#author:ying

[lionmeetskoala-blog]

Let’s quit abusing drug users (2015)

As you may have noticed, our beloved Government has been very vocal about its tough drug laws recently, even issuing this obnoxious declaration at the United Nations in front of a global live audience. I posted a response to it on Facebook highlighting the weaknesses of the Law Minister's argument, the gist of it being: If tough laws on drugs work so well, why aren't the other countries with laws like Singapore's (including Afghanistan, Syria, China, North Korea, Zimbabwe and so on) as safe as Singapore? Why are countries like Switzerland and New Zealand so safe despite having 'soft' drug laws? Where the fuck does our Government even get its confidence from? Anyway, to counter this unfortunate bout of ignorance, I've chosen to educate myself about drug use, addiction and policies. I talked to a pharmacist friend of mine who, by the way, told me a shocking fact: It takes 1,500 pounds (680 kg) to die from an overdose of marijuana. (Note that Singapore HANGS YOU for trafficking 500 GRAMS of cannabis. Note that technically, this means that Singapore could be executing 1,360 traffickers of cannabis just to save 1 person from overdosing on it.) Lastly, I decided to watch Dr Carl Hart's TED talk about the topic. I remembered him from this super great time where he decimated a Fox News host. On to the review!

Dr Carl Hart grew up in a poverty-stricken Miami neighbourhood where he engaged in drug use and petty dealing. When he began his studies in neuroscience, his goal was to eradicate drug addiction and the poverty and crime it caused. However, he soon found out that many of his assumptions about drug use and the behaviour of drug addicts were wrong. Here are some myths that have been debunked by his research.

Myth 1: All drug abusers are drug addicts.  

The most important takeaway from his lifetime of research is this: 80% to 90% of drug users are not addicts (the official definition of addicts according to the DSM). They are normally, functioning people who have jobs, families and responsibilities. Sometimes, they can even be the President of the United States. 

Myth 2: All it takes is one hit to get hooked. 

This myth is based on an old study in the 1960s that researchers conducted on lab animals. They gave the animals a choice between plain water and water laced with drugs, and most of them chose to  continue self-administering the drugs until it killed them. But these experiments were flawed because they only gave the animals a choice between taking the drugs and not taking the drugs. These findings were eventually disproved when modern scientists modified the experiments to give the animals alternatives such as a sexually receptive mate or a sweet treat in addition to the drugs. It was discovered that animals often chose the non-drug alternative over the drugs. 

Myth 3: Drug addicts are irrational people who would do anything for another hit (such as resorting to crime). 

Hart repeated the above experiment with crack addicts from New York (who fulfilled the medical definition of an addict). He gave them a choice between a hit of cocaine and $5. Astonishingly, 50% of the addicts chose the nominal sum of $5 over another hit. He did this again with meth addicts, this time increasing the monetary value to $20. 80% of the addicts chose the money. This is because, Hart explains, “attractive alternatives dramatically decrease drug use.” 

What does this mean? It means that drug addicts don't cause crime just because they're addicted to drugs (besides the crime of using drugs, of course). The reasons why they commit crime must be found in other factors, such as poverty, racism and--very importantly--racial targeting among law enforcement. There is no other reason why 80% of the people incarcerated for drugs are black, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of all users of every type of drug is white. 

In summary, drugs themselves are not the problem. They don't cause addiction, they don't cause crime. The real problems we need to address are poverty, unemployment, ignorance and selective drug law enforcement.

Note: We've decided to do something fun this time around! Instead of picking our own documentaries, we've decided that we're going to choose the documentary for the next person. The only rule is that you have to explain why you chose that documentary. 

For Poppy, I've chosen 'Why We Need to End the War on Drugs' by Ethan Nadelmann. The reason is that it's another TED talk about drugs, this time focusing on the regulation side of things instead. If we were to decriminalise drugs, what's the best way to do so? I guess you'll find out. LOL.

[lionmeetskoala-blog]

Who Killed Malcolm Smith? (1992)

In 1982, Malcolm Smith, an Aboriginal prisoner at Long Bay Jail, was found in a toilet cubicle with the handle of a paint brush driven through his left eye. He had inflicted the fatal injury on himself.

