Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label music. Show all posts

Friday, June 08, 2012

Windi Earthworm, Ragged Clown


Windi Earthworm was an institution of the radical anglo left in 1980s Montreal. A crossdressing openly gay street musician who took it upon himself to educate the public about the Vancouver 5, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the destruction of nature, and the miseries of life under capitalism, Windi was a frequent performer at benefits put on by the scene. Indeed, generally he was by far the most popular act.

Windi was diagnosed HIV+ in the mid-eighties, and had moved to the countryside by 1986 - and when his health started to noticeably deteriorate, he left Quebec for the West Coast, settling in Victoria, B.C. He died in 1993.

A few years ago i put up a webpage on the Kersplebedeb site - Windi Earthworm Remembered - , which contains Windi's music in mp3 format, some photos of Windi, and some memories about Windi by his friend Michael Ryan. Until recently, it was the only place on the web with information about Windi, or where you could hear his words, in his voice.

Thankfully, and thanks to Claude Ouellette, there is now a second place, where you can also see Windi actually performing - the documentary film Ragged Clown - as Ouellette explains:
Filmed in 1984-1986 as a year-end film school project. I first met Windi in 1976, in Calgary on the 8th avenue mall. My friend D. and I wanted to hitchhike to Vancouver but ended up in Calgary. That first night, when we arrived there with no where to go and no one to contact Windi took us in for the night, at his pad he shared with a visual artist/bus driver lover. I had never met a gay person before. I later found out that this is what Windi would do, bring in wayward youth for the night, feed them and send them on their way. I stayed in Calgary for a few months and would see Windi performing every once in a while, in a skirt but not as a woman, in Calgary, in 1976...I didn't know or realize what he was singing about at the time but I sure thought he was courageous. I then met him again a few years later in Montreal. A few more years later, needing a year-end film school project, I decided to do a portrait of this man who, more than most, lived his life according to his principles. Windi was, of course, full of contradictions, like us all, but somehow that didn't matter with him.

Up on youtube here (or just click on the photo above). A treasure from the history of radical Montreal, of the history of queer Montreal, and great music to boot - really, check it out!


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Sunday, November 15, 2009

Crass: There is no authority but yourself...


heard about this video earlier tday, haven't checked it out yet bt thought some of you might be interested...


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Thursday, October 08, 2009

Newport 63: With God on Our Side



I can't sing "John Johanna" cause it's his story and his people's story - I gotta sing "With God On My Side" because it's my story and my people's story -
- Bob Dylan


The "social patriotism" that had inspired activists in the first half of the sixties came to seem naive or worse, and the radical analysis and uncompromising contempt of songs like "With God on Our Side" more truthful, politically and emotionally.


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Tuesday, April 28, 2009

There's a Fire Truck on My Ceiling: Windi Earthworm Remembered



Windi Earthworm was an institution of the radical anglo left in 1980s Montreal. A crossdressing openly gay street musician who took it upon himself to educate the public about the Vancouver 5, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the destruction of nature, and the miseries of life under capitalism, Windi was a frequent performer at benefits put on by the scene. Indeed, generally he was by far the most popular act.

Michael Ryan has written the following for my new webpage memorial to Windi, who died of AIDS in 1993:

There's a Fire Truck on My Ceiling

In 1978, the first time I met Windi Earthworm, he was sweeping (there’s no other word for it) out of the apartment of a mutual friend as I was entering, his grinning face framed by a flaming bush of hennaed red hair, wearing a loose-fitting shirt and a skirt your mama would’ve died for. A quick introduction and he was gone.

It wasn’t the first time I had seen Windi, mind you. I was familiar with him as the most idiosyncratic and mesmerizing of Montreal’s legion of buskers. Among the Dylan and Beatles covers, the occasional tasteful jazz or classical and the many traditional Latin American bands playing for quarters, Windi stood out. Aggressive, frenetically in motion, chiding, cajoling, even baiting his audiences – sometimes in drag, not feminine drag, no one would have mistaken Windi for a woman, this was a guy in a dress. His lyrics were hard and real and torn from his own life: drug deaths, homophobic attacks, militant resistance, street youth suicides, slumlords, ravaged prostitutes. But Windi wasn’t just some street poet of the underbelly, and his relationship to the street wasn’t reserved for his riveting performances. Many were the frightened young people who ate his food and slept on his couch, or perhaps you’d see him on the street dressed in his nun’s habit, so realistic that I once heard the cops address him as sister, handing out condoms or clean syringes. Never as part of a movement. Windi didn’t do movements – movements had rules – Windi wasn’t very good at rules.

