One ongoing trend in documentary filmmaking involves privileged minority world saviours travelling to distant destitute lands in order to do good or capture the act of doing good on film. In films like FUCK FOR FOREST, playing at this year’s Hot Docs film festival, people from rich countries set out
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Art Threat: Fatal fish farms
Salmon Confidential is a new film by Twyla Roscovich on the government cover up of what is killing BC’s wild salmon. It is absolutely shocking to see the lengths the provincial and federal governments are going to in order to not allow the dissemination of information about the role of
Continue readingArt Threat: Hot Docs turns twenty
Twenty years ago today, it was a year like any other. The ceremonial swap between less liberal and more liberal leader of the United States took place when Clinton picked up where Bush left off (launching a cruise missile attack on Iraq just half a year into his term and
Continue readingArt Threat: Return to Gummo
Harmony Korine has been making headlines for his new pop-culture romp, Spring Breakers, with the usual fanfare and some reviewers decidedly giddy with the possibility of maybe “getting it” or maybe not. The film is apparently non-stop debauch and at least one critic has pointed out the work’s contribution to
Continue readingArt Threat: Print your own gun
This week’s Friday Film Pick is a new 24-minute documentary produced by Motherboard and distributed by Vice Magazine, on 3D gun printing (video after jump). The film peaks into the weird and extremely controversial world of Cody Wilson and associates, young gun-loving geeks who celebrate the intersection of firearms, freedom
Continue readingArt Threat: The Ghosts in Our Machine defends the animals on our screen
Over the last decade of programming political documentary for Cinema Politica I can say with confidence that there are two subjects that have always been decidedly divisive and caused the most vociferous backlash from audience members. One of those subjects is the ongoing illegal occupation of Palestine and the other
Continue readingArt Threat: Bowling for Columbine turns ten
Editor’s note: Art Threat has launched a cultural archaeological project that involves digging up previously published but now inaccessible film reviews and cultural musings from Montreal-based writer and teacher Matthew Hays. We’re calling it The Hays Files, and to get things rolling, we’re republishing a review Hays wrote of Bowling
Continue readingArt Threat: The Hays Files
Matthew Hays is a prolific cultural critic who, aside from publishing many academic journal articles and books, wrote for years in Montreal on everything in cinema, from porn to puppets to gun culture to corporate psychopaths. Always politically peppy and insightful, Hays oscillates between biting critique and irreverent humour, but
Continue readingArt Threat: Canadian gov’t approves filming immigration raid, deportation process for reality TV
The Canadian government has approved what appears to be the crass exploitation of human suffering for entertainment. In a new low, Safety Minister Vic Toews approved the filming of an immigration enforcement raid at an East Vancouver construction site for a reality TV show. In the raid, workers were arrested
Continue readingArt Threat: Anti-bully Beauty
Vimeo staff pick. Shane Koyczan. Collaborative artists animating each 20 seconds of powerful, stirring, anti-oppression spoken words. Enough said.
Continue readingArt Threat: Free Int’l Women’s Day Films at NFB.ca
The beaten (by the Canadian Conservative budget cuts) but not down National Film Board of Canada is offering a treasure trove of titles for free streaming today, in celebration and recognition of International Women’s Day. Included in the bunch is the 2012 experimental short by Jenn Strom, below (after the
Continue readingArt Threat: The Documentary Download Dilemma
Much ink has been spilled and pixels punctuated regarding the ongoing controversial topic around the copyright, downloading, streaming and file sharing of creative content, yet there has been little discussion (outside of organizational listserves and at festival forums) of documentary cinema and file sharing. This may be in large part due to
Continue readingArt Threat: Low-class Oscars leave the ladies booing
To this day the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do in my career was stand in front of a group of 300 university students in my role as president of an student newspaper organization – my peers at the time – and explain to them that they needed
Continue readingArt Threat: Blown Up: Gaming and War
Let’s face it: shooting stuff is fun – in video, that is; but it can also be ethically complicated. Gallery 101’s current exhibition Blown Up: Gaming and War, brings to the conventions of video gaming the complexities of art, activism and critical commentary. I am not exactly a typical gamer
Continue readingArt Threat: Identity, Oppression, Resistance
For this week’s Friday Film Pick I’m choosing two very different, seemingly unrelated docs that are available for online viewing. Girl Inside is an intimate portrayal of a male transitioning to female, and because the film is available for streaming from Canada’s TVO broadcaster, it is likely unavailable to non-Canadian
Continue readingArt Threat: Pirate Bay documentary debuts online
The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard documentary, which tells the story behind the embattled Swedish Pirate Bay project, is now available on YouTube. The film just premiered in Europe and was simultaneously launched on line at Youtube and for download on…Pirate Bay. Following the TPB founders, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij
Continue readingArt Threat: Athena Film Festival passes the Bechdel test
Occasionally films come out in the mainstream that give a glimpse of hope that perhaps the world of film is changing and becoming more adept at telling stories that don’t rely on sexist stereotypes – last summer the Hunger Games gave a promise of a heroine who could fend for
Continue readingArt Threat: Digital media challenge offers $100,000 for critical work on democracy
A new digital media challenge is looking for creative work that addresses the need to improve democracy in the United States. And as it is with American democracy in practice, large sums of money are at stake — $100,000 in cash prizes will go to “the most fresh and creative submissions.”
Continue readingArt Threat: On efficacy and ideology: Zero Dark Thirty and the ethical justification of torture
“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” -Walter Benjamin Kathryn Bigelow’s film Zero Dark Thirty was met with both large audiences and waves of criticism for how the film depicted, and seemingly endorsed, the
Continue readingArt Threat: The People of the Kattawapiskak River: watch for free until January 18
With Attawapiskat and its band chief, Theresa Spence, remaining in the headlines, the NFB has made Alanis Obamsawin’s new documentary on life in the First Nation community available for free. The People of the Kattawapiskak River can be streamed online at NFB.ca until Friday, January 18. Or just click the
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