I've always had a soft spot for Laika, the first dog in space, who tragically died upon the Sputnik II shortly after takeoff. I wanted to name my current pooch after the canine cosmonaut, but lost the naming battle with my partner. I can finally live out my space dog dreams through a beautifully illustrated biography of the most famous dog in the former Soviet Union.

Laika, a graphic novel by Nick Abadzis, recounts the life of this furry victim of the Soviet space race. Based upon historical fact with flourishes of fiction, Laika's colourful characters bring life to a dark period of Soviet history. And for those with a cartoon dog fetish, Laika reminds BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow of the famed Tin Tin, a similarity that "nicely complements the subject matter, contributing much to the sweetness of the story, and serving as counterpoint to the exhaustive research."

Danny Boyle's Sunshine is a surprisingly effective appeal to identify with suicide bombers. But in his film Boyle has engineered a narrative that frames secular science as the True Belief that drives the faithful. Sunshine tells the story of a future earth that circles a slowly dying star, and a concomitant mission to save the world by dropping a bomb into the center of the sun, reigniting its dimming burn. It is easy, watching Sunshine, to begin to imagine sacrificing one's own life for such a cause.

Refugees of the Blue Planet is a remarkable film that connects the unseemingly related geographic regions of Western Canada, the Maldives, and Brazil in a beautifully shot and slick one hour work. Avid documentary fans will already be well-aware of the central message of this Canadian documentary: corporate greed is not only consuming the very earth we live on, but leaving a path of poverty and misery in a scorched wake while “the North” continues in the blissful ignorance of privilege. There is a twist however, and it is this angle that the film takes that makes it such an informative and fascinating document of economic globalization and the modern side-effects. According to the UN environmental refugees now outnumber political refugees at a staggering 25 million. And as the film points out in a very subtle nod to optimism, it is an affliction that affects not only the very poor, but the wealthy as well, leading at least one interviewed expert to have hope for change.

From rising sea levels to hurricanes to monoculture “green deserts” to sour gas leaks in Alberta, the extreme corporate malfeasance, cajoled by the myopic and self-interested hand of governments like King Klein’s are exposed. And what is left are broken communities, decimated homes, jobless and dejected souls angry and despondent with nowhere to direct their frustrations. Enter Refugees of the Blue Planet: the film provides a platform, an outlet which serves as a conduit between those who may be sitting in the audience unmoved by recent environmental disasters like hurricanes and floods, to channel the stories of the survivors, of refugees seeking many things from justice to a place to sleep at night. The characters we meet are scattered postcards from the neoliberal project, an experiment gone terribly, viciously, wrong. The connections between environmental crisis and unchecked corporate rapaciousness have never been clearer than as they are in this work. The film’s technical troubles - redundant NFB voice of god narration, the art-destroying voice-over in lieu of subtitles, emotionally manipulative music - are not enough to detract from this intense portrait of the perils of neoliberal globalization.

Visit the film's NFB site here.

A powerful new documentary examining the effects of privatization has emerged from Germany. THE BIG SELLOUT weaves a story of mismanagement, neocolonialism, suffering and resistance from four separate corners of the globe. In the film we meet four central characters, beginning with Simon, a British train driver. Simon clearly articulates the consequences of the systematic dismantling of what was once Europe’s best public transportation system. Since Thatcher privatized the rail systems, wages have dropped, employment has dropped, service has denigrated, and no one wants to take responsibility for the rail lines (until recently, the government has stepped in and re-nationalized that one aspect sheerly out of safety concerns and a massive PR disaster after several deaths from rail collisions). Simon is a force for public service and organized labour, and brings the sometimes philosophically lofty discussions of “common good” down to earth.

The Platform 101 is a shoe designed for sex work - in particular, with the safety of the workers in mind. The shoes come equipped with a built in audible alarm system, hidden safety compartment for stashing keys, cash, condoms, etc., and a customized version of Rave Guardian, a wireless emergency signal and GPS locator allowing the wearer to send a call for help and give their location through GPS.