Eventually, Windi and I became good friends. Brought together by the Vancouver 5 defence campaign. Windi had known some of the 5 well during the period he had lived in Vancouver. But again, Windi didn’t join the Free the Five Defence Committtee – groups and all that. The Vancouver 5 simply became part of his act. When AIM activist Gary Butler was transferred to a Montreal area prison, some of us set up a support group; Windi developed a rant that became an overall lesson in the oppression of Native people in North America. How many people read the leaflets we so painstakingly created? How many people stopped to listen to Windi’s rant? I’m pretty sure Windi wins.

Then, when I was living in West Germany in 1985, a letter came from Windi. He’d been diagnosed HIV-positive, still a death sentence at the time. By the time I got back to Montreal a year later, Windi had moved to the country. He was living in a shack with no electricity or running water – and trust me, Quebec winters suck. He was raising chickens, had a few goats, a garden and a sheep dog named Taj. For the next few years, Windi was my source of eggs and occasional fresh vegetables.

When Windi’s health started to noticeably deteriorate, he left Quebec for the West Coast, settling in Victoria, B.C. He knew his time was short, and he had a daughter in B.C. he wanted to be closer to. Windi died in 1993; I had visited him in Victoria a few weeks before. The disease had ravaged him; his once long red hair was cut short, gray and wispy. He slept most of the time I was there. From Victoria, I went to Colorado to visit friends. Shortly after I left, Windi was hospitalized for the last time. Every couple of days, I would call the hospital and we’d make small talk – what really was there to say – he was dying, and we both knew it.

The last time I spoke to Windi, he was less than 24 hours from death and in the grip of dementia. The last thing he said to me was, “there’s a fire truck on my ceiling.” Of course there was.

Unlike Michael, i never knew Windi very well - by the time i left home and joined the anglo anarchist scene in Montreal in 1986, he had the somewhat unreal quality of being well-known and well-loved by almost everyone i met, and yet he just wasn't around so much any more. So apart from a few casual conversations in friends' homes, at the Café Commun/Commune, at the Art dans la Rue anarchist arts festival, i never really knew him.

So i guess like many others, my relationship to Windi was a relationship to his music. And of course to stories of his exploits - stories that he himself would recount as he performed - the mental image i have constructed of his chaining himself to Anita Bryant is as real as if i had seen it with my own eyes. But over time he became to me someone who existed as his music, recorded on tapes that slowly degraded as they were played year-in-and-year-out. (Don't believe what anyone tells you: the advent of mp3s was a very good thing as far as recorded music was concerned!) And then finally, most likely in the fire that gutted the apartment i was living in back in the early nineties, the tapes themselves were no more.

So when my pal loaded up my usb key with music earlier this year, and i saw folders full of Windi's music, it was a both very pleasant and surprising! i'd just assumed those old bootleg tapes were the only form the music had existed in, while in fact people had been translating them into mp3s and sharing them around, quietly and low-key, amongst his friends and family.

These mp3s of Windi's music were recorded in the 1980s, one set live at the Café Commun/Commune - a collectively run restaurant that was cornerstone of the anglo radical left at the time - the other, Alive!, was a collection of some of Windi's favourite tunes, assembled as a demo in the hope of drumming up potential shows or possibly even a recording contract.

They are made available here with the permission of Windi's daughter.

Windi Earthworm -
Live at Café Commun/Commune

Windi Earthworm
Alive!

click on the above links to play the song - right-click to download or else click on the following to download all of the above in a great big zipfile (203mb)



Working on putting up the Windi Earthworm Remembered webpage, i googled Windi to see if there was anything up on the net i should be aware of. While there are a few mentions, as of this writing it's not much.

i did find two articles mentioned at the National Archives, which i went down and photocopied. They're both from Montreal gay newspapers from the 80s, and both are in French. Each in their own way, they both recount the constant harassment Windi endured from the Montreal police, who would routinely arrest him for playing on the street - and this despite the fact that he paid to have a permit to do so. As he explains in the audio news report accessible here, "I draw a large crowd, I sing anti-socially I suppose as far as the police are concerned, I am a transvestite at times and that does stir up the police's blood I think..."

