This Friday’s Film Pick is the feature-length PBS documentary Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier. The choice this week was suggested by a colleague, Reisa Levine, over at CitizenShift. After you watch the video (above) you should hop over to that multimedia site dedicated to social change and check out what they’re up to. To get you started, here’s a portion of the introduction for Digital Nation, taken from the film’s PBS page:

Within a single generation, digital media and the World Wide Web have transformed virtually every aspect of modern culture, from the way we learn and work to the ways in which we socialize and even conduct war. But is the technology moving faster than we can adapt to it? And is our 24/7 wired world causing us to lose as much as we’ve gained?

In Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier, FRONTLINE presents an in-depth exploration of what it means to be human in a 21st-century digital world. Continuing a line of investigation she began with the 2008 FRONTLINE report Growing Up Online, award-winning producer Rachel Dretzin embarks on a journey to understand the implications of living in a world consumed by technology and the impact that this constant connectivity may have on future generations. “I’m amazed at the things my kids are able to do online, but I’m also a little bit panicked when I realize that no one seems to know where all this technology is taking us, or its long-term effects,” says Dretzin.

Joining Dretzin on this journey is commentator Douglas Rushkoff, a leading thinker and writer on the digital revolution — and one-time evangelist for technology’s positive impact. “In the early days of the Internet, it was easy for me to reassure people about what it would mean to bring digital technology into their lives,” says Rushkoff, who has authored 10 books on media, technology and culture. “Now I want to know whether or not we are tinkering with something more essential than we realize.”

Enjoy and give us your comments on what you thought of this week’s pick – a good critical analysis? A technophobic moral panic? Something else?

Work For All, an online film project by the NFB, has released it’s first films about racial discrimination in the workplace. Jaded is an hilariously uncomfortable short drama, and the first in a series of online videos on the topic that will be rolled out in the weeks to come.

Art Threat is partnering with Work For All to bring you ten videos on racism on the job — one a week for ten weeks. The campaign will kick off on March 21, 2010, on the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

The films will alternate between new, never before seen works, and classic gems from the NFB archive.

In the words of Work For All, “discussion about racism and diversity can happen anytime, anywhere — we just want it to happen. So take these films, embed them on your own sites, and let us know what you think about racism.”

As for Jaded, here’s the synopsis:

What if white people were visible minorities – victims of workplace racism? That’s how it is in the world of Jaded, a sharp and funny mockumentary that will get you talking about racism and discrimination.

Jade Stone can’t get a break. She’s got qualifications and drive, but despite her MBA, she’s working twice as hard to get half as far.

Racism is never funny, of course. But through clever role reversals, this tongue-in-cheek comedy allows us to laugh while confronting the realities of overt and systemic racism.

So check it out, and be sure to keep coming back over the next ten weeks as we keep rollin’ out the reels on racism.

The first film I was able to catch at this year’s One World Human Rights Film Festival was A Place Without People documenting the expulsion of the Maasai from the Serengeti in Tanzania. “Can’t at least we preserve the Serengeti for the animals and the people who come after us,” exclaimed Bernhard Grzimek, a German conservationist/zooligist famous for inspiring the creation of the Serengeti National Park. By this statement I presume he meant preserve it for other colonialists and not the Maasai, the parks original inhabitants. From British rule up to the country’s present day independent government, those in power have failed to recognize the tribe’s place in the park’s ecosystem and their role in preserving its balance for centuries.

Sentiments parallel to those of Grzimek have been used throughout the colonial world: expel/exterminate native peoples in the name of wilderness preservation. Using archival footage throughout the film Director Andreas Apostolides shows how the creation of uninhabited parks in the U.S. lead to similar actions in Tanzania. In 1877 approximately 300 Native Americans were killed in Yellowstone to make way for a park without people for white tourists. Afterward, Roosevelt traveled abroad to countries such as Tanzania pollinating these ideas.

Even after Tanzania gained independence from British colonial rule, its government continues to bar the Maasai from the park, which happens to be the size of Belgium. Like those in the West, Tanzania’s government uses “wildlife preservation” to justify upholding such policies. To further validate their stance they argued the Maasai were burning and ruining the land. The tribe was actually using controlled burns to replenish soil nutrients and prevent widespread fires during the dry season, a tactic eventually adopted by the government when finally realizing its effectiveness.

The Serengeti, regarded as a model for wilderness preservation, proves Western notions of conservation and tourism have negative impacts on original inhabitants and, in this case, the actual preservation of the land. Its first tourists were poachers, but since certain animal populations saw their numbers cut in half or more, the government has made these acts illegal (except, of course, for rich tourists who can pay 60K per rhino or 90K per elephant). Now the majority of tourists are armed with cameras instead and try to snap shots of the dwindling elephant herds or the Maasai who’ve been ushered into cultural bombas (fake villages set up by the govt. where a main source of income for the tribe includes dancing for tourists).

The Tanzanian government says tourist cash is needed to upkeep a park like this, but what they really mean is the money is needed to upkeep the facilities and tourism industry. Is this really necessary or sustainable? The resorts will eventually deplete all of the area’s groundwater. Should rich outsiders be invited to enjoy the land’s beauty and use its resources when its original inhabitants can’t step foot in it? The Maasai were able to maintain the area’s ecological balance with no outside aid or income. A Place Without People reminds us that these places need their original people.

This film played at One World Film Festival in Prague last week. Be on the look out for it at others to come. For more info or to order a screener, visit the producer’s site.

This past Friday a unique benefit to raise funds for Haiti took place, involving a combination of artists and twitter unlike anything I’ve seen before.

Paul Scheer and Rob Huebel invited 140 comedians, musicians, athletes, and entertainers who use Twitter regularly to perform their favourite tweets in front of a live audience at Los Angeles’ Upright Citizens Brigade stage. The event was aptly named A Night of 140 Tweets: A Celebrity Tweetathon for Haiti.

Funds raised from the event go to help build schools in Haiti. You can watch the preview embedded above, and if you’re really intrigued you can order a DVD on Amazon. 100% of the proceeds go to Artists For Peace and Justice to benefit the Haitian School Initiative.

You can see a full list of artists involved in the night by visiting visual artist Mike Mitchell’s webpage and clicking through to the Twitter accounts of participating artists.

A year and a half ago a haunting and beautiful documentary emerged in Quebec. Une tente sur mars (A Tent on Mars) takes a meandering visual stroll through the Northern Quebec mining town of Schefferville and surveys the effects of industry on the local Innu people. It is a quiet and disarming poem against colonization, with some unsettling scenes of intoxicated aboriginal people and a very quixotic sequence involving a rambling anthropologist in a garbage dump with black bears prowling in the background.

What is most captivating about this 2008 film by Martin Bureau and Luc Renaud is its approach to storytelling. In typical Quebecois fashion, standard formulae are abandoned in place of a lyrical, non-chronological approach that emphasizes the aesthetics of mise-en-scène and a soundscape that is sometimes heavy-handed, but overall, hypnotic and dream-like. Art Threat had the chance to ask the filmmakers a few questions about the project.

Art Threat: A TENT ON MARS is not your standard doc – the narrative structure is very non-linear and creatively, you made choices with music, with cinematography and with editing, that amount to a stunning film that is at times perplexing. Can you talk about why you made the film the way you did, and perhaps why you feel this “way” of telling a story is different from other documentaries?

Martin Bureau and Luc Renaud: Firstly, we are a Painter and a Geographer. We communicate with the language (codes) of our disciplines. We also have backgrounds in video installation that have influenced the way we approach images. We have formed ourselves to the school of documentary out of an interest in the genre, but our academic backgrounds (Visual Arts and Geography) have given us different perspectives on documentary. We feel that this world was mostly «conservative» and that there is a place for us in the way we could treat the form and the content of our project. We filmed A tent on Mars over four years. Each time we were in Northern Quebec we accumulated images and sounds that came close to meeting our own anticipations but, we were constructing our film without imposing our own preconceptions of what we could shoot, such as the way news reports often do. We wanted to confront our initial ideas, not to impose them.

Following up on that, as a programmer and viewer of documentary I am aware of a huge difference between the ways Quebecois filmmakers make films and the ways the rest of English Canada does. Can you speak to this and perhaps discuss why you feel there is an aesthetic, structural and maybe even political difference between the two cinemas?

In fact, we are sure that you could talk more about the links or the difference between cinematography from Québec and English Canada. Unfortunately, we are approaching documentary with few Canadian references. Our roots are more related to Québec, France or USA. The great tradition of the NFB [National Film Board of Canada] surely contributed to the development of our craft. We could simply say that, on aesthetic and theoretical terms, we wanted to be close to our professional origins and interests. On the one hand, a good amount of historical facts to confront our lack of experience on the ground. On the other hand, a certain idea of what the film could do and even more the film we didn’t want to do. For example, we wanted to use metaphor to tell the story instead of being literal. Also, we absolutely wanted to exclude the classical structures of documentary: voices over images, chronology (timeline) and classical interview. In the way of «cinéma direct», the film needed to be carried by the characters and the meaning of the message delivered by them, according to our initial theory. That’s why we completely rejected the idea of chronology. In that sense, we could say that our work avoids the traditional form – could we say ethic? – of documentary.

In A TENT ON MARS you interview members of a small northern Quebec community, most of whom are aboriginal and most of whom appear intoxicated in the film or have their eyes covered, I’m guessing for lack of permission to film them. Can you discuss your relationship with the community: How much time did you and the crew spend with the people of Schefferville? Why did so many seem uncomfortable with appearing in the film, at least in ways in which they could be identified? Why do so many appear intoxicated – is this representative of the whole community? Was the method to interview people based on a model of selection or relationships, or did the crew interview anyone they encountered? What is your opinion regarding the sticky ethics around filming people who are intoxicated, and especially around representing aboriginal people in such a way?

It is surprising that you mention the subject of alcohol addiction since it is only developed for about 5 minutes in our film. According to the on-the-ground reality, it would have been easy to emphasize this problem in many Native Communities. But it was not the subject of our film. These individuals captured in just a few words a situation that concerns the whole community of Schefferville. We wanted to film them with respect. And we absolutely didn’t want to deny the on-the-ground reality. We used their words to link to the concepts of colonization and assimilation. Everyone in our film consented to be in front of the camera – that was very important for us. Doing documentary is for us a question of complicity with the subjects.

Also, we are not going in to a place for just 24 hours with this idea of being sensational or efficient, and lacking all subtleties.  We must not forget that my colleague Luc [the co-director] spent 15 months living in the Schefferville community. Lastly, concerning ethics, we really don’t want to deny reality, the way too many cameras did before us in the North.

Following up on this, your film states at the beginning that it is about “The colonized and the colonizers.” How do you feel art can make not only a contribution but an intervention in the equation of colonized and colonizer?

While we where constructing this film, we approached it as an art piece free of external constrains (such as those imposed by broadcasters and producers). If at the end, our oeuvre can be part of a public debate about colonization and even bring it to the political forefront, we will have the satisfaction of knowing that Art can indeed have a profound influence. But this is a long process that goes beyond making one film…

Speaking of the process of making films – what is your next project and when can we expect to see it?

We are actually working on another film on the theme of colonization but this time though the lens of colonial tourism.  We are analyzing the presence of Québécois on the beaches of Cuba as a form of colonialism.  Still, we are trying to be critical about our relationship with others!

Do you have a favourite documentary you’d like to share with us?

(Martin) In classical terms, I would say Pour la suite du monde and La bête lumineuse, two films made by Pierre Perrault in the sixties and the eighties. In my interest linking painting, video and documentary, I would say Yes Sir, madame!, a film by Robert Morin who is on the edge of documentary and fiction. I have seen recently a great film from a Belgian Artist named Johan Grimonprez : Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y . His cinematographical treatment about his subject of History of Terrorism in the airports is simply amazing.

A circuit hacked children's toy

The consumer is supposed to do what they’re told, no? It is an old and well practiced arrangement. They make the stuff, and the rest of us buy it, eat it and use it. Especially, it seems, with technology where few of us have the know-how or courage for that matter to repurpose and reinvent the complicated digital gak that increasingly defines our lives.

Even the fun machines like video games and computers come to us with built in assumptions about how we are expected to behave with them, what we will do with them, and how our lives will be altered to integrate these objects into daily practices. We listen to radios. We play video games. We watch televisions. Just like we’re told.

But there are those among us who do it differently. Hardware-hacking is a growing movement to reclaim creative control of our relationships with technology. “Shape your tools, or you will be shaped by them”, so their motto goes. Televisions become oscilloscopes. Radios become synthesizers. Outdated video games become means of composing unique musical scores.

Foulab is a hardware-hacking collective based in Montreal. As the recently created short documentary “Repurpose” demonstrates (see below), it is an exciting world of scavenging and repurposing obsolete and abandoned technologies into works of art and creative tools.

Repurpose was created by Jack Oatmon. It is well worth the nine or so minutes it takes to watch – a nicely rendered mini-doc.

I’m about to fly off to the Maritimes to visit family for the weekend, so here’s a quick plug for a short film by our friend and media activist extraordinare, Liz Miller.

Novela, Novela looks at the making of Sexto Sentido, a groundbreaking Nicaraguan soap opera that regularly deals with controversial issues such as sexual orientation, rape, abortion and domestic violence in the context of a predominantly Catholic country that is the second poorest in the hemisphere. The doc explores the impact the incredibly popular program has had on audiences, as well as the young actors and screenwriters involved in the production.

The video embedded above is the 7 minute version of the film. If it tickles your fancy, you can get a copy of the full 30 minute doc, which includes an episode of Sexto Sentido, over at the film’s website.

Originally published in the Spring 2010 issue of POV Magazine.

Einstein on the screen

Recently, Disney, the largest children’s entertainment firm in the world, offered rebates on its hugely popular educational DVD set Baby Einstein. While the company refused to acknowledge the link, many point to the ongoing lobbying efforts by the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood as the reason behind the company’s capitulation. Apparently, research shows that little Abdul or Suzy can’t learn much at all from screen media, that is, if they’re under two years old.

Disney had marketed Baby Einstein to eager parents and created the impression that toddlers could indeed benefit cognitively from screen media, maybe even picking up a little physics along the way. But the information proving the contrary was all in the documentary Consuming Kids by the Media Education Foundation, an organization of academics and media makers based in Northampton, MA who produce educational documentaries on topics ranging from homophobia in hip hop culture to corporate greenwashing. Their documentary had warned of such marketing ploys.

This begs the question: if babies can’t learn from screen media, can the rest of us learn from documentaries?

Historically, documentary theory has oscillated between the information dissemination concepts of propaganda and public service/education. Propaganda is considered the false (or misleading) representation of facts for political gain, while public education is considered the unbiased transmission of cold hard facts to the unwashed masses. As mutually exclusive concepts, both are limited visions of the role documentary cinema has to play in informing audiences on a wide range of issues and as an intervening force in the public sphere.

This dichotomous debate often culminates at the discursive site of a beaten-down effigy of Michael Moore, who is alternately an evil, conniving and manipulative spin-master or a saintly, selfless media mascot of the marginalized and oppressed. That said, can we learn from his movies, despite the fact that they are “entertaining”? And what of the bias in Moore’s films—doesn’t this disqualify them from having any educational quality?

A biased education?

Documentaries, like fiction films, journalism, blogging, children’s books and restaurant menus, manipulate reality. The now famous edict from the controversial NFB founder John Grierson, that documentary is the “creative treatment of actuality” only nudges us toward an understanding of the genre and its capacity to deliver “truth” to audiences. And truth is indelibly connected to education. Not too many would admit to seeking an education of lies and falsehoods—although propaganda can offer such an indoctrination.

As potential educators, documentarians may aspire to be truth-providers, but truth be told, they too have their own biases, limitations, political convictions and social blinders. Audience attitudes do not always recognize this however, as illustrated when one overhears an audience member opining, “That was so biased! How can we believe a word of what they say? And that was supposed to be a documentary!” Documentaries, like textbooks, are not neutral documents—and this realization should encourage students to elicit the same frustrated response to textbooks as they sometimes do to films in their classrooms.

Similarities to other educational apparatuses aside, documentary has a different role to play in the visual media multiverse, especially concerning the towering pillars of truth and objectivity. A hybrid of narrative-based storytelling, journalism, info-graphics and photo-evidence, documentary continues to pry apart ossified socio-political layers of human reality, and provide a kind of education on everything from gay rugby to toxic babies. Because of the claims of veracity that documentary stakes out in our consciences as audiences and communities, we engage the genre with expectations of truth-telling and reality-revealing that leave notions of neutrality (and often objectivity) in the bin with the Disney DVDs.

Documentary is a heterogenous media form that is so excellently suited to intervening in the public sphere, it is not surprising the education it provides is one of a progressive, critical bent. By critically intervening with powerful visual media in public discussions that are often defined by corporate media production and dissemination, documentary has a chance to insert a counter-education based on alternative perspectives and critical oppositional narratives into the contemporary western media matrix—one that is increasingly audio-visual in nature.

Literacy in the 21st Century

In their report, Literacy for the 21st Century, Part I, authors at the Centre for Media Literacy, write, “The transformation of our culture from an Industrial Age to an Information Age is why a new kind of literacy, coupled with a new way of learning, is critical in the 21st century.” Learning through documentary (and consequently teaching with documentary) requires a kind of visual literacy, if documentary is to make effective interventions into the public sphere.

Liz Miller, a documentary filmmaker (The Water Front, 2007) and professor in the Communication Studies department at Concordia University, tells me that, “Documentary has a critical role to play in education. The rapid advances in media technology have forced educators like myself to rethink notions of literacy and adapt our curricula accordingly. If students are watching, listening, and producing even more than they are reading, we must ensure they have critical frameworks for analysis. We can use documentaries to raise questions around voice, truth, ethics, and a range of themes relevant to the shifting literacies of the 21st Century.”

These shifting planes of teaching, sharing, learning, producing and consuming media and knowledge amount to new shapes and roles for texts. In Miller’s case, her excellent documentary on the struggle for accessible water in a Detroit community is one text. But connected to that central audio-visual work are other texts, including an interactive website, online video clips and a comprehensive guide with sections such as “Water Privatization,” “Water as a Human Right” and “Citizen Action.” The guide is available to educators and anyone interested in expanding the critical perspective the film opens up around water and water rights. Her documentary is the centrepiece in an educational toolbox that utilizes other media and methods for exchange and dissemination of critical perspectives in the social landscape.

Documentaries have the unique capability to harness arguably the most powerful medium—cinema—in an increasingly visual culture and critically intervene in a landscape dominated by profit-oriented entertainment. This potential is even more pronounced with younger producers/audiences a.k.a. the “YouTube generation.”

I asked my niece, who is just beginning university and has taken up documentary viewing with a zeal not found in her peers, if she finds documentaries educational. As the “e” word is often said to be the death knell for viewing pleasures, I was optimistically surprised by her response: “I think being visually educated can have a greater effect on someone than if they were to simply read a book. I think the term ‘out of sight, out of mind’ is very true and documentaries give people a better understanding of issues by being able to literally see what goes on outside of everyday life. For younger people especially, who may not be very interested in traditional learning, they may find it easier to learn by watching a documentary because it’s more interesting than sitting down and reading words on a piece of paper.”

