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Get Involved–Organize a Screening Today!
This fall, as national attention turns to the mid-term elections, understanding the conservative movement, who is in it, where they come from, and what they want – is more important than ever. A screening of What’s the Matter with Kansas? is the perfect tool to energize the conversation, get beyond the shouting and the stereotypes and engage people in a way that can make a difference.
One of the Ten Best Documentaries of 2009
Roger Ebert just named his Ten Best Documentaries of the year, and “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” made the list! Of course all of us who made the movie are thrilled and honored. (His original review is here.) Ebert is quick to note, though, that like a lot of his favorite docs, very few people have seen ours yet:
Some of the best documentaries of 2009 hardly seemed to exist. (…)
Billionaire Koch Brothers: “out to destroy progressivism”
Do you suspect that the Tea Party movement isn’t quite the spontaneous, grass-roots popular uprising its followers would have you believe? (…)
A Kansas Farmer goes to Africa
Donn Teske, a self-described “red-neck farmer from Kansas” who’d never left the country before, recently found himself in Senegal on fairly short notice. (…)
FiveThirtyEight: Is Obama losing his cool?
Nate Silver, the political forecaster who famously called Obama’s 2008 victory six months before election day, reacts to Robert Gibb’s rant against “the professional left” in an interview with The Hill:
The euphoric feeling among liberals in the days between the election and the inauguration seems so quaint now — like something that happened decades ago — but it was very tangible at the time. (…)
Village Voice gives the thumbs up
The movie opens in New York tonight, and the Village Voice weighs in:
The subtle structure and elegant editing build to the pointed insight that the vast gulf in the country isn’t between right and left but between secular and religious. (…)
NYC: Thomas Frank & Barbara Ehrenreich at Borders Park Ave. 7/28/10
UPDATED 7/24/10 – Barbara Ehrenreich will join Thomas Frank for this special event! (…)
Wichita reacts to “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”
For audiences across the country, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” is a fascinating journey into the heart of American conservatism, a place that for many of us is warmly familiar yet utterly foreign — in the best documentary fashion, the movie gets viewers close to people they don’t really know. In Wichita, however, everybody feels they already know these folks, they are their neighbors.
Robert Reich: Guilded Age-level inequality threatens us all
Robert Reich, economist and former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration, contributes an opinion piece in The Nation which is a particularly eloquent statement of the liberal case for sweeping economic reform. (…)
“More subtle, perhaps even more provocative.”
Aubrey Streit Krug is an intern at the Center for Rural Affairs in Lyons, Nebraska. She saw What’s the Matter with Kansas? (…)
New York City run EXTENDED thru Aug 12, 2010
What’s the Matter with Kansas? starts its commercial New York theatrical run on Friday, July 30th at the Producers’ Club Indie House theatre, the latest addition to Manhattan arthouse cinemas. Located in Mid-town Manhattan, near the Theater District, Indie House promises to be a destination for independent film lovers.
Huffington Post: why we need to get past stereotypes of conservatives
Clay Farris Naff of Nebraskans for Science shares some reflections on “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” after viewing it with in a packed house in Lincoln, Nebraska — a region with, of course, close ties to Kansas and itself home to a fiesty, hopeless outnumbered band of progressive prairie populists. (…)