Special SilverDocs screenings/events

These films and post-screening discussions look interesting:

CRUDE
June 16 at 5:15 p.m.
Post-screening discussion with Award-winning filmmaker Joe Berlinger (PARADISE LOST, BROTHER’S KEEPER, METALLICA: SOME KIND OF MONSTER)

FACING ALI
June 16 at 7 p.m.
Post-screening discussion moderated by longtime USA Today sports writer David DuPree featuring filmmaker Pete McCormack and producer Derik Murray.

MUGABE AND THE WHITE AFRICAN
June 18 at 4:30 p.m.
Post-screening panel discussion featuring filmmaker Lucy Bailey, moderated by Peter Godwin, former BBC foreign correspondent and author of When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa.

NO IMPACT MAN
June 18 at 4:45 p.m.
Post-screening discussion moderated by Award-winning NPR national correspondent Daniel Zwerdling featuring filmmakers Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein and film subject BusinessWeek senior writer Michelle Conlin.

CONVENTION
June 18 at 7 p.m.
Post-screening discussion featuring members of the filmmaking team, Leah Daughtry, CEO 2008 Democratic National Convention, Katherine Archuleta, DNC Lead City Planner, Chantal Unfug, Denver liaison to the DNC, Curtis Hubbard, Denver Post political editor, and Denver Post reporter Allison Sherry.

FRED WESLEY QUARTET
June 19 at 7-8 p.m.
Fred Wesley Quartet in performance at the Downtown Silver Spring Plaza Stage on Ellsworth Drive between Georgia and Fenton. The legendary Fred Wesley, featured in the film SOUL POWER, delivers a little of his own.

THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE
June 19 at 7:15 p.m.
Post-screening discussion moderated by Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion writer Robin Givhan and filmmaker R.J. Cutler.

SOUL POWER
June 19 at 9:45 p.m.
Post-screening discussion and performance featuring filmmaker Jeffrey Levy-Hinte and legendary funk/jazz trombonist Fred Wesley.

EPISODE 3 – ENJOY POVERTY
June 20 at 3:30 p.m.
Post-screening discussion featuring filmmaker Renzo Martens moderated by WAMU-88.5 FM host Kojo Nnamdi.

Closing Night: THE NINE LIVES OF MARION BARRY
June 20 at 6:30 p.m.
Post-screening discussion moderated by Emmy Award-winning NPR news analyst Juan Williams, featuring Civil Rights activist Lawrence Guyot, Dorothy Brizill, Executive Director DC Watch, and NBC4 News reporter Tom Sherwood.

From Media Re:public (by Persephone Miel)

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediarepublic/category/cappucino/

Blogging for a cause – global voices!

Persephone Miel – June 5, 2009 @ 1:35 pm
· CAPPUCINO

You should read Global Voices Online. You should write
for them. You should re-publish Global Voices stories from around the
world in whatever medium you produce. You should give them money.

Why? Because how will you find out what Bahraini Mahmood Al Yousif thinks about Obama’s choice of Egypt for his speech unless Amira tells you?

I keep asking myself why did Obama choose the most
repressive regimes in the Middle East to honour not only with his
presence, but also to use as a launchpad for his Utopian vision of a
peaceful and democratic Middle East? A vision that will continue to
remain as illusive as a desert mirage for us Middle Easterners.

Then I try to select an alternate of the 22 Arab countries where he
could have used instead, but I fail to find a single one which could be
worthy of such an occasion.

– Bloggers React to Obama’s Address

Or how would you find out about Mariam Zouaghi,
a Tunisian student sentenced to six years in jail for her online
activities? (search for her Google News turns up 3 articles, none in
English) without Global Voices Advocacy?

Global Voices is important to me not because it brings us “citizen
media” from around the world. As I have opined repeatedly, I don’t care
whether media is “citizen” or “mainstream” and I live for the day when
those words (as Henry Jenkins proposed so eloquently here at Beyond Broadcast) have gone the way of the term “horseless carriage.”

