"To that end, in the Spring of 2014 we launched the Chasing Ice Ohio Tour in an attempt to use the film to shift the political conversation around climate change. As a society, for us to address climate change properly, we need our leaders in Washington to stop debating about whether or not it is actually happening and start taking action.
The trailer for The Danish Girl, released Tuesday, introduces the world to Lili Elbe and her wife, Gerda Wegener. Elbe was a transgender woman and one of the first recipients of transition-related surgeries, which she received over a course of two years starting in 1930 in Germany.
Born in China in 1941, artist Lily Yeh experienced first-hand the ravages of that country’s civil war when her family became refugees, fleeing to Taiwan as the communists took over. That personal story and the story of Yeh’s global art activism with communities from North Philadelphia to Rwanda and China is the subject of a new documentary film, The Barefoot Artist, now in post-production and ready for viewing later this year.
"The Scream: 21st Century Edition" was created by New York-based artist Jim Costanzo in response to the Iraq War. The piece is directly inspired by Edward Munch's painting, "The Scream." Costanzo expresses anger and frustration at the illegal American war and the attack on our civil liberties.
The Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf opens “The Gardener” with the declaration: “I am an agnostic filmmaker.” From anyone else, this might seem like a simple statement, but not from the complex Mr. Makhmalbaf. In 1974, when he was 17, religious and involved in a guerrilla group, he stabbed a policeman, for which he received a bullet to the stomach and a prison sentence.
The new Oscar-nominated documentary, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, focuses on world-famous photographer Nan Goldin, her life, her work, and the protests she led at museums that accepted funding from the Sackler family. Their company, Purdue Pharma, manufactured and unscrupulously marketed OxyContin. We'll talk with Goldin and director Laura Poitras.
The Trials of Spring is a major documentary event that chronicles the stories of nine women who played central roles in the Arab Spring uprisings and their aftermaths in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Bahrain and Yemen. It includes a feature-length documentary, six short films, articles by award-winning journalists, and a robust social media conversation about women and their unwavering quest for social justice and freedom.
Last September, Fusion commissioned artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, 29, to travel to Mexico City and create an installation of her highly-acclaimed art project protesting street harassment, “Stop Telling Women to Smile.” Fazlalizadeh’s visit to Mexico was her first to the country; it was also the first time the STWTS project — for which Fazlalizadeh papers city streets with hand-drawn portraits of women pushing back against their street harassers — had eve
Is there a way to make sex ed, big, scary, nasty, icky, sex ed, fun again? In the Spring Quarter of of 2013, UCLA students in the Sex Squad, a performance troupe dedicated to injecting a dose of humor into high school sex education, set out to answer that question through a series of short videos.
I love New York. When I was younger, the city was my playground. You could find me on any given weekend catching brunch with a friend at a café, going to an East Village restaurant for dinner, and then hopping the subway, headed to a nightclub in Chelsea. But at age 25, nine years ago, I was told I had multiple sclerosis, and I saw my freedoms slowly vanish.
See below for a link to the performance of the song at the Academy Awards.
From Salon: How Common and John Legend’s performance of “Glory” fired up Oscar night’s idling empathy machine by Sonia Saraiya
Youngsters on the West Bank will have the chance to benefit creatively from a new project this summer. From the beginning of July, Handheld Stories plans to teach filmmaking skills to groups between eight and 16 years old from youth centres and refugee camps in East Jerusalem, Nablus and Hebron, while also giving them video equipment, computers and software.
This project was made by the foundation Obra Social la Caixa with the intention to change the conversation and strategies while working with youngsters. Before this initiative, say the Director Claudio Zulian, the foundation would speak only about the lives of these girls and boys. However, they decided to involve them inside other stories as actors of a film project.
FACELESS was produced under the rules of the 'Manifesto for CCTV Filmmakers'. The manifesto states, amongst other things, that additional cameras are not permitted at filming locations, as the omnipresent existing video surveillance (CCTV) is already in operation.
FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES:
" While filming a documentary about divisive oil refinery ventures in the subzero cold of Fort McMurray, Alberta, the director David Dufresne said he wasn’t considering only pollution in that Canadian boomtown or the vast tar sands beneath its frozen ground. He was also thinking deeply about technology, about making a new kind of hybrid media, a docugame.
ARTS/CULTURE
FOKAL is the hub in Haiti where locals and international visitors from all walks of life -- artists, writers, citizens, activists-- come together to discuss the most pressing nation- and community-building issues, enjoy cutting edge artistic expressions, and share their ideas.
In the late 1960s, in the aftermath of the Watts Uprising and against the backdrop of the continuing Civil Rights Movement and the escalating Vietnam War, a group of African and African American students entered the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, as part of an “Ethno-Communications” initiative designed to be responsive to communities of color (also including Asian, Chicano and Native American communities). Now referred to as the L.A.
By 2010, the Nigerian film industry, also referred to as “Nollywood,” had become the second-largest film industry in the world. Today, the accessibility of digital video technology continues to enable prolific amateur filmmakers to produce wildly popular low-budget and direct-to-DVD films, which deal with timely issues of religion, poverty, and corruption.