Letters to the President Ahmadinejad Iran documentary film

Letters to the President Ahmadinejad Iran documentary film

This is a really interesting documentary coming out on Iranian president Ahmadinejad. The film directed by Petr Lom seems it is going to be a controversial peace, as he seems to have shot the side “allowed to be shown”. Lom, interviewed this morning in CBC, seems to have been granted full access to film. A strange privilege for documentary film making in Iran today. Hopefully this film will reveal some insight about Iran.

PEDICURE: Experimental

Music: Le Tigre, Deceptacon.

There were an Italian, a Vietnamese and a Camera Crew who never had been out in-front of the real world trying to film something as it happens, sort of vérité fashion. It was a learning experience the planning, the shooting, the reviewing… but most of all, the editing. How to make an awkward pedicure missing shots between the scenes look good? The answer: Make it visually appealing. T.V. by far reaches the conclusions of the experimental pedicure exercise. It gives a lot of flashy visual displays with very little content. It was a clear lesson that if the content can not be appealing, better dope the audience with effects and easy going material. Yet, the art of a documentarists development is to find the craftsmanship of making the documentary visually appealing, but complementing a content deep enough and strong enough to engage the viewer through its language into progressive action.

WORRIED: first edit

Music: Skye, Whats wrong with me?

This clip was one the first clip I liked which I edited. Two day class of Flashplayer allowed me to do this combination of pictures and music (all downloaded from the internet) to convey a view. The evolution now has been interesting as soon the newer stuff being edited will show the learning curve which I had to go through this summer in Vancouver. This little FlashPlayer clip was made last year in September and it was the turning point that brought me to Vancouver for Video. Hope you see something you may relate to in it. Eventhough Final cut and its plataform are so amazing, Flashplayer still stands strong.

THE INTERNATIONAL

Director :          Tom Tykwer

Writer:              Eric Singer

Official Site:    http://www.everybodypays.com/

It is amazing how fiction begins to resemble the world we live in. It is no myth how the IMF, WTO and WB lent millions of dollars to Latin American Countries and the African countries to governments who did not invest this money in development but rather in free trade and multinational companies, creating further debt, further poverty and more complications. Past movies such as the War.inc, The Lord of War, Syriana and some others tackle directly the trading of U.S. and Russian weapons to zones in conflict, such as the middle east, Latin American countries rebel groups and other African rebel militant groups. Interestingly enough, these “fictional films” portray what documentary movies such as Darwin’s Nightmare, Uganda Rising, Occupation 101, Zeitgeist Addendum, BLUE GOLD: The World Water wars and the Hot zone denounce from the American Government, the global Media and the International Banking system.

Movies like the International cost about 13.5 Million Dollars, they denounce the involvement of a “fictional bank” called the IBBC international banks in controlling of the worlds’ arm supplies. Although the IBBC is not entirely fictional  it seems ironic that a movie which had the budget to recreate the Guggenheim museum in a warehouse, denouncing corruption from the international banking system, while highlighting the key aspect of banking “DEBT”, happens to be simply a big movie hit and nothing more.

MEMORIES OF DOCUMENTARIES II

The story continues with a break down. The mind can no longer bear the horrors of the World. What is there to see is too much for the spirit to bear in terms of sanity. It was said once “what kind of mad person could live in this world and not be insane”. We were all born weird, fed with lies, caressed with strange norms, and then thrown into the world to learn it all again; to learn it our way the second time. Media has the power to shape that which it touches. It has the power to construct and destruct, it has the prowess to distort reality while recreating it. It is Frankenstein magic and promethean science. It is Art. 

It can show both, madness and beauty, artfully combined. Memories of documentaries happen in a mixture between man’s destructiveness and nature’s grandiosity. It is a dichotomy between creation and destruction.

Man Vs. Nature… No. This is not quite right. Human is part of nature. All human behavior is natural. Species force themselves into self-destruction very often, and they simply collapse. There is grandiosity in human nature as there is grandiosity in everything else in nature. It is all part of one and the same… will we evolve soon enough before collapse? I hope so.

 

PLANET EARTH

 

These are Manufactured Landscapes we live in. Our life form takes from the environment, like termites take from whole ecosystems of trees, or introduced foreign species take over order of whole ecosystems. We are no better. In fact, we are much worse, but, this is not the point of memories of documentaries. Documentaries can bring this knowledge into awareness, it can explain why, it can show so many sides of the same coin. They recompile professionals, research and data from multiple sources to present the current state of affairs under one lens. Their purpose often, may be to aggravate the circumstances from what the reality actually is. However, they fail in doing so. One can not aggravate the reality of things, human beings  can not imagine anywhere near what the actual reality is. And if they could imagine, they would not be sane.

  

For those who watching documentary media became a vice. It all becomes a crude awakening. These memories are not sympathetic to me. They may have drilled a lot into the depth of strange realms, but what may come after all these rushing thoughts of reality, how do you “fix” things through media. Is it dispair oriented… or is it constructive? One must see and decide.

It does not take a genius to see solutions. But to see solutions by no means provides the power to do so. More preoccupying, the only solution takes gigantic dimenssions, where it has to be an everybody acting together type of solution. We are somewhat far from co-ordinating ourselves globally. 

Obviously enough… there are many, many impediments to achieve global coordination. 

it is a strange world full of questions, and many more questions that can be answered, if any can be answered at all. But one must watch in order to know better… read in order to understand better. One must think, a lot, in order to Act better. but it is hard. And better is relative. 

