by Andrea Dulanto
-USA-

In December 2012, Brooklyn-based artist and writer Cristy C. Road came back home to Miami to read at Sweat Records from her latest graphic novel, Spit and Passion. The autobiographical narrative centers on Road’s early adolescence – growing up working-class, Cuban-American, and queer in the early 1990s.

As she read, artwork from the book flashed behind her on a screen – a surrealistic vision of a young Road flying into the universe with one of her earliest influences, Freddie Mercury of Queen, or the more muted image of her sitting in her bedroom closet, which is decorated with Christmas lights and the Cuban flag.

At intervals during the reading, Road sang and danced to Green Day’s music – a punk-pop band that has been a major influence in her adolescence and throughout her artistic life. Her performance mirrored the exuberance of Spit and Passion, and underscored the complexity of this story of early adolescence.

In many ways, it is a story about surviving alienation and self-doubt. Throughout the book, Road expresses being conflicted about coming out as gay to her family and friends, and particularly about the kind of effect it would have on her sense of Cuban-American identity.

by Stephanie Koehler
-USA-

Stephanie Koehler is a journalist and photographer residing in California. She also is an advocate for the Rape Crisis Center. The vision of “Female Perspectives on Ending Sexual Violence” is to unite women all over the world to document the pain they suffer as a result of sexual violence and the healing approach they take to grow from victim to survivor. Each installment includes a photo essay of a female survivor and is a platform to tell her story. Stephanie’s vision is to grow this project into an international sexual assault awareness campaign.

Anna, now in her early 30s, has endured many sexual assaults throughout her life. As a survivor of incest, her earliest memories of being abused by her father go back to when she was only four years old. He sexually violated her for most of her life until just three years ago, when she finally severed all ties to her family. Anna grew up in a farming community, where she experienced three additional counts of sexual assault in her teenage years by men from neighboring communities. Both of her two sisters are also incest survivors, one abused by their uncle, and the other abused by their father as well. The sisters have only spoken about their shared experiences with one another on one isolated occasion.

by Alexandra Marie Daniels
Arts, Culture & Media Editor

Although it feels like it is a film from the 1990’s recently stumbled upon and re-discovered high up on a shelf in a dusty box, How to Survive a Plague directed by David France and produced by Howard Gertler is a time capsule, crafted into one of the best documentary films you will see this year. It is a gift to be inspired by, to learn from, and to never forget what began in Greenwich Village in the 1980’s and became one of the most transformative human rights social justice movements since feminism and civil rights.

by Alexandra Marie Daniels
Arts, Culture & Media Editor

“I cried” is the first thing I say when I begin my phone conversation with Linda Goldstein Knowlton about her new film Somewhere Between. “If you don’t cry,” the director responds, “then I am actually really worried about you.”

In 1979 China imposed a “One Child Policy.” The result, as opening statistics to Somewhere Between illustrate, is that “hundreds of thousands of babies were abandoned, mostly girls.” 175,000 of these girls now live in 26 different countries around the world. 80,000 baby girls were adopted by American families and are growing up in all 50 of the United States. Somewhere Between is the story of four of these girls.

by Alexandra Marie Daniels
Arts, Culture & Media Editor

The big picture is that we’ve all been invited here to this planet, life didn't ask anybody to approve of the guest list. We are all connected. – Ron Fricke, Director, Cinematographer, Co-editor and Co-writer Samsara.

When I set aside my dance career, my fascination for movement in time and space had not ended though my interests had shifted from the proscenium stage to film. At the time, I asked my friend James, a film producer, to please make me a list of must see films. The next morning I received an email with a list of five movies. The film Baraka was at the top of the list with a note that said “Watch this film on the big screen.”

It has been twenty years since filmmakers Mark Magidson and Ron Fricke created Baraka, and now their alchemy returns to theaters with another must-see-on-the-big-screen masterpiece Samsara.

by Stephanie Koehler
-USA-

Stephanie Koehler is a journalist and photographer residing in California. She also is an advocate for the Rape Crisis Center. The vision of “Female Perspectives on Ending Sexual Violence” is to unite women all over the world to document the pain they suffer as a result of sexual violence and the healing approach they take to grow from victim to survivor. Each installment includes a photo essay of a female survivor and is a platform to tell her story. Stephanie’s vision is to grow this project into an international sexual assault awareness campaign.

When she was in third grade, Alex’s stepfather asked her whether she knew what the word ‘rapist’ meant. One would think that this is not exactly a term a 9-year-old could fully comprehend. Yet, since elementary school, she witnessed domestic violence toward her mother, and starting at the age of seven her stepfather often came to her room at night and sexually molested her. Over those years Alex also had to endure emotional abuse.

by Meghan Lewis
-U.K.-

I can think of many greater threats to feminism than a photograph of a woman without make-up. In fact I fail to see how this can be seen as a threat to feminism at all. However, in a controversial article recently published, Daily Mail columnist Liz Jones attacks British television presenter Holly Willoughby for tweeting such a photograph saying, “My feeling is that not wearing make-up is in fact anti-feminist.” Jones’ elaborates by saying that women who do not wear make-up are ‘showing up’ the women who do.

by Aline Sara
-Lebanon-

Rarely does one consider prison a site for entertainment and performing arts. Last spring however, Zeina Daccache - a certified NADT drama therapist and founder of Lebanon’s drama therapy program Catharsis - transformed the 3rd floor of Baabda prison, Lebanon’s largest female detention center, into a stage for inmates to express themselves through tears and laughter.

by Emily Herzlin
-USA-

A few years ago I became obsessed with the 19th century Irish playwright John Millington Synge. He was raised near Dublin, but was drawn to the wild Irish west where the people still spoke Irish. After reading his travel diaries, plays, and essays, I followed my obsession all the way from New York City to the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland, where Synge spent months talking to the islanders about their lives and recording their stories. I endeavored to do something similar, and have been working on a book about my three trips to Aran and how my travels there helped me find genuine confidence in myself.

by Alexandra Marie Daniels
Arts, Culture & Media Editor

"If everyone knows, it can’t be a secret." - The Invisible War

“If you could do one thing political this month, go see this film.” These words stay with me in the days following my conversation with producer Amy Ziering and director Kirby Dick about their latest film The Invisible War. For everyone who cares about our military and feels it is our duty to stand up and protect the people that give their lives to protect us, The Invisible War is your call to action.

Winner of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award, The Invisible War opens Friday, June 22, 2012 in Los Angeles, Washington DC, San Francisco, New York and Boston. The film achieves what no government brief or legal document has yet had the power to do. Giving voice to those who have been silenced, The Invisible War tells the stories of victims of the sexual assault and rape epidemic in the U.S. military, and what the military has done for decades to ignore, deny, and perpetuate these crimes.

by Stephanie Koehler
-USA-

The vision of “Female Perspectives on Ending Sexual Violence” is to unite women from all over the world to document the pain they suffer as a result of sexual violence and the healing approach they have taken to grow from victim to survivor. Each installment will include photography of a female survivor and provide a platform to tell her story. Stephanie’s vision is to grow this project into an international sexual assault awareness campaign.

Brandi and I met at her home after several prior conversations about my project. She agreed to be the first participant in this series of photo-journalistic accounts.

by Jessica Mosby
-USA-

The annual South by Southwest film, interactive, and music festivals are one of the highlights of my year. In 2011 I attended South by Southwest for the first time, and while I had fun, being a novice was often a bit distressing. I generally felt that I had to do everything, even when it was not physically possible. I would lament that I missed this film or that event, completely overlooking the fact I had spent days in dark theaters watching four or five films in straight succession.

by Alexandra Marie Daniels
Arts and Culture Editor

“What’s your dream?” she asks.

I look at my friend Marjon across the table at the little café on Second Avenue, where we regularly go for an affordable bowl of pasta and a glass of wine after work. It is 1997 in New York City, and she is waiting for my reply. I am embarrassed to respond. My face feels flushed to even contemplate my dreams and goals.

I fumble and take a long drag off my cigarette avoiding the question. “I’m not really sure. What is your dream?”

“I want to be in Cirque du Soleil.”

by Alexandra Marie Daniels
-USA-

Through the lens of average teenage eyes, The Forgiveness of Blood captures the contradictions that have hindered Albania’s post-communist development. Specific in context yet universal in theme, Joshua Marston (director of the highly acclaimed 2004 film Maria Full of Grace) has created a high quality artistic production - that educates and powerfully brings us closer to the possibility that, just maybe, as cultures we are not as different as we often like to think.

by Jessica Mosby
-USA-

2011 was another great year for movies. For me, it started in January at the annual Sundance Film Festival with a full slate of must-see films, and kept that momentum for the next eleven months. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to write about all my favorite films or film festivals as they were happening; so as we move forward into 2012, I want to take a look back at five of my favorite documentaries that screened at the San Francisco Bay Area’s top three Fall film festivals: Mill Valley Film Festival, San Francisco’s DocFest, and San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival.

by Victoria Aitken
-UK-

The social networking world is an odd one – you see your friends less, but know more about them - and real catching up has been replaced with the dubious substitute of half a dozen status updates on your newsfeed each day. But the upside is the strange tide of news about semi-strangers that drifts across your screen. Alexander Fiske-Harrison is one of those.

Xander, as he is known, a writer and actor, kept popping up on my screen with pictures of him doing one of the strangest and most controversial pastimes left in the western world – bullfighting.

by Jessica Mosby
-USA-

Charlie Barker is a guy who has it all – almost. He has a beautiful successful wife, a large New York City apartment, a loyal best friend, and a once-promising acting career that he is hoping to restart. The current lull in his professional life seems temporary; he is just waiting to be cast in the next big thing.

But the next big thing turns out to be a young woman freshly arrived in the Big Apple. Clea (played by Heather Gordon) sets her sights on Charlie (Stephen Barker Turner), and soon the two are involved in an affair. Charlie’s wife Stella (Daphne Zuniga) inevitably discovers the affair, and Charlie then finds himself alone and broke.

by Jessica Mosby
-USA-

For almost a year I have been experiencing insufferable allergies. Many doctors’ appointments and medications later, I still wake up in the morning with my skin inflamed and my eyes swollen shut. By the time I watched Farmageddon:The Unseen War on American Farms, I was ready to try just about anything.

by Jane Dabel
-USA-

Black Tuesday is a historical novel set in New York City on the eve of the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929. It traces the story of Leila Kahn, a smart and hardworking Russian immigrant who lives on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in a fifth floor walk up. Against her better judgment, Leila falls for banker Roderick Morgan, who is embroiled in a fraudulent financial deal with his uncle, Jack Morgan. Leila learns the truth about Roderick’s dealings and takes a heroic stance, confronting Wall Street's greed, power, and depravity in a manner that is both timely and inspirational in today's turbulent times.

by Alexandra Marie Daniels
-USA-

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan. For most of us, this is a relatively insignificant fact in our daily lives. We acknowledge our military as distant heroes, doing important work to protect our safety, over there. Yet for every one affected - the soldiers, their families and close friends - this war has been a brutal, life-altering reality. Repeated deployments, traumatic brain injuries, multiple amputees, and PTSD are devastating families and communities.

by Alexandra Marie Daniels
-USA-

Would David McKay and Bradley Crowder have made eight homemade bombs had they not come under the leadership of the charismatic, macho, and at times violent protest organizer Brandon Darby? How much did the United States government’s post 9/11 counter-terrorism efforts influence McKay, Crowder and Darby in what ultimately led to the incarceration of two naïve, idealistic, and impressionable boyhood friends with no prior arrests or criminal records?

by Alexandra Marie Daniels
-USA-

Someone tried to silence Anna Politkovskaya. An investigative journalist with a bleeding heart, she was assassinated on October 7, 2006 at age 48 in her apartment building in Moscow.

As expressed in the opening scenes of the new film A Bitter Taste of Freedom, Anna was Russia’s conscience. Despite fear, earlier assassination attempts and arrests, she exposed the wrongdoings of Russian authorities and became a voice for the innocent victims of the Chechen war.

by Alexandra Marie Daniels
-USA-

So often when people we love pass away too soon, we just want to hear their voices and see their smiles one more time. For Formula One fans and the many people who adored Ayrton Senna, the documentary film Senna is a gift - a gift in the form of an adrenaline-spiking, while tears-may-fall-compelling, drama.

by Jessica Mosby
-USA-

After watching the new documentary Crime After Crime at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, I was angry. I felt an intense call to action – to tell everyone I know that they must see the 93-minute film as soon as possible. The injustices documented on screen are unbelievable and the dramatic twists put fictional crime drama to shame, as the story is too sensational for even Law & Order.

by Jessica Mosby
-USA-

Life, Above All tells the story of 12-year-old Chanda who takes responsibility for her family after her baby sister dies and her mother falls ill. Fueled by rumors, the rural village outside Johannesburg quickly ostracizes the family suspecting that Chanda’s mother has AIDS. The mother flees the village to live out her last days in a deprivation that may shock viewers.

by Nola Solomon
-USA-

The United States had tough competition in Wednesday’s 2011 Women’s World Cup semi-final game against France. Though team USA will move on to the finals against Japan this Sunday, the French team gave them a real run for their money. Nola Solomon's story reflects her experiences playing with the Paris University Club (PUC) women’s semi-pro team in 2010.

