East End Film Festival - Goodbye Gauley Mountain (2013)

Ecosexual (e-co-sex-u-al): noun

1.    ‘An environmentally conscious person whose adherence to green living extends to their romantic and/or sexual life’

2.   A person who anthropomorphises nature and finds it erotic

Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle are charming, enigmatic, liberals who are on a two-women crusade to spread the word of ecosexuality: a combination of environmental activism and sexuality.  They want to shift the metaphor from Mother Earth to Lover Earth, and they are doing it in public as loud as they can.

Stephens is at the helm as director of their new documentary that explores the perils of Mountain Top Removal, alongside the erotic majesty of nature.  Primarily focussed on their home state of West Virginia, Stephens begins the story of deep mining tragedies of the 1930s up until the 2010 Massey Energy disaster that killed 29 people.

East End Film Festival - Blue Caprice (2013)

In February 2002, in the initial uneasy period after 9/11, a series of murders was to begin that would stretch across the United States from Washington to Alabama before eventually in September leading up to the Interstate 495 or the ‘Capital Beltway’.  The rampage was being conducted by a pair of snipers driving around D.C., Maryland and Virginia and was to become one of the worst spree killings in modern American history.

The perpetrator was originally reported as presumed to be a Caucasian in a white van, but was eventually identified as John Allen Muhammad and his 17-year-old protégé Lee Boyd Malvo – two African Americans driving a 1990 Blue Caprice.  Alexandre Moors’ new film is based on their father-son relationship and how they came to conduct such an explosion of violence.

The narrative begins with Lee (Tequan Richmond) being abandoned by his mother and having to fend for himself before eventually meeting John (Isaiah Washington), himself desperately trying to regain contact with his own children.  This symmetrical emptiness brings them to form a quick bond as John takes him in and teaches him to drive, shoot and steal.