lunedì 27 gennaio 2014

The Times of Harvey Milk - Rob Epstein

la storia di Harvey Milk, premio Oscar per il miglior documentario nel 1985, prima di Gus Van Sant e Sean Penn.
qui c'è il film completo, in spagnolo.
un film da non perdere - Ismaele



"I ask for the movement to continue, for the movement to grow because last week, I got the phone call from Altoona, Pennsylvania and my election gave somebody else, one more person, hope. And after all it's what this is all about. It's not about personal gain, not about ego, not about power -- it's about giving those young people out there in the Altoona, Pennsylvanias hope. You gotta give them hope."
-- Harvey Milk (11/18/78)
Recorded just nine days before his assassination, the above quote continues to resonate as the emotional high point of Rob Epstein's 1984 Oscar winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk—a poignant summary about his seminal achievement of becoming the first openly gay man to be elected to a prominent political position in California. Although Epstein's film relies on numerous talking heads, he avoids constructing a traditional biopic by focusing on Milk's brief political career and structuring the film as a contrast between the outspoken flamboyant crusader for human rights and freedom and his quiet assassin Dan White, described as a conservative All-American working class guy…


Harvey Milk must have been a great guy. You get the sense, watching this documentary about his brief public career that he could appreciate the absurdities of life and enjoy a good laugh at his own expense. He was also serious enough and angry enough about the political issues in his life that he eventually ran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and became California's first openly homosexual public official. That victory may have cost him his life.
"The Times of Harvey Milk" describes the lives and deaths of Milk and Mayor George Moscone, who both were shot dead in 1978 by Dan White, one of Milk's fellow supervisors. It also describes the political and social climate in San Francisco, which during the 1960s and 1970s began to attract growing numbers of gays because of its traditionally permissive attitude. Milk was one of those gays, and in old photographs we see him in his long haired beatnik and hippie days before he eventually shaved off the beard and opened a camera store in the Castro District…

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