“A Place at the Table presents a shameful truth that should leave viewers dismayed and angry: The United States has more than enough food for all its people, yet millions of them are hungry. The film bolsters its case with plenty of facts, charts and expert testimony, but what makes the movie compelling is its focus on a handful of victims, who make the statistics painfully real.
“When Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining was released in 1980, it baffled many film buffs, who couldn’t figure out why the man who’d made some of the most challenging, brainy, and beautiful movies of the previous 20 years would spend his precious time and talent on what seemed at the time to be a hammy, heavy B-horror flick.
“Shawney Cohen calls himself a filmmaker, but he’s actually been a strip club manager for longer. When he was six years old his father bought “The Manor,” a strip club attached to a seedy 32-room motel in Guelph, Ontario. Years later, his father has seen his weight balloon to 400 pounds, while his mother struggles to survive at 85 pounds.
“Filmmaker Paul Saltzman, who gave us the inspiring 2009 doc Prom Night in Mississippi continues his look at race in the South with this latest film that sees him returning to the town where he was assaulted for being a civil rights worker in 1965.
