Classroom 4 (2025)

This short documentary was short listed in that category for the 2026 Academy awards--it did not make the final cut, but it is open source and available to for viewing by all. The documentary takes place inside the Columbia River Correctional Institution (CRCI) in Portland, where incarcerated students and Lewis & Clark undergraduates meet weekly over the course of a semester to study the history of crime and punishment in the United States. The Inside-Out course—which is part of the nationwide Inside-Out Prison Exchange program—meets in Classroom 4 at the facility. There, students explore ideas of justice, mercy, and the evolution of the carceral state. What emerges is not only a study of history but a shared experience of humanity. The course is taught by Reiko Hillyer, professor of history and department chair. Hillyer began teaching Inside-Out courses in 2012, a year after completing training through the Philadelphia-based program. Since then, she has taught the CRCI class every other year, guiding mixed cohorts of “inside” (incarcerated) and “outside” (college) students through lively weekly discussions and shared assignments. Each class usually includes 30 students—15 from CRCI and 15 from the college—who meet behind prison walls to learn, debate, and reflect as equals. It is a very good watch.

Quilt By Night

Becky Halvorsen, family medicine doctor by day and quilter by night. I first came to know her because she issued an FPP design for the Rebel Loon at the height of the violence in Minneapolis, and being a member of the Minneapolis Modern Quilt Guild, one of our sew on Zoom sessions had one member finishing hers, one talk about the one she had made and put on a bag to take to QuiltCon and another member piecing one that day. She was a quilt hero to us. And she make the pattern available without charge. The same is true for her rainbow heart and same with this FPP for the classic VOTE logo. She also has a lot of fun whimsical patterns on her website and in her Etsy shop, including letters, which you can use to make a VACCINES MAKE ADULTS and other things that seem obvious but are now seen as political. Here is the thing. Basic decency is now seen as radical. Lying about absolutely everything is happening on our governmental web sites. It is incumbent on all of us to speak up. And some of what is coming out of the fiber art world is absolutely amazing, so check her out, download a free pattern (she has one with stars that I am eying a scrap friendly and not too hard as FPP goes, so right up my alley), buy a pattern (I am a true amateur when it comes to FPP so I am building a library of alphabets and hers is a great one), and support democracy.

The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025)

This is a docudrama that is nominated in the Best International Film category for the 2026 Academy Awards. It is a re-enactment of events that happened. On January 29th, 2024, the Israeli Army ordered the evacuation of the Tel Al-Hawa neighborhood in the Gaza Strip. On that day, six members of the Hamadeh family, along with their six-year-old niece, Hind Rajab, were trapped in their car after the Israeli Army opened fire on them, killing five occupants of the vehicle immediately. Miraculously, a fifteen-year-old girl named Layan was able to call the Palestinian Red Crescent Society and ask for help before she too succumbed to her wounds. That left six-year-old Hind alone in the car, surrounded by the corpses of her slain family members, possessing a cellphone with shoddy reception as her only hope. The conversations that members of the PRCS had with her while they are trying to coordinate an ambulance safe passage to come get her to safety use actual recordings of Hind and the movie quite dramatically takes the audience into the day to day stresses of being helpless at the end of a phone while people are in danger and at the mercy of what seems like a merciless war. This was very painful to watch.

Tie Dip Dye by Pepa Martin & Karen Davis

This is the year that I do a deep dive into dying. I haven't done this since I lived in Central California and was in a fiber guild with Jean Ray Laury. I did some dying and some silk screening and I really enjoyed it--as well as enjoying the creative expression it afforded. So I am taking all the books out of my local library that are available and learning what I can before I can take some classes. I started by going to the National Shibori Museum when I was in Kyoto and taking a class there. Then there are two things are happening to assist with expanging my coloring experience into the 21st century. My guild is doing an indigo dye vat in August, and the in person workshops that I take not at QuiltCon are at Minnesota Quilters and this year I am taking three classes where I do dying. This book has several techniques that I will be doing immersion in--ombre, shibori--specifically folding and tying or sewing to get resist dying features, ice dying and ombre dying. The book is a bit scant on exact details, but does have good pictures, if you are a visual learner, and it has a brief narrative about each technique. I think it would be hard to use this book alone to do it on your own, but it would be a good book to use in combination with a book that discusses more about the dyes themselves.