The documentary seeks to answer its eponymous question by looking into the dense network of 'protection' and welfare policies targeted at Aboriginal people, the damaging effects of long-term incarceration, and the appallingly inadequate treatment of mental illness in prisons. Malcolm had been taken away from his family at the age of 11 as part of a 'separation' policy designed by the Australian governement. He was sent to a series of juvenile homes which proved to be a training ground for jail. When he was released at 19, he was illiterate, innumerate, and already socialised into the brutal and perverse regime of institutional life. The inadequacy of the psychological care given to him is also underscored by the perfunctory and often inaccurate psychiatric reports prepared by prison authorities, which merely said that he was 'slow' and appeared dull - an assessment his parole officer simply agreed with them without making his own judgment. These reports were proven untrue because everyone who knew him personally stated that he was intelligent, creative, athletic and a natural leader.  

The lack of pre-release counselling or any attempt to rehabilitate him back into normal life resulted in Malcolm being constantly re-incarcerated for petty crimes, most of which he committed in order to survive. The courts failed to take this into account and often gave him sentences that were extremely harsh in proportion to his crimes. During his last interval of liberty, he got into a fight with a man he believed to be abusing his sister, and the man died. When he returned to prison, his feelings of guilt evidently consumed him. He became obsessed with religion and attempted to self-mutilate several times in order to atone for his sins. He had been given a tape recording of the Matthews gospel, which contained the verse: "And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell." He constantly expressed that he felt like he was in hell. Yet prison authorities failed to recognise this, and instead placed him into the 'observation unit', which was essentially small walled cells with only a tiny shaft of light at the very top.

Malcolm's death is one of many deaths of Aboriginal people in custody. There used to be nearly one in every month, although the figures have gone down since. However, I recently found out that the lower figures are not because less people are dying in custody, but rather because some deaths in remand are processed by external corrective services contracted by the police and are therefore not included in official statistics. It is important to recognise that these deaths are caused not only by the senseless Stolen Generation policy, but also a history of oppression and individual acts motivated by racial prejudice which has resulted in the appalling treatment and over-representation of Aboriginal people in the criminal justice system today.

[lionmeetskoala-blog]

Bangalore or bust: can India's clothing factories offer freedom to rural recruits? (2015)

Don’t be put off by the sombreness of the title - there’s a lot more giggling in this documentary than you’d expect. 

I confess that I was looking for an easy, relaxing documentary to review this time and was going to click through this one until I heard a peal of laughter within the first couple of minutes. Banu and Bhuntu are close friends who signed up to work at a clothing factory in Bangalore. They are excited, chatty and playful. They are such completely normal teenage girls that they remind me of my own secondary school days. “I’m going to go and see what it’s like, then I’ll decide if it’s good or not,” Bhuntu says. This is an eminently wiser approach than the one the makers of “Schoolgirls For Sale” adopted. 

The girls get settled in at the factory and the hostel accommodation their employer, the British-born Orlanda Ruthven, has arranged for them. They are introduced to flush toilets and strict rules about leaving the hostel at certain times. Orlanda attempts to work out a Free Sunday programme with the factory. The managers refuse on the grounds of practicality, saying that they can’t possibly ensure the safety of so many girls who don’t know the language or area while they roam around the city. (The younger feminist in me would decry this as a sexist and oppressive excuse, but I no longer object to these claims because I know them to be patently true, not only of Bangalore but almost any large metropolitan city in the world.) A compromise is reached: the factory will allow the girls their Free Sunday if they sign legal disclaimers absolving the factory of any responsibility if they get into trouble on their days off. Guess the gym membership’s off the table for this company’s employee welfare package, then. 

Banu and Bhuntu despair at the restrictions and decide to pack their bags and return home. Cue happy music and tearful family reunions. Or not. Hilariously, moments later they are both clutching their phones, texting their friends at the factory and wishing they could go back. Like I said, completely normal teenage girls. 

The parallels between the garment industry and the JK industry are numerous. They both involve the employment of vulnerable young female labour under the constant supervision of middle-aged male managers. They are both poorly regulated and the subjects of a lot of handwringing and wayang (term for puppet theatre) by their respective governments. They both raise serious issues of culture, violence, exploitation, agency and the freedom of (informed) choice. Obviously JK involves sex and therefore the term ‘seedy underbelly’ gets bandied about a lot more. But people (especially journalists and filmmakers) thinking about JK and anything related to young girls performing some sort of sexualised labour need to take a step back and disentangle their ideas about sex from sex work, and confront the issues in sex work as employment issues and employment rights, as opposed “omg you are SELLING ur BODY u need 2 B SAVED”. The scenes of Orlanda struggling and confronting these issues in a real and practical way offer great insight into how this should be discussed in sex industries. I found this documentary much more enjoyable than Schoolgirls and I suspect you will too.