The young woman’s nails clawed into my back.

“Pardon!” she exclaimed.

After having pulled me off the soccer ball by my skin, her contrition sounded bizarre. My American college coach had taught me “never say sorry for banging into someone.” But here in France, as traditional etiquette dictated, an apology followed every foul.

by Jessica Mosby
-USA-

If you could take a pill that would let you live for another 500 years, would you do it? Director Mark Wexler poses this question in his new documentary How to Live Forever. The film is a thought-provoking and notably lighthearted exploration of what it means to be alive in a world where people are living longer than ever before.

by Sarah Irving
-Australia-

For a piece of cloth, the burqa arouses an extraordinary amount of emotion. In France women wearing it have been criminalised, and politicians throughout the Western world seem keen to capitalise on it as an emblem of ‘otherness’. This sheet of dark fabric unites some right-wing patriarchal men and some left-wing feminist women in opposition, whether because it is interpreted as a symbol of women’s oppression or as a tool of terrorists. But, for those who choose to wear the burqa or the niqab, it can confer "a sense of value, control, and security."

by Andrea Dulanto
-USA-

When attending an event produced by Wizard World, it is hard not to feel a bit geeky.

Currently on tour throughout the U.S. and Canada, Wizard World made its first stop in Miami, Florida. Same as other comic book conventions, Wizard World presents artists and merchandise from different genres—not just comics, but graphic novels, sci-fi, anime, gaming, cosplay, and cult comedy.

by Jessica Mosby
-USA-

In today’s technologically connected world, there are few places completely absent from the 24 hours a day 7 days a week international news cycle. One of those places is Burma, now known as Myanmar. For more than 47 years the Southeast Asian nation has been isolated from the rest of the world with few foreigners or journalists reporting from the ground. The brutal military dictatorship has ruled with an iron fist, fighting a bloody civil war against the country’s ethnic minorities. Aside from singular and infrequent news reports the world receives little information about the innumerable human rights atrocities committed by Burma’s military dictatorship.

by Hebah Ahmed
-USA-

This article originally appeared on Silent Heroes, Invisible Bridges, an Istanbul-based not-for-profit media organization that promotes peaceful co-existence amongst nations, cultures, and religions. WIP Contributor Alia Turki Al-Rabeo is a founding member of the website which offers exclusive content in English, Arabic, Turkish and Urdu languages. By republishing Hebah’s opinion piece, we support Silent Heroes’ objective to add healthy debate and discourse about hurdles in cross-cultural, cross-religion integration such as the niqab ban in France. – Ed.

by Alexandra Marie Daniels
-USA-

In a coffee house on Alvarado Street in Monterey, California I sat down with documentary filmmaker Jules Hart to talk about her film Pink Smoke Over the Vatican. Pink Smoke, a story about the controversial movement for women’s ordination in the Roman Catholic Church, is a subject I would normally shy away from. I have actively avoided formal religion for most of my life. But when my friend Rick Chelew, who made the film with Hart, emailed me and said “This is a perfect story for The WIP,” I was intrigued. Pink Smoke Over the Vatican is about the Catholic women and men who have taken a stand, despite excommunication, to put an end to 2,000 years of misogyny, sexism, and silence.

by Jessica Mosby
-USA-

March 10 is the opening day of the 29th annual San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. From now until March 20, Bay Area residents can attend a varied selection of film screenings, discussions, interactive events, and musical performances at venues in San Francisco, Berkeley, and San Jose, California. I was particularly impressed with the selection of documentaries screening at the festival. The eight films in the documentary category each express a unique and global point of view that will definitely lead to thought provoking, and possibly heated, post-screening discussions.

by Jessica Mosby
-USA-

At the opening day press conference, Sundance Institute President and Founder Robert Redford proclaimed, “I love all of the films at this festival!” Eleven days of films later, I cannot agree more. This was a banner year for the annual Sundance Film Festival. There were great films and large audiences hungry to see something new and exciting. The presence of female directors was unprecedented. Previous Sundance darlings returned with their latest work while other directors made their festival debuts. I often found myself torn – schedule-wise – between seeing a film by a favorite director or venturing off into uncharted territory with a new face everyone was talking about.

by Jessica Mosby
-USA-

Rarely does a film come along that floors you in its perfection and then continues to resonate for months after that first viewing. I saw the German film When We Leave at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival, where it won best film in the world narrative feature competition. When I entered the theater at Tribeca, I had no expectations about the movie. But two hours later I could not stop thinking and talking about what I had just watched. Writer, Director, and Producer Feo Aladag flawlessly couples the humanistic and thriller elements of filmmaking to create a cinematic force that makes you care about the characters while sitting on the edge of your seat fearful of what will happen next.

by Alexandra Marie Daniels
-USA-

The Lottery, one of two films about American public education to make the short list for the 83rd Academy Awards, gives hope that public awareness about the dire state of American education will continue to build.

The statistics that cross the screen at regular intervals during The Lottery are difficult to digest. Nationwide, 58% of African-American fourth graders are functionally illiterate and in Harlem, the neighborhood where the The Lottery takes place, 19 out of the 23-zoned public schools have fewer than 50% reading at grade level. Tragically, children who fall behind in elementary school are less likely to graduate from high school and more likely to end up in jail or juvenile detention.

High school dropouts are an economic loss to the entire country. As President Obama points out during the film, the achievement gap “costs us hundreds of billions of dollars in wages that will not be earned, jobs that will not be done, and purchases that will not be made.”

by Jessica Mosby
-USA-

Tiny Furniture is poised to be 2010’s indie darling. The film is a charming coming of age story for a generation unsure of how to apply their education and execute their aspirations beyond the ubiquity of social networking.

The film opens with Aura, played by writer and director Lena Dunham, returning home to her family’s enviable Tribeca loft after graduating from college in Ohio. Aura aspires to make films, but her current professional resume is comprised of YouTube videos, the most famous of which captures her wearing a bikini and bathing in a campus fountain.

At home, Aura’s post-college malaise is exacerbated by her overachieving younger sister Nadine and accomplished photographer mother Siri. The film’s title refers to miniatures her mother photographs. Nadine and Siri are played by Dunham’s real life sister, Grace Dunham, and mother, fine art photographer Laurie Simmons. Neither had ever acted onscreen before, yet their deadpan performances are far from amateurish.

Unsure of how to proceed in life, Aura gets a job as a day hostess at a neighborhood bistro. While answering the reservation line in an empty restaurant, Aura falls for the attractive yet callous sous chef Keith (David Call). A bit desperate for male attention, Aura invites Jed (Alex Karpovsky), a visiting creative type whose work she admires on YouTube, to stay at the loft while her mother and sister are away visiting colleges. These misguided romantic endeavors are encouraged by Aura’s best friend Charlotte (Jemima Kirke), a bad influence who likes a good time.

by Jessica Mosby
-USA-

Made in Dagenham is a feminist manifesto arriving in theaters just in time for the holidays. The historical fiction film dramatically captures the struggles of female machinists working at an out-dated Ford factory in 1960s England who demand pay comparable to their male counterparts. The women go on strike until their demands are met, thus starting an international revolution for equal pay.

Sally Hawkins plays Rita O’Grady, a working class mother who puts in long hours sewing upholstery for new Ford cars. During a visit by union organizer Albert (Bob Hoskins), Rita is recruited to attend an upcoming meeting at Ford’s corporate offices. Shady union head Monty (Kenneth Cranham) tells Rita and her coworker Connie (Geraldine James) to keep quiet and act agreeable to whatever he says. Once at Ford’s offices, Rita becomes enraged when the machinists’ work is described as “unskilled” by Ford’s arrogant executives.

by Eloisa Morra Pucacco
-Italy-

After the great battles of the Italian feminist movement in the 1970s – when fascist codes on “family law” were modified and women obtained the rights of divorce and abortion - it seems that today we are having a backlash. In Italy, as in many countries, women often study faster and with better results than men, yet at work they are paid less than their male colleagues. Violence against women is increasing. The current Italian government is not working to create laws against discrimination.

At the heart of what appears to be a backward trend is Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who owns three private TV channels and many national newspapers. Every day Italian families absorb his vision of the world. Italian TV shows are filled with naked women in imagery similar to pornographic movies.

Despite this, a “new Italian feminism” is emerging. To understand what it means to be a woman in Italy, I find it useful to have an outside point of view. In “Notes on Visconti’s Bellissima,” a brilliant essay written in 2009, English novelist Zadie Smith writes, “In the Piazza della Madonna dei Monti, in the ombra del colosseo, expats gather to complain. Italian women is a subject to stretch from morning coffee to midday ravioli. ‘The land that feminism forgot!’ And on cue it all rolls out like an index: the degrading sexualisation of, the nightly televisual humiliation of, Berlusconi's condescending opinion of, perilous abortion rights of, low wages of, minimal parliamentary presence of, invisibility within the church of, et cetera. Yet there exist confusing countersigns, in the land that feminism forgot.”

by Alexandra Marie Daniels
-USA-

Can art change lives? Two artists, photographer Vik Muniz and filmmaker Lucy Walker, search for an answer by traveling to the largest landfill on the planet, Jardim Gramacho, located on the outskirts of Rio de Janiero, Brazil. Out of poverty, desperation, and misfortune, a community of catadores - or garbage pickers - lives and works in the landfill plucking recyclable material from mountains of trash.

by Jessica Mosby
-USA-

On Tuesday you may think that you are going to the polls to choose your next elected official, but the upsetting reality of many congressional and state elections is that incumbent politicians have manipulated district boundaries to decide the outcome of elections before any votes are cast. During every election we experience the effects of gerrymandering, and yet outside of high school civics class, the term “gerrymander” is not commonly used or understood by most voters.

To Gerrymander: To divide (a territorial unit) into election districts to give one political party an electoral majority in a large number of districts while concentrating the voting strength of the opposition in as few districts as possible.

The new film Gerrymandering clearly explains its namesake while documenting how racial, partisan, and incumbency gerrymandering are responsible for the state of our democracy. Director Jeff Reichert approaches his subject matter with a sense of urgency, as the United States will once again redistrict in April 2011 based on the results of the 2010 census.

by Alexandra Marie Daniels
-USA-

While most of the news out of the Middle East is of violence, terrorism, security and protection at all costs, and when conversations rarely move beyond who is right and who is wrong, it is difficult to find hope in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Yet according to Director Julia Bacha, her new film Budrus “shows that there is a way to move beyond, ‘Is this pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian?’”

This past Wednesday in Los Angeles, California, I had the opportunity to sit down with Bacha. Among her credits, Bacha previously wrote and co-directed Encounter Point in 2006 and co-wrote and edited the acclaimed Control Room in 2004. She is the senior producer and media director at Just Vision, an Israeli, Palestinian, and North American organization that emerged in response to the lack of media coverage of Palestinians and Israelis working together to end the conflict. I found the director positive, but not rosy, and dedicated to her work.

by Katharine Daniels,
Executive Editor, The WIP

What began as a simple introduction to Zimbabwean child rights activist Betty Makoni in 2007 through an article published on The WIP has since developed into a partnership with the filmmakers of Tapestries of Hope and a nationwide event to end violence against women worldwide.

Tapestries a Hope, a film documenting Betty Makoni and the Girl Child Network she founded to create a refuge for girls in Zimbabwe, will be shown in 100 theaters around the country for one night only on Tuesday, September 28. In 2007 Director Michealene Cristini Risley traveled to Zimbabwe to film Betty’s work to help the victims of rape and sexual abuse and to expose the pervasive myth that sex with a virgin cures HIV/AIDS. As a result of her filming Michealene was jailed, interrogated, and deported from Zimbabwe.

by Emily Wilson
-USA-

Reviving a piece doesn’t happen very often in the dance world, but director, choreographer, and writer Joe Goode doesn’t do things like other choreographers. For one thing, he loves language as much as movement, so in his pieces, his dancers tell stories with words as well as dance.

This summer Joe Goode presented his dance/theater piece, Traveling Light, at the Old Mint in San Francisco. This wasn’t the first time Traveling Light has appeared at the Mint – Goode’s performance group staged the meditation on excess and eco-consciousness there last year as well.

For Traveling Light, Goode worked with longtime lighting designer Jack Carpenter to create a dance that addresses ecological issues. The dancers’ bodies show the strain and struggle of trying to stay afloat in a world that is changing environmentally and economically. They struggle with what they need to do to change, what they need to let go of, and what to hold on to.

by Vera von Kreutzbruck
- Argentina/Germany -

Last winter film director Lisa Cholodenko came to Berlin to present The Kids Are All Right at the International Film Festival. Dressed in black with short dark hair and thick-framed glasses Cholodenko is an outgoing and witty person, who occasionally swears. She has a winning sense of humor, which is reflected in the new movie. Her films portray the clash between conservative and creative milieus, places she knows first-hand. Though The Kids Are All Right has not done well outside of the large cities and art house theaters, the topic is “timely” and significant.

