BLOG THIS | blog.thismagazine.ca: May 2009 Archives

Who wants to go see The Baby Formula? The new Canadian comedy debuts June 19 at Toronto's AMC Dundas Square. Email me at filmclub@thismagazine.ca before midnight tomorrow (May 29) for a chance to win a pair of tickets valid opening week.

The Baby Formula is a comedy about a lesbian couple who try to conceive a child using sperm created from their own stem cells.

More entries on: Film

Film Club Contest!

Posted by annette at 11:19 AM ET | Comments (0)

The Baby Formula is a comedy about a lesbian couple who try to conceive a child using sperm created from their own stem cells.

More entries on: Film

May 06, 2009

Bird is the Word: Ghost Bird

Posted by Elaisha Stokes at 10:56 AM ET | Comments (0)

Look up. Way up. What do you see? What do you think you see?

In the swamps of eastern Arkansas it might be a whole lot of nothing. Or so Ghost Bird a new film by director Scott Crocker suggests.

The Ivory-billed woodpecker has long been considered the Holy Grail by diehard birders who refused to believe it went extinct over sixty years ago. So when scientists announced that the bird had been found in the small town of Brinkley, Arkansas, it was celebrated around the world as the rediscovery of a lifetime. But the skeptics aren't convinced, and the evidence isn't conclusive.

What follows is a deep meditation on the politics of scientific discovery, the revival of a small town, and the hope for a species long considered a ghost from the past. Ghost Bird is not a film about birds, or environmental conservation. Rather it is a story of loss and belief, our difficult relationship with nature and our own tragic culpability. Ghost Bird is fundamentally a story about people.

Ghost Bird has it's world premiere at Hot Docs on May 6th at 9:45 PM at the Cumberland theater and May 8th at 1:30PM at the ROM.

More entries on: Hot Docs festival

May 05, 2009

How to tell imperfect stories: Reporter

Posted by Elaisha Stokes at 12:45 PM ET | Comments (0)

Before I was a blogger for This, I worked briefly as a media trainer in Zambia. The experience was challenging at the best of times and devastating at the worst, but overall I think I emerged a better person, and certainly gained a stronger understanding of the complex nature of international aid work. Suffice to say, sending your dollars to Africa isn't enough. Reporter, now screening at Hot Docs, attempts to answer some of these questions through the experiences of Nicholas Kristof, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the New York Times.

Reporter unfolds in the DRC, where decades of conflict have left four million civilians dead and countless more displaced. Like most conflict journalists, Kristof spends the film searching for that one individual story that can summarize an entire war and resonate with the readers. His goal: to make you care, which as he puts it, is almost impossible in an age where empathy is dead.

Reporter is Eric Daniel Metzgar third film, and without a doubt, his most commercial. Executive Produced by Ben Affleck and premiering at Sundance, the film still retains the tender appeal of Metzgar's earlier films. Unlike many of today's big budget documentarians, Metzgar directs, edits and photographs his own films. And while techies everywhere decry the shaky camera a one-man-filming-band can often produce, the result is a tender, intimate portrayal of the realities of international conflict reporting that goes beyond a superficial treatment and gets to the heart of the matter. It's like Sherman's March meets Apocalypse Now, and it totally works.

What sets Reporter apart from the pack of aid-agency documentaries released in the last few years (Shake hand with the Devil comes to mind,) is the imperfect characters. Metzgar's chilling commentary portrays Kristof not as a super-human being, or even a saint, but as a complex individual who sometimes detaches himself from the horror of his victims stories to get the job done. The dynamics between the characters is tense, anxious, and utterly real, making Reporter one of the docs to watch this festival season.

Reporter screens Wednesday May 6th at 4:30 PM at the Royal Ontario Museum

More entries on: Hot Docs festival

May 04, 2009

Since when did we divorce the right answer from an honest answer?

Posted by Elaisha Stokes at 10:49 AM ET | Comments (0)

Norman Cornett
Universities in Canada have been a source of political controversy for years. Increasing tuition fees, strikes that go unresolved for months, and conflicts between tenured professors are often the topics of nightly news reports. At times academia seems more like a political minefield that a sanctuary for the pursuit if higher learning.

Professor Norman Cornett, a new documentary by filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin, explores the wrongful dismissal of the professor Norman Cornett from McGill University in 2007. Cornett won the affection of many students with his unconventional teaching methods, which favored stream of conscious reflections over academic essays and standardized tests. He encouraged his students to explore diverse issues from a personal standpoint, and rejected the notion that academic pursuit much by an impersonal proposition. Unfortunately, McGill University did not share his views on unconventional teaching techniques and opted not extend his contract when it came up for renewal (Professor Cornett was not tenured faculty.)

Director Alanis Obomsawin, who is the subject of this years Hot Docs retrospective, explores the nature of what is means to learn through the story of Professor Cornett. Through the eyes of his excited and eager former students, Obosawin creates a touching and tender tribute to both the Professor and the virtues of an open minded and generous spirit. While this is a small film with a local perspective, it honors the spirit of the documentary medium, calling attention to a grave injustice, and building awareness on what it means to be truly educated.

Professor Norman Cornett will have its world premiere on May 8th at 9:30 PM at the Bader Theater in Toronto, Canada.

More entries on: Hot Docs festival

May 01, 2009

Queerly Canadian #11: Have I become a professional lesbian?

Posted by Cate Simpson at 12:01 PM ET | Comments (0)

Label Maker Queer people spend a lot of time thinking about labels. Picking one that fits, reclaiming offensive ones to alter their meaning, trying to avoid them entirely. Lately, I've started to worry about acquiring a label I never selected for myself: gay journalist.

I just finished an internship, and I'm returning to the freelancer's constant search for work, so I've been looking back over my portfolio and wondering: when editors read through my clippings, do they see reviews, news pieces, and columns, or do they see reviews of gay books, gay news, and a column about queer politics? I didn't set out to be a professional lesbian. I haven't decided yet what sort of journalist I want to be when I grow up so I want to keep my options open, but I worry that the more queer-themed writing I do, the more the label starts to stick.

My links to the queer community gave me my first breaks in journalism. Among my first publication credits were reviews of queer club nights for the LGBT section of a newly-launched magazine in my hometown of Edinburgh. These led to three longer pieces for the section, and I went on to work at a mainstream entertainment magazine. When I moved to Toronto, Xtra was the first freelance market to return my email, and quickly became my most regular and reliable source of work.

When you're trying to establish yourself in this industry, you can't afford to be choosy about what assignments you take. You're just grateful to be writing. And it's good to have a niche as a freelancer — it helps editors remember you. But at some point, a niche threatens to become a pigeonhole, and "gay writer" is a tough label to escape.

My dilemma is that to a certain extent, it is important to me to write about queer issues. Whatever progress we make and however integrated queer culture is with mainstream culture, we do still have our own concerns and our own history, and I think it's important to use the voice I have as a reporter to tell some of those stories. And since I am increasingly well-placed to do so, it would feel like an incredible betrayal of my own background to ignore these stories just because I'm afraid of being branded an activist.

All of these concerns were very much on my mind when I decided to start writing this column back in December. I was about to take a hiatus from most of my freelance work, including Xtra, and start a three-month internship, and I was ready to focus on broadening my experience. I had to think seriously about whether I wanted to weight my resume with another queer writing credit, especially since my being asked to write it in the first place suggested I was already becoming typecast. In the end, I decided that working with a magazine I had a huge amount of respect for was well worth the risk, but it was a tough decision to make.

The dilemma still rears its head every time I think about moving career forward. My best bet for getting into a big mainstream magazine is probably a story about something or someone queer, and I'm faced once again with deciding whether it makes strategic sense to do that, or whether I'd be shooting myself in the foot by refusing to capitalize on the most useful thing I have going for me.

More entries on: Queerly Canadian

Eco chamber #4: Fighting for the Fry

Posted by Emily Hunter at 11:41 AM ET | Comments (1)

[Editor's note: Every month, Eco-Chamber profiles an eco-activist from Canada and abroad, called "Eco-Warriors." Eco-Warriors takes a look at both the activist and the environmental issue they fight for, using such approaches as direct action, legal crusading, documentary filmmaking, or green commerce.]

As a lover of whales, Alex Morton left eastern plains of Connecticut for the mountainous rainforest of British Columbia. Setting out to study Orca whales, her research soon became more like of a "study of absence," with the whales becoming increasingly rare. She knew the food source of the Orcas was what really needed needed protection: B.C.'s wild salmon. Since there were few people advocating for wild salmon, she became an activist and a scientist.

Short film by Twyla Roscovich

Since 1984, she has written more than 10,000 pages of letters to politicians, written several books, has been profiled in the New York Times, founded a conservation group (adopt-a-fry.org), spoke to the Queen of England in person and led a recent Supreme Court case — yet the fight to protect B.C.'s wild salmon continues.

