{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"The Gory Details Of Corruption And Death","description":"I taste-tested two wonderful films from the abundance of The Hamptons International Film Festival\u2019s 2018 roster. Don\u2019t miss the world premiere of the new documentary, \u201cThe Panama Papers\u201d, directed by veteran documentarian Alex Winter, (\u201cTrust Machine\u201d, \u201cDeep Web\u201d), and co-produced by Laura Poitras, (\u201cRisk\u201d, \u201cCitizen Four\u201d), which is a start-to-finish thriller about global money laundering, in an age that one journalist in the film dubbed \u201cnear French Revolution levels of economic inequality;\u201d and \u201cTo Dust" a darkly comic first feature directed by Shawn Snyder and produced by husband and wife team Alessandro Nivola, (\u201cDisobedience\u201d, \u201cLaurel Canyon\u201d), and Emily Mortimer (\u201cThe Newsroom\u201d, \u201cDoll & Em\u201d), long-time Amagansett locals and actors, starring Geza Rohrig and Matthew Broderick. The film "The Panama Papers," starts when a person calling themselves John Doe offers access to documents from the Panamanian law firm and corporate service provider Mossack Fonseca to two relatively unknown journalists at the paper S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung in Munich, Germany. The digital documents reveal the identities of key players in the secret world of the law firm\u2019s wealthy clients. By setting up offshore companies, or shell companies, or \u201cspecial purpose vehicles,\u201d a term Mossack Fonseca liked to use, they shielded the super rich from paying tax on income. Like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden before him, The Panama Papers\u2019 leaker, John Doe, is a whistleblower who aims to be our global conscience. In his Panama Papers Manifesto, written after the publication of the documents, he refers to the information contained in the papers as \u201c\u2026a complete erosion of ethical standards, ultimately leading to a novel system we still call Capitalism, but which is tantamount to economic slavery,\u201d and says, \u201cSo now is the time for real action, and that starts with asking questions.\u201d Director Alex Winter\u2019s idea was to construct the film \u201c\u2026like a political thriller, which is really what the story was. I wanted people to feel what it was like for these two journalists at S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung, respected, but relatively unknown, underdog journalists who were handed the scoop of a lifetime. What do they do with it? How do they make sure it\u2019s protected and gets out into the world properly?\u201d When the story was initially published in 2015, Mr. Winter told me, it didn\u2019t stick. \u201cThose in power in politics on both sides of the aisle, corporations, media outlets, and some celebrities, just wanted this story to go away, and the story was very quickly buried. That\u2019s why I wanted to give it a big, broad documentary examination,\u201d he told me. There\u2019s a reason why The New York Times and The Washington Post and other big papers rejected the Panama Papers leak when it came to them, he said. It was much too big a story for one news outlet to handle, so the editors of the S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung made the difficult decision to share the leak with the ICIJ, The International Consortium Of Independent Journalists, who spearheaded the huge project, ultimately gathering over four hundred journalists, who took part in the collective effort to secretly investigate and release 11.5 million leaked documents simultaneously across the world in 2015. The global story eventually incriminated 12 world leaders, 128 politicians and public officials, celebrities and other public figures. The collaboration on a story this big could also offer safety, some thought, from retaliation by people in power. U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s corporations alone were named over three thousand times in the leaked documents. \u201cIt\u2019s very rare to have a businessman turned president who is so blatantly and heavily involved in Offshore,\u201d said Mr. Winter. \u201cOn the left you have Justin Trudeau and major players in his administration. It\u2019s everywhere. It\u2019s Nike, it\u2019s Apple. It\u2019s every major corporation for the most part, and most major government players.\u201d \u201cThe systemic corruption we\u2019re talking about in this film is really perpetrated by everybody, entire structures of government are implicated,\u201d said Mr. Winter. \u201cBanks, lobbyists, politicians, media outlets\u200aare funded by huge organisms of this very corrupt system. A lot of the information we get from news organizations and politicians can be skewed in their favor. It was really important for me to show this as a systemic problem. If you\u2019re thinking it doesn\u2019t matter that the lion\u2019s share of public money that we need for public services around the world is being stolen, then you\u2019ve been propagandized.