On July 15, 2010 a civil rights milestone was set - Argentina became the first country in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriage. Not so long ago, in fact until 1983, homosexuals were persecuted. Homosexuals in Argentina now have the same rights as heterosexuals, including the right to adoption, inheritance, pension, and social security. This is a sign of evolution in a nation in which a Macho-driven culture unfortunately still prevails.

by Anna Clark
-USA-

I was the only woman who worked on a ropes course during the summer I spent employed at a girls’ camp in Pennsylvania. Officially, my job was to strap kids into climbing harnesses and belay them as they ventured to the top of walls, fake boulders, and the a 60-foot “adventure pyramid.” Unofficially, my job was to encourage and coax the many girls who were scared to climb high.

During Parents’ Weekend, one eight-year-old, who made it to the peak of the adventure pyramid, was scared to slide off the top—a necessary move for me to belay her back down to the ground. While I could have had someone simply climb up after her, I spent half an hour encouraging the girl to let go. A crowd of parents and girls formed, their necks craned backwards to look up at the little girl stranded at the top. She trembled. She whined. And, finally, when she did slide off – to enormous cheering – she hit the ground with both feet and held her hands in the air in triumph.

“Nice coaching,” said one of the fathers.

by Jessica Mosby
-USA-

Israeli director Yael Hersonski examines the lost footage in her 89 minute directorial debut, A Film Unfinished. Interweaving footage with diary entries by Ghetto inhabitants, an account of filming by a German cameraman, and reflections by Warsaw Ghetto survivors now viewing the footage, Hersonski brings a new perspective to the authenticity of Nazi propaganda films. Scenes were staged to create a life of happiness and abundance that concealed the suffering of the Ghetto’s 440,000 residents. Imagined encounters include a staged dinner party with guests who were, in reality, on the verge of starvation. The perversity of the Third Reich’s obsessive documentation of human suffering, intensified by the revelation of cinematic manipulation, stays with you long after leaving the theater.

by Charukesi Ramadurai
- India -

High in the north Indian state of Kashmir sits Ladakh, held by many as the last bastion of Himalayan Buddhism. Since Tibet is out of bounds for most tourists, Ladakh now attracts travelers and spiritual seekers who come for glimpses of a traditional Buddhist way of life; even seasoned travelers go so far as to describe it as the last Shangri La.

• Buddhists in Ladakh are often seen spinning a prayer wheel, a practice believed to bring wisdom and good karma or merit. All photographs © Charukesi Ramadurai. •

It is true that Kashmir is a war-torn region, however, the turmoil does not touch Ladakh, a good 280 miles from the capital city of Srinagar. Nor are there any foreign invaders intent upon destroying Buddhism to establish their own faith.

Today, the (perceived) threat to Ladakhi Buddhism is from a different kind of invasion - globalization - brought by travelers and their notions of modernity that invariably spread along with them. And with this comes concerns about the erosion of a faith and way of life that is centuries old.

by Emily Wilson
-USA-

I admire boldness. So Katrina Rodabaugh’s The Dresses / Objects Project, a multi-disciplinary installation combining a dizzying array of artistic forms appealed to me. Through poetry, dance, fashion, photography and letterpress, Rodabaugh embraces a broad swath of disciplines and takes on a wide range of ideas. She uses women’s clothing to explore gender and femininity, the line between art and what is generally considered women’s crafts, and how context affects the way we view things.

Rodabaugh’s The Dresses / Objects Project was inspired by Gertrude Stein’s book of experimental poetry, Tender Buttons, published in 1914. Rodabaugh, a poet and an artist, loves the way Stein played with language, focusing on the sound of the words. She finds poems like A Petticoat modern and moving almost 100 years later:

A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm.

by Victoria Aitken
-UK-

The Sinai desert has a new underground radio station - the only one to escape a ban on live radio transmissions - and it is breaking records for a radio station of its size. Radio Sharm’s secret location in the Sinai desert and its Disc Jockey’s code names like “The Mad Monk,” “The Girl with No Name,” and “Little Miss Slumdog” add mystique and character to Sharm el-Sheikh’s only live radio station.

I visited this holiday location on the Red Sea famous for its picturesque beaches, coral reefs, and year-round sunny weather; and discovered Radio Sharm. Who has ever heard of a secret radio station in the desert? Just the inhospitable location was intriguing enough to want to discover more about the radio station.

by Nusrat Ara
-Indian-Administered Kashmir-

It is Sunday noon. I am standing outside the only functional cinema in all of Indian administered Kashmir.

Located in the city of Srinagar, the shabby Neelam Cinema sits quiet. It looks more like a war torn military post, with coils of razor wire and bunkers, than a cinema. A paramilitary guard looks out from a bunker above as we approach the tin door. “No film today,” he says. “Go back.”

• The Neelam Cinema, Srinagar, Kashmir. Photograph by Nusrat Ara. •

“I would ditch school to watch a movie. It was difficult at times to get a ticket from the counter. Mostly we had to rely on the black market,” said businessman Shameem Ahmad, 38, about the pre-insurgency days.

The guard lets us in only after we convince him we have to meet the manager.

Inside we learn that they have been waiting for a movie to arrive for three days. “We are getting it by this afternoon,” Muhammad Ayub, the projector operator tells us. The big poster for a film assures us that we are in the right place.

by Nora Maccoby
- USA -

"The question for me has always been: How can I help the world?" Mara Haseltine smiles - her large aquatic blue eyes bright and passionate. "Because it's a race against time. We have to engage people into a scientific narrative so that everyone can be part of the solutions."

In her thirties, Haseltine is both a professor of Environmental Studies at The New School in New York City and a ground breaking artist - merging science, functionality and art. She was one of the first people in the world to be exposed to bio-informatics, the 3D representation of molecular and submolecular data that went along with the Human Genome Project, run by her father, Dr. William Haseltine.

"With the discovery of how proteins function, we saw how we could advance medicine from the dark ages to a new renaissance. What I saw with proteins was that function follows form," Haseltine explains. "So I began making sculptures with molecular and submolecular armature/shape. Taking things you couldn't even see and making them giant."

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

Nash traveled the world filming the effects of climate change. The footage is startling as a human face is put on the world’s worst natural disasters. The heart of the film is Nash’s interviews with victims of natural disasters. In Bangladesh, “ground zero” for climate change, Nash interviews victims of 2007’s Cyclone Sidr, which killed over 10,000 people and cost $450 million in damages. The victims’ testimony is heart-breaking as they describe losing their families and homes.

by Vera von Kreutzbruck
- Germany -

Howl, a biopic centered on beatnik Allen Ginsberg’s seminal poem and the resulting obscenity trial, was the most moving and intellectually engaging film presented at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival.

by Aditi Bhaduri
- India -

A debate gripping much of India’s urban middle class has been the controversy surrounding renowned painter M.F. Hussain. Considered India’s Picasso, he received the country’s second highest civilian award – the Padma Vibhushan. But the 95-year-old painter recently relinquished his Indian citizenship to become a citizen of the Gulf state of Qatar. He had been living in self-imposed exile since 2006, when controversy broke out over his depictions of Hindu deities.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

The most emotionally and politically-charged documentary of the year is about a surprisingly original subject: the domestic pets that were lost or left behind in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Mine artfully portrays the class discrimination, utter chaos, and distress that surround one of the worst disasters to occur in the United States in recent history. At the heart of the film are the helpless pets that were forced to fend for themselves and then, after surviving Katrina, were not reunited with their owners.

by Anna Clark
- USA -

Why is the word yes so brief?
It should be
the longest,
the hardest,
so that you could not decide in an instant to say it,
so that upon reflection you could stop
in the middle of saying it.

So goes the entirety of the 17th untitled poem in Vera Pavlova’s new collection, If There is Something to Desire: 100 Poems. A bestselling poet in her native Russia, with her work translated into 19 languages, this is the first full collection of Pavlova’s to appear in English (though her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and Tin House). Born in Moscow in 1963, Pavlova studied music at the Schnittke College of Music and the Gnessin Academy before turning to poetry in her twenties. The change was a rapid one: Pavlova published 72 poems in Segodnia, a Russian daily, which started a buzz that she was a literary hoax.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

Rebel was the theme of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. The message was everywhere: On screen before every film; on the front cover of the film schedule, which read “This Is Your Guide to Cinematic Rebellion”; and in the originality and creativity of almost every film selected by Sundance Institute President and Founder Robert Redford and Festival Director John Cooper for this year’s festival. Rebellion meant great films, particularly documentaries.

In addition to established competitive categories (U.S. Documentary, U.S. Dramatic Competition, World Cinema Documentary Competition, World Cinema Dramatic Competition, and Shorts) and non-competitive categories (Premieres, Spotlight, New Frontier, and Park City at Midnight), there was a new category for low-budget independent films appropriately titled Next. In every category, there were films whose themes seem particularly relevant for our time – films about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the recession and resulting unemployment, political revolutions, the search for environmental alternatives, and the incredible resilience of people when faced with extreme adversity.

by Mandy Van Deven
- India -

Anyone who has ever sat through the frequent and painstakingly choreographed musical numbers in a Bollywood film can tell you that dance is an integral part of Indian culture. From Bhangra in the Punjab province to Kathakali in Kerala, each part of the country has its own distinctive combination of body movement, facial expressions, and hand positions which form the regional style. But nowadays in urban India, dance is not simply used as a form of cultural expression. Women of means are being seduced by a type of dance that is a little more, shall we say, exotic.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. is living the dream. After discovering his love of letterpress, Kennedy left his comfortable corporate job and devoted his life to his art. Today the self-described “humble negro printer” lives in rural Alabama and sells his socially relevant and politically charged letterpress posters for $15 each.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

The most striking element of the new documentary Tapestries of Hope is not the hell that the young rape survivors profiled have lived through, but their unbreakable spirit. The film is a vibrant international call to action and a breathtaking portrait of hope in the face of overwhelming odds.

by Mandy Van Deven
- India -

Known for its bawdy sexual humor, over-the-top characters, and underlying social criticism, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales set the stage for the satirical theatrics which came to be known as burlesque. During its 700-year metamorphosis, burlesque has utilized various styles of music and performance to poke fun at issues spanning social and political themes, particularly conventional gender roles and sexual scripts. Combining the fundamentals of classical burlesque—parody, double entendre, and risqué sexuality—with elements derived from their own ethnic traditions, New York City’s Brown Girls Burlesque (BGB) is a 21st century incarnation of Chaucer’s magnum opus. Founded two years ago by AuroraBoobRealis, BGB is drawing a new audience to this old art form by blending women of color’s experience and artistic aesthetic with this historically Caucasian craft.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

Post-war London is at its most enchanting in director Lone Scherfig’s new film, An Education. Nick Hornby’s clever screenplay, Scherfig’s apt direction and a talented star-studded cast that includes Emma Thompson, Alfred Molina, Peter Sarsgaard, Dominic Cooper, Olivia Williams, and Sally Hawkins make the 95-minute feature one of the best films of 2009.

by Brittany Shoot
- Denmark -

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Celebrations for the historic occasion have been planned for months, and next week, Angela Merkel – Germany’s first and now second-term female chancellor – will lead festivities at the historic Brandenburg Gate. The massive symbolic structure, which was previously located in East Berlin, was the site of Ronald Reagan’s famous speech to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, in which he instructed the former Soviet leader to “Tear down this wall!”

