FEAT URES | FILMS
Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements Irene Taylor Brodsky FRI, 6:15 P.M., OW; SUN, 9:30 A.M., NUG
In Person: Irene Taylor Brodsky, Tahria Sheather When a talented documentary filmmaker turns her lens to her own personal life, to the story of her family, be prepared to be moved. In the same way that a piece of classical music, like a sonata, can build and absorb you with a slow, deliberate syncopation of minor and major chords, sharps and flats and rests, so this film carefully expands and unfolds. Until, almost without knowing what’s happened, you find yourself swept away by its beautiful, heart-rending, irresistible force. Filmmaker Brodsky’s son, Josh, and her father, Paul, are both deaf. Josh is just coming into his own, an adolescent poised confidently on the threshold of an abundant future. Paul stands, uncertain and offbalance, on life’s opposite threshold. Across that wide temporal divide, they are intimately bound by their common deafness and by their mutual love. —PK (USA, 2019, 89 min.)
The River and the Wall Ben Masters
The Pursuit John Papola FRI, 9 P.M., OW; MON, 9:15 A.M., MAS
In Person: John Papola, Arthur C. Brooks Why are people in advanced societies increasingly disenchanted with a system that has lifted billions of people out of poverty? Devoting himself to this riddle, conservative economist Arthur C. Brooks, the outgoing president of the American Enterprise Institute, concludes that free enterprise is the best antidote to poverty and human misery, contrasting it with the failures of “statism.” The Pursuit is an unusual polemic for Mountainfilm: asserting, in Brooks’s words, that “the American free enterprise system is our gift to the world.” Skipping from India to Brooklyn, and from Copenhagen to Barcelona to Inez, Kentucky, Brooks celebrates examples of free-market capitalism that lift people up and decries socialism and social welfare programs, however wellintended. —SC (USA, 2018, 76 min.)
Colorado Premiere
FRI, 1:30 P.M., SOH; SUN, 9:15 A.M., SOH
In Person: Hillary Pierce, Jay Kleberg, Heather Mackey The topic of immigration on the southern border of the U.S. is one of today’s most divisive issues, with pundits, politicians and the public locked in battle over a proposed wall spanning its length. But what would a wall really look like? And how would it affect the ecosystems, animal corridors and communities of the borderlands? In The River and the Wall, filmmaker Ben Masters sets out with a team of scientists and friends to answer those questions the best way they know how: by traveling 1,200 miles along the Rio Grande River by bike, horse and canoe. Along the way, they talk to lawmakers, spend time with ranchers and explore the hard-scrabble desert and its abundant wildlife. What begins as an exploration into the impacts on the natural world runs headlong into the human side of the issue as they dig deeper into this complicated issue. —KK (USA, 2019, 110 min.)
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