Laura Paglin films in the news...
By Andrea Meyer
Sundance Film Festival Daily Insider
A lot of journalists and filmmakers went out looking for a story on Election Day, 2004. Only one of them was lucky enough to find Fannie Lewis. The feisty, 80-year-old councilwoman from Cleveland, Ohio – star of Laura Paglin’s short documentary No Umbrella – is all grit and no nonsense, with the determination of Sisyphus and the refusal to understand the word “no"...
Jen's Green Journal
I attended a screening for Shorts Program II as part of the Sundance Film Festival here in Salt Lake City yesterday - it was an excellent collection of films, although one of the films, "Range" did not appear in the program. I'm not sure if there were some technical difficulties with the film. The next to the last short film of the set, No Umbrella: Election Day in the City was especially fascinating to the part of me interested in politics and our electoral system...
By Clint O'Connor, Plain Dealer Film Critic
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Park City, Utah - After years of waiting, she finally got invited to the big dance. She had to say no.
Cleveland Heights filmmaker Laura Paglin was thrilled when the Slamdance Film Festival accepted her short documentary "No Umbrella: Election Day in the City." Slamdance runs concurrently with the Sundance Film Festival. Paglin had also submitted her film to Sundance, America's premiere film festival and one of her dream destinations...
By David C. Barnett
WCPN 90.3
This past week, the story of frustration in a Cleveland “wait line” has been favorably received by Sundance audiences. After a Tuesday screening of her 26-minute documentary short “No Umbrella - Election Day in the City,” director Laura Paglin was asked questions about her depiction of the chaos at a Hough neighborhood polling place in November of 2004...
Salt Lake City Weekly
Laura Paglin's infuriating minidocumentary observes a Cleveland polling place besieged by bureaucracy in November 2004, and the 80-year-old city councilwoman trying to preserve her mostly black constituents' ability to vote...
By Tiffiny Kaye Whitney
L.A. Splash Magazine
At 7:15 AM on November 2, 2004, lines for the national election are already long and full of people waiting to have a say on who the next president of the United States should be. Though the wishes of swing-state Ohio have come to fruition in the form of a heavily campaigned high voter turnout, reality sets in. The election board apparently hasn't planned appropriately for the explosive expansion of citizens eager to perform their civic duty...
Cleveland Jewish News
Filmmaker Laura Paglin, who received acclaim for her first film, the locally filmed “Nightowls of Coventry,” has completed a new documentary, “No Umbrella - Election Day in the City.”
The film, which examines the 2004 Election Day failures in one of Ohio’s poorest neighborhoods, will have its world première at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival, held Jan. 19-29 in Park City, Utah...
By James Renner
Cleveland Free Times
RAIN WILL GIVE WAY TO SUNDANCE… Local director Laura Paglin spent several years and thousands of dollars completing her passion project NightOwls of Coventry, which premiered at the Cleveland International Film Festival in 2003. But it’s a short documentary with a budget of $25 that might make her career...
By Lori Fireman
Now Magazine
THE NIGHTOWLS OF COVENTRY is a cinematic time capsule of changing times in the 70s in Coventry, a quiet Jewish neighborhood in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, that's suddenly inundated with bikers, hippies and incipient yuppies. Nostalgia buffs will enjoy real-life photos of the old 'hood...
By James Simons
Eye Weekly
In The Nightowls Of Coventry, a pleasant, sentimental film about the various patrons of a Cleveland deli in 1973, writer-director Laura Paglin attempts to craft characters who are not only natural and unique, but are also representative of their clashing generational stereotypes...