Can democracy be salvaged?
The Extreme Centre: A Warning Tariq Ali Verso Books, 2015 In the late 1970s, several years before Margaret Thatcher would become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the remaking of…
reviews
From Exposé to Opacity: With The Migrant Image, T.J Demos Rethinks Documentary Aesthetics
Though often situated at the centre of grandiose political and activist projects, tasked time and again with capturing visible evidence of exploitation, violence, deprivation, and inequality, documentary, as both a…
There is Power in a Union: Pride
Directed by Matthew Warchus 2014 Warning: This review contains spoilers. Pride, a film about class struggle and the importance of solidarity set against the backdrop of the 1984-85 British miners’…
A Changing Chinatown
Julia Kwan’s NFB-produced Everything Will Be (Canada, 2014) examines the gentrification of Vancouver’s Chinatown as an uneasy balance of preservation, assimilation, and creative re-purposing. A flurry of condo development encroaches…
Performing Aloha in Queer Times
In 2001, filmmakers Kathryn Xian and Brent Anbe broke new ground with their documentary Ke Kulana He Mahu: Remembering a Sense of Place. The film, which documents the lives, struggles,…
Art and photography tackle the conscience and chronology of war
A review of: Conflict – Time – Photography @ Tate Modern, London Conscience and Conflict: British Artists and the Spanish Civil War @ Pallant Gallery, Chichester Brute @ arthouse1, London…
How Canada gets people tortured
Guantánamo Diary Mohamedou Ould Slahi Little, Brown and Company Following December’s release of the U.S. Senate report on American complicity in torture, Prime Minister Stephen Harper quickly declared, “It has…
Idleness, the enemy of progress
Fighting Against Western Imperialism Andre Vltchek Badak Merah, 2014 For the better part of three decades, Andre Vltchek has dedicated his career to exposing injustice. As a filmmaker, journalist, documentarian…
Screening Truth to Power: A Reader on Documentary Activism
“>Screening Truth to Power: A Reader on Documentary Activism is a collection of essays and interviews related to the films and filmmakers of Cinema Politica (CP), and as such provides…
Maidan: one of the most honest depictions of popular protest ever filmed
Sergei Loznitsa’s latest film, Maidan, falls firmly in the tradition of documentaries that use the real to question the possibilities of cinema. Those expecting a more activist documentary like Jehane…
Quote: Vonnegut on reviewers
Originally appears in “The War Between Writers and Reviewers,” by Thomas Flemming in the NYT, 1985. Alltop loves a good bad review.
Justice Belied: The Unbalanced Scales of International Criminal Justice
Justice Belied: The Unbalanced Scales of International Criminal Justice Edited by Sebastien Chartrand and John Philpot Baraka Books, 2014 This enlightening book on international criminal justice is a collection of…
Gravity: A Review
While watching director Alfonso Cuarón’s film, Gravity, this weekend, I was struck by how powerful the mixed themes of isolation and survival can be. I was reminded not simply of…
Ethnography 101: La cour de Babel and La marche à suivre
The only thing I hate more than bad puns is bad ethnography, and La cour de Babel walks a fine line on that. Following an integration class for new immigrants…
What does the word Polytechnique mean to you? – a review of The Anorak
The Anorak, written and performed by Adam Kelly Morton, goes beyond the pat answers and media sensationalism around the Polytechnique massacre and examines what made Marc Lépine a killer. Exceptionally…
The Look of Silence: breathtaking in every sense
A lot of people didn’t like The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2012 film exposing the impunity the perpetrators of Indonesia’s 1965 genocide continue to benefit from. The biggest objection…
The Theology of The Fly
While watching the 1958 film of The Fly last night, I was struck by its similarities to Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein. And in the similarity of the underpinning morality…
Academic Dumas-ery
Kane X. Faucher’s latest novel is a brilliant adaptation the classic Alexander Dumas tale of revenge, The Count of Monte Cristo. I’ve always loved the original, and Faucher’s book is…
Derailing the Status Quo: Snowpiercer
Snowpiercer Written and directed by Joon-ho Bong 2013 Following in the footsteps of recent allegorical and dystopian films such as The Hunger Games and Elysium, Bong Joon-Ho’s summer blockbuster Snowpiercer…