Stage and screen star Olympia Dukakis is profiled in “Olympia,” now streaming through the Jane Pickens Theater. The film includes archival photographs and footage that span Dukakis’s long and illustrious stage career.
If you know Olympia Dukakis only from her pitch-perfect, Oscar-winning role as Cher’s sharp-tongued Italian mother in “Moonstruck” (1987), you’re missing a lot.
Fortunately, you can fill in the gaps with Harry Mavromichalis’ 2018 documentary “Olympia,” available for streaming through the Jane Pickens Theater. It’s a delightfully revealing and touching overview of the extraordinary life and career of Dukakis, now 89, the daughter of Greek immigrants in Massachusetts and first cousin of former Massachusetts governor and 1988 presidential nominee Michael Dukakis.
Although it is the candid, bawdy Dukakis herself that makes the documentary so entertaining, the film is also a worthwhile show business chronicle. After graduating from Boston University, the attractive Dukakis wasn’t getting good stage roles in New York because she was categorized as too ethnic. So, she launched her own theater, the Whole Theater Co. in Montclair, New Jersey, along with Louis Zorich, her husband of 55 years. The irrepressible Zorich figures prominently in the film, completed just before he died.
Over many decades, Dukakis starred to critical acclaim in the plays of Shakespeare, Brecht and Tennessee Williams, among others, at her own theater and often at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts. The film boasts a rich selection of historic photographs and archival footage, including Dukakis performing in “The Rose Tattoo” and rehearsing a production of “The Tempest” in which she plays Prospero.
In another great sequence, she travels to her ancestral homeland in Greece and is visibly moved by the local peasant women who treat her as family.
Like “Tea with the Dames,” “Olympia” is a master class on the skill and work ethic of a legendary actor that also offers a delicious glimpse into her lively spirit, sharp wit and steel spine.
Director Kim Longinotto’s extensive body of work has often documented women from around the world as they confront and battle an oppressive male power structure. Her documentaries “Divorce Iranian Style” (1998), “Gaea Girls” (2000) and “Pink Saris” (2010), among many others, profile women and gender and sexual outlaws, sometimes all three, at odds with the patriarchy.
Loren King is an arts and entertainment writer whose work appears regularly in The Boston Globe and other publications.
In “Shooting the Mafia” (Amazon, iTunes), Longinotto has found a fascinating subject in Italian photographer Letizia Battaglia.
Her bold and self-assured personality made her stand out in provincial, patriarchal Palermo, Sicily even before she made her mark photographing the mafia, those it murdered and the devastating aftermath of its violence, leaving survivors in grief and communities decimated by bloodshed and rampant corruption.
“Shooting the Mafia” is about Battaglia’s career and life. It’s rich with lively and revealing interviews, especially with the larger-than-life Battaglia. But it’s also about the reign of terror that the Sicilian mob held over Palermo and other nearby towns, such as Corleone, for hundreds of years.
In Battaglia’s role as a journalist (she didn’t begin her career until she was 40) she photographed gruesome mob murders during the 1970s, one of the bloodiest periods when, she says, there were sometimes five murders a day in Palermo. Her stark, black-and-white images of corpses strewn on the street, of bodies under bloodied sheets and the placid faces of onlookers, of mothers screaming, of tight-lipped witnesses, of children living in dire poverty because of rampant mafia corruption, are powerful testimony and gripping works of art and documentation. It made Battaglia an enemy of the mob, but she remained undeterred.
There is nothing glamorous or “honorable” about the thugs we see in “Shooting the Mafia.” Battaglia points out, and has the grim photographs to prove that, along with other criminals, they killed women and children who witnessed their crimes in cold blood. They blew to bits via car bombs the judges who had the courage to prosecute them.
The film reveals the personal cost to all who stood up to the mob. Battaglia, who was threatened for years, talks about the photos she did not take because they were too harrowing, but how those images live in her heart and head. These include the ‘80s mob slayings of two dedicated reformist judges who tried, with some success, to prosecute the mafia, but who paid the ultimate price.
Besides a compelling portrait of Battaglia and the forces she stood up to in Sicily, “Shooting the Mafia” is a chilling, timely piece of journalism about the far-reaching tentacles of corruption and how it systematically ruins innocent lives and decimates societies. It is a powerful film with contemporary relevance.
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