You can read these two articles here:

With the help of google, i learned that there is also a brief entry in Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada: A Selected Annotated Chronology , 1964-1975, that in May 1975 one John Windi "a.k.a. Windi Earthworm" was the first chairperson of the newly established Gay Information and Resources Calgary, a group that offered "weekly meetings, a speakers' bureau, political action, and a library."

Enticingly, i also learned that in 1986, Claude Ouellet produced a short film about Windi, entitled Ragged Clown, which was presented at the Gay Film Festival that year. (This film will hopefully be made available on the internet soon!)

More recently, Viviane Namaste has mentioned Windi in two of her books (C'était du spectacle!: l'histoire des artistes transsexuelles à Montréal and Invisible lives: the erasure of transsexual and transgendered people). Both times she refers to the same incident: in 1980 Windi (who had trained as a nurse) was refused employment by the Montreal General Hospital because he wore the "female" nurse's uniform. Seeking support for a human rights complaint, Windi approached l'Androgyne, Montreal's gay/lesbian/feminist at the time; but the bookstore collective refused to write a letter of support, citing the criticism that transsexuality was "sexist". (Note that by today's definitions, Windi clearly was not trans - he liked to be referred to as "he", he made no effort to pass, he stated that he would not perform at a women's festival "because that's for sisters" - but back in the day of course the term could easily have been used by and for someone who liked to dress in drag.)

Windi Earthworm lived at a time where it was still true that to be openly gay was to put yourself in opposition to the way the world was, no ideological hidden agenda required. And the leap to being not "just gay", but to seeing through the other lies of capitalist culture, was not so great as it is now. It was certainly a leap that more than one person made. It may be a different world today, but the lessons of our past, the joys and power of being yourself, of saying what you think, of sailing away from cookie-cutter America and not just hoping to recreate it, all these are worth remembering if not rediscovering.

And while you're at it, enjoy the music.


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Sunday, December 03, 2006

[Movie Review] Songbirds, a Musical Documentary about Women in Prison



Songbirds, a film by Brian Hill
lyrics by Simon Armitage, music by Simon Boswell
UK / 2005 / Betacam / 62 min / english
Contact: Sue Collins, Century Films, Studio 32, Clink Street Studios, 1 Clink Street, Londres SE19DG Angleterre. T: +44-207-378-6106 F: +44-207-407-6711 | sue.collins@centuryfilmsltd.com | www.centuryfilmsltd.com

i saw Songbirds somewhat by accident. It was on a double-bill with Cottonland, a film about drug addiction in Cape Breton Island. Cottonland was so good that i would have left the theatre right away to gather my thoughts and write a review, but i had bumped into friends and so i stayed to hang out with them for the second feature – and i was glad i did.

Songbirds is a documentary about women who are in prison. Not about “women in prison” – with the exception of a few incongruous discussions of lesbianism and masturbation there is nothing about prison life here – but about the lives and experiences of the women who end up incarcerated.

So this is about what happened before getting locked up, and it’s pretty horrific. Almost all of the women featured in Songbirds are survivors of male violence, including rape at the hands of strangers, husbands and fathers. With the exception of Theresa – the only obviously middle class woman interviewed, and tellingly the only one who committed a serious violent crime (manslaughter) and who was nevertheless getting out soon – male violence forms a backdrop from which it is almost impossible to separate their current imprisonment.

There is Mary, who is 35 and has been in and out of prison since age 15, when her own mother turned her in for having drugs in the home. As she explains it, her mother wanted to scare her, but never imagined she’d actually get locked up. Today, she has been in and out of prison for all but one of the past twenty years. At one point she mentions that she has been raped five times, at another she talks about her child being placed in care. We see scars up and down her arms from slashing.

Another woman, Sam, had a father who beat and raped both her mother and herself. When as an adult she saw her child beaten by her partner she found herself unable to intervene, so she brought him to school, hoping that the teacher would see the bruises and notify children’s services. They did, but with unforeseen consequences: her kids were taken away from her. This led to her marriage to an abusive well-to-do man, in a desperate (and unsuccessful) ploy to win custody back by showing that she had “gotten her life together.” She ended up in prison after setting his house on fire after he tried to coerce her into having sex with him.

Most of this film introduces us to other women with similar stories. In and of itself, i think this makes Songbirds well worth watching, and these interviews remind us that traditionally prison is not the main institution of patriarchal control.

