Less Told Stories

We Are Many: Will We Be On The Same Page?

2012-01-05T14:21:00.006Z

Milan Kundera’s memorable phrase, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”, will find ample resonance in the documentary, ‘We are Many’ , that BBC journalist Amir Amirani is producing and directing on the 15 February 2003 global anti-war demonstrations in which millions participated but were then ignored by their leaders, principally the Bush-Blair-Aznar clique, which invaded and destroyed Iraq on a monstrous lie.

The event needs remembering for at least three reasons: it set the pattern for rolling wars in this century; it was the first truly global day of demonstration in which tens of millions participated in every continent and the participants asked nothing for themselves. It was a moral outrage against war mongering that had hijacked the cherished words, liberty, democracy and peace. Due for release on the tenth anniversary of the marches, the documentary will unfold “the drama of many millions of everyday people fighting to stop a war, set against a small number of people working to start one”. It will chronicle an “untold chapter in the history of people power… which reveals the potential power of ordinary people as well as the dark underbelly of the war machine”. Amirani lets it be known that the “story of the greatest mass mobilization in history is also a devastating critique of the state of democracy today”.

This is as good a start as any. Amirani works for the BBC but his employers would not fund him, which is why he has had to look for other sources and contributions from the people. BBC’s mistake is perhaps the least worst thing to happen since it will allow the story to be told without its restrictive framework. More than that, the BBC was stingy at best in giving airtime to the voices against the war and, once it started, enthusiastically embedded itself with the invading armies.

Amirani’s BBC experience will contribute to the making of a fine documentary. Yet that is also a legitimate source of concern. Will his narrative be able to look beyond the London-New York mental axis? How many of the talking heads will be from say Spain, Italy or Germany? Will they be central or the story or tokens? Will we see such inconvenient figures like George Galloway and John Pilger in the documentary? If, as Amirani says, he intends to look at reports and commissions on the war, will he also look at the media, his own included, which prepared the ground for the war? Curiously, Antarctica is mentioned as a shooting location but not Baghdad, which too had a large anti-war demonstration, no doubt aided by the Saddam government, and which has had to live with the consequences.

Clearly, funds are a problem and will dictate many of the choices but hopefully Amirani’s enterprise will be able to factor these in.

Impunity: Colombia's Elusive Justice

2011-06-25T15:28:00.000+01:00

Colombia has long been at war with itself. It has a stinking human rights record but no more than a whiff of it reaches European and U.S. shores. It also has the biggest mass graves in Latin America, and recent ones among them. It has the world’s oldest guerrilla army, the FARC, which controls vast swathes of territory even after it has been severely weakened. It has many more paramilitary groups linked to the narcotics trade, some of whom staged a charade of a demobilisation a couple of years ago. The country’s institutions have long-held links with the drug cartels.

But it is strategically placed next to Brazil, Venezuela, Panama and Ecuador. Its ruling classes are the USA’s most enthusiastic lickspittles. The International Criminal Court is not at its proactive best when dealing with Colombia. All this allows many paramilitary bosses to escape justice. The recent documentary, Impunity, examines precisely this. The documentary-makers, Hollman Morris and Juan Jose lLozano ask: “Where are the decision makers in this war? Where did the orders come from? What purpose were they serving? What does it have to say, multinationals such as Chiquita Brands... military, businessmen, politicians and drug traffickers of this wonderful country?”

Micro Debt: Small Loans, Big Problems

2011-03-03T11:14:00.006Z

Muhammad Yunus, “banker to the poor”, Nobel Prize winner and head of Grameen Bank who popularised micro-credit worldwide, has been sacked from his post by the government of Bangladesh. Yunus and the bank will take the case to court and his friends, a powerful group including a former World Bank president and a former Irish president, have come out in his defence.

This was triggered by Micro Debt, a documentary by the award-winning Danish filmmaker Tom Heinemann first aired on Norwegian television in November 2010. Heinemann looks at the dark side of the micro-credit industry in Bangladesh, India and Mexico. He found that far from liberating the poor, these small loans trapped them even more in poverty and made them vulnerable to harassment from loan collectors and their peers.

The documentary raised the issue of “questionable” loan transfers by Yunus, something he, his bank and the Norwegians deny. The film is more than about one man being pulled down from the pedestal: Heinemann questions whether micro loans are fit for purpose as the “poor always have to pay”.

If you find this shocking, have a look at Renzo Martens' documentary, Enjoy Poverty, which he filmed over a period of two years in Congo.

Tom Heinemann's page

Toxic Tears: Documentary on Farmers' Suicides

2011-03-01T13:43:00.007Z

There is a silent epidemic of farmer suicides in India, a figure that reaches hundreds of thousands. Researchers reveal that it is something like a farmer taking his life every 30 minutes for more than a decade. There have been other documentaries made on the subject earlier and a Hindi film, Peepli Live, on this topic fared well at the box office.

The Times of India had this to report about a 24-minute documentary by a Dutch researcher on this issue:

It is a juxtaposition of contraries that has now become ironic. Even though Punjab government has found a negligible number of farmers who merit Rs 200,000 compensation, given to those who are driven to suicide because of debt, a Dutch researcher has been overwhelmed by the tragedy which has almost become an every house tale in the villages.

Tom Deiters, who had come to India six years ago to carry out research on farmer suicides in a cluster of Punjab villages as an academic exercise, was

moved by the destruction that the pesticides were wreaking that he decided to stay-on for a longer time.

His documentary, Toxic Tears, profiles the men and women in Punjab's villages who have lost their sons to the faulty farming practices. An old woman, her face heavily creased with age, in Chottian village, broke down as she narrated how her eldest son had drunk the very pesticide, which had trapped him in a debt, to end his life four years ago.

A year later, her younger son, unable to tolerate a failed crop and more debt, followed suit. Tom, whose thesis was for doing Masters in International Relations, a part of political science, at the University of Amsterdam in Holland, is now using the Punjab model, to highlight how globalisation is far removed from reality. "The evils of so called "green revolution" are so stark in Punjab," said Deiters.

"I want to use Punjab's example to show how the policy makers are not connected to the reality. This is important because other states in India want to follow Punjab's footsteps," he said. Frustrated by the pattern of the vicious trap that he had seen replicated across the villages, Toxic Tears, highlights how some, especially commission agents, are trying to deny farmers' suicides. "Farmers are borrowing money at outrageous rates from agents, many of whom double up as agents of pesticides and fertilizers. There is a strong bias at work,” said Dieters, who is now more focused on solutions.

Presumed Guilty: A Look At Mexican 'Justice'

2011-02-18T20:00:00.019Z

Antonio Zuñiga

In Presumed Guilty, Geoffery Smith and Roberto Hernandes selected 90 minutes from about 350 hours of filming of the case of Antonio Zuñiga who was accused of murder. Picked up from the streets on December 12, 2005, the 26-year-old was framed for murder. In prison, he contacted Layda Negrete and Hernandez, two young lawyers, to defend him.

Unusually, the two lawyers who had made another short film called the Tunnel which secured the release of their client, took the camera as a key witness throughout two years of appeal and finally managed to overturn Zuñiga’s conviction, laying bare what they call the complex and byzantine world of Mexico’s judicial system. The film also records how Zuñiga changed from being just another prisoner to a protagonist of his moral transformation.The victim's family are unhappy with the documentary, saying their side of the story has not been told.

The film is being screened in 120 theatres in Mexico. In Mexico, the presumption is of guilt and the prisons are crammed with people who have very little hope of making it out. Hernandez and Negrete did the filming while Smith structured the documentary.

Geert Wilders: Europe's Most Dangerous Man?

2011-02-14T09:25:00.005Z

Showing on BBC 2 February 14th, 7:00pm

A profile of controversial Dutch politician Geert Wilders. The man with the shock of platinum blond hair is known for virulent anti-Islamic views which led to his being denied entry into Britain until he successfully appealed against the ban. The film follows him on the campaign trail during the 2010 Dutch general election. The leader of the Party for Freedom, now on the brink of real power in the Netherlands, Wilders is the first politician to stand trial on charges of inciting hatred because of his pronouncements on Islam and his call for a ban on the Qur'an. With anti-Islamic and anti-immigration parties on the rise in Europe, what makes him the poster boy of the far right? Members of the international anti-Islamic network who support him are also interviewed about their leader in this documentary by Bafta-winning film-makers Mags Gavan and Joost van der Valk.

Miss: Exploring Venezuela's Beauty Industry

2011-01-13T15:58:00.003Z

Edward Ellis, an anthropologist who worked as production coordinator for Oliver Stone’s South of the Border, and Flor Salcedo, a Venezuelan activist on women’s issues, are working on a film to explore the beauty industry’s grip on the country.