I care about good stories and authentic perspectives. And I care
about the lives of people in countries that mass-market legacy media in
my country ignore except when there’s a war or a US economic or
diplomatic interest at stake.

Full disclosure: I’m friends with many of the people who make Global
Voices what it is and I’m writing this today in response to an
interesting challenge that could help bring some more money to Global
Voices. But I’m not doing it to help my friends, I’m doing it because I
know how hard they work, how many amazing new projects they’d like to
do and how important they are to the project of bulding the
cross-border connections that we all need to become global citizens.

It is election time in India. Painted walls tells stories of political
loyalty. India is rich with political symbols some more obvious than
others. Congress’ symbol — THE HAND. Photo by Carol Mitchell via Global Voices and Flickr.

This blog post is part of Zemanta’s “Blogging For a Cause” campaign to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes that bloggers care about. Check it out.

Community Gardener Extraordinaire

Charlie Koiner is almost 90 years old, yet he has an amazing farm in downtown Silver Spring that supplies the whole neighborhood (and beyond) with an amazing variety of fruits and vegetables almost year-round. Below is a video I shot recently where we talk a bit about Montgomery County’s new initiative to promote community gardens. Although one site has been removed from consideration, the initiative is going strong and the county is on the lookout for appropriate locations. I am thinking of doing a documentary about Charlie. If you know him and/or have any ideas for the documentary, please let me know by adding a comment to this blogpost.

(wait for video to load and then click play)

Watch documentary films free on-line

SnagFilms is committed to finding the world‘s most compelling documentaries, whether from established heavyweights or first-time filmmakers, and making them available to the wide audience these titles deserve.

SnagFilms.com is a website where you can watch full-length documentary films for free, but we’re also a platform that lets you “snag” a film and put it anywhere on the web. With a library of 250 films, and rapidly growing, you’re bound to find films that resonate with your interests. We make it easy for you to find a film that shines a light on a cause you care about. You can then open a virtual movie theater on any web site, so any one can watch your favorite SnagFilms for free.

SnagFilms can be summed up in four words: Find. Watch. Snag. Support.

Find. Whether using our custom search tools, browsing by topic, or tuning into one of the great channels provided by our partners, with a few clicks you’ll be able to find what you’re looking for.

Watch. By streaming films worldwide, on-demand, 24×7 and with no software installation or downloading required, we have radically expanded the audience for documentary films. All you need is a decent broadband connection. Just click play, go full-screen, and lean back and enjoy our films.

Snag. Widgets let you take your favorite SnagFilms with you wherever you like to go online. Open a virtual movie theater right in your webpage, blog, Facebook or MySpace page, or just about any other place online you can think of.

Support. At their best, documentaries don‘t merely entertain us, they engage and inspire us to action. Our filmmakers have selected their favorite charities and causes so you can get involved, immediately. And just by embedding our widget our widgets, you’ve donated your pixels and helped support independent film.

FILMOCRACY Winners Make a Statement!

After checking out these clips, go to the library and check out the book entitled Food Politics, by Marion Nestle. I highly recommend it.

Repost of: Independent Lens Newsletter: June 23, 2008

KING CORN, one of this season’s favorite docs, provided the backdrop
for the first Filmocracy mashup contest, where we asked people to mix
it up, make a statement and answer the question: If you are what you
eat, what are you?

Many people used the powerful medium of film to illustrate their
point of view on the politics of food, using KING CORN clips and
footage from Getty Images. Participants uploaded their own clips as
well, and mixed it all up with the Eyespot online editing tool.

And without further adieu… the Filmocracy contest winners are:

Grand Prize
“Corn King Takes Over the World” by Kylee Darcy

Highest Rated
“The Politics of Food” by Brandon Savoie

Most Popular
“And So It Is” by Ananta

Watch at:
http://www.pbs.org/filmocracy

Grand prizewinner Kylee Darcy won $1,000 and her stop-motion animated
short, “Corn King Takes Over the World,” will be screened throughout
the country at Indie Lens Community Cinema events this fall. She also
gets a KING CORN DVD, soundtrack and other fabulous corn-free prizes!
The most popular and highest rated videos get cool prizes too.

