by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

After seeing the new documentary Flow, my 2009 New Year’s resolution is to stop buying bottled water. Over $100 billion is spent annually on bottled water, but it would cost only $30 billion to provide clean drinking water to the entire world. Unlike tap water, bottled water is not regulated for cleanliness. And don’t even get me started on the mountains of plastic bottles created by the bottled water industry.

For 84 terrifying and informative minutes, filmmaker Irena Salina makes a very persuasive case for stopping the commoditization of water and ensuring that everyone has access to clean drinking water. Salina interviews an array of researchers and activists who all describe the frightening international situation: dirty water kills more people than wars, the world is quickly running out of clean water, and water has become a valuable commodity for multinational corporations to exploit for profit. Flow is currently available on DVD.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

This incredible story of average Liberian women coming together to fight for peace is the subject of the new documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which is currently playing in theaters. Filmmakers Gini Reticker and Abigail E. Disney capture the inspiring story of the Women in Peacebuilding Network (WIPNET) with compassion and reverence. Their story of unbelievable heroism in the face of unspeakable violence makes for a dramatic and heart-wrenching 72 minutes.

by Kavita Bedford
- Australia -

Those seeking insight into the Chilean mentality should explore the footpaths of Santiago and Valparaíso. The desires, fantasies and messages of the last forty years are boldly expressed on walls, metro stations and buildings. Here, the streets have a voice.

The memories and consequences of Pinochet’s rule live on in Chile, but in the world of art, repression and prohibition no longer reign. The past decade has seen a powerful resurgence in artistic communities as new galleries, shows and exhibitions are popping up on every re-invigorated street corner. Yet, in formal art spaces there is a distinct lack of comprehensive and challenging visual work. Museums are lagging in attendance and flagging amid a strong collaboration of ideas between the artists and their communities.

by Blaire Dessent
- France -

For the 2008 Dak’Art Biennial, an international art exhibition held in Dakar, Senegal, a group of artists and thinkers associated with the Action Lab project of the Brooklyn-based freeDimensional (fD), collaborated on the production and distribution of Gorée Gazette. A one-time, free newspaper, the Gazette includes personal narratives, drawings and statistics related to the crisis of economic migration - specifically ocean crossings from Africa to Europe and the United States.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

At the tender age of 19, Claudio Duran opened the door of his Santiago home in the middle of the night to find military secret police ready to arrest him. The officers took him to Villa Grimaldi, ironically known as the Palace of Laughter – a Chilean prison used by General Augusto Pinochet after the 1973 military coup. At that moment, he says, “my life changed.” Duran (now known as Quique Cruz) chronicles his imprisonment and the art that helped him reconcile his painful past in the new documentary Archeology of Memory: Villa Grimaldi. The film debuted at the 2008 Mill Valley Film Festival.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has made nineteen trips to the Middle East in the last two years in hopes of securing a regional peace accord. But as the Bush administration comes to an end, Rice’s goal of a two-state solution will not be realized. During her most recent trip last week, she admitted that they’re not “at the finish line” of the peace process.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

I vividly remember the 1988 presidential election, or more accurately the months of campaigning that led up to the election. At the time, my family did not have cable television and all that was on the few channels available was election coverage. Throughout the entire summer and fall, my parents forced me and my siblings to watch the Democratic and Republican conventions, and then the nightly news coverage. Once I returned to elementary school in September, someone decided it was a good idea for everyone to gather in the cafeteria and watch more election coverage. I sat there thinking, I had to watch this all summer. Can’t I just get a break? My unending boredom was aggravated by my disinterest in candidates Michael Dukakis and George H.W. Bush. And I couldn’t even vote!

