Film

Communities Acting Collectively With Entrepreneurial Leadership

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Screen Shot 2013-07-08 at 9.50.42 AM

Thanks to this interview podcast on Fresh Air, we learned about Ava DuVernay and through her we learned about @AFFRM (click the banner above to go to their site, and be sure to read her interview with Director Spike Lee). DuVernay is a cultural entrepreneur, par excellence, and we salute her sense of community and collaboration:

Before she started making movies a few years ago, DuVernay made a name for herself through her marketing and publicity firm DVA Media + Marketing, which has handled films by brand-name directors like Clint Eastwood and Steven Spielberg. Continue reading →

Are you doing a Big Year?

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I was working from the internet café during a windy day last week-end when I thought I was squinting again. “Did you see that bird? It has two tails!” my colleague Martin exclaimed entering the room a little later. I checked out the sighting: a racket-tailed drongo. The most surprising, graceful creature I have ever seen. Actually, I didn’t know much about birding before I got here. Since then, I’ve learned about the fallouts following a storm, the threats to bird migration and the ethics of the birder. As of yesterday, thanks to India’s cable tv, I’ve learnt from a Hollywood movie that birding can also be a competition. Continue reading →

“3 idiots”: a Bollywood must-see

/ Allegra / 2 Comments

3 idiots

One of the most memorable weeks of my childhood was during a summer holiday in Mauritius spent with my brother and cousins with no adult available to take us to the beach. We kept going back and forth to the video store because all there was on television were Bollywood movies with no subtitles. Since then I’ve been pretty biased against Bollywood movies, there’s only so much Shannen Doherty direct-to-video one can take, you know? So when I met friends from Bombay, I asked them for an outstanding Bollywood movie. They said: “You’ve got to see 3 idiots“. That same night a friend from Tanzania wrote on his Facebook wall: “Make your passion your profession.! #The 3 Idiots.” So it was written in the stars, I had to see this movie.

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Documentaries : Black Out by Eva Weber, children searching for the light

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Short electricity cuts punctuate the day here in Kerala. As if to remind us, for a few seconds in our daily life, that the electricity fairy can play hard to get. Generators always kick in in an instant though, and that is it. Elsewhere, in Guinea for instance, generators are not there to save the day. 

Only about a fifth of Guinea’s people have access to electricity. With few families able to afford generators, school children have had to get creative to find a place to read, do their homework and study for exams. So every day during exam season, as the sun sets over Conakry, hundreds of children begin a nightly pilgrimage to the  G’bessia International Airport, to petrol stations and parks in wealthier areas of the city, searching for light.

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Midway – a transmedia project by Chris Jordan

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imagesThis morning’s post about the Smithsonian Ocean Portal featuring one of Chris Jordan‘s pictures from his exhibit Midway reminded me to check on his current work on the atoll. On one of the remotest islands on our planet, tens of thousands of albatrosses lie on the ground, their bodies filled with plastic from the Pacific Garbage Patch.

Returning to the island over several years, Chris Jordan and his team witness the cycles of life and death of these birds. He will release in late 2013, his first documentary feature Midway, message from the gyre.

See the  trailer after the jump. Continue reading →

Documentaries : The Carbon Rush by Amy Miller

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carbon rush credit Amy Miller

I am from Europe where since the Roman conquest forest and civilization were perceived as antagonistic. Silva, the forest, was wild and needed to be tamed, and ager, the man-made open space was culture. So when Western countries debate of reducing deforestation and planting trees to offset carbon emissions, you can bet they mean elsewhere.

We have shops where you can buy a wooden chair but in exchange you pay for a carbon offsetting voucher which will allow for trees to be planted somewhere. That’s the thinking behind the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which allows a country with an emission-reduction or emission-limitation commitment under the Kyoto Protocol to implement an emission-reduction project in developing countries. Director Amy Miller went around the world to meet the communities where some of those offsetting projects were implanted.  See the trailer after the jump.

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Documentary: Shunte ki pao! (Are you listening), the life of a family of climate refugees in Bangladesh

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Shunte ki pao (Are you listening) (c) Beginning Production

When introducing his documentary at the Paris International Documentary festival, Cinéma du Réel, director Kamar Ahmad Simon said to the audience: “Thank you for being here. I will be back at the end of the screening to discuss the film with you. I’d like to know your opinion and to answer any questions you may have, whether you liked the film or not, so I can go forward and progress.” If I had to sum up the response from the audience and jury it would be something like: “Please keep going. We’ll follow.”

Click here for the  trailer  of Shunte Ki Pao ! (Are you listening)

Rakhi and Soumen are a beautiful couple, they are young, in love and are the happy parents of little Rahul. You could say they have it all. That’s if their region of the coastal belts of Bangladesh had not been wiped out by the tidal in 2009. Rakhi and Soumen are climate refugees. A couple among  almost a million homeless, stranded under the open sky on an ancient dyke. They now live in a small village named Sutarkhali. Rakhi and Soumen were from the middle-class, today three years after the tidal, they buy fruits by the unit, fish for their meal and line-up on neverending queues for food aid. And life goes on.  Shunte Ki Pao ! (Are you listening) is not about disaster, it tells how people build a life afterwards. Continue reading →

Washington D.C.’s Green Carpet

/ Amie Inman / 1 Comment

When our new contributor ÉA Marzate wrote about a recent film festival it had the added benefit of providing the incentive to explore similar festivals worldwide. I’d nearly missed the DC Environmental Film Fest, which boasted documentaries that overlapped with those screened in Paris as well as some that touch a direct personal chord with RAXA Collective. (As I live in India, I use the word “missed” figuratively of course!)

