Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival will be running in Toronto from April 19 to 29. A festival like this one is always a great opportunity to see the world through the eyes of others and discover how no matter how far they are, the themes are recurring and quite familiar. I’ve compiled a list of a few films that should be of interest to the readers of Global Culture:
- The Underground Orchestra (Heddy Honigmann, Netherlands):
Beneath the streets of Paris lies a rich and intriguing community of musicians and singers who hail from such far-flung countries as Iran, Algeria, Armenia and Vietnam. [...] Theirs are tales of escape from religious and political persecution.
Read more about Diasporas
- McLuhan’s wake (Kevin McMahon, Canada):
McMahon’s key concerns-the relationships between culture, technology, environment and national identity-coalesce in this artful and sophisticated overview of Marshall McLuhan’s background, ideas and insights.
Read more about the evolution of TV
- Losers and Winners (Ulrike Franke & Michael Loeken, Germany):
German efficiency and Chinese industriousness pass each other on globalization’s economic ladder in this revealing, candid and wryly humourous look at the efforts of 400 Chinese workers, supervised by 30 German foremen, to cut apart a virtually brand new coking plant so it can be rebuilt in China.
Visit the film website or read more about the outsourcing culture and our many posts on China
- The Big Sellout (Florian Opitz, Germany):
as the practice of privatization become similar to warfare, dehumanizing us and reducing us to mere statistics? [...] The Big Sellout offers an empathetic and sobering study of the human impact of global economics
We have our own collection of statistics about migration & globalization.
- Everything’s cool (Daniel B. Gold & Judith Helfand, United States):
Award-winning filmmakers Helfand and Gold bring you their latest “toxic comedy” about global warming, an issue that has created the most dangerous chasm ever to emerge between scientific understanding and political action.
Visit the film website or read our own little debate as a result of the post global warming swindle
1 response so far ↓
1 Global Culture » the big sellout // May 13, 2007 at 10:59 pm
[...] Directed by Florian Opitz, this documentary about the real consequences of privatization was my favorite at the recent HotDocs. Its biggest accomplishment is to reveal the characters affected by globalization, thus humanizing the problem again. Making it clear that it is not about statistics or economics. It is about the people that have their lives affected in such a way that many of them are robbed of their most essential rights. To do this he recruited a small group of local heroes battling with the consequences of privatization in very different ways: a South African hacking the electrical system to give power to the poorest, an English train driver calling out the mess created by the British government when they privatized the rail system, a Philippine mother struggling to keep his son alive in the middle of a health system falling apart, a group of citizens in Bolivia fighting against privatization of their water. If just a dozen of people had the insight and courage of these individuals in every city, the world would be such a different place. [...]
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