During Queen of Katwe’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, director Nair, who lives in Uganda, quoted the motto of the Maisha Film Lab, a filmmaking program she founded in east Africa: “If we don’t tell our own stories, no one else will.”
The film’s admirable adherence to that ethic transcends whatever issues of length or performance it may have. Queen of Katwe is a movie committed to the real people whose story it tells, showing their struggles, strength, love and faith. No white savior required.
“It is very, very, very tragic that a woman died,” he said. “But I’ve been at the train station and thirty people are at that same spot on other days.
“One death is one too many, but just to look at how a train stops and a few hundred people get off, and sometimes a few at one time go left to the Path (commuter trains), others go right to the light rail. It could have been so much worse.”
But others viewed things differently.
The West Nickel Mines School is long gone. Two of the survivors are now married. Several of the couples who lost their daughters have had more children.
The shooting 10 years ago in [Bart Township, Pa.] made headlines across the world as the Amish rushed to forgive the shooter. But the grief and pain live on.
On Oct. 2, 2006, a heavily armed milk truck driver, Charles Carl Roberts IV, burst into the West Nickel Mines School shortly after recess. By the time Roberts had committed suicide, less than an hour later, five girls aged 6-13 were dead, and five others severely wounded.
Recent polls show that 68 percent of black Americans think the government should provide monetary reparations to descendants of slaves. That this most recent call for reparations, from a global governing body, has largely gone ignored in the same week that Congress gave sweeping support to the JASTA bill suggests to black citizens that the United States government is comfortable pursuing justice for others’ terrorism but less interested in taking responsibility for its own.
1. Using Sound to Explore One of Syria’s Most Notorious Prisons
“The user is immersed in both an auditory and visual experience narrated by the detainees. As you explore the different locations you can hear water dripping through the pipes, the faint sound of birds or the footsteps of approaching guards.”
2. Social Media Got You Down? Be More Like Beyonce.
I mean … isn’t that always the answer to the question? But really, a very important read for the swipe generation.
3. Hip Hop and Liberation of Women in Kabul
How some women are defying deprecated Taliban mores and making their voices heard.
The members had no idea that word of their efforts to start the Islamic Center of Nashville had reached Yusuf Islam, the famous British musician and Muslim convert also known as Cat Stevens, until his check arrived in the mail.
“I was thinking, ‘What a miracle,’” said Elberry, who was a Vanderbilt University graduate student from Egypt at the time.
The Internal Revenue Service has reclassified one of the most famous Christian organizations, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
At the request of the Graham organization, the IRS changed its tax status from a nonprofit to an “association of churches,” The NonProfit Times reported on Sept. 26. The change was made last November.
The change means the 66-year-old Christian organization no longer has to file what the IRS calls Form 990, a public statement of its financial information, including salaries for top officials. It will continue to publish an annual financial report, available to the public on its website.
The survey, released by the Pew Research Center on Sept. 28, polled more than 4,500 adults on the use of contraception and other recent “values” controversies in an effort to put data to the often-public communications breakdowns between America’s understanding of religious liberty and nondiscrimination. Other hot button issues in the survey included whether businesses should be required to provide wedding services to same-sex couples, and whether transgender people should be able to use the restrooms of the gender with which they identify — both of which revealed national opinion to be nearly evenly split.