Watch the video here.

[lionmeetskoala-blog]

Malaysia: Mahkamah akan memutuskan Hak Golongan Transgender*

Quick note: Ying gets to take over Poppy this week because one of us has to be a productive member of society. 

Last week, the Federal Court of Malaysia upheld the constitutionality of the syariah law in Negeri Sembilan prohibiting Muslims from cross-dressing (s 66 of the Syariah Criminal Enactment 1992). This is a reversal of the Court of Appeal’s landmark decision last November which declared the law unconstitutional, calling the provision “degrading, oppressive and inhumane”. 

The respondents in this case are four Muslim bridal make-up artists who were arrested while attending a wedding ceremony. The particular cruelty of the Islamic authorities in choosing the wedding ceremony of the mak nyahs’ clients as a location for a raid is striking, and speaks volumes of the capacity of the authorities for both personal and professional humiliation. In light of this, the bravery, resilience and resourcefulness of the mak nyah community in pursuing their constitutional rights, right up to the highest level of the courts, is nothing short of inspirational. 

The mak nyahs’ case was dismissed on the grounds of their failure to abide by Art 4(4) of the Federal Constitution: "Proceedings for a declaration that a law is invalid ... shall not be commenced without the leave of a judge of the Federal Court”. I don’t agree with this particular cop-out. Prima facie, it’s true that the mak nyahs’ lawyers failed to seek leave from a Federal judge. (I imagine the reason behind this has more to do with the judges’ lack of sympathy than any sort of incompetence or oversight on their part of their lawyers.) 

But when applying a constitutional law it may also be necessary to look to the purpose of the law. As the Federal judges pointed out, the purpose of Article 4(4) is to ensure that "frivolous or vexatious proceedings for such declarations are not commenced”. There is quite some room to argue that this case was neither frivolous nor vexatious, given the level of domestic and international scrutiny it has attracted since 2011 and its potential to affect a minority group that has been systematically disenfranchised for decades, and at an increasing rate in recent times to boot. Unfortunately for all of us the respondents’ lawyers chose a different argument that failed, and the Federal Court sidestepped the opportunity to discuss the actual issue of whether the law did infringe upon the human rights sections of the Constitution. 

More troubling questions also arise on a broader level. How prepared is the Federal Court to decide on the constitutionality of any syariah law, given the increasing Islamisation of society (and arguably the demographic of the Federal Court judges)? Are syariah laws above the law now, so to speak? Former CJ Abdul Hamid certainly thinks so: in response to the November ruling, he lamented that “[w]hen Islamic law can be challenged on grounds of being 'unreasonable' by judges, including non-Muslim judges, then Islamic laws will constantly be exposed to being invalidated.” If syariah laws can be invalidated (even though they have never been) by the Constitution, what is the best way to interpret the Constitution? Is it true that, as Mr Abdul Hamid says, that there is an ‘Islamic’ standard of interpretation that is different from the ‘liberal Western’ view? Conversely, if syariah laws cannot be invalidated, what does this mean for Muslim Malaysians? Lawyers and advocates have suggested that it means that “Muslims in this country would not enjoy the constitutional protections that non-Muslims will enjoy.”

On a brighter note, the case has certainly generated a great deal of publicity and goodwill for the mak nyahs over the last three years. Islamic and women’s based groups have spoken up to voice their support for and solidarity with Justice for Sisters, the organisation set up by Nisha Ayub (one of the four litigants). There remains a legislative avenue for the community to further their pursuit for justice. One can only hope.  

*Translates to “Court Ruling on Rights of the Transgender Community”. 

[lionmeetskoala-blog]

Teddy Cruz: How architectural innovations migrate across borders (2013)

Hi! So, two things: I’m sorry it’s been more than a week since your review, and I’m sorry that this isn’t really going to be a documentary - it’s a TED Talk. Then again, what is a documentary? Dictionaries online variably suggest that it has to a) be factual or informative; b) present political, social, or historical subject matter, and c) be a work such as a television or film programme. Then again, the Internet happened, and we now have documentaries in various multimedia formats and platforms. If it’s in 240p, is it really a documentary? And while TED Talks and John Oliver clips are undoubtedly factual and political in content, where do we draw the line? Shouldn’t there be an element of artistry in documentaries, so that we can comment on tone/direction/cinematography/choice of soundtrack? Okay, end of #digressionalmusings.

