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Just Do It

Mona — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 13:00:33 +0000

Given an exclusive access by two (Climate Camp and Plane Stupid) environmental and climate change protest groups, Emily James (director, camera) followed them in their endeavors as they enthusiastically executed their plans by putting up camp sites in air strips, super gluing themselves to each other to form human barricades, and serving cups of tea to bystanders to show their passionate sense of responsibility for the future.

Having studied documentary directing at the National Film and Television School, James is quite learned in this field and has already received various international awards for her other works like The Luckiest Nut in the World (2002), Don’t Worry (2004), and What Would Jesus Drive? (2006).

Just Do It follows Marina Pepper, a very optimistic person that believes offering local police a cup of tea will have a subversive power and effect to their cause. The film quickly jumps from place to place across the United Kingdom and over to Denmark with a sense of rapidity and secrecy to prevent the authorities on closing down to them.

One key point in the documentary is the way the protesters deal with the police. They’ve developed a remarkable technique called “dearest”, a moniker for “the arrest”, wherein they will simply grab hold of the arrestee, creating an unwieldy human mass and the exasperated officer will just give up and go elsewhere. Ever since the Ian Tomlinson Death, the authorities have a gentler approach to street demonstrators thus the confrontations has a calmer and rather comedic quality.

Just Do It provides the suffice amount of media coverage that the environmental direct action needs. Crowd-funded and mostly made with Do-It-Yourselves and home-brewed anarchistic vibe, it strictly sticks to its nature of being an anti-capitalist movement while giving voice to the other side, which is usually misrepresented by the mass media. It surely serves rousing stuff and is a stepping stone to the future of activism.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

John and Joe

Mona — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 13:00:00 +0000

A sure heart-melter, John and Joe shows an emotionally moving story of a father… told in a unique way.

This short animation is based on the real recollection of John Vigiano Sr., a retired New York City firefighter who loses both of his sons in the September 11 attack at the World Trade Center. It was directed by The Rauch Brothers and was produced by Lizzie Jacobs and Mike Rauch.

Unlike most documentaries that use real shots of people, the short film blends animation and reality. The cartoon and colorful backdrop contrasts with the deep and aging voice of the story teller. I personally like how the creators use narration to intensify more emotions, you could really feel how the father copes up with this tragic loss.

John and Joe is beautiful and sad at the same time. I commend the filmmakers in giving voices and faces to those who have experienced a lot because of this tragedy. It is honest in a way that you let them speak from their own experiences.

This amazing film is made possible through Story Corps along with The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, The Carnegie Corporation of New York and National Endowment of the Arts.

The Man with the Beautiful Eyes

Mona — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 13:00:23 +0000

Beautifully combining the world of animation and the world of literature, Charles Bukowski‘s poem The Man with Beautiful Eyes is put into life by the collaboration of animator Jonathan Hodgson and illustrator Johnny Hannah.

Bukowski was an American poet, novelist and short story writer from Los Angeles. His works are highly influenced by the social and cultural status of his home town and further “marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work”.

The short opens up with a recollection of a childhood memory. A group of kids finds a mysterious house in an overgrown garden thinking that there was no one living inside, until one day a voice came out of the house. A dead-beat alcoholic steps out and welcomes them warmly. The children have never seen a man with such a free spirit and immediately turned him into a romantic character, set apart from the uptight grown-ups they know.

Visually, the animation is dazzling. I loved how the seemingly painted illustrations help in bringing the poem to life without overpowering it. This shows how the artists’ respect the piece, its past and its future. The play-up of words to images is also more than just captivating, transporting you into a whirlwind of abstract objects.

This short animation comes to remind us that society does not always ‘permit’ the existence of the beautiful things as some may be seen as a threat to the pre set order of things.
The Man With the Beautiful Eyes is indeed a great piece of animation, it’s refreshing to hear Bukowski’s words transferred into an another medium. So press play and enjoy five minutes of pure imagination.

A Life on Hold

Mona — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 13:00:45 +0000

There are those films that on some primal level touch straight into your heart, and A Life on Hold certainly fits this category.

Directed by Nick Francis and Marc Silver, the film tells the life of Omar, a 17-year old Somalian who’s stranded in a refugee camp since the 2011 war in Libya. When the war broke out, thousands of citizens and refugees from Somalia, Sudan, and Eritrea who were staying or working at the country during that time were forced to leave their lives. In the camps, Omar and the other refugees are left with the hope that they would be relocated to a safer place.

Though it has a short run time, the story was well-delivered. Omar as the main character paints not only his life, but also the life of his co-refugees.

The documentary provides a deeper understanding on situations that are remotely different from our surroundings. It sheds a more personal look at the unending war and how one’s life is trapped In between intense and shattering experiences.

Technicality wise, the film is a visual treat. The scenes are artfully done. I personally like the sunset lighting; it applies a dramatic layer to the documentary.

In a time where the Internet has dissolved geographical boundaries, A Life on Hold explores emotional and physical barriers. It is a remarkable story with tremendous human interest. This documentary will surely captivate and enlighten you to issues outside your comfort zones.

