Meaningful movies comes to Ridgefield, Cascade Park Library

Movies don’t have to be about escaping reality and playing pretend. Some films strive to bring you face to face with the actual truth.

A couple of years ago, Ridgefield newcomer and movie buff Megan Dudley, a pediatrician, started thinking about ways to knit her fast-growing but still sleepy community closer together.

She and her husband “noticed that there weren’t so many events for people in the evenings,” she said. She was also aware of some racial harassment in her neighborhood, she added, and felt some consciousness-raising was in order.

Documentaries weren’t exactly Dudley’s passion, but she figured that issue-oriented films were a guaranteed way to generate some substantive conversations in Ridgefield. “I didn’t know ‘Meaningful Movies’ already existed,” she said, but she quickly found out.

Meaningful Movies got started in Seattle in 2003 by a group of anti-war activists who were amazed to see their documentary-and-discussion format grow quickly and start generating requests from other groups wanting to try the same thing.

That led to the eventual launch of the regional Meaningful Movies Project in 2013; today there’s a network of 26 different local groups in Washington and Oregon (plus one in Utah) that regularly screen thought-provoking documentaries and host discussions.

“Over 40,000 people have come to see over 700 films, with about half of the people staying for the community discussions,” Meaningful Movies Project director Diane Turner said in a statement accepting the Organization of the Year award from Fix Democracy First, a Seattle group working to get money out of politics. “That’s a lot of people who have gotten to know some of their neighbors better, learning from each other, and becoming active (or more active) in issues that moved them to action.”

Dudley’s Ridgefield group screens a movie at 7 p.m. (doors open at 6:15 p.m.) on the fourth Wednesday of each month at the Old Liberty Theater (where you can also purchase snacks and beverages). Turnout is variable but usually quite healthy, she said.

In November, she said, on the night before Thanksgiving Day, Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Sequel” drew more than 100 people — thanks in part to the local Loo Wit chapter of the Sierra Club, which helped with outreach, she said.

“We aim to be nonpartisan and try to find the common ground within the issue discussed,” Dudley is quick to point out. “We hope to promote civil discourse and to find the commonalities across issues.”

Heartbreaking, inspiring

Rich, relevant panel discussions help keep things productive, she added. When the group screened “Heroin(e),” a hard-hitting, Oscar-nominated documentary about the opioid crisis in West Virginia, the panel afterwards included local police and fire chiefs, addiction specialists and other community leaders.

When the screening was “Never Give Up: Minoru Yasui and the Fight for Justice,” about a Japanese-American lawyer from Hood River who challenged the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the filmmaker (the subject’s daughter) attended the screening, and students from the Ridgefield High School class of English teacher Jill Uhacz “asked great questions and seemed very moved by her story,” Dudley said.

Uhacz regularly offers her students extra credit for attending screenings and participating in discussions, she said.

Uhacz herself will be a panelist for the upcoming May 23 screening of “He Named Me Malala,” and so will Dr. Olubukola Okafor, a Kaiser Permanente pediatrician originally from Nigeria who now lives in Ridgefield and works alongside Dudley at Kaiser Permanente in Longview, she said.

“He Named Me Malala” tells the heartbreaking, inspiring story of Malala Yousafzai, a young Pakistani woman and education activist who was shot in the head in an assassination attempt by the Taliban in 2012; she survived the attack, became the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize (for Peace), and continues to work as a human rights activist to this day. She now lives in England and is considered one of the most influential people in the world — at age 20.

After the screening, Ridgefield teacher Uhacz will discuss her innovative ways of reaching students; Okafor will talk about the education of girls and the political complexities of Nigeria.

On June 27, Meaningful Movies in Ridgefield will show “Kiki,” which explores the young-people-of-color drag/ballroom scene — politics, poverty and prejudice — in New York City.

Panelists will include Keegan Dittmer, the high school junior who was recently profiled in The Columbian for launching a monthly drag show at Brickhouse in downtown Vancouver.

Cascade Park, too

Meanwhile, east Vancouver’s Cascade Park Library does more or less the same thing on the third Thursday of each month: a free, social-justice-oriented, documentary film screening, followed by audience and panel conversation.

Doors open at 5:30 p.m. with pizza; screenings begin at 6 p.m.

“The Cascade Park chapter is always looking for organizations with whom to partner in title selection, promotion and leading the conversation following the movie,” said organizer Rodger Stevens.

The upcoming schedule at Cascade Park includes “Art and Craft,” an unlikely story of art forgery and mental illness, on June 21; and, in a detour from the nonfiction/documentary genre, the celebrated 2012 film “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” based on a novel about mental health and high school, on July 19. (“The Perks of Being a Wallflower” has been compared to another classic story of adolescent alienation, “The Catcher in the Rye.”)

Stevens said the Cascade Park group is currently previewing films about women and sexism for its Aug. 16 screening. Then, the Sept. 20 screening will begin a six-part series called “Becoming American: The Century of Immigration,” supported by a special grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Watch this space for details about that in late summer.

All of these Meaningful Movie events are always free, but donations are gratefully accepted to help defray expenses.