Venezuela has won more beauty contests than any other country. But while it might have six Miss Universe crowns, it only has two shelters for victims of gender violence. One reality hides another. The beauty industry in Venezuela has struck deep social roots and is highly organised. Girls are taught from very young to aspire to be a “Miss”, a beauty queen. Beauty pageants for even little girls are highly sexualised.

An astonishingly large number of women do breast implants and it is not that unusual for proud fathers to buy breast implants for their daughters when they turn fifteen. Venezuela is also the highest per capita consumer of cosmetics, as the filmmakers point out. The “Misses” of Venezuela are white women. Many of them end up as TV anchors in the private channels, from where they both spew hate for the socialist government and reinforce the extreme objectification of Venezuelan women.

The Venezuelan beauty industry sits comfortably with a macho culture. In 2008, 10,000 gender violence cases were registered but local activists think it is only a ninth of the actual number. The newly-constituted Bolivarian police have had some success in reducing this in parts of Caracas but, like violence generally, it is an enormous and lingering problem.

The big boss of this industry is Osmel Sousa, a particularly dislikeable man who deserves a whole documentary to himself as a crude misogynist. Some of the scenes where he clinically measures up young aspirants could be straight out of a cattle market. Which is probably what it is.

Here is another documentary on Venezuelan obsession with beauty.

So What Are Documentaries All About?

2010-12-29T19:45:00.005Z

Not many of you will have heard of the ânûû-rû âboro festival– it means shadow of a man or image of a man in Païcî, the language of the Kanak people – or of Paul Néaoutyine, Président de la Province Nord, New Caledonia, who delivered this speech at the festival’s opening, but here is an excerpt from an inspiring account of what documentaries are all about :

"The choice to stage this ânûû-rû âboro documentary film festival owes nothing to chance. It stems from a political commitment clearly expressed by the Northern Province to give Peoples a chance to make their voice heard through the medium of film. To have a voice is to assert your existence, your self-respect and your right to influence events. Such is the inalienable right of a People, to be free in its own country, to run its own country itself and to establish equal relationships with other countries, including the former colonial power.

"The films that you have made and the films that you are going to watch are invitations to think again and to question the world in which we live, a complex world far from received or simplifying ideas, a world in motion moulded by forces of domination and forces of resistance.

"The documentary film genre that our Province supports sides with the forces of resistance. The philosophy of the ânûû-rû âboro Festival is to screen documentaries that respect the people filmed, that do not mutilate their message in the editing suite and that do not stifle their voices under a tide of commentary telling us what to think, as if we were not adult spectators capable of thinking for ourselves.

"These films do not comply with the formatting conventions imposed by most television channels worldwide.

"These films are an opportunity to free ourselves from the straitjacket and they open up a space of freedom for you.

"Those who trumpet the merits of the free market would have us believe that globalisation is the only path to prosperity.

"That we have no choice and that the economy, services and culture should bend to market rules and that we should kneel before the new all-powerful God of merchandise.

"Images have become a marketable product and a formidable weapon. We are submerged in images from morning until night, more and more of them, moving quicker and quicker.

"To go fast, you have to be brief, to be brief, you have to be simple. But can our world and its peoples' realities be packaged into simplistic television approaches formatted for maximum audience ratings?

"Documentaries are clearly a lifeline in the general stifling of critical thought by the totalitarian market. Where sensationalist society organises a simplified mock portrayal of reality, the documentary approach is an attempt to grasp and question a complex world."

WikiRebels: Documentary On Wikileaks

2010-12-16T15:08:00.011Z

By Rady Ananda

“What we have here is a new breed of rebels, IT guerrillas without a national base.”

Sweden’s public service television, SVT, is about to broadcast a deeply-moving, one-hour documentary chronicling the history of WikiLeaks, after having followed the crew for six months. An uninterrupted rough cut of the film has been put out on You Tube.

In WikiRebels, we learn about the early hacker life of Julian Assange, and his later decision to form an organization where whistleblowers can anonymously pass information that documents crime and immorality. His stated goal is to expose injustice, and nothing exemplifies this more than the leaked film entitled “Collateral Murder.”

Published in April of 2010, the military video drew global attention for the callous reaction of the US soldiers who shot unarmed civilians in Baghdad in 2007, even killing a father who happened upon the murder scene while driving his children to school. WikiRebels shows other films released by WikiLeaks, and catalogs the most significant leaks since its 2006 inception, including the Iceland banking scandal, Kenya corruption and death squads, and toxic dumping in Cote D’Ivoire.

Assange’s stated hope was that alternative media would disseminate the leaks – amounting to over a million documents to date – in a way that would drive positive change. In the film (and in various interviews), he expressed disappointment that alternative media has mostly been unable to adequately analyse and synthesize the data contained in the massive data dumps. So, the whistleblower organization turned to corporate media, with its deep pockets. The Guardian (UK), Der Spiegel (Germany) and the New York Times (US) brokered a deal to publish their analysis of the documents at the same time.

Though this controversy is not mentioned in the rough cut of WikiRebels, such a move launched widespread suspicion that the group is part of a carefully contrived psychological operation. I discount this in Criminalizing Whistleblowers: Wikileaks and America’s SHIELD Legislation. Speculation about the source of the documents is much easier than analysing the thousands of released documents.

One independent news source, IndyBay.org, reports that Assange accepted payment from Israel to delete any U.S. diplomatic cables that portray Israel poorly (as if anything could mar its reputation any worse than it already is). The source of this information, however, is Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former disgruntled employee of WikiLeaks.

WikiRebels gives Domscheit-Berg plenty of face time to present his views on WikiLeaks, and to voice his complaints about Assange. The most salient complaint might be the decision to release tens of thousands of documents at once, instead of a slower and more careful release, “to grow the project.” Domscheit-Berg promises to start a new whistleblower site that will pass leaked material to the media, apparently in an amount and at a rate that he believes the public can digest.

The film clearly makes the point that, regardless of the controversies, the WikiLeaks disclosures benefit democracy. One web comment articulates this most succinctly: “Secrecy is the cloak behind which too many crimes are hidden these days.”

Even Domscheit-Berg admits, “What I really learned in the last three years is that a difference can be made bottom up, and not only top down.”

At the end of WikiRebels, Iceland TV journalist, Kristinn Hrafnsson concludes, “Democracy without transparency is not democracy.”

Source: CounterCurrents
[An earlier posting of Julian Assange speaking at Frontline club]

'Stolen Land' Wins Cuban Top Prize, Colombian Indians Criticize Documentary Approach

2010-12-15T16:30:00.005Z

Colombian filmmakers Margarita Martínez and Miguel Salazar have won the 2010 “best documentary of the South” award at the 32^nd Cuban film festival that ended in Havana recently.

The documentary depicts the story of how “a fiercely proud people, the Nasa, [in the south-eastern Colombian district of Cauca] fight for the land stolen from their ancestors while fending off the violence encroaching on their nation. Their charismatic leader is Lucho Acosta, 39, an imposing tactician descended from Indian warriors. He knows from experience that violence only breeds more violence. But facing nearly insurmountable odds, Lucho’s beliefs are tested to their very core. The future of the Nasa hang in the balance”.

The dispossession of native Indians and Afro-descendants is a huge social problem in Colombia. The country has the second highest number of internal refugees, something like a tenth of its population. The biggest land grabbers are large agro corporations that grow African palm trees and the big individual landlords, both of whom hire paramilitaries to drive peasants off the land. These paramilitaries, in turn, have close ties with the military and the government, local and national. Resistance, peaceful or otherwise, by the Indians have been met with severe violence, though the Nasa community keeps to peaceful struggle.

However, indigenous groups doing the fight have put out an unusually strong statement criticising the filmmakers, saying that “this entire documentary revolves around one person. All is done by him and for him. This portrayal is not an error insofar as it is the on-screen construction of a narrative. However, what is serious is that it is done in the name of a process, the costs of which the whole process will pay. Margarita Martinez and Miguel Salazar acquired the permission of the indigenous authorities to make a documentary about the indigenous process in Cauca. In the end, they created one against it. It was a trick. The simple fact of fabricating an individual figure that shines above a collective struggle, appropriating it, is a fault against a collective and centuries-old struggle”.

John Pilger's The War You Don't See: The Corporate Media As Propagandists

2010-12-11T14:07:00.005Z

[Pablo Navarrete, documentary maker,interviews John Pilger]

PN: Your new film 'The War You Don't See' focuses on the media's role in war. I'd like to start by asking you why you felt you wanted to make this film.

