No bullshit, just coffee: Kyle Allatt performs The No Bull$#!% History of Canada to June 21st A tight, well-paced show, The No Bull$#!% History of Canada rips through 600+ years…
Albumn review, “Campfires on the Moon”, by Michael Nenonen. Rodney DeCroo’s latest album, “Campfires on the Moon,” reveals hidden faces. I’ll say more about that in a moment. “Campfires”, released…
The Extreme Centre: A Warning Tariq Ali Verso Books, 2015 In 1977, two years before Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, political theorist Tom Nairn’s The Break-Up…
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…
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…
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’…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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 is a collection of essays and interviews related to the films and filmmakers of Cinema Politica (CP), and as such provides…
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…
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 Edited by Sebastien Chartrand and John Philpot Baraka Books, 2014 This enlightening book on international criminal justice is a collection of…
First, there was Alice. You have lived your whole life in the lap of storytellers; everything you have learned, everything you remember, is from stories told over and over. The…
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…
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…
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…
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…
