There’s a new band rehearsing in our basement and they’ve got a record release party and concert tonight at Union Pool. I think they go on at 11.

Talk about spearheading global peace! This sounds amazing. Read about the event below. DCTV and NYWIFT will be your local hosts for this worldwide event. This Saturday from 2-6pm.

www.pangeaday.org

Pangea Day is a global event bringing the world together through film.

Why? In a world where people are often divided by borders, difference, and conflict, it’s easy to lose sight of what we all have in common. Pangea Day seeks to overcome that – to help people see themselves in others – through the power of film.

Starting at 18:00 GMT on May 10, 2008, locations in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked for a live program of powerful films, live music, and visionary speakers. The entire program will be broadcast – in seven languages – to millions of people worldwide through the internet, television, and mobile phones.

The 24 short films to be featured have been selected from an international competition that generated more than 2,500 submissions from over one hundred countries. The films were chosen based on their ability to inspire, transform, and allow us see the world through another person’s eyes.

The program will also include a number of exceptional speakers and musical performers. Queen Noor of Jordan, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, musician/activist Bob Geldof, and Iranian rock phenom Hypernova are among those taking part.

Click for flickr set.

Click for flickr set.

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The voices heard in this installation were collected from a series of flyers that were posted around New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area between the months of December 2007 and April 2008. The flyers, mimicking the form of the common street tear-off, contained short, nondescript statements derived from personal thoughts (for example, one set read, “I remember every word you said to me. 646-607-5550”). Public response was collected via voicemail. Every few weeks, a new set of flyers was posted hundreds of times in the same areas.

After flyering was completed, the voicemails were edited and reassembled into a new whole, creating a sonic patchwork of public response and a constructed dialogue between the participants.

The project adopts the informative and advertising medium of the flyer and replaces standard marketing rhetoric with a personal, anonymous gesture. Private thoughts are displaced into the public realm, thereby simultaneously appropriating and disrupting the existing vernacular of a visually and textually fragmented urban landscape. In a city oversaturated by information and advertisements, the public has become indifferent to the constant demand for visual consumption. With the flyers, the intent is to utilize solicitation not for self-service or promotion, but as a plea for an intimate response from the passerby. By turning the recognizable commercial object into an unexpected personal engagement, an anonymous dialogue is created between the flyer and the pedestrian, the maker and the spectator, the private and the public. The rhetoric of advertising no longer interpellates the passerby as consumer, but suggests a more familiar relationship.

By revisiting and recycling, the messages take on new meaning: they are no longer individualized reactions; they are redefined as parts of a whole. Each caller becomes a recontextualized fragment of a broader realm, extensions of personal thoughts in a universal forum.

On Display @ UnionDocs || April 18th & 19th

High Risk Citizen
VIDEO EXHIBITION @ ART IN GENERAL
04.17.08—05.03.08
Organized by Mary Billyou and Eva Díaz.

High Risk Citizen explores forms of political resistance and public engagement today, as considered by contemporary artists working in film and video. The works in the exhibition move between depressed responses to the ways in which collective, political efficaciousness has been curtailed, and euphoric re-imaginings of sites of robust social and civic culture.

more info

Expression = Life
VIDEO SCREENING AND PANEL
APRIL 18TH, 7:00PM @ CANTOR FILM CENTER

On April 18th, a video screening and panel discussion with ACT UP members, filmmakers, and media theorists entitled “Expression = Life: ACT UP, Video and the AIDS Crisis,” will be held at the Cantor Film Center of New York University. Activists, filmmakers, and media theorists will be on hand to discuss the history and significance of this powerful, grassroots work, and how it contributed to movement organizing and the culture of resistance that evolved from this crisis period.

More info

In reflecting on Full Frame, I’d like to revisit a screening that’s already been somewhat discussed here. In pairing Albert Maysles’ latest film about Sally Gross (The Pleasure of Stillness) with the first film from Aurelien Foucault (Of Shadows and Men), the festival programmers created a dynamic that echoed through the rest of Full Frame. The convergence of master and novice, established and innovative, predictable and daring. That’s part of what made the festival so exciting, to see the potential everywhere mixed with stunning proven results.

We saw it also in films like Salim Baba, which was a beautifully-shot short about a man in India who drives a cinema cart to support his family. The cart is a mobile screening booth, with the film projected on the back wall of a little box, and children peeking through windows on the sides, under the cover of a curtain to keep the light out. To watch as the Indian man and his young sons take scrapped celluloid and re-configure it to make their own films, painstakingly taping the frames together with unwieldy scotch tape - that’s what’s exciting about filmmaking, what’s always been exciting about it.

When asked, many filmmakers we spoke to during the festival cited the digital revolution in filmmaking as such a great, revolutionary, daring part of filmmaking in 2008. The idea that every person can go out and buy a camera and edit a film on their laptop while sipping coffee in a cafe. Yes, it’s amazing! It’ll be even more amazing to watch what unexpected things people do with the medium now - ways of reappropriating the technology and the artform for something revolutionary. Glimpses of these possibilities were seen in films like In A Dream, which melded animation and film footage with an incredible family history and great cinematography to create a beautiful artifact. Or Man On Wire, which used dramatic representation and humour to re-enact and re-examine an act of daring humanity writ large.

This enthusiasm and encouragement were constantly present at Full Frame. Unlike other festivals, where the air shimmers with fevered competition, this was a great opportunity to just hang out with film fans and filmmakers alike and watch a bunch of great films together. Also, Durham, NC provided the perfect setting for this festival - relaxed, friendly, and home to some superb red velvet cake (Blue Coffee Cafe).

It’s impossible to try to encapsulate everything in a handful of sentences though. The UnionDocs podcasts made and photos taken during Full Frame lend another perspective to the madcap adventures that were undertaken in the pursuit of film appreciation.

On an ending note, some quips that were wonderfully memorable:

“To have a hand is to make good things.” - Laotian saying, quoted in The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)

“I never thought I’d look at the twin towers and think of anything but 9/11, and your film changed that.” - audience response to James Marsh’s Man On Wire

“I didn’t want to make a sexy, National Geographic version of Kolkata.” - Tim Sternberg in Q&A about his film, Salim Baba

“…all it takes is two guys, a camera, and a computer.” - Aurelien Foucault on how to go about making your first film