JP: Television is most people's principal source of information. In Britain, much of television journalism is devoted to a mythology of 'objectivity', 'impartiality', 'balance'. The BBC has long elevated this to a self-serving noble cause, allowing it to broadcast received establishment wisdom dressed as news. This helps us understand why propaganda in free societies like Britain and the United States is far more effective than in dictatorships. While 'professional' journalists, especially broadcasters, present themselves falsely as a neutral species, truth doesn't stand a chance. This is most vividly demonstrated when imperial power -- that is, America with Britain in tow -- invades countries it wants to control, regardless of international law. This lawlessness is seldom a yardstick used in the coverage and selection of news. I didn't really understand this early in my career. Perhaps it was my arrival in Vietnam in the 1960s that helped me understand. ‘The War You Don't See’ is a product of that, and of routinely deconstructing almost every news item I see, hear and watch.

PN: In an interview with Venezuelan academic Edgardo Lander, he argued that countries that do not have a democratic media cannot be called democratic. Why is a functioning democratic media system so important for democracy in general?

JP: I agree with Lander. Thomas Jefferson said, “Free information is the currency of democracy.” It's simple. No free flow of information; no democracy. Without an informed public, political or corporate authority -- any authority -- cannot be held to account, and if it's not held to account, it's very soon corrupted.

PN: The British-based media watchdog website Media Lens argues that the increasingly centralised, corporate nature of the media means that it acts as a de facto propaganda system for corporate and other establishment interests. This is a damming verdict on mainstream journalism, but is it a fair one?

JP: Yes, it's entirely fair. Again, take the issue of war. The United States is a 'warfare state' with the most stable and powerful part of its economy devoted to the manufacture of armaments. It sells these armaments, and planes and munitions, to hundreds of countries. Go to any arms fair, and it's clear these have to be 'market tested' in wars. The cluster bombs that rain down on people in Iraq and Afghanistan were tested in Vietnam; the Napalm that has been refined to burn beneath the skin was tested in Korea. Each new war is a laboratory. Much of the media and the arms companies are augmented; in the case of NBC, this is explicit. NBC is one of the world's biggest news organisations and its parent company, General Electric, is one of the world's biggest arms manufacturers. In the message of its news, the BBC is not very different. A study by the University of Wales, Cardiff, about the BBC's role in the run-up to the Iraq invasion found that the corporation's coverage was found to have been overwhelmingly supportive of the government -- a government then engaged in serious lying, as we now know and as journalists ought to have known at the time. There are of course a number of honourable exceptions -- but think of an 'establishment' interest, then consider how it is propagated, directly or indirectly, in the so-called mainstream media; and by 'indirectly' I also mean a censorship by omission. This surely must explain why so many in the media could barely contain their fury at Wikileaks; how dare these unclubbable types get in the way of the media's right to be used and flattered and lied to. In ‘The War You Don't See’, a former Foreign Office official describes in detail how easy it is to manipulate 'lobby' journalists.

PN: Your film begins with shocking images from a 2007 US Apache helicopter attack on Iraqi civilians which first came out via the whistleblowers’ website Wikileaks. Last week Wikileaks released more than 250,000 classified US embassy cables which have since dominated the global news agenda. How important do you think the work of Wikileaks is and how big a threat does it pose to governments wishing to keep information about their foreign military operations secret from their citizens?

JP: I hesitate to use the word 'revolution' but the entry of Wikileaks does represent a revolution. Digital technology has made it possible for governments to read our emails, but it also means we can read theirs. Is this a 'threat' to established power? Yes, because, again, information is power. It gives an undemocratic elite its power and secrecy perpetuates this power. When we know the nature of official machinations and deceptions, we the public can act. As the historian Mark Curtis says in my film, “the public is a threat that has to be countered.” When the beans are spilled, the “countering” is all the more difficult.

PN: In your film you also recount how Edward Bernays invented the term public relations and pioneered the modern-day system of propaganda. And you show how the US government used Bernays’ techniques to recruit US citizens to join the First World War. Are governments such as the US still using these techniques today, and if so can you give some concrete examples of how this works?

JP: Edward Bernays said, “The intelligent manipulation of the masses is an invisible government which is the true ruling power in this country.” The same techniques are still being used, such as the creation of what Bernays called “false realities” and the rituals of patriotism devoted to justifying war-making. What's different these days is that the propaganda is not working. Look at the panic in the responses of governments to Wikileaks' disclosures. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are opposed not only throughout the world but in the US and Britain. The world wide web has given people a way of finding out without turning on the TV or the Today programme. I write a column for the ‘New Statesman’, which has a modest circulation. Once it goes out on the web, it can reach an audience of several million.

PN: Finally, what would be the best way to make the mainstream media’s reporting of war less subservient to government interests and are you hopeful about the internet’s ability to provide alternative reporting of major events such as war?

JP:The mainstream media will not change until its structure changes. A Murdoch newspaper or TV channel will always reflect the rapacious interests of Murdoch. However, journalists and broadcasters collectively have power, as does the interested public. I would like to see established a 'fifth estate' in which journalists, and those in media colleges who tutor aspiring journalists, and the public, unite to begin to change practice from within. During the invasion of Iraq, there were small mutinies in the BBC, but they weren't co-ordinated. The potential is there. As for the internet providing an alternate reporting of war, that's already happening. Most of the best reporting of Iraq was on the web -- from the likes of Dahr Jamail and Nir Rosen, and 'citizen journalists' such as Jo Wilding. And it's already happening where it probably matters most: at the seats of power, where, it seems, almost everything is leaking on the web; and long may it continue.

Source: http://www.levelground.info/#/featured-interview/4539991314

New Documentary on East Timor

2010-12-10T13:34:00.004Z

Almost 20 years ago, Peter Gordon, then working for Yorkshire Television, travelled to East Timor to make a documentary on the occupying Indonesian regime’s atrocities against the local population. The documentary, Cold Blood, was telecast on national television. Something like a third of the East Timorese people were killed by the Indonesians and a reign of terror was suffocating that part of the island. Peter Gordon’s documentary, which captured the infamous cemetery massacre in the capital Dili that year, contributed to the outcry against the Western-backed Indonesian military junta.
Peter Gordon is now making another documentary on the effect the first filming had on the crew. There was Max Stahl, who did most of the filming, especially the cemetery killings when he came close to being killed. Max remains an outspoken critic of the Indonesian role. Kirstie Sword was an Australian researcher who deflected suspicion from the film crew, all posing as tourists. She later married Xanana Gusmao, who is now Prime Minister of East Timor.
Other interesting characters in the documentary include a dying man in the cemetery attack and someone straddling him. The dying man recovered later and his helper is interviewed in much the same spot for the new documentary. Gusmao and others speak at length of their memories and some of the personal and political dilemmas they had to confront in East Timor’s struggle for independence. The documentary is more a look at – the tired jargon be excused – the “human interest” angle than at the overall politics. Peter Gordon organised the screening of this pilot for the Ilkley Documentary Group.

Iceland: Future of Hope – A Parable of Modern Documentary Making

2010-10-05T12:10:00.006+01:00

Take this for commitment: two Britons set off for Iceland in 2009 in the wake of the financial crisis there, when traffic was heading the other way, looking to understand what impact it would have on that country. Without financing, but hoping to make a documentary, they go first for a five-day research trip and then set up base there in a caravan for eight weeks till they find a more secure accommodation. A fund-raising website allows them to raise the money, local Icelandic filmmakers, musicians and artists collaborate with them and the result is the recently released documentary, Iceland: Future of Hope.

Director Henry Bateman and producer Heather Millard knew little of the country other than that it was a “country up North somewhere that was cold, expensive and had lots of fish”. The first trip made it clear that the stereotypical films and media reports of Iceland, “a country of fishermen turned bankers, a nation that believes strongly in the hidden people and a fantastic tourist destination”, were banal and misleading. Now they say they have fallen in love with the country and have “no huge desire” to return to England.

The film focuses on the “positive and inspirational things to come out of Iceland since the economy crash and intends to improve the reputation and image of Iceland on a global scale and also give hope to many individuals throughout the world that are faced with an uncertain economic future”. There are stories of environmental innovations and experiments with a sustainable life style. It focuses on stories of individual hopes and aspirations rather than resignation in the aftermath of the knockout crisis.

The film is a tribute to the courage and commitment of the two documentary makers and sheds light on what sacrifices go into the making of this genre. Nevertheless, there is some disquiet with the approach of the documentary. The recent public protests in Iceland indicate that anger at least runs as deep as stoic rebuilding.

This is a particularly insightful comment on the Facebook page for the documentary:

“As a Brit in Reykjavik, I dragged a couple of other travellers. We loved the various stories, and the general thrust of the film, but felt that it left us feeling both mournful and complacent. These people are already doing stuff, so we - as viewers - don't have to?

"Also, it'd have been nice to get a bit more detail on ...the collaborations in the abandoned powerplant, some of the citizens' crowdsourcing convention, and the initial wave of protests ... it seemed like there was more focus on hope than any real anger or agency - as if the film was shunning the details of direct action in its aspiration to respectability.

