Arabian Sights Film Festival 2013

The Cinema Lounge

Adam's Rib: Was Hyman Roth Right?

Zaytoun: Q&A with Director Eran Riklis and Others

By Ron Gordner, DC Film Society Member

Zaytoun (United Kingdom/Israel/France) had its world premiere screening in September 2012 at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film was directed by Eran Riklis, an Israeli who also made some other wonderful films that have played in Filmfest DC and DC area theaters such as: The Syrian Bride, Lemon Tree, Human Resources Manager, and Playoff. The screening received a standing ovation from the audience. This is an odd buddy/road movie. The film takes place in 1982 on the outskirts of Beirut during the war between Lebanon and Israel. An Israeli pilot, Yoni (Dorff) has been captured and is being guarded nearby in a Palestinian refugee camp. Sometimes he is guarded by children including 12 year old Fahed (Abdallah El Akal) who recently lost his father and much of his home in an Israeli bombing attack. The boy still lives with his ailing grandfather in a bombed out house and his one cherished heirloom from his father is a potted olive tree. He hopes to replant it at his former Palestinian home in a village now offlimits. Fahed promises to let Yoni free if he will take him to his ancestral Palestinian home to plant the tree. So begins their dangerous journey. The film was the runner's up Best Audience Award losing to winner Silver Lining's Playbook in 2012. It is distributed by Strand Releasing and opened at the Avalon on September 27.


Left to right: Abdallah El Akal, director Eran Riklis and actor Stephen Dorff

Tiff Moderator: We have the director and several of the stars of the film with us. How much experience does the cast have in acting?
Eran Riklis: Obviously Stephen is a veteran actor and a few of the cast are veteran actors but for many of the children including Abdallah El Akal this is their first acting experience. It's quite wonderful for a kid we found in Tel Aviv. He only worked 3 hours a day according to the rules.

Audience Question: What does Zaytoun mean?
Nader Rizq (writer): Zaytoun means olive, or in this case olive tree.

Audience Question: What locations did you use?
Eran Riklis: Sometimes it was a hard film to shoot. We had to find areas in Israel to double as areas near Beirut in Lebanon. I had to take kids out of suits and put them into clothes that refugees would wear and some of the work was by intuition and others by hard work which I hope shows. They gave us a lot of talent. I hope to make films that are accessible to audiences and that have a clear message and respect the audience to get out of it what they will with their own experiences. I took away the instant rage and made it, I hope, simpler. I hope it makes you think. Can it change the world? I don't know.

Audience Question: How long did it take to make the film?
Eran Riklis: That's a long story.
Nader Rizq: The first thought for the story came in 1991 so it took over 20 years to create the story and later make a film. Yes I type extremely slow, but this is really not my field. I am an engineer so it took me a long time.
Fred Ritzenberg (producer): My involvement was about 5 years after reading the script. We asked for the Palestinian writer to be balanced with the Israeli director and I asked around we all agreed we really wanted Eran to direct based on the strength of his other films. Gareth came on board and then we moved fairly quickly and the film was done in about another year and a half.
Gareth Unwin (producer): I was looking for other material after working on The King's Speech and we received the script for Zaytoun and immediately loved it. It was probably the best script we had read in about 18 months. So we trusted the material and got financing within six months, shot within nine months, did post production within 12 months, finished editing last Thursday when Eran left Paris with a copy under his arm and here we are with our world premiere (applause). I want to particularly thank TIFF and Jane Schoettle our programmer for giving us her trust and confidence to get this film to Toronto just under the wire.

Audience Question: Was the script difficult to write?
Nader Rizq: For me the part of the boy Fahed was fairly easy to write. Writing for the Israeli pilot was more difficult. I called the Israeli air force and airports and asked if I could speak to some pilots and that was a very short conversation. I did have some pilots that gave me some briefing about what they did which helped keep the story compelling.