All The Empty Rooms (2025)

This short documentary was seven years in the making. Media correspondent Steve Hartman used to work on finding something positive to report after mass school shootings, basically the silver lining after children have been killed in their classrooms. You could see how that would wear on you over time. Much like all the “thoughts and prayers” rather than real outrage and an effort to make change. So along with long-time friend and photographer Lou Bopp they visit families across the US who have been affected by school shootings and document all of their ‘empty rooms.’ We’re so used to seeing the media side of stories that this is where it gets very real in a way that puts us into the long term effects of the loss, the hole that dead children leave behind. Directed by Joshua Seftel and distributed by Netflix, the emotionally poignant untold stories have been nominated for ‘Best Documentary Short’ at this year’s Academy Awards. We step into the families lives. From keeping the lights on to hearing their voice recordings through teddies and keeping their rooms exactly how they left them. Alongside this we see Lou talking through the process of photographing his daughter every day to see her progression. This freedom of growing up serves as a reminder for the importance of life.

The Henna Artist by Alka Joshi

I have a slow roll on this, but I am reading all the Reese Witherspoon book club picks and have overall found them to be good and a bit lighter than books that are longlisted for the Booker Prize. This is not my favorite of these--I found the writing to be just okay. This story is about Lakshmi, and takes place in 1955, the early years of Indian independence. Fifteen years before, she was married to a man by force who abused her and depended on her to support him. One day, she had the courage to flee her home and her village. Even though it means she had to leave her saas (mother-in-law) behind. She was close to her saas and she learned a lot of herbal medicine remedies. It turns out she has quite a talent for it, and after a rough journey Lakshmi ends up in Jaipur where she settles and establishes a life for herself as henna artist with an herbal medicine practice on the side. Lakshmi has worked hard, starting with nothing and slowly making a name for herself as a henna artist. Her business is taking off, new plans are about to come to fruition, and everything she’s ever wanted is within reach. Then the abusive husband she fled turns up on her doorstep with a sister she never knew about. With her parents dead and an outcast in her village, Radha has no one else to turn to except her sister. Introducing Radha, a 13 year old girl who has only ever known village life to wealthy castes of Jaipur society proves to be increasingly more challenging and Lakshmi can feel her dreams slipping through her fingers. She does manage to find her way, not without help and not without difficulty. The book is strongest when it is describing the sights and sounds of post-colonial India.

Arco (2025)

First of all, this animated French film, which was nominated for a 2026 Academy award, sees rainbows not just as a reflection of sunlight through water in the air, but rather as time travelers from the future. Arco is oe such traveler. He is a 10 year old who travels from the distant future back in time to 2075, when robots have taken over human tasks, suburbs evolved into fireproof domes, with the ecological crisis worsening—all of which have left humanity about as isolated as one might anticipate. Crash-landing in a forest, young Arco has the good fortune to encounter Iris, a girl his age, who takes him in. There’s an immediate joy and curiosity to their initial meeting, something warm beyond words. Iris lives with a nanny bot named Mikki, programmed by her parents—only accessible via video hologram—to help raise her and her baby brother, and she leaps at the chance to make a real friend, especially one who looks at her world so curiously. Iris works towards helping Arco get back to his time and his family. It is an overly optimistic but very pleasant tale.