"Also, the interviewees seemed to be at the mercy of forces outside their control, however much they might have been trying to take responsibility for their lives and circumstances. Overall, though, we enjoyed it a lot, and left talking about the issues, which has to be a good thing. And ace cinematography, editing and animation really helped tie it together. Kudos.”

New Documentary on Che

2010-09-09T21:02:00.004+01:00

Che Guevara died when he was only 39 and that too more than 40 years ago. His legend has not diminished and the many dimensions of his short life, whether as guerrilla fighter, writer or banker, still have the capacity to surprise. Che A New Man, a documentary by Argentinean Tristán Bauer on the hero of the Cuban revolution throws up yet more interesting facts.
Described by Camilio Guevara, Che’s eldest son, as the best documentary on his father, the two-hour work is the result of archive material that the Bolivian army mistakenly provided him after a call from the Argentinean embassy in La Paz in 1995. Bauer and his researchers were astounded and immediately began photographing the material and hiding some of it. They were asked to leave when the soldiers realised the mistake in giving them access to the 21 volumes which included his two passports, the books and notebooks in his backpack which have writings, still not made public, in blue green and red. Evo Morales, Bolivia’s President, handed the files to the documentary team over the objections of the army. Bauer was also helped by Che’s widow, Aleida March, who gave Bauer access to the family archive for the documentary.
The 50-year-old documentary maker says Che was a more profound and intense individual than what he had imagined before making the film. In a 8 mm film, Che is seen reunited with his father. Extra screenings had to be organised for the documentary at the recent Montreal festival, where it won the best documentary award as the people’s choice.

Wikileaks Founder Speaks at Frontline Club

2010-07-29T14:01:00.006+01:00

This is strictly not a documentary. But the importance of the Wikileaks papers on Afghanistan as a defining moment of journalism and public's right to information is just so overwhelming that posted below is the talk by Wikileaks founder Julian Assange at the Frontline Club in London. Frontline Club screen and support in their own way many of the most original and independent documentary makers of our time

Like A Pascha: Where Fantasies Come True

2010-06-30T19:08:00.003+01:00

By Kristoffer Larsson

Swedish television [has] aired a 52-minute documentary by filmmaker Svante Tidholm entitled Like a Pascha. The documentary reveals an eleven-storey, clear-blue building in the middle of Cologne, Germany’s fourth largest city. It could have been like any other building, but it’s not. This is a place where fantasies come to life. This is a brothel. In fact, this is the largest brothel in Europe, open day and night, 24-7. Its name is Pascha (German for pasha). The concept: that visitors will leave feeling like a pascha.

Tidholm made several trips to the brothel during a three-year period to find out why sex is so important to men.

Paying the €5 entrance fee gives you access to all eleven floors. Over 700 men pass through the entrance of the brothel every day to enjoy the 150 women that work here. For only €30 you can get an orgasm on the first floor (the brothel even offers a money-back guarantee in case customers are unsatisfied). There are different themes on different floors. Dream about doing a nurse? Then you’ve come to the right place. Are you into Asian women? The fourth floor is theirs. You’ll find the transvestites on the seventh floor.

During daytime hours, Tidholm says, most of the people that make a visit to the brothel are businessmen, especially when big conferences and fairs take place in Cologne. Family men stop by late during the weekends, or on Monday mornings, after a tough week with the family.

We meet Sonia, a cute, dark-haired woman working at Pascha. It was very hard in the beginning, she admits, but eventually you “get used” to it. The job doesn’t make her feel bad about men (“men are men, you know”). Sonia believes that prostitution serves a purpose, that it prevents violence against women and children. In Romania, her country of origin, she was raped seven times.

“You don’t have to think it’s bad because if you think it’s bad you start crying, you get depressed,” she explains. It’s better for her to make a living by selling sexual favours than to be a murderer or thief. She wants to have a family in the future and by soliciting she can make some money. “I think this is the last thing that I wanted in this life.”

Sonia says that some men like to talk, and some even start to cry when telling her what it’s like at home. “What do you feel when they cry?” Tidholm asks. “Sometime I cry also. You feel compassion. You feel bad for them.”

We meet André, a fairly good-looking, German man. He recalls one time when he and his girlfriend spent a week at her parents’ home, during which they had to abstain from sex. Upon returning he was in the mood, she wasn’t. “I was so angry I said, ‘Okay, I’ll go to Pascha’.”

Of course, that’s not what he told is girlfriend: “I said I had to go to a meeting with my clients.”

He goes to the brothel once or twice a month. Most men change their behvaiour when they enter the brothel, André says. “They feel like a cowboy on the ranch. … They say, ‘Okay, I’m the boss, and these are all my girls’. That’s the reason why people are enjoying themselves.” He goes on explaining that there are two types of visitors. There are those who just want to fuck or get a blowjob and then leave. André himself belongs to the other category, those who want to party and have fun before getting to it.

When Svante Tidholm made his first visit to Pascha he found the place to be “abnormal, almost unreal.” But as time went by, he started to feel that he was the one who’s abnormal. Sad, yet understandable. Human beings can get used to almost anything. Everyone at the brothel defends prostitution. An employee thinks it’s simple: “When you feel your teeth hurt, you go to the dentist. And when you need sex, or just to talk to someone… you come here.” Needless to say, the men who visit the brothel don’t seem to give a second thought about what they’re doing to the women.

“A brothel is a symbol of how we try to solve a problem in society,” Tidholm says in the beginning of the documentary. “We have a lot of men with some sort of idea about sex that isn’t working particularly well. The brothel is an idea of how to solve this problem.” He adds that in the brothel—just like in the rest of society—it is women who are to take care of men.

Pascha is a place where these men can run away from their problems and their families, if only for a short while. The brothel symbolises a solution to a problem that isn’t a solution at all. In reality, it is a legal way for men to exploit women. But it also symbolises the failures of Western society where there’s equality on paper but not in real life. It symbolises the failures of the Left, which has fallen for the capitalist scam that exploitation and abuse is alright as long as the victim gets paid. And worst of all, legalising porn and prostitution tells men (and women) that it is fine to exploit others for your own personal needs.

Kristoffer Larsson is a Swedish theology student and member of Tlaxcala, the network of translators for linguistic diversity
Source: Tlaxcala

Oliver Stone's Documentary South of the Border Travels South

2010-05-29T13:07:00.003+01:00

South of the Border, Oliver Stone’s “political road movie” on Latin America’s new breed of progressive leaders, itself headed south on May 28 with an inaugural show at Caracas, where President Hugo Chavéz was present, as he was at the September 2009 debut at the Venice film festival. The documentary crew, including Stone and script writer Tariq Ali, will travel through Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina and Paraguay to revisit the leaders of these countries featured in the documentary, which will be screened in all these countries. The documentary will be screened from June in the USA and soon afterwards in Britain.

The principal protagonist of the film is Latin America, President Chavéz said at the screening night. The story of Latin America standing up to the USA and charting its own future was still unfolding, he said. Oliver Stone said he had a modest project to start with but, as it so happens with Hugo Chavéz, it kept growing. The Venezuelan President asked President Obama to see the movie if he had not had the time to read Eduardo Galeano's book, The Open Veins of Latin America, which the former had gifted to him at a regional summit some time ago.

The documentary form is experiencing a big impulse in Venezuela and other Latin American nations where filmmakers can now count on the support of some of their governments. Some outstanding documentaries have been made in Spanish on the recent Honduras coup sponsored by the USA, which is seen in the continent as a throwback to the dark days of the Seventies. Hopefully some of these documentaries will be translated into English and make their way over here.

Interview With Marc Isaacs

2010-05-26T13:45:00.003+01:00

Marc Isaacs is a leading British documentary maker with classics like The Lift and The Men of the City to his credit. We interviewed him when he visited Ilkley some time ago. In this interview, he discusses the making of The Men of the City at some length.

Traversing A Continent With Documentaries

2010-05-14T13:59:00.009+01:00

Griselda Moreno and Viviana García, two Argentinean women in their mid-30s, have been taking their love of films and documentaries all over Latin and Central America in a journey of some 80,000 km, the first phase of which will end later this year.

Moreno and García set off from the southern Argentine city of Córdoba on 28 June 2008 in a station wagon with a collection of films and screening and audio equipment. The Cine a la Intemperie (open air cinema) project was about “dreaming with eyes open”, that screening these films and documentaries would allow people to reflect on their social reality and help them “share social, political and cultural practices in the search of a new social identity in Latin America”.

The initial money came from García. Her father was among the many who “disappeared” in 1977. She bought a flat with the money she received as compensation and rent it out. This paid for half the costs. They have raised the other half from diverse sources while, on the road, they have lived off the hospitality and solidarity of ordinary people.