Audience Question: Did the actors find that working on the film changed their views of the world?
Stephen Dorff: This was an amazing experience for me. I had never been to Israel and I spent three months there, shared the screen with these talented actors and kids. When we saw the audition tape with Abdallah we knew he was Fahed. I don't work on many scripts in Hollywood that touch your heart like this one. This was an incredible joint effort from people all over the world, actors, D.P., staff, etc.

Moderator: Stephen, your Hebrew accent was very good, how did accomplish that?
Stephen Dorff: It was hard. I went to Israel early and worked with a dialog coach also named Yoni. The character had been in America before which helped and we wanted it to seem authentic.

Audience Question: What is the film's message?
Eran Riklis: Well it was telling the story of the 1982 War and what happened after that in Lebanon and Israel and Palestine. I hope that the emotional shot of Fahed in the jeep as he approaches his old house tells the story. I hope it could be Fahed 30 years later also as PLO or other representative of the U.N. or something that is coming home. Maybe he can become instrumental as someone who can talk to the Israelis.

Audience Question: How realistic do you feel the situations presented are in the film?
Eran Riklis: For the kid the danger is less about being back in his homeland than from the impending danger of dropping bombs. He was heading back to danger. We changed the ending several times, but this was the one we kept because we didn't want to commit that this or that was definitely going to happen. We want the audience to decide what happens. Those who know the history know what happens next in that area. Does Fahed want to go back to Lebanon? Yoni asks him that also and knows the dangers that are obvious if he stays in Palestine or returns to Lebanon so we wanted the ending we chose.

Blue Caprice: Comments by Filmmaker Alexandre Moors

By Anita Glick and Annette Graham, DC Film Society Members

On September 9, a preview screening of Blue Caprice was held at the AFI Silver Theater and Cultural Center and followed by a Q&A with the film’s director/co-writer Alexandre Moors and actor Isaiah Washington who plays John Allen Muhammad.

Blue Caprice, a film that has been hailed as “something to watch,” is a harrowing yet restrained psychological thriller, chronicling the distorted father-son relationship between the D.C. snipers. It is inspired by the real life events (as we Washingtonians know far too well). The film investigates the genesis of the atrocious events (of 2002) from the point of view of the two killers, whose distorted father-son relationship facilitated their murderous three-week spree killing ten people and injuring three. Blue Caprice is named for the old blue Chevrolet Caprice whose trunk is jury-rigged to carry out their attacks. The film premiered (to rave reviews) at 2013 Sundance Film Festival and opened New Directors/New Films Festival at MoMA.

About the director: Growing up in the suburbs of Paris, Alexandre Moors was active in the graffiti scene while studying fine art. Moors began directing short films and music videos after moving to New York in 1998. Recently, he co-directed with Kanye West, the experimental short film Cruel Summer, which premiered at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. Blue Caprice is Moors’ feature film debut.

These comments are a combination of the audience Q&A and the press release notes.


The panelists on stage at the AFI. Photo by David Stark

How did this project come about for Alexandre Moors? "I made this film about what troubles me and this violence." Moors had been living in the US since 1998, but at the time of the shootings, was in France. “I was really kind of oblivious to the media frenzy about it and the effect it had had on so many people’s lives. I was not in the States when the events happened. I heard distant echoes of the story, barely any detail except that there was a sniper. Ten years later I dug out the subject when looking for a film to make. I thought this particular story of a father and son embarking on this kind of odyssey was quite an interesting entry in the question of the violence that exists in America. Tonight we are in Maryland, I am curious as to how people react. It's very humbling for me."