\u201d \u201cMy epiphany in working on this film, \u201c Winter told me, \u201cwas that it became jaw-droppingly clear that this wasn\u2019t a case of just thousands of of acts of criminality. It was revealing an entire system, essentially of how our economy really works. Income inequality is systemic by design, not happenstance\u200a\u2014\u200athat was really staggering to me. When you have systems run by very wealthy people who have the ability to change laws, then over time you can construct a system that is essentially a kleptocracy, that steals money from the poor and the middle class and hands it to the wealthy.\u201d In the feature film "To Dust" Geza Rohrig plays a Hasidic cantor having trouble coping with the death of his wife. Searching for relief from gruesome nightmares about his wife\u2019s decaying body, he finds a community biology professor, Matthew Broderick, somehow willing to teach him more about the process. According to the HIFF press release \u201cthe two form an unlikely bond via clandestine biological experiments, despite the blasphemous consequences.\u201d \u201cThe tone of the film is so unique and unusual. There were people who were skeptical that you could marry a comedy with subject matter about death and rotting corpses. It\u2019s hard to pitch that!\u201d Alessandro Nivola told me, laughing. Ms. Mortimer found the script for \u201cTo Dust\u201d while she was on a panel of judges for the Tribeca Film Institute Sloan Screenwriting Competition. \u201cWe both loved the script, which won the competition, and we thought we could do it on a modest scale\u2026of course, we hadn\u2019t taken into account what it would be like to get a pig to do what you wanted it to do\u2026\u201d Nivola told me. \u201cIt took us two years to raise the money, and every person who worked on it did it as a labor of love.\u201d said Mr. Nivola. \u201cThey all really responded to the script. We loved the director, Shawn Snyder, when we met him and he had a really strong idea of how he wanted to make the film. Emily had worked with the cinematographer, Xavi Gimenez, when he shot Transsiberian, which Emily was in. It\u2019s really high class. We had a dream cast that came together easily and naturally. We were so lucky to get Geza Rohrig, who starred in the Oscar-winning best foreign language film, Son Of Saul. Geza loved it the minute he read it.\u201d Matthew Broderick loved it too, said Mr. Nivola.   During the two-year process of producing \u201cTo Dust,\u201d Mr. Nivola was offered a role playing a Hasidic Rabbi in the film \u201cDisobedience\u201d with Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams. \u201cI couldn\u2019t believe it. I would come into our office every week as I was growing the the beard for the rabbi in \u201cDisobedience,\u201d and I was slowly starting to look more and more like Shmuel, the cantor in the film we were producing. It was an ongoing joke,\u201d he said. Because of his work in \u201cDisobedience,\u201d Mr. Nivola became close to many of the Orthodox Lubavitch people in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, especially the family of Zalman Raksin, who took him under their wing, helping him with the pronunciation and physicality that he needed to play the character. Mr. Zalman ended up becoming the Hasidic advisor for their production of \u201cTo Dust,\u201d and he and his son ended up playing characters in the film. \u201cHe really helped us bridge the divide. It allowed us to be accurate and respectful of the Orthodox community,\u201d said Mr. Nivola. \u201cThose two movies were a great coincidence.\u201d The film went on to win the audience award and Shawn Snyder won as best first-time feature director at The Tribeca Film Festival. Gorgeously unembellished by its cinematographer and director, the film is as spare as the plain pine box that Shmuel\u2019s wife is buried in. But the two main characters are full of surprises and deviations from what could have become caricatures. We see the biology professor at home rolling a joint and wearing an ex-girlfriend\u2019s frilly robe, Shmuel emptying a jar of Gefilte fish into the toilet so that he can collect some of the earth from his wife\u2019s grave, his sons with a flashlight trying to dispel a demon through his toe while he sleeps. Offering insight into worlds usually closed to us, there is a beautiful balance struck by the subtle performances from actors who know how to portray complex characters who are anything but living on one note. It\u2019s difficult to walk the line between irreverence and mockery, but there is never a doubt that no one is being ridiculed here. These characters are so like us that we can actually go with them into shocking and far fetched situations, and by the middle of the film we ride the line deftly between the comedy and tragedy into deeper and stranger truths. ","author_name":"Phantom Hampton Podcast","author_url":"http:\/\/phantomhampton.libsyn.com","html":"