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

“There are two types of bayonet fighters, the quick and the dead. Which type are you?” This is what a boot camp drill sergeant yells at new recruits, who then reply in unison – “the quick!” During any war, a soldier’s survival depends on this “kill or be killed” mentality. But killing the enemy, even for soldiers who deeply believe in the cause, is not easy. Some soldiers decide they must put down their weapons – even if that means being court-marshaled and imprisoned.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

If you could know that you were at risk for a terminal illness, would you want to know? And then what would you do next if the news confirmed your worst fears? At the tender age of 27, Joanna Rudnick faced this very conundrum when she tested positive for the BRCA genetic mutation. Her chances of developing breast cancer subsequently went from about 11 to 12 percent to a devastating 80 to 90 percent, and her chances of developing ovarian cancer shot from about 1 to 1.5 percent to 50 to 60 percent.

Rudnick, a scientific journalist, chronicles her struggle as she comes to terms with her altered gene and her uncertain future in the very personal documentary In the Family. The film is currently playing on PBS as part of the Point of View series.

by Imelda V. Abaño
- Philippines -

Back in September 2005, the now infamous Danish cartoon of the prophet Muhammad became a worldwide controversy. It was reprinted in newspapers in several countries and led to widespread Muslim protests and violence.

Now the book, The Jewel of Medina, a semi-fictional novel written by American journalist Sherry Jones about the youngest wife of Muhammad, has also led to a firestorm of controversy for its portrayal of the prophet. Many say it could incite similar acts of violence from radical Muslims.

The initial response to the advance edition of Jones’ book was explosive. It was dropped by her publisher Random House because of the anticipated backlash from the Muslim community even though it had paid her a US$100,000 advance. It was also pulled from bookshops in Serbia last August after pressure from Islamic groups.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

No, this is not a parody of the 1990 Johnny Depp film Edward Scissorhands. This is Pearl Fryar’s life – and the engaging subject of the new documentary, A Man Named Pearl. For 78 minutes directors/producers Scott Galloway and Brent Pierson lovingly capture Fryar’s spirit and artistry as a self-taught topiary artist who has overcome a lifetime of bigotry to become internationally respected. The film is currently in theatres and will be released on DVD in December.

In 1976 Fryar and his wife Metra moved to Bishopville, South Carolina. As the son of a North Carolina sharecropper, Fryar was no stranger to racism; when the Fryars attempted to buy a home in a predominantly white neighborhood, they were told they weren’t welcome because “Black people don’t keep up their yards.”

by Jennifer Fenton
- USA -

"We have an entire generation of people in their twenties and thirties who have never gone through a war…the media and government have gotten so good at the creation of messages, people don't know the reality" - Casey J. Porter

Army Sergeant Casey J. Porter has many battles to fight, and unlike the dramatizations of politicians and media commentators, his battles are concrete, real, and hard fought. During his time as an enlisted soldier deployed in Iraq, Casey has undergone an evolutionary process, one that has taken him from warrior to peace activist. His talent and passion for filmmaking have given him the perfect medium for his personal expression. Utilizing his current circumstances and natural talent as a filmmaker to speak out against the war, Casey's films have turned the heads of people like Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! and filmmaker Michael Moore.

by Blaire Dessent
- France -

When the family of Ramon Avalos, a blind and mentally disabled man in his 50s, received a check from Center for Creative Growth for a few hundred dollars from the sales of his artwork, they sent the check back thinking it was a mistake. Founded in the mid-1970s in Oakland, California, The Center for Creative Growth (CCG) is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing those with mental, physical and emotional disabilities a place to make artwork. Avalos had been working at the Center for years and was known for his colored pencil on paper abstracts.

by Vera von Kreutzbruck
- Germany -

Even before Elite Squad was released commercially in October 2007, the hugely popular film about police violence and corruption in Rio de Janeiro was already a major success in Brazil. Eleven million Brazilians saw the film on pirated copies and almost 3 million spectators were drawn to the theatres. It will be released this month in the United States.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

There will always be those who yearn for a simpler time, a time before the world was consumed by the internet and ever-advancing technologies. For the 54 million people living with disabilities in the United States, assistive technology can transform their lives, making it possible to fully participate in the able-bodied world – if they are able to afford it. The documentary Freedom Machines profiles people living with physical disabilities and the miraculous technologies that hold the key to their futures. The film, by Jamie Stobie and Janet Cole, will be broadcast on PBS September 9th as part of the Point of View series.

by Lijia Zhang
- China

Sundown left a trail of blood-red clouds in the western sky, yet evening offered no respite from the burning heat. With the plum rain season at an end Nanjing renewed its reputation as one of China’s four furnace cities, the temperature soaring over 40 degrees, or so we all believed – the government reported only 38 or 39. Yes, even the temperature was dictated by the authorities. Once it officially exceeded 37 degrees one working hour would be cut from the day. If it topped 40, all could go home.