He was anxious to begin work on a feature film but one that could be produced quickly and on a low budget, without having to navigate the usual cumbersome steps of film development. “I was in the mood to do something quick and for little money. I was tired of all the dead ends of the usual way one has to go about getting a film project started.” He decided to focus on a true story, “Because the script of a true story is already half-written.” At the time, a gunman had recently gone berserk on the streets of New York, shooting several people outside his office building in Manhattan. “It was such a crazy story, a crazy event.” But the subject himself wasn’t particularly interesting. “I discovered pretty quickly that one doesn’t just pick a true story out of a hat,” he said. While doing research on that shooting, Moors came upon a mention of the D.C. Sniper shootings. “It was just a blurb, but it mentioned the pair as being, like, father and son – but they were not really father and son, that they had adopted each other, and that this guy had trained this kid to be an assassin. I saw those five lines, and I thought, ‘My god – that’s a film.’” His relative unawareness of the events also would allow him to focus more what drew him to the story in the first place – the relationship between Muhammad and Malvo. “The aspect that those people blended into society is in the film. Had I really lived through that experience the way so many American did, I’m sure that would have made the task at hand for too large. What fascinated me was their relationship.”
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How did Moors decide on his approach to the film? He focused on the unusual relationship between Muhammad and Malvo, rather than make an accounting of the senseless shootings. "My entry point in the film was the father-son relationship between John and Lee. I was interested in the dynamic between the two. “I wanted to make a film about how this father trained this kid to be a killer – almost like a series of drills – to prepare for a mission. But I wanted it to be something pure and abstract.” "I was not doing a biography on those persons. I found a story that I wanted to be universal. It could have happened 100 years ago. I was trying to go somewhere else with that whole concept." While the killings are represented by a fairly short montage towards the end of the film Moors notes, “For a long time, I didn’t even want to touch that part of the story, to have the movie end before they even get to Maryland.” As the script evolved, Moors planned on interspersing the development of the relationship in between segments depicting shootings. But during editing, he and Gordon Grinberg decided to take a different route. “It’s a movie about their relationship. We don’t need to see a disturbing bloodbath – we already know that part of the story. The part we don’t know is the part about John and Lee. That’s what I wanted to explore.”

What sort of research did Moors and his screenwriter do? Ronnie Porto and Moors studied files related to the cases against Muhammad and Malvo, along with psychological profiles and other materials, as well as approached the pair’s legal team members. [John and Lee] did give interviews, but when we made the film three years ago, those interviews were not available; we had to rely on trial and medical records and police interviews. We had some base and we added to it. If I had all the facts printed in front of me I would not have made the film. It was far too horrible. Moors and Porto also retraced the steps, as best as possible, that Muhammad and Malvo took during their trek of destruction, just prior to beginning filming. In the end, though, Porto and Moors opted to not specifically recreate detail after detail of Muhammad’s and Malvo’s stories, but instead to adapt the facts to a story which would focus more on the relationship than on specific events. “It’s really the same approach you have to take when adapting a book into a play,” Moors said. “You have to make a reduction into something that will work within the scope of the film you’re making. It’s condensed – and it was a challenge to figure out how to tell a story like this in three brush strokes, instead of 300.”

How was the casting done? When it came time to find an actor to play the complex John Muhammad, Moors had only one name in mind. “From the beginning, I knew Isaiah Washington was the only person who could play him. John is a bad guy – a scary guy – but, somehow, you have to be able to see the mountain of pain in his heart. And I knew Isaiah was the only person who could portray that kind of menace and still have you feel something for him. Isaiah’s not afraid to play a character with ambiguity. I’ve seen that movie many times, and I still don’t know if the guy is guilty. He never plays it just black and white – with Isaiah, there’s always a little bit of yin and yang. You never truly know what’s going on in his characters, and those are tough waters to navigate. And that’s exactly what we needed for John.” Before sending Washington the script, Moors first recommended that he read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1864 Russian novel, “Notes From the Underground,” about an embittered and isolated former civil servant. “I wanted him to understand the mountain of anger and bitterness, because this was going to be a study of a ravaged soul,” Moors said. The challenge was finding a way to put some humanity into the character. Washington said, “I read the script, and thought, ‘Okay, this scared the bejesus out of me – how can I achieve some humanity in this thing?’” The way in for the actor was through John’s ambiguous character, as Moors had hoped. “I enjoy that kind of ambiguity - You never really know what’s going on in his head – and that’s what’s chilling. I never play it black or white – I think the world is very gray. I liked the challenge, so I told Alex ‘yes.’” There was a second book. "The most important piece was Scared Silent, written by Mildred Muhammed, John's wife. That was all the research I had time to do," Washington said.