The open-air cinema very deliberately goes to isolated communities and people living away from the big cities. They speak to the communities and, depending on the experience of the hosts, choose from among the films/documentaries that would match their experience or most inspire them. Some of their preferred themes are human rights, gender equality, working class struggles, the fight against marginalisation, environment and caring for natural resources. They like to show documentaries that are simple but with a strong narrative and aesthetically pleasing and follow it up with debates and discussions.

They are in Venezuela now, penniless, having travelled all the way to Mexico’s “wall of shame” with the United States and back and expect to spend the next three months in Brazil before returning to Argentina via Paraguay and Uruguay. This is the first stage of the project, they say, and expect to keep going afterwards, though they haven’t worked it out. At the moment, they are more worried trying to raise money for new tyres.

Erasing David: Does Nothing To Hide Mean You Have Nothing To Fear?

2010-03-29T17:19:00.010+01:00

Erasing David looks at surveillance Britain. There are an estimated 4.2 million CCTV cameras in the U.K., one for every 14 people, and a fifth of all such cameras worldwide. Now there are 32 cameras outside the house where George Orwell lived. This is part of a wider problem. The state collects vast amount of information on its citizens and collates them into databases. With more and more data stored in fewer but larger databases which are then accessible by more people than ever before, is this the stuff of nightmares? Or if you have nothing to hide, is there nothing to fear? What happens if you happen to become one of the ‘false positives’, someone mistakenly picked up by the surveillance system as a threat to the state?

David Bond decides to find out how much private companies and the government know about him by putting himself under surveillance and attempting to disappear for a month. He is tracked across the database state by private investigators using legitimate tracking tools. The result is the documentary Erasing David.

Other documentary makers have been investigating this loss of civil liberties. Chris Atkins’ Taking Liberties looks at how the Blair government galloped merrily along an authoritarian road. Another interesting documentary in this field is Harvard academic Peter Galison and film-maker Rob Moss’ Secrecy . In one recent year, the U.S. government classified more pages of information than that which was added to the Library of Congress. This documentary looks at the world of government secrecy and explores the tension between safety as the state views it and liberties.

Exploring The Venezuelan Revolution

2010-03-08T09:23:00.006Z

Inside The Revolution: A Journey Into The Heart Of Venezuela
Dir: Pablo Navarrete
65 mins, 2009

Documentary-makers exploring the recent history of Venezuela struggle to escape the shadow of 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised', an emblematic documentary on the coup that overthrew Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and how popular support defeated the putsch. Pablo Navarrete's 'Inside the Revolution: A Journey Into the Heart of the Revolution' takes the narrative forward, updating it to where the Venezuelan revolution found itself at the start of 2009.

Navarrete lays out the context of the current happenings in Venezuela and allows his narrators, mostly Venezuelans, to analyse the profound changes. There is a multiplicity of views, unity that the process needs protecting, but not unanimity. By giving Venezuelan protagonists the voice, the documentary avoids the impression that analysis comes from outside and the locals just pump clenched fists at rather colourful political rallies.

Documentaries on Venezuela get dated very quickly since events tend to move fast there and Navarrete will have the opportunity for sequels. This particular documentary avoids hysterics, is informative, balanced and will endear itself to those looking for clear light rather than political heat about Venezuela. Perhaps a weakness of this documentary, as of so many others, is that the Venezuelans speaking out are from Caracas. There is ferment in the heartland of the country and it would be useful to hear men and women from the Andean regions and the llanos, the plains. But then finances are a struggle for documentary-makers, and we should celebrate what we have been offered in Navarrete's documentary.

More information about film at: Alborada Films

We Live In A Deeply Ageist Society: A Response From Jocelyn Cammack

2010-02-09T15:12:00.009Z

First of all thank you so much to everyone who took the time to come and see the film and to send feedback. It’s wonderful to be able to hear directly from people what they thought of the film and please do contact me again if you'd like to know more. Below I’ve tried to answer the questions and suggestions that were made in the order I received them but some do overlap so you may find answers to other questions useful also. You can also read more about the film on http://www.timeoftheirlives.com/ as well as see video and audio clips and read the biographies of Hetty, Rose and Alison.

Is the home selective?

The Mary Fielding Guild is a not for profit organisation which is run by a voluntary committee on behalf of the charity which employs the care and office staff. The only ‘entry‘ criterion as such, is that you have to be physically active enough when you first move in, to be able to walk from your room to the dining room where everyone usually has lunch together. Of course during your stay, you may become less able physically, in which case food is brought to you in your room if necessary and during the time that I was filming there were in fact two residents who were entirely bed-ridden. The real qualification for entry though is whether you like the place and it likes you. Most people come to stay for a couple of weeks trial before they make the final decision to move in, just to see if they like it and if they feel they fit in. If they do and the residents feel the same, then they can. The priority for the Guild is to keep the atmosphere they have established over such a long time and not to disrupt that for the residents who are already there. This is also why if a resident becomes demented in such a way that means they start to be aggressive and affect the lives of others, they have to leave – remember this is a care home not a nursing home, even though many of the care staff are qualified nurses. But for those who amy lose their memory or easily become confused, there’s no reason why they would be asked to leave, in fact usually the Guild tries very hard to keep those residents from being moved to a strange place at a time in their lives when change can be very distressing.

But you are right in saying that most of the residents are quite middle class – Highgate is a ‘nice’ part of London and most, but by no means all, of the residents have previously lived locally. The Guild is trying very hard, however, to make sure that anyone who ‘fits in’ and wants to live there is able to do so regardless of whether or not they can personally afford it. Currently the cost is round about £500/week (which is similar to the price of a local authority home) and most residents have sold a house in order to fund living there. But there are also two bursaries available and a trust fund has recently been established which is raising money to provide more bursaries in the effort to make sure it is not only those who can afford it who can live there.

Thank you for your kind words too, they are always very nice to hear.

Why can’t it be done elsewhere? / dumbing down

Precisely my question too. This isn’t rocket science, it’s about the word ‘care’ which includes thinking about how people feel and what they want and making that a fundamental part of how the place is organised. As you saw in the film, the residents are able to contribute their opinions about all sorts of things from where they sit at lunchtime to what books are available in the library to what food is served, what outings will be planned and so on. It just means treating people like people and assuming that they have the same interests in their lives and those of the people around them as they did when they were younger – or that they are all the same either. It’s about basic respect and that’s what lies at the heart of how the staff and residents are treated and how they are with each other. This also relates to the question about dumbing-down – I think this happens as soon as people are perceived as ‘old’, regardless of what social class or background they come from. We live in a deeply ageist society and it really has to change. But what’s also crucially important about the Guild, I think, is that the business is not run for profit. All the money is put back into the organisation for the benefit of residents and staff.

Institutions which deal in risk-taking

It’s nice that this comment gives me the opportunity to mention Storyville at BBC4 because without them I think I would have been making the film in my bedroom. Working with them was a dream; they understood right from the first conversation - this was February 2008 - how I wanted the film to feel and what had drawn me to these particular people. It's so refreshing to feel that your approach and your instincts are genuinely valued and that there isn't pressure to conform to some agenda or ‘house style’. This is partly because Nick Fraser and Jo Lapping are genuinely interested not only in what filmmakers have to say but in how they want to say it, in the filmmaking craft. For example, no one ever tried to persuade me to use commentary, as soon as I said the film wouldn't need it, that was fine – whereas most commissioners would insist on it.

But because of their increasingly limited budgets, Storyville can only finance to a certain level - in our case about 50% - so we had the choice of agreeing to deliver on what they were offering, which meant subsidising the project ourselves but getting on with making it, or delaying until we could secure the rest of the money. Well when two of your key subjects are 101 and 102, you don't hang about so Hilary (the producer) and I decided to work for a tiny fee and get on with it. Then the UK Film Council came in with money to cover editing a slightly longer festival cut – which is the one you will have seen and actually the version I am most pleased with.

But you’re right, all parties took a risk, there’s never a guarantee that a film will make it’s money back or that you can make a living making this kind of film. But I do think it’s vital that all of us who love watching the kinds of films that tell us something about what it is to be someone other than ourselves, do whatever we can to ensure they keep getting made and seen. UK TV is under real threat these days, particularly the BBC, and I for one would hate to see it go the way of so many commercial channels.

Formal introduction

I’m not sure if this suggestion relates to the film itself or to the screening situation in which you saw it but I’d be happy to talk about the sounds scape etc if you tell me a bit more.

Why did we see shots of people doing odd jobs, interviews with managers, house-keeping staff, what did it add to the story?

What I was trying to do was to draw a portrait of the home as a place to live, mainly through the lives of these three particular residents but also giving some context about the feel of the Guild. I especially wanted to get across something of the relationship between the staff and the residents which I think is so important to the quality of the residents’ lives. And also that, in some ways, the life of the house is not unlike the life of the people within it: things wear out and have to be mended or maintained or nurtured back into full bloom – it’s all a cyclical process.

