Manohla dargis biography of donald

For instance, Weber was one of the industry’s first female directors and a big name at the time, but has now faded from general film history. She tackled issues ranging from child labor to prostitution. Shoes follows the story of a young woman struggling to support her sisters and parents as a store clerk, and unable to afford a new pair of shoes. “It’s exciting to show a 1916 movie, and especially with so much discussion around female directors,” says Dargis. “The fight for female directors goes on, but there’s a history. Women made movies at the beginning of cinema.”

Ford’s 1941 working-class opus How Green Was My Valley, about 19th century Welsh coal miners, snagged Ford a best director Oscar. “Watching the film, we discuss, ‘What’s an auteur?’” says Dargis, referencing auteurism, which views a director as the main creative force of a movie.

Filmed for less than $10,000 over a series of weekends, Burnett’s 1977 gritty and humorous black-and-white drama Killer of Sheep—his MFA thesis film at UCLA—follows a disillusioned husband and father who works in a slaughterhouse in Watts. The movie is a realistic bird’s eye view into African-American Southern California experience, shot by a black director.

With the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements raising the bar when it comes to women being treated fairly, and growing attention on boosting overall equity, diversity and inclusion in television and film, the need for a variety of filmmaker voices is essential. According to a 2018 USC report examining 1,100 popular films from 2007 through 2017, only 4 percent of the films’ directors were women, and only 5 percent were black or African-American.

“I want a diversity of voices, stories and styles because it’s better for the art form, and part of that diversity is ra

It’s too bad that in making its first movie based on a Marvel comic Disney didn’t decide to take a real leap into the future, say, by making Hiro a girl…

— Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

Dear Ms. Dargis,

I was born in Vietnam shortly before the tanks rolled into Saigon and my family was forced to flee. Raised in South Minneapolis’ largest, poorest, and most racially diverse neighborhood, my father taught me to walk to the library and got me hooked on free books. Later, I would learn to run there, mostly to avoid the myriad groups of bullies wanting to beat me for whatever reason they could conjure that day, and I would read books and comics to take me far away from who I was and where I was. It is safe to say that the majority of my boyhood was spent imagining that I was anything but who I was.

Perseus, Launcelot, Spider-Man, Superman, Wolverine, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Captain Kirk, Aragorn, Flash Gordon, Bilbo Baggins — yes, they are all men. But what else do they have in common? In my dreams I was always a white hero, because that was what I was taught to believe heroes looked like. Even the weird cartoon I loved from Japan — an animated space soap opera called Robotech — featured a main character, Rick Hunter, that I thought was white. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I found out his name in Japan was Hikaru Ichijyo.

Remember also that the 80s was a special time: “Buy American” was all the rage, most of that patriotic fervor directed against Asians, even Asian Americans, as if all of us were getting checks from the Japanese auto industry (we weren’t — and the American auto industry was really the one screwing over workers by building plants in other countries ). My people in particular were the target of a very special xenophobic hatred: people on the street would shout at us and other Asians on the street, blaming us for the Vietnam War and the deaths of their relatives, not knowing that people