On this Thursday, April 8, episode of Sundial:
Curfews And COVID-19 In Miami-Dade
Miami-Dade County is leading the state in COVID-19 vaccinations, with more than 850,000 people receiving doses as of Thursday.
“We've been assured by the president that everybody who wants a vaccine will be able to get a vaccine,” said Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava. “We were told that we would be able to get additional vaccines, so we have the capacity to deliver over one hundred thousand shots a week, and that's what we need to do to really move forward.”
WLRN is committed to providing the trusted news and local reporting you rely on. Please keep WLRN strong with your support today. Donate now. Thank you.
Increased vaccines combined with a slowdown of COVID-19 spread has led Levine Cava to lift the midnight curfew on businesses across the county beginning April 12.
“We have good precautions in place across our businesses and hospitalization rates are down, death rates are down and we are moving in the right direction. With the proper protections, we can open up a little bit more,” Levine Cava said.
It’s a welcomed change in policy for restaurants and bars who’ve been forced to send home spring break crowds in the evening. But public health experts have warned that COVID-19 variants are spreading rapidly in Florida, and individuals should not relax their pandemic precautions.
Tallahassee Takeover
Local governments in Florida normally have control over how business works in their communities, such as licensing who can do work on your home to zoning where new businesses can be opened within communities. Two new bills in Tallahassee would strip those powers from municipalities. They’re part of a series of new bills filed this session that move power away from local governments and into the hands of the state.
“I would be very hesitant to talk about this in strictly partisan terms, there’s a lot of local elected Republicans, who feel strongly about this in the opposite way that the people in Tallahassee feel about it. A lot of Republicans are very concerned about this, and they like local government. It's a pretty foundational conservative ideal. They want to hold on to that,” said WLRN reporter Danny Rivero.
His work is part of our series looking at how state leaders have wielded influence over Florida’s local elected officials and voters called Tallahassee Takeover.
Miami’s Jewish Film Festival
Growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, Dr. Henry Panion knew the story of the 16th Street Church bombing all too well. Although he was four years old when it happened, the explosion that ended up killing four young girls in 1963 was a seminal point in the battle for civil rights.
Now, more than 50 years later, the longtime musical composer has released a documentary film that tells a different story about the church — about a concert featuring violins that were recovered and restored from the Holocaust.
“Violins of hope are instruments that were recovered from the Holocaust,” said Panion on Sundial. “When the Jewish community in Birmingham thought about presenting these, they thought there might be an opportunity where these two pivotal moments in our history came together.”
The documentary film “Dreams of Hope” is part of this year’s Miami Jewish Film Festival beginning next week. The festival will be the largest in its history featuring an array of outdoor, drive-in and virtual screenings. Another film screening at the festival that’s set to have a wide release is “Tango: Shalom”, a comedy about a rabbi who wants to learn the tango. Director Gabriel Bologna explained how the bizarre story was tangentially connected to reality.
“The script was written by the Laniado brothers. Jos and Claudio Laniado. It’s really an autobiographical piece. Jos teaches in a Hasidic school and is obsessed with tango. He and his brother are refugees from Egypt and they ended up in all places, Argentina. And they would hear this incredible tango music, they play it in the streets, ” said Bologna on Sundial.
You can find more of this year’s film festival entries and information here.
