Activist and actor Sean Penn talks with Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman about the situation in Haiti, and on his role as an Emergency Tent Camp Manager of 55,000 people. The characteristically no bullshit artist compares the behind-the-scenes management of the camp to being on a movie set, only with “stakes that are a lot higher.” He also has some deserved criticism for the international community of aid-pledgers, aid organizations, governments, and the corporate media. We’re sharing this clip because Haiti has largely vanished from mainstream news headlines and, Penn is an artist and a political one at that. For more info on the non-profit Penn co-founded, visit the J/P Haitian Relief Organization’s site.
From the category archives:
Conversations
What do you get when you mix a postindustrial urban mess with a group of artists who want to make it better? In Windsor, the answer is Broken City Lab, a post-avant-garde art project whose object is the city itself and the social relations necessary to transform urban blight into community and prosperity.
Broken City Lab (BCL) is the brainchild of artists Justin Langlois and Danielle Sabelli that quickly attracted the interests of a handful of other artists – Josh Babcock, Michelle Soulliere, Cristina Naccarato, and Rosina Riccardo. The idea was to find a new way – other than protest, that is – to use art for social change. What they came up with is a fascinating series of public interventions rooted in art practices intended to energize and mobilize local interest in reimagining Windsor’s future.
Anna Sarkissian and Ameesha Joshi are emerging filmmakers from Montreal, Quebec, currently making a documentary in India “on a shoestring budget” about women boxers called With this Ring. The synopsis from the film’s site:
Winning four world titles is not enough to get noticed in India, just ask 27 year-old boxing champion Mary Kom. She could have been a household name by now if she had chosen to pursue a more “ladylike” sport like tennis or field hockey. Instead, she is fighting against centuries of tradition in a country that expects women to be sweet and docile. With cropped hair, defined shoulders and a mean left hook, she is anything but your typical Indian girl.
With This Ring lets you step into the ring with members of the Indian Women’s National Boxing Team. From their villages to the podium, these girls quickly rise to the top of their game. At the 4th World Women’s Boxing Competition in 2006, the Indian team makes a clean sweep, winning eight medals and the Championship Team title. They officially become the best women’s boxing team in the world. And the most under-appreciated.
Art Threat recently fired off a few questions to this dynamic duo. Their responses, with images, and a sneak peak video of the film are below.
Bas: Beyond the Red Light is a gorgeous, moving and remarkable Canadian documentary about former sex-trafficked girls at a recovery centre in India who take up dance to express themselves, heal and to tell their story. Or, from the site, it is about “13 young girls sold into Mumbai’s infamous network of gated brothels confront the inner and outer perils of life after rescue and reveal the very human story inside the big business of child trafficking.” The film recently won the Colin Low Award for most innovative Canadian documentary at DOXA in Vancouver, and will undoubtedly win more prizes as it makes the festival circuit. Wendy Champagne, the documentary’s director, took a moment out to speak to us before heading off with the film to Australia recently.
Art Threat: How did you find out about this program in India and what was it that inspired you to make a film about it?
Wendy Champagne: I was in Nepal researching a print story in international adoption and I met Geeta, the character at the centre of the film. She had just returned by train from India bringing six Nepali girls who she helped rescue from the brothels in Mumbai. She was a four foot ten warrior, complex, conflicted and just 18 at the time. Her story compelled me to take the leap and embark on the deeper process of documentary storytelling.
American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein is a new documentary by filmmakers David Ridgen and Nicolas Rossier. After a bumpy start, with many film festivals opting to not program the documentary, it has recently screened at some international festivals including the recently completed Hot Docs in Toronto. American Radical also won the Cinema Politica Audience Choice Award 2009.
The doc follows the scholar, writer, and public speaker Norman Finkelstein as he tours universities in Canada and the US. Far from a hagiography or an unfair skewering, American Radical is a balanced, sensitive and thoughtful window into Finkelstein’s world. The outspoken and embattled critic of Israel comes across as acerbic, self-destructive, and angry, but also sincere, honest, and tirelessly concerned with justice. It is a fabulous primer on activism in the academy and the important issue of academic freedom, as well as a study of how an individual can embody a conflict so intensely and completely.
I recently had the chance to ask Ridgen and Rossier a few questions about Finkelstein and the film.
There has been sudden explosion in documentaries looking at the problems and politics of water. Films like Water Life, Blue Gold, Thirst, Flow, The Water Front and others have focused their attention towards a contemporary issue facing the whole planet: access to clean water and water sustainability. Liz Marshall’s new documentary Water on the Table focuses in even closer, following water rights advocate Maude Barlow as she tirelessly fights, lobbies, talks, and debates her way toward a future where the world will secure accessible, clean and sustainable water resources for all. This is an urgent issue, as urgent as fossil fuels, and thinking otherwise is to dream in the plenitude of the west. Water is running out. Water is being privatized, commodified, bottled and packaged like cream cheese and water is being fought over. Many are already desperately going without and many are sketching out policies that will spell a future of water-as-commodity.
But many are resisting and fighting these realities and trends, and Maude Barlow is one such Water Warrior. As spokesperson for the Council of Canadians and as the more recently appointed First Water Advisor for the United Nations, Barlow has been at the forefront for water justice, and shows no sign of stopping. Marshall’s documentary on this champion is a fantastic film and an important piece of the water puzzle that hasn’t been explored in other films on the same topic. We managed to ask a few questions to Marshall between her own frenetic schedule of art and activism.
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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