Photoessay by Tammy Law
- Australia -

One of the oldest countries in the world, Ethiopia is often referred to as “the cradle of civilization” – a country with a tumultuous past, present and future, and yet at the same time, a place of unparalleled beauty. In the Northeastern region of Ethiopia earlier this month, a team of scientists recently unveiled their latest findings, Ardi, a revolutionizing fossil that pre-dates the infamous 3.2 million-year-old skeleton of Lucy.

by Mandy Van Deven
- India -

Unlike the abundance of exploration into the many dilemmas of motherhood by feminists in the West, in India the subject is so under-examined that it might as well not even exist. In fact, the magnitude of the topic is so daunting that my initial approach to Veena Poonancha, the Director of the Research Centre for Women's Studies at Mumbai's SNDT Women’s University and a contributor to the newly published Motherhood in India: Glorification without Empowerment?, yielded much apprehension. Veena was worried our interview wouldn’t be sufficient to do justice to the surplus of issues needing to be addressed—and honestly, she was right.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

Crude: The Real Price of Oil is outright sickening. Huge crude oil pits dot the landscape, natural waterways are so polluted that drinking the water causes cancer, and Ecuador’s indigenous communities’ entire way of life is on the brink of destruction. Responsibility for this pollution is the core of a lawsuit filed against Texaco (now Chevron) in 1993. The case has yet to be resolved.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

Burma (also known as Myanmar) is a closed country, literally. Since the 1962 military coup, few outsiders have even entered the Southeast Asian country. News reports are scarce and often unreliable because the news is almost exclusively dispensed by the military dictatorship, which cuts off internet access and cell phone networks during periods of social unrest – further isolating the country’s 50 million citizens. A documentary film about Burma filmed by native Burmese seems as unlikely as it would be dangerous.

by Brittany Shoot
- Denmark -

Migrant communities in Denmark are a subject fraught with debate. As South Asian women increasingly immigrate to Scandinavia, stricter laws have been enacted to discourage the practice of convenience marriages. Rumors about abuse in these communities are common. Yet in a remote western region of Denmark, nearly 600 Thai women currently live with their Danish husbands. The documentary films Love on Delivery and Ticket to Paradise follow a new couple through their wedding day and explore the possibilities for a young woman still living in Thailand. Avoiding the pitfalls of a judgmental outsider point of view, Danish filmmaker Janus Metz provides a sensitive portrayal of Thai women living in rural Denmark.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

The title of Colin Beavan’s book, No Impact Man – not to be confused with the documentary or blog – has a mildly self-deprecating tone that sums things up nicely, No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet, and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

Highland Park, Michigan would seem an unlikely candidate for water access problems – the city is located on the Great Lakes, the largest group of freshwater lakes in the world. The Great Lakes are so vast that when standing on their shores you cannot see the other side. With freshwater so ubiquitous, why did Highland Park’s mostly low-income and elderly residents have to fight to keep the water flowing from their taps? The new 53-minute documentary film, The Water Front, skillfully documents Highland Park’s long and heated fight over water access and cost.

by Brittany Shoot
- Denmark -

For the past two years, the buzz has grown increasingly louder about emerging Danish documentary filmmaker Janus Metz. In his complementary, almost sequential films, Love on Delivery (From Thailand to Thy) and Ticket to Paradise (From Thy to Thailand), Metz and anthropological collaborator Sine Plambech adeptly examine relationships between Danish-Thai couples. Both films were shown on Danish public television with a record number of viewers and have since experienced wider distribution with screenings at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam and South by Southwest.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

Maripaz Vega, currently the world’s only professional female matador, emerges triumphant from yet another death-defying bullfight. Her jeweled matador jacket and pants are covered with as much blood as sparkle while the crowd’s enthusiastic roar echoes through the second-rate bullfighting ring in a small Spanish town. Bullfighting is undeniably gory, and yet the sport’s myriad dangers and even risk of death don’t stop the dedicated few like Vega from committing their lives to the dream of facing a bull in one of Spain’s most prestigious plazas.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

Growing old in a nursing home is rarely an enviable fate. For the Palestinian Christian residents of the Catholic–run Our Lady of Sorrows nursing home, old age is particularly disheartening. Located in East Jerusalem, the nursing home is situated right next to the Israeli security wall that cuts through the West Bank. But most of the employees and residents’ families live in Palestine, and therefore need special authorization to cross the border legally.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

During its midcentury glory days, Weequahic High School was a prestigious public school located in a predominantly Jewish enclave of Newark, New Jersey. Students were expected to excel post-graduation, as evidenced by noteworthy alumni, including author Philip Roth and NBA star and coach Al Attles. By the time Newark native Ronald Stone became principal in 2001, the high school’s demographic had changed and daily life was so riddled with gang violence that Stone wore a bulletproof vest when walking outside the campus’ main buildings.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

Gertrude Berg is the most famous cultural icon you’ve most likely never heard of. The Jewish-American writer and actress played her most famous character, Molly Goldberg, for over 25 years on radio and later television in the first situational family comedy. At the height of her long career, Berg was named by Billboard magazine as “the first lady of radio,” won the first Best Actress Emmy ever awarded, and was voted the second most-respected woman in America after First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

The opening scene of Sterlin Harjo’s new film Barking Water perfectly sets the film’s tone. Frankie (Richard Ray Whitman) lies dying in the hospital when old flame Irene (Casey Camp-Horinek) busts him out, loads him into her Volvo station wagon, ditches his wheelchair, and hits the road. The dialogue is sparse, the vista is breathtaking, and the emotions between Frankie and Irene are both real and complicated.

by Vera von Kreutzbruck
- Germany -

Unlike many actors in the film industry, Parker Posey’s aspiration is not to be an A-list Hollywood star. Her career path has circumvented mainstream filmmaking, which – in her own words – does not produce singular voices or tell human stories.

In her quest for authentic storytelling, she has opted for riskier projects. Barely forty, Posey already has 53 movie credits to her name. Some of her most memorable and celebrated roles have required taut emotional performances, portraying mostly eccentric and conflicted women. She is well known for her turns in Party Girl, where she played a hard partying 20-something in New York City, Best in Show as a hilariously high-strung dog owner and the controversial art film, House of Yes which deals with incest. Her sporadic appearances in blockbuster movies can be counted on one hand with small parts in Scream 3, Superman Returns and You’ve got Mail.

by Anna Clark
- USA -

See’s new novel, Shanghai Girls, follows the lives of Pearl and May Chin—two sisters enjoying the glamorous life of “the Paris of Asia”—Shanghai in 1937. Their father owns a prosperous rickshaw business while the sisters, as “Beautiful Girls,” pose in silk dresses for paintings on cigarette and soap ads.

Pearl and May don’t know it yet, but their lives are on the brink. Japan will soon invade China, bringing a world war to their country, and they are about to set off on a terrifying journey that takes them through wartime China, across the Pacific Ocean, and through interrogation and detainment at Angel Island (called the Ellis Island of the West). They find Los Angeles’ China City, experience the odd relationship between Hollywood and Chinese actresses, and brave the Communist witch-hunts that targeted Chinese during the 1950s. Shanghai Girls focuses on the tense and loving relationship of sisters in an epic context of war, immigration, racism, wealth and marriage.

by Mandy Van Deven
- India -

Couched in a story from Indian mythology, Deepa Mehta’s newest feature film, Heaven on Earth, blurs the line between reality and fantasy to provide a nuanced and authentic look at the struggles of a young Punjabi woman who has immigrated to Canada from her homeland for what turns out to be an abusive marriage. Never one to shy away from heavy and complex issues, Mehta’s film addresses arranged marriage, Indian family dynamics and expectations, domestic violence, and love.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

This summer Don Draper and company return to AMC for the third season of the hit TV show Mad Men. The stylized drama has made the 1960s advertising industry seem like the glory days of creative freedom, complete with noontime cocktails in the office and young feminists breaking through the almost impenetrable glass ceiling.

by Vera von Kreutzbruck
- Germany -

When I told British director and choreographer Sally Potter, 59, that I am from Argentina, she broke into song - “Don’t cry for me Argentina.” She has many fond memories from the time she spent in Buenos Aires in 1997 shooting her film The Tango Lesson with tango dancer Pablo Verón and herself as the protagonists. And her passion for tango has grown fervently ever since. “Next week I’m flying to London to dance with Verón,” she tells me before starting our interview at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

Martin Strel does not look like an athlete. The overweight fiftysomething is an alcoholic, a flamenco guitarist, and a one-time professional gambler. But this Slovenian long-distance swimmer has swam the Mississippi, the Danube, the Yangtze – and now, the Amazon.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

"Daddy, how come I don't have good hair?"

That question, tearfully posed to comedian Chris Rock by his young daughter Lola, was all it took for Rock to travel the country (camera crew in tow) to find out what it actually means to have Good Hair, particularly in the African American community. From local barbershops and the Bonner Bros. International Hair Show to scientific laboratories and an Indian religious temple, Rock and director Jeff Stilson investigate the cultural messaging that has built a $9 billion industry.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

Anyone who thinks that documentaries are boring and stuffy should see The Cove – just to have their preconceived notions shattered. The film is 90 minutes of danger, covert operations, and thrilling feats with a big dose of environmentalism mixed in. It’s as if James Bond and the Ocean’s Eleven team joined up to stop the annual capture and slaughter of 23,000 dolphins in Taiji, Japan.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

On Wednesday, the United States will celebrate the 39th Earth Day. In honor of this annual call to environmentalism, I have chosen to preview two documentaries that premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival: No Impact Man follows one family’s year-long effort to live a more sustainable life in the middle of New York City, while Earth Days chronicles the history of the modern conservation movement. Both films are thought-provoking perspectives on our relationship with the planet.

by Mridu Khullar
- India / USA -

A theatre troupe consisting of unemployed job seekers, hawkers on the streets of Kolkata, India, and people who've been told they have no prospects in life, come together each evening to sing, dance and hone their acting skills.

Earning little more than Rs. 100 (US$2) per show, they perform in small theatres, villages, local parks, even on the roadside.

Their movements are perfectly coordinated, their dramatically delivered dialogues impressive. And it's only when you see the ropes placed strategically around the stage to demarcate the boundaries that you begin to question, that you look closer and realize—almost all the performers in the troupe of Anyadesh are blind.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

American Idol in Afghanistan? Seriously?

Afghanistan’s first competition/reality show, Afghan Star, is arguably the most popular – and controversial – television program in Afghanistan. Eleven million people, or one-third of the country, tuned in for the competition’s finale. And at least two of the finalists now fear for their lives.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

Handmade Nation: The Rise of D.I.Y., Art, Craft, and Design is about one my favorite things (do it yourself) and profiles some of my favorite artists and crafters (Jill Bliss, Nikki McClure, and Debbie Stoller of Bust magazine). I bought my ticket to the special, sold-out San Francisco Film Society screening the morning tickets went on sale, arrived to the event early, and waited in a long line with other excited fans. Post-screening I was so inspired that I wished I could have crafted on the train ride home, but alas, my handbag lacked the necessary supplies.

by Vera von Kreutzbruck
- Germany -

Tilda Swinton is one of the most talented and captivating artists in current international cinema. She’s also in high demand. Tilda recently finished shooting a Jim Jarmusch film in Spain with Jim Murray and Gael García Bernal. She is also planning a collaboration with Marilyn Manson who wants to direct a film on the life of writer Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, and is working on the creation of a foundation dedicated to the introduction of cinema to children, which already has support from the World Cinema Foundation. In August of last year, she successfully organized a small film festival called “Ballerina Ballroom – Cinema of Dreams,” which took place in Nairn, Scotland. And at the end of this year, she will play a mother who does not identify with her maternal role in a film directed by Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

Most American romantic comedies and dramadies go something like this: two attractive people "meet cute"; after some witty banter, and maybe a date, they find themselves in bed together; immediately following this sexual encounter they refer to one another as “boyfriend” and “girlfriend"; then some silly misunderstanding momentarily tears them apart; and finally they reconcile and ride off into the sunset – all in a mere 90 minutes.

by Mridu Khullar
- USA/India -

A few days ago, after weeks of avoiding it, I finally watched Slumdog Millionaire.

The reason I'd put it off for as long as I had wasn't because as a journalist from India currently in the Bay Area, I felt the pressure of giving a long, insightful critique of the film to my non-Indian colleagues. Nor because of the controversy and debates that would inevitably require me to pick a side and try to explain away the complexities of India, which clearly can't be explained away.

It was simply because having endured some awful movies about India in the past, I didn't want to watch yet another foreigner's misrepresentation of something he didn't understand.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

On Sunday night, the 81st Academy Awards will air live from Los Angeles. Five documentary films are vying for the coveted Documentary Feature Oscar: The Betrayal (Nerakhoon), Encounters at the End of the World, The Garden, Man on Wire, and Trouble the Water.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

The premise of the new documentary film Over the Hills and Far Away is straight from the handbook of the American bourgeoisie: Journalist father and professor mother take their young autistic son on a summer vacation to Mongolia where they horseback ride across the country meeting with shamans – all in an attempt to help cure their son after Western medicine has failed. But the film should not be written off as a vanity project conceived by people with money to burn; it is actually a very heartfelt and realistic look at one family’s struggle to confront their son’s autism in an unconventional way. Over the Hills and Far Away premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. Documentary Competition. A companion book, The Horse Boy, will be published this Spring.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

Oscar season usually guarantees that there will be at least one film about the Holocaust starring an A-list actor. 2009 is no exception: Tom Cruise stars in Valkyrie; Viggo Mortensen (of Lord of the Rings fame) in Good; and Daniel Craig (the new James Bond) in Defiance. These films reenact the lives of Nazis (Cruise), academics recruited by the Third Reich (Mortensen), and resistance fighters (Craig). While the holiday movie season is rife with little known Holocaust-era stories about men, what about the stories of women’s experiences?

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

After seeing the new documentary Flow, my 2009 New Year’s resolution is to stop buying bottled water. Over $100 billion is spent annually on bottled water, but it would cost only $30 billion to provide clean drinking water to the entire world. Unlike tap water, bottled water is not regulated for cleanliness. And don’t even get me started on the mountains of plastic bottles created by the bottled water industry.

For 84 terrifying and informative minutes, filmmaker Irena Salina makes a very persuasive case for stopping the commoditization of water and ensuring that everyone has access to clean drinking water. Salina interviews an array of researchers and activists who all describe the frightening international situation: dirty water kills more people than wars, the world is quickly running out of clean water, and water has become a valuable commodity for multinational corporations to exploit for profit. Flow is currently available on DVD.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

This incredible story of average Liberian women coming together to fight for peace is the subject of the new documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which is currently playing in theaters. Filmmakers Gini Reticker and Abigail E. Disney capture the inspiring story of the Women in Peacebuilding Network (WIPNET) with compassion and reverence. Their story of unbelievable heroism in the face of unspeakable violence makes for a dramatic and heart-wrenching 72 minutes.

by Kavita Bedford
- Australia -

Those seeking insight into the Chilean mentality should explore the footpaths of Santiago and Valparaíso. The desires, fantasies and messages of the last forty years are boldly expressed on walls, metro stations and buildings. Here, the streets have a voice.