This statement, made by someone recently out of high school and preparing to begin university, may nurture a moral panic with educators and literature fans everywhere, but it is a social reality that needs to be faced, and prepared for, as we continue along our social trajectory in the “Information Age.”

Erik Chevrier, a media educator and activist who works with youth in Montreal on a host of projects ranging from production to literacy, isn’t panicking. “Documentaries are audio-visual equivalents to books. They provide information about a subject and/or event as told by the writer and director of the documentary. It is our job, as educators, to train students to conduct proper research from as many sources and mediums as possible. Media is evolving rapidly. Teachers should embrace these newly developing sources of information and help students develop appropriate critical skills.” In this sense documentaries are part of an educational arsenal, deployed in conjunction with other materials, and tapping into a zeitgeist of popular visual media production and consumption the likes of which have never been seen before.

Western culture is rapidly embracing the visual, which is eclipsing traditional textual media forms. With the proliferation of technologies that produce and disseminate audio-visual media, we are increasingly creating and sharing knowledge, ideas and culture by way of images and sound. Somewhere between YouTube DIY videos, online television streaming, corporate visual marketing and viral videos, documentary emerges as a locus for critical engagement with social reality through visual storytelling. Miller argues that “What documentaries are able to do best is transmit knowledge through stories instead of statistics or data. And most of us are hardwired to respond to stories—so we will internalize information that is presented through a story.”

The best educational documentaries are the ones that are able to impart information (such as statistics and data) through entertaining storytelling. Chevrier agrees that one quality does not have to come at the cost of another. “I do not believe that a documentary’s educational and entertainment value contrast. My students enjoy documentaries which they can relate to, and this often means tapping into the ‘language’ they understand—entertainment.” With Western youth typically described as apathetic to local and global social issues, educators have a wonderful opportunity to stimulate by deploying documentaries into the mix.

Getting a docucation

That’s easier said than done of course, and one challenge to getting and giving a “docucation” that both Miller and Chevrier point to, is awareness and access. Many educators are unaware of the veritable mountains of documentaries that often sit in libraries, dormant. As for my niece, she seems to have had no problem navigating the Internet in search of social justice documentaries. In the expansive repository that is the world wide web, she’s found plenty of sites for streaming, including that of the National Film Board of Canada, which is currently in the throes of digitizing its enormous collection for the web.

So why do we need documentary for a well-rounded education? Because we gain critical perspectives, and because docs speak the language of visual media. Here’s the rub: I am unlikely to read a book on the Alberta tar sands—not for lack of interest but for lack of time. I am, however, very likely to sit in a theatre or at home and watch an 80 minute documentary on the tar sands. And if that documentary is a good one, as H2Oil (Shannon Walsh, 2009) is, then I am likely to be inspired to seek out more texts on the issue and maybe even get involved in activating change, rounding out my education through knowledge and participation. And therein lies one of the important distinctions between an education through textbooks and one through documentary.

Textbooks, at least in the Canadian education system, reinforce normative narratives on everything from colonialism to gender. A textbook education (or if you prefer “traditional education”) helps build a foundation for integration and assimilation in society. Critical perspectives are left to the interpretive communicative powers of the knowledge-authority in the classroom: the teacher.

If one’s teacher happens to agree with the normative narratives and mythologies of domination and conquest, then one struggles inside a pedagogical framework devoid of alternative perspectives. Documentary, especially social justice or political documentaries, help fill in the voids left by the state (textbooks) and corporations (mainstream media and Hollywood) with critical interventions into social reality and itinerant discussions, debates and discourses.

As my knowledge-hungry niece tells me, “I like watching documentaries because I know most people spend a good amount of time watching movies, television shows, etc. And of course I have as well, and I wonder: what do we gain from this? Personally, I feel that I gain nothing when I sit down and watch mindless TV, but when I watch a documentary it brings a sense of meaning to my time and the more I learn about the issues these documentaries teach me about, the more I feel like I can start making a change.”

Inspired learning through the visual representation and interpretation of social reality is part of the larger puzzle of visual media literacy. And while all media have a role to play, documentary is proving to be a powerhouse of envelope-pushing and agenda-setting. Documentary pushes debates further in the public sphere (without always surrendering to liberalism and populism), providing an opportunity for knowledge dissemination that breaks from ivory towers, corporate offices and policy think tanks.

Consider the public debates and discussions around agriculture and food politics currently underway. This discourse continues to be shaped and fuelled by current documentaries like We Feed the World, Our Daily Bread, Seed Saver, The World According to Monsanto, Fresh, Food, Inc. and others, which offer critical perspectives against normative narratives around how our food is grown, who grows it and how our bodies and the environment are implicated.

Examples abound for other contemporary discussions, from Palestine/Israel to climate change to pornography. If we left it up to our schools and corporate media institutions these discussions would be significantly more shallow and narrow, and social change would be much slower.

Epilogue: Future screen learning

Recently, I co-curated a selection of documentary film and video works for a mini-festival called Sex, Labour, Smut, which was organized by Cinema Politica and the Concordia Documentary Centre. The festival was meant to provide critical perspectives and alternative stories about sexuality, sex work and pornography.

Through the course of reviewing dozens of films and videos ranging from transsexual sex work guides to films on pornographic actors, I came to a startling (but others would surely say obvious) realization: I knew little to nothing on the topics and associated issues. Spending the weekend watching the selected works with the other co-curators and our audiences I realized something else: I was getting an education that I would be hard-pressed to find anywhere else.

When the festival was over, I felt my knowledge had grown intensely and I was prepared to better discuss the issues with understanding and empathy. I felt that what I had learned before seeing these documentaries was in large part a liberal mainstream perspective: narrow, fixed and exclusive. There clearly were other perspectives, other stories and other truths out there, which somehow I hadn’t experienced beforehand.

And there lies the challenge for the future, for literacy in the 21st Century. There is no shortage of documentaries that can inspire, educate and entertain. There is no shortage of audiences, saturated in a visual media landscape dominated by celebrity fluff and corporate news, who are eager to experience alternative, critical perspectives. In short, the “truths” are out there, it’s up to us to support them, and not just with bums in seats, but with policies and practices that sustain independent documentaries and their makers. And that attention applies to the audiences too—even the babies who have been duped by Disney and are growing into our future viewers, producers and educators.

Image: video still from The Water Front by Liz Miller.

Michael Moore’s latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story takes aim at the elite bankers and CEOs who are steering America’s economy into the gutter, and among the bad guys he goes after is none other than the world’s largest and most brutal retailer, Wal-Mart (now re-branded as Walmart). Moore exposes Walmart’s dirty practice of taking out insurance claims on its employees and cashing in on their deaths without telling their families.

So it may come as a bit of a surprise that Moore’s anti-capitalism, anti-Walmart documentary goes on sale today…in Walmart. Yes, you can buy the DVD at your local low-wage, environment-destroying, human-rights abusing Walmart, as well as at Amazon and other video retailers. Moore thinks that the reason Walmart is happily carrying Capitalism: A Love Story is due to the fact that they are uber-comfy in their position of ruler of the world. In an email sent out today, he writes:

The fact that Wal-Mart is carrying this movie — a movie that specifically exposes Wal-Mart’s past practice of taking out secret “dead peasant” life insurance policies on its employees and naming itself as the lone beneficiary should the employee meet an “untimely” early death — well, my friends, need you any further proof that Corporate America is so secure in its position as the ruler of our country, so sure of its infallible power that, yes, they can even sell a movie that attacks them because it poses absolutely no threat to them?

A sane person would think that Wal-Mart would never carry “Capitalism: A Love Story” because it’s simply not in their best interests to inform their customers of their shady past. After all, many Wal-Mart stores wouldn’t carry “Bowling for Columbine” back in 2003. That was *Kmart* I went after (for selling the ammo to the Columbine killers)! But I guess that was too Mart-y close for Wal-Mart — so no DVDs were allowed of that film on the shelves of some of the world’s biggest retail chain’s stores (the movie studio estimated that cost them $2.5 million in sales).

But seven years later, it’s a new day in America. The corporate coup is complete. Corporations like Wal-Mart now call all the shots, write all the laws, pay off almost all the congressmen and essentially (along with the other Fortune 500 companies and Wall Street) rule the nation. They’ve helped to eliminate consumer choice and the free market while convincing you they are all for “free enterprise” and the “U.S.A.”

Moore also reminds us that Walmart is co-opting criticism by appropriating green rhetoric and organic retail practices. This was recently, shamelessly highlighted in the Academy Award nominated documentary Food, Inc:

More importantly, they’ve snuffed out any criticism or opposition. They’ve even co-opted liberals, like the people who made the wonderful documentary, “Food, Inc.” The last half-hour of this movie includes — I kid you not — an homage to Wal-Mart as the filmmakers swoon over this kinder, gentler company that has decided to — bless them! — put an organic food counter in their stores! Thank you, Wamart! Kumbaya! (And hey, granolaheads, don’t forget to flash a smile on the way out of the store at the “greeter” who can’t afford to see a doctor.)

So the question remains – with critical interventions like Moore’s documentary on sale at Walmart, are we past the point of no return when it comes to revolutionizing our economic system into one that is just, fair and sustainable? Or should we just buy the movie for cheap, watch it, and go back to business?

A frank discussion on sex workers and labour rights appears to be too hot and heavy for the brass at Sweden’s Stockholm University.

The local chapter of Cinema Politica had plans to commemorate International Women’s Day with a screening of Live Nude Girls Unite!, a documentary on the creation of the first labour union for strippers in the United States.

Exotic dancers are regularly exploited by club owners, and the story of one woman’s quest to organize her fellow workers and fight back against the oppression of sex workers seemed like a perfect way to foster debate around the issues of empowerment and workers’ rights.

If university management has their way, however, no such discussion will take place. The administation has effectively banned the event, having canceled the student film group’s room booking and destroyed all of their promotional material.

Here’s an excerpt from a message sent out by the event organizers:

Our screening of the film and following discussion, as clearly stated in Cinema Politica’s charter, is to present ALTERNATIVE perspectives regarding pressing social, political and cultural issues. We strongly feel that Live Nude Girls Unite! will help us continue this tradition.

We are disturbed and appalled by this action, as it represents an inexcusable abuse of power, censorship and flagrant disregard of free speech by Stockholm University’s administration. Cinema Politica refuses to take this action lightly. We are forced to take action to continue our efforts to foster free and open debate.

Please show your support by attending Monday, as we WILL make this event happen. Tell all of your friends so we can make this the biggest screening in our young history.

We will not be censored, and we will not be stopped from celebrating International Women’s Day.

You can learn more about the banned film at LiveNudeGirlsUnite.com.

Jay Black’s photographs of the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic mascots first caught my eye down at the W2 Culture + Media House in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. They are at once poignant and playful, and seemed to be a well thought out and cohesive effort to tell the story of the concerns people had about the Olympics using the plush toys. I interviewed him and discovered that really, the photos had been completely spontaneous, merely play done to fill time. Despite the protest-like nature of the photos, Jay also had a positive experience with the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

The following are excerpts of my interview with Jay in which he talks about his inspiration for each of the photos.

The IOC

My first use of an official 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games mascot was in a 2008 set titled Quatchi’s dream comes true. According to the Vancouver 2010 “Meet the Mascots” webpage, Quatchi is a shy young sasquatch who dreams of becoming a world famous hockey goalie and enjoys photography and meeting new friends. It occurred to me that I could introduce a hockey playing friend of mine to him to help make him famous while I took photos of the event. A few weeks after I’d uploaded the shots to Flickr, I noticed an added piece of text on Quatchi’s official bio page. Now, in addition to photography and making new friends, he also likes having others take shots on him. It told me they had a sense of humour about what I was doing, so I felt encouraged to continue.

More recently, I spoke with local Games Organizing Committe (VANOC) marketing executive Bill Cooper and asked if he would be fine with me selling prints of my 2009 mascot spoofs in a local gallery. He said their concern was with distribution and that as long as I wasn’t selling prints through a nationwide chain gallery then they would be fine with it. That’s how you came to find my work at W2. Not sure if Irwin [Oostindie, W2 Executive Director] has sold any prints. I’ve donated all proceeds to the Perel Gallery there so if you like what you see here and want a matte, dry-mounted print for your office, e-mail W2.

During the Games, I went to a Flickr meet up at the Yahoo! Sports Studio in Yaletown with Kris Krug who introduced me to two IOC staff who were there to launch their new Flickr group. As we shook hands I asked if they traded pins. One handed me a metallic, speech bubble shaped pin bearing the Olympic rings and the engraved words “I’m a fan” on its face. In return, I gave each of them a 1.5” anti-Olympic activist badge and we shared a chuckle. My intent was to remind them their group was one of thousands on Flickr where freedom of expression is respected by the ownership. They received the badges I offered with slightly surprised smiles but in good humour. That meant the world to me.

Quatchi

I was bored on a sunny September day off work and stopped in at the Megaphone Magazine office on East Hastings to ask Sean Condon [then Editor-in-Chief] if he needed any shots for upcoming stories. He said he was okay for the time being, but I had Quatchi in my backpack and decided to take him on a tour of the Downtown Eastside and put into practice a few ideas I had held in mind since 2007 when the plush toys were placed on the market. I live three blocks east of the Megaphone office, so I pulled out the doll and my civic flag which he wore as a blanket and scouted locations that would reflect images I had grown accustomed to seeing on the street since moving into the community. The photos I took that day have received praise from both Olympic supporters and resisters, so I’m pleased Sean didn’t have anything for me to cover that day.

Miga

I was at work that day, at a community centre that has an ice rink, and was about to take my supper break. It was late July, and the hottest day on record in Vancouver, so I’d planned spend it in the rink where new ice was being built for the season ahead. I cut through the lobby on the way and noticed a container into which parents were encouraged to deposit war toys and comic books, the final contents of which would be used in the creation of a piece of pacifist art.

A news story I’d read that morning the ballooning security budget for the Games came to mind as did the fact one of my coworkers had a plush Miga doll in her office. I wasn’t sure how the work would unfold but I sensed then that I had the raw materials to create something fun. I grabbed my camera, Miga, a handful of action figures and toy military vehicles and went to the rink. Because it was so hot outside and the ice not quite its final thickness, the rink’s compressors were kicking butt, but not strongly enough to keep a mist from rising above the surface. I set up the toys and shot the series with the intention of creating art, but it was also just a way to kill time with play in a cool place on a very hot day

While creating these works, I don’t envision an end product as something to aim for. It’s more like play that I record with my camera. I often don’t know how things are going to turn out, but in the end I have these pieces of art and people on both sides of the Olympic debate seem to enjoy them. That makes me feel good.

Sumi

It occurred to me early on that Sumi’s name sounds the same as “sue me,” so when [Olympic Resistance Network Members] Chris Shaw and Alissa Westergard-Thorpe sued the City of Vancouver over inconsistencies between its Olympic By-law and guaranteed Fundamental Freedoms under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, this “animal spirit” mascot came to mind. I attended a press conference outside the law courts where the plaintiffs stated the basis for their case, but when I arrived home and started uploading the photos to Flickr it looked a bit boring. Knowing the By-law’s restrictions on civil liberties were IOC demands, I thought it might be interesting to find out how Sumi – as an Olympic symbol – might react if presented with a hardcopy of the Charter. I purchased a plush Sumi at the HBC [Hudson Bay Company]-based Olympic Store (I know, I know … but artists need their supplies!) and then stopped in at the People’s Law School for a copy of the free document.

While walking home, I considered variations on the theme. A nice closeup of his foot stomping across the Charter was an automatic. I noticed a wonderful synchronicity in Sumi being the only plush mascot with a Vancouver 2010 mark sewed to the bottom of his foot, especially as he was the only official mascot left to subvert. Sometimes everything just falls into place, as they say. At home, I cleared my desk, set up and took the photos, and uploaded the set along with the press conference series. It gives political cartooning a greater portion of the space devoted to telling the story than you’d find in a newspaper and more entertaining for the viewer than staid columns of text on grey newsprint.

Muk Muk

During the Games, after the anti-Olympic activist convergence had ended and the Olympic Tent Village being largely ignored by local mainstream media, some folks rallied in a lighthearted protest urging VANOC to grant Mukmuk official mascot status. He’d always been the outsider, a sidekick condemned to cheer from the sidelines but never actually participate in sports like Quatchi, Sumi and Miga do. I considered how Mukmuk might feel about these well-meaning folks and their spirited advocacy of his plight. The result was Black Bloc Mukmuk, a spoof reflecting the social exclusion underlying the sidekick’s story. As well, I felt a need to break some of the tension in the air over the split in local activist circles over the use of a “diversity of tactics,” i.e., an acceptance of destructive behaviour, in protesting the Games. The shot of Black Bloc Mukmuk kicking over the mascot-stickered Canada Post toy mailbox became my most viewed photo on Flickr during the Games, going microviral via social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.

To celebrate the ending of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics and the launch of a new book about political documentary and art as social intervention we have chosen You Are On Indian Land (YAOIL) as our Friday Film Pick.

Produced under the National Film Board of Canada’s Challenge for Change Program in 1969 YAOIL was one of the first documentaries produced with members of the Indian Film Unit (a production unit made up of aboriginal filmmakers, cancelled some years later). The 37 minute black and white film, made by Mort Ransen and Mike Mitchell (who is currently Grand Chief of Akwesasne) is a powerful instalment of cinema verité and an incredibly important historical document that still measures up to today cinema standards.

On the eve before a protest and blockade organized by Mohawks from the St. Regis reserve in Cornwall, Ontario, Mike Mitchell and Mort Ransen convinced the National Film Board to green light an impromptu film crew and budget to make a documentary about the ensuing struggle. The next day Ransen, Mitchell (who appears in the film as one of the central characters and is arrested and put in a police car while sarcastically saying “See you in Disneyland”) and the crew headed to Cornwall where members of the Mohawk community had amassed in the wintry morning to stop cars from going over what they saw as an illegal and intrusive bridge spanning their territory.

The protesters put up signs that say “You are on Indian Land,” indicating trespassers will be arrested and fined. What then follows is a protracted stand-off with Ontario police, who eventually ignore the Mohawk’s right to assembly on their own land (as indicated in the Jay Treaty of 1794) and begin making very forceful arrests. Intense, emotionally charged and candid, this documentary serves as testament to the ongoing struggle of aboriginal peoples’ fight for justice, self-determination and to land inside the borders of Canada.

A fitting film, we think, to mark the end of a spectacle in Vancouver that destroyed habitat on First Nations land and that did little to live up to the narrative of Canada’s inclusive Multiculturalism – a games where aboriginal communities (and other non-white communities) were elided in policy and planning, and where development on ancestral lands was pushed through at great cost to habitat, culture and community.

You can watch more Challenge for Change films here, at the new playlist created in conjunction with the release of Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada, edited by myself, Tom Waugh and Mike Baker and published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.

A Review of Cape Farewell’s SHIFT Festival at the London South Bank Centre and the exhibition Earth: Art of a Changing World at the Royal Academy, London.

