iWonder: November highlights

Ahead of the US Thanksgiving, iWonder this November screens three films exploring trends and tensions at every level of society in the US.

USA: The Woke Revolution
16th November
In the USA, a new identity movement has emerged. Its mission: to fight against ethnic, sexual and gender discrimination and to impose new rules. Its name: “woke”. To be woke is to be aware of the discrimination suffered by minorities and of white privilege. In Denver, Colorado, wealthy white Americans pay $500 to attend dinner parties where they are told they are unknowingly racist. At New York City Hall, a special commission tracks the “micro-aggressions” suffered by citizens from minorities. Those who oppose this ideology are considered racist and are “cancelled”, that is to say socially eliminated and shamed on social networks. But some feel the woke revolution has gone too far. Is there a case to be made for a return to universalism and tolerance?

Conscience Point
23rd November
The Hamptons: playground of the super-rich. Epicenter of a luxury property boom, with developers scheming for any scrap of land on which to make millions. Meanwhile the original inhabitants of this beautiful peninsula, the Shinnecock Indians, find themselves pushed to a point of near extinction, squeezed onto a tiny 750- acre reservation. Exploring the roots of American inequity, greed and pollution, Conscience Point contrasts the values of those for whom beautiful places are a commodity – who regard land as raw material to be developed for profit and pleasure – and those locals for whom land means community, belonging, heritage and home. Conscience Point metaphorically and thematically goes beyond the Hamptons to tell a story of fighting the elite 1% at a time when so many are struggling to remain in gentrifying parts of cities.

Missing Kelly
23rd November
In the twilight of his life, Mike, an ordinary American man from Kentucky, is convinced of one thing: his son Kelly was murdered. Refusing to believe the police’s verdict of suicide, Mike sets out on an investigation to reveal the truth, taking him on a journey through his past, his own trajectory, and that of his generation. A history of the American twentieth century emerges. Through the portrait of this “ordinary” man from the southern United States, Missing Kelly offers an immersion into Christian white America. Mike is one of those “forgotten”, for whom the American dream never came true.