Teddy Cruz is an architect and professor in the U.S. who has been bemoaning an urban and cultural crisis afflicting the U.S. since, like, 2008. Here he argues that the future of cities is now in the hands of migrant communities, which make up a crucial force resisting the tired homogeneity and one-dimensionality plaguing suburbia these days. 

His talk is a summary of his decade-long research on the Tijuana-San Diego border region, where some of the world’s wealthiest real estate (on the edges of San Diego) exists 20 minutes away from some of the poorest slums in Latin America. As a result of their close proximity, there is, predictably, a lot of mixing and borrowing going on--for example, entire houses have been transported across the border from San Diego to literally build slums in Tijuana. 

As you can see in the picture above, Mexican contractors have been loading up old post-war buildings in San Diego onto steel frames and ferrying them across the border to be recycled in Tijuana. The area under the steel frame is then appropriated into another space by the Mexican family as a garage, a small business, or an extension of the house. Waste material such as garage doors and old tyres are similarly recycled and transformed into building blocks for houses. 

Likewise, migrants in San Diego neighbourhoods have been retrofitting their houses by building illegal granny flats to accommodate larger families, adding garages, and incorporating religious or cultural figures or spaces. A small house (below) was saved from demolition when people decided to convert it into an informal Buddhist temple. In doing so, Cruz says, this boring old suburban unit has mutated into a micro-cultural institution, adding flavour and “difference” to the neighbourhood. And it’s acts of innovation and collective imagination like these that are exactly what we need to overcome the urban and cultural crisis. 

How does this apply to us? What can we do about our (Singapore’s) increasingly one-dimensional suburbia? Where do we find instances of bottom-up innovation? When I stayed in UTown at NUS, I was mystified when a series of L-shaped wooden structures started springing up in the otherwise-empty outdoor public spaces at the residential colleges. They were in fact tables (called “Döhldeng”--the name itself a playful Anglicization of the Hokkien term) designed by students from the Faculty of Architecture, aimed at encouraging people to linger in these outdoor spaces. It was an uphill challenge because y’know, we do love our air-con, but I was pleased to see that in the evenings various clubs and societies gathered around the doh dengs for meetings and the like. 

The greater lesson, I think, is that architectur-ing is no longer, and should no longer be, the exclusive province of the middle-class and educated - people are taking matters into their own hands. But these changes at the bottom need to be filtered to the top and factored into policy. Governments (and architects) need to address the fact that those who cannot afford housing still need housing - and almost 50% of the world today lives in illegal housing. (I’d be keen to get your response to this, because at least you’ve lived in cities like Shanghai and London with urban sprawl and shantytowns or ghettoes!!!) 

Watch the talk here.

[lionmeetskoala-blog]

Life In A Day (2011): Ying’s take

I actually spent a really long time watching this, because the subject matter was so confounding at first that I stopped several times to come back to it later. I usually steer clear of these Koyaanisqatsi-style films, probably I guess because I’m more used to small, polished, YouTube-length clips that tell me exactly what I’m in for. Instant gratification and all that. When I finally did finish it, it was 5am in Canberra, my room still and so pin-drop quiet you could hear the trees stirring, just barely, beyond the window. It was so beautiful I wanted to film it and send it in to Kevin Macdonald. 

The film is organised loosely around three questions: What do you love? What do you fear? What is in your pocket? There’s a lovely shot of a plate of sushi making its rounds on its conveyor belt in the restaurant, and it’s a great microcosm of the concept behind the film--placing a camera on a conveyor belt around the world and just letting it run. It is no surprise that the most memorable moments were the most intimate, some of them delivered in such a matter of fact way (”Say good morning to mummy.” “I don’t want to.”) that it hurts even more. 

Another favourite of mine is this man’s answer to “What do you fear?”

“I’m fearless now,” he said. “It was my fear once that you’d get cancer, and you did. So I’m fearless.”

That’s the kind of humour that makes the film humane, between all the gorgeous but sort of repetitive wide-angle shots of glittering cityscapes and rolling pastures. That said, the film is very cleverly edited in a way that advances its metanarrative idea: that people across cultures and continents are more similar than you’d expect. The potentially cringe-inducing shot of someone eating balut in Southeast Asia is then followed by the graphic, brutal slaughter of a cow in a sterilised European facility by a white doctor in a lab coat. A wealthy, Beverly Hills-type brags about his Lamborghini with the same self-satisfied smugness as the Chinese woman who parades her Marc Jacobs paraphernalia in the next scene. One of my favourite subthemes is the one of elderly couples poking fun at each other in that way only 30-odd years of marriage allows you to. A middle-aged man gamely steps up to demonstrate to his wife the correct way to draw from a well, only to fail spectacularly, to the amusement of his wife. A couple renewing their vows after 50 years of marriage wrote each other’s vows:

“John, it is necessary to address one or two things in the physical side of marriage. Do you agree to wash the windows inside the house?”

