In a move that has privacy advocates either piping mad or peeing in their boots, as US Federal court has ordered Google to hand over YouTube user records, including the videos each user has watched, their usernames and IP addresses.

Viacom is suing Google for not doing enough to keep its copyrighted videos from television shows such as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report off the popular website YouTube. [...]

The company argued it needed access to the information on user viewing habits to prove that copyright-infringing material is more popular than user-generated videos on YouTube, which would strengthen its case against Google.

In a ruling issued on Tuesday, Louis Stanton, a judge with the U.S. District Court for the southern district of New York, agreed with Viacom and ordered Google to turn over the information.

Google argued user data should not be handed over because of privacy concerns, but Stanton dismissed those concerns as "speculative."

In protest I'm going to download torrents of the Daily Show yet refuse to watch them. Either that or visit the crowd lining up outside the Colbert Report studios and shower them with Google juice.

The Alianait! arts festival in Nunavut is being streamed live on the internet on Isuma.TV every night this week beginning at 7 pm. From the festival website:

The Alianait Arts Festival is an annual event in its fourth year. No less than ten days (and nights) of art, music, film, storytelling, circus arts, dance and theatre. Alianait is an Inuit expression of joy and celebration and to celebrate our fourth annual festival, the theme for Alianait 2008 is String Games - an ancient Inuit tradition.

The festival started on June 21 and runs until July 1. Here's the webcast schedule for Isuma.TV:

June 21: 7 to 10 pm EST –
ALIANAIT GRAND OPENING - LIVE at www.isuma.tv from the Big Top

June 22 : 7 to 9 pm EST –
FIBONACCI CIRCUS PERFORMANCE - LIVE from the Big Top

June 23: 7 to 9 pm EST –
NUNAVUT ARTS FESTIVAL WITH LIVE MUSIC - LIVE from the Old Residence

June 24: 7 to 9 pm EST –
ARTICIRQ/OATIARIO - LIVE from the Big Top

June 25: 7 to 10 pm –
STORYTELLING PERFORMANCE - LIVE from Parish Hall

June 26: 7 to 10 pm EST-
SAQIYUQ THEATRE PERFORMANCE – LIVE from the Parish Hall

June 27: 7 to 9 pm EST –
ART EXHIBIT – LIVE from the Nunatta Museum

June 28: 7 to 9 pm EST –
YOUTH MUSIC CONCERT – LIVE from the Big Top

June 29: 2 to 5 pm EST –
FREE MUSIC CONCERT – LIVE from the Big Top

June 30: 7 to 10 pm EST –
STRING GAMES FINALE CONCERT – LIVE from the Big Top

July 1: 2 to 5 pm EST –
FREE MUSIC CONCERT - LIVE from the Big Top

It’s not often that you visit a major civic gallery and come away amazed, disturbed and politically provoked. Rebecca Belmore’s current exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery does exactly that and more. It is a remarkable retrospective for an artist deeply engaged in some of the most defining and difficult politics of our time.

Belmore’s practice encompasses sculpture/installation, performance, video and photography. The exhibition includes video documentation of five of Bellmore’s performances, and the much talked about video installation Fountain (2005), which is projected on a wall of falling water in a darkened room. The exhibition also includes some of her sculpture work and components from her performances. There is so much to see in this collection and all of it so very good.

Belmore’s art is an embodied practice, and as an aboriginal woman, her body is a complicated site where colonial, cultural and resistant tensions are inscribed on a daily basis. Wild (2001-2008) is a four-post bed with a red satin bedcover woven from beaver pelts and (black) human hair. The bed was created for an exhibition in The Grange, a colonial building that served as the original location of the Art Gallery of Ontario. Belmore sleeps in the bed unannounced. Nearby, hangs the disturbing Fringe (2008), a near life-size backlit photograph of a woman, naked but for a white sheet over her hips, lying on her side facing away from the viewer. On her back is a huge transversal wound starting at her right shoulder and ending below her left hip. The wound is sewn together, and hanging from the stitches are the beginnings of beadwork, small red beads decorating threads hanging from the grotesquely damaged skin.

(more on the exhibition...)

Despite statements made to the contrary at the time, the $2.5 million that the Conservative government cut from the National Film Board of Canada's budget in March is resulting in more jobs being lost, including in programming.

The NFB, Canada's sole publicly-funded film agency, has announced it will be eliminating 22 positions, including two of its three remaining staff directors.

Paul Cowan and Beverly Shaffer, two of Canada's most renowned documentary film directors, with a combined 46 NFB films to their names, will now be joining the ranks of Canada's private filmmakers (including other NFB alumni who have seen their jobs disappear during previous rounds of Liberal and Tory backed cuts).

The sole director remaining on staff will be Alanis Obomsawin.

Bredan Kelly has more in a good article from today's Montreal Gazette.

There is a war being waged far from the carnage of Iraq or Darfur. It connects to the war on want, but is more about making peace with our environment than anything else. The documentary Garbage Warrior is the story of renegade architect Michael Reynolds, who has been quietly waging a battle in New Mexico for the right to make mistakes when designing housing. Reynolds has been building “Earthships,” sustainably self-contained housing units in the desert of New Mexico since the 1970s.

The film traces the growing community of like-minded builders that work with him and the decade-long fight Reynolds embroils himself with, first with municipal zoning boards then with the state legislature. His goal: to have a bill passed that would allow experimental housing such as his Earthships legal and physical space to develop and grow.

