Mike Wallace is Here

Friday, April 12 @ 7:15pm

Followed by Skype Q+A with Avi Belkin (Director) and Bruce DuMont (American broadcaster)

Synopsis

Director: Avi Belkin
94 min, U.S., 2019

This “sharp, propulsive and brilliantly assembled portrait” (Indiewire) focuses on pioneering 60 Minutes reporter Mike Wallace, infamously known for asking the tough, probing questions others were afraid to ask. In between glimpses of the journalist’s most momentous interviews, from Barbara Streisand to the Ayatollah Khomeini, filmmaker Avi Belkin skillfully connects Wallace’s own struggles—both professionally and personally—to find legitimacy as a TV journalist with the rise and fall of the news media itself as it passes from trusted pillar of truth to “fake news.” Was Wallace a hard-as-nails muckraker or the forebear of sensationalistic infotainment? And “why,” as Streisand accuses him, “are you such a prick?” Composed entirely of archival footage, Mike Wallace Is Here offers no simple answers, offering a “masterful, cinematic biography that unpacks a man’s life through his work” (The Wrap).