The loudspeakers spitting propaganda and stirring tales of model workers were all the more unbearable in such heat. But I was riding away from them.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

In the not so distant past, the idea of reducing, reusing, and recycling seemed idealistic, even if it just meant putting a glass bottle in a recycling container instead of the trash. But a wave of environmentalism has swept the United States, and now recycling a soda can is practically a given. To truly be “green” you must buy the latest environmentally friendly technology, watch green television channels, drive a hybrid, and live in a multimillion dollar home constructed exclusively with green products. If this lifestyle is going to save us, it’s sadly out of reach for most people.

by Lijia Zhang
- China -

Since the reform and opening up, a handful of young people have begun to worship capitalism,” preached political instructor Wang Aimin, the ideologue-in-chief of our unit, spittle flying over his notes and out into the audience. His cold eyes blinked in- voluntarily, lending a sinister look that belied his given name, Aimin – Love the People.

“Unable to distinguish between fragrant flowers and poisonous weeds, these young people pick up capitalist trash like the ‘trumpet trousers’ and rotten music,” Wang spat. “We must resolutely defend the ‘four cardinal principles’ of socialism!”“

by Lijia Zhang
- China -

CLICK, CLACK, CLICK, CLACK ... When the percussive tap sounded from the corridor outside I was instantly alert. Soon, the source arrived in the doorway and walked into the workshop.

“Masters, have you all eaten?” Little Zhi, a colleague who tested electric gauges in another room along the corridor offered the common greeting in China – one which required no answer. A giant by local standards at 1.86 metres tall, his eyes were long and thin; the sparse moustache on his young face as out of place as legs painted on a snake. He settled cross-legged in a chair, one foot in the air showing off his shining leather shoes with half-moon metal plates on the soles – the source of the tapping. They were considered attractive – not everyone could afford leather footwear. As the only son of the most senior deputy director of the factory, and, perhaps more importantly, the newly found nephew of a man living in Taiwan, Zhi could afford certain luxuries.

by Lijia Zhang
- China -

The end of 1980 saw the dawn of reform but also roaring unemployment. To address the problem, the government introduced a temporary policy, allowing young people to take over their parents’ positions. My mother, aged only 43, having pickled machine parts in acid most of her working life, decided to take advantage and retire, worried I might never land such a good job. Chenguang Machinery Manufacture in Nanjing, with its army of 10,000 workers, was among the largest and most prestigious enterprises in China, churning out civilian as well as military supplies, including the country’s “fist product” – missiles.

From free nurseries to cremation, with countless bowls of rice in between, the life of a state employee provided cradle-to-grave security. Workers were hailed as “big brothers”, “the masters of the nation”.

by Mridu Khullar
- India -

• Tibetan writers are using literature and new languages, Chinese and English, to share information about Tibet's struggle for freedom with a wider audience.
Photograph by Sirensongs. •

Their language of choice—Tibetan, English, and surprisingly, now even Mandarin.

“Although the exile Tibetan community [in India] has been very effective in providing a high level of cultural production in religious areas, it is inside Tibet that Tibetan intellectuals and artists have been able to make achievements in secular culture, such as poetry, literature, music, painting, and some forms of scholarship, despite the difficulties they face,” says Dr. Robert Barnett, Director of Modern Tibetan Studies at Columbia University and author of Lhasa: Streets with Memories.

