#POWER TO THE PEOPLE MOVIE MOVIE#

As much as artists reflect who we are as a society, they are also the ones who embolden us to imagine and co-create a better world. Simultaneously, the artist can be the one to incite the collectively inherent but mostly repressed desire for social change. In a talk titled “ The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity,” James Baldwin says, “The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us. This includes our colonial history and present reality of inequity and racial injustice. Movies, music, zines, poetry collections, anthologies, art galleries, and other artistic expressions are the emblems that reflect truths about us. There has been a rise of artists and storytellers-filmmakers included-who create and play at the forefront of liberation work. Since the pandemic, film offered short-lived yet substantive escapes while surviving a tumultuous, ever-shaping world.įrom left: The author’s mother and the author in Reel World. This, to me, was a source of pleasure and comfort. Along with my occasional leisurely film-viewing, I love engaging with film from spiritual and philosophical vantage points, locating themes underneath the overarching plot.

My brother is a film critic and animator today. My family’s devotion to film lasted longer than Reel World’s three-year run. In the shop were vivid wall posters of a Robin Williams or Julia Roberts film, one of the Rush Hour movies, and, of course, Titanic. We looked forward to the weeks when dad availed new movies, readily visible to the customers who entered.

#POWER TO THE PEOPLE MOVIE MOVIE#

I remember the satisfaction of hearing the click of a VHS tape rewinder cuing that a movie was ready. Residing at the heart of my hometown in the Philippines and sandwiched between street vendors and stationary stores was Reel World, my dad’s old VHS rental shop, a local counterpart to the U.S.’s Blockbuster, but much humbler.

Power to the people movie