Flickers: Rhode Island International Film Festival

Joan's Boys | Directed by Catherine van Campen | 1 hour. Feature Documentary | Netherlands, 2013.

Joan is a committed, warm-hearted social worker and psychotherapist who works with derailed teenagers. In this documentary we see her efforts to help two of these kids -15 year old twins Alaa and Adil from a Moroccan family- to get back on track. The twins drop out from school, play violent video games all day and fight among each other about who can hold the PlayStation controller. In the midst of the heat they accidentally hit their mother, who goes knock-out on the floor. The boys are placed in custody. Can Joan save her boys by playing on their conscience? Or is her 'soft' approach deemed to fail? And what about Joan herself? Does her work with these kids replace her own unfulfilled child-wish?

SCREENS WITH:

In Ben's Footsteps | Directed by Noam Oz-Setter | 55 min. Israel, 2014. US premiere. 

On August 9th 2006 a platoon of Israeli paratroopers operating in Dabel Miri, a Lebanese village, was hit by a Cornet missile fired by Hezbollah. Nine soldiers were killed. Ben Sela was one of them. He planned to devour the world but managed only a small taste. One of the formative journeys in his short life was to Mongolia, a year before the war in Lebanon. Ben and Avsha, riding horses, crossed the challenging Mongolian wilderness. Six years after his death his parents, joined by Avsha, are planning to follow his journey. They will go to the end of the world to get closer, as much as possible, to their beautiful child that is no longer with them.