Gini Reticker Movies

Producer/director Gini Reticker (A Decade Under the Influence, Class of 2006) turns her attentions to the topic of peaceful protest by exploring the efforts of Liberian Leymah Gbowee in ridding her government of corruption and paving the way for the election of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf -- Africa's first elected female head of state. Shortly after Charles Taylor was elected as president of Liberia in 1996, he proved to be a hopelessly corrupt dictator. Opposing warlords from the north were terrorizing, raping, and murdering Liberians by the hundreds of thousands, sparking a bloody civil war, and many speculated that Taylor was quietly supporting them from the sidelines. Gbowee had already lived through one civil war, and the prospect of another was simply too much to bear. Determined to bring peace to her troubled country, Gbowee called on everyday Liberian women from neighboring churches to form the Christian Women's Peace Initiative -- a group dedicated to protesting the war that had claimed 250,000 lives and displaced over a million citizens. The women of the Christian Women's Peace Initiative dressed in white and came out to protest the war by the thousands, even going so far as to surround the building in Ghana where the peace talks were taking place and physically prevent the men from leaving until a deal had been bartered. In addition to proving that peaceful protest could indeed affect change in times of unparalleled strife, the Christian Women's Peace Initiative also helped pave the way for Johnson-Sirleaf to be elected as Liberia's first-ever female president. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

In the late '60s, American culture experienced a period of change as the youth movement challenged conventional attitudes about politics, sex, drugs, and gender issues, while the advancement of the Vietnam War found many citizens questioning the actions and wisdom of their government for the first time. As American attitudes continued to evolve, so did the American film industry; as costly big-budget blockbusters nearly brought the major studios to the brink of collapse, smaller and more personal films such as Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, and Five Easy Pieces demonstrated there was a ready audience for bold and challenging entertainment. As the '60s faded into the 1970s, American cinema moved into an exciting period of creativity and stylistic innovation, which led to such landmark films as The Godfather, MASH, The Last Picture Show, Shampoo, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Chinatown, and Taxi Driver, and new freedom for directors and screenwriters. Ironically, however, it was another pair of big-budget blockbusters directed by students of the new wave of filmmaking -- Jaws and Star Wars -- which brought the studios back to power and put an end to Hollywood's flirtation with offbeat creativity. A Decade Under the Influence is a documentary which explores the rise and fall of new American filmmaking in the 1970s, and features interviews with many of the key directors, screenwriters, and actors whose work typified the movement, including Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Roger Corman, Dennis Hopper, Jon Voight, and Julie Christie. A Decade Under the Influence received its world premier at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival, and an expanded version of the film was later shown on the premium cable outlet The Independent Film Channel; the documentary was the final work of co-director Ted Demme, who died shortly before the film was completed. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

The Lusty Lady is a peep-show strip club in San Francisco whose dancers were not happy with management. While the club paid good wages and the performers didn't have to participate in legally iffy practices such as "private lap dances," they made no provisions for sick days, gave Caucasian dancers priority in scheduling over African-Americans, pressured dancers into "dating" friends of the management, and allowed patrons to videotape their performances without their knowledge or consent for amateur porn films. So the women of the Lusty Lady, in the grand tradition of the American labor movement, decide to unionize. When negotiations with management broke down, the dancers went on strike, with both the strippers and their customers picketing the club. The documentary Live Nude Girls, Unite! offers a witty but sincere look at the Lusty Lady strike, which paved the way for unionization of exotic dancers in a number of other major American cities. Co-director Julia Query was also one of the club's dancers as well as a key organizer in the strike, and the film also takes a look at her sometimes rocky relationship with her mother, feminist activist Dr. Joyce Wallace. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide