EzraWinton.com | Media arts and politics

The Coke ad at Hot Docs says: "Thanks to Coca-Cola Canada for supporting the presentation of environmental films at Hot Docs"

Below is an excerpt from a longer piece I’ve just posted on Art Threat about the documentary festival Hot Docs, currently underway in Toronto. This is one of the largest festivals for documentary in the world, and this year organizers have made the very unusual and short-sighted blunder of signing on Coca-Cola as the environmental film presenter for the fest. I plan on writing more about this after talking with more organizers, but for now, here is an excerpt from the my Art Threat piece:

And now finally, the ethics of the fest: I plan on writing about this more in the future, but for now I’d like to flag a huge problem with this year’s edition of Hot Docs. Organizers have made the massive mistake, ethically inexplicable as it is, of signing on with none other than Coca-Cola as their, get this, environmental film sponsor. At many of the social events I accosted Hot Docs management about the festival facilitating greenwashing for one of the world’s worst human rights and environmental abusers. For a festival that showcases a film genre interested in not only truth but social justice, it is bizarre that they would take such a careless decision to not just bring on Coca-Cola as a sponsor, but give the company the space it needs to misrepresent itself as a corporation concerned with the environment. Coke’s eco-record is well-documented, and judging from my conversations with many audience members at Hot Docs, I’m assuming also well-known. Imagine a cigarette company sponsoring the festival’s cluster of films on health issues. Imagine BP sponsoring a program of eco-disaster docs.

Off the record, Hot Docs organizers told me that there is a “firewall” between programming and the business of the fest, and that there was a discussion about bringing on Coca-Cola as a sponsor, but it seems it wasn’t a protracted debate. This separation between art and economy at a festival like Hot Docs is about as real as objectivity in documentary, or the tooth fairy. The relationship is a delicate balancing act that determines the ability of the organizers to show quality documentary cinema. I appreciate this tension, but it is hardly a firewall when Coca-Cola is given the opportunity to associate their brand (in fact, the opportunity to rebrand) with environmental documentary cinema.

Hot Docs is risking their reputation with this new partnership, and if they think it will pass over without notice they are wrong. The Coca-Cola commercial played before every film I watched at the festival, and each time I overheard audience members around me, surprised and in disbelief: “What? You’ve got to be kidding me!” The reaction from documentary filmmakers was, of course, even more sever. Festivals like Hot Docs may feel immune from questions of ethics, when confronted by those of us who bring attention and protest to unethical sponsorship, but with their Green Galas, carbon offsetting, and other eco-friendly initiatives (and promotions), I’m venturing festival organizers actually do see the importance of addressing a newly-formed alliance with a company with one of the worst track records on human rights and the environment in the world (and I’m also sure Hot Docs ist familiar with Coke’s record, considering the documentaries on this very subject). Let’s hope enough people talk to them about this issue and they drop Coke for next year.

It’s a busy month already: a book about to be launched in a few weeks (see last post), finishing up my Second PhD comprehensive exam (hopefully, fingers and discursive tentacles crossed), and the new POV Magazine is out with an article I wrote on documentary as a tool for education. The cover is pictured at the left so you can spot it on the newsstands - it comes out this week across Canada. If you can’t find it in the meat world, you can go to the virtual source and order a subscription online.It’s the first thematic issue and they chose education, a great theme for documentary of course. I argue in my piece that documentary cinema is an effective and much-needed tool for education - for students, teachers and the rest of us. Docs already provide an alternative, critical education and often accomplish much more than a textbook can. It’s for this reason and others I outline in the article that we need to seriously take up programs and policies of media literacy in Canada. The lens through which we view the world is increasingly audio-visual - it’s not time to fight it or engage in moral panics, but prepare our citizens with the abilities needed to critically engage with all the media saturating our daily lives. Check out my article if that mini-rant didn’t bore you….

Whew!! Writing from extremely cold cold cold Winnipeg where snow is on the ground and chill is in the bones. I’m here for the Gimme Some Truth documentary project - a film festival and conference happening in the city between November 6th and 9th. Myself and Tom Waugh were asked to come and speak about Challenge for Change as we approach the final editing stages of our book on the same subject. It’s been nice to see some of the people from the IMAA conference I attended in Kelowna last May, and today I saw a great video art performance installation. So for today and tomorrow and maybe Monday, I’m throwing out the odd blog about my experiences here at my real online gig, Art Threat. Check out my posts about Gimme Some Truth there.

