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.

Power Alley (Levante)
Directed by Lillah Halla
Written by Lillah Halla and María Elena Morán
Starring Ayomi Domenica, Loro Bardot, Onna Silva, and Heloísa Pires
In Portuguese with English subtitles
Rated 15 in the UK / unrated in the US
Runtime: 1 hour and 30 minutes
Now streaming on BFI Player in the UK; seeking North American distribution

Folks may recall from my Athena 2023 coverage that I was (and remain) acutely aware of the threat on the lives of abortion providers and abortion seekers, all while medical abortion is safer than Tylenol. But I honestly thought that this was a uniquely American problem, given the confluence of enough anti-choice fundamentalists, historic restrictions on abortion even during the Roe/Casey era, and just an awful lot of guns. Sure, other countries have broad restrictions on abortion, or just give abortion-seekers an onerous runaround — as festival-screening short Nine Days in August (dir. Ella Knorz, 2024) showed from a German lens. But 2023’s Power Alley (aka Levante) shows that this culture of not just fear, but terrorism, persists in a transnational sphere.

As Power Alley shows, abortion is largely illegal in Brazil (with criminal punishment to abortion seekers and providers), but legal in the neighboring Paraguay. Star prep school volleyball player Sofia (Ayomi Domenica) is caught between these two systems, the daughter of a Brazilian father and professional beekeeper João (Rômulo Braga) and a deceased Paraguayan mother (but lacking the documentation proving Paraguayan citizenship). When she finds out she is pregnant, amid a championship tournament and a possible university scholarship in Chile, she seeks out a termination to the pregnancy however she can. But in the process, she falls under the prey of whatever the Brazilians call “crisis pregnancy centers”; essentially a fake clinic to talk her out of the abortion. Sofia, with her father’s eventual help, will stop at nothing to get an abortion, but conversely the head of the clinic (Gláucia Vandeveld) is similarly forceful in her invasions of privacy to stop Sofia.

The tension brought on by the extent of Gloria and her antiabortionist cohort’s regime of terror (up to and including a home invasion and vandalism) lays bare how inhuman people can get under the guise of preserving life. But this tension is cut, jarringly at times, with the love and support Sofia has from her team, especially her teammate and sapphic partner Bel (Loro Bardot) and her coach Sol (Grace Passô). Largely without Sofia’s knowledge, the team bands together to get the funds needed for Sofia’s procedure, pledging to win the tournament and pool the prize money to Sofia.

The film is a bit uneven at times — I wasn’t sure what to make of the cuts to João’s honey business, but it was clearly important enough to director and co-writer Lillah Halla to make it a regular motif — and Sofia’s discovery of her pregnancy and attempts to end it feel close enough to films like Never Rarely Sometimes Always (dir. Eliza Hittman, 2020) to feel a bit staid. With that being said… Maybe that just reinforces the global nature of the obstacles patriarchal societies have placed in front of people seeking abortion.

I was surprised that more emphasis was not placed on Sofia’s team being such a motley bunch. That’s particularly the case for Nicolle (Onna Silva), a trans player who we see injecting hormones in the locker room, which felt like a big deal to me — and would seem to me as revolutionary in a repressive, conservative society. Though again, this may just be from an uninformed and US-centric lens as a viewer — which further proves Power Alley as such an eye-opener, and a riveting one at that.

Spacewoman
Written and Directed by Hannah Berryman
Starring Col. Eileen Collins
Unrated
Runtime: 1 hour and 41 minutes
Now available for institutional licensing

I felt like there were two elephants in the room while watching Spacewoman, written and directed by Hannah Berryman and based on Col. Eileen Collins’ co-authored memoir Through the Glass Ceiling to the Stars. The film itself is a somewhat dialed-in blow-by-blow of Collins’ upbringing in poverty in Elmira, NY, her scraping together the cash to take flying lessons, and ultimately her career as a test pilot ahead of being the first woman to pilot, and then command, the space shuttle. Each of her four missions — STS-63, an initial rendezvous with Mir; STS-84, which saw Atlantis dock with the Russian station; STS-93, which launched a new space telescope; and STS-114, the return to flight following the 2003 loss of Columbia upon re-entry — had a clear impact, not only on Collins’s trailblazing role but for the achievement in space exploration and foreign affairs. Berryman presents them each with care, though with a heavily didactic tone at times.