The writings of these poets and essayists have transformed over the past decade from musings about an exotic culture and history, to more real issues of human rights, political policies, and memoirs of people loved and lost. The Tibetan writers of today, regardless of their genre, seem to write with an agenda: to spread the word about the declining situation of the Tibetan freedom movement to readers both inside and out of China.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

Neil Young does not mince words. During his Freedom of Speech 2006 tour with on-again-off-again band mates David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, the group energetically performed Young’s new songs titled, “Let’s Impeach the President” and “Lookin’ for a Leader.” But the responses to CSNY’s new songs haven’t all been positive; one woman walked out of the group’s Atlanta concert saying, “Neil Young can stick it up his ass.”

Music, politics, and controversy are all part of the powerful new documentary CSNY Déjà Vu. The film – directed by Young under his filmmaking moniker, Bernard Shakey, and currently playing at theaters nationwide – follows the “four balding hippie millionaires” (as one concert review described the aging rockers) while they tour country with their anti-war message.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

Paying upwards of $10 USD to see a movie about economics, particularly in these increasingly desperate financial times, hardly seems like a prudent decision – much less a pleasurable way to spend a Sunday afternoon. But if you’re willing to shell out the cash to see the new documentary I.O.U.S.A., which opens in theatres this August, you may be surprised at just how enjoyable and educational a film about America’s economy can be.

The federal debt seems too incredible a sum to even fully grasp; an easier way to understand such an enormous figure is that if the debt was equally divided among the country’s population, each American would owe over $30,000.

If you have no idea or don’t even care that this debt exists, I.O.U.S.A. makes you want to learn. The film’s complex premise and daunting numbers are made more accessible by the use of colorful graphs and illustrations. Creadon effectively contrasts what average people think (or think they know) against experts’ analysis, which keeps the film from being too weighed down by statistics and theories. The film’s tone can be summed up by student activist Mike Tully who yells at passersby in one scene: “Would you like to go on a date with me? No! Would you like to learn about the debt? Yes!”

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

On 8-8-08 when the Beijing Summer Olympics begins, the world will see that the Maoist doctrine of the Cultural Revolution has been replaced by capitalism and McDonald’s – all in the name of progress. This Modern China bears a striking resemblance to the West it once condemned. But what will not be proudly displayed in shiny new shopping malls is the reality that modernization comes at the displacement of millions of people who must abandon the only way of life they know and join a new China.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

Every Sunday afternoon my college journalism advisor, who everyone lovingly called “Coach,” would meet with the newspaper staff and critique the past week’s articles. As a portly middle-aged man who had won numerous awards for his work at a major newspaper, Coach would often encourage us to cover our stories with a “Gonzo” approach. The concept of participatory journalism seemed feasible, but drinking a bottle of bourbon while driving around Las Vegas in a Cadillac convertible with a trunk full of drugs didn’t really seem conducive to writing articles about our school’s basketball team.

by Sara Terry
- USA -

It all goes back, I think, to the day I was standing in a mass grave, hating the fact that I was there, balanced precariously on a mound of bones, camera reluctantly in hand. I’d been asked to make a photo of a partly-preserved pair of hands, the remains of a teenage boy who along with thousands of other Bosnian Muslim men and boys had been murdered by Bosnian Serb forces seven years earlier during the Srebrenica massacre.

• Forensic anthropologists Ewa Klonowski (right) and Piotr Drukier examine the partially preserved hands of a teenage boy, found in a mass grave of victims of the 1995 massacre of some 7,000 to 8,000 Muslim men and boys at the hands of Serb forces who overran the U.N. "safe haven" of Srebrenica. The grave, which contained more than 150 intact bodies and some 350 partial remains, was one of the largest mass graves uncovered in Bosnia since the end of the war. Photograph © Sara Terry. •

by Emily Rose Herzlin
- USA -

“Theatre is ephemeral,” proclaims Geoffrey Decas as he waxes philosophic and waters the plants on his terrace in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Cars whiz by on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway as the smell of marinated tofu wafts into the apartment from the grill on the terrace. “I’m a vegetarian so I get to decide what people eat,” Geoffrey says mischievously. “Which means the rest of us have to eat vegetarian since he’s cooking,” chimes in TJ Witham.