And as I get ready to fly back to Montreal tomorrow, I’ll reflect on my recent stint of Canada-trotting from Montreal to Ottawa to Montreal to Vancouver to Montreal to Ottawa to Montreal to Winnipeg to Montreal, all in the span of about eight days. My eco-footprint is now the size of Manitoba. I have one more presentation to give in Ottawa on Tuesday (on my Female Suicide Bomber paper), then I’m really really done with all this extra craziness. From then until Xmas it will just be two papers and Cinema Politica. Ahh, the sweet smell of the end of a busy, frenetic time….

So check out my posts at Art Threat people - I’m hanging out with doc legends up here!!

A friend of mine, Rajesh Thind, is a UK-based documentary filmmaker who is making a documentary about the socio-political challenges faced by rural people in India. Below is an excerpt from his description of “Twelve Acres,” after you read it, please consider helping him out by donating a few bucks through the Chip In widget above. Thanks all.

Twelve Acres — that’s the amount of Punjabi farmland that I will inherit from my 70 year old father when he dies. The film will document my attempt to figure out what to do with this land when the time comes. More than that though, it’s a film about families, migration, and living outside of the constraints of the high-pressure urban life we live in London. That’s the skeleton on which the flesh of the film will hang…

The same pressures that people in Western cities are used to living under are increasingly at play in India. Fifty years worth of consumerism and materialism have been unleashed there in just the past decade or so, and the impact this is having on the lives on Indians is profound and wide-reaching.

Many of you have heard the terrible stories of farmers in India committing suicide because of the burden of debt, but we haven’t heard of what I found in my village and others around it - that teenage boys are killing themselves because their parents can’t buy them the shiny new consumer goods that their satellite TVs are exposing them to; that women are being killed by their husbands so they can get a new dowry; that young people see no future for themselves and are struggling to adapt to a new world.

Svetla’s friend’s seaside camping neighbours in Bulgaria called me “Hugh” secretly because they couldn’t pronounce my name and I apparently reminded them of Hugh Grant. Well recent news has got me convinced that they should have been calling me “Grant” in keeping with the likeness but also by reflecting this summer’s spat of excellent news.

I’m back in Montreal now and yesterday I checked the PO Box for Cinema Politica and found what has ominously lain there twice before: a large white and cream envelope from the Canada Council for the Arts, news writ large of our bid for a grant for the Cinema Politica project. As the previous two times the news contained the word “regret” in the first sentence and was therefore not the news I had wished for, I felt my heart palpitate and held my breath while I scanned the envelope looking for clues in it’s near incandescent body. And what was that! I caught a glimmer of the word “pleased” - the affirmative clue to “regret’s” negative!! I feverishly opened the envelope to read the news: “We are pleased to inform you that your application to the Media Arts Project Grants - Dissemination Projects…was successful.” Yes! Retribution! Finally, Cinema Politica has been recognized by funding authorities (and arts peers) as worthy of the holy grail of arts funding in Canada! Yes!!! So as you can see, this news combined with the SSHRC news a couple of weeks back has me thinking the neighbours might not have been too misdirected in connecting me with the grant aspect of Hugh Grant.

And so turns a new chapter in our lives: with the end of summer and beginning of the glorious burning Quebec Autumn, comes a new leaf, a beginning in a long series of beginnings. Stress will be lowered, health will be lifted, intellects will be injected and our projects will be infected with the renewal spirit. It’s going to be a good year (I follow the academic calendar, so my year is September to August). Woopee!

While suffering the blow from the Canada Arts Council (for the second time, a jury didn’t rank Cinema Politica high enough to receive funding) and going to Hot Docs to discover, um, filmmakers narrowly focused on their own projects (I can’t blame them), I am delighted to report some good news.

Last Thursday, April 17th, 2008, I received word from some faculty and profs at Carleton that I had been awarded the SSHRC (apologies for the instructive graph above – I did it for Michael) Doctoral Fellowship – meaning I’ll receive $20,000 per year from SSHRC every year for the next three years. It is truly a lifesaver as I consider naming my firstborn Visa, after my best friend of the last three years (and now my worst enemy).

But wait! Good news might just travel in twos! Around the same time, we were informed that the long, arduous journey to get Svetla status in this immigrant-unfriendly land had come to a near-end. Yes, Svetla is now a proud permanent resident of Canuckland.

So all that is left is to STUDY for these bloody PhD exams on May 16-17…

Yesterday I had lunch with the incredibly experienced and calm André Paquet (at right), who has been programming Montreal’s Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal (RIDM) for the last three years. In Canada, RIDM is second only to Hot Docs in size, but in my books (and André’s) it has resisted the hyper-market business zeal that other large fests like TIFF and Hot Docs tend toward (who do for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is pressure from funding agencies) in favour of a more nuanced cultural initiative.