I’m referring to the U.S. Premier of the 2012 BBC film Lonesome George and the Battle for the Galapagos. Continue reading →

International Environmental Film Festival of Paris: Prize List and Small Gems

/ Allegra / 3 Comments

The 30th edition of the International Environmental Film Festival closed in Paris a few weeks ago. The selection of rare, beautiful and eye-opening films was a treat so I wanted to share some of the goodness with you.

Grand Prix: The Fruit hunters by Yung Chang

Inspired by Adam Leith Gollner’s book of the same name -that also inspired a post in these pages – Canadian director Yung Chang (Up the Yangtze) enters the world of fans of rare varieties of fruits.  As he follows fruit hunters’ travels and meet-ups, he finds the tree of an almost extinct mango, comes across actor Bill Pullman and interviews many of these unsung heroes of biodiversity. The aesthetics of the cinematography makes those fruits and those characters irresistible. Continue reading →

Crowd-sourced Project Finance 101

/ Crist Inman / 2 Comments

Recently, I happened upon the pitch above and was at first thrilled to see yet one more alternative approach to raising awareness and appreciation for nature: good production values and the style is quirky and fun.  The Kickstarter pitch came midway through and then my thoughts started wandering. Continue reading →

If You Happen To Be In Hyderabad

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Inviting film to the table seems like a powerful, creative idea:

The Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India, and the National Biodiversity Authority are hosting an International Biodiversity Film Festival and Forum in Hyderabad as part of COP-11 in association with CMS Environment. Continue reading →

A Learning Laboratory (Stop Motion Video!)

/ Chi-Chi Lin / 12 Comments

Yesterday, Jonathon, Siobhan, Milo, and I moved into one of the new Raxa Collective properties under development. As the four of us huddled silently under our covers, the backwaters of Kerala’s nighttime accompanied Jonathon’s ghost stories…

Instead of spooky tales, though, today I want to share with you another story Jonathon narrates, Raxa Collective presents “A Learning Laboratory.” It’s a short video, Jonathon (narrator), Sunnie (illustrator), Siobhan (director), and I (producer) put together with the help of all the staff and summer interns to highlight some of the best anecdotes of how Raxa Collective’s Cardamom County ecolodge has acted as a “learning laboratory” for its staff, international trainees, and summer interns.

Enjoy!

Golden Rule Loops

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the fourth instalment of the “valtari mystery film experiment” is by icelandic directors arni & kinski. their video for rembihnútur focuses on meditation:

the much needed changes in the world will happen through changes within each and every one of us. we all want and need love. this film is a celebration of sigur rós’s music and the benefit it is having in the elevation of consciousness that is happening with humankind. people are finding strength in love, care, and respect for themselves, each other, and the world we live in.

more information is here

Bollywood Century

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As several of us prepare to celebrate a couple years of residence in India, and this site approaches its first birthday, a certain theme song (and equally essential accompanying dance) comes to mind.  Therefore, a big thanks to The New Yorker‘s James Pomerantz for posting this reminder:

While it may seem like just yesterday that the silent film “Shree Pundalik” was released in Mumbai, May 18th marks the hundredth anniversary of what many consider to be the first Indian film made. The past century has seen India grow to become the world’s largest producer of films…

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Dance Now

/ Amie Inman / 3 Comments

Throughout human history Dance has been a form of culture that is much greater than the sum of its parts.  Wordlessly it has the capacity to tell stories, communicate with deities, perform rites of passage, lead a people to war or join them together.

Whether linked to seasonal activity in villages or the entertainment history of the 20th century, dance is part and parcel of the human condition.

In the cinematic world director Wim Wenders has made a career making films that do similar things.   Continue reading →

Dance Then

/ Organikos / 3 Comments

Click the image to the right for a wonderful reminder, in the form of book review, of what makes dance uniquely suited to certain important cultural tasks:

Now that The Artist has whetted our interest in the silent film and the revolutionary impact of sound, it may be time to reconsider the career of the man who made the conversion to sound the basis of a whole new kind of movie, Fred Astaire. The Artist suggests quite accurately that the definitive event of the new sound era was the arrival of the film musical. Sound meant music; music meant jazz. But the technological transition was slow. After the first feature-length sound movie, The Jazz Singer (1927), which starred Al Jolson, it was six years before the advent of the Jazz Dancer proved that talking and even singing mouths were not nearly as expressive in the new medium as dancing feet, especially and almost exclusively the feet of Fred Astaire. Astaire and the difference he made to the film musical add up to more than the story of one career. No other film genre provided as perfect a synchronization of sight and sound or an experience as exhilarating, and that was very largely Astaire’s doing. Continue reading →