Davis Guggenheim

Waiting for “Superman” is a 2010 documentary film from director Davis Guggenheim (Academy Award-Winning Director of An Inconvenient Truth) and producer Lesley Chilcott. The film analyzes the failures of American public education by following several students such as Emily, a Silicon Valley eighth-grader who is afraid of being labeled as unfit for college and Francisco, a Bronx first-grader whose mom will do anything to give him a shot at a better life.

The film received the Audience Award for best documentary at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. The film also received the Best Documentary Feature at the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards.

The film has earned both praise and criticism from commentators, reformers, and educators.

One criticism of note:

“The film dismisses with a side comment the inconvenient truth that our schools are criminally underfunded. Money’s not the answer, it glibly declares. Nor does it suggest that students would have better outcomes if their communities had jobs, health care, decent housing, and a living wage. Particularly dishonest is the fact that Guggenheim never mentions the tens of millions of dollars of private money that has poured into the Harlem Children’s Zone, the model and superman we are relentlessly instructed to aspire to,” says Rick Ayers, Adjunct Professor in Education at the University of San Francisco.

You will be invited to voice your opinion during a post screening discussion.

The film is part of the monthly Movies That Matter series examining a wide range of issues. The UU Fellowship is located at 10341 Hwy. 42, Ephraim. For further information visit www.uufdc.org or call (920) 854-7559.

With great courage, Americans are re-examining what it means to be human and how we choose to live on this planet. The religious-environmental movement is experiencing growth as people from diverse traditions work to build a sustainable future inspired by Americans who are answering a spiritual call to confront the enormous challenges of environmental degradation.

Described as “heart-warming and tingly”, this documentary illustrates how people of many faiths – Christian, Jewish, Buddhist and Muslim – are finding ways to become caretakers of the Earth. Examples portrayed include Catholics and Native Americans protecting land and water together as well as Interfaith Power and Light mounting a religious response to ecology.

If you have ever felt like there is no hope, you need to see this film.

As Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature notes, “The movement is potentially the key to dealing with the greatest problem humans have ever faced. I hope this film moves people off the fence and into action.”

Movies That Matter are presented by the Social Responsibility Committee of the UU Fellowship. This series of thought-provoking films is free and open to the public with screenings on the third Tuesday each month. The UU Fellowship is located at 10341 Hwy. 42, Ephraim. For information call 854-7559 or visit www.uufdc.org.

Fish Out of Water is filmmaker Ky Dicken’s personal journey, an assemblage of footage from the first legal gay marriage in Boston, shots from Proposition 8 rallies, the Obama election and animated sequences illustrating Bible verses. Her own narrative also includes interview commentary from gays and lesbians, ministers, preachers and historians who all want to share their vision of the truth about religion and gays with others in the film who openly discuss their discontent for the LGBT community.

The film explores the seven Bible passages notoriously used to condemn homosexuality and justify marriage discrimination in order to make this polarizing subject accessible and non-threatening. It will be screened in Ephraim on Tuesday, September 21 at 7 pm for free, by the Unitarian Fellowship of Door County at part of their Movies That Matter series.

On the following Sunday, Dr. Bill McConkey’s will address, New Laws: Big Ones and Little Ones, providing a detailed look at the war on “God’s gay and lesbian children.” He was the plaintiff in McConkey v. Van Hollan, a legal effort to overturn Wisconsin’s Amendment discriminating against lesbian and gays and all single couples. The case went to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. He lost but his fight continues.

“Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, The US Constitution, The US Supreme Court, and enter stage right, the Neo-Con Right who teach hatred for votes, to fill pews and make tons of money. The human infant hates no one,” says McConkey. “It is taught to hate, all through its life. The teaching of hatred must stop. If not now, when? If not you, who?”

Dr. McConkey, Political Science Professor at UW-Oshkosh, is an educator and social activist and the author of “Fighting the Merchants of Hate: The War for America’s Soul.” He has worked for several government agencies, including the Executive Office of the President of the United States, the Florida Senate’s Committee on Higher Education, and for the Governors of Illinois and Alaska.

Both events will be held at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Door County (UUFDC) located at 10341 Hwy. 42, Ephraim. Fish Out of Water will be shown September 21 at 7 pm. Dr. McConkey will speak September 26 at 10 am. The public is invited to both events.