• CollaborationTown charts new theatrical territory with their unique philosophy on art-making. CollaborationTown's website design by Derek Rippe. •

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

American slave trading is a human rights atrocity forever associated with the Confederacy of the Southern United States. Northerners are stereotypically portrayed as benevolent abolitionists fighting the South’s slave labor plantations. But history is rarely that cut and dried.

by Cathy Oerter
- USA -

I ran through the Iowa countryside, young and carefree, unaware of the life I had been richly blessed with. It was just me and the breeze and the green methodical cornfields. The gravel roads, loose with sand and oversized rocks, could easily sprain an ankle yet were gladly accepted in lieu of a track that did not exist. Small towns in Iowa could not afford that luxury and I knew I wanted to run. The gravel became my path into another world.

• Al Oerter at the 1960 Olympic Trials in California. •

Al was tall and muscular and boyishly handsome; he was a gentle giant. No loud bravado, just a common man who had unusually large muscles and monstrous hands that made mine disappear completely in their grasp.

by Sarah Wyatt
- USA -

Years of hardship and backbreaking labor in the riot-stricken slums of Kibera in south Kenya have worn 18 year old Eshe Koome to the bone. A single mother of two, she walked out on her abusive husband and survived for two years as a daily wage laborer, loading vegetables and other goods for sale.

• Eshe is now able to earn a living wage at Kazuri. Photograph by Sarah Wyatt. •

Eshe's story captures in a nutshell how a group of formerly indigent, urban women operates a business for themselves. The Kazuri Bead Factory, located in the Nairobi suburb of Karen, is unique in that it is Kenya’s first visitors’ attraction of its kind, created for and by women. Founded by Lady Susan Wood in 1975, the company is known for its beautiful, hand-painted beads made from the authentic clay from the Mt. Kenya area. Kazuri (Swahili for “small and beautiful”), also produces a number of other goods popular with tourists including pottery, hand-beaded sandals and purses. The beads are often featured on three-dimensional art cards and can also be found in shadowboxes.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

What makes The Linguists so entertaining are the stars’ contagious love of linguistics; between them they speak over 25 languages and have devoted their professional lives to traveling around the world – on screen they venture to Siberia, India, and Bolivia – documenting obscure languages on the verge of extinction. Their work is exciting because Harrison and Anderson are up against the clock: currently there over 7,000 languages spoken around the world, but one is disappearing every two weeks.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

Revealing the ending of a film is downright mean, but it’s obvious that Oscar-nominated director Morgan Spurlock does not find Osama Bin Laden in his latest documentary film Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?. Spurlock’s claim to fame is having exclusively eaten McDonald's for 30 days in his hit 2004 documentary Super Size Me, so I didn’t initially want to run to the theater when I heard he had made a documentary featuring him trekking around the Middle East on a fruitless search for Osama Bin Laden – despite the clever promotional milk carton with Bin Laden’s missing person photo on it that I received at the Sundance Film Festival. (Quite frankly, at that moment I was more interested in the chocolate inside the milk carton.)

But after seeing the documentary, I have to admit that I enjoyed it, simplistic though it may be. The appeal of the film, which is an inevitable hit now that it’s screening at theaters everywhere, is Spurlock’s style: he’s more of a goofy explorer on a madcap adventure than an award-winning foreign correspondent. Within the first few minutes, the film has a musical number with Osama Bin Laden and his followers dancing to MC Hammer’s early 1990’s hit “U Can’t Touch This.”