In retaliation, her husband’s request was to “agree to let him do that thing you once told him you’d let him do on his 40th birthday but still not have yet done.”

Kevin Macdonald writes in his Guardian article that a special effort was made to source entries from developing countries: 

To make the project truly global, we had to find a way to represent the developing world. So we walked into Jessops camera shop with £40,000 one day and asked how many decent HD cameras that would buy. About 400. These were set to widescreen and sent to around 40 countries. Various aid organisations distributed them among people in remote towns and villages. Each camera had two memory cards: one to send back to us, one for them to keep.

Some of these shots are pretty predictable: a one-legged beggar in Kabul; a family of 14 living without electricity, water or drainage; a Peruvian shoeshine boy; a man with no money in his pockets. 

But some of them are also awesome, like a woman explaining that proposals in Uganda traditionally involve the woman kneeling instead of a man (by the way, I only recognised the Ugandan flag because we used to play games with those erasers with the flags on them, and the Uganda one was one of my favourites). The scene of a women’s-only dojo in Afghanistan is also excellent, with the filmmaker explaining earnestly that he wants to show a side of his country that doesn’t involve wars and violence.

Several critics have pointed out that these clips are almost too saccharine-sweet and optimistic. A particularly savage piece in NY Times called it “a sentimental credit-card commercial stretched to feature length”. In response, Macdonald writes:

Our aim had been to premiere our movie at Sundance; thanks to the deep pockets of YouTube, we were able to take 20 of our best contributors along. It was an incredibly emotional experience: finding oneself in a room with people from all over the globe – Japan, Indonesia, the US, Peru, Ukraine, Russia – who had nothing in common but the fact they had contributed to this film. They were so lovely, I began to wonder if this was what everyone outside my own cynical, metropolitan bubble was like. Then I got pickpocketed in New York shortly afterwards and realised this probably wasn't the case. Instead, I think the contributors came from a special, self-selecting little group: to take part in the film, they had to be, almost by definition, generous, unmaterialistic people who cared about sharing what was special to them.

[lionmeetskoala-blog]

Simi Kopitiam? (2015)

After the 2011 General Elections, the PAP initiated a series of kopitiam (coffee shop) sessions, perestroika-style, aimed at eliciting feedback and suggestions from blue-collar workers—a demographic once regarded as stalwart apparatchiks of the party but are now, increasingly, one of the party’s harshest critics. You know these guys. Singlet-clad, bony, shuffling around in their cheap plastic slippers or Crocs. Sharp as ever, what Lee Kuan Yew referred to as “a hard-working, industrious, rugged individual.” They hang out at kopitiams, park benches, karaoke bars. They run the kopitiams.

June Cheong’s Simi Kopitiam is not so much a meditation on the coffee shop as political space (although that would’ve been a better documentary), but an ode to the tireless champs running the show. Most of them are open at least six days a week; one guy says his place is open 365 days a year, more than ten hours a day. The filmmakers have assembled a good range of subjects with distinct personalities and backgrounds. Most of them are second-gens who have dedicated their lives to learning the ropes and taking over their parents’ businesses. This is not a cushy job, not even for the slicker third-gen types who’ve clearly taken a business course or two, and have fancy titles like Director of Branding and Market Development. Some of them, like the Ya Kun guy, have their eye on Global Expansion and product development and experimental marketing strategies. (A point underscored, aptly, by a shot of a green tea latte being slid over the counter in a plastic Ya Kun cup.) Some of them stick to their guns obstinately, the kind of complete purists who want to keep everything exactly the way it’s been done, including grinding up their coconut juice by hand.

The crowd is discerning, too. As one grizzly customer points out, there are a lot of kopitiams around, but each one is different. That comment astounded me. It’s like someone telling you there’s a difference between the McDonald’s in Ang Mo Kio and Queenstown. There is no mass franchise, not even McDonald’s, as ubiquitous as the kopitiam in Singapore. But he could tell the new ones from the old. People like Kenneth, he says, referring to a fiftysomething second-gen beverage stall owner, are different. You can tell they’ve been doing it since they were kids.  

