Day: April 22, 2024

Preconceived was watched as part of Cascadia International Women’s Film Festival 2024! It had its showing on Saturday, April 27th as part of the festival.

We here at Gorgon Reviews love making sure I have time to review any and all documentaries about abortions, and how hard they can be to acquire in the United States. Also, we here at Gorgon Reviews, hate that we have to do reviews on this topic. We would love to stop, but the problems haven’t been fixed yet, so here we are, again.

In the documentary, we are actually looking at Crisis Pregnancy Centers. Now, this is something that was covered by John Oliver before in his show. A fun thing that I often do during his show is to look up the documentaries he references and potentially watch them. This is the first time I have seen a documentary that spends a moment to acknowledge John Oliver’s show.

A Crisis Pregnancy Center is like an abortion clinic, except that it doesn’t offer ever abortions. In fact, its entire purpose seems to exist to convince people to NOT get an abortion. To fabricate the things that must be done before an abortion could take place. To lie about what was allowed. To present untrue facts about the fetus, how far along the patient was, and to make sure they just did not get an abortion at all costs. Surely enough, these things are funded strongly through America’s churches and Republican organizations.

Their entire existence, I want to reiterate, is about preventing people from getting abortion access, through tricks and deceit. Trainings on how to talk to people out of it, to string them along, how to get “clients” away from an actual clinic, including making sure they appear at the top of Google search results.

Yeah, these places suck.

I normally see billboards with the opposite messages, unfortunately.

It is really easy (I imagine, I just review stuff) to make a documentary about a subject and say “Gee Whiz, this thing STINKS!” You can interview everyone who agrees with you, throw in some news stories and B-roll footage, and be done. What I was more surprised about is how many people who work in, work for, or work with, these crisis pregnancy centers who are a part of this documentary too. I worry about deceitful tactics to get them to sign on board. But, presumably all of their arguments for why they should exist, and why they are doing this, are given verbatim and they are giving time for “their side.”

They got the president of Heartbeat International, a pro-life group, to spread his organizations goals and methods and they aren’t ashamed of these things. They are proud of it.

The documentary obviously does a great job of making its arguments and hopefully highlighting how so many women get tricked into spending extra funds, or having kids, they never wanted or planned to. With the overturn of Roe v. Wade, the centers haven’t stopped, they have amplified and feel like they are winning and that their message is important. This documentary is one that is meant to be seen as awareness to a topic, because, people cannot be tricked by something, if they know it is out there. The centers rely entirely on people assuming they are also abortion clinics, but that the abortion won’t be right for *that client* for whatever reason.

Watch it, get informed, and donate to your local Planned Parenthood or similar organization.

4 out of 4.

Waapake (Tomorrow) was watched as part of Cascadia International Women’s Film Festival 2024! It had its U.S. Premiere on Thursday, April 25th as part of the festival.

In case you did not know, there used to be a policy in the United States, as part of the treaty signings, that indigenous communities would agree to have their children be assimilated into United States “culture” through their schools. Notably, this was ALSO TRUE IN CANADA. In fact, this documentary is dealing with Canadian indigenous families. Of course, as part of these signed treaties, the sides were never on equal grounds, and these native groups were almost always forced to do it, or else. But even then, it is doubtful that those communities understood exactly what that clause would mean.

Which was of course, children being taken from their homes, and often sent to boarding schools. Not just any boarding schools, ones often FAR from where they actually lived. Schools that had little to no accountability and were seemingly encouraged to belittle and even beat these kids into conformity. To make it so that these kids would only have this new countries culture, whatever that means. A lot of students who were taken were changed alright, and generally for the worse. Depression, drug addictions, anxiety, and even suicide were common. They were put into situations away from their families and had no support system.

This documentary is about those people, a little bit. But even more notable, it is about the generation of people that came after. So the people interviewed for this piece are sons, daughters, and grandsons/granddaughters of survivors from these schools. About how their older relative has been negatively harmed, how it has affected their current lives, and more importantly, how they can potentially heal from this to have a stronger tomorrow.

This is how you can know it was made in Canada, by the way.

It is hard to talk about this just on the Canadian level, because we know these sorts of things happened in the US as well. But Canada has been more in the news for it lately, given they had various burial sites found outside of some of these schools, with many dozens of bodies, all in a large unmarked grade. A lot of shady shit happened at these schools. Awful things. Abuse. More. But as the documentary put it, generational trauma is an important thing to acknowledge and point out, but generational healing can also occur.

This is not to wash away the crimes of the past. But that is why this documentary brought in the various stories, of the offspring of survivors, to note their similar upbringings and the negative harms that came out of it. But it is very uplifting at the same time, with their statements about how they will make sure they fix certain issues, so that their own children do not have to go through it again. They want to break the cycle, and part of that comes through talking about it.

WaaPaKe is a powerful documentary, a stronger documentary if you go in already know about the schooling atrocities for indigenous groups in the past. It is also stronger knowing this was made by a Canadian native, involving her own story, her families, and others to put this piece together. After all, these stories are horrifying, but often still the human, personal element, can be missing. These types of documentaries make it more personal, and really puts the important aspects out there.

3 out of 4.