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

The experiences and emotions of young American girls are much more complicated, and even tragic, than most people, particularly men, would assume. Girls as young as eight are regularly confronting low self-esteem, eating disorders, broken families, peer rejection, drug addiction, and the eternal search of finding their place in an unforgiving world. But every summer girls from 8 to 18 find a reprieve from their daily struggles for one week at a truly original venue: Rock 'n’ Roll Camp for Girls!

by Vera von Kreutzbruck
- Germany -

Andrzej Wajda was 13 years old when World War II broke out. Together with his mother he lived most of his life in the vain hope that his father might have survived the war: his father’s name had never appeared on any official list of Polish soldiers killed in combat. The truth, discovered years later, was that Captain Wajda had been shot cold-bloodedly by the Soviet secret police in a prison in the western Soviet Union. Andrzej and around 22,000 other people had waited for their loved ones in vain.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

“Rape has always been used as a weapon of war” is the opening line of the new documentary film The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo. For 76 minutes the film exposes the incredibly brutal civil war that has raged for over ten years in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Not only have over four million people been killed, but over 250,000 women and girls have been raped, kidnapped, and tortured.

by Nancy Van Ness
- USA -

In a heap on the studio floor as though they had collapsed under some disaster, fallen birds present a scene of despair. I am drawn toward them. They are a very powerful artistic reinterpretation of the Japanese tradition of the thousand cranes that people traditionally make from beautiful origami paper as signs of hope (most recently that would be hope for peace).

A closer look reveals that the defeated origami cranes are made from newspaper accounts of war, violence, cruelty; indeed these birds have succumbed under the weight of the torment and anguish of needless human suffering all over the world. I found them when I visited another studio at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, Nebraska, where I was briefly in residence.

by Molly Nance
- USA -

I'm not usually one to arrive to a press event 30 minutes early, but recently I woke up in time to drive two hours north from Monterey to San Francisco, to arrive promptly at the Legion of Honor, for the first time. The view from this hilltop setting - a bright blue San Francisco Bay framed by the Golden Gate Bridge - took my breath away at that early morning hour.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

- March 8th - Today we celebrate International Women's Day with our sisters and mothers, aunts and grandmothers, cousins and daughters, and most of all, with our writers, who have become family. On this important day, we find it appropriate that Jessica's review is of a film about a group of remarkable women in Argentina who found their voices and by doing so transformed themselves from victims into successful entrepreneurs. The women of Brukman are yet further proof that women who empower themselves cannot be stopped. - Ed.


Christmas should be a happy time for families to congregate over lengthy meals while watching little kids open presents, but in 2001 Argentina’s economy collapsed a week before the holiday. Almost immediately factories shut down, business owners fled the country, and low-paid workers were out of their jobs just when everyone needed a little extra money. Yuletide joy was harder to find than a job. However the amazing women featured in the documentary film The Women of Brukman didn’t let the crumbling economy destroy their livelihoods, their spirit, or their Christmas.

• Delicia works the presses, perfectly ironing every piece of clothing that leaves the Brukman factory. Photograph by Gunes-Helene Isitan. •

One day in late 2001, the workers of the Brukman garment factory arrived for their shifts, only to find that the factory’s owners had fled the country – neglecting to pay anyone! The predominately female workforce decided to go about their jobs just like it was any other day; no one had any extra money and, with the recent economic collapse, few employment opportunities elsewhere. Everyone assumed that the Brukman family would eventually return to Buenos Aires and want the factory back.

by Vera von Kreutzbruck
- Germany -

This year’s 58th International Film Festival in Berlin is offering a heterogeneous mix of topics and genres with many documentaries, a lot of pathos, a few lost souls, war and violence, politics as usual, and last but not least, some comedy.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

Forty years of unending gang violence between rival gangs, the Bloods and Crips, has killed over 15,000 people in South Central Los Angeles. It seems counterintuitive that one of the most dangerous places in the United States is so close to one of the most famous places on earth; the sunny palm tree lined streets of Hollywood seem worlds away from the dangerous and economically depressed streets of South Central LA. But the sad reality is that children are regularly gunned-down while walking to school at 10 a.m. a mere twenty-five miles from Disneyland.

