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.
The consumer is supposed to do what they’re told, no? It is an old and well practiced arrangement. They make the stuff, and the rest of us buy it, eat it and use it. Especially, it seems, with technology where few of us have the know-how or courage for that matter to repurpose and reinvent the complicated digital gak that increasingly defines our lives.
Even the fun machines like video games and computers come to us with built in assumptions about how we are expected to behave with them, what we will do with them, and how our lives will be altered to integrate these objects into daily practices. We listen to radios. We play video games. We watch televisions. Just like we’re told.
But there are those among us who do it differently. Hardware-hacking is a growing movement to reclaim creative control of our relationships with technology. “Shape your tools, or you will be shaped by them”, so their motto goes. Televisions become oscilloscopes. Radios become synthesizers. Outdated video games become means of composing unique musical scores.
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