There has been a centuries old tradition for artists to act as the handmaidens of the powerful and the wealthy, commissioned to celebrate victories in battle, coronations of potentates or vanity portraits. In our relatively more democratic age the link between artists and patrons has become more problematic, allowing artists a greater freedom to plough their own furrows towards indigence or fortune, to indulge their own interests or, stepping outside of their private bubbles, to respond to the issues of the day.

It was the supreme narcissist, Pablo Picasso, who, in the nineteen-thirties, most spectacularly confronted the issue of his day, the danger from the rise of militarism and fascism, in his monumental work Guernica. Now, in our own perilous times, Guernica seems to have replaced the polar bear¹ as the creative community’s icon of preference, a template with which to confront our own Armageddon, the threat to the planet from climate change and global warming.

Picasso’s masterpiece was used to illustrate the need for artists to respond to the crisis of climate change in an article published by Art Threat in June 2007. Two years later the power of Guernica was invoked again, this time to encourage responses from artists to global warming (“Where is the Guernica of climate change”? Guardian newspaper blog, October, 2008). More recently, the artist and ceramicist Grayson Perry’s work The Walthamstow Tapestry was celebrated as “The Guernica of the Credit Crunch” in the Art Newspaper, September, 2009.

The phrase “A Guernica for Gaia”, apart from its alliterative appeal, was prompted by the publication of the environmental scientist James Lovelock’s book, The Revenge of Gaia, in 2006. Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, first made public in 1972, presents the world, our planet, as a self-regulating entity of which humanity is a part and in which we, together with other natural forces, have a role to play in determining its future, frightening evolution.

In response to this need for artists’ engagement with global warming, London hosted a climate-change-inspired art bonanza at the turn of the year. It attracted a cosmopolitan array of the art world’s great and the good. Timed to coincide with the Copenhagen Climate Conference, whose unhappy outcome can only reinforce the need for new initiatives, it was the brain child of Cape Farewell, a charity formed in 2002, to research and provide public education on the impact of human activity and pollution on the North Atlantic Ocean and to make a cultural response to climate change.

The link between what is ostensibly a scientific charity and the arts developed very quickly and the first expedition to the Arctic, involving both scientists and artists, took place in 2003. Since then there have been six other expeditions involving many well-known artists from the British, European and World art scene. The painter, Gary Hume, produced his Polar Bear painting after the first trip, and others who have enjoyed Cape Farewell’s patronage have included the artists Sophie Calle, Antony Gormley and Rachel Whiteread, the musicians Laurie Anderson, Jarvis Cocker and Martha Wainwright and the writers Vikram Seth and Ian McEwan.

Cape Farewell’s SHIFT: Artists’ Take On Climate Change, at the London South Bank Centre, was a festival of artworks, music, writings and performance inspired by artists who had joined Cape Farewell expeditions to the High Arctic. Central to the festival were the SHIFT Encounters, open forum discussions involving a selection of artists as well as scientists from the expeditions.

The discussion with the artists did not shy away from contentious issues like the danger of the participants compromising the artistic authenticity of their work, or the carbon footprint resulting from their Arctic travels²; nor from the humility-hubris contradiction of their often described awe and fear in the face of the raw power of nature, on the one hand, and the equally oft-expressed concern, on the other, for the fragility of an environment that we puny mortals were at one and the same time both destroying and trying to save.

The Australian artist, Michele Noach, was clear about the artistic legitimacy of the program. There was no remit from the organizers or sponsors, no requirement to produce environmentally correct art. Each artist was left to respond as they saw fit; to find the experience of the Arctic transformative or not; to produce no art or art that was driven by an inner passion and, perhaps, after exposure to an ecosystem that was beautiful, precious and fragile, that set out to save it.

Professor Chris Wainwright, artist and academic, focussed more on the entirely legitimate role of the artist as a social critic and on the social function of art. If the business community is expected to demonstrate Corporate Social Responsibility, with its triple “bottom line” of People, Planet, Profit, then why not the cultural community? And, as far as art education was concerned, as head of a consortium of London art colleges, he was determined that his students should see art as a virus that would “fold back art into society”, each individual act of creative endeavor rippling across society like a pebble dropped in a pond.

David Buckland, the founder of Cape Farewell, emphasized that the organization was never propagandist or cause-driven but always knowledge-driven. In the Arctic, the ice cap was melting, it was there that the battle to save the planet needed to be fought, it was vital to find out what was happening and, then, to spread the word. He saw the role of artists primarily as adding an emotional understanding to the scientific research results.

Artists have ideas “on the edge of knowing”, ideas that they strive to articulate through their practice. When they work they produce good art and good art provides an emotional ballast for the science. There is much evidence today that the scientists are not winning the argument, the propaganda war for hearts and minds. They need the support of an emotional dimension that only art can provide. Good science needs good art.

The exhibition Earth: Art of a Changing World (at the prestigious Royal Academy of Arts, founded by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1768), filled the Academy’s extension in the former Museum of Mankind, a suitably anthropological base for the anthropogenic essence of the show.

The Belgian artist, Luc Tuymans, has commented that paintings succeed where words fail but, here, the curators felt the need to provide lengthy explanatory notes as if, without words, the art would fail, not, perhaps, as art but as a commentary on the issue that the show set out to confront – the effect of human activity on “the natural balance and physical cycles of our planet”. To misquote Marshall McLuan, the message is the message rather than the medium. [For those who missed the show the small catalogue is worth getting hold of and includes illustrations of all 35 artists’ work together with the exhibition texts.] The show presents the artist variously as “interpreter, recorder of disaster and provocateur”.

The Canadian artist, Edward Burtynsky, ticked several of these boxes, especially with the brutal aesthetic of his photograph Alberta Oil Sands. Burtynsky is perhaps unusual in being one of the few artists whose practice is centred on environmentalism. Tracy Emin’s is certainly not. When invited to produce a piece of work for the exhibition, the controversial YBA artist replied that, whilst she knew she would never understand the science of climate change, she just knew that she cared. Her work, especially created for the show, eschewed her stock-in-trade of explicit, autobiographical installations and consisted of delicate drawings of birds and flowers, echoing the fragility of so much of the natural world.

Some installations had a more-or-less literal form – an installation evoking the meteorology of clouds (Sunlight in an Empty Room, 2004, by the American artist, Spencer Finch), or Mona Martoum’s fragile steel globe (Hot Spot, 2006). Other work was made of living organisms (Ackroyd and Harvey’s planting of saplings, a homage to Joseph Beuys (Beuys’ Acorns, 2007 +), or of organic matter now dead, the product of man-made or natural disasters (Cornelia Parker’s Heart of Darkness, 2004, and David Nash’s Ash Dome, 2009).

There was a good deal of video and photographic work. The Finnish artist, Antti Laitinen’s video of his attempts to construct his own island in the Baltic against a decidedly uncooperative sea (Its My Island, 2007), and Shiro Takatani’s Ice Core, 2005, a DVD representing part of an Antarctic ice core containing the history of the planet’s carbon dioxide content over the last 800,000, perhaps most clearly demonstrated what the exhibition set out to achieve — a scientific message embedded in good art.

The last word, in the catalogue, goes to the novelist Ian McEwan, a participant on the 2005 Cape Farewell expedition and whose much anticipated new novel is said to be a satirical look at climate change. Are we, he asks, “living in an Edwardian summer of reckless denial? Is this the beginning or the beginning of the end?” The last word in the exhibition, from the work that lingers most ominously in the mind, is in fact not a word, nor even an image, but a sound: The sound of the 567 digital wall clocks of Darren Almond’s sound installation, Tide, 2008, that each minute, with a jarring, mechanical cacophony, give warning of the unstoppable progress of the planet towards a tipping point, a mere 96 months away. that, once reached, could lead to sudden, irrevocable climate changes, disastrous for the survival of mankind.

1. Whatever Happened to the Polar Bears? Landscape and Arts Network Journal, April 2006.
2. Review of Cape Farewell Ice Garden Exhibition, Oxford, 2005.
Images from Earth: Art of a Changing World.

Protesters against the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the West Bank barrier wall take a more theatrical approach in Bil’in. On February 12, 5 Israeli, Palestinian and international demonstrators dressed as James Cameron-style Avatars marched towards the barrier, which has absorbed approximately 60% of this Palestinian village’s farmland, and were, per usual, met with tear gas and sound bombs. Though sporting blue painted bodies, pointy ears and long tails didn’t seem to faze the Israeli Defense Force, the tactics generated more media attention than usual for this weekly action.

In 2004, the International Court of Justice declared the barrier a violation of international law, and the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that sections of it imposed “undue hardships on Palestinians and should be re-routed.” 3 weeks ago Israel began reconstruction of the wall returning 30% of the land it previously confiscated. Though this sparked celebration, demonstrators and maybe even occasional ‘Avatars’ will continue their weekly action demanding justice and the return of all illegally confiscated West Bank lands as they’ve done for the past 5 years.

The first video I saw documenting this reenactment (edited with music and footage from the Cameron’s Avatar film) seemed to overdramatize and simplify the situation. The occupation and strategic seizure of Palestinian land is dramatic enough without music from a mainstream epic. I eventually found footage sans cinematic soundtrack, which helped me view the theatrics more objectively. While the demonstrators’ analogies may be quite blatant (the Israelis being the imperialist colonizers and the Palestinians the indigenous Na’vi), incorporating global pop culture into their weekly performance boosts morale of participants and generates more coverage for Bil’in.

With no freedom of movement, most people in the West Bank have no way to go to the cinema. Luckily Mohammed Khatib, one of the village organizers, scored a bootleg copy, which was used for costume reference and inspiration to enhance the demonstration. Once again, tear gas canisters, which have injured and even killed other weekly protesters here, were shot directly at the crowd in violation of IDF firing regulations. I don’t think millions of tickets will sell for this real drama. However, if you want front row seats, the villagers of Bil’in welcome you any and every Friday.

Photo from bilin-village.org.

For the last three years I’ve been working on a book about a daring documentary initiative that took place four decades ago at the National Film Board of Canada. Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada, co-edited by Thomas Waugh, Mike Baker and myself and introduced by Naomi Klein, is a 600-page collection of articles and essays about the Challenge for Change program, which ran from 1967 to 1980 and produced over 200 documentaries in English and French (the French sister project was Société nouvelle).

Challenge for Change (CFC) became famous around the world for not only using documentary to tackle social problems but because it was a government-funded project that produced films highly critical of the government. From First Nations problems to housing, CFC documentaries didn’t hold back in their critical analysis of the things the Canadian government was doing wrong. In an era when Alberta’s Ministry of Culture attempts to censor would-be films critical of the tar sands and anti-Olympics signage in Vancouver were prohibited, it is difficult to imagine a contemporary version of the Challenge for Change project.

The initiative was launched during the heyday of newly mobile video recording and new left politics. The arsenal of films produced were unabashedly political and honest and were the product of a process where filmmakers would make media with communities, not just about them. The utopian ideals of film changing the world fuelled productions that intervened on everything from racism to sexism to poverty to urbanization.

Challenge for Change was social media before media became social, at least as we know it today. The initiative’s artists, activists, and administrators used film as a focal point for all kinds of collaborations between groups and communities, often surreptitiously forcing dialogue through the use of media where before there had been only animosity or ignorance (most notably between state authorities and marginalized groups).

Yet for the most part the films have been hidden from the world, often critized for their didactic impulses and lack of aesthetic sensibility, or as redundant historical relics. Nothing could be further from the truth, and this book project seeks to right such wrongs and revive one of the most important media moments in Canada’s history that holds a treasure trove of fantastic and fascinating films. The NFB has also been optimistic and has collaborated with the book’s editors and publisher (McGill-Queen’s University Press) and is now hosting a new playlist of classic CFC and Société nouvelle works, many available to the public for the first time since the program was shut down.

With the films accessible on line and this excellent collection of close analysis of individual films and filmmakers, criticism and celebration, we hope future generations of political documentarians and critical media makers will now find it difficult to forget whose shoulders they stand on.

For more information on the book (and how to buy it), the initiative, the playlists and the book tour, visit changebook.ca.

The Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games have come to an end. Canada won more gold medals than any country ever in the history of the Winter Games. And yesterday, Canada took gold in men’s hockey in an electrifying game against the USA. A fitting end it seems to a two-week barn-burner of patriotism and national pride.

But the celebration has its darker side, one that few Olympic enthusiasts know about, or perhaps care to know about. For starters, in 2002 Vancouver residents voted in favour of a $3 billion Olympics that have subsequently mushroomed into a $7-8 billion bacchanalia of subsidies and debt. These “unexpected” costs have put unprecedented pressure on the provincial spending. Over the next two years, provincial funding for the arts will be cut by a staggering 88% – a devastating blow to cultural groups in British Columbia. School closures throughout the Lower Mainland reflect more of the pressure that has been brought to bare on provincial budgets. Add to these the ongoing crisis in homelessness and poverty in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side and the ways that Olympic enforcement ran roughshod over Constitutional rights of expression and assembly, and you have substantive fodder for a critical conversation about the Olympic Games.

From February 11 to 14, the Anti-Olympic Convergence called for four days of Olympic resistance and protest – a mobilization and public expression of criticism during the first few days of the Olympics.

A key element of the anti-Olympic movement was getting the message out. Mainstream media tended to limit coverage to the more dramatic images of the “black block” vanadalizing windows and newspaper boxes. But the Anti-Olympic Movement had its own “embedded” media – the Vancouver Media Coop (VMC) – a collection of journalists from across North America pooling resources to provide immediate raw local coverage of Olympic protest.

Journalists mobilized to capture audio, photographs and video while others provided editing services and writing expertise. The VMC had footage of protests up and available to the public long before mainstream news outlets. Their audience swelled to over a million during the Convergence.

Located in the Downtown East Side of Vancouver at 16 East Hastings and next door to the Tent City squat built on a VANOC parking lot (as part of the campaign to raise awareness about homelesness), the Vancouver Media Coop became one of the key sources of information about the public expression of dissent during the Olympic Games.

I caught up with Moira Peters and Isaac Oommen at the VMC studios.

Tadamon, a Montreal-based collective that works in solidarity with struggles for self-determination, equality and justice in the Middle East, has spearheaded a call from Montreal artists to support the international campaign for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israeli apartheid. The following is an open letter they released on February 25.

Today, a broad spectrum of Montreal artists are standing in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom and supporting the growing international campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against the Israeli state. Last winter, the Israeli state launched a violent military assault on the Palestinian people of the Gaza Strip, leaving over 1400 Palestinians dead, including over 300 children. Despite the official end of military operations, the blockade continues to this day, with devastating consequences for Gaza’s residents.

Over 60 years from the beginning of the ongoing Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) in 1948, in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced from historic Palestine through Israel’s creation, Montreal artists are united in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom and justice.

Montreal artists are now joining this international campaign to concretely protest the Israeli state’s ongoing denial of the inalienable rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties, as stipulated in and protected by international law, as well as Israel’s ongoing occupation and colonization of the West Bank (including Jerusalem) and Gaza, which also constitutes a violation of international law and multiple United Nations resolutions.

Palestinian citizens face an entrenched system of racial discrimination and segregation, resembling the defeated apartheid system in South Africa. A matrix of Israeli-only roads, electrified fences, and over 500 military checkpoints and roadblocks erase freedom of movement for Palestinians. Israel’s apartheid wall, which was condemned by the International Court of Justice in 2004, cuts through Palestinian lands, further annexing Palestinian territory and surrounding Palestinian communities with electrified barbed wire fences and a concrete barrier soaring eight meters high.

Gaza remains under siege. Israel continues to impose collective punishment on the 1.5 million Palestinians of Gaza, who still face chronic shortages of electricity, fuel, food and basic necessities as the campaign of military violence executed by the apartheid state of Israel endures. UN officials recently observed that the “situation has deteriorated into a full-fledged emergency because of the cut-off of vital supplies for Palestinians.” As a result of Israeli actions, Gaza has become a giant prison.

The global movement against Israeli apartheid, supported by a large majority of Palestinian civil society, is not targeted at individual Israelis but at Israeli institutions that are complicit in maintaining the multi-tiered Israeli system of oppression against the Palestinian people.

In fact, the Palestinian civil society BDS call, launched by over 170 Palestinian organisations in 2005, explicitly appeals to conscientious Israelis, urging them to support international efforts to bring about Israel’s compliance with international law and fundamental human rights, essential elements for a justice-based peace in the region. The present appeal is also rooted in an active engagement with many progressive Israeli artists and activists who are working on a daily basis for peace and justice while supporting the growing global movement in opposition to Israeli apartheid.

During the first and second intifadas, Israel invaded, ransacked, and even closed down cinemas, theatres and cultural centers in the occupied territories. These deliberate attempts to stifle the Palestinian cultural voice have failed and will continue to fail. Around the world, the call for BDS is growing and is strongly rooted in the historic international solidarity movement against apartheid in South Africa.

In keeping with Nelson Mandela’s declaration that “our freedom [in South Africa] is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians,” we believe that international solidarity is critical to liberating Palestinians from Israeli colonialism and apartheid. This struggle will continue until all Palestinians are granted their basic human rights, including the right of return for all Palestinian refugees living in the Diaspora.

Today, a diverse array of artists in Montreal, from filmmakers, musicians and dancers to poets, authors and painters, are joining the international movement against Israeli apartheid. On the streets, in concert halls, in words and in song, we commit to fighting against apartheid and call upon all artists and cultural producers across the country and around the world to adopt a similar position in this global struggle.

