Film & theatre

Green Left TV's Zebedee Parkes has had his short film My Friend in Detention has been officially selected to be screened at the Washington DC-based Global Impact Film Fest later this month.

Ghostbusters Written by Kate Dippold & Paul Feig Directed by Paul Feig Staring Melissa McCarthy; Kristen Wiig; Kate McKinnon; and Leslie Jones In cinemas now Internet troll Zane Alchin will be sentenced in Sydney next week after pleading guilty to “using a carriage service to menace, harass or offend”, to wit 55 vile comments on a Facebook post.

“When one farmer kills themselves you can call it suicide. But when a quarter of a million farmers kill themselves, how can the government call it suicide? It is genocide. These farmers are being killed by design.” So opens Cotton For My Shroud, a documentary about embattled Indian farmers and the assault on traditional rural agricultural life waged by Monsanto and the political class in its pockets.

Chasing Asylum Directed by Eva Orner Selected cinemas Chasing Asylum is a new documentary that shows the Nauru and Manus Island detention centres for the “Hell on Earth” and “human dumping grounds” they are.

The Meddler Written and directed by Lorene Scafaria Starring Susan Sarandon, Rose Byrne, JK Simmons One place where the personal is very political is the sometimes fraught relationships between mothers and daughters. Some time ago Hollywood screenwriter Lorene Scafaria, while dealing with a major project, also had to grapple with difficulties with her mother. That became the raw material for her new film, The Meddler.

The Sherpa are a Nepalese ethnic minority who have a reverent regard for the world’s highest mountain, Chomolungma — known in English as Everest.