The documentary is funny and inspiring, well shot and aside from the odd overdone cliché of a hammer hitting dirt to drive a point home, is skillfully edited. Reynolds is the driving force of the film, and as a character study he emerges as enigmatic, driven, excentric and innovative. Despite my near-capacity tolerance for documentaries about white men doing good, this story is important, entertaining and inspiring.

Pangea Day was a global event of short films, music and speakers ounded by Jehane Noujaime, TED Prize winner and director of the award winning film Control Room. It was broadcast live in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro. It was also shown at grassroots screenings in cities, communities, and private homes around the world and was streamed live on the internet. Most people don't know other cultures or societies and some don't even know their neighbors. Noujaime states, "By sharing stories, we've started the process of turning strangers into friends." She believes that if people from all around the globe start trying to understand each other, then we can move a few steps closer to world peace. Since many aren't willing and others aren't able to travel, Noujaime concludes that we can use film to share stories and overcome the obstacle of distance.

Arshad Khan's Threadbare is understandably a little rough around the edges (some shaky camera, sound and lighting), but delivers an emotional and lucid blow to the dangerously paranoid and racist echelons of state power in Canada. The 40 minute documentary follows the story of the "Toronto 24"–the South Asian men in Toronto wrongly suspected of being a terror cell operating inside Canada, supposedly targeting the CN tower. After violent and publicized arrests of the men, their names and loose associations with Al-Queda (they had no associations with Al-Qaeda at all) traveled the globe, culminating in CNN reports and front page stories on every Canadian newspaper. Khan's film traces the absurd media blow-up following their arrest and detention, and offers some more sober insights into irresponsible and responsible journalism from some of the writers at Canada's only large left-of-center daily, The Toronto Star.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) project that was racially profiling these men and wrongfully surveilling their lives as they went about school, jobs and regular life, was called Project Thread. Some extremely loose connections between the 24 (such as being Pakistani and Muslim, or allegedly attending the same business school) was enough of a "thread" to knock in their doors one morning and drag them to prison where many stayed for months despite no charges and dropped allegations two weeks later. The film also documents the small but fierce group of people who rally in support of the detained men, who call themselves Project Threadbare.

At a recent Cinema Politica screening at Concordia University, Montreal, filmmaker and professor Liz Miller caught up with Svetla Turnin and yours truly to get our two cents on organizing grassroots political film screenings. She interviewed us at her very packed screening of her new documentary, The Water Front.

For those unfamiliar with the project, Cinema Politica was started five years ago at Concordia and has grown into an alternative network for distributing and exhibiting independent cinema (with a focus on Canadian titles and documentaries). There are currently about 30 locals (chapters) in operation across Canaada, mostly at college and university campuses.

Cinema Politica has also sprung up in Germany, France, and Romania. The first Cinema Politica "festival" will take place this May in Transylvania.

überculture, the non-profit responsible for this here blog, is the organization behind the project. We started Cinema Politica to support independent political cinema as well as to address the lack of diversity on Canada's movie screens.

Heritage Minister Josée Verner hates bill C-10, according to a comment made by Conservative Senator David Angus.

A member of the Senate committee on banking, trade and commerce, Angus was listening to arguments against the proposed film censorship law from Canadian film producers when he committed a classic political faux pas—he said something incriminating while his microphone was still on.

"The minister agrees. She told me she hates the law," said Angus to a colleague, as his voice was still being streamed live on the internet. "What we want is a sort of moratorium…"

As an experienced politician, Angus took the high road when asked about his comments. Standing strong in the face of incriminating evidence, he denied everything.

"I did not quote the minister because I did not even talk to the minister," he told CBC News. "I haven't heard myself say [the comment] and I'm certainly not acknowledging that I said it."

What was he thinking? That as an unelected Senator appointed for life he is totally unaccountable to the public and therefore doesn't care about flagrant displays of hypocrisy? Yeah, that's probably it.

Image: Heritage Minister Josée Verner upon her arrival to Camp Nathan Smith on April 13, 2007. (Photo by Cpl Dan Pop.)

More on Bill C-10:
Harper should cut his hair, not film funding
Like the porn industry needs Tax Credits
Bill will yank funding from "offensive" film
An open letter to Prime Minister Harper
Jack and the NDP weigh in on bill C-10
Right-wing Christians fight support government censorship
Sarah Polley and friends lobby against bill C-10

Activists and actors were in Ottawa today to protest the proposed Bill C-10, which would give the government powers to censor films (by killing their tax credits) it deemed "offensive." So far Harper's Conservatives have found the following things offensive and have summarily cut their funding:

+ Adult literature program for First Nations
+ Women shelters across the country
+ First Nations Declaration of Rights at the UN (not only opposed, but tried to influence other states into not signing this historical document that recognizes indigenous peoples' rights across the globe)
+ Medicinal marajuana
+ Assistance funding envelopes for museums
+ Pensions
+ Arts

OK, for more on what the Tories find offensive you can read an earlier post from my blog.

From the intervention in Ottawa today, the CBC reported yesterday:

Canadian filmmaker Sarah Polley, actress Wendy Crewson and Brian Anthony, CEO of the Directors Guild of Canada, will be among those appearing before the Senate committee on banking, trade and commerce, asking for changes to Bill C-10, an omnibus bill proposing a host of amendments to the Income Tax Act.

"These clauses are an attack on freedom of expression and will destroy film financing in Canada," Crewson said in a news conference ahead of her presentation.

Part of the Tories' controversial legislation would allow the Canadian Heritage department to refuse tax credits to Canadian film or TV productions, even if federal agencies such as Telefilm and the Canadian Television Fund have invested in the project.