To add your support to this letter or to present questions or suggestions please write to info@tadamon.ca

1: Aidan Girt, musician, 1-Speed Bike
2: Alexander Moskos, musician, AIDS Wolf
3: Chole Lum, musician, AIDS Wolf
4: Yannick Desranleau, musician, AIDS Wolf
5: Esmeralda Súmar Jara, Amérythmes
6: Karen Lliana Lemus, Amérythmes
7: Ronald Lemus, Amérythmes
8: José Sermeno Rosales, Amérythmes
9: Daviyd Yisrael, Amérythmes
10: Pierre Allard, Action Terroriste Socialement Acceptable, ATSA
11: Annie Roy, Action Terroriste Socialement Acceptable, ATSA
12: Hamid Nach, musician, Bambara Trans
13: Kattam Laraki-Côté, percussionist, Bambara Trans
14: Iqi Balam, singer, Banda de Gaza
15: Owain Lawson, musician, Black Feelings
16: Brian Mitchell, musician, Black Feelings
17: Kyle Fostner, musician, Black Feelings
18: James Di Salvio, Bran Van 3000
19: Bronwen Agnew, Chaotic Insurrection Ensemble
20: Maire White, Chaotic Insurrection Ensemble
21: Skyla Mody, Chaotic Insurrection Ensemble
22: Annabelle Rivard, Chaotic Insurrection Ensemble
23: Veronica Post, Chaotic Insurrection Ensemble
24: Sonja Engmann, Chaotic Insurrection Ensemble
25: Cathy Inouye, Chaotic Insurrection Ensemble
26: Anne Gorry, Chaotic Insurrection Ensemble
27: Andrea Miller-Nesbitt, Chaotic Insurrection Ensemble
28: Joseph Boulos, Chaotic Insurrection Ensemble
29: Matt Corks, Chaotic Insurrection Ensemble
30: Florence Richer, Chaotic Insurrection Ensemble
31: Maggie Schreiner, Chaotic Insurrection Ensemble
32: Jon Boles, musician, Clues
33: Ben Borden, musician, Clues
34: Brendan Reed, musician, Clues
35: Don Wilkie, co-founder, Constellation Records
36: Ian Ilavsky, co-founder, Constellation Records
37: Tyler Megarry, DJ Backdoor
38: Robyn Maynard, DJ Dirtyboots
39: Kevin Moon, DJ Moonstarr
40: Vladimir López, DJ Palosanto
41: Scott Clyke, DJ Scott C
42: Mike Lai, DJ Static
43: Mado Lamotte, Drag Queen Diva
44: Nader Hasan, musician, Echoes Still Singing Limbs
45: Nick Kuepfer, musician, Echoes Still Singing Limbs
46: Aidan Jeffery, musician, Echoes Still Singing Limbs
47: Amine Benbachir, Elby & Woods
48: Jordan McKenzie, musician, Elfin Saddle
49: Emi Honda, musician, Elfin Saddle
50: Deeqa Ibrahim, singer, Empress Deeqa
51: Normand Raymond, musician, Ensemble Acalanto
52: Carmen Pavez, musician, Ensemble Acalanto
53: Rafael Azocar, musician/composer, Ensemble Acalanto
54: Rebecca Foon, musician, Esmerine
55: Jean-Sébastien Truchy, musician, Fly Pan Am
56: Lisa Gamble, Gambletron
57: Emilie Mouchous, electronic musician, Gamackrr
58: Sub Roy, musician, Grand Trine
59: Zayid Al-Baghdadi, musician, Hazaj Ensemble
60: Fadi Halawi, musician, Hazaj Ensemble
61: Michael Farsky, musician, Homosexual Cops
62: Joel Janis, singer, Jahnice +
63: Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, artist, Jerusalem in My Heart
64: Lubo Alexandrov, musician, Kaba Horo
65: Erik Hove, saxophonist, Kaba Horo
66: Zibz Black Current, poet, Kalmunity Vibe Collective
67: Matin Heslop, contrabass, Kalmunity Vibe Collective
68: Ron G. vocalist, Kalmunity Vibe Collective
69: Katalyst, poet, Kalmunity Vibe Collective
70: Adam Kinner, saxophonist, Kalmunity Vibe Collective
71: Mohamed Mehdi, guitar/voice, Kalmunity Vibe Collective
72: Jordan Peters, guitar, Kalmunity Vibe Collective
73: Fabrice Koffy, poet, Kalmunity Vibe Collective
74: Gordon Allen, musician, L’Envers
75: Simon Leduc, musician, Le Descente du Coude
76: Fanny Bloom, La Patère Rose
77: Kilojoules, La Patère Rose
78: Roboto, La Patère Rose
79: Simon D., Léopard et Moi
80: Lynne T., Lesbians on Ecstasy
81: Bernie Bankrupt, Lesbians on Ecstasy
82: Mathieu Farhoud-Dionne, rapper, Chafiik, Loco Locass
83: Geneviève Beaulieu, musician, Menace Ruine
84: Steve Lamothe, musician, Menace Ruine
85: Fred Savard, musician, Metis Yeti
86: Matthew Jacob Lederman, musician, Moondata LABprojects
87: Nantali Indongo, Nomadic Massive
88: Modibo Keita, Nomadic Massive
89: Diegal Leger, Nomadic Massive
90: Nicolás Palacios-Hardy, Nomadic Massive
91: Lou Piensa, Nomadic Massive
92: Ralph Joseph, Nomadic Massive
93: Meryem Saci, Nomadic Massive
94: Vox Sambou, Nomadic Massive
95: Jason Selman, Nomadic Massive / Kalmunity Vibe Collective
96: Sébastien Fournier, musician, Panopticon Eyelids
97: Félix Morel, musician, Panopticon Eyelids
98: Nicolas Basque, guitar/voice, Plants and Animals
99: Matthew Woodley, percussionist, Plants and Animals
100: David Bryant, musician, Set Fire to Flames
101: Thierry Amar, musician, Silver Mt. Zion
102: Sophie Trudeau, musician, Silver Mt. Zion
103: Mohamed Masmoudi, musician, Sokoun Trio
104: Greg Napier, musician, Special Noise
105: Jeff Simmons, musician, Special Noise
106: Edward Lee, artist, St. Emilie SkillShare
107: Reyrey Castonguay, artist, St. Emilie SkillShare
108: Machaulay Culkin, artist, St. Emilie SkillShare
109: Amanda Oliver, artist, St. Emilie SkillShare
110: Rochelle Ross, artist, St. Emilie SkillShare
111: Tasha Zamudio, artist, St. Emilie SkillShare
112: Kerri Flannigan, artist, St. Emilie SkillShare
113: Jessie Stein, singer/guitar, The Luyas
114: Yassin Alsalman, musician, the Narcicyst
115: Gern F., singer/guitar, The United Steel Workers of Montreal
116: Martin Cesar, musician, Think About Life
117: Greg Napier, musician, Think About Life
118: Caila Thompson-Hannant, musician, Think About Life
119: Graham Van Pelt, musician, Think About Life
120: Andrea deBruijn, poet, Throw Poetry Collective
121: Alessandra Naccarato, poet, Throw Poetry Collective
122: Merrill Garbus, musician, Tune-Yards
123: Sundus Abdul Hadi, visual artist
124: Jean-Marc Abela, filmmaker
125: Faiz Abhuani, Artivistic collective
126: Paul Ahmarani, actor
127: Mitchell Akiyama, electronic musician, intr. version recordings
128: Patrick Alonso, photographer
129: Hala Alsalman, filmmaker
130: Tito Alvarado, poet, Proyecto Cultural Sur
131: David Arancibia, pianist
132: Sabrien Amrov, photographer
133: Fortner Anderson, poet
134: Tasha Anestopoulos, DJ
135: Daniel Anez, pianist
136: David Arancibia, pianist
137: Amelie Ares, artist
138: Shahrzad Arshadi, artist/photographer
139: Nedaa Asbah, musician
140: Natali Asbah, violinist
141: Maroupi Asbah, violinist
142: Jon Asencio, musician/performance artist
143: Martine Audet, poet
144: Mila Aung-Thwin, Eye Steel Film
145: François Avard, author
146: Shira Avni, filmmaker
147: Magali Babin, electronic music composer
148: Gina Badger, visual artist
149: Rebecca Bain, musician
150: Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, filmmaker
151: Kate Bass, visual artist
152: Philippe Battikha, musician
153: Mireya Bayancela, comedian
154: Jonathan Belisle, Transmedia StoryTeller
155: Nabila Ben Youssef, comedian
156: Kamal Benkirane, writer/editor
157: Serge Bérard, writer
158: Patricia Bergeron, film producer
159: David Bernans, author
160: Isabelle Bernier, artist
161: Josué Bertolino, documentary filmmaker
162: Santiago Bertolino, documentary filmmaker
163: Mark Berube, singer, The Patriotic Few
164: Kawtare Bihya, artist
165: Eli Bissonnette, founder Dare to Care Records
166: Pierre-Guy Blanchard, percussionist
167: Julien Boisvert, filmmaker
168: Michel Bonneau, musician
169: Rana Bose, writer
170: Marie Boti, director, Productions Multi-Monde
171: Magda Boukanan, pianist
172: Bachir Boumediene, Eye Steel Film
173: Arnaud Bouquet, documentary filmmaker
174: Marie Brassard, actress/theatre performer
175: Derek Broad, designer
176: Richard Brouillette, filmmaker
177: Marion Brunelle, jazz singer
178: Alexia Bürger, comedian
179: Chris Burns, musician
180: Louise Burns, artist
181: Peter Burton, musician, executive director of Suoni per il Popolo festival
182: Antoine Bustros, pianist/composer
183: César Càceres, visual artist
184: Philippe Cadieux, visual artist
185: Michel Campeau, photographer
186: Olivier Campo, Bar Populaire
187: Daniel Canty, writer/filmmaker
188: Paul Cargnello, singer/songwriter
189: Boban Chaldovich, filmmaker
190: Vincent Champagne, filmmaker
191: Mazen Chamseddine, graphic artist/architect
192: Yung Chang, filmmaker, Up the Yangtze
193: Sarah Charland-Faucher, filmmaker
194: Elsa Charpentier, artist
195: Julie Châteauvert, Dare-Dare art gallery
196: Ghada Chehade, poet
197: Geneviève Chicoine, artist
198: Shayla Chilliak, musician
199: Jordan Christoff, musician
200: Stefan Christoff, pianist/photographer
201: Jacob Cino, music producer/DJ
202: Moe Clark, poet
203: Andrea-Jane Cornell, sound artist
204: Michel F Côté, musician
205: Marie-Hélène Cousineau, filmmaker
206: Mateo Creux, pianist
207: Jean Michel Cropsal, painter
208: Daniel Cross, filmmaker, founder of Eye Steel Film
209: Vincenzo D’Alto, photographer
210: Amy Darwish, artist/dancer
211: Noémie da Silva, photographer
212: Marie Davidson, singer, Les momies de Palerme
213: Mary Ellen Davis, documentary filmmaker
214: Luke Dawson, artist
215: Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood, literary translator
216: Étienne de Massy, artist
217: Sylvie de Morais, comedian
218: Lhasa de Sela, singer
219: Julie Delorme, DJ/CKUT host
220: Sophie Deraspe, filmmaker, Les Signes Vitaux
221: Jean Derome, jazz musician
222: Nathalie Derome, interdisciplinary artist
223: Marcelle Deschênes, composer/multimedia artist
224: Robert Deschênes, artist
225: Richard Desjardins, artist
226: Denys Desjardins, filmmaker
227: Keiko Devaux, pianist, the Acorn/People for Audio
228: Omar Dewachi, musician
229: Benoît Dhennin, photographer
230: Nathalie Dion, artist, Zazalie Z
231: Xarah Dion, musician, Ample collective
232: Dominique Lebeau, Domlebo, musician
233: Kim Doré, poet/editor
234: Julie Doucet, comic artist
235: Robyn Dru Germanese, artist
236: Frédéric Dubois, cultural worker
237: Bruno Dubuc, filmmaker
238: Martin Duckworth, documentary filmmaker
239: Philippe Ducros, theatre director, Hotel Motel
240: Katie Earle, artist
241: Marlene Edoyan, filmmaker, Multi-Monde Productions
242: Will Eizlini, musician
243: Hassan El Hadi, musician/singer
244: Majdi El Omari, filmmaker
245: Darren Ell, photographer
246: Nirah Elyza Shirazipour, filmmaker, Eyes Infinite Films
247: Yves Engler, author
248: Bérenger Enselme, Bar Populaire
249: Claudia Espinosa, photographer
250: Tony Ezzy, musician
251: Julie Faubert, visual artist
252: David Fennario, playwright
253: Javier Fernàndez-Rial, pianist
254: Carlos Ferrand, filmmaker
255: Ian Ferrier, poet
256: Riley Fleck, percussionist
257: Arwen Fleming, musician
258: Lindsay Foran, visual artist
259: Andrew Forster, artist
260: Tammy Forsythe, choreographer
261: James Franze, musician
262: Kandis Friesen, visual artist
263: Fanny-Pierre Galarneau, graffiti artist, Aïshaaglyphics
264: Carmen Garcia, film producer
265: Francisco Garcia, artist
266: Brett Gaylor, filmmaker, RIP! A Remix Manifesto
267: Chloé Germain-Thérien, filmmaker/illustrator
268: Christine Ghawi, musician/actress/winner of Gemini Award
269: Olivier Gianolla, painter
270: Peter Gibson, visual artist, Roadsworth
271: Serge Giguère, filmmaker
272: Yan Giguère, artist
273: Dan Gillean, visual artist, Fiver
274: Jason Gillingham, artist
275: Miriam Ginestier, DJ/artistic director of Studio 303
276: Michel Giroux, filmmaker
277: Ernest Godin, producer/filmmaker, Kondololé films
278: Anne Golden, video artist
279: Malcolm Goldstein, violinist/composer
280: Amber Goodwyn, singer, Nightwood
281: Ashley Gould, DJ
282: Janna Graham, sound artist
283: Étienne Grenier, sound artist
284: Neil Griffith, musician
285: Steve Guimond, artistic director of festival Suoni per il Popolo
286: Alexandra Guité, filmmaker
287: Freda Guttman, artist
288: Malcolm Guy, documentary filmmaker, Productions Multi-Monde
289: Tamara Abdul Hadi, photographer
290: Rawi Hage, author
291: Linda Dawn Hammond, photographer
292: Katy Hanna, artist
293: Shannon Harris, documentary filmmaker
294: Tim Hecker, electronic musician
295: Dorothy Henault, documentary filmmaker
296: Anne Henderson, documentary filmmaker
297: Hanako Hoshimi-Caines, contemporary dancer
298: Magnus Isacsson, documentary filmmaker
299: Yuki Isami, musician
300: Naledi Jackson, visual artist
301: Yohan Jager, pianist
302: Stéphane Jaques, theatre director
303: Jocelyn Jean, artist
304: Rodrigue Jean, artist
305: Sandra Jeppesen, poet/professor
306: David Jhave Johnston, poet
307: Sophie Jodoin, visual artist
308: Norsola Johnson, musician
309: Nicole Jolicoeur, artist
310: Sawssan Kaddoura, visual artist
311: Stephan Kazemi, designer
312: Kaie Kellough, poet
313: Arshad Khan, documentary filmmaker
314: Nika Khanjani, filmmaker
315: Maya Khankhoje, writer
316: Valerie Khayat, poet/singer
317: Catherine Kidd, poet
318: Sergeo Kirby, cinema producer, Loaded Pictures
319: Courtney Kirkby, sound artist
320: Aysegul Koc, filmmaker
321: Nick Kuepfer, musician
322: Devlin Kuyek, author
323: Sylvain L’Espérance, cinéaste
324: Danièle Lacourse, cinéaste
325: Stéphane Lahoud, cinéaste
326: Jean-Sébastien Lalumière, cinéaste
327: Ève Lamont, documentary filmmaker
328: Noam Lapid, visual artist
329: Chantale Laplante, composer
330: Rodolphe-Yves Lapointe, artist
331: Monique Laramée, multidisciplinary artist
332: Graham Latham, musician
333: Hugo Latulippe, cinéaste
334: Brian Allen Lipson, musician
335: Klervi Thienpont Lavallée, actress
336: Franck Le Flaguais, artist
337: Sophie Le-Phat Ho, Artivistic collective
338: François Leandre, visual artist
339: Michel Lefebvre, artist/multimedia editor
340: Vincent Lemieux, artist/DJ
341: Jean-François Lessard, writer/composer
342: Anna Leventhal, writer
343: JJ Levine, photographer
344: Mika Lillit Lior, choreographer/dancer
345: Sarah Linhares, singer
346: Paul Litherland, artist
347: Amy Lockhart, filmmaker/artist
348: Guillermo Lopez, cinema editor
349: Jacinthe Loranger, visual artist
350: Ehab Lotayef, poet
351: Lousnak, singer/multidisciplinary artist
352: Caytee Lush, poet
353: Kit Malo, artist
354: Khalid M’Seffar, radio host/DJ
355: Jessica MacCormack, multidisciplinary artist
356: Emmanuel Madan, sound artist
357: Rob Maguire, editor ArtThreat.net
358: Claude Maheu, musician
359: Hernán Maria, musician
360: Omar Majeed, filmmaker, Taqwacore – the Birth of Punk Islam
361: Iphigénie Marcoux-Fortier, filmmaker, Multi-Monde productions
362: Natalie Marshik, artist
363: Billy Mavreas, visual artist
364: Valerian Mazataud, photographer
365: Kirsten McCrea, artist, Papirmasse
366: Taliesin McEnaney, theatre artist
367: Catherine McInnis, artist
368: Meek, electronic musician
369: Feroz Mehdi, filmmaker/activist
370: Elany Mejia, musician
371: Amy Miller, documentary filmmaker
372: Jeff Miller, writer
373: Claude Mongrain, sculptor
374: Émilie Monnet, singer, Odaya
375: Evan Montpellier, musician
376: Vincent Moon, filmmaker
377: Allison Moore, artist
378: Katie Moore, singer/songwriter
379: Jean-Guy Moreau, artist/comedian
380: Dominic Morissette, filmmaker/photographer
381: Nadia Moss, visual artist/musician
382: Krista Muir, musician, Lederhosen Lucil
383: Mehdi Nabti, musician
384: Tyler Nadeau, photographer
385: Dimitri Nasrallah, author
386: Rawane Nassif, filmmaker
387: Pamela Navarrete, artist
388: Norman Nawrocki, musician/author
389: Joshua Noiseux, photographer
390: Kelly Nunes, DJ
391: Alexis O’Hara, multidisciplinary artist
392: Sean O’Hara, founder Alien 8 Recordings
393: Sarah Pagé, musician
394: Cléo Palacio-Quintin, musician/composer
395: Catherine Pappas, documentary filmmaker
396: Marie-Hélène Parant, artist
397: Richard Reed Parry, musician, Bell Orchestre
398: Alain Pelletier, multidisciplinary artist
399: Yann Perreau, singer/songwriter
400: Sara Peters, poet
401: Pierre Petiote, artist
402: Mauro Pezzente, musician, founder Casa del Popolo
403: Alisha Piercy, artist/writer
404: Pierre-Emmanuel Poizat, musician
405: Carole Poliquin, filmmaker
406: Janet Ponce, singer/author/composer
407: Jeannette Pope, filmmaker
408: Rozenn Potin, filmmaker
409: Levana Prud’homme, dancer
410: Jean-François Poupart, writer/professor
411: Thea Pratt, artist
412: Alain G. Pratte, photographer
413: Kern Prophete, hip-hop artist
414: Jesse Purcell, artist, Just Seeds
415: Nelly-Eve Rajotte, artist
416: Anne Ramsden, artist
417: Nada Raphael, documentary photographer
418: Louis Rastelli, author
419: Antonella Ravello, photographer
420: Coire Ready Langham, circus artist
421: Fred Reed, writer
422: Victor Regalado, artist
423: Monique Régimbald-Zieber, artist
424: Alain Reno, illustrator
425: Gisela Restrepo, artist
426: Gerard Reyes, dancer
427: Andrea Rideout, theatre artist
428: Coco Riot, artist
429: Matana Roberts, saxophonist
430: Antoine Rouleau, photographer
431: Guilaine Royer, cultural worker
432: Daïchi Saïto, filmmaker
433: Trish Salah, poet
434: Babak Salari, photographer
435: Samian, hip-hop artist
436: Miriam Sampaio, multidisciplinary artist
437: Marjolaine Samson, artist
438: Julian Samuel, artist/writer
439: Ariel Santana, artist
440: Claire Savoie, artist
441: Dorothy Saykaly, contemporary dancer
442: Patti Schmidt, radio host/cultural commentator
443: Anita Schoepp, artist/musician
444: Nadia Seboussi, artist
445: Fran Sendbuehler, graphic artist
446: Marcel Sévigny, author
447: Sam Shalabi, musician/composer
448: Nik Barry-Shaw, writer
449: Eric Shragge, author/professor
450: Bridget Simpson, musician
451: Michelle Smith, documentary filmmaker, Productions Multi-Monde
452: Prem Sooriyakumar, filmmaker
453: Jennifer Spiegel, writer
454: Laurel Sprengelmeyer, artist, Little Scream
455: Darlene St. Georges, art educator
456: Alexandre St-Onge, sound artist/musician
457: Allison Staton, photographer
458: Victoria Stanton, performance artist
459: Gab Perry Stensson, artist
460: Martha Stiegman, documentary filmmaker/author
461: Kiva Stimac, visual artist, founder Casa del Popolo
462: Brett Story, filmmaker
463: John W. Stuart, graphic designer/writer
464: Caroline Tagny, graphic artist
465: Roger Tellier-Craig, musician
466: Vincent Tinguely, poet/writer
467: Juan Toro, musician
468: Tanya Tree, documentary filmmaker
469: Benoît Tremblay, artist
470: Philippe Tremblay-Berberi, filmmaker
471: Gisèle Trudel, artist, Ælab
472: Svetla Turnin, executive director of Cinema Politica
473: André Turpin, cinéaste
474: Armand Vaillancourt, painter/sculptor
475: Rufo Valencia, writer/poet
476: Sylvie Van Brabant, filmmaker
477: Niek van de Steeg, artist
478: Francis Van Den Heuvel, filmmaker
479: Rahul Varma, theatre director, Teesri Duniya Theatre
480: Chris Vaughn, violinist, Free Benny Meanz
481: Adrian Vedady, jazz musician
482: Felipe Verdugo, pianist
483: Sebastián Verdugo, pianist
484: Stefan Verna, documentary filmmaker
485: Gilles Vigneault, artist
486: Sam Vipond, musician
487: Tamara Vukov, filmmaker/academic
488: Shannon Walsh, documentary filmmaker
489: Francesca Waltzing, artist
490: Erin Weisgerber, sound artist
491: David Widgington, journalist/filmmaker
492: Ezra Winton, founder Cinema Politica
493: Britt Wray, artist
494: Gary Worsley, founder Alien 8 Recordings
495: Dexter X, filmmaker/musician
496: Eileen Young, visual artist
497: Karen Young, singer/songwriter
498: Kevin Yuen Kit Lo, graphic designer
499: Michael Zaidan, filmmaker
500: Kim Zombik, singer

Photo by Filippo Minelli.

