Documentary Series Focuses on Social Issues

Four feature-length documentaries on social and political issues will be shown over the next three weekends at the Monica 4-Plex. They will be screened Saturday and Sunday mornings simultaneously but with staggered starting times: Cathy Zheutlin’s “Just One Step: The Great Peace March” (10:15), Martyn Burke’s “Witnesses: Afghanistan--The Untold Story” (10:30), Morley Markson’s “Growing Up in America” (10:45) and Beverly Shaffer’s “To a Safer Place” (11).

All of them are worthy rather than dazzling efforts, and they all tend to pound out the points that their makers wish to make.

The most affecting is “To a Safer Place,” an occasionally awkward and self-conscious but rewarding study of Shirley Turcotte, a 36-year-old Vancouver phone company executive, wife and mother, who reveals her nightmarish childhood. From the time she was a toddler until she was at last able to escape to a foster home at 14, she was the victim of her brutal father’s incest. By the time Turcotte was filmed she had already pretty much come to terms with her past and had become an activist in the prevention of child abuse; consequently, the film is more in the spirit of advocacy rather than self-discovery. Even so, her conversations with her family and even former neighbors are strong stuff, and the film makes clear the awful helplessness and guilt of the abused child.

“Just One Step: The Great Peace March” captures the tremendously spiritual experience those 500 anti-war, anti-nuke protesters underwent in the course of their 1986 nine-month march from Los Angeles to Washington. Unfortunately, the film in its attempt to hammer home its message becomes repetitive and wearying long before the marchers reach the District of Columbia. There are some nifty moments along the way, however--e.g., the elderly man who runs the Reagan Information Center in the President’s hometown, Dixon, Ill., and who reasons that “more bombs make for more jobs.”

“Witnesses” is an illuminating, comprehensive and utterly relentless account of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, focusing on the incredibly brave, resilient and unyielding Afghans and a remarkable band of Westerners who are trying to come to their aid. This is a sobering, invaluable account of a war that has been called “Russia’s Vietnam,” but we’re shown so much suffering that the film becomes numbing.

On a lighter note “Growing Up in America” contrasts footage of a group of ‘60s radicals with contemporary interviews with them. Inevitably, there’s Abbie Hoffman, who has kept the faith, Jerry Rubin, who thinks he has, even though he’s become a Manhattan entrepreneur, and Allen Ginsberg, who remains wonderfully transcendent no matter how often he shows up in such documentaries. Of the 10 subjects attorney William Kunstler is by far the most incisive. While acknowledging that he has lived a good, fulfilling life he stresses that in regard to racism and other social ills, America has actually changed very little since the ‘60s.

Monica 4-Plex information: (213) 394-9741.

As a curtain-raiser to its weekend morning New Chinese Cinema series, the Nuart is presenting Sunday and next Monday Xie Fei and U Lan’s exquisite “Girl From Hunan,” adapted from a 60-year-old classic novel by Shen Congwen that indicts the cruelty of child marriage. As it tells of the fate of a 16-year-old peasant girl, Xiao Xiao (Na Renhua), already married for four years to a boy a decade her junior, it exudes a sensuality that has been exceedingly rare in the Chinese cinema and has some nude scenes that are, in fact, regarded as a first.

At first Xiao Xiao’s life seems reasonably idyllic--for one thing she somehow escaped having her feet bound--but then she and a farmhand (Deng Xiaotung), too poor to afford a wife, become mutually attracted. Considering the zealous puritanism of their community the film concludes surprisingly (though not without irony). The film is set in 1910 but it might as well be antiquity, yet it’s clear that its feminist sentiments are meant to reverberate in today’s China. For full schedule: (213) 478-6379, 479-5269.