As former political prisoner Susan Saxe explained in Gay Community News back in 1987:

My own experience among women in prison tells me, as numerous studies and observations of others have shown, that an overwhelming majority of incarcerated women began as victims of child abuse. What differentiates them from all the rest of the abused women who do not go to jail? Not much, except that like the battered women who finally turn on their attackers, they sometimes fought back. They rebelled against their abusers, became throw-away or run-away children, were jailed, or were placed in institutions by parents who saw them as “crazy” or “delinquent.”

Again, the message is the same: submit to abuse in private by a parent, husband or boyfriend, or fall prey to abuse by strangers – the pimps and pushers on the street or the social workers, wardens, officers and attendants in the prisons, mental hospitals and detention centers. (Susan Saxe, Telling Someone reprinted in Cages of Steel: The Politics of Imprisonment in the United States, Maisonneuve Press, Washington DC 1992)

Historically, for more “privileged” women the father and then husband was supposed to be able to play the role of jailor; she was in his custody, and the State was simply a last line of patriarchal defense if these more personal and informal mechanisms of control were somehow breached. The situation was more complicated for working class and poor women, and women from oppressed nations, but informal mechanisms of control were still far more important here than they were for men.

Today still, this history of informal male control means that for many women there is little freedom to be found on either side of the prison walls. This is the jarring fact alluded to by one woman after another in Songbirds, who explain that life “on the outside” is in many ways worst than life behind bars. Mary explains quite matter-of-factly that she got herself caught on purpose last time, just so that she could go back to her “home” behind bars. Sam described prison as a time out from the hell her life had become with her “successful” abusive husband. In a statement that really spoke to the fact that as a survivor she is both stronger and more “free” than many, she explains that if she doesn’t like things when released, she’ll just come back. “You can do that? Just choose to come back here?” asks the director… “Sure, I’ll just get a gun and shoot a few perverts. I could do that no problem,” she answers. And i’m sure she was not kidding…

Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur noted this very same phenomenon when she was being held at Rikers’ Prison in 1978. As she wrote in her essay Women In Prison: How It Is With Us:

For many, prison is not that much different from the street. It is, for some, a place to rest and recuperate. For the prostitute prison is a vacation from turning tricks in the rain and snow. A vacation from brutal pimps. Prison for the addict is a place to get clean, get medical work done and gain weight. Often, when the habit becomes too expensive, the addict gets herself busted, (usually subconsciously) so she can get back in shape, leave with a clean system ready to start all over again. One woman claims that for a month or two every year she either goes jail or to the crazy house to get away from her husband.

For many the cells are not much different from the tenements, the shooting galleries and the welfare hotels they live in on the street. Sick call is no different from the clinic or the hospital emergency room. The fights are the same except they are less dangerous. The police are the same. The poverty is the same. The alienation is the same. The racism is the same. The sexism is the same. The drugs are the same and the system is the same.

i am also reminded of the words of former political prisoner Bo Brown, who in the movie 3 Black Panthers and the Last Slave Plantation explains that “Prisons are just a microcosm of this [the outside]. This is just minimum security and it’s prettier you know, it’s green and lovely and we have more choices about where we go and what we eat and who we do things with, but the same things operate.”

There is no illusion here about prison playing a positive or therapeutic role. Just some stone cold realism and honesty about the extent to which you don’t have to be in prison to be imprisoned.

A truth which of course has more or less reality depending  on your class, nation, race, age… and most definitely your gender.

Songbirds would have been more on the mark had its director Brian Hill heard the words of these former political prisoners, who all analyze prison as an extension of other mechanisms of control. Unfortunately Hill seems to paint it as some kind of benevolent alternative. The words “country club” almost come to mind... so much so that i can’t help but see this as a bias, a desire to frame prisons (and, more broadly, the State) in a positive light. But then i also appreciate what he has said, that “it’s an awful indictment of any society that some people prefer to be in prison than out.”

----------------------

A film about women who have survived abuse is something of a long-shot in terms of the “public at large.” In real life women often have their very survival held against them; to have been a “victim” is to be dehumanized, and makes one less interesting than the “heroic” fantasy-figures Hollywood preps us to admire. Women who have survived male violence are often considered something of a social eyesore. The capitalist patriarchy trains us to mistake their battle-scars for weakness, their virtues for vices.