The memories and consequences of Pinochet’s rule live on in Chile, but in the world of art, repression and prohibition no longer reign. The past decade has seen a powerful resurgence in artistic communities as new galleries, shows and exhibitions are popping up on every re-invigorated street corner. Yet, in formal art spaces there is a distinct lack of comprehensive and challenging visual work. Museums are lagging in attendance and flagging amid a strong collaboration of ideas between the artists and their communities.

by Blaire Dessent
- France -

For the 2008 Dak’Art Biennial, an international art exhibition held in Dakar, Senegal, a group of artists and thinkers associated with the Action Lab project of the Brooklyn-based freeDimensional (fD), collaborated on the production and distribution of Gorée Gazette. A one-time, free newspaper, the Gazette includes personal narratives, drawings and statistics related to the crisis of economic migration - specifically ocean crossings from Africa to Europe and the United States.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

At the tender age of 19, Claudio Duran opened the door of his Santiago home in the middle of the night to find military secret police ready to arrest him. The officers took him to Villa Grimaldi, ironically known as the Palace of Laughter – a Chilean prison used by General Augusto Pinochet after the 1973 military coup. At that moment, he says, “my life changed.” Duran (now known as Quique Cruz) chronicles his imprisonment and the art that helped him reconcile his painful past in the new documentary Archeology of Memory: Villa Grimaldi. The film debuted at the 2008 Mill Valley Film Festival.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has made nineteen trips to the Middle East in the last two years in hopes of securing a regional peace accord. But as the Bush administration comes to an end, Rice’s goal of a two-state solution will not be realized. During her most recent trip last week, she admitted that they’re not “at the finish line” of the peace process.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

I vividly remember the 1988 presidential election, or more accurately the months of campaigning that led up to the election. At the time, my family did not have cable television and all that was on the few channels available was election coverage. Throughout the entire summer and fall, my parents forced me and my siblings to watch the Democratic and Republican conventions, and then the nightly news coverage. Once I returned to elementary school in September, someone decided it was a good idea for everyone to gather in the cafeteria and watch more election coverage. I sat there thinking, I had to watch this all summer. Can’t I just get a break? My unending boredom was aggravated by my disinterest in candidates Michael Dukakis and George H.W. Bush. And I couldn’t even vote!

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

“There are two types of bayonet fighters, the quick and the dead. Which type are you?” This is what a boot camp drill sergeant yells at new recruits, who then reply in unison – “the quick!” During any war, a soldier’s survival depends on this “kill or be killed” mentality. But killing the enemy, even for soldiers who deeply believe in the cause, is not easy. Some soldiers decide they must put down their weapons – even if that means being court-marshaled and imprisoned.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

If you could know that you were at risk for a terminal illness, would you want to know? And then what would you do next if the news confirmed your worst fears? At the tender age of 27, Joanna Rudnick faced this very conundrum when she tested positive for the BRCA genetic mutation. Her chances of developing breast cancer subsequently went from about 11 to 12 percent to a devastating 80 to 90 percent, and her chances of developing ovarian cancer shot from about 1 to 1.5 percent to 50 to 60 percent.

Rudnick, a scientific journalist, chronicles her struggle as she comes to terms with her altered gene and her uncertain future in the very personal documentary In the Family. The film is currently playing on PBS as part of the Point of View series.

by Imelda V. Abaño
- Philippines -

Back in September 2005, the now infamous Danish cartoon of the prophet Muhammad became a worldwide controversy. It was reprinted in newspapers in several countries and led to widespread Muslim protests and violence.

Now the book, The Jewel of Medina, a semi-fictional novel written by American journalist Sherry Jones about the youngest wife of Muhammad, has also led to a firestorm of controversy for its portrayal of the prophet. Many say it could incite similar acts of violence from radical Muslims.

The initial response to the advance edition of Jones’ book was explosive. It was dropped by her publisher Random House because of the anticipated backlash from the Muslim community even though it had paid her a US$100,000 advance. It was also pulled from bookshops in Serbia last August after pressure from Islamic groups.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

No, this is not a parody of the 1990 Johnny Depp film Edward Scissorhands. This is Pearl Fryar’s life – and the engaging subject of the new documentary, A Man Named Pearl. For 78 minutes directors/producers Scott Galloway and Brent Pierson lovingly capture Fryar’s spirit and artistry as a self-taught topiary artist who has overcome a lifetime of bigotry to become internationally respected. The film is currently in theatres and will be released on DVD in December.

In 1976 Fryar and his wife Metra moved to Bishopville, South Carolina. As the son of a North Carolina sharecropper, Fryar was no stranger to racism; when the Fryars attempted to buy a home in a predominantly white neighborhood, they were told they weren’t welcome because “Black people don’t keep up their yards.”

by Jennifer Fenton
- USA -

"We have an entire generation of people in their twenties and thirties who have never gone through a war…the media and government have gotten so good at the creation of messages, people don't know the reality" - Casey J. Porter

Army Sergeant Casey J. Porter has many battles to fight, and unlike the dramatizations of politicians and media commentators, his battles are concrete, real, and hard fought. During his time as an enlisted soldier deployed in Iraq, Casey has undergone an evolutionary process, one that has taken him from warrior to peace activist. His talent and passion for filmmaking have given him the perfect medium for his personal expression. Utilizing his current circumstances and natural talent as a filmmaker to speak out against the war, Casey's films have turned the heads of people like Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! and filmmaker Michael Moore.

by Blaire Dessent
- France -

When the family of Ramon Avalos, a blind and mentally disabled man in his 50s, received a check from Center for Creative Growth for a few hundred dollars from the sales of his artwork, they sent the check back thinking it was a mistake. Founded in the mid-1970s in Oakland, California, The Center for Creative Growth (CCG) is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing those with mental, physical and emotional disabilities a place to make artwork. Avalos had been working at the Center for years and was known for his colored pencil on paper abstracts.

by Vera von Kreutzbruck
- Germany -

Even before Elite Squad was released commercially in October 2007, the hugely popular film about police violence and corruption in Rio de Janeiro was already a major success in Brazil. Eleven million Brazilians saw the film on pirated copies and almost 3 million spectators were drawn to the theatres. It will be released this month in the United States.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

There will always be those who yearn for a simpler time, a time before the world was consumed by the internet and ever-advancing technologies. For the 54 million people living with disabilities in the United States, assistive technology can transform their lives, making it possible to fully participate in the able-bodied world – if they are able to afford it. The documentary Freedom Machines profiles people living with physical disabilities and the miraculous technologies that hold the key to their futures. The film, by Jamie Stobie and Janet Cole, will be broadcast on PBS September 9th as part of the Point of View series.

by Lijia Zhang
- China

Sundown left a trail of blood-red clouds in the western sky, yet evening offered no respite from the burning heat. With the plum rain season at an end Nanjing renewed its reputation as one of China’s four furnace cities, the temperature soaring over 40 degrees, or so we all believed – the government reported only 38 or 39. Yes, even the temperature was dictated by the authorities. Once it officially exceeded 37 degrees one working hour would be cut from the day. If it topped 40, all could go home.

The loudspeakers spitting propaganda and stirring tales of model workers were all the more unbearable in such heat. But I was riding away from them.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

In the not so distant past, the idea of reducing, reusing, and recycling seemed idealistic, even if it just meant putting a glass bottle in a recycling container instead of the trash. But a wave of environmentalism has swept the United States, and now recycling a soda can is practically a given. To truly be “green” you must buy the latest environmentally friendly technology, watch green television channels, drive a hybrid, and live in a multimillion dollar home constructed exclusively with green products. If this lifestyle is going to save us, it’s sadly out of reach for most people.

by Lijia Zhang
- China -

Since the reform and opening up, a handful of young people have begun to worship capitalism,” preached political instructor Wang Aimin, the ideologue-in-chief of our unit, spittle flying over his notes and out into the audience. His cold eyes blinked in- voluntarily, lending a sinister look that belied his given name, Aimin – Love the People.

“Unable to distinguish between fragrant flowers and poisonous weeds, these young people pick up capitalist trash like the ‘trumpet trousers’ and rotten music,” Wang spat. “We must resolutely defend the ‘four cardinal principles’ of socialism!”“

by Lijia Zhang
- China -

CLICK, CLACK, CLICK, CLACK ... When the percussive tap sounded from the corridor outside I was instantly alert. Soon, the source arrived in the doorway and walked into the workshop.

“Masters, have you all eaten?” Little Zhi, a colleague who tested electric gauges in another room along the corridor offered the common greeting in China – one which required no answer. A giant by local standards at 1.86 metres tall, his eyes were long and thin; the sparse moustache on his young face as out of place as legs painted on a snake. He settled cross-legged in a chair, one foot in the air showing off his shining leather shoes with half-moon metal plates on the soles – the source of the tapping. They were considered attractive – not everyone could afford leather footwear. As the only son of the most senior deputy director of the factory, and, perhaps more importantly, the newly found nephew of a man living in Taiwan, Zhi could afford certain luxuries.

by Lijia Zhang
- China -

The end of 1980 saw the dawn of reform but also roaring unemployment. To address the problem, the government introduced a temporary policy, allowing young people to take over their parents’ positions. My mother, aged only 43, having pickled machine parts in acid most of her working life, decided to take advantage and retire, worried I might never land such a good job. Chenguang Machinery Manufacture in Nanjing, with its army of 10,000 workers, was among the largest and most prestigious enterprises in China, churning out civilian as well as military supplies, including the country’s “fist product” – missiles.

From free nurseries to cremation, with countless bowls of rice in between, the life of a state employee provided cradle-to-grave security. Workers were hailed as “big brothers”, “the masters of the nation”.

by Mridu Khullar
- India -

• Tibetan writers are using literature and new languages, Chinese and English, to share information about Tibet's struggle for freedom with a wider audience.
Photograph by Sirensongs. •

Their language of choice—Tibetan, English, and surprisingly, now even Mandarin.

“Although the exile Tibetan community [in India] has been very effective in providing a high level of cultural production in religious areas, it is inside Tibet that Tibetan intellectuals and artists have been able to make achievements in secular culture, such as poetry, literature, music, painting, and some forms of scholarship, despite the difficulties they face,” says Dr. Robert Barnett, Director of Modern Tibetan Studies at Columbia University and author of Lhasa: Streets with Memories.

The writings of these poets and essayists have transformed over the past decade from musings about an exotic culture and history, to more real issues of human rights, political policies, and memoirs of people loved and lost. The Tibetan writers of today, regardless of their genre, seem to write with an agenda: to spread the word about the declining situation of the Tibetan freedom movement to readers both inside and out of China.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

Neil Young does not mince words. During his Freedom of Speech 2006 tour with on-again-off-again band mates David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, the group energetically performed Young’s new songs titled, “Let’s Impeach the President” and “Lookin’ for a Leader.” But the responses to CSNY’s new songs haven’t all been positive; one woman walked out of the group’s Atlanta concert saying, “Neil Young can stick it up his ass.”

Music, politics, and controversy are all part of the powerful new documentary CSNY Déjà Vu. The film – directed by Young under his filmmaking moniker, Bernard Shakey, and currently playing at theaters nationwide – follows the “four balding hippie millionaires” (as one concert review described the aging rockers) while they tour country with their anti-war message.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

Paying upwards of $10 USD to see a movie about economics, particularly in these increasingly desperate financial times, hardly seems like a prudent decision – much less a pleasurable way to spend a Sunday afternoon. But if you’re willing to shell out the cash to see the new documentary I.O.U.S.A., which opens in theatres this August, you may be surprised at just how enjoyable and educational a film about America’s economy can be.

The federal debt seems too incredible a sum to even fully grasp; an easier way to understand such an enormous figure is that if the debt was equally divided among the country’s population, each American would owe over $30,000.

If you have no idea or don’t even care that this debt exists, I.O.U.S.A. makes you want to learn. The film’s complex premise and daunting numbers are made more accessible by the use of colorful graphs and illustrations. Creadon effectively contrasts what average people think (or think they know) against experts’ analysis, which keeps the film from being too weighed down by statistics and theories. The film’s tone can be summed up by student activist Mike Tully who yells at passersby in one scene: “Would you like to go on a date with me? No! Would you like to learn about the debt? Yes!”

