DER SCHWARZE KANAL
Der schwarze Kanal (The Black Channel) was a series of political propaganda programs aired weekly between 1960 and 1989 by East German state television broadcaster DFF. A perfect name for our line-up of films that are currently playing or coming soon.
November 14-20: THERE WAS, THERE WAS NOT
USA/Armenia | 94 min. | 2024 | Armenian with English subtitles.
Director: Emily Mkrtichian
In THERE WAS, THERE WAS NOT, myth and reality intertwine to reveal the lives of four women facing the loss of their homeland. This poetic, urgent film offers an intimate portrait of four Armenian women whose lives were forever altered by the invasion of Artsakh. What began as a quiet observation of their daily lives became, after the war, an urgent chronicle of survival — a cinematic act of memory and resistance. Their stories transform grief into beauty and pain into something enduring, reminding us of the power of story to keep a place alive even as it is being erased.
In 2018, Emily Mkrtichian initially set out to make a film about the daily lives and hopes of women in Artsakh – an autonomous, disputed ethnically Armenian territory between Azerbaijan and Armenia with an enduring legacy of conflict. She followed a minesweeper, an aspiring politician, a women’s rights activist, and a judo champion as they navigated a precarious peace while building their lives and communities. In 2020, when Azerbaijan launched a surprise attack and war broke out again, Mkrtichian continued filming as shelling began around her, witnessing her subjects’ worlds and dreams immediately transform. The documentary evolved from an observational meditation on strength into an urgent portrayal of survival, capturing the personal and cultural impacts of a homeland at risk of loss, and the power of story to keep it alive.
November (TBD): PAINT ME A ROAD OUT OF HERE
USA | 90 min. | 2024 | English
Director: Catherine Gund
Featuring artists Faith Ringgold and Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, PAINT ME A ROAD OUT OF HERE uncovers the whitewashed history of Faith’s masterpiece “For the Women’s House” and follows its 50-year journey from Rikers Island to the Brooklyn Museum in a heartbreaking, funny and true parable for a world without mass incarceration.
December (TBD): NIGHT IN WEST TEXAS
USA | 83 min. | 2025 | English
Director: Deborah S. Esquenazi
In 1981, Father Patrick Ryan, a closeted Catholic priest, was found murdered in a seedy motel in a West Texas boomtown. The crime scene suggested a brutal act of “overkill.” A year later, a 23-year-old out-of-work oil engineer, James Harry Reyos, who was the last person seen with the victim, was charged with the priest’s murder. James was convicted to a 38-year sentence, despite the fact that he was out of the state at the time of the crime.
Law enforcement in the oil-rich town of Odessa, Texas, knew they were targeting an innocent man, but James was seen as a “throwdown character”—he was closeted and Native American, two characteristics that the prosecution used to exploit rampant homophobia and racism locally.
But times had changed when forty years later under a new Odessa Police Department, Chief Mike Gerke, reopened Reyos’ case when his daughter-in-law, a true-crime podcast fan, raised questions about the conviction after listening to an episode of “Crime Junkie.” Gerke’s re-investigation uncovered a massive oversight: latent bloody fingerprints from the scene had never been processed through AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System), technology that didn’t exist in the 1980s. After reinvestigating the prints, three suspects emerge to breathe new life into Reyos’s battle to clear his name.
NIGHT IN WEST TEXAS, a feature documentary by Peabody & Critic’s Choice-winning journalist Deborah S. Esquenazi, embeds with the Innocence Project as they forge a rare alliance with the Chief of Police and the District Attorney’s office to rebuild James’s case, despite the slim odds of exonerations granted to defendants in the State of Texas. Will James win and live free after 40 years?