This blog will present news items about the motion picture business, with emphasis on lower budget, independent film in most cases. Some reviews or commentaries on specific films, with emphasis on significance (artistic or political) or comparison, are presented. Note: No one pays me for these reviews; they are not "endorsements"! Starting in May 2016, many of the reviews for new feature films have been done on a hosted Wordpress site, and this blog now mostly does shorts and older films.
Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!
"The Blood of Yingzhou District" tells the story of children orphaned by AIDS in China, caused when parents are forced to share needles to sell blood
The 40-minute documentary “The Blood of Yingzhou District”,
by Ruby Yang (2006), presents a shocking picture of AIDS and HIV-disease in rural
China, transmitted through the re-use of needles when parents sell blood for
income. The film is shot in a flat,
winter landscape of poor villages in the province of Anhui in China, in the
eastern part of the country at mid-latitude, about 200 miles in from the
ocean.
Much of the film focuses on one orphaned child, Gao Jun, who
speaks at the end of the film when fed a flower plant by an uncle, HIV-infected
himself, who has finally taken him in as a foster child.
The film talks a lot about family responsibility and “filial”
piety. Other family members often wind
up raising children orphaned by AIDS. A
few of the children presented in the film were infected themselves at birth. All of the children are stigmatized in rural
schools.
The living conditions shown in the rural villages are indeed
shabby and rather shocking, Toward the end of the film, there is discussion of
attempts to get medication from the West for Chinese families in rural areas,
presumably like protease inhibitors.
The music is by Brian Keane, but includes a famous cello and piano passage by Bach.
The official site is here, from Thomas Lennon Films and Cinema Guild.
I thought about the 1968 MGM film "The Shoes of the Fisherman", by Michael Anderson (based on the novel by Morris West), where the first Russian Pope (fictitious) settles a crisis (resembling the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962) by a deal to feed "starving Chinese", just dealing with Mao's Cultural Revolution. A Catholic friend, himself another graduate student with whom I saw the film, disagreed that this could even happen. The 1963 book had a very sympathetic passage about homosexuality in the Catholic Church that sticks in my mind.
Wikipedia does not have a lot of images of the region; one
of the closest would be the bridge in Fuhang, link here , p.d., not author given (Creative Commons 1.0). But all the
scenery in the film is rural. The second picture is mine, winter in rural MD.
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