What about Lee? At first Moors hoped to find an unknown or non-actor, but soon realized the skill that would be required to portray such a difficult personality as Lee’s. Casting director Eve Battaglia, having gone through countless other candidates, was fortunate to spot 19-year-old Tequan Richmond, who, early in his career portrayed a young Ray Charles in Taylor Hackford’s “Ray” in 2004, as well as spent four years in the cast of “Everybody Hates Chris.” The role appealed to the young actor, who was eager to take on an indie film role. “I was just finishing up another project in New York, and Alex Skyped me and we talked,” Richmond recalls. “We ran through some lines, and then he sent me the script the following day, and I signed on.” Says Moors, “He was far and away above anyone else we had seen.” Key to the performance is Richmond’s ability to portray a character with but a handful of lines, as Lee has. Richmond had to constantly portray the deep loneliness that Lee has felt for most of his life, which were familiar feelings for the actor. “I’m an only child from a single mother, so I had maybe some sense of what he lived with, which I simply exaggerated onscreen to try to fill his shoes. I had to constantly keep myself in a dark, weird zone the whole time. It was difficult.”

What about the relationship between the two? The film is a study of the deadly chemistry between the two killers, John and Lee. Tequan Richmond says: “Lee is insane. How he got there is that his mother left it up to Lee to raise himself. Lee has nobody. He thinks the reason his mother left him is that he wasn’t able to make her happy. So he’s in desperate need of finding somebody to please.” Alexandre Moors added, “It’s a primal need for a boy, to be fathered, to get that kind of guidance. And that’s a part of the story that is just heartbreaking, that Lee has never had that.” Once he finds it, in John, he’ll do anything to keep it. “That need is so big in him, he’ll do anything – even embrace this ‘career’ – thinking it will fix it so he’ll be able to keep his dad.” The same goes for John’s insatiable need to lead someone. “That’s also a very primal need,” Moors says. “A little family cell is a microcosm of the entire world. And it satisfies your desire to be admired, to be ‘in charge, and to be a hero to your kid. People are drawn to the natural position parenthood puts you in – you’re a god to your children.”

What made John crazy? "At the root of this project, it was to understand some of the cause of violence that we all suffer from. It was important for me to look at those people first as human beings. Nothing is black and white. Before they were painted as the monsters they become, it was important that you could look at their humanity first and try to understand what made them change. It’s not so much about what made them change but the idea of embracing violence as a viable option once you down. John feels like he’s been betrayed by everyone and everything. He trained himself in military tactics, but when it came down to it, he wasn’t allowed to become a Special Forces candidate. That was the thing that set him off. Something broke. Then he was, like, ‘Now I’m gonna show the world.’ He was going to have his own jihad.” That said, the source of his pain only goes so far. “His anger has very little to do with America or the military or religion, or race. This is somebody that just cannot accept the cards life dealt to him. And nothing can alleviate the pain or anger he feels – and he doesn’t know it.” John is the classic big-headed loser who portrays himself as a winner – an egomanic with an inferiority complex. “That’s something Alexandre was very clear about, that John was the ultimate loser,” says Washington. “He wasn’t good at anything. Probably had failed at every single thing in his entire life. But even losers have egos. Even losers think they’re the greatest at everything, even though they are horribly inept. I had to figure out how this guy could become a king in his own mind. And to make that work onscreen.”

