We Wear Lavender Bracelets

to symbolize our unity and to remind us we are not alone

In Theaters Now!

 GARDENS OF THE NIGHT is about an eight-year-old girl named Leslie (Ryan Simpkins) who is abducted through trickery by an older man, Alex (Tom Arnold), and his young accomplice Frank (Kevin Zeegers).
     Leslie is held captive in their house but she is not alone, there is another captive with her, an eight-year-old black boy named Donnie (Scooter?), who believes his mentally unstable mother, sold him to Alex.
     This is their story, about the bond they create with each other as they suffer abuse at the hands of adults, how they manage to escape into a fantasy world they create in their room, and how Leslie's perception of love is so severely mutated through her relationship with Alex.
    Nine years later Leslie and Donnie (Gillian Jacobs and Evan Ross) when they are seventeen years old and living on the street and struggling with how to cope with what they have suffered through, how it affects them differently and if they can not only survive this experience but be set free from it's terrible shackles. 
 
    DOUBT Sister Aloysius, principal of a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964, Meryl Streep fears that a priest played by Philip Seymour Hoffman is sexually abusing the school's lone black student. She passive-aggressively draws Sister James (Amy Adams) into her plan to oust Father Flynn, who with his newfangled ideas also happens to be at cross-purposes with the sister's tradition-bound preferences.
      Hoffman is the picture of expansive, do-gooder entitlement, an All-American man of the cloth but for his creepy long fingernails. The strict gender hierarchy of the church and the era are on parade throughout. As the priests chortle over rare beef and red wine at dinner, the scene cuts to the sisters primly, mutely forking up their food.
     As Father Flynn blithely perches himself in Sister Aloysius' chair for a meeting in her office, a smile just shy of smug tossing out the first grenade, she knows she's in for the battle of her life, and up to the challenge.
 
 
Doubt

Alecto's Directory is a growing collection of book and movie reviews designed to help survivors of sexual violence screen what they watch and read; because entertainment should be safe.

Movies for Television

    American Idol winner Fantasia Barrino may still be savoring her victory of two years ago, but the 21-year-old single mom reveals in her memoir, Life Is Not a Fairy Tale, that parts of her past were anything but idyllic. The singer admits to hiding the fact that she can neither read nor write– and that she was raped as a 9th grader in school.
      As for the sexual assault, Fantasia said the perpetrator was a popular male student on whom she had a crush, and after the incident (which occurred in the school auditorium), she crawled right into bed at home. 

Life Is Not a Fairy Tale
   The Lifetime original movie was the 2nd most watched movie in Lifetime TV history with more than 19 million viewers tuning in during the August 19-20 weekend to watch. The movie was ranked the number one basic cable movie premiere in 2006 among women aged 18-49. Weekend online traffic to Lifetimetv.com rose by more than seventy percent during that weekend.

    In 2007, the movie and its actors including Fantasia, Loretta Devine and Kadeem Hardison were nominated for 4 NAACP Image Awards. The Movie was also nominated for a 2007 Teen Choice Award in the category of "Outstanding TV Movie".

 Georgia Rule Keeping Generational Secrets 

Why Do We Keep Our Secrets?
     Georgia Rule is about our multi-generational denial and how we rationalize against our self protection to protect the homeostasis. 
 
     The grandmother, Jane Fonda, plays the guilt ridden matriarch who ignored her own husband's abuse of her daughter.  Her guilt allows her to accept her daughter's alcoholism.  Felicity Huffman, plays the mother whose own pain keeps her numb to the sign that her own husband is also abusing her daughter.
 
    Lindsey Lohen plays the daughter who is just starting her rebellous teens - not fully aware of how her sexual behavior is getting her into trouble. But this time the grandmother is not going to ignore it even when the mother believes her man and blames the daughter.