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

On 8-8-08 when the Beijing Summer Olympics begins, the world will see that the Maoist doctrine of the Cultural Revolution has been replaced by capitalism and McDonald’s – all in the name of progress. This modern China bears a striking resemblance to the West it once condemned. But what will not be proudly displayed in shiny new shopping malls is the reality that modernization comes at the displacement of millions of people who must abandon the only way of life they know and join a new China.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

Every Sunday afternoon my college journalism advisor, who everyone lovingly called “Coach,” would meet with the newspaper staff and critique the past week’s articles. As a portly middle-aged man who had won numerous awards for his work at a major newspaper, Coach would often encourage us to cover our stories with a “Gonzo” approach. The concept of participatory journalism seemed feasible, but drinking a bottle of bourbon while driving around Las Vegas in a Cadillac convertible with a trunk full of drugs didn’t really seem conducive to writing articles about our school’s basketball team.

by Sara Terry
- USA -

It all goes back, I think, to the day I was standing in a mass grave, hating the fact that I was there, balanced precariously on a mound of bones, camera reluctantly in hand. I’d been asked to make a photo of a partly-preserved pair of hands, the remains of a teenage boy who along with thousands of other Bosnian Muslim men and boys had been murdered by Bosnian Serb forces seven years earlier during the Srebrenica massacre.

• Forensic anthropologists Ewa Klonowski (right) and Piotr Drukier examine the partially preserved hands of a teenage boy, found in a mass grave of victims of the 1995 massacre of some 7,000 to 8,000 Muslim men and boys at the hands of Serb forces who overran the U.N. "safe haven" of Srebrenica. The grave, which contained more than 150 intact bodies and some 350 partial remains, was one of the largest mass graves uncovered in Bosnia since the end of the war. Photograph © Sara Terry. •

by Emily Rose Herzlin
- USA -

“Theatre is ephemeral,” proclaims Geoffrey Decas as he waxes philosophic and waters the plants on his terrace in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Cars whiz by on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway as the smell of marinated tofu wafts into the apartment from the grill on the terrace. “I’m a vegetarian so I get to decide what people eat,” Geoffrey says mischievously. “Which means the rest of us have to eat vegetarian since he’s cooking,” chimes in TJ Witham.

• CollaborationTown charts new theatrical territory with their unique philosophy on art-making. CollaborationTown's website design by Derek Rippe. •

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

American slave trading is a human rights atrocity forever associated with the Confederacy of the Southern United States. Northerners are stereotypically portrayed as benevolent abolitionists fighting the South’s slave labor plantations. But history is rarely that cut and dried.

by Cathy Oerter
- USA -

I ran through the Iowa countryside, young and carefree, unaware of the life I had been richly blessed with. It was just me and the breeze and the green methodical cornfields. The gravel roads, loose with sand and oversized rocks, could easily sprain an ankle yet were gladly accepted in lieu of a track that did not exist. Small towns in Iowa could not afford that luxury and I knew I wanted to run. The gravel became my path into another world.

• Al Oerter at the 1960 Olympic Trials in California. •

Al was tall and muscular and boyishly handsome; he was a gentle giant. No loud bravado, just a common man who had unusually large muscles and monstrous hands that made mine disappear completely in their grasp.

by Sarah Wyatt
- USA -

Years of hardship and backbreaking labor in the riot-stricken slums of Kibera in south Kenya have worn 18 year old Eshe Koome to the bone. A single mother of two, she walked out on her abusive husband and survived for two years as a daily wage laborer, loading vegetables and other goods for sale.

• Eshe is now able to earn a living wage at Kazuri. Photograph by Sarah Wyatt. •

Eshe's story captures in a nutshell how a group of formerly indigent, urban women operates a business for themselves. The Kazuri Bead Factory, located in the Nairobi suburb of Karen, is unique in that it is Kenya’s first visitors’ attraction of its kind, created for and by women. Founded by Lady Susan Wood in 1975, the company is known for its beautiful, hand-painted beads made from the authentic clay from the Mt. Kenya area. Kazuri (Swahili for “small and beautiful”), also produces a number of other goods popular with tourists including pottery, hand-beaded sandals and purses. The beads are often featured on three-dimensional art cards and can also be found in shadowboxes.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

What makes The Linguists so entertaining are the stars’ contagious love of linguistics; between them they speak over 25 languages and have devoted their professional lives to traveling around the world – on screen they venture to Siberia, India, and Bolivia – documenting obscure languages on the verge of extinction. Their work is exciting because Harrison and Anderson are up against the clock: currently there over 7,000 languages spoken around the world, but one is disappearing every two weeks.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

Revealing the ending of a film is downright mean, but it’s obvious that Oscar-nominated director Morgan Spurlock does not find Osama Bin Laden in his latest documentary film Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?. Spurlock’s claim to fame is having exclusively eaten McDonald's for 30 days in his hit 2004 documentary Super Size Me, so I didn’t initially want to run to the theater when I heard he had made a documentary featuring him trekking around the Middle East on a fruitless search for Osama Bin Laden – despite the clever promotional milk carton with Bin Laden’s missing person photo on it that I received at the Sundance Film Festival. (Quite frankly, at that moment I was more interested in the chocolate inside the milk carton.)

But after seeing the documentary, I have to admit that I enjoyed it, simplistic though it may be. The appeal of the film, which is an inevitable hit now that it’s screening at theaters everywhere, is Spurlock’s style: he’s more of a goofy explorer on a madcap adventure than an award-winning foreign correspondent. Within the first few minutes, the film has a musical number with Osama Bin Laden and his followers dancing to MC Hammer’s early 1990’s hit “U Can’t Touch This.”

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

The experiences and emotions of young American girls are much more complicated, and even tragic, than most people, particularly men, would assume. Girls as young as eight are regularly confronting low self-esteem, eating disorders, broken families, peer rejection, drug addiction, and the eternal search of finding their place in an unforgiving world. But every summer girls from 8 to 18 find a reprieve from their daily struggles for one week at a truly original venue: Rock 'n’ Roll Camp for Girls!

by Vera von Kreutzbruck
- Germany -

Andrzej Wajda was 13 years old when World War II broke out. Together with his mother he lived most of his life in the vain hope that his father might have survived the war: his father’s name had never appeared on any official list of Polish soldiers killed in combat. The truth, discovered years later, was that Captain Wajda had been shot cold-bloodedly by the Soviet secret police in a prison in the western Soviet Union. Andrzej and around 22,000 other people had waited for their loved ones in vain.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

“Rape has always been used as a weapon of war” is the opening line of the new documentary film The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo. For 76 minutes the film exposes the incredibly brutal civil war that has raged for over ten years in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Not only have over four million people been killed, but over 250,000 women and girls have been raped, kidnapped, and tortured.

by Nancy Van Ness
- USA -

In a heap on the studio floor as though they had collapsed under some disaster, fallen birds present a scene of despair. I am drawn toward them. They are a very powerful artistic reinterpretation of the Japanese tradition of the thousand cranes that people traditionally make from beautiful origami paper as signs of hope (most recently that would be hope for peace).

A closer look reveals that the defeated origami cranes are made from newspaper accounts of war, violence, cruelty; indeed these birds have succumbed under the weight of the torment and anguish of needless human suffering all over the world. I found them when I visited another studio at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, Nebraska, where I was briefly in residence.

by Molly Nance
- USA -

I'm not usually one to arrive to a press event 30 minutes early, but recently I woke up in time to drive two hours north from Monterey to San Francisco, to arrive promptly at the Legion of Honor, for the first time. The view from this hilltop setting - a bright blue San Francisco Bay framed by the Golden Gate Bridge - took my breath away at that early morning hour.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

- March 8th - Today we celebrate International Women's Day with our sisters and mothers, aunts and grandmothers, cousins and daughters, and most of all, with our writers, who have become family. On this important day, we find it appropriate that Jessica's review is of a film about a group of remarkable women in Argentina who found their voices and by doing so transformed themselves from victims into successful entrepreneurs. The women of Brukman are yet further proof that women who empower themselves cannot be stopped. - Ed.


Christmas should be a happy time for families to congregate over lengthy meals while watching little kids open presents, but in 2001 Argentina’s economy collapsed a week before the holiday. Almost immediately factories shut down, business owners fled the country, and low-paid workers were out of their jobs just when everyone needed a little extra money. Yuletide joy was harder to find than a job. However the amazing women featured in the documentary film The Women of Brukman didn’t let the crumbling economy destroy their livelihoods, their spirit, or their Christmas.

• Delicia works the presses, perfectly ironing every piece of clothing that leaves the Brukman factory. Photograph by Gunes-Helene Isitan. •

One day in late 2001, the workers of the Brukman garment factory arrived for their shifts, only to find that the factory’s owners had fled the country – neglecting to pay anyone! The predominately female workforce decided to go about their jobs just like it was any other day; no one had any extra money and, with the recent economic collapse, few employment opportunities elsewhere. Everyone assumed that the Brukman family would eventually return to Buenos Aires and want the factory back.

by Vera von Kreutzbruck
- Germany -

This year’s 58th International Film Festival in Berlin is offering a heterogeneous mix of topics and genres with many documentaries, a lot of pathos, a few lost souls, war and violence, politics as usual, and last but not least, some comedy.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

Forty years of unending gang violence between rival gangs, the Bloods and Crips, has killed over 15,000 people in South Central Los Angeles. It seems counterintuitive that one of the most dangerous places in the United States is so close to one of the most famous places on earth; the sunny palm tree lined streets of Hollywood seem worlds away from the dangerous and economically depressed streets of South Central LA. But the sad reality is that children are regularly gunned-down while walking to school at 10 a.m. a mere twenty-five miles from Disneyland.

• Playboy Gangstas Crip, Nikko De. Photo courtesy of the filmmakers. •

The film’s director Stacy Peralta is no stranger to the rough side of Southern California; his rise to fame as skateboarder who revolutionized the sport on the seedy sidewalks of Venice Beach in the 1970s is chronicled in the documentary film Dogtown and Z-Boys (which he also directed) and in the feature film The Lords of Dogtown. Besides Peralta, this film has an extraordinary amount of star power behind it, especially for a documentary: actor Forest Whitaker narrates and NBA star Baron Davis, who was raised by his grandmother in South Central LA, financed and produced the film.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

If you want to see interesting independent films and the movie stars in them, the Sundance film festival, held in the picturesque ski town of Park City, Utah, is the place to go. The annual festival attracts movie stars, independent filmmakers, studio executives, journalists, and people who love movies. Sundance has gained a reputation as the premier American film festival for independent feature films and documentaries. Although the festival itself has an air of exclusivity, to me and most people who care about film, the independent films shown represent film at its best: a medium that transcends boundaries and moves people to a greater understanding of humanity, even if the world they’re watching is completely foreign to them.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

When thinking of Afghanistan, it is difficult not to be overwhelmed by despair. Violence claimed over 6,000 lives in 2007 alone. The quality of life for women continues to decline as a result of continuing violence and the country’s shattered infrastructure. Good news about Afghanistan rarely makes the nightly news. However, after watching the documentary The Beauty Academy of Kabul, which is widely available on DVD, I felt more hopeful about the future of Afghan women, because the film depicts a possible alternative to the oppression and poverty that characterize most women’s lives there.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

Including the word “orgasm” in the title of your documentary film is a bold move. After seeing the film Passion and Power: Technology of Orgasm at the Mill Valley Film Festival, I wanted to talk to the equally bold women behind the film: Bay area filmmakers Wendy Slick and Emiko Omori. During our interview, Slick provided greater insight into the creative process of an independent documentary filmmaker who chooses to focus on women’s social and political freedoms as viewed through sexuality.

• Co-producer and co-director Wendy Slick •

by Anna Clark
- USA -

There comes a time when a reader is starved for something new.

A lot of tremendous fiction is being published these days, but most people don’t ever hear about it. In a time when big publishers pay to place their titles on the front tables of bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders, when book reviews are slashed in most periodicals, when smaller publishers simply don’t have the cash to send their brightest talents out on book tours—then the avid reader tends to hear about the same authors over and over again, while work they might fall in love with slips through the cracks.

I love Cynthia Reeves’ new book, Badlands, winner of the 2006 Miami University Press Novella Contest. Being the work of a debut author and published by a small publisher, I might not have heard of it if I hadn’t attended graduate school with Reeves. The two of us entered the fiction program at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina in 2004. Reeves worked on this book as a student, which meant that I was lucky enough to see the beginnings of Badlands. I was drawn to her creative sensibility; her story tells itself not in the traditional “first this, then that” chronology of mainstream fiction. Rather, her characters are developed through the juxtaposition of their dreams and memories with their present lives.

by Nalini Jones
- USA -

Tomorrow evening, I fly to India. My bag is mostly packed and is a source of consternation to my dog, a sensitive soul who fears imminent departure. For me it is a sort of icon, a reminder of dozens of other trips to see my family in India. I remember the care with which my mother packed, the strong sense that every available space must be used. We were trafficking in whatever was rare or difficult for our family to find, from our own school pictures to electronics, from the sort of nightgown my grandmother favored to the peanut butter we American kids liked to eat, even on our chapatis.

by Hayward Hawks Marcus
- USA -

For years, many people have painted Yoko Ono as the cold and controlling monster who broke up the Beatles, ran John Lennon’s life, and probably made the pop legend unhappy, even if he himself wasn’t aware of it. Allen Tannenbaum’s new book, a collection of photographs he took of the iconic couple, defies this persistent myth. Springing from many of Tannenbaum’s photos is undeniable visual evidence of John and Yoko truly relating to one another, in a deeply heartfelt and human way not often seen in photos of the famous. One cannot dispute the affection for each other lighting John and Yoko’s eyes when caught by Tannenbaum’s lens. In a starstruck world, where pretty celebs are often seen hanging on each other’s arms like sparkly but soulless Tiffany baubles, images such as these are both rare and refreshing.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

“Free Tibet” has become part of our lexicon due to countless bumper stickers adorning Volvos and fundraisers featuring Richard Gere. Despite the feminist persuasion of many Tibetan supporters, women in Tibet, particularly nuns, are rarely the focus of the movement. After seeing the film Daughters of Wisdom, which is currently on the film festival circuit, I was so inspired by Tibetan nuns and their spunk that I wondered why the “Free Tibet” movement doesn’t focus more on these incredible women.