As the Vancouver Olympics wind down and Art Threat’s coverage of the Games continues with pictures, video and writing on the happenings of those exploring ways to resist the corporate orgy with art and culture, we bring you a Friday Film Pick that celebrates a sport you’ll never find included in the Olympic roster.

Carts of Darkness is a fantastic NFB documentary by Murray Siple that follows homeless men in North Vancouver as they survive on collecting recyclables and as they thrive in their self-made sport of shopping cart racing. The men find joy in the adrenaline of reaching dangerous speeds racing down the steep slopes of the North Vans streets. From the film’s site:

In the picture-postcard community of North Vancouver, filmmaker Murray Siple follows men who have turned bottle-picking, their primary source of income, into the extreme sport of shopping cart racing. Enduring hardships from everyday life on the streets of Vancouver, this sub-culture depicts street life as much more than stereotypes portrayed in mainstream media. The films takes a deep look into the lives of the men who race carts, the adversity they face, and the appeal of cart racing despite the risk.

You can watch the film in its entirety above. Enjoy!

Protest for Housing

If anything is making its slow way out of the Downtown East Side (DTES) and into mainstream Olympic news flows, it is the issue of homelessness. The Red Tent Campaign, the Tent City Squat on a VANOC parking lot, the homeless banner strung from the Cambie Bridge (for a VANOC sanctioned 20 minutes, and time immemorial photo-op), Saturday’s national housing rally …

This was the topic of conversation at last Sunday’s Safe Assembly Newscast at the VIVO studios. Safe Assembly is a gesture to protect the critical conversation about the Olympic games. Hosted by VIVO, a media arts collective who chose not to participate in the Cultural Olympiad, the Newscasts are opportunities for those critical of the Olympics to come together and reflect on the events of protest and dissent taking place in Vancouver.

What follows is a brief summary of the gathering — topics of discussion included the housing protest at the Vancouver Art Gallery last Saturday, update from the Tent City squat, a look at the growing phenomena of Olympic fans protesting against protesters, and the potential effects of university students as shock troops of gentrification in the DTES.

Campaign for National Housing Initiative

The first speaker was Am Johal, one of the organizers of Saturday’s housing rally at the Vancouver Art Gallery. From his perspective, the rally went well. There were 500 or so gathered to call for a renewed national housing program. Canada’s federal housing program was cut in the early 1990s which apparently coincides with the emergence of homelessness as a crisis in Canada. The Red Tent campaign is asking for a national housing strategy to be reinstated.

Also part of the Red Tent Campaign is the Homelessness 2010 Hunger Strike Relay, now in its 61st week. Participants have included municipal politician Ellen Wordsworth, federal MP Libby Davies, artists Emilio Rojas and Jamie Griffiths, and most recently an 8 week old baby (who was already on a liquid diet). Each week new volunteers become the holders of the Wooden Spoon and fast for 7 days. In June 2010, supporters from across the country will board a train to Ottawa commemorating the 75th anniversary of the “On to Ottawa Trek” to demand government support for affordable housing, a living wage and accessible social programs.

The Art of Homelessness

Up next was Emilio Rojas, a performance artist with the White Pillows collective. He was speaking about his current show a Vivarium Gallery. Rojas joined the rolling hunger strike in the same week that he wandered the city with a shopping cart while reading Jack Layton‘s book about homelessness.

Emilio Rojas

He said that for most of his journey throughout the city, including the areas where Olympic crowds gather in their festive throngs, he became invisible. The only part of the city where people stopped him to find out what was going on was the DTES.

Vancouver Media Collective (VMC)

Next up was the VMC, home of the unembedded Olympic media. The Vancouver Media Coop showed three videos: First, showing student opposition to the torch when it went through UBC; second, showing the rally in support of Insite preventing Harper from getting to his speaking engagement’s; and third, about the February 13th bullying by police of pedestrian supporters of a protest.

The Semiotics of Protest

Anti-protest protest sign

Donato’s question: is protest still politically meaningful? Or has it become a self-contained form of dissent that is its own outcome – protest for the sake of protest?

Protesting against protest comes in a number of forms. One recurring theme is that political protest is a violation of their (non-protester) rights. How dare you, they ask, protest at my Olympic party? The larger problem here, according to Mancinci, is that protesting against protest it is an argument against the democratic value of protest, a kind of creeping fascism that we should pay attention to.

Another theme common in APP is that protest against the Olympics is absurd. Why absurd? Because, Mancinci suggests, the Olympics presents itself as outside of politics. A political complaint against something that exists outside of politics is rendered nonsensical. He showed a photo of a woman holding a cardboard sign that read “Being a vandalizing douchebag is not a political statement” — presumably in response to the vandalism that occurred during the Heart Attack 2010 rally. A protest against capitalism is equally absurd in a world where the end of capitalism is unimaginable.

VANOC, the IOC and others are also aware of the shifting semiotic terrain of protest. Olympic officials have been promoting what activists have taken to calling “red block” tactics – dressing up in Canadian flags, painting maple leaves on the face, singing Oh Canada in crowds and drowning out events of protest with vocal displays of patriotism and Olympic enthusiasm.

Commercialization of anti-protest protest

Commercializing anti-protest protest

The Red Tent Campaign: Update

Up next was someone from the Red Tent Campaign who has been living at the Tent City on East Hastings. Apparently, the “red block” has been busy there, too, aggravating tenters, pissing on tents from the street, unplugging and screwing around with the camp generator, even pushing and shoving some of the tenters and supporters.

The Red Tent Campaign has come under criticism for pandering to the media, but this according to the speaker is exactly what it is supposed to do. The goal is to present an easily digestible non-threatening message to the world’s media. The campaign’s goal is to have a national housing program reinstated by the federal government.

Someone said that there are rumours that some homeless people using the red tents had encountered trouble with the police because they had become more visible. The speaker said that of course use of the tents was entirely voluntary. There was also a suggestion that the Red Tent Campaign could benefit by making links with the green narrative around alternative housing strategies – cob housing, bale housing, etc. The person who made the suggestion was invited to speak at the next Red Tent Campaign meeting.

Shock Troops of Gentrification: Community Service Learning in the DTES

Last to speak was someone from the Humanities 101 program in the DTES, a series of classes offered through UBC for local residents. There is a crisis of change in the neighbourhood, we were told. The two things that make new home-buyers in the DTES feel safe – gentrification and police presence – are the very two things that DTES residents fear the most.

On the leading edge of gentrification – after, presumably, the transformed Woodward’s building, its commercial tenants, new occupants, and the increasing prices of SROs in hotels closest to the Woodward’s complex – is something called the Learning Exchange (LE). LE is a UBC program that offers UBC students an authentic inner-city experience in the DTES as part of a community service learning program. It is a model imported from the U.S., and one that many in the room perceived as dangerous and ultimately destructive to the DTES.

In brief, every semester the LE brings in over 1,000 students who, according to the speaker, are ill-prepared and come with many problematic assumptions about the neighbourhood. The influx of students also makes the neighbourhood attractive to different kinds of businesses. And the invasive quality of students coming to the area to conduct “research” to further their own careers by studying poverty leaves a very bad taste in the mouths of many local residents and organizers. The students, it seems, are like gentrification shock troops.

The “community service” — or whatever it is, maybe parasitic visitation — has become part of how students are assessed academically. Their stint in the DTES now appears on student transcripts and plays a role in the vying for recognition and prestige in job markets and academic settings. The speaker suggested that we need a new way to describe this activity – that “volunteer” no longer applies when the context is so deeply enmeshed in career building and academic standing.

Someone in the audience suggested that there is a kind of “ethnographic violence” at work in the way academics appropriate knowledge and experience from a poor and marginalized community. The academics, because of their position in society, can transform the knowledge and experience of poverty, homelessness, drug addiction into social and economic benefits for themselves through academic careers. The people who own these experiences and knowledge are marginalized and devalued because of them.

Other interesting items discussed: the so-called “mixed” housing at Woodward’s is apparently not so mixed after all. The social housing units have their own entrance and their own elevator. Commercial units face the street; social housing units face the alley. And, the social housing does not have access to the spa and gym facilities on the top floor. What exactly is being mixed in these circumstances remains unclear.

Also, the housing kiosk on the ground floor of the Woodward’s building set up by various levels of government to help address international interest in the DTES is “dangerously misrepresenting the neighbourhood” as a beacon of positive development and transformation, according to some. Many believe that the kiosk was created to divert international media away from speaking with community organizations and local residents.

There was also a discussion about recording images of people in the DTES, often in states of crisis. Many people who participate in media projects – for instance, Lincoln Clarkes’ internationally recognized Heroines project, photographs of women heroin addicts in the DTES using the techniques and semiotics of fashion photography – later want to rescind their consent. How valid is consent from someone experiencing or recovering from severe trauma, anyways? But they rarely if ever can, and the images become a permanent record of something participants would rather remain private.

Someone pointed out that photography entered the world as an instrument and technique of control and classification — a way of documenting criminals, conducting sociological research, organizing knowledge within structures of power. Even the earliest films by the Lumiere Brothers — films originally made for display to audiences of means at World’s fairs — tended to focus on exotic others: women workers at a factory, images of locals and local scenes from the colonies.

Thus ended the VIVO Newscast, February 21, 2010.

This Friday, Montreal’s Immigrant Workers Centre (IWC) will re-launch a campaign that resonates with so many other workers’ struggles worldwide. The offenders? Montreal-based textile and clothing companies that are trying to squeeze greater profit margins from their already profitable businesses. The sufferers? Montreal textile and clothing industry workers, most of whom are women, immigrants and “aging” according to Quebec statistics. It’s a tale of the consequences of (neo)liberalized trade agreements on the lives of marginalized groups.

Since international trade liberalization and reduced protectionism in the early to mid-1990s, the Canadian government has gradually reduced tariffs and quotas on garment imports. The Canadian border has therefore opened for cheap apparel from around the world without compensating protections for Canadian-made goods and the workers who make them. Imports have increased while domestic manufacturing has shrunk considerably, particularly in the past decade.

Between 2002 and 2005, Quebec’s textile and garment industries shed 25% of its workforce, leaving thousands without employment. These widespread lay offs are largely a consequence of companies shedding their local workforce in favour of cheaper workforces in China, Bangladesh and other poorer countries where labour rights are weak. Many of these companies justify this move by pointing to the recession, but truth be told, most of them remain highly profitable in spite of the times and in spite of a costlier Montreal workforce.

When mass lay-offs occur in Quebec, workers are legally eligible for substantial collective termination packages. However, it seems that some of these companies are slipping through a loophole: by laying off workers in small groups over an extended period of time, the company is not required to offer collective compensation. This means that the offending companies have been handing out a few pink slips at a time without warning or compensation.

The people affected by these mass lay-offs make up some of the most vulnerable segments of society and already endure higher rates of poverty than the rest of the Quebec population. Without financial support for retraining from the government, they are also unlikely to be hired elsewhere in Montreal’s shrinking textile and garment industries.

Based on the needs of these laid off workers who have approached the IWC and inspired by the hefty compensation packages the Quebec government is offering to forestry workers, the IWC has presented the provincial government with the following demands:

1. Adequate compensation and retraining for workers who have been laid off after years of loyal service.
2. Early retirement for workers aged fifty-five and over.
3. Stronger laws to prevent companies that are already profitable from moving textile jobs overseas.
4. Reform to existing social assistance programs, ensuring that families of laid off textile workers receive benefits adequate for their survival.

(Oh and in case there are Quebec politicians reading this, “retraining” entails much more than French language training!)

So how is this renewed campaign related to art? Well, this Friday, those of us working on this “Justice for Textile and Garment Workers Campaign” are hoping to fire up our local workers movement by showing a moving documentary film about another garment workers’ struggle, Made in L.A by Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar. This film follows three Latina immigrant workers’ prolonged struggle for basic labour protections from the trendy clothing retailer Forever 21 in Los Angeles.

We and the event’s co-sponsor, Cinema Politica, are hoping that this documentary about other workers’ persistent struggle will inspire our Montreal-based movement to continue to pressure the Quebec government for just compensation. Let’s hope this film night gives us the juice we need to fight on for justice and political change!

(Image: video still from Made in L.A.)

Yuri Arajs, a Kelowna born artist who recently returned to Vancouver after a 30-year stint in Minneapolis, Minnesota, first heard about the Pivot Legal Society’s Red Tent campaign from his mother.

“I told myself I had to look it up,” explained Yuri in a conversation early Tuesday morning, just over a week in to Vancouver’s Olympic shenanigans which the Red Tent campaign was designed to correspond with.

The campaign centres around the use of red tents as symbols on the streets of Vancouver to draw attention to Canada’s homelessness crisis, allowing them to provide education to the public about the need for a funded national housing strategy and to pressure the government to take action on homelessness.

“So I read about the Red Tents, read about Pivot Legal, and started reading about the peole who work there… and those lawyers are rock stars,” Yuri stated. “They do great work, and for them to come up with the idea of this Red Tent campaign was absolutely inspiring.”

So inspiring that within four days of talking to his mom, Yuri had rented time at a screen printing studio and had already created the two colour prints that would become the basis of his art-meets-fundraising efforts to help raise money for the Red Tent campaign.

The Red Tent campaign. Photo by Jay Black.

Yuri created 125 prints in the studio, and has been selling them online for $25. The tent in the image is a two colour silk screen, tagged with a white cross done with a grease crayon, and each print is stamped with a rubber stamp in the top right.

“I was interested that there was no visual arts component to [the Red Tent campaign], the project itself is a visual art,” he mused. “It’s a live installation, it’s performance, it’s site specific, there’s all these things that it achieves. And I love that they’re doing it at the time that they are.” The time, of course, being the Olympic celebrations happening here in Vancouver, which many organizations have centered their campaigns around in an attempt to capture a global audience. Like many in Vancouver, Yuri questions whether the huge amount of money spent on celebrating our athletes is necessary in order to appreciate them, and wonders whether our priorities have become skewed, particularly when the province is dealing with such a massive poverty crisis.

Selling the prints as a fundraiser to help Pivot Legal Society and the Red Tent campaign make this crisis a priority is just a small gesture on his behalf. “We can do so many things with really a little amount of effort.”

“So much of what [I'm doing is about] putting art in front of people for an affordable price, and letting that turn into a larger donation,” said Yuri. “I’m very happy to say I sent a cheque to Pivot Legal for $500 last week.”

The next phase of his project is to raise enough money to buy $1000 worth of art supplies for artists living on the streets in vancouver and on the island.

Yuri’s red tent art can be purchased through his website for $25, and can be shipped anywhere in the US or Canada.

When local homeless and under-housed residents of the Downtown East Side (DTES) were asked what they wanted during the Vancouver Olympic games, they said a safe place to hang out, get some food and coffee, relax and listen to music. And they wanted this without the invasive scrutiny of the media and without feeling like they were a problem to be solved with charity. The Homeground Festival was born, a festival of sustenance and sanctuary specifically for those struggling with poverty, substance dependency, homelessness and physical and mental health challenges.

The dates of the festival are not publicized. The only way to find out about it is word of mouth or if you happen to see a poster which only appear in the DTES. And with one exception, media is not allowed on site – no cameras or recording devices of any kind. It is a place where DTES residents can go and feel comfortable among themselves without the invasive gaze of outsiders.

(See the video interview after the jump.)

That exception is Fearless City Mobile, a production crew from the DTES. And this exception highlights one of the profound distinctions between cultural production that comes from within a community and forms of media that rest on the traditional assumption of a gap between producer and audience.

I caught up with with Barbara Hinton, one of the organizers of HomeGround, and Sid Tan of Fearless TV to talk about the HomeGround Festival and the diversity and importance of local independent media during the Olympics.

Take a break from Olympic recaps on CTV Tuesday night and tune your radio to 90.1 CJSF (in the Vancouver area) or listen online at CJSF Campus/Community Radio, based out of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC, and Vancouver musician Adaline will be speaking with local artists who have been affected by homelessness as part of the International Homelessness Marathon / Canadian Homelessness Marathon. Those in the area can come to a live studio braodcast at the W2 Culture and Media House at 112 W Hastings from 8–10pm.

Running through the night, this 14-hour marathon is a collaboration of national community and campus radio programming featuring the voices and stories of homeless people in the United States and Canada.

The Homelessness Marathon was started in 1998 by Jeremy Weir Alderson, host of “The Nobody Show” which was then broadcast weekly on WEOS in Geneva, NY, as a result of the heartsickness he was feeling at the huge homelessness problem in New York City.

The Marathon took up force in Canada after being adopted by McGill University’s CKUT radio in 2004.

Photo by Rob Maguire.