Was it love or just manipulation that created that monster? “That’s up to the audience to figure out,” Washington says. “When I tied him to that tree, on that cold night, I knew I only had one or two takes in me. Who could do this to a child? And why?? He’s trying to mature a child soldier by breaking him down psychologically. But what’s really driving his is anybody’s guess.” Moors agrees. “I can’t tell you what’s going on in John’s mind. We don’t exactly understand how they go from point A to point B – we don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle, and no one ever will. I don’t know how to become a murderer. The film isn’t explicit about that. It’s up to each member of the audience to figure that out for themselves.”

Blue Caprice opened September 27 at the AFI Silver Theater and West End Cinema.

We Are What We Are: Q&A with Director Jim Mickle

By Ron Gordner, DC Film Society Member

A screening of We Are What We Are was held September 22 at the AFI Silver Theatre. Jim Mickle, the film's director was interviewed by AFI programmer Todd Hitchcock after the screening. The film deals with the Parker family, a mother, father, two teenage daughters Iris and Rose and a much younger brother living in the Catskills. As we enter the story during torrential downpours, the family seems fairly steeped in religious and traditional practices that are slowly revealed.


AFI's Todd Hitchcock on the stage with Director Jim Mickle. Photo by Brian Payne

Todd Hitchcock: I'm not sure everyone is aware that this is a recent vintage remake of a Mexican film made in 2010 and directed by Jorge Michel Grau of the same name but the story and family were different. How many people have seen the earlier film? (About 3 or 4 audience members raise their hands).
Jim Mickle: I'm impressed, that is the most people that have ever seen it yet at my screenings.

Todd Hitchcock: How did you get interested in this film and the remake?
Jim Mickle: A few years ago I had another film called Stake Land on the festival circuit and most places it played I kept hearing all this hype about the Mexican film We Are What We Are and talked about it to my producer. So over about two years I still hadn't seen the film but some producers I know bought the rights to remake it. My writer Nick Damici and I both said no but agreed to watch the movie. It was different than what we expected and we loved it but still thought this already is a wonderful film. Why remake it when it already has a wonderful singular voice? We left it for a few days and then said, "Yeah this could be good remake. Let's think about the location, maybe New Orleans which is already steeped with great mystery and cuisine." So we both talked and realized neither of us had spent much time in New Orleans so we decided to change the location to the Catskills which we know and which has its own forests and mysteries. I spent some time the Catskill mountains and we changed the story. The original Mexican movie is about two teenage brothers trying to become the head of the household when their father dies.

Todd Hitchcock: How did you get Michael Parks?
Jim Mickle: I wrote that I loved his work and wanted him to be in the film. [Quentin] Tarantino really rediscovered him. He is 72 and agreed to do our film for very little money if he could take a train to get to the location.

Todd Hitchcock: Some people see Stake Land as a type of Western also more than a vampire movie.
Jim Mickle: I wanted to do this movie to be different than that film with less characters and no real outside influences. Andrew Corkin, one our producers, also did Martha Marcy May Marlene which I loved because of the style and not telling you any more than you needed to know at any one time in the film. I also like the Japanese horror genre films with their understated master shots.

Audience Question: How did you choose the music?
Jim Mickle: I really hate low-budget horror films that use garage type or metal music only. I think it's kind of special to use lighter or sadder music instead to frame the film. I remember seeing Larry Fessenden's film The Last Winter (2006) and the piano score by Jeff Grace was beautiful and just haunted me. I saw it again later and thought I want him for my movie. We met and hit it off and he has done some great Thai Western films. This time around I gave him the script earlier and he came up with some great music to glue the whole film together. We worked together this summer on my next film called Cold in July based on a Joe Lansdale novel and we'll have Michael C. Hall from Dexter, Sam Shepherd and Don Johnson and it's set in Texas.

