by Daniel Pecoraro, Staff Writer

Athena Film Festival closed out amid International Women’s Day and then scary times across Broadway, casting a pall on Sunday’s flicks. It’s hard to hold a film festival, even one focused on envisioning new opportunities for equality and breaking down obstacles to get there, when the host institution’s associates are complicit in truly heinous acts. Nevertheless, I suppose the show must go on, and as such here are three films I saw over the last two days of the fest.

Who in the Hell is Regina Jones?
Directed by Billy Miossi and Soraya Sélène
Written by Regina Jones
Starring Regina Jones
Unrated
Runtime: 1 hour and 39 minutes
Seeking distribution

In retrospect, there was no way Who in the Hell is Regina Jones? was not going to succeed as a film overall, taking into account its dynamic subject. Even if it were all stale talking heads and the same archival footage of the Watts uprising, the Black Power movement, and soul, funk, R&B’s ascendance in the 1960s and ‘70s, it still would have turned out okay. But for the first twenty minutes or so of Regina Jones, I was worried it was going to be just that: a rote recitation of Jones’s family history (granddaughter to the founder of the largest Black-owned insurance company west of the Mississippi, married at fifteen to aspiring TV journalist Ken Jones, mother of five at the age of twenty-two) leading up to her successes as co-founder and all-around manager of the pioneering music and entertainment newspaper Soul, with a jump to the present day thrown in.

The break from these doldrums thankfully arrives when the reticent, emotionally compartmentalizing Jones recalls the 1965 uprising in her home neighborhood of Watts, while working as an operator for the LAPD. The moment is depicted by Billy Miossi and Soraya Sélène as a rupture, with the photography and video you might expect punctured by jarring cuts and the audio of Jones recalling the first distress call she received the night the rebellion kicked off. Then the story shifts to the aftermath, as the uprising helped make Ken and Regina’s careers. Ken jumped from radio to television, first as a reporter and then an anchor. And similarly, he dreamed up Soul, with Regina starting as a cofounder and writer and quickly becoming editor-in-chief as the work of the newspaper clashed with Ken’s newfound television success.

And of course it’s Soul’s archive that provides a key tentpole in the film. The newspaper’s issues, photography, and audio interviews, all under the auspices of Regina’s grandson (and the film’s archival producer) Matt Jones, creatively exemplify the clear impact it had, from Regina’s close and long-standing personal connection with Aretha Franklin, to Donna Summer turning a twenty-minute photoshoot into a four-hour one after quickly putting her trust in Soul photographer Bruce Talamon. But Miossi and Sélène’s greater triumph is drawing the primary subject out of her shell and recognizing the importance of her story, not just through her home movies and photos but in the here-and-now. Whether it’s going from Soul to working as a cashier at a soul food restaurant in the wake of the paper’s dissolution, her divorce, and the death of her mother, and then becoming head of publicity at SOLAR Records followed by her own PR firm, to memories of her husband and her eldest son Kenny, getting Regina Jones to talk about herself and bring her own story to light is a gift. It could have gone deeper but, given that the title came from Regina doubting her own place in the culture, Who in the Hell is Regina Jones? is still a great achievement.

Paint Me A Road Out of Here
Directed by Catherine Gund
Starring Faith Ringgold and Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter
Unrated
Runtime: 1 hour and 29 minutes
Seeking distribution

I will admit, when I was growing up, I didn’t realize there was a gap between how big a deal Faith Ringgold was in my life and how big a deal she ought to have been. I grew up on Tar Beach and Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in the Sky, picture books adapted from her story quilts. (Tar Beach was featured on Reading Rainbow, for goodness’ sake — for a ‘90s kid, it didn’t get any bigger than that.) But I did not have a sense of how ahead of her time Ringgold was, and how her art bled directly into her activism.