Art confounds so many of the problematics that come with the politics of power and poverty. Take the Hastings Folk Garden, for example. You can’t find it through the Cultural Olympiad. There are no Tourism BC pamphlets that tell you how to get there. You find it by walking around in Canada’s poorest neighbourhood, the Downtown East Side (DTES). In its own very quiet way, it defies the Olympic corporatization of public space and corresponding rendering of this beset community only in terms of a problem to be fixed.

The Downtown East Side is a neighbourhood that was not invited to the Olympic buffet — at least its residents weren’t. As the poorest community in Canada, the Olympic games are largely an unaffordable party that views their neighbourhood as a potential “public relations embarrassment” rather than vibrant albeit troubled home.

What was once an empty lot among the ruin of storefronts along the East Hastings corridor (a few steps from Insite, North America’s only safe injection site), is now a community garden owned by the Portland Hotel Society. And for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, the garden has been filled with art to create a little urban oasis with found objects and recycled materials.

The garden was created over the last 300 days largely by DTES resident Jim — who was unavailable to be interviewed on the day that I visited. I spoke briefly with Dominique, one of the artists who helped to make the art garden happen.

VIVO (the media arts group formerly known as Video In) surprised everyone by refusing Cultural Olympiad funding – not because of who they are, but because just about everyone else who was there at the time did take funding. And no surprise. The Cultural Olympiad handed out more than $20 million to local cultural and arts groups. Saying no to money is hard enough, even harder if you’re a cash strapped arts organization, which they all are.

But look what’s happened now. Gordon Campbell’s Liberals have announced the largest cuts to cultural spending in the history of the province. According to the Tyee, the Ministry of Tourism Arts and Culture, provincial funding for arts will fall a staggering 88 per cent over two years, from $19.5 million in 2008-’09 down to a vindictive $2.25 million in 2010-’11. Artists and arts organizations are understandably in shock, and the $20 million Olympic largess is starting to look not only like a cultural Trojan horse that will leave many arts groups facing questions of survivability, but also like a cynical plundering of the public purse for a two week party of Olympiads. There is a one helluva hangover coming, and British Columbia artists will be among the first to feel it.

Recognizing the complicated position that arts groups and artists participating in the Cultural Olympiad were in, VIVO has created a series of cultural events inviting the wider community to explore the dynamics of political dissent and public engagement in Vancouver and during the 2010 Olympics. One of them is [de]tour Vancouver 2010, a Google map of Vancouver’s history and present of civic engagement, artist groups and local progressive economies (see below), Another is Safe Assembly, two weeks of public conversation about resistance to and criticism of the Olympic machine.

In this report, I speak with Cheyanne Turions and Emilio Rojas from VIVO, two of the creators of the Safe Assembly programming at VIVO during the Winter games. They describe the creative thinking behind Safe Assembly, the programs and performances, collaboration with activists and artists in London (2012) and Sachi (2014) and what happened when Industry Canada representatives showed up at their studies wearing VANOC blazers to shut down their low-power radio broadcast of the news.

On Wednesday night, the Safe Assembly Newscast at VIVO, a local artist run media arts organization, was host to a tumultuous gathering of activists come to discuss the tactics of property damage used in last Saturday’s Heart Attack 2010 rally. The so-called “black block” vandalized newspaper boxes and smashed windows including the Hudson’s Bay. There were arrests, and the images of angry black-clad protesters breaking things and getting taken down by riot police whizzed around the world. Shortly after, David Eby, head of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA), denounced the vandalism causing a furor within the anti-Olympic movement. Among other things, these events have caused a significant and deep rupture within the anti-Olympic movement itself.

About 100 or so local organizers and activists gathered in the VIVO studios. Many were from the Olympic Resistance Movement, but there was also a vocal contingent who supported the strategies of the ‘black block’. (And, it seems, there was a cop or two in attendance – a staffer told me that he served a beer to a guy who looked remarkably like the photo of one of the undercover cops recently outed at the Tent City protest in the Downtown East Side.) Even Libby Davies, Member of Parliament for Vancouver East, was there.

The mood in the room was tense. Before the newscast got underway, David Eby, BCCLA Executive Director, had a pie thrown in his face. The event set the tone for the evening.

Up first was a relative newcomer to the Vancouver media scene, the Vancouver Media Coop with a series of videos – one about the banner hung from the Cambie bridge denouncing homelessness, a pre-arranged protest by the Pivot Legal Society which allowed for the banner to be hung for 20 minutes and then taken down. It was a fitting story to open with, one that raised a key point of tension among the activists: what constitutes real protest? Many felt that the 20 minute “permitted protest” was absurd. There were some in the discussion who viewed all forms of permitted protest as ineffectual: either protest is threatening or it isn’t protest, they claimed.

The second video report from the Vancouver Media Coop was about the tent city that local activists and residents have built on a parking lot leased to VANOC. The tents – provided by Pivot Legal Defense – have been up for three days and it is quickly becoming ground zero for restive Olympiad dissent. Local residents and activists have transformed the unused lot into a campground filled mostly with the small red tents handed out by Pivot Legal Defense in their campaign to bring attention to homelessness during the Olympic games.

There are two interesting rumours about the property. One, that negotiations to secure the land for community use are well underway, and that little will be done during the course of the Games to disrupt the squatters. The other is that Concord Pacific who owns the land is bargaining for a development perk (zoning change, density increase, etc.) in return for being the heavy and lodging the complaint that would give the police cause to move on the camp. Local authorities are increasingly embarrassed about the visibility of the homelessness issue (so embarrassed that local governments have jointly opened a housing kiosk for foreign journalists that some believe are intended to divert journalists away from community groups, activists and the homeless themselves).

Meanwhile at the camp, banners have been strung along fences on Hastings Street declaring “Profits before people” and “Resist the 2010 Corporate Circus” to all who drive by on this major artery of traffic feeding the downtown Olympic party zone.

Chris Shaw, spokesperson and one of the key organizers of the Olympic Resistance Network, described the week in terms of the good, the bad and the ugly. Good: media coverage of the Friday Convergence bringing issues of poverty, the environment, and Olympic excesses and abuses of authority to public light in the international media. Bad: the ways in which the vandalism diminished the movement by shrinking who might want to participate from outside the ranks of the already converted. And Ugly: the lack of general consensus for the vandalism. According to some, many of the core groups mobilizing against the Olympics were surprised by the events in Saturday’s march.

The response in the room to Shaw’s presentation was an accusation of class politics, accusing Shaw and the others of a professional and privileged habit of leadership underpinning a frustration that they had not been in control. A lack of consensus for one was foundation for freedom for the next.

Still cleaning the aftermath of pie from his face, David Eby spoke at length and somewhat courageously to a hostile crowd explaining why he had publicly condemned the vandalism. The hub of his argument seemed to be quid pro quo and escalation. If activists use vandalism and threats, he reasoned, they lose the moral legitimacy to complain when similar tactics are used against them. And, once all tactics are embraced, the dialogue becomes one of escalation. Others countered that these stakes were already at play in the threats and violence used by the state. Once again, it was an impasse: one group’s untenable escalation was another’s inevitability.

Up next was a local independent journalist working with the Media Coop – Dawn Paley – who was at the Saturday protest. She described being asked at the rally by a CTV reporter why the activists were so angry. She told the reporter: because of stolen aboriginal land, because of capitalism and colonialism and poverty- and if you don’t put that on television, she said, you’re a liar. Of course, the reporter didn’t put it on television. Paley’s point: that the movement should not gauge its success through the mainstream media. She referred to Dr. Robert Hackett’s (professor of communications at Simon Fraser University) three purposes of movement media: (i) to expand relations among subordinate groups; (ii) to increase public awareness and broaden the conversation; and (iii) for resisting the effects of power.

The “success” of the Olympics (“success” in imposing its agenda, creating mass audiences of support and bending political will to its needs) she argued was in large part a result of the media-industrial-sports complex of CTV/VANOC/POLICE – apparently CTV has been feeding VANOC and local police video footage in unprecedented volumes. She called it COP-TV.

And finally, Derek O’Keefe – writer, contributor to Rabble.ca – weighed in with a strong condemnation of the pieing of David Eby earlier in the night. His point was that the left had a terrible history of fighting – some nasty stuff about Trotskyites beating Marxist-Leninsts with two-by-fours back in the day. Who needs that? he asked. Indeed, no one does. He emphasized long-term movement building, the damage that was being done to the IOC brand, and the importance of the diversity of allies. In the end, for O’Keef, the use of tactics must answer to whether or not they help the movement. And we may not like it, he said, but the mainstream media does mediate public events for most people.

(Which reminds me: Did anyone else know that on the opening day of the Olympics, and despite the absurd but presumably well-intentioned Olympic truce proposal by the United Nations, NATO launched the largest offensive to date in Afghanistan? O’Keefe referenced the story while drawing a comparison between the anti-war and Olympic resistance movements as long-term strategies.)

One intriguing criticism raised but largely ignored was that Saturday’s vandalism targeted a window display with a family watching television on a large flatscreen TV. Next to it, and left untouched, was a window protecting one of the appropriated Olympic Cowichan sweaters. “It was a missed opportunity,” someone said, “to turn a smashed window into a powerful symbol and criticism of the Hudson’s Bay history of colonialism”.

Another point of anger for those in favour of the property damage on Saturday was its characterization in mainstream press and by others at the meeting as “violence”, something which they said should only be used to discuss threats and attacks on people. Alas, the dictionary is no help in the issue, and the movement has yet to come to a consensus of its own.

It isn’t clear what was resolved, if anything, and maybe resolution isn‘t and shouldn’t be the goal. It was, as a colleague put it, an airing, the first time all concerned had been in the same room since last Saturday’s events and had chance to speak and probably more importantly to listen. It also isn’t clear that the fracture lines will be bridged, especially those rooted in the philosophical differences that make out vandalism as either the only form of legitimate protest (vandalism and its escalations) or as unwanted hooliganism. It was said a few times over the course of the evening, that now – presumably meaning after the Heart Attach march – “we know who our allies are and who they are not”. They may not be fighting words, but they certainly aren’t conciliatory.

And then there was VIVO and their role in putting the evening together – an arts organization who refused Olympic money and who will soon to be on the front lines of the most severe cultural cutbacks in British Columbia history – a full 88% decrease in funding over two years.

Where else, one might ask, could the conversation have happened? VIVO offered the infrastructure of a large room, but just as importantly the political credibility and ideological independence to host a neutral ground. And isn’t this one of art’s great offerings? A territory where entrenched beliefs and “truths” can be re-examined and future possibilities released from pasts that lock them into relationships that fragment larger struggles against the effects of power into less effective or perhaps slower and smaller acts of resistance.

This week we’re going pretty mainstream, but it’s appropriate given that the world—well, at least those of us with the privilege do to so—is completely consumed with the Winter Olympics. Now, if you think the Vancouver games have been tough on the organizers, you need only look back one generation to find an Olympics that generated much more outrage, and far higher human toll.

Steven Spielberg’s Munich is a 2005 historical fiction film about Israel’s state-sponsored assassinations that followed the 1972 killing of Israeli Olympic athletes by the Black September militant group. The film was remarkable for its ability to generate a tremendous amount of controversy, with deeply divergent opinions on both the artists and political aspects of the flick.

Take quick glance over at Rotten Tomatoes and you’ll see the film derided as “disastrously inept” and full of “muddled liberal Zionist politics”, while simultaneously praised as a work of “deeply felt moral analysis” and an “even-handed cry for peace”.

So pop your popcorn, grab the film from most any rental shop, and be sure to come back when it’s over to let us know where you stand on the grand Munich debate.

Montreal artist Isabelle Hayeur was contacted by the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad about a year and a half ago, after curator Marlene Madison visited her studio in Montreal.

Her piece, Fire with Fire, is a three story tall video installation projected from the windows of Vancouver’s W2 culture + Media House at 112 West Hastings Street. The neighbourhood of choice is nationally known for being the poorest postal code in the country, plagued with a history of missing women and drug problems, and Hayeur’s work links both to the distant and recent troubles the area has faced.

“I was inspired by The Vancouver Great Fire that destroyed most of the newly incorporated city on 13 June 1886,” explained Hayeur. “I also refer to the architectural conditions of the neighbourhood since the late 80s—to its urban decay after the closure of the Woodward department store. The artwork was motivated as well by the human distress and the poverty of this ‘intense’ area of town.”

The Olympic Games have accelerated the transformation of the downtown eastside from a place where your parents beg you not to stand and wait for the bus by yourself to a neighbourhood with new condo towers and big box stores.

Hayeur has experience addressing such site specific issues, having done previous projects in the both Montreal’s Red Light District and impoverished areas of Brooklyn. “These issues are unfortunately too common,” she lamented.

It took her a five day visit to Vancouver to find the perfect location for the installation, and connecting with the brand new W2 building happened by chance. “I didn’t know them before,” she eplained. “112 West Hastings was the building that seemed appropriate for an art installation. From the outside it seems vacant.”

Fire with Fire can be seen from Hastings up until February 28, and begins daily at dusk.

This is a guest post by Kalli Paakspuu, who along with Suzette Araujo and Tahir Mahmood created the “World Without Water” installation currently on display at the Cultural Olympiad in Vancouver.

A restorative and favorite space after life’s trials is the transitional space of a bathroom vanity where the intensity of living can be washed away. We refresh, rehearse, rework and realign an inner to an outer world through cleansing before a mirror. In our interactive installation World Without Water, the act of facing a mirror becomes a physical interaction in culture jamming.

Originally produced at the Canadian Film Centre as a prototype, World Without Water uses the participant’s physical interaction with a bathroom vanity to connect with global education on water consciousness. The sink and vanity mirror are reformed into an interventive site of environmental activism. This new media experience is featured at CODE Live One in the Cultural Olympiad in Vancouver from February 4 to 28, 2010.

By turning the tap we stream into the mirror a global view of the absence and abundance of fresh water. If both taps are turned the user is invited into an associational play with the “hot” (absence) and “cold” (abundance) images uploaded by professional and amateur photographers and made available through a flow sensor that controls a live photo stream from Flickr. Educational and entertaining, the user washes while simultaneously building a narrative out of images of water from places as diverse as Eurasia, Africa and the Badlands of North America

The tap handles also control a theatrical and fractured soundscape based on the traditional round song, “There’s a Hole in the Bucket”, which gets richer and thicker in relation to the image and tap flow. As the tap handles pour cold water from the right and hot water from the left, the user enters an improvisational play: the right tap releases images of clean and beautiful water against the left side’s toxic sights and deserts. A recombinant narrative through the sounds, images and mirrored self interrupts binary logics in a third space envisioning “we”.

When the tap is turned off, the screen resolves into two large images—one of abundance and one of absence—with a provocative quote about water. A second level of interaction takes place through the public’s use of Flickr, where anyone can upload images from their homes.

The intention of World Without Water is to create awareness of the global shortage of clean, drinkable and diminishing water supply. The relationship to water alters when the user is made aware of the power relations of their personal use. Through our mirrored selves, we become aware of our connection to people, places and the cycle of water.

The interactive experience leaves an indelible memory through culture jamming and a détournement which suggests the possibility of becoming something different. Here private space is interrupted and a passive relation in a body’s time, space and emotion is transformed to an inter-embodiment and engagement with others visually, imaginatively and by touch. A community politic from the primacy and privacy of our first person relation to water becomes a consciousness raising and a beginning of a de-colonization of public space. This once private reflective space is thus provocatively charged with questions about our responsibility to our environment and to others.

Photos by Tahir Mahmood.

The $7 billion spectacle of the 2010 Winter Olympic games will attract a million or so visitors to Vancouver. Official hosts VANOC and the IOC want very much to shape the experiences of these vistors to fit the Olympic mould.

Alas, their efforts suggest a limited and limiting narrative: the silencing of all public criticism and dissent (the infamous “muzzle” clause in Cultural Olympiad performer contracts); a whitewashing of indigenous political and social realities; a faux social housing bureau to field questions from international reporters about homelessness; the ramped up merriment and festivities in the Downtown peninsula where Olympic revelry exhausts itself each night in a patriotic hurrah! of music and drink until 3 am.

Ahhhh, Vancouver, Canada’s very own happy land.

(See the video interview after the jump.)

There is, of course, the Vancouver that is already here with its very own histories and communities and artists and festivals and complex political realities. A Vancouver of public engagement, community organizing, democratic participation. A cityscape of cooperatively run small businesses, women’s shelters, safe injection sites, free food services, and needle exchanges. A Vancouver of aboriginal friendship centers, community radio stations, farmers markets, community gardens, lantern festivals, small theaters and media arts groups.

Using Google maps, a group of local artists have found a way to let visitors peek behind the IOC curtain and into the rich tapestry of cultural, political and creative pasts and present that is the Vancouver of the people who live here.

Althea Thauberger is one of a group of artists working at VIVO who put together the Vancouver [de]tour guide 2010, a fascinating use of Google maps to introduce all and sundry to the other Vancouver where people strive for community, speak their mind, resist abuses of authority and privilege and celebrate experiences other than the consumption. Join Althea as she guides us through the Vancouver [de]tour in this video.

Reckless Tortuga is a crew of hilariously funny filmmakers, producers and actors who make some of the best anti-racism material online right now. Their videos are a breath of fresh air from the usual racism victim stories, which often fail to leave the viewer with a sense of what the real problem is, and where it stems from.

Through simple story-lines, Reckless Tortuga get their point across, in a funny way that all non-white people can relate to. The language is sometimes harsh and to the point, and that’s precisely what the videos do—they get to the heart of everyday racism in North America and the frustration minorities feel when they encounter these seemingly innocent acts.

Racism in America – Episode One explores racist stereotypes during a job interview, where Eric Pumphrey) plays a Black man heading to a regular ol’ racist company for an interview, when the receptionist asks that all time favourite question of visible minorities, What are you?

Enjoy the video—a great watch during Black History Month, and during any of the longer months of the year.

Aisling Chin-Yee is a line producer web editor on Work For All, a National Film Board of Canada project about racism in the workplace.

This is the first in a series of video reports (video embedded at the end of the post) focusing on the independent media and cultural events of the Vancouver Olympic Games, where contributing Editor Michael Lithgow is on the scene.

It’s complicated and exciting here in the Downtown East Side of Vancouver, home of the critical conversation about the Olympic games and their human cost. What is making this conversation possible, diverse and accessible to people around the world is the rich diversity of social and citizens media groups and cultural events taking place – an unprecedented people’s media event that has grown in response to one of the world’s largest media spectacles: the Olympic Games.

On the ground there are a number of organizations involved in the independent media movement and events taking place. A quick bird’s eye view: W2 Culture and Media House, an social media resource center providing internet and work spaces for unaccreditied artists and journalists, editing facilities, a visual art gallery, and host to a month-long “subculture” arts festival. There is the Vancouver Media Coop, an offshoot of the Dominion Newspaper providing a quick, daily, on the ground coverage of what is happening in the streets, the protests, police actions and in general news central for the Anti-Olympic Resistance Movement — all through community participation. There is Fearless TV, a community television production outfit located in the Downtown East Side providing live streaming video of various press conferences and cultural events. There is VIVO, host to a series of newscasts and discussions called Safe Assembly bringing activists, artists and thinkers together to reflect on resistance, the Olympics, media and culture as it unfolds during the Olympic games. And there are the dozen or so art galleries in the DTES hosting a cultural festival Bright Light, bringing together a provocative collection of installations contributing to the critical conversation about the Olympics games.