The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow

This falls into the genre of fan fiction--It is not the retelling of Pride and Prejudice but rather an extention of that story. The novel explores the predicament of Mary, the overlooked middle daughter of the Bennet household. Mary doesn’t have a story of her own in Austen’s novel – she’s there to serve as a foil to her sisters’ charm, and a temporary obstacle to their happiness. Bookish and gauche, Mary is the one who can be relied on to give an ill-judged performance on the pianoforte or deliver a sententious comment at exactly the wrong moment. By the end of the novel her circumstances have changed, but she has not; she’s still just as plain and awkward as she ever was, but with her sisters variously settled elsewhere, she is at least not compared to them daily but she is not a woman of note either. In this version of the story Mary begins very much as Austen depicted her – plain, awkward, overlooked – but she is now our protagonist, the one we are supposed to be rooting for. As the great majority of us are not beautiful to look at or glittering company, we are predisposed to hope that her studiousness and loyalty will somehow eventually pay off. We come to understand what has made her the way she is. From girlhood, she has been mortified by her mother, who constantly evaluates her five daughters’ looks, and finds only Mary’s wanting. Her father, too, is a source of grief; she is desperate to be close to him, but he makes a pet of Lizzie, and only seems to speak to Mary – Hadlow is quoting Austen here – in put-downs. Her sisters exist in fixed pair-bonds: Jane-and-Lizzie, Kitty-and-Lydia; Mary is left to drift alone. Teased, belittled and criticised, it is no wonder she is so ill at ease; no wonder she blunders. I cringed a few times at Mary's missteps but mostly was rooting for her, and very much enjoyed once again being plunged into the world of Austen.

Retirement Plan (2025)

This short animated film is nominated for a 2026 Oscar, and maybe it is because I am actively thinking about my own retirement (I am aiming for 3 years from now) that it seemed so poignant. This is a devastating yet optimistic piece of storytelling. It’s funny, endearing, relatable and playful but it also has a fierce undercurrent of melancholy. In the throes of his overstimulated, energy poor midlife, Ray fantasizes about everything he'd love to do in retirement, once he finally has the time. It plays with the idea that we’re taught to postpone living until retirement, until we have more time but in reality, that day may never arrive. Retirement Plan reminds us to live in the now, to stop living through lists and start embracing each day as it comes. Twice things happened to teach me that you should not put off today the things you really want to do—the first is when my youngest son had a brain tumor and the second is when I was diagnosed with a poor prognosis cancer myself. I am blessed with a job that has a lot of vacation as well as a fair amount of work related travel, and I have been active about doing things now rather than putting them off. Even still, I can relate to this. Aside from the thought provoking, personal narrative. Retirement Plan is also a beautifully animated feature that showcases the simplicity and power of animation. Stripping back the shots, playing with minimal movements and relying on the impact of the storytelling made the sentiment all the more beautiful. Finally, if you take anything away from this tender-hearted story, remember to embrace every day of life, don’t wait.

Jane Austen's Bookshelf by Rebecca Romney

I, like the author, love Jane Austen. Unlike her, I know nothing about the world of rare books, and while I know only slightly more now than before I read this book, I have a better understanding of what draws people not just ot the book itself, but to those who read this exact volume before one picks it up. She asks the question about who might have influenced Austen and the answer is that there were quite a few women authors who wrote in the late 18th and early 19th century and who clearly Austen read because she mentions them by name in her letters to her siblings and in some cases because she has lifted things out of their books to make her own. It is a wonder someone hasn’t thought before to do a little detective work into the authors that influenced her: Ann Radcliffe, whose 1794 gothic thriller The Mysteries of Udolpho peppers every other conversation in Northanger Abbey; Elizabeth Inchbald, whose 1798 play Lovers’ Vows is rehearsed by the characters in Mansfield Park; and Frances Burney, whose third novel, Camilla (1796), originated the phrase “pride and prejudice”. The interesting thing is not that they exist but more that they have been largely forgotten. I was able to find their hallmark works through the Guttenberg project and in the Kindle library, and will uspdate later as I read through some of them, but this author thinks that they are worthy. In addition to the above, she found Fanny Burney’s Evelina to be bold and witty, Charlotte Lennox, whose The Female Quixote" is witty and smart, to Elizabeth Inchbald, whose concise and ironic style may have influenced Austen as well. It is great fun to read this.