Rachel Carson

Silent Spring chronicles how a courageous woman took on the chemical industry and raised important questions about humankind’s impact on nature. It will be shown at the UU Fellowship’s Movies That Matter monthly series

Although their role will probably always be less celebrated than wars, marches, riots, or stormy political campaigns, it is books that have at times most powerfully influenced social change in American life. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which in 1962 exposed the hazards of the pesticide DDT, eloquently questioned humanity’s faith in technological progress.

Carson, a renowned nature author and a former marine biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was uniquely equipped to create so startling and inflammatory a book. A native of rural Pennsylvania, she had grown up with an enthusiasm for nature matched only by her love of writing and poetry. The educational brochures she wrote for the Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as her published books and magazine articles, were characterized by meticulous research and a poetic evocation of her subject.

Carson was well aware of the larger implications of her work. Appearing on a CBS documentary about Silent Spring shortly before her death from breast cancer in 1964, she remarked, “Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.  [We are] challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.”

The UU Fellowship is located at 10341 Hwy. 42, Ephraim. The monthly Movies That Matter Series is open to the public at no charge.  The UU Fellowship gratefully acknowledges the loan of Silent Spring from the Door County Environmental Council.

Potter is former Vice President of corporate communications at CIGNA, one of the country’s largest health insurance companies. In June 2009, he testified against the HMO industry in the U.S. Senate as a whistleblower.

There was a time, in the early 1990s, when health insurance companies devoted more than 95 cents out of every premium dollar to paying doctors and hospitals for taking care of their members. No more.

Since President Clinton’s health reform plan died 15 years ago, the health insurance industry has come to be dominated by a handful of insurance companies that answer to Wall Street investors, and they have changed that basic math. Today, insurers only pay about 81 cents of each premium dollar on actual medical care. The rest is consumed by rising profits, huge executive salaries, administrative expenses, the cost of weeding out people with pre-existing conditions and claims review designed to wear out patients with denials and disapprovals of the care they need the most.

This equation is known as the medical loss ratio (MLR), an aptly named figure that is widely seen by investors as the most important gauge of an insurance company’s current and future profitability. In a private health insurance industry that collected $817 billion this past year, a 14 percentage point difference in the MLR represents $112 billion a year! Over 10 years, that would be more than enough to pay for health reform.

The interview is shown as part of the UU Movies That Matter series at the UU Fellowship, 10341 Hwy. 42, Ephraim. All movies are free and open to the public. Discussion and opinions are invited.

Jon Walker vs. Wendell Potter on Democracy Now!
The progressive community is split over the $871 billion healthcare reform bill that passed the Senate last week. Some have lambasted the Senate for removing language that would have created a government-run health insurance program to compete with private insurers. Others believe the Senate bill is the biggest expansion of federal healthcare guarantees since the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid over four decades ago and should be supported as a first step toward reform….

Joan Allen narrates this film that chronicles 12 years of the Nazis’ pillaging works of art throughout Europe and the international effort to locate, protect and return millions of valuable treasures. The film traces the story of art lovers and everyday heroes who tried to thwart the looting Nazis and reveals how experts from Europe and the United States are working to recover priceless works of art missing or hidden for decades.

Who knew that Hitler actually aspired to be an artist?  The film tells the story of Hitler’s plans to acquire all of the great artworks of Europe while systematically destroying the countries from which he would steal them. He did manage to accumulate quite a massive collection, a collection that included thousands of paintings from Italy, France, and even Russia. Mixed in are millions of dollars worth of plundered art from the private collections of wealthy Jews in Germany and beyond, including the Rothschild’s.

The heroes of this story are the “monuments men,” a group of Army officers and enlisted men who were entrusted with the task of finding and returning as much of the plundered treasures as possible.  One officer interviewed even mentioned that at the time he still was unaware of what Hitler had done to the Jewish population of Europe, but that everyone was aware of how he had looted the continent’s museums… a chilling observation, indeed.

Much of what was taken has been returned and restored, but the darker side of the story is the missing art that has not yet been found or that has not yet been returned to the rightful owners (usually prominent Jewish families). A few countries, particularly Austria, are still fighting to keep what they have in their state museums from the suffering descendents of the art’s rightful owners. The story is still unfolding.

Movies That Matter is a project of the UU Fellowship’s Social Responsibility Committee bringing films with a message to the Door community. The films are shown at 7 pm on the third Tuesday each month at 10341 Hwy. 42, Ephraim. There is no charge and the public is welcome. For more information, visit www.uufdc.org.