The story of these missions, especially STS-114 and its challenges to ensure the safe return of its crew, is told with an expected tension — Collins went to frickin’ space and came back, after all! — ratcheted up by Marcelo Zarvos’s strings-heavy score. On top of this, there’s the family story, particularly the dynamic between Collins’ daughter Bridget living with the inherent risks of her father’s career as a commercial airline pilot and her mother’s work as an astronaut, and the attendant feeling of abandonment.

But I kept peering beyond the four corners of the doc. As the federal government wages war on “DEI” — both the traditional definition of strategies to ensure that arms of the government like the Air Force and NASA resemble the whole of America, and the creeping connotation that “DEI” means “who’s a person of color or a woman with a high-level public-facing job,” — I’m not sure that this movie could be shown at Colorado Springs or Cape Canaveral under the current administration, which is a chilling thought. Equally disheartening is looking back on the age of opportunity for post-Communist Russia and former Soviet satellites. There was a time, long since passed, when working together on missions like STS-84 or the collaboration on the International Space Station meant putting the old ways of the Cold War behind us, breaking bread (or dehydrated meals) between nations, and instilling a new era of trust and human rights, now seemingly abandoned in favor of regimes of empire among both mid-century superpowers. I kept wondering what Collins would think of the impact of her career not just in the film, but right now. And while it of course isn’t the fault of Spacewoman that it doesn’t have the answers — documentaries don’t have an auto-refresh setting — it still left me wanting.

Home Court
Directed by Erica Tanamachi
Written by Jean Kawahara and Erica Tanamachi
Starring Ashley Chea, Jayme Kiyomura Chan, Baov Chea, and Lida Chea
In English and Cambodian with English subtitles
Unrated
Runtime: 1 hour and 35 minutes
Premiering on PBS’s American Experience and streaming on PBS Passport March 24

Home Court tells a thrilling story, but it could have told a more insightful one. The doc centers on Ashley Chea, a first-generation Cambodian American and high school basketball star, and her parents who (with their parents) fled the Khmer Rouge and now run a donut shop in LA. Director Erica Tanamachi tracks Chea’s high school career from her sophomore year PCL tear through graduation and commitment to Princeton (the entire Princeton women’s basketball team was in the row behind me at the screening, making for a unique viewing experience!), showing her growth as a player and a leader.

It’s certainly enjoyable to see the Flintridge Prep Wolves as they stumble in Chea’s return to the court junior year, and make a championship run in senior year, as part of what team coach Jayme Kiyomura Chan describes as a “bunch of misfits.” And it is sweet to see Chea’s college visits with her father Baov, who introduced her to the game, as he and her mother Lida try and get some final time with Ashley before she heads to the east coast in the fall.

However behind the game coverage of Flintridge Prep and Chea’s club team, there’s a more interesting story that gets too short shrift: the world of all-Asian American basketball leagues in California, a key gateway to the game for Chea and Chan. Tanamachi tells the story of how the leagues were founded by Japanese American teams as a response to racist and exclusionary white leagues, how they persisted in the World War II era of Japanese American incarceration, and how they opened up to include players of other ethnicities like Chea. But the story is over and done with in a flash, with focus returning to Chea’s games. Maybe this is like asking folks to eat their broccoli before their dessert, but while Chea’s story is entertaining and (for sports fans, anyway) captivating, it’s just one player in a larger tradition. There is clearly a rich history in the Asian American leagues, and a lens through which to tell a multi-generational story of community resilience and growth while putting their stamp on an all-American game. But Home Court just doesn’t give this narrative enough space, opting for what I think is a safer, enjoyable, but less rewarding doc.

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

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