A casual meander

I hope the casual meander wasn’t too misleading! I like stories and do think of myself as a storyteller but in this instance I didn't want to force these very individual people into a prescribed, three act-type structure. As I said earlier, it’s a portrait rather than a commanding narrative because I wanted us to relate it to our own experience and understanding of what it is to get older, or to that of people we know. In other words, I wanted to ensure we have the space to reflect on what is at times deeply philosophical and to accumulate what we learn about their perspectives on life

Men didn’t seem to have much to say

True, this is partly because there were only three of them there at the time of filming and only one who was really happy about being filmed – the tall, elegant man you see who loved the garden so much. He died, sadly, just before the film was finished at the age of 99 and although I got to know him, he was a very private and quiet man who loved to be in company but preferred to hear the sound of other voices rather than his own. So yes, I agree, the men are rather quiet but it wasn’t intentional on my part, it’s just how it happened.

Less afraid of being old

I mentioned that you had said this to Hetty when I last saw her and she was so thrilled. She was always a bit anxious not to come across as if she thought she was a celebrity (so many of that generation loath the concept of ‘celebrity’ - understandably in my opinion) and her motivation for doing the film was exactly that – to show people that old age didn't have to be feared and that it could be a productive and happy time of life. So it gave her great pleasure to think someone had taken that from the film. Thank you for letting us know.

Hetty is now 104 and still going, though not quite so strongly. Last October she walked three and a half miles for Oxfam and raised £1,500. She still says she wants to die but frankly I think she’s too busy.

Jocelyn Cammack
jocelyncammack@blueyonder.co.uk

Secrets Of The Tribe: Putting Anthropolgists Under The Scanner

2010-02-02T13:38:00.009Z

What is the size of an average African family? Five:the parents, the two children and the French anthropologist studying them. You could think of anthropologists as dashing figures bravely going into and unravelling the secrets of pre-modern societies or is there a more sinister side to them?

At the recent Sundance film festival in Utah, USA, Jose Padilha’s Secrets of the Tribe (Brazil, 2009, 110 mins, colour) revisited an old anthropological wound. Western anthropologists in the ‘60s and ‘70s began studying the Yanomamo people in Brazil and Venezuela. The Yanomami lived for a long time beyond the influence of the modern world and suddenly became one of the most studied and filmed pre-modern societies.

The research set off a firestorm of controversies. There were allegations the researchers gave the Yanomami machetes in exchange for their cooperation. There were reports of sexual abuse of Yanomami boys and girls by the anthropologists who allegedly caused a measles epidemic among them and denied them medical treatment. Patrick Tierney documented these in his book Darkness in El Dorado, and anthropologists are still sharply divided over the book and the allegations.

Padilha allows the anthropologists to tell their side of the story and the Yanomami theirs, deconstructing the legacy of colonial anthropology, its claims of objectivity and the very notion of the “other”. Padilha has another acclaimed documentary to his credit, Bus 174.

The God Market In India: It Is Not Always A Love Story

2010-01-19T12:22:00.012Z

Assorted Hindu holy men have never stopped charming Western documentary makers. Babaji: an Indian love story (Dir Jiska Roberts, the Netherlands, 71 mins), explores the life of Babaji Basant, who says he is more than a 100 years old, as he lies in a homemade grave where is wife is buried waiting to be reunited with her. People flock to him to be healed.

Babaji is an indigent man. But the god market in India is booming. It has 2.5 million places of worship but 1.5 million schools and a mere 75, 000 hospitals for a population of over a billion.

Religious tourism is the single biggest component of packed tour. One temple complex in India alone had 23 million visitors in 2009. That temple has more than $200 million in bank deposits and earns more than half that amount every year, apart from the gold and silver offerings made by the devotees. Devotees tonsure their head there, which again brings in a tidy sum for the temple. In a 2007 survey, 30% of Indians said they had become more religious in the past five years.

Some Indian documentary makers have been taking a more critical look at the effect of organised religion in

India

. Among them is Rakesh Sharma, who explored how Hindu Right-wing parties organised large-scale killings of Muslims in the Indian state of Gujarat in 2002 (The Final Solution). More than 100,000 DVDs of the films have been distributed in India and it won several international awards. The Indian government refused to show it at two film festivals.

Anand Patwardhan's documentary In the Name of God explores the rise of Hindu fundamentalism. In another documentary, Father Son and Holy War, Patwardhan explores the relation between religion, violence and male identity. Does the root of India's recent bloodshed - perhaps all bloodshed - lie in male insecurity, itself an inevitable product of the very construction of "manhood?

Elena Varela, Chilean Documentary Maker, Put On Trial As 'Terrorist'

2010-01-05T13:24:00.014Z

Elena Varela, a Chilean documentary film-maker, is to stand trial on January 8, days before the second round of the country's presidential election in which the billionaire candidate of the Right is expected to gain. Elena was arrested in May 2008, charged with consorting with an armed revolutionary group and sent to a high security prison. She was then subjected to a media trial which pounced on her for being a "terrorist".

Released after three years, Elena maintains that she has been framed for taking sides with the Mapuche Indians fighting the powerful timber companies in southern Chile. She started looking into the Mapuche cause after the death of a young activist in the struggle to reclaim ancestral land. Her documentary, Newen Mapuche, was intended to record the unequal battle of the Mapuches against Chile's repressive state. The secret police confiscated all her footage and material for the film and charged her under sections that carry a maximum of 20 years of imprisonment. At least 50 Mapuche political prisoners in Chile also face the terrorist tag.

Elena's cause has been taken up Chile's leading documentary film-makers and she is being defended by some of Chile's most prominent lawyers. She received funding from the state and has won previous awards. A musician who set up a children's orchestra and worked with child education in southern Chile, Elena has a 17-year-old daughter. Amnesty International has interceded on her behalf and expressions of support are most welcome at the blog set up to publicise her cause: http://libertadaelenavarela.blogspot.com
A trailer of Elena's documentary is available for viewing here and, although in Spanish, is worth a look if only to see the force that the Chilean state employs against the Mapuches:
http://www.ojofilm.cl/newen.html

A Place Called Chiapas

2009-12-30T14:02:00.002Z

On January 1, 1994, Mayan peasants of the southern Mexican state of the Chiapas rose up in revolt on the day that Mexico’s free trade agreement with the USA and Canada came into force. The army moved in and the fighting did not last long. But the rebels were not defeated either. They withdrew to the forests and have since maintained an autonomous territory. Their leader is an enigmatic former philosophy lecturer, a non-Indian, but he prefers to call himself subcommandante Marcos and covers himself in a ski mask while smoking a pipe.

Marcos is an accomplished writer, the author of many books, including children’s stories and mild erotica. This rebel army is known as Zapatistas. They take their inspiration from Emilio Zapata, a legendary Mexican peasant leader. The Zapatistas have combined their peasant base with an impressive use of new technology, including the Internet, and linked with social movements worldwide to keep the army off their backs.

Canadian director Nettie Wild took a lot of risk from state-sponsored paramilitaries to make a documentary on the Zapatistas. Some of the terror is captured in the film itself.

Big Oil vs. Little People

2009-12-13T10:52:00.004Z

Large oil companies have a deservedly hostile public image for corrupting democracy with their lobbying, causing environmental damage and consorting with unsavoury regimes to maximise profits. From Nigeria to Burma, they have been trailed by documentary film-makers. Crude: The Real Price of Oil [2009], a Joe Berlinger documentary, looks at what Chevron has done to the oil-rich Amazonian region of Ecuador.

Now the indigenous people of Ecuador are suing Chevron for basically poisoning their water sources and the land. Berlinger’s documentary follows this and the reality on the ground. The Ecuadorian President, Rafael Correa, has said his country is willing not to tap the oil reserves at the Yasuni national park if the international community forks out only half its projected earnings. Not one Western government has reacted so far. [It is worth sticking with the trailer below even if it stalls at times]

Another documentary with a similar theme is Total Denial [2006] which followed a law suit against the Total oil company by 15 indigenous Burmese people who had been forced to flee to Thailand by the military regime of Yangkon, Total’s and Unocal’s business associates.

At the other end of the spectrum is Red Oil[2008], which looks at how President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has rewired the oil industry to work for the benefit of the majority. Red Oil presents all sides of the argument in Venezuela and leaves it for the viewer to decide.

Last Train Home Wins Amsterdam Award

2009-12-01T10:16:00.004Z

This year’s winner at the Amsterdam documentary film festival is Last Train Home by the Chinese-Canadian director Lixin Fan. Millions of migrant Chinese workers take a break from their harsh living conditions to return to their native villages for the Chinese New Year, braving long journeys on crowded trains. Adult diapers are one of the highest selling items of the new year as overcrowded trains means it is impossible for passengers to access the toilets. Fan’s documentary deals with a Chinese couple, the Zhangs, who have not met their teenage daughter for three years, their traumas of both the travel and the reunion.