To add to the complexity, some of these groups are participating in the Cultural Olympiad and have taken Olympics funding raising questions and tensions about artistic freedom and political compromise.

In this first report, I’ll bring you on a walking tour of the W2 Culture and Media House in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side—the first of its kind in Olympic history—and speak with one of the W2 coordinators, Hywel Tuscano.

In solidarity with the detainees currently on hunger strike to protest inhumane conditions at the Los Fresnos immigration jail (Port Isabel, TX), I’m highlighting Homeland Guantanamos. Much more than an educational online game, this project documents actual detainees’ stories and the abuses they endured while in detention. Approximately 300,000 immigrants both legal and illegal are being detained in the U.S., many without conviction of any crime. This non-linear storytelling/investigative project invites players to discover what’s really happening on the inside.

The game’s assignment: go undercover by working as a prison guard and find the truth about what happened to Boubacar Bah, an immigrant from Ghinea who died while in ICE custody May 30, 2007. Free Range Studios built the virtual facility to match the Elizabeth Detention Center (run by the private company Corrections Corporation of America) where Bah was detained and designed the story around the actual events and people involved. While exploring each room, I found clues to help solve the case including embedded video interviews with Bah’s friends and family, his fellow detainees and their families. The video and written evidence reveal human rights abuses that mimic those committed at Guantanamo and other U.S. secret prisons.

Partnering with Free Range Studios, the international human rights organization Breakthrough used this project to launch a national engagement campaign. Included on the site are innumerable ways to take action, a memorial wall for the 87 immigrants who’ve died while in detention and a searchable U.S. map that locates local Gitmos by zip code. The article that triggered this project along with the recently released video What Really Happened to Boubacar Bah can both be found here. Spreading, creating or participating in projects as informative and comprehensive as this encourages the beginning of the end of real homeland Guantanamos.

…suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East… And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.
– George Orwell, Shooting an elephant, 1948

Directors Alberto Arce and Mohammad Rujailah document an important and very recent chapter in the history of imperialism in the Middle East with the courageous film, To Shoot and Elephant, a documentary that has been made freely available to the public through a Creative Commons License. It is an inside account of the 2008/2009 Israeli invasion of Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, which killed approximately 1400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis.

This is not an easy film to watch. You will see children die in a Palestinian hospital, their bodies wrapped in sheets and carried to the morgue; you will see a civilian man hit in the face by shrapnel; you will see a paramedic, trying to move a dead body from the street, fired on and wounded by Israeli soldiers.

An overwhelming number of the dead and injured are children. In its 2009 report on Operation Cast Lead, Amnesty Internal wrote, “Disturbing questions remain unanswered as to why such high-precision weapons, whose operators can see even small details of their targets and which can accurately strike even fast moving vehicles, killed so many children and other civilians.” Similar concerns were raised by the 2009 United Nations report.

To Shoot an Elephant is a first-hand account that confirms many of these human rights abuses did indeed occur. These include attacks on hospitals, schools, and civilian residences, and the use of white phosphorous – a particularly barbarous weapon that creates a powerful flame that is almost impossible to extinguish and sticks to the skin, causing second and third degree burns.

Filmmakers Arce and Rujailah do not pretend to represent all sides, and in fact, such an effort would probably have proven impossible, since Israel prohibited most humanitarian organizations from observing the conflict. Instead, the filmmakers made the choice to embed themselves with paramedics for the duration of the invasion.

Arce writes in his film introduction, “We decided that civilians working for the rescue of the injured would give us a far more honest perspective of the situation than those whose job is to shoot, to injure and to kill.”

Co-director, Mohammad Rujailah, also appears in the film as the “fixer.” He is the 24 year-old Palestinian insider who gives the film crew access to families and acts as translator. In the film’s early scenes, he declares that the Israel/Palestine conflict is an internal problem. By the film’s end, after an international aid warehouse has been bombed by Israel, effectively torching millions of dollars worth of medicine, blankets, and other provisions, his opinion has changed. His anger is no longer focused solely on Israel; its scope broadens to the “International Community” that remains silent as its aid money goes up in flames.

I had expected to see a highly militarized society under siege in Gaza, but what emerges instead is a portrait of a long-suffering and stoic people. While many Gazans are clearly overwhelmed by grief – there is one scene in which bereaved women say that death is the only thing they look forward to – other scenes show the courage of the people in retaining some semblance of life, as they tell jokes, prepare food, and take care of each other.

It is perhaps in these moments that the film’s true power lies, as it becomes not just a document of suffering, but a testimony to the strength of spirit in the Palestinian people. The film offers a glimpse of Gaza under the more “normal” conditions that prevail even outside of war. For instance, it struck me, as a Westerner, to see an ostensibly urban area nevertheless relying on donkeys as a means of transportation.

To Shoot an Elephant is an unflinching film. It is difficult to watch through to the end without feeling a deep contempt for the feckless and cowardly western governments, including the Canadian government, that supported Israel unwaveringly throughout this humanitarian catastrophe.

You can watch this film in its entirety for free at the film’s official site.

The Guardian has selected political artist Michael Rakowitz as their artist of the week. Although this American of Iraqi-Jewish heritage has drawn inspiration from sources as diverse as Arab newspapers and eBay, Guardian arts writer Skye Sherwin is drawn to Rakowitz’s constructive solutions to public problems, such as ParaSITE, his custom built homeless shelters.

Often he has devised practical, creative ways to get discussion going at ground level: public art projects that directly involve people. Begun in 2004, a project he called Return saw Rakowitz relaunch in Brooklyn a version of his grandfather’s import/export business; the local Iraqi community were invited to send items to Iraq for free, testing channels of communication at a time when there was almost no postal infrastructure. For another of Rakowitz’s projects, Enemy Kitchen (2006), cooking classes became a way to broach cultural boundaries, teaching school kids family recipes with the help of his mother in workshops staged in California and New York.

Rakowitz’s latest exhibition, The Worst Condition Is to Pass Under a Sword Which Is Not One’s Own, is at Tate Modern until May 3.

On the bustling streets in Manila the world moves fast, traffic winds quickly over roads, street vendors push popular food, rivers of people move in mass, currents amongst the infamous traffic jams, all is moving in Manila while the beautiful Pacific ocean shimmers under the sun.

Behind the urban beauty and chaos that shapes each day in Manila lies a major political crisis that shapes contemporary politics in the Philippines. Since President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo came to power in 2001, hundreds of progressive political activists have been murdered—most often executed by paramilitary death squads—in a chain of killings pointing to a pattern of politically-driven murder targeting left social movements in the country.

Amnesty International reported that “the attacks, mostly carried out by unidentified men who shoot the victims before escaping on motorcycles, have very rarely led to the arrest, prosecution and punishment of those responsible,” in an extensive report on political killings in the Philippines published in 2006 by Amnesty, continuing later in the document to say that “the common features in the methodology of the attacks, leftist profile of the victims, and an apparent culture of impunity shielding the perpetrators, has led Amnesty International to believe that the killings are not an unconnected series of criminal murders, armed robberies or other unlawful killings. Rather they constitute a pattern of politically targeted extrajudicial executions taking place within the broader context of a continuing counter-insurgency campaign.”

In 2007 I traveled to Manila as political killings were on the rise across the country, to participate in the International Observers Mission (IOM) bringing together progressive election observers from across the world to monitor the 2007 mid-term elections in the Philippines. Elections in the Philippines often spark political violence and killings shaped by criminal political ambitions, patterns that are clearly presenting themselves again surrounding the upcoming 2010 Presidential elections scheduled for May. Last November the Philippines was rocked by the largest killing of journalists in recent history, as thirty journalists lost their lives in the southern province of Mindanao, leading the Philippines to be widely declared as one of the most dangerous countries for the media by organizations such as Reporters Without Borders.

“On movements in Manila” my photo exhibition on the Philippines showing throughout February in Montreal at the Middle Eastern cafe Kaza Maza, collects moments captured in Manila while participating in the grassroots election observation mission in the Philippines. As photographs the focus is on Manila’s urban landscape, one widely shaped not by the cold glass surfaces common in western cities but by human hands, a grassroots and humane city in the most basic sense. It was grassroots social movements across Manila that made my photo exhibition possible, hosting me for informal talks and discussions in popular areas in the capital where political killings and violence against progressive movements in the country such as Bayan are often a horrifying reality.

Celebrated Montreal poet Kaie Kellough commented recently about my exhibition “On movements in Manila” writing that “the photos are both timely and timeless. They document the realities of life in Manila as the country heads toward elections. Simultaneously, the photos extend beyond the present moment, and beyond documentation,” writes Kellough, “They invite us to ask: How will the elections change what the camera’s lens has framed, what its shutter has fixed? Precisely because these photos prompt that question, they involve us. We wonder if the people who scavenge for their subsistence among smoldering rubbish-piles, if the smiling but smudge-faced children, if the shanty-towns that extend along the waterfront will continue to exist in their present state. We shake our heads at this fragility, and we too are shaken.”

In these two images from my current exhibition, first we see a young girl who lives in Smoky Mountain, a urban poor community in Manila, who is intensely impoverished and struggling to survive amongst garbage and rubble. Second we see the housing in Smoky Mountain, a community literally built within a landfill, which I spent time in during my travels in Manila. The house featured in the photo is the family home of the girl featured in the first photo.

In the most extreme circumstances it was the grassroots organizing for justice and dignity which was most overwhelming in the Philippines, worlds beyond the contemporary political reality of progressive political networks in Canada. Given the strength of social movements in the Philippines what is clear is that today grassroots activists across the Philippines need our solidarity as they struggle against political violence and incredible odds.

In January, the makers of the P2P project formerly known as Pirate Bay launched ipredator, a pay-service that allows complete anonymity while sharing files through P2P networks.

As most of our readers will be all too familiar with, P2P networks have emerged as significant and alternative distribution channels for all kinds of cultural and artistic materials – films and documentaries, music, texts, etc. – a strategy that has pitted intellectual property merchants against advocates for a more expansive cultural commons. And while anonymity may be the new arms race in this battle of online wits, the real gamble is whether or not people will be willing to pay a price for the privilege of secrecy. Ipredator costs about 5 euros a month to join.

In a recent article on TorrentFreak, ipredator said that they will encrypt not only the connection between individual users and the ipredator network, but also all data leaving the network. The weak link in the identity chain will be the host of the network, and this is how ipredator wants to set itself apart in the market of virtual networks: ipredator will apparently not keep data logs or user details. If the servers are seized, there will be no records of how the network was used, by whom and for what.

It is a challenging parry in the ongoing dual between information freedom fighters and the intellectual property police. It raises many important questions about the balance of interests between privacy, lawfulness, the privatization of collective intellectual endeavor, and personal security.

The webite offers little information. If any of our readers sign up for the service, we’d love to hear about it – drop us a line and tell us about it.

When klezmer troubadour Geoff Berner sings that “the dead, dead children were worth it”, he does so with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Berner’s “Official Theme Song for the 2010 Vancouver Whistler Olympic Games” mockingly lauds the BC government for dismantling the Children’s Comission—a provincial body that investigated children’s deaths—in order to pay for the Olympics. And this is just one of many programs that have been scaled back or eliminated as the government makes cuts to compensate for a Olympic-sized deficit.

I caught up with Geoff in Saskatoon last week as he kicked off his latest tour, which will see his trio criss-cross the prairies before heading to Norway in early March. With the Vancouver Olympics just around the corner, I wanted to know how he felt about the long-term economic legacy of the games in BC, and how artists could get involved in speaking up against cuts to arts funding and social programs.

Leon sets his revolution forth by asking, “Does school suck? Should it?” In this vein, do political comedies suck? The answer is, yes, more often than not, but fortunately, not this one. The Trotsky is part history, part autobiographical (the filmmaker’s life that is), and part funny fiction.

From Montreal filmmaker Jacob Tierney comes a tale of wit and longing. Young Leon, played in earnest by the talented Jay Baruchel (of recent apprentice fame), has from a young age, been convinced that he is indeed Trotsky reincarnated. On his adolescent bedroom wall he’s built an action plan: a bulletin board with to-dos such as “start a revolution” and “find a Lenin.” He even eagerly awaits his own assassination. To eke out his existence as Trotsky redux, Leon begins by first taking on his evil capitalist father’s business and moves on to unionizing his high school.

The film is very funny and charming, and surprisingly manages to valorize direct action activism, even duct-taping your principle and holding him hostage until negotiations resume (played in awesomely funny villain-ness by Colm Feore of Bon Cop, Bad Cop). The film connects youthful political ideals with action instead of ridiculing activism or reducing activists to two-dimensional stereotypes as so many other comedies (and so many fiction films in general) would have easily resorted to.

The Trotsky opens across canada on May 14.

Today we’re kicking off a new weekly feature, our Friday Film Pick. Each week we’ll suggest a movie for your weekend viewing pleasure. And we’ll try to recommend films that you’ll be able to find with relative ease, whether at your local video store, cinema, or on the web.

This week’s pick falls into that final category. The NFB recently made the entirety of RiP: A Remix Manifesto available for online viewing. For free. In HD.

The film became a platform for discussion on copyright reform as it played to audiences worldwide, and sparked a pretty good debate on this blog last year. If this is the first you’ve heard of RiP, here’s the brief synopsis from the NFB.

Join filmmaker Brett Gaylor and mashup artist Girl Talk as they explore copyright and content creation in the digital age. In the process they dissect the media landscape of the 21st century and shatter the wall between users and producers. Creative Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig, Brazil’s Minister of Culture, Gilberto Gil, and pop culture critic Cory Doctorow also come along for the ride.

Enjoy the movie, and we’ll see you back here in a week’s time for our next Friday Film Pick!

The Olympics are coming to Vancouver in just three weeks and almost no one I know is super thrilled about it. For some, it’s the traffic, for others, it’s the feeling that the only way we’ve been told to help is to “go on Vacation,” “take time off work,” “go to work earlier or later than usual to reduce traffic,” or “don’t drive your car.” It could also be that the City of Vancouver passed a by-law which prohibits the distribution of handbills in designated Olympic zones or lanes, and requires the removal of graffiti or posters that cause a “disturbance… with the enjoyment of entertainment on city land.”

For years leading to the Olympics, we’ve been seeing this “enjoyment disturbing” graffiti all over the city. (I actually quite enjoy them.)

So far, my best friend is the only exception to the city wide Olympic hate-on. It could be that her aunt is Olympic gold medalist Nancy Greene, or it could be that she and her family are generally excitable about winter sports. Truth be told, there is going to be some amazing things happening in Vancouver. If you happen to be in town, there will be some free visual art to look forward to thanks to the Cultural Olympiad, which will be running from January 22 to March 21.

My personal picks?

A fire hydrant on Waterfront Road, at the north end of Main street.

A message on the new bike path outside the Athlete's Village, by the newly constructed 'Habitat Island'.

Ginger Goodwin Way
An exhibition in which visual artists “wrestle” with the contested histories of Albert Ginger Goodwin, a miner who in 1928 was killed by a police constable, leading to the first general strike in Canada’s history.

Jason de Haan: Life After Doomsday
Jason de Haan uses every day objects to offer coping strategies for a post-apocalyptic future.

Isabelle Hayeur: Fire with Fire
In the middle of Canada’s poorest neighbourhood, Isabelle Hayeur will illuminate the windows of a four-story building to connect the conditions of the neibhourhood today to its history.

See more about the Cultural Olympiad at CODE online.

Images by Amanda McCuaig. Top: Graffiti on a construction poster outside the Athlete’s Village.

One day prior to the earthquake in Haiti last week, Darren Ell’s art exhibit Haiti: Holdup opened in Concordia University’s Media Gallery. His photographic documentary pieces were a prescient warning about the vulnerability of Haiti’s fragile infrastructure — a fragility directly caused by American, Canadian and French manipulation.

Ell’s exhibit consists of three enormous photographs, seven feet wide and five feet high to be precise. Each is intended to make the viewing experience as immediate as possible, to enable viewers to enter the scene. Two photos deal with UN-led arrest operations in the slums of Port-au-Prince. They are meant to bring the viewer close to the reality of foreign occupation and ongoing colonial control. The third photo is more romantic, with smoke billowing around a beautiful tree and flung open gate. The light beauty of the scene sets the viewer up for a thud when one realizes that the smoke comes from extinguished fires following a student demonstration against the high cost of living. This protest was one of many during the food riots of 2008.

Ell draws these three photos together with a large text on the wall giving background on the 2004 coup d’état when democratically-elected President Aristide was kidnapped by American forces. Leading up to the coup, the American and Canadian governments were gradually destabilizing Haiti’s government by depriving it of much needed aid. Immediately following Aristide’s election in 2000, the American government cut all of its aid to Haiti and even blocked loans in order to isolate the country economically. Haiti’s annual budget consequently diminished from $600 million to $300 million. (To put this in context, Ell notes that Haiti’s new budget for its 9 million citizens was equivalent to that of a Canadian city of only 100,000 people.) Meanwhile, the Canadian government cut its funding by 50 percent over the two to three years following Aristide’s election, thereby intensifying Haiti’s destabilization.

Needless to say, the country began to teeter. The government did not have sufficient funds to cover the basic needs of its people. After a few years in this state, levels of violence rose in Haiti, but a shameful disinformation campaign in Canada and the US targeted the Aristide government as the main culprit. To make matters worse, Aristide’s power was being further undermined by paramilitaries invading from the Dominican Republic. Aristide even asked the international community for a small number of marines or soldiers to help him stop the paramilitaries—a request that Canada, the U.S., and the U.N. ignored.

Because the paramilitaries couldn’t overthrow the Haitian government, the U.S. stepped in and kidnapped President Aristide, his wife, and his helicopter pilot. (It is a shame that Ell’s fourth piece couldn’t be featured in his current show. It is a video landscape featuring the voice of Haitian-Canadian journalist Jean St-Vil reading the 2007 deposition given by Aristide’s helicopter pilot explaining what happened on the night of Aristide’s kidnapping—proof of American meddling.)

So why would the U.S. government go to such lengths to overthrow the democratically elected government of such a poor country? And why would the Canadian government support the U.S. in crippling the country economically? These are precisely the kinds of questions Darren Ell wants us to ask. Such questions are integral to “bearing witness,” a responsibility that Ell stresses through his work. Bearing witness does not mean merely watching the death toll in Haiti rise from the comfort of our Canadian homes; it means acting now to help with Haitian relief and then informing ourselves about our government’s hand in the devastation. In other words, we need to donate then wake up.

Two organizations Ell recommends for our donations are Partners in Health and Doctors Without Borders—both of which have deep roots in Haiti. Partners in Health was created in Haiti and has many Haitian employees, while Doctors Without Borders has been in Haiti for a long time and has experience working in its poorest areas. Ell is also sending donations to the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund, which funnels money to grassroots organizations in Haiti. You can find more information about donating money to all of these organizations at canadahaitiaction.ca.

