A clip from Ann Buford’s new film, “Elevate,” about four high school athletes recruited from Senegal to play basketball at upscale prep schools in the US.

Then there’s “The Redemption of General Butt-Naked” directed by Eric Strauss and Danielle Anastasion. From the film PR: “… Once a brutal warlord who mercilessly slaughtered men, women, and children during Liberia’s bloody civil war, Joshua Milton Blahyi (General Butt Naked) led his child soldiers into battle in the nude, believing their bare skin to be impenetrable. This riveting documentary follows Blahyi as he reinvents himself as an evangelist and seeks forgiveness from the survivors of his victims, raising difficult questions about the limits of forgiveness and the possibility of deliverance.” The video above contains an interview with the directors as well as clips from the film. (The video was shot at Sundance 2011.) Here’s a link to another video interview with the directors of the film.

Both films are screening next week at the BAM Cinemafest (link to the program) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I am hoping to see both films as well as the documentary film about Brooklyn street photographer, Jamal Shabazz.

Further Reading

And do not hinder them

We hardly think of children as agents of change. At the height of 1980s apartheid repression in South Africa, a group of activists did and gave them the tool of print.

The new antisemitism?

Stripped of its veneer of nuance, Noah Feldman’s essay in ‘Time’ is another attempt to silence opponents of the Israeli state by smearing them as anti-Jewish racists.