the U.S., which have an effect on how drug addicts can get treatment in each nation. Canada has universal health care and usually has much lower costs for prescription drugs than the U.S does. A drug addict like Adrianne, who lives in Canada, doesn’t have to worry about paying for a trip to a hospital emergency room and she won’t get kicked out of a hospital because she can’t afford to pay the bill. As someone who has Canadian health insurance, she doesn’t have to worry about not being able to afford prescriptions because she doesn’t have the right insurance or because she no insurance. It’s yet another “blind spot” that this movie has that shows how unprofessionally this serious topic is handled by the filmmakers.
And even if “psychedelic therapy” became legal in the U.S., which is what a lot of its advocates are pushing for, it’s clear that it will probably be available only to the people who are privileged enough to afford it. That’s why it’s not being marketed to “everyone,” but only to certain people who fit a certain demographic.
The documentary also has a “holier than thou” attitude toward the pharmaceutical industry. Adrianne and other drug addicts like her can certainly make a case for how they’ve been over-prescribed prescription drugs. But at the end of the day, pharmaceutical companies and the “psychedelic providers” are drug pushers with the same agenda: get as many people as possible to buy your drugs on a regular basis, even if the side effects might damage some people’s health. It’s very hypocritical to pretend otherwise. At least you need a legitimate license to be a pharmacist, whereas the people who sell these “doses” of illegal psychedelics, under the guise of medical treatment, are not regulated at all.
The one time a drug test is shown briefly on camera is after Adrianne’s ER crisis. The test kit with negative results is quickly flashed on camera, and viewers are told that those are Adrianne’s test results. But for people who aren’t naïve enough to believe everything they see in a biased documentary, a couple of things are noticeable: We never actually see Adrianne take the test. And if she did take that drug test, how do we know she didn’t use someone else’s urine? (It’s a common way for drug addicts to fake their drug tests.) Given all the lies that Adrianne tells in this documentary, her statements should be taken with a huge grain of salt. If the filmmakers wanted to choose a “human guinea pig” for this documentary who would be credible and sympathetic, they picked the wrong person.
It should come as no surprise that at the end of the movie, Adrianne professes to be “sober” for a year, but then she also says she still uses illegal psychedelics on a regular basis. How is that being “sober”? But considering that Adrianne exposed herself in this documentary as a chronic and convincing liar who lied about all the heroin she was doing, it’s understandable if people watching this documentary question if she’s telling the truth about how “sober” she really is, thereby undermining the point that “Dosed” is trying to make.
Ironically, “psychedelic therapist” Howard says something before Adrianne’s ER medical crisis when commenting on the agenda that this movie is trying to push: “When people start getting ideas off of documentaries, that’s when things get dangerous. It is dangerous. We have seen enough to know that.”
Abramorama and Mangurama released “Dosed” on digital and VOD on March 20, 2020.