A Life on Hold is an Amnesty International Production in association with Speakit Films and Marc Silver Ltd.

To Shoot an Elephant

Mona — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 14:00:21 +0000

To Shoot an Elephant is a licensed documentary directed by Alberto Arce and Mohammad Rujailah about life on the Gaza Strip. This hard-hitting film has already gained international acknowledgement and awards such as the “Most Innovative Filmmaker” at Florence’s Festival dei Popoli.

Despite the Israeli ban on foreign correspondents and humanitarian aid workers to cover and witness operation “Cast Lead” on the ground, there was a small group of international volunteers that managed to remain present in Gaza when the bombing started on December, 27th 2009. To Shoot an Elephant is therefore a collection of stories gathered by the only foreigners who decided and managed to stay embedded inside Gaza strip ambulances, with Palestinian civilians.

Backtrack on the last four decades; Gaza Strip’s situation has not been a pleasant ride; from being under the Israeli occupation until January 2006, when the Israelis imposed a total siege on its 1.5 million inhabitants. This was the country’s attempt to strangle the strip’s economy and to undermine the Hamas’ (ruling political party) government. Then on December 20, 2008, the six month truce between the Israeli and Hamas ended leaving Gaza Strip as a battle ground for an uprising war.

The documentary shows more than just moving stories from different sectors of society. It opens up with a long queue of Palestinians waiting for food, followed by an image of a United Nations relief warehouse that had stopped giving goods. These contrasting images are very powerful, as the inactivity of the warehouse and the long line of hungry people presents us with the seriousness of the humanitarian crisis.

The scenes are heart-breaking. Whether it’s the once flourishing olive plantation turned into a barren buffer zone or a playground dripping in civilian blood due to sporadic mortar hits.

I’m not trying to victimize myself; I think it’s about being fair and being just in this world. It’s giving the chance to live the way they want to and to elect and select the people who they want to represent them. -Mohammad Rajuilah

This is one of the most striking statements in the film because it came from the point of view of a normal citizen. This showed how the war affected civilians trapped in between two conflicting factions.

I admire how the film let the images speak for themselves. It doesn’t talk a lot or force opinions. It shared an impartial and honest look on the life of Palestinians during the attacks of Israelis.
Overall, To Shoot an Elephant focuses on the Palestinian’s struggle to live a normal life. The stories presented are extremely moving, you can really feel the tough conditions and the unbearable fear in the air.

Hands down to the people who have risked their life in making this excellent film, you showed the world that being a journalist is not just a profession; it’s the urge to tell the truth.

The documentary is available as a free torrent download.

The Revolution Will Be Animated

Mona — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 15:00:07 +0000

The Revolution Will Be Animated is a twenty-minute documentary created by Marie Lormant Sebag that presents multiple viewpoints on the concept of copyright laws and free culture. It focuses on Nina Paley, the creator of the animated film Sita Sings the Blues which is also available for free download.

The film captures well-selected footages of Paley while talking about the copyright problems that she had encountered while creating the said film. These experiences lead to her new advocacy of allowing free content dissemination to the public domain.

“The more you control it, the less far it could go,” said Nina while explaining the reasons on why she allows copying and distribution of her own work. For her, art comes first before money which clashes with Bill Plympton’s opinion, another well-known animator featured in the film.

The parallelism on Paley’s and Plympton’s views provoke an interesting contrast. He believes that a certain work should be copyrighted in order to make profit, because in the end, the bread and butter of each artist is his own craft. Plympton still continues to produce his work following copyright restrictions under the monopoly system while Nina Paley commits to an audience-distribution model.

This “Art for Art versus Art for Profit” idea adds depth to the film and raises questions on how information should really be distributed.

It’s a laborious task to fit the copyright and public domain issue in just twenty minutes but by intimately looking from the viewpoint of a single artist affected by this system, the film clearly presented the whole picture.

Overall, The Revolution Will Be Animated is an impressive documentary that focuses on raising a network of issues and providing educated perspectives about it.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

American Censorship Day: November 16th, 2011 – STOP SOPA and PROTECT IP from passing!

Kademlia — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 20:45:01 +0000

The House Judiciary Committee scheduled a hearing on SOPA for November 16, 2011. The hearing today showed that both the sponsors and the supporters the bill have little understanding of the under workings of Internet Industry & little respect of the free speech principal that all Americans cherish so dearly. The opposition of this bill in Congress is not as active as it’s necessary for it to fail and the chance of this bill passing is still very much so real.

Watch the videos below, read the articles and contact your representatives to voice your opinion. Passing of those bills is going to be the first cornerstone for open censorship in United States and quite possibly, around the world.

Go to AmericanCenshorship.org, learn more and contact your representative through an easy online form.

The below is from the AmericanCensorship.org and gives you just the major bullet points about the proposed legislation:

Website Blocking
The government can order service providers to block websites for infringing links posted by any users.

Risk of Jail for Ordinary Users
It becomes a felony with a potential 5 year sentence to stream a copyrighted work that would cost more than $2,500 to license, even if you are a totally noncommercial user, e.g. singing a pop song on Facebook.

