Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canadais now on sale at Amazon.ca for the ridiculously low price of $22. The regular price for this 600-page book will be around $35, so if anyone is interested in what’s kept me locked in this tiny office for the last three years and wants to save a few bucks, I’d go to amazon.ca and pre-order this excellent book now.

This was a labour of love for sure, and it wasn’t exactly easy organizing 40 contributors and so much material into one coherent chunk of literature, but myself, Tom Waugh and Michael Brendan Baker did it! We start our book tour with the first launch in Toronto on February 25th, followed by stops across the country. For details on the tour, visit this page. Below is a description of the book, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. Thanks for your support – my goal is for the publisher to need to print a second run within one year!!

Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada is a collection of thirty-eight essays and interviews written by the editors and other Canadian scholars, including a small selection from academics outside of the country. While in some published works there exists a tendency to discuss Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle exclusively as a romanticized revolutionary media experiment that empowered citizens, disseminated counter-narratives and impacted real change—and in other works a fair dose of postmodern skepticism around such naïve baby boomer idealism is found—the bigger project of complicating CFC/SN and interrogating its many (conflicting) facets is best reserved for a dedicated collection. The essays provide such a heterogeneous approach, and yield varied perspectives that together, house cultural theory, politics, historiography, film and media studies, and cultural policy discourse. The book is divided into four sections, “Historical Spaces,”  “Community Spaces,”  “Screen Spaces,” and “Discursive Spaces,” and book-ended by an introduction and conclusion by the editors. A “Resources” section complements the literature with details for further reading, research and viewing, along with a complete filmography of the CFC/SN collection, for the first time in one place.View the Table of Contents online

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