The problem is fish farms, specifically salmon fisheries. Many people see fish farming as a solution to our 2050 crisis, in which it's predicted the world's wild fish stocks will be depleted because of rising demand and poor management. According to Morton, however, fish farms are more harm than help. Many wild fish are used as pellet food for farmed fish, killing off wild fish populations in the process. Fish farms operated offshore also have the side-effect of infecting wild fish with diseases and parasites.

In British Columbia for example, many Norwegian companies, such as Marine Harvest, operate salmon aquaculture offshore in the south coastal channels, including the Fraser River. Sea lice flourish in these feedlots and attach themselves to baby wild salmon (called "fry") that migrate through the channels. The fry are highly vulnerable and susceptible to infection as they have undeveloped scales. And while parasites, such as sea lice, are a natural occurrence for salmon, the high level of parasite infection coming from fish farms is unnatural. The infection rates are disrupting growth and propagation of the wild salmon and killing off the last of their population.

According to Science magazine, wild pink salmon are likely to become extinct due to offshore fish farming. But the problem does not end with the fry; the fish farms affect the larger B.C. ecosystem, too. Wild salmon are food for such animals as grizzly bears, eagles and Orca whales. Many local communities in B.C. depend upon the wild salmon fishery too. Starting in 2001, Alex Morton watched her community fall apart with the depletion of wild salmon in Echo Bay.

"In Echo Bay, there was once a large community, a school for children and mail delivered three times a week," she says. "Today, there are less then ten people in the community, the school is shut down and there is no mail delivered."

Because there has been no political will to protect wild salmon, and in turn the ecosystem and economy, Morton, in her 50's, decided to take her own direct action. In 2008, Morton founded the Adopt-A-Fry organization, originally with the aim to single-handedly evacuate the wild fry away from the farm-infected areas with her small boat. Since then, last February, her group has gone to the B.C. Supreme Court in a case against one of the largest Norwegian fish farm companies, Marine Harvest, in an attempt to get them off water and on land. Currently, Adopt-A-Fry is collecting signatures on a petition to end offshore fish farming in Canada.

"Farming salmon in Canadian waters is unconstitutional because no one is allowed to privatize ocean spaces, nor schools of fish," says Morton. "Canadian law needs to apply to these Norwegian fisheries."

So far, Morton's petition has gone largely ignored in political circles: B.C. premier, Gordon Campbell and federal Fisheries Minister Gail Shea have both remained silent on the issue. Despite this, the petition has rapidly grown, from 100 signatories in winter 2008 to over 13,000 today. Morton believes that when the petition closes in nearer to a million signatures, the politicians will be forced to listen.

"Somewhere between 13,000 and one million, we will get Canada to follow its own laws," says Morton.

Please visit the group's website to sign the Adopt-A-Fry petition.

Emily Hunter is an environmental journalist and This Magazine's resident eco-blogger. She is currently working on a book about young environmental activism, The Next Eco-Warriors, and is the eco-correspondent to MTV News Canada.

More entries on: Eco Chamber

Jackpot! An interview with Filmmaker Alan Black

Posted by Elaisha Stokes at 10:59 AM ET | Comments (0)

Delta Bingo Hall
Back in grade five (oh the good old days) my best friend Cait and I used to spend our lunch hours playing Bingo in the cafeteria. The Scottish lunch lady would call out the numbers and we would patiently scratch them out on our tiny square cards. It was free to play, and prizes included bouncy balls and stickers. Not that it mattered much - even at that tender age of ten I had the worst luck ever. I never won anything.

Still the thrill of the game stuck with me. And it turns out I'm not alone. I caught up with Canadian filmmaker Alan Black to talk about his new film Jackpot! Set against the backdrop of a local Toronto Bingo hall, Jackpot! explores what it means to really win in life.

Your film is about a Bingo hall in Toronto. Where did the idea come from? Do you play a lot of Bingo?

It came from playing Bingo with my grandmother as a kid. Every Christmas we would go down to Florida to visit her and pass the days playing Bingo. It was a great experience, exciting and a great feeling to win. To this day is stands out as a really Important childhood memory. Later on in life I went to play Bingo as an adult and it was so different, people were so serious, it wasn't fun at all. There was this strange sub culture that I don't remember existing when I played as a kid. Then I read an article about a shooting outside a Bingo hall at Jane and Finch over $1500 bucks. Four people beat another person to death. Can you imagine killing someone for $300? It made me realize, playing Bingo is not about the money. I started to wonder "what are these people really after?"

Playing Bingol And what are they really after?