Chaos for the Internet
Thousands of sites that are legal under the DMCA would face new legal threats. People trying to keep the internet more secure wouldn’t be able to rely on the integrity of the DNS system.

This Bill is an Emergency for the Internet

1. Watch these videos

2. Read these articles

House takes Senate’s bad Internet censorship bill, tries making it worse
Protect The Internet
SOPA: Hollywood Finally Gets A Chance to Break the Internet
SOPA on OpenCongress
PIPA on OpenCongress

3. Check this infographic out:

Marcin Jakubowski: Open-sourced blueprints for civilization

Kademlia — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 13:00:47 +0000

Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that’s only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village (starting cost: $10,000).

Declaring that, “We can lead self-sustaining lives without sacrificing our standard of living,” Marcin Jakubowski believes that only by opening the means of production can we achieve abundance for all. Though he has a Ph.D. in fusion physics, he became dissatisfied with its remoteness, and turned back to the earth as a farmer and social innovator.

He is the founder of Open Source Ecology, which is creating the Global Village Construction Set — the blueprints for simple fabrication of everything needed to start a self-sustaining village. At Factor e Farm in rural Missouri, he’s been successfully putting those ideas to the test.

“It’s not reinventing the wheel; it’s open-sourcing the wheel.”
Julia Valentine, farmer, in The Atlantic

From TED.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Khan Academy

Natalie — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 13:00:51 +0000

The Khan Academy is “an organization on a mission”. By providing absolutely free of charge instructional videos on topics covering anything from Algebra, Banking, Biology, Calculus, Chemistry, Astronomy, Economics, History, Geometry, Physics, Statistics, etc.,

Salman Khan, the founder of Academy, have already appeared on PBS, CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS; has been invited for talks at local schools, TED, MIT, NPR; and have been featured in Forbes’ blog, just to name a few. The more recently received donation from the Gates Foundation and the prize of two million dollars from Google for winning it’s Project 10 to the 100 of Ideas to change the world (selected from 150,000 submissions), have given the necessary resources to further expand this amazing project into a full blown open education movement. Today, Khan Academy team is constantly introducing, in addition to its 2100+ instructional videos, new learning tools and software to make the learning experience that much better.

Although Khan is not the first person to teach through the Internet, his easy to comprehend 10-20 minute educational presentations (also available en Espanol) and simple operations/graphics have attracted more eyeballs than most University sites. The Khan Academy aims to help anyone, be it a professional wanting to brush up on his/her skills, middle school/university student, or a person who can not otherwise afford basic education, to live up to his/her full potential.

The short instructions enabled students and those otherwise eager to learn to be able to review the material at their very own pace, and as it is impossible to do in a classroom setting – to pause, to rewind, and practice as long as it is needed to master a specific subject.

But outside the videos, Khan Academy offers other important tools. It provides it’s users with some great preparation resources for tests such as SAT, GMAT, CAHSEE, and IIT JEE; a world of free exercises for each of the covered subjects (with a interactive map for students to navigate through the undertaken exercises and a tool to track ones progress); and a special instrument allowing coaches (teachers) to track the progress of all their students in a class.
And with nearly 42 million lessons already delivered no one is ready to stop.

Currently Khan Academy is in the process of developing the adaptive software for all the topics covered in the videos; intend to develop simulation games to give more nuanced and applied understanding of concepts; and expand its learning materials to cover a multitude of additional subjects – translating everything into as many languages as possible. So lets help the global classroom to fully flourish.

In addition, for those who for some reason are unable to access the website or its YouTube.com channel, all copies of the videos can be found at archive.org. Furthermore The Lewis Center for Educational Research, closely affiliated with NASA, is also bringing the content into community colleges and charter schools around the US, while World Possible is creating offline snapshots of the content to distribute in rural, developing regions with limited or no access to the Internet.

Before revolutionizing the area of math, science, and finance education, Salman Khan, holding three math, electrical engineering and computer science related degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as well as an MBA from Harvard Business School, worked as an analyst in a Hedge Fund. His involvement in open education movement started thanks to his younger cousins living in New Orleans who, at the time, needed some basic math tutoring. However, as the time went by, the eight state distance between the cousins remained the same, and the different time schedules created some difficulties in holding a one on one session, Khan decided to record his explanations and upload it on youtube.com. It wasn’t long before the videos turned to be a huge success, and not only with his family, but people from all around the world.
As the number of individuals relying on the videos as an indispensable academic supplement grew, Salman Khan decided to abandon his Analyst position in the world of finance and devote his time to producing other instructional videos, living entirely off his savings until first donations started to come in.

Khan teaches exactly the way he wished he was taught before – as a lot of his own educational experience was spend being frustrated with just how information was presented in textbooks and lectures. He felt like most of the “fascinating and INTUITIVE concepts were almost intentionally being butchered into pages and pages of sleep-inducing text and monotonic, scripted lectures. I saw otherwise intelligent peers memorizing steps and formulas for the next exam without any sense of the intuition or big picture, only to forget everything within a matter of weeks.” And so the presented videos became a labour of love of a determined man with a passion to teach the same material in a slightly different form.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.