Paint Me a Road Out of Here tells part of this story, bringing to light Ringgold’s career, and that of contemporary artist Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter’s, in the context of women’s prisons and the decarceration movement. The film centers on two installations at Rikers Island. Ringgold’s painting For the Women’s House (1972) envisioned lives for the women incarcerated at the Women’s House of Detention, a response from a woman inmate at Rikers which gives the film its title. Women in roles of agency across politics, public transit, police, and sports were not yet made manifest in this period, giving the painting an aspirational quality. But after New York City moved women out of the House of D and into the Rose M. Singer Center, the painting did not make the trip to Rosies. Instead, it remained in the jail (turned into an all-men’s building in the complex), and the painting was whitewashed, exemplifying Rikers’ indifferent brutality and appalling the corrections officers who had known the impact the painting had. The film tells the story of the Ringgold fighting to have the painting restored and rehoused. This story intertwines with Baxter’s as-yet-unrealized piece replacing For the Women’s House ahead of Rikers’ statutorily mandated closure in 2027 (which the city, to its shame, is unlikely to complete on time). Baxter has used her experience as a ward of the state and an incarcerated person in her multidisciplinary art, including a documentary of her own recounting her experience giving birth while shackled in prison. As the film shows, her murals affirm the possibilities for incarcerated people on the outside, and their humanity and potential on the inside, if given the proper support.

Both Ringgold and Baxter’s stories are clearly important ones, bringing to light not only the racialized nature of the art world but connecting it to the prison-industrial complex. This intertwining of museums as centers for reifying conformity and polite society, particularly through a white lens, with the correctional system for stamping out nonconformity, is a concept I had never fully considered until seeing the film. And it also brings to light key players in the decarceration movement, from organizations like the Women’s Community Justice Association to officials like de Blasio-era commissioner of corrections Vincent Schiraldi, who fought to get For the Women’s House out of Rikers. But ultimately in bouncing from these different stories, the film ends up scattered. I hate to say it, because it’s such a copout, but Paint Me a Road may have worked better as a miniseries (with segments on Ringgold, on Baxter, on art in prison generally, and on decarceration) rather than as a single, nonlinear film. The doc’s principle is certainly worthy, and its principal figures have a clear impact, but the film itself ends up a bit muddled in time and space.

Mexico 86
Written and directed by César Diaz
Starring Bérénice Béjo, Matheo Labbé, Leonardo Ortizgris, and Julieta Egurrola
In Spanish with English subtitles
Runtime: 1 hour and 39 minutes
Opening in French theaters April 23, seeking North American distribution

I came into Mexico 86 with a bit of trepidation. Not only was it the last film of the night, the not exactly coveted 9 PM Saturday slot, it was noted as a French-Belgian coproduction set in Mexico. I’ve seen that film before — in the past eight weeks at that — and hoo boy was I not a fan. But I was pleasantly surprised that Mexico 86 had me riveted and was a tense and thoughtful period thriller.

As you would presume from the title, Mexico 86 begins in…Guatemala, in 1976! Maria (Argentine-French actress Bérénice Béjo, formerly of 2011’s The Artist, dir. Michel Hazanavicius) has witnessed the murder of her comrade in the rebel Liberation Army, and father of her infant son Marco. Faced with the choice of sending Marco to be raised in a revolutionary hive in Cuba, flee with him and her compatriot Miguel (Leonardo Ortizgris), or leave him with her mother Eugenia (Julieta Egurrola), she chooses the latter. Ten years later, on the eve of the World Cup, Maria and Miguel — now partners in love and in the struggle — are in Mexico City, operating under an array of covers and, in Maria’s case, a bunch of wigs, and welcome Marco (Matheo Labbé) and a dying Eugenia for a visit. But Marco, it turns out, is arriving to stay, against the wishes of Maria’s fellow revolutionaries, and he and his mother have an awful lot of catching up to do.

This is a rare “can a woman have it all?” film where having it all involves being a freedom fighter and undercover agent against a repressive regime, in addition to being a mom. And why shouldn’t the effort to build a new society through armed struggle not involve making the world safe for mothers to be with their children?

Béjo ably portrays Maria as she navigates the threats on her life, strives to ensure Miguel and Marco’s safety, attempts to provide some normalcy for Marco even while he has to assume a new Mexican identity of his own, all while trying to get news of the Guatemalan dictatorship’s butcheries published in the magazine where she works under an alias as a proofreader. It’s all a tough job with hard choices, exemplified in the third act by what I will only describe as a kind of binding-of-Isaac reworking, a crisis of faith amid the struggle and the precarity of her own life. Similarly, Ortizgris gives a thoughtful performance as Miguel, who quickly becomes a father figure and protector for Marco, a kind of gentle revolutionary. And writer-director César Diaz has crafted taut story with surprising depth over its 99 minutes, complemented by Rémi Boubal’s score. Compared to that other Euro-Mexican flick, this one’s worth a watch once it gets a North American release.

Find all the latest Athena film fest dispatches from MovieJawn’s Daniel Pecoraro here.

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