• Ochi Drolma has been a nun since the age of 14 and is one of Kala Rongo’s founders who helped build its first temple structure. Photograph courtesy of BTG Productions. •

In Tibet, a man who devotes his life to religion is considered a source of pride for his family, but women are not encouraged to join a monastery, even if this is their only access to an education; rather, nuns are considered a burden to their families since they cannot help farm, will not have children who will help farm, nor can they be married off in exchange for livestock. The Kala Rongo Monastery is the only place in Tibet exclusively for nuns, many of whom join the monastery when they are children, to live freely amongst other women.

by Nancy Van Ness
- USA -

I cross 42nd Street and walk up Times Square. It is a cold, windy, rainy day but I had promised to come. I continue past the army recruiting center and the police headquarters; police are out in force. I notice the New York Times building on the east side of the Square at 43rd. The huge Clear Channel signs, some of the most prominent of those that are bright day and night cast a glow that makes the square seem like daytime 24 hours a day while flashing images. Across the way are the Disney buildings and Reuters. I walk over to the Broadway side of the Square, go up to 44th and then to Shubert Alley and over to 45th, giving high fives and thumbs up to striking stage hands as they parade up and down between police barriers in front of the theaters.

• In the city that never sleeps, Time Square glows brightly just steps away from Broadway's theaters and striking stagehands. Photograph by
Nancy Van Ness. •

I head to a theater where, ironically, the show is about RCA’s theft of the rights to the invention of television from its inventor. It is never comfortable or convenient to man the picket lines and today is really nasty, but I had told the stage hands there I would be back today, so here I am.

I have come to see if I can get a true picture of what is going on. The endless media reports about the family from Seattle or somewhere else who had come to see The Grinch and how disappointed the children were because the stage hands had shut the show down had become intolerable to me.

by Jessica Mosby
USA

The story of a young and adrift guy finding his way in a confusing world has been done – too many times. Though I usually would not go see a film about this sort of fellow, I found myself intently watching a film about just that at the Mill Valley Film Festival. In part it was the name that intrigued me, Four Sheets to the Wind, but what really inspired me to attend the screening was when I read that it was a film about Seminole-Creek Indians by a Seminole-Creek Indian. A niche market if there ever was one.

• Cufe (Cody Lightning) and Cora Smallhill (Jeri Arredondo). Photograph by Chuck Foxen. •

by Jessica Mosby
USA

• Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis become the kings of corn in their new documentary by exploring the factors that have led to America's obesity epidemic. Photograph by Sam Cullman, courtesy of Mosaic Films Incorporated. •

After watching the documentary King Corn, which is currently playing in select cities, I was shocked to learn that corn is indeed wreaking havoc on America’s health. Gone are the days of idyllic Midwestern family farms growing tasty organic vegetables. Today large corporate farms grow genetically-modified corn that is later used to create the real criminal: high-fructose corn syrup.

by Jessica Mosby
USA

When you think of Afghanistan, smiling women in shift dresses attending college is not the first image that comes to mind. Decades of violence has devastated the country, leaving little more than bomb craters, crumbling buildings, families struggling to rebuild shattered lives and oppressed women who suffered at the hands of the Taliban. After watching years of newsreels depicting the country in such extreme peril, I cannot envision any other Afghanistan.

• Image courtesy of
Tora Bora Pictures •

In the summer of 2004, Wazhmah went to Afghanistan with her friend and camerawoman Kelly Dolak to make a documentary film about the modern-day situation in Afghanistan. It was Kelly’s first international trip. After filming for three months in a country Wazhmah hardly recognized, the filmmakers had more than enough footage for the serious, issue-focused documentary they planned to make. But in the editing room something happened: they realized that the real story their documentary needed to tell was Wazhmah’s - specifically the physical and emotional process of returning to and connecting with her homeland after more than 20 years of living in the United States.

by Jessica Mosby
USA

100 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa will have been infected with HIV/AIDS by the year 2010. Another 26 million children will be orphaned by the virus. The idea that two ordinary people could affect, much less save, the lives of hundreds of children dying of HIV/AIDS in Africa seems naively idealistic. For many of us, myself included, our main contribution to the epidemic in Africa is buying a Red iPod.

• Image courtesy of
Dream Out Loud Films •

What really resonates is the ability of the children, even those that are HIV-positive, to still have hope while living in a country that isn’t exactly blazing any trails in its response to the virus. There are countless scenes of kids dancing, singing, chasing chickens, and having fun. The Cloetes have not only built a safe haven for children to live, they have created a future for hundreds of children that would otherwise be dead or living in extreme poverty.

by Nancy Van Ness
USA

Forty Years Ago - I was flying. The other dancers and I, in lines, executed jumps across the studio, immediately turning and coming back - jumping over and over again - propelled by music from a pianist skilled at marking the rhythm for dancers. Though one of my feet touched the floor briefly at regular intervals, my consciousness was only of my soaring body. The physical work was very vigorous, but in that moment, it seemed effortless.

• Van Ness (right) performing. Photograph courtesy of American Creative Dance. •

•

That was exactly four decades ago, but that exhilarating experience and moment of encouragement from my teacher have sustained me many times in my life as an artist. When the money runs out, when I don't know where the next opportunity or the next gig is coming from, when I am looking for support for the company I founded and don't know what will happen, when life seems tenuous and precarious, I will suddenly find myself back in that light filled studio with the piano pounding - defying gravity - easily, joyously flying. Remembering that time, I know that no matter what, I must keep going. I also know that the art I make is good and that it is the most important thing in my life.

by Jessica Mosby
USA

In an admirable effort to contribute to the dialogue on what to do to save the planet, Leonardo DiCaprio has recently released a documentary film, The 11th Hour, which he produced and narrates. However, if you are already feeling overwhelmed by the world’s problems and suffering, you probably shouldn’t see it. It might push you over the proverbial edge as surely as if you were a polar bear slipping unexpectedly off a melting glacier!

• Image courtesy of Warner Independent Pictures •

One problem is The 11th Hour’s narrative structure, or lack thereof: it is painfully short on the pizzazz needed to take environmentalism from the grassroots of individual action to an international movement. Instead, one expert pops up briefly on the screen (name, title, and credentials are dutifully noted) to lecture for a few minutes while seated in front of a black wall, then the film cuts to the next expert, and then the next. Occasionally the monotony of “expert” footage is broken up by cutting to montages of very basic news reels set to a musical score; at other times, digitally drawn diagrams appear, imposed next to an expert’s head to illustrate their points.

by Michelle Chen
USA

• Detail of mural co-painted by the author. Photograph by Michelle Chen. •

A smile blooms on the round face of a middle-aged man as his home begins to glow. For the past three days, he has watched volunteers, including me, spread paint over the front wall, washing the drab cement slab in a torrent of rainbow stripes and geometric shapes.

We work and sweat contentedly, surrounded by children who color in purple bubbles alongside us and never tire of crying, ‘What’s your name?’ in English. The wall fills up: a lone crude window is subsumed in a human-sized purple triangle, and paralleled on the right by a pink triangle containing an imaginary window, which looks out on a landscape that one of the inhabitants instructively scribbled for us on paper. As I put the last dots of color on a scene of a pink sailboat drifting before a forest with snow-capped mountains, the man offers a gentle suggestion.

by Jessica Mosby
USA

• Image courtesy of IFC •

The documentary film, The Devil Came on Horseback, which is currently playing across the United States, spends 85 minutes answering that very question. The film is pure humanitarian propaganda: a call-to-action to stop the killing and displacement of innocent people.

by Sarah McGowan
Features & Photo Editor, The WIP
- USA -

Recently relocated to Los Angeles, artists Kim Strouse and Joseph Michael Lopez are no strangers to the often aggressive nature of both “big city” life and life itself.

• Artists Kim Strouse
and Joseph Michael Lopez •

Vera von Kreutzbruck
Germany

• Emigrants preparing to depart from Hamburg. Photograph courtesy of Bildarchiv Denkmalschutzamt Hamburg •

The vast majority of them embarked from BallinStadt, a development conceived as a unique full-service departure point for emigrants. Encompassing 30 buildings, BallinStadt was so big that it was almost a small self-contained city itself, tucked within the bigger port of Hamburg. This innovative idea, perfectly suited to the times, originated with Alfred Ballin, general manager of the German shipping company HAPAG (Hamburg-Amerikanische Packetfahrt-Actien-Gesellschaft). What is left of BallinStadt is now located in the Veddel neighborhood of the Hamburg suburbs.

by Nancy Van Ness
USA

As director of a performing ensemble, one of the joys of my life is to support other artists and witness their work. There is nothing more satisfying than watching my young colleague Lena Gilbert unravel the knots of a creative problem.

• Anne Folke Wells and Lena Gilbert. Photograph courtesy of American Creative Dance. •

In sharp contrast, it breaks my heart to see talented people who could be artists fail to do their work because they aren’t confident enough of their own ability to create. Perhaps they have been taught to be too self-critical, as can happen, especially in academic circles. An emphasis on critical thinking can kill the drive to create freely. Sometimes I think the prevalence of university degrees in the arts hinders rather than helps in this matter! (However, I certainly don’t discount that aspiring artists without degrees also suffer inhibitions that hold them back.)

by Jessica Mosby
USA

• Image courtesy of Little Dust Productions •

Viewed as a music documentary, Gypsy Caravan is an invigorating film that shines a spotlight on the rich musical heritage of the Roma people. Organized by the World Music Institute, the film follows the six-week tour of the five Romani bands: Antonio el Pipa and his Flamenco Ensemble (Spain); Esma Redzepova and Ensemble Teodosievski (Macedonia); Maharaja (India); Fanfare Ciocarlia (Romania); and Taraf de Haïdouks (Romania). The most inspiring part of the film is seeing the performers interact on and off stage during the 18-show tour. Over the course of six weeks, people who don't all speak the same language; who live in different countries and socioeconomic classes; and who do not play music that would seemingly complement each other jam on stage and lovingly impersonate one another off stage! For musicians who have never played together before, the five bands have incredible synergy. In almost every group scene, someone is singing or playing an instrument. The bands literally jam their way through hotel rooms, airports, bus rides, cigarette breaks, and even a photo-op at Niagara Falls. One regret that most viewers of Gypsy Caravan will have is that they didn't get to see the tour live; while the documentary attempts to capture the energy, being there in person must have been an unparalleled experience!

by Constance Manika
- Zimbabwe -

Hopefully, readers may remember the piece I wrote for The WIP in May 2007 about prominent Zimbabwean playwright Cont Mhlanga, and the premiere of his most recent and controversial play yet, “The Good President.” The play had opened in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital and largest city, on April 12, to good crowds. While theatre buffs praised it as a highly entertaining play which was admirable for calling for the society to take the moral high ground, its plot certainly provoked serious debate.

To quote myself from the May article, the play kicks off with a scene in a police station where two police officers are assaulting the leader of an opposition party, acted by a look-alike of Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of Zimbabwe’s strongest opposition, Movement for Democratic Change.

In addition to beating him up, they search his pockets and steal all his money and leave him for dead. And it goes on from there.

by Nancy Van Ness
USA

• Van Ness in the film Tango Passion. Photo by Dick Brooks. •

Some people have said I don’t have the “perfect” body for a dancer. But others like the way I look. Either way, I don’t worry what people think of my body. In fact, I take issue with directors of dance companies and dance critics who discuss dancers’ bodies instead of their art. Even the highly respected Arlene Croce wrote unkindly about Gelsey Kirkland’s body. To me, that is not only a travesty, but it is what contributes to the eating disorders and self loathing so many dancers live with.

by D-L Nelson
France

France is a mecca for the large number of small-scale raw milk cheese producers that live and work in the region.

• Photograph by Jacob Rushing •

However, many cheeses from France never cross the Atlantic because they are made from raw milk and are then sold anywhere from the day of their fabrication to six weeks of age. This is the case with the majority of goat cheeses in Provence.
And yet, this great tradition of raw milk cheeses has come under attack as France seeks to comply with the new food regulations coming from Brussels and the European Union (EU).

by Rosemary Okello
Kenya

Walking through Mefa Creations, a local organization specializing in African designs and located along Ngong Road in Nairobi, you are greeted with bold African colors, local jewelry and clothing made from African fabrics.

• Evelyn Odongo with one of her designs. Photograph by Judy Waguma. •

Unlike before, when young people used to shun traditional African dress in favor of the latest western fashions, Kenyan youth are now embracing African design and culture with a renewed passion.