The documentary has been praised for its photography and construction. Fan said he gained the trust of the Zhangs after he opened himself up to them and they reposed their moments of sorrow and hopes in him. Fan was involved in the making of another documentary, Up the Yangtze, about the Three Gorges dam before getting the chance to direct one of his own but found financing initially hard to come by.

He dedicated Last Train Home to the Chinese migrant workers, “people who toil in the factories and make everything that we use”.

Blood In The Mobile & Blood Coltan: Looking At The Rape of Congo

2009-11-24T11:53:00.007Z

The Danish director Frank Piasecki Poulsen is working on a documentary, Blood in the Mobile, which takes a look at the illegal mining of minerals in eastern Congo, minerals that are useful to the mobile phone industry. This is the blood in the mobile, for the minerals are extracted under the brutal gaze of militias, the miners are treated brutally, including children who have to stay in these mine tunnels for 72 hours and Western businessmen strike questionable trade deals. The film-makers are trying to sensitise the mobile phone industry and campaigning for them to own up to their responsibilities. The other Poulsen documentary that attracted international attention was Guerrilla Girl which charts a middle class girl Isabel joining the Colombian FARC rebels.

An earlier documentary on this subject is Blood Coltan, directed by Patrick Forestier of Java Films. Blood Coltan investigates the conditions in which coltan, vital to manufacturing microprocessors for mobiles, is mined, the militias who control the mining, the traders who deal in it and the European firms who ship it all over the world.

Christian Poveda:Documentary To Die For

2009-11-16T11:13:00.012Z

Sometimes, when documentary film-makers get too close to the truth, they end up dead. This is what happened to Christian Poveda, aged 52, a French photographer and documentary film-maker, shot dead in El Salvador, a country he loved and where he had recently finished filming the Mara gangs and their strange world of savage initiation rites and fanatical loyalty and the decimation of young people there. The Mara Salvatrucha gang developed among the Salvadoran slums in Los Angeles and spread to El Salvador after the Americans deported the gang members.

Poveda was shot in the head in the car he was returning in after a day’s filming. Just before his death, Poveda had told friends that the gang and the police were unhappy with him. Poveda worked together with Nick Fraser in the making the BBC documentary, Journey to the Far Right.

Violence is a way of life in El Salvador, part of the legacy of a brutal civil war in the 1980s between the Left-wing FMLN guerrillas and the Salvadoran army and death squads blessed and equipped by the USA. This is also the theme of Oliver Stone’s film, Salvador, based on a true story, again that of a photographer covering the conflict. The FMLN have recently won the presidential elections and there are already rumours that the coup in Honduras will be rolled out there next.

La Vida Loca was screened at this year’s Sheffield documentary festival.

With Yes Men Like These Who Needs Enemies

2009-10-24T12:49:00.012+01:00

The Yes Men describe themselves as a “genderless, loose-knit association of some 300 impostors worldwide who agree their way into the fortified compounds of commerce… pretending to be powerful people and spokespersons for prominent organizations”. They then pull off hoaxes like telling BBC News that Dow Chemicals was to compensate victims of the Bhopal gas disaster, that the American Chamber of Commercewas dropping its opposition to climate change or that the WTO was for slave labour in Africa. They famously faked the New York Times edition of 4 July 2009 with headlines like ‘Iraq War Ends’.

The Yes Men have a new documentary, The Yes Men Fix The World, out now for screening. [Guardian report on the Yes Men]

A Thriller And A Shocker -- All About Fish

2009-10-17T13:44:00.020+01:00

The Cove
[2009, Director: Louie Psihoyos, Run Time: 90 mins]

An American dolphin trainer-activist hears of a small Japanese fishing town where thousands of dolphins are slaughtered every year. But the ring of secrecy is almost impossible to breach. The Cove tells the story of how a team of divers, a stuntman, an air force engineer and industrial designers used advanced spy technology to make a documentary about something Japan did not want the world to know. Described as an environmental thriller.

End of the Line
[2009, Director: Rupert Murray, Run Time: 86 mins]

End of the Line takes up the exposé of journalist Charles Clover that blind overfishing is depleting the ocean’s fish stock to the extent that commercial fish stocks will become extinct sooner that we think; that fish are a finite resource and that we are all responsible for denuding the ocean.

You might like to have a look at Darwin's Nightmare by Hubert Sauper which explores an environmental experiment that turned disastrous in Lake Victoria, Tanzania, but how it proved a great benefit for globalised trade. [See online]

Documenting Immigration: Which Way Home

2009-10-06T16:17:00.017+01:00

The UNDP Human Development Report 2009 focuses on immigration. For many people around the world moving away from their home town or village can be the best—sometimes the only— option open to improve their life chances, it says, arguing that restrictions within and across borders need to be reduced to “expand human choices and freedoms”.

Which Way Home, a documentary released early this year and aired by HBO, "chronicles the journey of several children (most from Central America) riding the "Beast," a Mexican train that runs north of the border with Guatemala. Many people looking to enter the US illegally will board the train (riding on top, many fall off and are crushed to death) to make the treacherous and often deadly trip. The children are from 9 to 17 years old and are either looking to reunite with family in the US, or seeking a better life away from extreme poverty in their home countries. During their trip, the kids witness two people falling off the train and getting crushed, they are robbed, caught by immigration authorities in Mexico and deported back home, and one witnesses two women being repeatedly raped in a boxcar."

[This documentary is currently available on More 4]

An older Spanish-language film, El Norte, had explored this theme of a teenage brother and sister moving away from dangerous Guatemala, after the army came calling to their village, and heading to the North, the United States. [Available at Amazon]

Erik Knudsen 21 May 2009

2009-04-10T13:12:00.012+01:00

Erik Knudsen of One Day Films screened 'Heart of Gold' and a number of extracts from his other short films on May 21, 2009, in Ilkley and took questions from the audience.

Heart of Gold

A poetic film mixing fiction and documentary, exploring the changing spiritual and material relationship the people of Akim Abuakwa region of Ghana have with gold. 40 minutes, 2006.

The Age Of Stupid: A People's Premiere

2009-03-09T16:14:00.010Z

Franny Armstrong's docu-drama, The Age of Stupid, will premier is 65 cinema halls simultaneously, including in Leeds. Six years ago, she set out to make a film about oil and climate change. With no formal film-making degree, no budget to speak of, and the prospect of travelling to such hotspots as Iraq and the Niger Delta, Franny started on the quest and her documentary will be seen by millions worldwide.

Pete Postlethwaite stars as an old man in 2055 who looks back to the time of the making of the documentary in 2008 and wonders why no one did anything about climate change why they still had the chance. Why indeed.

The People's Premiere: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/feb/28/franny-armstrong-film
Making of the film: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/02/the-age-of-stupid-documentary
Age of Stupid website: http://www.ageofstupid.net/

War and Love in Kabul: Ilkley Screening

2009-03-08T14:35:00.001Z

War and Love in Kabul [2009, 87 minutes]

Dir: Helga Reidemeister, Germany. Subtitled

Screening Date: November 22, Sunday, 7 p.m.

Venue: Ilkley Moor Vaults (The Taps) pub, off Skipton Road, opposite All Saints Primary School

Tickets: We are asking for a voluntary contribution of £3 each or £5 a couple and £1 for pensioners. Free for students and people on benefits.

Parking: Plenty of parking spaces in and around the pub. Within walking distance of train and bus stations

Hossein and Shaima have loved each other since childhood. As teenagers, they were separated by war. Now, they meet again in Kabul in the 1990s. Poverty forced Hossein to fight in the war. A shell splinter leaves him a paraplegic. Shortly afterwards, Shaima is sold in marriage to a man 40 years her senior. Despite the fact that Shaima is with child, her father brings her back into the constraining patriarchal fold as her husband never paid her dowry in full. These complex circumstances do not prevent these two lovers from seeing each other, even though this means going against their families’ rules and living in fear of revenge. [Source: Film.com]

The other documentaries on Afghanistan worth a look are:

Rethink Afghanistan by Robert Greenwald
Taxi to the Dark Side, Alex Gibney's Academy award winning documentary
Enemies of Happiness documenting the incredibly brave Afghan M.P. Malalai Jola standing up to the warlords in parliament
Addicted in Afghanistan follows two young boys, among an estimated million children addicted to heroin

Join The Conversation: What Are We About?

2009-03-02T10:34:00.007Z

Supriyo Chatterjee argues that...
A fair summary of the meeting on 25 February, I think, is that we decided to go ahead with the proposed Ilkley Documentary Group. Now we need to flesh it out: what should its purposes be, what could be its possible lines of work, what about some immediate programmes and how could everyone participate in it without crippling responsibilities.

