Caught in the net: News bullet in

Chicago makes great stock of the urban renewal its undergone over the past decade – Downtown is just as much fun these days as Manhattan – but scratch beneath the surface and it’s a place riven by serious poverty and racial tension. Just how cheap and segregated African-American life has become in the Windy City is underlined by independently produced new documentary The Field: Violence, Hip-Hop, And Hope In Chicago.

You’ll see firearms pointed at the camera,” reads the blurb. “Firearms stuffed into sagging pastel-colored, Louie V-belted jeans. Firearms wielded as totems of respect, authority, domination – tons of guns.”

Depressingly it delivers – and then some.

The ‘hope’ part comes from the rappers and community leaders who eschew all the gangsta-bynumbers bollocks in favour of an almost Black Panther-style radicalisation. If they can push through their pride, education and positive role model agenda, then maybe things will improve for all Chicagoans. Check it out at the always brilliant worldstarhiphop.com/videos.

Empowerment is something that also underpins This May Be The Last Time, Espoketis Omes Kerreskos’ Sundance-wooing doc about Native American music from Oklahoma.

“It’s an important story for not just Native Americans, but for all Americans,” says Executive Producer Vincent LoVoi. “It shows us that the roots of all American music – blues, jazz, rock and roll – go deeper than we originally thought.”

Have a goo here. Also from the Sooner State comes Rudderless, the directorial debut from William H. Macey, which admits to being influenced by Walk The Line, 8 Mile and our own Once.

“A grieving father in a downward spiral stumbles across a box of his recently deceased son’s demo tapes and lyrics,” we’re told. “Shocked by the discovery of this unknown talent, he forms a band in the hope of finding some catharsis.”

Cop an eyeful at facebook.com/rudderlessthemovie

Which just leaves time for quick visits to nerve.com (a celebration of sex in all its myriad squelchy forms); tsn.ca (US network examines homophobia in sport with its ReOrientation series) and aceministries.com (the Lock Ness monster disproves evolution and other insane fundamentalist claims).