As she talks about her work and why she chose to focus on the African designs, Evelyn Odongo, who is the designer and the proprietor, says; “My designs appeal to the younger generation because they are blended with the latest trendy designs from the west. This makes the youth feel like they are still current with fashion and I find my designs also have an impact on their lifestyles too.”

From music to food and even fashion, young Kenyans are now concerned with looking like “real” Africans. Odongo says the younger generations now prefer natural hair, and at times in dreadlocks, with their African attire. They also accent their appearances with African beads, locally made slippers and bags. These young people seem to be experiencing a cultural renaissance sparked by fashion. They have even created their own langauge, called “sheng” – a combination of English, a bit of slang and Kiswahili.

by Daisy Tormé
USA/UK

Sunday the Concert for Diana was aired live on VH1 and yes, I found myself huddled in front of the TV watching the entire thing along with millions of other viewers. The concert was organized from the ground up by "the heir and the spare", Princes William and Harry, as a tribute to the life - rather than the death - of their late mother, Princess Diana, on what would have been her 46th birthday. (Thank you, VH1, for showing this live, un-edited and not chock full of commercials.)

by Pilirani Semu-Banda
Malawi

Over 65 percent of Malawi's 12 million people live below the poverty line

by María Suárez Toro
Costa Rica/Puerto Rico

In Costa Rica, a multidisciplinary group of women artists, scientists, activists and academics is producing a musical, Wings of the Butterfly.

• Ceramic artwork for "Wings of the Butterfly" by artist, Rebecca Fernández •

Among the women involved are microbiologist, Libia Herrera; anthropologist and environmentalist, Lorena Aguilar; singer and composer, Guadalupe Urbina; radio producer, Katerina Anfossi; historian, Anna Arroba; and scriptwriter, Roxana Campos, among others.

by Sarah Wyatt
USA

She was a socialite. Or was she awkward, gullible, clumsy?

View larger image
Broadway veteran, Patti Cohenour as Florence Foster Jenkins in Souvenir. Photo courtesy of the Seattle ACT Theatre

Will the real Florence Foster Jenkins please stand up?

Stephen Temperley’s Souvenir recently made its West Coast debut at the Seattle ACT Theatre. Broadway actress Patti Cohenour stars in this affectionate valentine to tin-eared opera soprano, Florence Foster Jenkins (1868–1944), a real-life New York socialite who stunned concert audiences in the 1930s and 1940s with her unassailable self-confidence and unique interpretations of the opera repertoire.

By Vera von Kreutzbruck
Germany

Ever since the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe was inaugurated in Berlin two years ago, it has become a major tourist attraction. The vast monument consists of a sprawling field of 2,700 stone slabs near the Brandenburg Gate and is dedicated to the millions of victims as a whole. Together, the slabs symbolize a collective loss. But it’s not the only memorial in the capital city. A daring German sculptor has implemented an original project to remember individual victims.

Photo courtesy of the artist - www.stolpersteine.com

The idea is both simple and original. These discrete yet provocative memorials are small brass plaques containing the personal details of victims of the Holocaust, embedded into the sidewalk in front of their former homes. About six million Jews were murdered in Germany and Europe, as well as political dissidents, homosexuals, gypsies and people with disabilities.

by Imelda V. Abaño
Phillippines

Body tattooing is one of the world's oldest art forms having been widely practiced for thousands of

Lagya Aturba remembers her mother who bore intricate tattoos all over her body.

In many cultures, tattoos were not just drawings on the skin - they were elaborately decorated testaments to the life of the culture. They often depicted men’s and women's status as warriors in society. They served as profound depictions of their cultural identity, emblems that embodied the story of their life experiences. And for some cultures, tattoos were simply a convenient way to identify and brand criminals.

But as tattooing has become less about tradition and more about fashion, people of all walks of life, especially young adults, are joining the ranks of the “inked”. Tattooing is no longer the exclusive tradition of indigenous peoples and many fear that this once unique practice is dying out.

by D-L Nelson
France

It is easy to talk about a problem; it is much harder to do anything about it.

Two Canadian women, tired of hearing about leadership crisis, decided to kick-start a national dialogue. Françoise Morissette M.Ed., P.C.C. and Amal Henein CHRP spent almost three years developing their book, Made in Canada Leadership: Wisdom from the Nation's Best and Brightest on the Art and Practice of Leadership.

All types of organizations and governments need a steady supply of people with real leadership skills to reach their goals and ensure a positive future. Waiting around for a knight in shining armour doesn’t cut it; the wringing of hands is a waste of time. Their book was researched and written to find and propose alternatives. In an interview, Morissette pointed out that the world spends more time and effort training athletes than they do training leaders.

by D-L Nelson
France

Geneva, Switzerland - “The chair is back,” Geneva residents are saying to each other.

The Broken Chair

The simple brown wooden chair would look good at any dining room table if it were of normal size and if it had four instead of three and a quarter legs. The fourth leg is broken off, leaving shards of jagged wood, yet the chair does not tip.

by Constance Manika
- Zimbabwe -

Zimbabwean theatre lovers have had something to talk about for the past two weeks. Cont Mhlanga's riveting new play, The Good President, premiered here in Harare, Zimbabwe, on April 12.

This politically charged satire, written and directed by Zimbabwe's most controversial playwright, summarizes the country’s 30 years against British colonial rule, focusing specifically on events leading to Zimbabwe's independence. It goes on to highlight what has happened in the 27 years since Zimbabwe gained independence from Britain in 1980. All in one tight hour of compelling action.

The play kicks off with a scene in a police station where two police officers are assaulting the leader of an opposition party, acted by a look-alike of Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of Zimbabwe’s strongest opposition, Movement for Democratic Change.

In addition to beating him up, they search his pockets and steal all his money and leave him for dead. One of the police officers, Wangu, who had been shown in a previous scene sadly telling his girlfriend that he had no money to meet her demands, is suddenly ready to finance all of her requests.

These events bounce back to haunt Wangu when his grandmother comes to the city for an eye treatment. In one of their many conversations, Wangu is told that his father, himself a former leader of the opposition, was murdered by state agents during the 1983 Gukurahundi, the civil war that erupted in Zimbabwe soon after independence between two ethnic groups—the Shona and the Ndebele.

by Sarah Wyatt
USA

Young playwright Sarah Ruhl continues to gain widespread recognition for her play, The Clean House. She is emerging as a powerful presence in the American performing arts. The acclaimed and affecting comedy by the MacArthur genius grant recipient explores four markedly different yet intimately connected women and their varied attitudes toward order and cleanliness.

Ruhl recounted in American Theatre, “I was at a party full of doctors. A doctor walked in and said, ‘It's been such a hard month. My cleaning lady from Brazil is depressed and I took her to the hospital and had her medicated, and she still won't clean. And in the meantime, I've been cleaning my house. And I'm sorry, but I didn't go to medical school to clean my own house.’ I was fascinated and horrified by the political and cultural implications of the speech, but also by how transparently the woman laid out her case. It became the first monologue in the play.”

by D-L Nelson
France

Sujatha Venkatesh sips Indian spiced tea in her Geneva, Switzerland countryside home as she talks about her real and creative journey from Bangalore, India, to becoming the maven of Indian classic and folk dance in Switzerland.

Sujatha Venkatesh in performance.

Although she sits restfully and nibbles on a chocolate-covered cookie, when she talks about her childhood, it is clear why and how she has the work ethic she does, why she gets more done in a day then most people do in a week.

She was the middle child between an older brother and younger sister. Her father was an engineer in charge of a machine tool company. “He wasn’t a typical Indian father,” she says. “He helped with the children, probably an idea he picked up in his many travels.”

Her mother would not allow idleness. Time was for learning, crafts and cooking. “We kept fingers, eyes, feet and voices active,” Sujatha says. The family was up at 5:30 in the morning for yoga, something her father continues at age 80...except it is even earlier.

by Anna Clark
USA

Green consciousness is finally hitting that bastion of carbon emissions with a war-inducing appetite for oil: the American automobile.

Between the nationwide Step It Up campaign of community activism and Al Gore’s Academy-Award winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, the clamor for global warming action is forcing U.S. automakers to respond. And they are—if a bit begrudgingly.

Hybrid and fuel-efficient cars are hot; GM’s gone so far as to design a plug-in concept car that may never need gasoline. Tellingly, Detroit’s road-maintenance and salt trucks run on biodiesel. With the U.S. Supreme Court ruling earlier this month that gives the Environmental Protection Agency authority to regulate fuel efficiency—expressly because global warming is a “serious threat”—we might expect a green ethic to become more inherent to American cars.

It marks a significant change for an industry built on the premise of wastefulness. Giles Slade’s illuminating book, Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America, points to Detroit automakers for popularizing the corporate strategy that justifies the nation’s overproduction of goods by creating wants and needs in consumers.

by Hayward Hawks Marcus
USA

Guerrilla Girls: Protesting the Art World With a Primate Punch—Part I

So, after just a little investigation, it seems it’s still mostly a white-man’s art world. Ever the optimist, I wanted to leave with a vision of how this sorry state might change. I ask Guerrilla Girl Frida Kahlo if she thinks the internet might help open some doors for underrepresented artists.

“I certainly hope so,” she replies. “For example, the major art magazines have become trade journals filled with advertising. You can’t tell the adverts from the articles––you can’t even find the articles––and you wonder, doesn’t that compromise the discourse? Whereas the online art mags aren’t that dependent on advertising––I hope. [The internet] is quicker, faster, cheaper and it travels around the world, so let’s hope that it would change it. The internet does break down this idea that art is this single object that can only exist in one place at one time, and that it’s currency that can be traded only among wealthy people. The internet is really redefining media in general. I was wondering how we could create a counter-culture with media the way it was, all being controlled by a small group of people all wanting the same market share. I don’t know if it will change the art world, but I’m hopeful it will create an alternative.”

by Hayward Hawks Marcus
USA

Who could have predicted that I would one day interview artist Frida Kahlo? Not via Ouija board, mind you, but by telephone. And while I didn’t ask, I doubt she was wearing her gorilla mask.

Before anyone asks, this Frida Kahlo is a founding member of the Guerilla Girls, New York City’s female, gorilla-masked, artist avengers, who lead a perpetual battle for parity within the world of High Art.

Forming in 1985 to protest an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, where the number of male to female artists ran 148 to 17, the Guerrilla Girls referred to themselves as “The Conscience of the Art World.” With pseudonyms of deceased female artists, they cloaked their identities inside gorilla masks to keep the public focused on their actions, not their personalities, to protect their own art careers, and, I suppose, to give their appearance the same humorous slant as their work.

by Sarah Wyatt
USA

In 2003, Palestinian activists mourned the passing of an American, a woman whose brilliance returns to life in My Name is Rachel Corrie.

The production is based on the writings of Rachel Corrie, the 23 year-old woman who was killed on March 16, 2003 by an Israeli Army bulldozer while she was protesting against the demolition of Palestinian civilian homes. This compelling story of a personal journey is told through Corrie’s own words from her journals, as assembled by British actor Alan Rickman, who also directed the London and New York productions, and journalist Katharine Viner.

The witty and poignant drama follows Corrie's rise from her middle-class upbringing in Olympia, Washington, to becoming an activist forever remembered. Ensconced in her beloved college apartment, the play opens with Corrie reflecting on the dizzying heights and emotional lows of her childhood, on her adventures as a college peace activist, and on her heartbreaking romance with another student.

by Glory Mushinge
Zambia

The past week saw some of Lusaka’s top members of the diplomatic community from Francophone embassies in Zambia, get carried away with festivities for ten straight days and nights, between the 15th to the 25th of March.

This kind of exuberance is a rare occurrence that happens only once a year and attracts throngs of people who don’t want to be left out of the fun.

Francophone Week, or La Semaine de la Francophonie, celebrates different cultures through a variety of activities.

Representatives from a host of countries, many from within the Francophone community, made time to play together as they danced to musical performers from Africa and Europe, viewed paintings and sculptures, laughed at comedy presented by theatre artists, and played sports of various kinds for over a week.

Against this backdrop of creativity, Francophonie fosters political action and promotes multilateral cooperation.

by D-L Nelson
France

Not having any business experience didn’t stop artist-sculptor, Cristina Schønberg, from creating an arts and culture center in the tiny Catalan village of Argelès-sur-mer, France (www.argeles-sur-mer.com) at an age when most women are thinking of retirement.

Her life was always a bit unusual. The fourth of six children, she was born in Argentina, the daughter of free-spirited Danes. The family moved back to Denmark when Cristina turned seven.

by Laramie Glen
- USA -

Miss Delirium Tremens traipses on-stage. Her skin is white, her hair black, her lips red. Covered only by two scarlet feather fans, she begins a coy dance to music that is dedicated to the art of the tease. First she turns towards the audience, one fan in front of her, the other behind. She does a twirl and now her back is to the audience, only this time the fans seem to be wings on her back. You still see nothing but a glimpse of her pale skin through the feathers. As the song continues, she has yet to reveal anything from her neck to her knees.