Purpose
I suggest we have both a narrow and a broad view. The narrow view first: we are not going to be a film club or society. The group should focus on documentaries, though there are many types of documentaries. It should focus on documentaries that explore the world we live in, our times, the issues that affect us all from the standpoint of 'justice', the hidden structures of power. These together constitute the 'less-told-stories' approach. Documentaries that alert us to another way of seeing. It shouldn't be just about screening either. We could have talks, exhibitions, social events and so on so that the screening becomes a space for people to socialise and communicate.

The broad approach is in recognising that there can be multiple viewpoints on most subjects and that we choose documentaries that make their case rationally rather than through hysteria. We don't wish to be an exclusive club and the documentaries we screen should appeal to a broad section of people, not just the usual faces.

Lines of Work
Monthly private screenings, moving quickly on to public screenings, an informal library, making Ramon's blog the site through which we carry out the conversation, pooling in our ideas and resources to have a detailed programme and for all this to happen have a formal organisation. Should it be an incorporated association moving to seek charity status or should we have it as a co-operative? I suggest we also think of other possible lines of activity (giving ourselves up to imagining or, as middle-aged people like ourselves might say, even daydreaming and then working to make it happen). Let's have suggestions, lots of them, and then debate and prioritise.

Participating
Doing a little is doing a lot. Choosing documentaries for the next screening, sharing information on new releases, helping with publicity, writing for the blog, meeting new groups etc. All of this can be done in surprisingly little time. Let's also have some really boring planning meetings. I think it was obvious to everyone at the meeting that given the quality of the group and with some planning and organisation, we will achieve lot.

Name
We have two suggestions: Fact? and CounterSpin:The Ilkley Documentary Group. Please indicate your preference

Let's get rolling! Let's hear from you.

2009-02-27T13:30:00.004Z

Great, stimulating, enjoyable and satisfying - and that was just the coffee and snacks!

Oh - and the documentary was not bad either!

I will post a rather more serious comment soon!

Thanks to everyone and look forward to our next meet.

Enemies of Happiness

2009-02-27T00:51:00.002Z

If anyone is interested in finding out more about the film shown last night 'Enemies of Happiness', please follow the link below.

Kind regards

Ramon

www.enemiesofhappiness.com

Thank you and welcome to the blog

2009-02-26T16:50:00.000Z

Thank you to all who attended last night. Hopefully that was the first of many more evenings of discovering new international documentaries and short films.

To all those who assisted with the washing up another big thanks.

As promised, please find a list of useful links below.

Please feel free to comment on the films or group meetings here.

Many thanks

Ramon

www.dfgdocs.com

www.shootingpeople.org

What The Audience Have Been Saying

2009-01-25T20:32:00.026Z

Inside the Revolution: A Journey Into the Heart of Venezuela

Screened on March 21

We had the highest turnout for the screening so far. Pablo Navarrete’s documentary clarified the background to the happenings in Venezuela, about which most people had a hazy notion. Most thought this context would be useful in reacting to establishment media reports about Venezuela. Some found the documentary inspiring. Others felt it could have been shorter. There was some debate on whether the film would be as popular outside the Left tradition and if the documentary was a cabaret for the Left. Questions arose on whether it was right for Chavez to go in for repeated re-elections and if this was a weakness of the revolution. The overwhelming reaction was that it would be no bad thing to have more information about happenings there.

Men of the City

Screened on Feb 21

The group watched this documentary which tells the stories of men working in the City of London in the midst of the recent banking crisis. As an account of human alienation - people compelled to do jobs that have no relationship to their real selves -, this is a remarkable film. Rarely has an image of capitalism at empty work been so vividly captured. Those present were impressed and moved. One audience member thought it was too long; another felt that the time flew by and he was sorry to see it end. One expressed concern that it was all about men; but hadn't we also observed that the previous documentary we saw was all about women? The post-documentary discussion was invigorated by a filmed interview with the documentary's director, Marc Isaacs, whose recent work surely marks him out as one of the most original and perceptive documentarists in contemporary Britain.

Time Of Their Lives

Screened on Jan 24

Fantastic, inspirational – wanted to know more about the home – is it selective in intake? Well edited and funny.

How did people get into the home, is there a selection, seemed to be privileged people?

In many places, care is very poor, care in this place was great. If it can be done there, why can’t it be done everywhere?

In many cases, assumption is that working class people don’t have needs other than playing bingo and singing World War 1 songs. Care dumbs people down and denies them their humanity. In general, people are quickly categorised.

Really interesting film – thought provoking, uplifting and moving. Plenty of issues to discuss.

Isn’t it terrific that we still have resources and institutions which deal in risk-taking like the making of this film?

A “formal” introduction –pointing out techniques (e.g. sound scapes) in advance would have been useful. Heating! A screen to “centre” the showing, perhaps?

Good didn’t show pictures of these ladies when they were young. It was not sentimental or idealised. Why did we see shot of people doing odd jobs, interviews with managers, house-keeping staff, what did it add to the story?

It was almost misleadingly casual meander through their lives, gave a lot of hope

Liked some of the sub characters, men didn’t seem to have much to say

I had a secret fear of old age, the film made me less afraid of being old

Age of Stupid

2009-01-15T19:21:00.000Z

Please find a link to all things 'Age of Stupid' which I hope you will find useful.

http://www.ageofstupid.net/weekone

Best

Ramon

About Us

2008-10-08T18:03:00.004+01:00

The idea of Less Told Stories as a blog emerged from an informal documentary group based in Ilkley, a small town in West Yorkshire, U.K. As our name suggests, we are interested in documentaries that alert us to another way of seeing, documentaries which explore the world we live in, our times, the issues that affect us all from the standpoint of 'justice', the hidden structures of power. These together constitute the 'less-told-stories' approach.

Many documentary-makers use their own money and labour to tell what they see as an important story. They are chroniclers of our times. We want to encourage them, introduce them to new audiences and introduce communities to the rich and diverse world of documentaries lost on the highway of commercial screening and ignored by the corporate media. Above all, we are interested in documentaries that enlighten us on the truth about power and the power of individual and collective acts of integrity, resistance and working for a more just world.

To get in touch, mail: supriyo@chatterjees.freeserve.co.uk

Ilkley Screenings for 2010

2008-01-07T13:32:00.021Z

Screenings resume September 26
Venue: The Ilkely Moor Vaults (The Taps) pub, Stockeld Road
Off Skipton Road, opp All Saints Primary School, Ilkley
Parking available at and around pub
Please bring your own cushion if you'd like to be more comfortable
We request you to buy your drinks at the pub which does not charge for the venue

Past Screenings:
June 20:
The Yes Men Fix The World
Dir: Andy Bichlbauj; Mike Bonanno
Time: 87 mins
Impersonating big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them. Their targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else, and they pull off incredible stunts to do that. Political screwball comedy with a message.

May 23:
Burma VJ
Dir: Anders Østergaard
Time: 84 mns
Amidst marching monks, brutal police agents, and shooting military Burmese reporters with camcordersembark on their dangerous mission, working around the clock to keep the world informed of events inside the closed country. Their compulsive instinct to shoot what they witness, rather than any deliberate heroism, turns their lives into that of freedom fighters. Major awards for this film at many of the world's documentary festivals.

April 18:
The End of the Line
Dir: Rupert Murray
Time: 86 mins
The world’s first major documentary about the devastating effect of overfishing premiered at Sundance Film Festival. It follows investigative reporter Charles Clover as he confronts politicians and celebrity restaurateurs, who exhibit little regard for the damage they are doing to the oceans.

March 21:
Inside the Revolution: A Journey into the Heart of Venezuela
Dir:Pablo Navarrete
Time: 65 mins
Filmed in Caracas in November 2008, on the eve of the 10th anniversary of Chavez's controversial presidency, this feature-length documentary takes a journey into the heart of Venezuela's revolution to listen to the voices of the people driving the process forward.

Feb 21:
Men of the City
Dir: Marc Isaacs
Time: 60 mins [2009]
A Bangladeshi man dashes through the streets burdened by the crossed shaped advertising signboard he carries on his back; a trader loses his family as a result of his addiction to the financial markets; a chain smoking insurance man tries desperately to escape the city’s daily grind; an aggressive metals trader lives for killing animals at the weekend; a street sweeper on a spiritual quest seeks a life in the wilderness. Marc Isaacs’ latest feature length film shot during the current financial crisis explores the human cost of life in the dog eat dog world of London’s Square Mile.

January 24:
The Time Of Their Lives
Dir: Jocelyn Cammack
Time: 70 mins
Produced for BBC Storyville in 2009 this is the story of Hetty, Rose and Alison and the Mary Feilding Guild, the residential home where they live. With a combined age of almost 300, they are among the Guild’s oldest residents. Yet they are still powerfully engaged in their individual brands of activism – from journalism to anti-war demonstrations – whilst quietly negotiating the final years of their lives