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Friends,
 

I have great news for you!
 

CODA, the winner of Best Picture at the Academy Awards, opens today at the State Theatre! We are one of the few theaters that have been granted the opportunity to show CODA this week. It is the first movie distributed theatrically by a streaming service to win the Oscar for Best Picture. Apple+ made this happen, and I and the majority of the 9,000 Academy members declared last Sunday that this was the best film made in the past year. 
 

It is indeed my favorite film of the year. Powerful, moving, unexpected. If you’ve heard of CODA you probably know it as “that movie about a deaf family.” And if that’s all you know about it, well, just wait til you see it. Because it is much, much more than that. It is the kind of movie that can change the way you see the very world and society we live in. 
 

Hollywood loves to make movies with “disabled“ characters because they know it’s an easy way to pull at the audience’s heartstrings, to create intense drama, inspire pity and sadness, and, deep down, a fake sort of empathy that narcissistically lets the viewer say softly to oneself, “thank God that’s not me.”

I think a lot of disabled and physically challenged people hate this because they don’t want your pity. They want to be treated just the way you are treated, with all your greatness and all your flaws. If you have someone in your family in a wheelchair or who is blind or has lifelong pain, you know what I’m talking about. 

So let me simply say what CODA is about: It is about a family trying to make ends meet in this difficult time. It’s about a father who fears he can no longer support his family, a mother who keeps the books of the family fishing boat and sees the ugly writing on the wall. It’s about the one child in the family who not only can hear but who has the most beautiful singing voice — that none of them have ever heard. Their house is full of humor and humanity — and though they are laughed at and dismissed by classmates and townspeople alike, they forge ahead, even if Goodwill is their Macy’s and the smell of fish from their boat to their clothes causes them a shame which they never feel because only their daughter can hear it. 

They are the working class. A working-class family that just happens to be deaf, not the other way around. And this movie is that rare film about the working class that seldom gets made. We who grew up that way, or are that way, never see true depictions of our lives on the silver screen. The images of those who work the backbreaking jobs, the smelly, grimy cogs in the wheels of Capital, those who truly built this country, those who grow and pick our food, those who stock the shelves at Meijer at three in the morning. When stories about the “working stiffs” are told, they are often doing so with condescension, patronizing, or they hold our people up as the Noble Blue Collar Man of Downriver (even though the majority of the working class in 2022 is female, under 40 and often of Color.)
 

 

CODA provides the audience with authenticity so rarely seen in a scripted drama. This is a beautiful film. I truly beg you not to miss it! Your spirits will be lifted, you’ll laugh, you’ll get mad — and when you leave at the end, you may want to go and find your own voice. 

 

Maybe those of us who are hearing people haven’t really been listening. Maybe the only reason the deaf are “disabled” is that they have to live in our world. What if we had to live in theirs? What if, in fact, we all share a common disability, one that forces most of us to live in a society where you need three weeks pay to afford the rent, one where you have to cut your prescription pills in half because you can’t afford what the doctor has ordered, an America where the words “weekend” and “vacation” don’t exist because they are just the names of more days on the calendar when you have to work that second job to get by, or have to find tutoring you can’t afford to help for your child, or where you yourself just can’t cope because your own personal mental health resembles a giant fog machine at a Whitesnake concert at Castle Farms in Charlevoix in the 80s, back when you were sure life would never be this hard. 

 

I loved this film. I honor those who made it. I thank Apple films for letting us show it on the big screen in this beautiful theater we brought back to life 15 years ago, thanks to the 200 working-class women and men in Traverse City and a few good souls who shared their blessings with their neighbors. 

 

Enjoy this brilliant movie. It IS the Best Picture of the Year. And the best place to see it is in this wonderful 106-year old movie palace with friends loved ones and beautiful strangers. 

 

To make sure everyone who wants to see CODA can do so, we will be open and showing it at the State every day for seven days beginning today and ending next Thursday. 

 

Today, Saturday and Sunday at 1pm and 4pm. 

 

Monday thru Thursday at 3pm and 7pm. 

 

One week only. 

 

Thanks for letting me share this movie with you. Write me and let me know what you think.
 

All my best,

Michael Moore 

 

Buy tickets online here.

 

P. S. And we are holding over Oscar winner BELFAST at the Bijou, this weekend only at our regular times. 

 

Here’s the trailer.

 

Buy tickets online here

P.P.S. Thank you to everyone who entered our Oscars contest! Winners have been contacted directly. We hope next year we can bring back our classic Oscar party, but we thank everyone who submitted a ballot!

 


(Note: Covid protocols are still in effect. Please show your Covid vaccination card at the door.)


 
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