There is also an online component of Platforms -- a website that will provide sex workers with a basic email client, calendar, "problem client" blog, chat rooms and an area for downloading audio and video for the shoes. There will also be a link on the website to track the user's shoes (and other registered sex workers with transmitters) using Rave Guardian technology. This will be a secure community network that protects the privacy of its users. As with the university systems and APRS, tracking is voluntary and can be turned on or off at any time. Each sex worker will have their own login to program their shoes, access email, and post information on problem customers. Workers can also track customers, set up appointments, create schedules, and access health and other resources.

The shoe has been created by the Aphrodite Project to re-examine the role of consumer design in marginalizing the experiences of women and question moral attitudes and value judgments about sex work. The project is also examining surveillance technology -- What are the ethics of surveillance and tracking? Is it possible to ensure that this information will empower and not endanger sex workers? Is it ever possible to guarantee that knowledge will stay within the hands of those who it is intended for?

In the artists’s words: “The shoes address creativity and artmaking as well as practical issues of design and marketability. It is our hope that in addition to creating beautifully crafted objects, the project will contribute to the current international debate over the regulation, decriminalization, and legalization of prostitution.”

Check out the Aphrodite Project’s website for more info.

Thanks to Valentina Culatti at Neural.

Big Red & Shiny has an insightful review of Global Feminisms, a collection of present and future feminist artwork at the Brooklyn Museum. One concluding statement in particular is begging for discussion: "Feminist art today is not as radical, or harsh as it had been originally in the '70s; Global Feminisms shows that feminist art no longer requires spreading blood all over your body, burning bras, or imagery that looks suspiciously like female genitalia." As there is no place to comment on the article at BR&S, fee free to duke it out here.

Image: Ingrid Mwangi, Static Drift, 2001. Two chromogenic prints mounted on aluminum.

With the possible exception of some work produced by post-modern wunderkind, photographs that are out of focus, poorly exposed and ill composed are rarely compelling. But The Border Film Project, a collection featuring 150 of such unskilled images, is about as compelling as a book of photography can be.

Rudy Adler, Victoria Criado, and Brett Huneycutt distributed hundreds of disposable cameras on both sides of the US-Mexico border. On one hand there were migrants preparing to illegally cross the border and enter the United States, as thousands of their compatriots do each year. On the other were the Minutemen, armed American citizens who voluntarily patrol the border in the hopes of stoping northward migration.

The three editors soon received over 2000 photographs from the migrants and Minutemen, offering perspectives from both sides of the immigration debate and opening a window through which we gain an intimate perspective of this high stakes game of cat and mouse.

Although photographs from both sides often depict friends, family, and desert landscape, the similarities end there. In documenting themselves, the Minutemen are found engaged in activities reminiscent of a hunting trip. Some have dozed off in lawn chairs, beer cans in hand and pasty bellies turned towards the sun. Others meanwhile are focused on target practice, or are found peering through binoculars off into the horizon, in search of their target. Friendly and fun, the Minutemen have painted themselves in stars, stripes and smiles, as well as the occasional Starbucks and Sam Adams. [More...]

Nick Broomfield is a filmmaker used to controversy and his newest film, recently released on DVD by Tartan Video is no exception. GHOSTS tells the story of Ai Qin Lin, a Chinese migrant who pays a large sum of money to have herself smuggled into the UK in order to find work to put her small child through school. After a harrowing journey Ai Qin quickly realizes that England is not the promised land, and is eventually "escorted" to a small dirty townhouse where she will live with 11 other Chinese migrant workers. From there the film follows her through one grueling job after another - in a duck processing factory, on a spring onion farm, and the last job 23 workers did before drowning off the coast at Morecambe Bay at night.

GHOSTS is a work of social realism: Broomfield hired non-actors, put them in real scenarios (such as the migrant house where all the performers lived for one month), and based the script and storyline on real events that have occurred recently in the UK. The film credits Guardian journalist Hsiao-Hung Pai's stories for inspiring this gritty, digitally shot narrative.

Broomfield has produced a masterpiece of understated cinema. GHOSTS is a documentary waiting to be born: it is fiction only insofar as scenes are recreated with some creative construction. The British filmmaker, who up until now has stuck with the documentary genre, has retraced the steps backward from the real-life 2004 tragedy of the 23 Chinese workers who - after being beaten and driven off the sands during the day by white English cocklers (a tiny shellfish) - returned in the evening only to misjudge the quickly moving tide and drowned. The families of the victims are still paying off their debts, totaling 500,000 pounds.