Darcy, age 19, is a health conscious sophomore at UC Berkeley who is
passionate about food politics. She came across the Filmocracy
contest while conducting research about the relationship between
nutrition and exercise with mental health. For her entry, Darcy
created her own hand-drawn animation and mixed it up with KING CORN
clips and archival images to make a bold and colorful statement about
the politics of food.

The KING CORN filmmakers chose the grand prizewinner, and Eyespot
viewers gave the highest ratings to “The Politics of Food” by Brandon
Savoie. Savoie, a 22-year-old student and forklift operator from
Louisiana, has “a passion for indie filmmaking,” and entered the
contest to comment on the fast food controversy he had read about on
the Internet. “Even if I didn’t win,” he said, “I thought it would be
a good opportunity to help inform others of the irresponsibility of
the major fast food companies.” The winner of Most Popular
designation, “And So It Is” by Ananta, has not responded to our email
request.

Watch the Independent Lens Filmocracy contest shorts winners (all
under 3 minutes) at:
http://www.pbs.org/filmocracy

From the Personal Democracy Forum (PDF08)

Repost from:

http://www.personaldemocracy.com/blog

Daily Digest: Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutley.
By Nancy Scola, 06/24/2008 – 3:54pm

This is Day Two of the 2008 Personal Democracy Forum and we’ll be (mostly) devoting the Daily Digest to a recap of what’s going down at the conference, being discussed in the halls, and heating up the back channels. We’ll return to our regular digest format tomorrow.

Visual presentation virtuoso Larry Lessig at a text-only mid-morning press conference here at PdF ’08: “I’m a little lost because I don’t have slides.”

Google evangelist and wise guy Vint Cerf: “PowerPoint corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”

(Yes, we know Larry uses Keynote in his presentations. But still, that’s a great line.)

Bad weather kept keynoter Elizabeth Edwards away from New York City in body but she was still able to appear at PdF ’08 via Skype, which preformed remarkably well. The upside of Elizabeth staying in North Carolina? Her husband, John, popped into view of Elizabeth’s laptop camera [here’s a photo] and stuck around to say a few words. The New York Times‘ Katharine Seely reports on the tech-focused discussion between Elizabeth and the PdF crowd.

NPR’s Sunday Soapbox “field vlogger” Jacob Soboroff conducted video interviews with MySpace IMPACT’s Lee Brenner, the Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington and Open Left’s Matt Stoller. Also in NPR land, Soapbox’s senior producer Davar Ardalan responds to Jay Rosen’s take on notes on “semi-pro” journalism presented at a PdF panel yesterday morning and posted to TechPres last night, saying that digital integration “brings with it many philosophical questions about editorial control and the ethical rules we have all been trained to follow.”

Over on the tech blog ArsTechnica, Julian Sanchez responds to yesterday’s discussion over the modern media’s “fake neutrality,” to borrow a phrase from Arianna.

Silicon Alley responds to McCain advisor Mark Sohoo’s defense yesterday of his candidate’s relationship with the Internet. The Guardian UK also has coverage of the session under the in-no-way-judgmental headline “Republicans Admit Obama is Winning the Online Battle.” Ooh, this just in: source material — video of the exchange between Mark and John Edwards’ online staffer Tracy Russo that has had people talking since.

CNN’s iReport has a station set up here and the conference and has gone live with interviews and coverage with attendees.

Virtual reality pioneer Mark Pesce gave a keynote this morning on “hyperpolitics — American style” that both Twitter and room tone seemed to indicate was very well-received. If the reporting on the speech strikes you as slightly fuzzy, that’s because I unfortunately arrived at the talk where there was only about three minutes left; no worries, though, because Mark has generously posted the full text of his presentation.