Much the same for prisoners – to be locked up is to be considered a “loser,” and the eyes glaze over as people tell their stories of how they ended up behind bars. Living in a capitalist society, infected with its shallow individualism, our minds acquire an orientation by which we focus on the trivial and ignore the very facts we should be paying most attention to. So the million and one details of how people end up faced with choosing between imperfect options, each of which brings them further from where they want to be, most often alienate the viewing public. While they should in fact be startling to us, angering us, waking us up to the fact that something is not right in this world.

Or at least that’s my experience of how many people (the kind of people who think of prison as a place they could never end up) react to this kind of story.

Which is where the music comes in.

After being interviewed by director Brian Hill, these women had their words taken to poet Simon Armitage, who composed songs based on their stories. The women were given singing lessons, and professional quality video editors, and we see them perform these songs throughout the movie. So you have women telling these gut-wrenching stories of their lives before prison – the lowest common denominator being rape and battery from men, and the use of drugs to dull the pain – interspersed with these moving songs they’re singing about the very stories they have just told.

To say that this format is effective would be a major understatement.

Music – which is really just poetry with a tune – is capable of communicating truths in a way that a simple account of the facts cannot. Perhaps in the same way that expressionism or surrealism provide more accurate representations of certain relationships and dynamics than realism does. Where people have internalized the system’s lies and acquired this capitalist knack of blaming the victim and celebrating the bully… music and poetry become ways to catch people off guard, to outflank our own subconscious complicity with repression.

Or as Songbirds director Brian Hill explained to CBC’s Rachel Giese:

if you’re dealing with people who are marginalized and people who have committed crimes, no matter how liberal you are and how sympathetic, i think there’s a tendency to define people by what they’ve done: she’s a crackhead, or she’s a prostitute. It stops us from seeing anything else about them. If you get people singing, they’re actually pretty vulnerable. It gives them another dimension: this is a person who has talent, creativity and is brave enough to stand up and do this.

[…] The women were much more involved in the process than in a traditional documentary. They okayed all the lyrics and had a sense of ownership over the project. i do think the women are magnified. The music does give them an extra dimension. Take Maggie, for instance, the Irish traveller in the film, who sings a country and western song and then a lullaby for her children who’ve been taken into care. Maggie is a crackhead. She is a bogus caller – i don’t know if you know that expression in Canada, but it’s a person who knocks on the doors of elderly people and then invites themselves in and robs them. It’s horrible what Maggie does. But she’s something else, too. She’s a mother who grieves for her children. And she’s someone with talent. She can really sing. And that’s the truth about Maggie. She’s all of those things.

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While Songbirds is a very moving and well done film, a thorough look at women in prison it is not.

As i already mentioned, there is no real discussion of life in prison. The violence and oppression that Hill shows us is purely intimate and interpersonal. The violence these women have endured is at the hands of “their men,” and hardly a word is said about other agents of oppression. If anything, the State appears as a benevolent actor.

i don’t want to exaggerate this criticism. These women are saying that in their lives it is their fathers and boyfriends and husbands who have been their oppressors, not the local cops or capitalists, and we should listen to this and mull it over and if this shocks you then you should rework your theories to take this into account. It doesn’t mean we should stop being anti-cop or anti-capitalist, just that we should not blinker ourselves to the fact that this may not be enough, may in fact cover up the “primary contradiction” in many women’s lives.

But we know that in real life many women are abused by an alliance of intimate and impersonal oppressors. This is the point so well made by the three women former political prisoners i quoted above. As Bo Brown, Susan Saxe and Assata Shakur each noted independently, the cops and courts and prisons are not an alternative to patriarchal oppression, just a different expression of it. An extension of oppression on “the outside.” When they do occur, collective responses to male violence are hindered if not simply repressed by the State. And finally, just as many men take advantage of the informal power they enjoy in intimate relationships to abuse and exploit women, so also do many men take advantage of the opportunity offered by their formal class position and relationship to the State – as bosses and managers and cops and social workers and prison guards too – to do the same.

Songbirds came out in 2005, the year that an increasing rate of suicides in women’s prisons in the UK finally crested. The preceding several years had seen a constant increase in the numbers of incarcerated women killing themselves – and for every woman who succeeded many many others would make the attempt. The widespread self-violence in women’s prisons in grim testimony to the fact that these are not “nice places” the State maintains – and the fact that the wave subsided when it did is proof of a direct correlation between repressive sentencing, overcrowding, and an unsafe environment. (2005, the first year the suicide rate decreased, was also the first year that the number of women in prison in the UK decreased.)