The second part of our responsibility as witnesses is to inform ourselves about our government’s and the American government’s hand in creating this crisis. We must ask why last week’s earthquake has resulted in a rapidly rising death toll when a similarly powerful earthquake shook San Francisco in 1989 and resulted in only 63 deaths. Why the difference? Human involvement. This leads us back to not only American and Canadian vested interests in keeping the Haitian government under thumb, but also further back to French colonialism.

Ell summarizes the history of foreign occupation in Haiti as follows: The French exploited Haitian resources for a couple of hundred years through the plantation system and the slave trade. After ten bloody years of fighting the French and losing thirty percent of their population in the struggle, Haitians took their independence in 1804. In response, the French blockaded Haiti, forcing Haiti to compensate French slave owners for their losses. This resulted in a massive debt, one that took 80% of Haiti’s annual budget until 1947 to repay. It also resulted in the profound impoverishment of Haiti.

Enter the American government, which invaded Haiti in 1915. The Americans rewrote the Haitian constitution and occupied militarily for the following couple of decades. During this time, American corporations moved in and reaped the wealth of Haitian resources while the American government propped up dictators who allowed this to continue. Since that time, the American government has been tipping the playing field in favor of US capital, making it difficult for peasants to make a living off of their crops. (The democratic—i.e. not U.S.-controlled—election of President Aristide in 2000 threatened the future of this American exploitation and the American government, supported by the Canadian government, cut aid and led the 2004 coup.)

Haitian peasants, unable to sustain themselves off of their agriculture, began to move into Port-au-Prince slums, a city without proper building codes whose infrastructure had never been properly developed because of a long history of invasion and exploitation. By the time the earthquake hit last week, the heat from the U.S. and its loyal ally Canada had already ripened Port-au-Prince for disaster. It’s the sad but common tale of richer countries assaulting the sovereignty of poorer countries to maintain their political economic interest (read: dominance) in the area.

Because of Canadian and American vested interests in maintaining control over Haiti, we must also critically question the images of Haiti being circulated in the news. For instance, Ell notes that there are gangs in Port-au-Prince just as in any poor urban centre, just as in Montreal, but all reports from the ground show that news reports of violence have been grossly exaggerated. So who benefits from Canadians believing that there is mass violence in Haiti? What does this alleged mass violence imply that the Canadian government, birthplace of peacekeeping, should do?

Ell’s work is the starting place of such critical engagements with Canadian-Haitian relations. His moving, sometimes startling work draws one into a singular moment only to bring one closer to larger political economic truths. This is precisely what Ell believes political art should do: lure with aesthetics, provoke thought with text, and hope that viewers go on to explore the larger issues.

Is the juggernaught of Olympics coming to town? Police clamping down on activists? Olympic security denying your reporters press clearance? Then the W2 Culture + Media House is the place for you.

Set across the street from the soon to be reopened Woodwards housing redevelopment in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side, the folks at W2 have rented four floors in a building for a month-long cultural party and 24/7 service hub for the hundreds of local and international journalists and bloggers coming to Vancouver to cover the Olympics. This is the media centre for journalists who can’t get accredited by VANOC or the BC government.

The Culture + Media House will also host free cultural exhibitions, workshops and conferences during the day. At night, some of the space will be transformed into a performance and event venue to showcase Vancouver’s diverse culture scenes.

Highlights include African Dance Party, Bikes Inside, Hot One Inch Action, Abandon Normal Devices Conference (with Liverpool), visual arts exhibits, DJ parties, workshops, screenings, and the Feb 22 Fresh Media Olympics conference — altogether 40 events in 28 days.

This is going to be a great party and vital part of getting alternative information out during the Olympic Winter Games about how police and ramped up Olympic security are behaving towards activists and in one of Canada’s poorest neighbourhoods.

There is one reason, above all the others, that the Academy Awards are not worth paying any attention to this year: the documentary Dreamland is not up for best picture, best documentary, or best anything.

Once every five to ten years a film comes along that shakes your soul, rattles the cage of your conscience, and awakes you from a media-immersed cryogenic dream state. The technical perfection and power of the message rearrange the synopsis in your circuitry and leaves you feeling like a wave of clarity and inspiration has washed over you. This sermon on the mount, the audiovisual awakening that has knocked me from safe and comfortable passage into a world I had temporarily forgotten was there, is the magnificent breathtaking political documentary Dreamland.

Dreamland asks us how much is a mountain worth? Two billion? Twenty billion? Then challenges the capitalism calculi that conjures these figures, re-orienting the audience toward another framework, one of eco-logic, and argues for 89 minutes that the value of the natural world is of course not measured in dollars, or barrels, or extractions. The value of the natural world we inhabit is immeasurable: it is beauty, harmony, health, co-existence and much, much more.

If I’m sounding like a hippy that’s likely because three viewings of this documentary from Iceland have changed my purview. It’s not that I didn’t give a damn about ecology before Dreamland, it’s just that this film was the much-needed kick in the ass that I required. Dreamland is like a drug: a truth serum that wrestles memories out of their webs, that beautifully captures the “reality” of the natural world, and that connects our fears with our needs with our wants. The fear of the antithesis of progress – of simply preserving and protecting the environment because its value is immeasurable; the need to push for a kind of progress defined and managed by elites who have disdain for the natural world and who answer to constituencies, not rivers, rocks, tundras, the hooved and the winged; and the want, as it is articulated by CEOs attracting politicians attracting large amounts of small pieces of paper with abstract symbols on them.

Dreamland is a documentary like no other. This 2009 film by Þorfinnur Guðnason & Andri Snær Magnason is a visual treatise that exposes the greed and corruption that has befallen Iceland like a plague of myopic and avaricious infection of the mind and heart. It is a poem to the natural world and speaks for ecology through stunning cinematography and the pacing of a practiced orchestra.

Dreamland shows us how mining multinationals and hydro-electric companies have steered Iceland toward a precipice of pillage. The country already produces more than enough energy for its 300,000 inhabitants, but Alcoa (based out of Montreal) and politicians in Iceland see resources that exist without intervention as willful waste and neglect. There is money to be made, and through massive mining operations as well as monstrous hydro-electric projects, the corporate and political elite argue, Iceland can have more, much much more. But what is needed when the country’s needs are met and the people live in one of the most beautiful and pristine environments in the world?

The documentary powerfully examines the psychology of fear that leads to progress and consumerism that leads to apathy and support for the eco-criminals currently destroying Iceland’s natural world. And the film, through gorgeous photography and a perfectly complimentary soundtrack, inspires, provokes and dare I say initiates change.

It is telling of this film’s potency that I left the cinema in Amsterdam back in November full of rage, but also full of plans. Rage at the injustice and immoral acts that I had bared witness to. But plans, inspired by the moving argument played out so politically and emotionally on the screen, to be a better environmentalist. And that the story I had seen was about a country so far removed from my immediate reality, yet I was so compelled to change and effect change, further illustrates the powerful masterpiece that is Dreamland.

Dreamland is an experience, and one that you do not sleep through. Once this film grabs hold of you, it is a tight and cathartic embrace that does not end when the lights go up. It is one of the most important and powerful documentaries I have ever seen, and deserves not just an Oscar, but a place in every person’s conscience – a reminder of who we have been, but also who we can be, what we have and why it is worth fighting for.

To learn more and join in the fight for Iceland’s natural world, visit SavingIceland.org.

Each year the CRTC sets aside over $100 million for local, independent and activist television. Canadians have until February 1, 2010 to tell the CRTC how well this money is being spent, and how to spend it better in the future.

If you didn’t know about this amazing amount of money, you’re not alone. Community channels have in been in slow decline as cable companies have increased their stranglehold on access and programming over the past 15 years. What was once a vibrant network of tens of thousands of volunteers, activists and artists has dwindled through lost opportunities and in many cases outright hostility by the cable companies to community participation.

It’s time for Canadians to take back their community media resources from the cable companies.

A key issue is what to do with community television in a digital future. One of the big ideas being put forward is to use the $100+ million annual funds to build a network of community media centers, like local libraries, but with the emphasis on access to digital media training, production, and distribution through online and low-power broadcast opportunities. It is an idea being put forward by CACTUS, a national community tv advocacy group.

Since their creation in the early 1970s, community channels have attracted well over $1 billion in mandated funding. This money has been spent on training, programming and the creation of a network of television production facilities across the country required to “provide and encourage citizen access” and give communities the “widest opportunity for self-expression”. Community channel resources are like a public trust, and it is time Canadians got the benefit of this trust rather than it’s being squandered on cable company self promotion.

If Canadians do not speak out now, these opportunities could be lost forever.

For more information go to the CACTUS website, or check out OpenMedia.ca.

You can submit a comment to the CRTC directly online.

To review the CRTC’s call for comments, check out Broadcasting Notice of Consultation 2009-661.

Photo by Matt Hampnel.

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What can make a giant tremble? When a penniless student group gets a threat from New York lawyers – in this case, Coca-Cola’s lawyers – on account the students want to show a film condemning human rights abuses, the optics suggest that the giant has something to hide. ‘Screening truth to power’, it seems, has its consequences.

Earlier this month, Coke threatened legal action to prevent the screening of a new documentary film The Coca-Cola Case. The $141 billion company (with annual revenues of $28 billion) threatened a small non-profit media-arts group called Cinema Politica which shows documentary films for free at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec and through a network of independent locals across Canada, in the United States, and in Europe and Latin America.

(For the record, I volunteer help for CP and my colleague here at Art Threat Ezra Winton is one of the founders. Let’s just say this story hits pretty close to home …)

What may have the soft drink giant so jittery is that the film is slated to be shown at 24 network locals from Halifax to Stockholm in an upcoming international tour co-sponsored by one of the film’s producers, the respected National Film Board of Canada. Seventeen of those screenings are located on campuses. Coca-Cola is well known for the agreements made with universities for the exclusive sale of Coke products.

Students want a chance to see the documentary and to decide for themselves not only about the fairness of the film, but also about the fairness of Coca-Cola’s business practices. It is David and Goliath yet again, this time a corporate giant fending off filmmakers, activists, students and – as the film makes out – workers and union leaders. And, like the Bible story, it seems this Goliath too is the one facing the rougher ride.

So what is it Coke doesn’t want you to know?

According to the documentary and according to lawsuits brought against the corporate leviathan, its rise to global corporate soda-pop kingship has been part and parcel of a systematic campaign of kidnapping, intimidation, torture and even murder in its aggressive hostility towards workers and unions in some regions.

The film focuses on Coke’s business strategies in Colombia, Guatemala and Turkey, by following two human rights lawyers and their accusations of human rights abuses in a lawsuit before the U.S Federal Court. In Colombia, for example (and this according to Business Week, no less) in 1996, a group of armed men kidnapped a union leader representing workers at a Coke bottling plant, torched the union offices and shot and killed Isidro Segundo Gil, a member of the union’s executive board. Then they camped outside the bottling plant for two months demanding workers resign from the union.

Not surprisingly, the union folks allege that Coke was involved. The company denies the charges. It is admittedly hard to imagine why in the real world a paramilitary group would randomly attack the union without Coke’s backing. And, since then, again according to Business Week, eight other unionists have been murdered, 65 have received death threats, and 50 have been forced into hiding.

The organizer’s at Cinema Politica were surprised by the letter threatening legal action. According to executive director Svetla Turnin, the network has screened well over 200 films but has only encountered legal intimidation in one other instance. A couple of years ago, the owners of a sugar plantation in the Dominican Republic unsuccessfully tried to bully the network away from a film that accused the plantation of gross exploitation of workers. Turnin says the network was within its legal rights to show the film, and it did. Coca-Cola finds itself with some unsavory bedfellows in its fight to silence public criticism.

Considering that the network’s motto is “Screening truth to power”, the organizers do consider the truth of the films they show and are concerned about filmmaker accountability. But their concern falls within a wider analysis of a mediscape and public discourse that tends to favour some kinds of biases over others.

“We program documentaries that offer critical perspectives on stories and issues that have had either little or no coverage in the mainstream or that have been grossly misrepresented,” Turnin explains. “We offer an alternative to dominant narratives on everything from human and labour rights violations, to corporate green-washing, to sex work, copyright, first nations issues and occupation and imperialism.”

Their goal is as much to entertain as it is to inform as it is to stimulate interest and discussion about matters of public concern. “We also try to curate the most independent and critical works while providing a space for discussion and debate, therefore leaving space for our audiences to interpret truth perspectives and critically engage with the representations they see on the screen.”

And while Concordia University – home of the screening this Monday that is the subject of the letter from Coke’s lawyers – doesn’t have an exclusive product agreement with Coke (they have one with Pepsi), Turnin says the film raises issues about corporate presence on university campuses that students everywhere should be thinking about.

“Canadian universities have started to look into contracting companies that stick to fair labour practices,” says Turnin. “Some student bodies, such as UBC, have fought against corporations that had pressured the administration to eliminate water fountains in university buildings so that they can sell their bottled water.”

Perhaps Coke’s biggest fear is that their actions – in far away places like Guatamala and Columbia – might have real repercussions closer to home, if people knew about them. According to Turnin, “Universities in Norway and in Canada (Guelph comes to mind) have kicked Coke off campus.” The optics from a marketing and PR perspective must be terrible.

The issues raised in the film tour will also touch on questions about the future of university education. Says Turnin, “It is important to raise awareness about the issues at hand and challenge people to look into who’s monopolized their schools.”

The film screens this Monday at 7:30 pm (January 18) in room H110, Concordia University in Montreal 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W.

For more information on the international tour of the film go to the Cinema Politica Network website.

Woodblock printing is an ancient Chinese art form—the earliest known prints date from the Han Dynasty before the year 220. Over the past hundred years, however, the medium became politicized. Prints were created by the Communist Party to communicate with primarily illiterate population, while later artists would rebel and reinvent woodcuts for their own purposes.

“Portrait of Mao Zedong” by Chen Tiegeng, 1937-1948.
From the collection Professor and Mrs. Theodore Herman,
Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University.

Today woodblock prints provide a fascinating perspective into China’s history of political upheaval. That history will be explored at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts with their exhibition of 65 prints entitled “Woodcuts in Modern China, 1937-2008: Towards a Universal Pictorial Language”. The show opens January 23 and runs until April 18.

Boston printmaker and professor Renee Covalucci co-curated the exhibition, and recently spoke to the Kalamazoo Gazette about the work on display at the gallery.

“When you give a definition for avant-garde, it is art work that has to really change society and behavior in society — or at least documents that change. And it has to change the appearance of the art,” Covalucci said. “These works are considered the start of the Chinese avant-garde movement.”

“Most of the messages were leaning toward the idealism of Mao Zedong and were able to get the attention of peasants and share their views with them. They focused on atrocities and how things could be different. [...] But in the rural and inner sections of the country, the images were a little shocking. People were afraid of them with the rough marks on people’s faces and the shading. To them that was a ghost or death.”

Read the Gazette’s preview of the show at mlive.com.

Art art everywhere

Sent to us from Art By Chance: Ultra Short Film Festival:

IT’S TIME TO MOVE!
ART BY CHANCE is the brand new “Ultra Short Film Festival” that will be aired in May 2010 all around the world. Films will meet with us unexpected, non-theatrical venues around the world on digital advertising screens located inside metros, busses, railways, public transport.
ART BY CHANCE present urban dwellers with stimulating content thus colouring the time slices that are usually considered dead.

UNIQUE SHORT FILM FORM AS WELL AS THE SCREENING
ART BY CHANCE opens to movies of all kinds; fiction, animation, documentary and video art with the exception of training and advertising films. Enthusiastic and creative international film makers will be preparing 30 seconds long, films*, on “Time”.  Participants also submit online from  www.artbychance.org

IN THE SUMMER OF 2009 MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WERE CAUGHT BY A SHORT FILM
Last year festival aired May-June-July 2009 in 13 countries and in over 70 cities around the world for the first time and was viewed by more than 1 billion people worldwide.

ALL THE WORLD’S WAITING TO SEE YOUR SHORT FILM!
ART BY CHANCE is currently partnering with many digital advertising network operators throughout the world. With these partnerships ART BY CHANCE realize a revolutionary event allowing art to meet millions of people around the world. The best festival entries will be selected by an international jury and will be screened. ART BY CHANCE films took place on 7907 screens in 20 different networks.

LARGEST AUDIENCE EVER REACHED BY A PUBLIC ART EVENT
ART BY CHANCE is going to allow film makers to share their work with a large audience. Viewers around the world will have the opportunity to watch the best festival movies free of charge and within the course of their daily routine. This is the largest audience ever reached by a short film festival. Reaching so many people can only be possible by taking the screenings outside the theatres where the urban people can see it without an effort.

Seems like an opportunity to insert some political into the public.

Stumbling out of the Imax theatre, $35 poorer and eyes feeling like candy had been poured into them for two-and-a-half hours, we spotted a colleague who had also been seeing large blue people. Whadya think we asked? Ahh they replied, liberal Hollywood stuff – you know, Dances with Wolves and all that. Ya, I said, but what a visual ride.

What a visual ride indeed. Not many have dared decry Avatar for its effects extravaganza, and I certainly immersed myself in James Cameron’s CGI world for the entire experience. But corny and tragically simplistic dialogue aside, there is something else about Avatar that was nagging at me, and the Dances with Wolves comment nailed it: it’s the white American hetero-male saves the helpless indigenous people all over again.

The fact that the alien peoples (Na’vi) can’t get their shit together until a white American military man in a blue person avatar rides in to save the day is the principle thing wrong with this uber-spectacle. One can walk away from the film conflicted: it’s a critique of military culture and a valorization of the environment and human connection to ecology, but wait, while their forests burn and missiles fly, the Na’vi gather round a tree to sing? No damnit! That’s not how AMERICANS do it! And then the speeches about “our land” and our struggle and all that, led by of course the white American guy whose macho might and military mind save the day for these tree-loving aboriginals.

So there it is, that’s why Avatar is the new, more expensive, 3-D version of Dances with Wolves. Sure I wasn’t bored and for sure I was dazzled – the aesthetic and technical achievements were well worth the millions they spent on it and the talent that poured into the project. But couldn’t a new world have included a new Hollywood narrative? Not all the money in the world can apparently produce that.

I was thinking along these lines when I suddenly stumbled on Hamish Ford’s excellent article in Australia’s National Times, just published today (well, tomorrow if you’re in the Western hemisphere). Ford nails it. No one likes a killjoy, but the film’s made over a billion already – there’s room for criticism in the sea of adoring film critics. And Ford brings it:

Avatar’s rendering of the Na’vi is not only textbook Romanticism, these very handsome “noble savages” go beyond even Rousseau’s fantasies, but its truly patronising account of indigenous culture is crucially revealed when we witness its lack of intellectual and creative agency at the moment of truth: in the face of imperial human power. Towing the familiar liberal line, for the “other” to be “good” they must need one of us to save them. When it comes to facing the destruction of their idyllic habitat by the marauding invaders, the Na’vi have no answer. For that they need US soldier Jake Sully (Sam Worthington).

Yep, Dances with Avatar – nice on the eyes but damn lacklustre on the culture and politics.