Audience Question: The original Mexican film dealt more also with police corruption and other societal issues than this one.
Jim Mickle: Yes, that was something we struggled with on the script. But this film deals more with a rural area and when we had switched the genders of the kids and brought in more organized religion aspects I think that aspect didn't fit in the U.S. as much. Also the police story in the original film became a second story and we felt the tie-in with the doctor and his missing daughter took over other needed story development. We also talked finally with the Mexican director of the first film and told him we would be changing many aspects of the story. He was sweet and said of course I like your films and want to see what you do with your version. He also said in Mexico people continue traditions religiously but sometimes don't remember why they are doing them anymore. So it's a tradition kind of like our Thanksgiving but with cannibals which I found interesting. Getting away from the gruesome aspects somewhat.

Audience Question: How did you direct the scene with the two sisters at the dinner table with the father?
Jim Mickle: Little Julia was shy about doing the scene. For about three weeks she kept asking me how we would do that scene. I told her to just surprise herself and me when we see how big the scene went. I wanted it to be a cathartic moment after they've been under the father's thumb the whole movie. After they did a great take they wanted to make it bigger. I also liked that Ambyr found this kind of sexuality to add to the scene. They were into when to add the blood and it became a type of sports event. Bill even suggested that the father may have been preparing them for such a moment.

Audience Question: What was the book that was shown in the end?
Jim Mickle: It was kind of a mix of Mormonism and a retelling of the Donner party disaster which was carried on.

We Are What We Are is scheduled to open in the DC area on October 11.

Inequality for All: Panel Discussion with Robert Reich

By Annette Graham, DC Film Society Member

A screening of Inequality for All (Jacob Kornbluth, 2013) was held on September 22 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Robert Reich, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and former Secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration was a member of the panel that discussed the film. Here are his comments:

Moderator: This film makes clear the problems of inequality. But it's an abstract notion. One of the things the movie does will is to tell stories. Why did the film use people's stories to tell the story of inequality?
Robert Reich: The director [Jacob Kornbluth] came to me about two years ago and said he wanted to make a movie about the widening of inequality. I was skeptical because it's a very difficult thing to dramatize and connect with. It seems somehow too abstract, too removed. Which is one of the reasons why we haven't seen more of a movement in this country to do something about it. People who are lower middle class, working class, poor--many times they feel that they've failed somehow. They don't see the entire system. Or if they're democrats or on the left, they're angry at corporations and the rich. If they're on the right, they're angry at the poor or they're angry at the government. There's a lot of anger and blame but we don't really come together to see the larger problem and to do something about it. The story, the narrative, the idea of pulling people in was very important to Jake and was very important to me. I was skeptical if not actually anxious about Jake's decision to use my biography as much as he did. I did not want a documentary about me, I wanted the issue to be the center piece. Jake convinced me that my story was important in bring people in and I know that this movie has had a remarkable impact and we've even screened it before audiences that were totally top 1%, 1/10th of 1%, and people have come up to me and said they were moved and want to do something about what's happening. And I think that's fabulous. The film will open in 25 major cities which is big for a nonfiction documentary.

Audience Question: What can we do as individuals and as progressives to hold the line against worsening inequality and corruption?
Robert Reich: I was on ABC this week sitting next to Newt Gingrich. (everyone laughs) The issue we were debating was exactly that question. It's not just the affordable care act, it's not just the shutdowns, it's not just the inappropriateness of using the government and the institutions of government as a vehicle for blackmailing the country. But more profoundly it is exactly about big money in politics. The reason why you have so many people confused by the affordable care act is that you have hundreds of millions of dollars being spent since the affordable care act and before the affordable care act, on commercials. That money is coming from Americans for Prosperity which is a front group funded in part by Charles Koch and David Koch, It's coming from the Club for Growth, another political front group. A lot of money behind them is coming from the concentrated and smaller group of people that have huge amounts of money in this country. You have a political culture that is not just about lobbying and direct campaign contributions. It is actually poisoning and infecting the way Americans have come to understand public policy. And the Supreme Court obviously is not helping. What do we do about it? Number one, we have to reverse--if by constitutional amendment if necessary--we've got to reverse Citizens United. (everyone claps). But even with Citizens United we can support a campaign system that, for example provides government matching funds for small contributions, that makes it possible for people who aren't going to go out a solicit billionaires to have a fair chance. That is consistent with Citizens United, Citizens United doesn't prohibit that. Jon Stewart asked me, "Isn't campaign finance reform doomed? We can't really do it." A lot of people forget the post-Watergate reforms with regard for campaign finance. For 28 years they enabled presidents to take public finances and constrain that kind of corruption that has gotten into our elections from big money. Twenty-eight years. We can do it again. Don't forget our successes. The other thing we have to do is again combat the degree of inequality we have. Louis Brandeis, the great jurist, once said, "We can have a society in which a handful of people have a huge amount of money, or we can have a democracy. But we can't have both." And that is fundamentally the problem, it goes directly back to what the film tries to portray.