All of which is missing from Songbirds.

Viewers may also come away with a distorted idea of how much women in prison may or may not have in common. There is a national divide here which speaks volumes about capitalism and imperialism, but which is glossed over, its true import covered up.

Songbirds introduces several “traditional” white prisoners, four of whom are English and one Irish, each of whom has their own song and their own in-depth interview in which they discuss their life herstories. We are also introduced to many foreign women, some of whom are serving very long sentences, who were caught trying to smuggle drugs into the country. The interviews with these foreign women are much more superficial, and rather than each singing their own song, they all do one musical number together. What's more, unlike the citizen-women whose songs recount their lives and what led them to finally break the law, the foreign women's song only deals with the actual crime of drug smuggling itself. Hill gives a quick overview of how these women end up working as drug “mules” perhaps, but he chooses not to provide anywhere near the same degree of detail or focus as provided the other prisoners.

This emphasis on British citizens blurs several facts. To gloss over the “drug mules” is to gloss over one of the most important new elements in women’s imprisonment, for more than anything else it is the incarceration of female drug couriers which lies behind Britain’s skyrocketing women’s prison population. One in five woman prisoners in Britain today are foreign nationals, and half of these are from Jamaica. So that Afro-Caribbean women, only 1% of the general British population, account for 24% of women in prison in Britain today.

That these women’s predicament is also a result of men and male violence is documented in the film – but completely absent are the other (fairly obvious) factors that push Third World women to accept this dangerous work.

To flesh out this picture we can turn to feminist anti-prison activist and scholar Julia Sudbury, who has written about precisely this phenomenon:

Between 1980 and 1989, Edward Seaga’s conservative Jamaica Labour Party (JPL) pursued the ‘Washington Consensus’ model of neo-liberal economic reforms, privatizing state-owned companies and public utilities, scaling back local government services, introducing user fees for education and health care, and obliterating an already weak social safety net. Although People’s National Party candidate and former socialist Michael Manley was reelected in 1989, Manley and his successor J.P. Patterson have continued the economic path established by Seaga and his powerful international backers. These policies have led to layoffs of public service employees, many of them women, a reduction in social service provision, and dramatic increases in the cost of basic necessities. The impact on poor women has been particularly harsh because traditional gender roles burden women with the responsibility of caring for children and sick or elderly relatives. When the state sheds its role in providing social support and public infrastructure, poor women fill the vacuum. (Julia Sudbury, “Mules,” “Yardies,” and Other Folk Devils, in Global Lockdown: Race, Gender and the Prison-Industrial Complex, Routledge, New York, London 2005)

Sudbury notes that these women, pauperized by neo-liberalism, are the “exploited, poorly remunerated, and ultimately disposable workers of the global drug industry” – making the drug trade no different from other sectors of global capitalism, in which all manner of mechanisms both formal and informal concentrate the harshest levels of exploitation on to the female proletariat.

To say this, and to say that this is an important factor in women’s imprisonment even in countries like Britain, is not to deny the importance of “intimate” male violence, but simply to insist on telling the whole story, which is that there are different ways in which patriarchal oppression plays out for different women. Nation-class joins gender-class as a factor that can lead a woman through the prison gates.

An entire film could be devoted to the super-exploitation of women by the illegal drug sector, and their scapegoating by “tough on drugs” politicians, and i don’t want to fault Hill for not having chosen to make that documentary. But given the fact that the incarceration of foreign women for drug offenses is such an important factor in women’s prisons in Britain, and ever-increasingly so, it comes off as almost offensive that all of these women got such (comparatively) superficial treatment. (Not to mention the fact that their musical number was almost upbeat in a goofy kind of way.)

Despite these shortcomings, Songbirds remains a truly amazing movie, in both content and form. The “musical documentary” aspect, which had turned me off when i read the description (sounded awful corny, you know) makes this film a truly powerful experience, allowing the women to express far more than a dry interview format would. So much so that i left the cinema in a daze, blown away by what i had seen and heard, and it was only much later that i realized that fine as it was, it could have been even more.

Still, a real treat for a movie i initially had no plans on seeing…


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