• Playboy Gangstas Crip, Nikko De. Photo courtesy of the filmmakers. •

The film’s director Stacy Peralta is no stranger to the rough side of Southern California; his rise to fame as skateboarder who revolutionized the sport on the seedy sidewalks of Venice Beach in the 1970s is chronicled in the documentary film Dogtown and Z-Boys (which he also directed) and in the feature film The Lords of Dogtown. Besides Peralta, this film has an extraordinary amount of star power behind it, especially for a documentary: actor Forest Whitaker narrates and NBA star Baron Davis, who was raised by his grandmother in South Central LA, financed and produced the film.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

If you want to see interesting independent films and the movie stars in them, the Sundance film festival, held in the picturesque ski town of Park City, Utah, is the place to go. The annual festival attracts movie stars, independent filmmakers, studio executives, journalists, and people who love movies. Sundance has gained a reputation as the premier American film festival for independent feature films and documentaries. Although the festival itself has an air of exclusivity, to me and most people who care about film, the independent films shown represent film at its best: a medium that transcends boundaries and moves people to a greater understanding of humanity, even if the world they’re watching is completely foreign to them.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

When thinking of Afghanistan, it is difficult not to be overwhelmed by despair. Violence claimed over 6,000 lives in 2007 alone. The quality of life for women continues to decline as a result of continuing violence and the country’s shattered infrastructure. Good news about Afghanistan rarely makes the nightly news. However, after watching the documentary The Beauty Academy of Kabul, which is widely available on DVD, I felt more hopeful about the future of Afghan women, because the film depicts a possible alternative to the oppression and poverty that characterize most women’s lives there.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

Including the word “orgasm” in the title of your documentary film is a bold move. After seeing the film Passion and Power: Technology of Orgasm at the Mill Valley Film Festival, I wanted to talk to the equally bold women behind the film: Bay area filmmakers Wendy Slick and Emiko Omori. During our interview, Slick provided greater insight into the creative process of an independent documentary filmmaker who chooses to focus on women’s social and political freedoms as viewed through sexuality.

• Co-producer and co-director Wendy Slick •

by Anna Clark
- USA -

There comes a time when a reader is starved for something new.

A lot of tremendous fiction is being published these days, but most people don’t ever hear about it. In a time when big publishers pay to place their titles on the front tables of bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders, when book reviews are slashed in most periodicals, when smaller publishers simply don’t have the cash to send their brightest talents out on book tours—then the avid reader tends to hear about the same authors over and over again, while work they might fall in love with slips through the cracks.

I love Cynthia Reeves’ new book, Badlands, winner of the 2006 Miami University Press Novella Contest. Being the work of a debut author and published by a small publisher, I might not have heard of it if I hadn’t attended graduate school with Reeves. The two of us entered the fiction program at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina in 2004. Reeves worked on this book as a student, which meant that I was lucky enough to see the beginnings of Badlands. I was drawn to her creative sensibility; her story tells itself not in the traditional “first this, then that” chronology of mainstream fiction. Rather, her characters are developed through the juxtaposition of their dreams and memories with their present lives.

by Nalini Jones
- USA -

Tomorrow evening, I fly to India. My bag is mostly packed and is a source of consternation to my dog, a sensitive soul who fears imminent departure. For me it is a sort of icon, a reminder of dozens of other trips to see my family in India. I remember the care with which my mother packed, the strong sense that every available space must be used. We were trafficking in whatever was rare or difficult for our family to find, from our own school pictures to electronics, from the sort of nightgown my grandmother favored to the peanut butter we American kids liked to eat, even on our chapatis.

by Hayward Hawks Marcus
- USA -

For years, many people have painted Yoko Ono as the cold and controlling monster who broke up the Beatles, ran John Lennon’s life, and probably made the pop legend unhappy, even if he himself wasn’t aware of it. Allen Tannenbaum’s new book, a collection of photographs he took of the iconic couple, defies this persistent myth. Springing from many of Tannenbaum’s photos is undeniable visual evidence of John and Yoko truly relating to one another, in a deeply heartfelt and human way not often seen in photos of the famous. One cannot dispute the affection for each other lighting John and Yoko’s eyes when caught by Tannenbaum’s lens. In a starstruck world, where pretty celebs are often seen hanging on each other’s arms like sparkly but soulless Tiffany baubles, images such as these are both rare and refreshing.