Fuel
Thursday, September 2
7:00 PM
Mercury Cafe
2199 California St, Denver
$5 suggested donation

Director Josh Tickell takes us along for his 11 year journey around the world to find solutions to America’s addiction to oil. A shrinking economy, a failing auto industry, rampant unemployment, an out-of-control national debt, and an insatiable demand for energy weigh heavily on all of us. Fuel shows us the way out of the mess we’re in by explaining how to replace every drop of oil we now use, while creating green jobs and keeping our money here at home. The film never dwells on the negative, but instead shows us the easy solutions already within our reach.

Kevorkian
Monday, September 6
7:00 PM
Hooked on Colfax
3215 E. Colfax Ave, Denver
$5 suggested donation

Dr. Jack Kevorkian, whose participation in at least 130 assisted suicides earned him the nickname “Dr. Death,” courted controversy in the 1990’s by arguing for death with dignity and ending the physical and psychological anguish of the terminally ill. After being exonerated of murder charges in five separate trials, Kevorkian was found guilty in 1999 and sentenced to 10-to-25 years in prison for the 1998 death of Thomas Youk - the first patient whose death Kevorkian videotaped. Despite serving eight and a half years in prison, Kevorkian today insists, “I don’t have regrets. In fact, I’m thankful.”

“Kevorkian” offers a “Lion-in-Winter”-style portrayal of a man whose compassion and vision has largely been misunderstood, perhaps, at times, even by he himself. One friend compares him to “an Old-Testament prophet. He’s very disagreeable, hard to take, nobody you want over for a weekend, but somebody who tells us some unpleasant truths.”

Enjoy Poverty
Thursday, September 9
7:00 PM
Mercury Cafe
2199 California St, Denver
$5 suggested donation

Absurdist satire is not what comes to mind when people think of documentaries about poverty in Africa, but filmmaker Renzo Martens’ approach is more Andy Kaufman than Nicholas Kristof. Traveling the Congo and observing the ways Western interests profit from misery and degradation in the region— selling photographs of malnourished children, paying plantation workers so little they cannot feed their families, flying in to dig for gold that will be taken and sold elsewhere—Martens decides that poverty is a natural resource that Africans need to learn to exploit. He sets up a makeshift school to teach wedding photographers to take pictures of war and raped women rather than celebrations, because they can earn 50 times as much by photographing misery. When this plan fails after an official tells the men their photographs are not good enough to earn them press credentials, Martens tells the men they should resign themselves to their poverty, since it will never change. It makes for uncomfortable viewing. No one is spared—even charity organizations like UNICEF and Doctors Without Borders are shown to be callous and exploitative in some ways—and most disturbing is Martens’ own interaction with the villagers, as he refuses to let them in on the joke. It is a kind of cruelty, another humiliation for the villagers. In making himself a villain of sorts, Martens has abdicated the filmmaker’s privileged position and produced a film that allows no one, not even the viewer, to escape awareness of their own complicity.