The American Sector [Online]
View this title online from
Jun. 25 – Jul. 16, 2021
Jun. 25 – Jul. 16, 2021
$12 General Admission
Courtney Stephens & Pacho Velez
US
2020
1h 10m
About
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked a powerful turning point in the history of the Cold War and offered prospects for a reunified Germany. It also began a new chapter in the life of the wall itself. Over the past three decades, this powerful symbol of freedom has migrated piece-by-piece, all over the world. In The American Sector, filmmakers Courtney Stephens (Terra Femme) and Pacho Velez (Manakamana) travel across the United States to seek out these fragments of history, and find themselves encountering all walks of life along the way.
“Detached and incisive, wry and deceptively whimsical, The American Sector is a brisk lesson in how we often fail to learn from history because even the most concrete testimony is open to interpretation.” – Boston Globe
“The film’s strengths lie in its simplicity. The shots are carefully composed and lingering, giving us a visual representation of the United States from Los Angeles’s Mulholland Drive to a Chicago subway station to a food court in Seattle. Furthermore, the thoughts of the subjects are captured with the ear of an ethnographer and edited for clarity and curiosity, which allows for moments of gravity as well as humor. For each person, the wall means something explicit about freedom, democracy, and patriotism, but implicit in these descriptions are ideas about propaganda, indoctrination, our intergenerational relationships with history, and the broken promises of capitalism.” – The Nation