Audience Question: There are similaries between 1929 and 2007 but different reactions. In the 1930s there was no question about who was responsible for the depression. That didn't happen this time. Why?
Robert Reich: There is a social outreach campaign associated with the film that many organizations are involved with. Common Cause has been fighting to get big money of out politics for years; they are involved. Please do get involved in this social action. It is the rudiments of the kind of movement which is really what we need. A movie is fine, books are fine, policy ideas are great. But we need a citizens movement to take back our economy and our democracy.

Audience Question: Our culture is based on the myth of bootstrapping and rugged individualism. How can we foster a political will in this country that will address inequality in America and do that in a way that overcomes the challenge of the very individualist cultural system that we have?
Robert Reich: This goes back to a question raised before. Why in the 1930s did we have the kind of social solidarity that we needed to generate--you name it--social security, unemployment insurance, national labor relations act, wage/hour laws, 40 hour work week, etc. that provide a very important countervailing power to the wealthy and to the privileged in the society. We did not see that after the collapse in 2008. Why not? There is an irony here. We understood enough by that time that what Washington needed to do to avoid another depression was to subsidize the banking sector and to stimulate the economy enough to avoid us going over the precipice. That was probably right. I have a lot of detailed critiques of how we did it, I think we should put a lot more conditions on the banks. Here's the rich irony: We avoided another depression, but because we, just by the skin of our teeth, avoided another depression, we also avoided the kind of politics and political solidary that drew the group out of the great depression that might have actually provided a new kind of understanding, a new kind of politics, linking the middle class and the poor in this country and taking back the economy and society. So the question in front of us is, "When do we reach a tipping point?" I think it's coming soon. A tipping point in which enough of us regardless of political persuasion--tea partiers, conservatives, republicans, progressives--enough of us understand that we have a very linked fate here. And a linked set of interests, and we must take action. When do we get to that tipping point? I frankly think it's very soon. In terms of the economy being very fragile, in terms of the kind of divisiveness we're seeing, making it almost impossible for us to get anything done whatsoever. I think it's coming very soon.

Audience Question: I'm officially poor and members of my generation feet a great sense of apathy towards the inequality struggle. How should we combat this apathy?
Robert Reich: The movie doesn't make the argument that is a moral argument, that you should do this because it's unfair. It says we cannot have a vibrant and vital economy for you or anyone if we don't have a more equitable distribution of the benefits of this economy. And secondly we can't have a democracy that's responsive to you if we allow it to be undermined and corrupted by money that is becoming more and more centralized and concentrated. So it's a matter of our society, your children, your grandchildren, all your neighbors and friends. It's much larger than us as individuals. One final point: If we allow ourselves to become cynical, we are essentially ceding the entire game to the money interests. They would like nothing better than for us to wallow in cynicism and then give up. Because if we give up they get everything.

Inequality for All opened September 27 at Angelika Film Center Mosaic, Landmark's E Street Cinema and Landmark's Bethesda Row.

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