I think they are after purpose in life. Some glimmer of hope that their life otherwise doesn’t provide. I have a lovely fiancé, a job, a family and friends. Every morning I wake up and I think about all the good things in my life. I think about this interview, the festival, what’s next. But what do you do if you don’t have anything good on the horizon? If every day is the same and you have nothing to look forward too? All you want is a moment of success, some possibility. I believe Bingo players play for that moment of winning. They play for the feeling of possibility, that moment of success!

So is this film a comedy, a tragedy or a character film?

It’s a bit of all of those things. It’s not a comedy, it’s not for laughs. There is definitely humanity and comedy in the characters. But it’s not a tradegy either. It's a bit of everything, I hope.

The characters in your film love Bingo, but at moments it seems that this love is more of an addiction. In your mind, are these people gambling addicts, or is it more complex?

It’s more complex. The questions is not whether or not they are addicts, but why. What has caused them to meet something like this in their lives? You know, at one point one of the characters points out that playing Bingo isn't much more expensive than a night spent at the movie theater. In the end these people are spending their enterainment dollars on something that brings them joy, and what’s wrong with that?

It’s obvious through the intimacy of your interviews with the characters that you built a strong relationship with these people. What kind of process did you go through to gain their trust?

What you see is about 30 days of shooting. Myself and my producer spent every weekend playing Bingo and hanging out with the characters at the Bingo hall for an entire year before actual filming commenced.

Did you ever worry you might become addicted to Bingo? Alone

I don’t have an addictive personality. I really like Bingo and there is something exciting about winning or coming close. When you're one number away from winning you get this amazing rush. I get that, but I don’t think I need it. There isn’t that void in my life

What do you think your film says money and our current recession?

I think it's funny that the film is being read that way. Jackpot! is in the Lets Make Money program at Hot Docs and I’m on a panel about greed and poverty. But this is not a movie about money. It’s a film about an absence of something. That absence could be financial, but it could also be emotional, social, etc. I suppose in the end this film speaks to overcoming adversity. It speaks to perservearance and finding purpose when things aren’t going well.

Is this a hopeful film?

I think so. I think it’s about not giving up. About finding something to keep you going, even when that thing is very hard to find.

What the one thing your hope the audience takes away from this film?

I hope they get a glimps of a section of Toronto they never get to see. I hope they get exposed to a world they don’t really know about. I hope it helps them better understand peoples motivations in life, however silly they might seem. In the end, you can’t really judge people on what there doing, you can only hope to get a better understanding of why they are doing it.

Jackpot! screens at the Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival Friday May 1st at 10 PM at the Royal Cinema, and Sunday May 10th at 6:30PM at the Bloor Cinema.

More entries on: Hot Docs festival

Hot Docs launches with docs in crisis

Posted by Elaisha Stokes at 10:27 AM ET | Comments (0)

Hot Docs Film Festivall
Last night marked the opening of the 16th annual Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival, the largest documentary film festival in North America, and an important industry event for independent film makers world wide. As an independent Toronto based producer, I've been involved with Hot Docs for the last four years. This year I'll be covering the event for This Magazine, bringing you news and reviews from the front lines of the festival.

This years festival is the largest in the history of Hot Docs. It's also arguably the most important. The global economic down turn, combined with the restructuring of Canadian government funding for film and television has created unprecedented challenges for documentary filmmakers. Recently, the Conservative government elected to abolish both the Canadian Television Fund (CTF) and the Canadian New Media Fund (CNMF). While these funds have been replaced by the Canadian Media Fund (CMF), the CMF is controlled by the cable industry, with no commitment to educational or documentary programming. Moreover, private broadcasters will have access to the CMF to produce their in-house productions. The result? Less financing for independent Canadian producers, more of tax payers money in the hands of private broadcasters and cable companies, and less quality Canadian content on our airwaves.

Independent Canadian documentary production is a $170 million dollar industry in Canada. It represents some of the best in educational Canadian content. While Hot Docs is a time of celebration for an industry with international recognition, it's also a time to pause and reflect on what kind of content we as Canadians want to see on our airwaves. Like it or not, television matters. And in my mind, television without Canadian content in no television worth having at all.

More entries on: Film | Hot Docs festival

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THIS MAGAZINE: BECAUSE EVERTHING IS POLITICAL

May 28, 2009

Film Club Contest!

Film Club Contest!

May 06, 2009

Bird is the Word: Ghost Bird

May 05, 2009

How to tell imperfect stories: Reporter

May 04, 2009

Since when did we divorce the right answer from an honest answer?

May 01, 2009

Queerly Canadian #11: Have I become a professional lesbian?

Eco chamber #4: Fighting for the Fry

Jackpot! An interview with Filmmaker Alan Black

Hot Docs launches with docs in crisis