Is there a connection to be made? Personally, I believe humans are animals which are all part of nature. It seems obvious. The question becomes, why act other wise? Why not just dominate and self exterminate ourselves? What motives can drive human behavior beyond economic profit and physical pleasures? Is there a reason to believe in altruistic beahaviour?

 

Is it life so saturated of life, so many choose to escape from it?

MEMORIES OF DOCUMENTARIES I

 

It all began with a movie about two young students in Columbine School. Bowling before running into their school, these two young men went in  indiscriminately shooting their fellow students. One could never really understand the reason behind such horrible acts of violence. In my young understanding of things, I did not even know what documentary media was to unravel before me in the next 5 years… it was only the beginning of a journey. Bowling for Columbine was probably the first documentary that comes into memory when thinking of what a documentary is. It was the first conceptualization of non-fiction film or realist film. i do not know which term is proper to describe documentary film. It does not really matter.

Then, after those memories, I am not exactly sure what episodes came after. What is remembered however, is the happening of a big documentary which changed the way i understood the world forever. I suppose i was quite naive and blind, stupefied and caressed by the consumer culture, but the Corporation had an impact in my understanding of the system, the economy and the current situation. I could no longer dream anymore of escalating ladders or feel the wants I once longed for. 

Sometimes, the thought is strange, as if the more you read the more you wish you did not. But then, the more you end up reading anyways. Memories then fluctuate towards Fahrenheit 911. This episode changed human history forever. For those who still think the terrorists are out there hiding in caves, think again. They are at home, in your home, watching t.v.

 

Bizarrely enough, Michael Moore made documentary media Mainstream. For that many of us owe this controversial guy a big thanks. As memories hold these docs together, there is this rush of frenzy and angst oriented media which followed. It was sort of this traumatic experience of information being displayed everywhere: after classes in the conference rooms of universities, in film festivals, at home, in the public library. This realist shocking device got some people excruciatingly panicked about the situation of the world… I was one of them. It was too much information with little or no solutions. To discover how flawed our world was, the fallacy of university education, the lies behind governments, the economy, the planet… it all made no sense, and documentary did not make it better. Books were worse.

 

Like a trip through history, the globe, the economy, an education in politics, human right violations, like trip into identity, this was a glimpse into human nature. A sad glimpse into The Horror of Conrad’s Kurt. Highschool literature became reminiscent of the rebellion of the rats (Fernando Soto Aparicio), Chronicles of a death foretold (Garcia Marquez), 1984 (Orwell), Oryx & Crake (Atwood). I was the watchman in a Penal Colony who did not know anything about the world, yet he had to keep watching.

There was no longer right or wrong. Human evolution became legend, slavery had always been a reality. I am still shocked. Neocolonialism and the global economy are proof but nobody cares. Religion, Nations, the UN, Politics, the legal system… all unreal. Good and Evil became relative to the will to power Nietzsche once described to me. Camus, Sartre, Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, all interests from the past, began to make more sense through the experience of documentary film. Even Eliot’s wasteland became poetic.

Yet some people do not seem to have clue. This is stranger than fiction. One would think that Philip K. Dick was crazy enough to fragment personalities in such ways they could no longer recognize one another. Modern psychology calls it MultiPersonality disorder. Although i think this is crap. I call it cocktail mixture of paranoia, anxiety and Schizophrenia.  

   

Brutally enough, most of these catastrophes have been known before their happening. They could have been prevented or its consequences diminished. But there was deliberate choice from the imperial superpowers.  In most cases the U.N. to did nothing about. The reasons, in most cases, were economic ones. 

How do these memories proceed then, without the open words revealing wounds of trauma? how do they reconcile beauty, love and happiness with the woes and flaws of the world? They dont. How does the mind proceed in sanity in its whereabouts and petty wants in order to succeed in the subjective realm of oneself. Darwin’s Nighmare was only the beggining. 

These docs became sort of a revelation of apocalyptical times, there were no more MTV shows or Reality shows that could distract these memories from the cruel reality. What is it then, what brings most of human beings into living into these strange lives so disconnected from the past, the present and the future? Is the matter at hand relevant at all for the present generations and the future generations to more carefully consider the consequences at stake?

It is a waking life full of questions and paradigms, never to be resolved, yet always evolving. The space for the humane and the uncanny seems relevant. Memories dictate the path been traced and the one to be taken. There are patterns being repeated from the past, there are ellipses, circles and spirals of many cycles, but there are no straight lines. There are only asymptotes. We are getting closer and closer and closer… but we will never be there. No matter.

MURDER BALL & ATTITUDE

Attitude, strength, self-determination, passion, courage, so many descriptives to think of after watching this film. Documentary film is slowly transcending to a whole new level, it aims to combine the social and the human with the personal and the relevant. Murderball is an inspirational film for those who know little of what being a quadriplegic means, or what goes into the paralympics. Shocking accidents from the past created tough and driven athletes to fight in their two wheelers to demand more from life. Their stories are marked by a set of events which outstandingly remind us of what life really means for those who fought hard to keep in control. Wheelchair Rugby or murderball has definitely been a very well elaborated documentary tracing the interconnectivity between the personal, the team, the family, the accident, the present and the future.  

 

 

 

Directors: Henry Alex Rubin & Dana Adam Shapiro

 

Definitely a very moving documentary one must watch to learn and know better.