PdF’s Alison Fine has great coverage of Doug Rushkoff talk on “The New Renaissance” and Morely Winegard’s presentation on the civic engagement of the millennial generation.

PC World covers the unveiling of Internet for Everyone, a new Free Press-engineered push for universal broadband launched at PdF ’08 this morning. Nancy Scola (hey, that’s me) has a quick guide to the the bite-sized arguments made by the project’s supporters, from Vint Cerf to Writers Guild East president Michael Winship to TechPres contributor David All.

CNET’s Caroline McCarthy reports on Larry Lessig’s exhortation to the PdF crowd to not fall into the “four-year trap” of keeping a close watch on politics and politicians only when election time rolls around.

Nancy Scola (again, me) reflects upon a session featuring Mayhill Fowler where the OffTheBus contributor called for bloggers to agree to some “code of the road” that creates a safe, off-the-record space for press.

ThePoint.com’s Alex Steed is doing some granular liveblogging of the conference.

Of course, there’s more going on than we can possibly capture. So check out the Twitter stream tagged #pdf2008 on Summize.

1st Amendment? Never heard of it, says FCC

repost from

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/Media Re:public

encouraging collaborative, practical research and analysis of the new media (r)evolution

Persephone Miel – June 24, 2008 @ 5:08 pm · CAPPUCINO, Politics

The FCC says they want to make it easy for someone to deliver wireless broadband for free. But, as we say here at Berkman, there is free as in beer, and free as in speech. And the FCC’s new idea is UNFREE as in speech. Why? Because the license for the spectrum they want to auction requires a mechanism that “filters or blocks images and text that constitute obscenity or pornography and…any images or text that otherwise would be harmful to teens and adolescents. For purposes of this rule, teens and adolescents are children 5 through 17 years of age. As someone pointed out in a gahering here at Berkman just now, that puts the United States right up there with China. Further, the rule states, “should any commercially-available network filters installed not be capable of reviewing certain types of communications, such as peer-to-peer file sharing, the licensee may use other means, such as limiting access to those types of communications.”

The problem is the ruling makes the Internet like broadcast television or radio, where we still can’t use George Carlin’s seven words, when it really should be like the telephone, where it’s none of your @O#*$U# business what I want to talk about. I am neither a lawyer nor a technologist, but I know this is BAD. I read the text (actually I just searched for the word “pornography” and read that bit) and then went here to tell the FCC how I felt. (The comments submission form is very tricky, the 2 relevant dockets are 07-195, and 04-356, but I found it rejected my attempts to put them in myself (got an error message after submitting) so I clicked on proceedings and search for them.

That’s the basic Internet freedom part.

There’s also the sleazy background part about the M2Z, the company that’s pushing this. Business Week points out that one of the two founders of M2Z is a former FCC official. The company’s site encourages visitors to send letters to Congress and the FCC tell them to support “free, family-friendly, nationwide broadband.” Wendy suggested they rename it the “free, family-friendly, FILTERband.”

Awsomely Powerful and Well Done Documentary Film

I saw this film tonight at SilverDocs. It was fantastic. I also got to speak with the Director and the surgeon himself.

The English Surgeon - A Film By Geoffrey Smith.

http://www.theenglishsurgeon.com/thefilm.htm

THE FILM

What is it like to have God like surgical powers, yet to struggle against your own humanity? What is it like to try and save a life, and yet to fail? This film follows brain surgeon Henry Marsh as he openly confronts the dilemmas of the doctor patient relationship on his latest mission to the Ukraine.

Henry is one of London’s foremost brain surgeons, but despite being a pioneer in his field he stills rides an old pushbike to work and worries himself sick about the damage he can inflict on his patients. “When push comes to shove we can afford to lose an arm or a leg, but I am operating on people’s thoughts and feelings…and if something goes wrong I can destroy that person’s character ……forever”.

Daily Digest: Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutley. By Nancy Scola, 06/24/2008 – 3:54pm

repost from

Daily Digest: Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutley.
By Nancy Scola, 06/24/2008 – 3:54pm