In this vein RIDM has always focused on the “rencontres” in its name, that is encounters, mainly the interaction between audiences and artists. For this, they have my respect. Even better, recent editions including last year’s (for which I was on one of the juries) have made attempts to be less exclusionary to the non-Francophone communities of Montreal, which are numerous and diverse.

So it was with honour that I accepted the invitation yesterday to become a member of the Pre-selection Committee for the 2008 (11th) edition of the festival. What does this entail? Um, watching about 200 films over the summer. Thankfully I already watch between 80 and 100 every year for Cinema Politica, so the number only doubles. But I am indeed looking forward to working with André, who has been programming for 40 years now and indeed has a thing or two to teach this neophyte curator. So, let the viewing begin!

Read related posts:
An article I wrote on last year’s RIDM.
A post about sitting on last year’s Jury.

OK, I’m going to try and not make this bitter, despite how utterly bitter and negative I feel at the moment. I just received word from the Canada Council that they have indeed denied support for Cinema Politica, for a second time in a row. This time, I painstakingly applied to a different envelope - a new section at the Council that had less competition - with the hopes that that would increase our odds.

Nope.

Cinema Politica is massive and shows only signs of expansion. There are 30 locals with ten waiting in the wings to join the network of free political film exhibition sites across the country. Since our focus is documentary and Canadian independent works, and since our focus is on youth (most CP locals are located on Canadian campuses) and building new audiences for independent cinema in the country, we thought that we had a pretty damn fine chance at some funding. Everyone has been telling us at least. If only the people who have sat on the last two review committees saw it that way.

With this rejection letter, I am left with two possible conclusions regarding this country’s most important arts funding agency:

1. Cinema Politica does not fit in the Council’s mandate because documentary is not seen as an art by so many in the arts community and has historically faced discrimination;
2. Cinema Politica was not an attractive project to fund for the ten (two committees of five) independent artists who reviewed all the applicants because they a) do not value documentary as a media art, b) think the project is doing fine - based on our swanky website and expansive scope across the country - and is not in need of cash (which is so far from the truth it hurts), or c) are artists who have no understanding of the crucial need to fund initiatives in this country that aim to disseminate (READ: distribution!) independent cinema to new, young audiences at alternative exhibition sites.

Alas, with this incredibly depressing news, we may be forced to terminate the project. We desperately need to hire someone to run the sprawling network, to send films across the country, to secure screening rights, to offer support to new startups in the network, etc, etc.

This cannot happen with the network being so big. So, while the Canada Council is not in the business of supporting Cinema Politica, maybe you are? Drop me a line if know where we can find cash or would like to support our work. I’m going for a long, cold walk.

It’s reading break, and between Svetla’s birthday, a roudy trip to Quebec City for Carnival, and some recent private screenings with friends and drinks, I am trying to clear the cobwebs before the reading begins. The film we recently previewed over a few beer was Terror’s Advocate, worth checking out, but not a great doc to wade into without a truckload of a priori knowledge. The film covers so much historical ground that I was often lost and need of rest stops with a bit more clarification. Still, a very intriguing man and a very intriguing life as a politico, lawyer and anti-colonialist.

Now that my office is cleaned up and organized, I’m about to sit down and work on some essays, book reviews, research on films on terrorism (it’s turning into a habit), and of course drafting up the many papers I’ve committed to give at upcoming conferences. I’m hoping to go to Stockholm this summer, and maybe Berlin. I got turned down for the cultural conference in Istanbul, sadly. As a final note, I had forgot to include a link to the pdf four-page spread of my article in POV magazine on RIDM’s tenth anniversary. It was a couple of months ago, but it’s never too late to self-promote (the picture at left is the first page of the spread)..

Nouvelle <<vues>> sur le cinéma québécois has published my review of Projecting Canada: Government Policy and Documentary Film at the National Film Board, published by McGill-Queens University Press, in 2007. The review appears to have one grammatical error, and I’m not sure if that’s my fault or has happened later in the process, but it’s up and waiting to be read.

The one problem with the journal’s site is that it is in php, and is a bit frustrating to navigate while also not allowing direct links to parts of the site. Therefore, all I can offer here is a link to the main page, and you’ll have to click through and dig around to find my article (and other great stuff too of course). Here is the link: http://cinema-quebecois.net/index.php

Short and sweet, I’ve got to get back to multitasking, which of course includes listening to the best alternative news program in North America, Democracy Now, which on this Thursday has a segment looking at the 9/11 Commission Report and just how much information was retrieved through torture. Amy Goodman rocks, period.