During the past two and half years photographer/director Eric Minh Swenson has created over 200 short documentaries about Southern California artists, as well as assembling thousands of images which record art events–installations, openings, art walks, fairs–from Ventura to San Diego. His mini-documentaries are works of art in themselves, allowing the artists and their work to speak directly to the viewer.

In watching and listening to the unfolding stories over the last week of sexual assault in the military, I could not help but notice how similar the military’s mess is to the situation in the Roman Catholic church over child abuse carried out by priests. Trusted leaders misused their positions of power to gratify their own sexual desires, and even worse, the hierarchy all too often protected the abusers and failed the victims.

Here’s hoping that the brass at the Pentagon have learned a few things from the bishops about how NOT to deal with the perpetrators of sexual assault by those in authority.

Director Julien Nitzberg returns to FDL Movie Night with To Be Loved and Understood, his ten minute mini-doc about comic genius  Patton Oswalt. And he’s brought Patton Oswalt with him! The American stand-up comedian, writer, actor, and voice actor known for roles such as Spencer Olchin in the popular sitcom The King of Queens joins us to discuss, well, whatever we ask, and he’s willing to answer!

NASA continues to peer into the future, claiming that the world did not end on 12.21.12. We’ll address that on 12.22.12. If we’re here. Meanwhile, I got email from JP Sottile at newsvandal with whom I have an ongoing tinfoil millinery competition…

The two dudes behind the anti-Obama documentary 2016: Obama’s America—Gerald Molen, the Oscar-winning producer of Schindler’s List, and co-writer/director Dinesh D’Souza–are all sad and stuff because their documentary didn’t make it on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ short list of docs from which the final nominees are drawn (This year four of those 15 have been or will be on Firedoglake Movie Night: The House I Live In, How to Survive a Plague, The Invisible War, and upcoming on Monday December 10, The Waiting Room).

In the short documentary From Silence to Recognition, father and son filmmakers David Hughes Duke and John Duke explore a painful part of the history of Emory University and its Jewish students: the consistent abuse of Jewish students in the University’s School of Dentistry which lead to a 65% flunk-out/withdrawal rate over the thirteen years that John E. Buhler was the Dean of that department.

Ghosts! A haunted house! A dead serial killer! Unscrupulous real estate partners! And an Ancient Unnamed Evil who needs another victim! Throw in a creepy priest, a goofy cocktail waitress/ghost rights’ activist, a sick mother, denied health insurance claims, and some bleeding walls and you’ve got nice guy Richard Scarry’s problems in a nut shell, and the premise of The Selling, tonight’s Halloween feature, starring guests, writer/producer/actor Gabriel Diani and actor/producer Etta Devine.

Muhammad Yunus is visionary economist and Noble Peace Prize winner who believes in the essential goodness of humanity. Stepping down from the ivory tower of academia, Yunus visited the poorest villages of Bangladesh in 1976 and made a personal loan of $27 to 42 women in the village so they could build and sell bamboo furniture. The loan was paid back with interest, and the women took out a larger loan. Thus microfinance was born. In the past 30 years, microcredit has spread to every continent and has benefited over 100 million people. Yunus’ Grameen Bank (literally “village bank”) has loaned money to 1 out of 1,000 people on earth, at 98% repayment rate.

In Bonsai People, The Vision of Muhammad Yunus, Holly Mosher follows the founding of a Grameen Bank branch and several of the women aided by loans.

Tonight’s guest Sue Wilson is a firebrand – smart, driven and articulate. A longtime journalist, she got fired up about how the public airways, which belong to the citizens, are controlled by mega-corps which do not act in the public interest. Broadcast Blues, which she wrote, directed and narrates traces the history of the airwaves, the gutting of the Fairness Doctrine, and explains how the consolidation of stations has limited Americans access to a wide range of voices and views—and has actually put citizens at physical risk during emergencies.

After the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Stu Levy mobilized to volunteer his help, traveling with a group bringing food and gasoline to a shelter serving 1,000 people, where the volunteers put together a soup kitchen to feed the refugees their first hot meal since the quake. A subsequent trip took him to Ishinomaki, on the Tohoku coast, where over 3,000 people in a city of 165,000 had been killed, with over 2,700 unaccounted for, and another 30,000 displaced.

Fronm these experiences comes tonight’s film Pray for Japan.