On the recently released DVD a 64-minute making-of featurette shows Broomfield, his crew and his "actors" actually being bullied and driven off the beach by white workers as they try to construct the scene that depicts the same events. As Broomfield puts it:

"Some actors are method actors, but in GHOSTS I bring the method to them, to the non-actors."

GHOSTS is a film that has largely slipped under the radar in North America, and with this fabulous featurette added, the DVD is a compelling artifact of not only the genius of Nick Broomfield, but also of the process of making "fiction" as real as the first time it occurred.

To watch the trailer, find out how to order the film, or donate to the fund set up to pay off the workers' debts, visit the film's official site.

Feeling a little semiotic overload? Advertising imagery and political propaganda spreading in your brain like rust? The folks at subvertr want to give you a chance to fight back. In this Roland Barthes inspired project, the online community is invited to subvert the semiotic power of the images that dominate our cultural landscapes.

The project is based on the observation that our cultural systems are not created by the whole community, but rather are defined by a much smaller “semiotic elite” within processes based on marketing and the desire for profit. The idea is to take these symbols and reassign them new meaning, to invert the traditional one-way relationship of symbol-consuming to symbol-creative. The hope is that this inversion will allow users to create new cultural contexts for well-known symbols and to “regain” symbols that belong to the “collective media imaginary”.

My experience at the site was hit and miss – seemed like a lot of search tags that I tried drew blanks (i.e. consumerism, patriarchy, copyright), and not all of the images make the kind of semiotic leaps that might give an unsuspecting Lilliputin shivers.

A picture of the Pope on a book about fellatio is pretty powerful, as was the “Intifada” coca-cola sign. The potential, however, for a collaboratively created database of culture jamming imagery to be shared and spread around the net – now that gives this Lilliputin shivers… check it out. Invert the semiotic tyranny!

This past February Abderrahmane Sissako's Bamako was released in the UK and North America. The film is a searing indictment against the IMF and the World Bank, shot documentary-style with real lawyers, witnesses and family members, culminating in a fictitious mock-trial where African society "legally" challenges the World Bank. The direction is exceptional, but the dialogue is unflinching in its politics, where witnesses speak of the devastating effects that 20 years of structural adjustment policy by the G8 has had on the African continent.

The film launches a devastating, albeit rhetorical, blow to economic neoliberalism and the West's inability to intervene in the process of privatization. Witnesses give long speeches that connect the audience to the real lives lived in Mali - the country where the trial takes place - and to the socio-political realities of much of African society. The film is an emotionally-charged personal essay articulated by many, levied against the powerful and the affluent, and acted out in the courtyard of the director's family, where throughout his upbringing he was politicized through lengthy debates on Africa and the West with his father. Bamako is mostly potent speeches from African teachers and writers who expose the regressive and destructive nature of privatization, who point to the complete and utter failure of an imported economic strategy, and who tell stories of suffering and struggle caused by or exacerbated by such policy. Do not be fooled, there is little pity to be found in all this: the vigorous speeches set a fiery tone of anger, resistance and regeneration that should cause even the odd republican bow-tied banker on Wall Street to at least exercise the imagination in seeing numbers as real, lived consequences. Bamako is after all, a film that personalizes policy without pulling any punches.

The trial device is the central element of the film, with some snippets of stories acted outside of the courtyard, revealing "life-as-usual" day to day activities like weddings, work, family, and relationship complexities. However the heart of this film is an uncompromising investigation into the greedy, racist and neo-colonial economic policies of a self-concerned Western hegemony and the ultimately destructive policy effects on the continent of Africa. The problem's cause identified and indicted, the film also focuses on accountability and "sentencing" for the guilty. This adds up to a powder keg of calculated political attacks that places power in the hands of the oppressed, at least for two incredibly moving cinematic hours. It is an important piece of art that demands an especially Western audience, as it is after all the West's leaders who apparently act in the interest of the West's populations while pursuing the pillage-based policy of Africa. As Sissako says:

"...faced with the seriousness of the situation in Africa, I felt a kind of urgency to bring up the hypocrisy of the North towards the Southern countries."

For more information visit the Bamako site.