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 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.
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.
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.
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