Peter Wong

Kai Stanicke's Teddy Jury Award-winning drama "Trial Of Hein" provides enough specificity to suggest it's a 19th century-ish tale. Yet the way the story of this year's winner of Frameline's Out In The Silence award gets told gives it the timelessness of the Bertolt Brecht classic "Mother Courage And Her Children.". Like the Thirty Years War-set play, "Trial Of Hein" makes heavy use of Brechtian alienation.

How can claims of so-called "protection of children" be a mask for animus against a highly disliked minority? Gianna Toboni's documentary "Just Kids" offers an infuriating example. In one scene, South Carolina State House Representative John McCravy introduces in the state legislature's Health Committee a bill banning gender-affirming care for people under 18, claiming the ban will somehow protect these children.

Dolls have been one method used in the past to talk about personal trauma when the victim has trouble finding the words. Tim Odonnell and Sam Oldmeadow's touching documentary "The Last Yztari" shows how AI can be used as a tool for good by its trauma victim central subject. Until 2007, film subject Mary Dague served as part of the U.S. Army's Explosive Ordinance Disposal Corps. In other words, she was with the Army Bomb Squad in Iraq.