But brand longevity is not a concern for these guys. All of them seem demonstrably fine with their kids choosing not to continue the family business. Kenneth’s son wants to go into the hotel industry, says Kenneth with a wry grin, because there’s air-con. Teo says his son doesn’t want to do it because it’s long hours with no rest. Hamirul, the third-gen scion of Warong Nasi Pariaman, helps out at the store on weekends in preparation for the time he takes over the reins from his uncle, but even his uncle expresses doubts about Hamirul having to give up his well-paying airline job. It’s not that the brand of rugged industrious individual from the Pioneer Generation is dying out. It’s just that there are so many opportunities out there. And the competition seems to be getting tougher.

This rings painfully true somewhere in the final third part of the documentary, when a pretentious British-Singaporean accent interrupts the great run we’ve had of candid, heartfelt, refreshingly Singlish-accented interviews. It’s hotelier Loh Lik Peng, the man behind Bincho and the voice of gentrification—the bad kind that profits from the manufacture of nostalgia. In case you didn’t know, Bincho is one of those places that purports to “showcase a neat mix of Singapore’s past, present and future”, the future being, inexplicably, a Japanese whisky bar. Unfortunately this appears to be the only business strategy keeping the old mee pok store that they’ve requisitioned alive.

The one glorious, shining moment in the film that will stay with you comes at around the 17:00 mark. Jumrin, the head chef at Warong Nasi Pariaman, is talking about how he’s seen the same kids go from their pak tor (dating) years to adulthood and then parenthood, and now the kids of those kids are also visiting his warong every week. “You’ll know people, a lot of people. And your relationship is quite close, because of food.”

Did I like Simi Kopitiam? I wanted to. The cast was so likeable, so personable, so real. But a lot of aspects of the editing felt annoyingly heavy-handed, like the incessant tinkly soundtrack and the overbearing sepia-toned glow. The thing about kopitiams is that they’re the base of the heartland. Like, figuratively, but also literally, because they occupy the void decks or ground floors of the HDBs. Being at the base means being on the ground and being kind of gross. Coffee shops are all about wet grimy floors, wadded-up tissues everywhere and oily fingerprints visible on the table top. This film was beautifully shot, but so sanitised. It failed to present the sizzle of socio-cultural commentary, to depict the spark of challenging discursive activity that keeps the coffee shops alive. There was definitely a missed opportunity to pontificate on the racial/social implications of the popularised use of the Hokkien term kopitiam for coffee shop, even though warongs and kedai kopi also exist and are also being used today.

Earlier this week, WP candidate Daniel Goh wrote a great note about heartland spaces. In response to a reporter’s comparison of PAP candidates getting introduced in coffee shops and WP doing the same in their HQ, Dr Goh wrote: “The question left me thinking. My answer would have been, with a bit of extra hindsight time, “So what? I live in heartland spaces every day; I get introduced as a candidate at the HQ because it is a special event. My normal reality is the heartland, the heartland is not a special event for me. My life is the heartland, the heartland is not my symbolic gesture.”” And that’s what Simi Kopitiam feels like - a symbolic gesture.

Watch the film here. 

[lionmeetskoala-blog]

Marie’s Dictionary (2014)

In Central California, an 82 year old woman has spent the last seven years of her life pecking slowly, painstakingly away at the yellowed keyboard of her computer in order to put together a dictionary of the Wukchumni language. Ms Wilcox, the last fluent speaker of Wukchumni in the world, and several members of her family have committed themselves to resisting the linguicidal plague that has been sweeping indigenous communities across the world. 

You might be right that I’m naturally drawn to racial or ethnic themes (not just in documentaries, but also in life). This will probably be a pattern. But unlike the tone of seething fury that permeated Utopia (2013), this documentary about one is a truly uplifting tale of perseverance and selflessness, of strong familial bonds, of community, of hope. Ms Wilcox’s dictionary is not so much a race against time, but a collaborative effort with her daughter Jennifer and her almost-fluent grandson Donovan to teach the young ones--who are eager to learn!--their mother tongue. Donovan is helping her to record an audio version of the dictionary, as well as several folktales from the tribe, fables that are themselves fascinating for the insights they offer into the Yokuts’ animistic worldview.

There isn’t any fierce, scathing political commentary delivered in John Pilger’s measured, NatGeo-ish voice to punctuate each interview, each conversation. This is a keenly-observed documentary that sits back and just lets its characters be.