Tales of a Video Blogger ebook
Many thanks to RE.FRAMING ACTIVISM for publishing the ebook ‘Tales of a Video Blogger’, a collection of my recent writing about activist film-making.
Download your copy here:http://
9 Notes on Digital Cinema
A new online journal from Colombia, Corónica, has posted a short interview with me on video, made by Juan Soto, called ‘9 Notes on Digital Cinema’. It accompanies my film on the students protests in Chile, Three Short Films about Chile.
Here is Juan’s video (in Spanish and English, with subtitles).
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/48867239#[/vimeo]
“I Like Students’
or ‘Me gustan los estudiantes’: Mario Handler at St Andrews
The Uruguayan documentarist Mario Handler came to St Andrews recently for a symposium revisiting New Latin American Cinema of the 60s through the Uruguayan case. The event was able organised by Beatriz Tadeo Fuica, included a prety cogent overview of Documentary and Activism by Leshu Torshin, and a Q&A with Mario Handler by Gustavo San Román. This was my own contribution. Read more
Nostalgia for the Light
Patricio Guzmán’s latest film finally reaches London at a DocHouse screening on 2nd February.
The Atacama desert in the north of Chile—the location for Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de la luz (Nostalgia for the Light)—is one the driest places on earth, where astronomers have located optical and radio telescopes to take advantage of the extraordinarily clear air, the zero humidity and almost total lack of clouds, and an absence of light pollution and radio interference from nearby cities. In the film’s opening scenes, Guzmán’s gentle voice tells us how he became attracted to the region as a consequence of his boyhood fascination with astronomy and enthusiasm for Jules Verne—the subject of a film he made for French television a few years ago (Mon Jules Verne, 2005)—and he now waxes lyrical over the magnificence of the Atacama skies, where an extraordinary number of stars and constellations can be seen even by the naked eye. The first film that Guzmán has shot in HD, the pellucid light of the film’s title, and the bleak expanses of the extraordinary landscape, are beautifully captured in the limpid cinematography of Katell Djian. The soundtrack too is permeated by the landscape, full of silences and reticent touches of music by the Chilean musicians Miranda and Tobar.
The Persistence of Allende’s Vision
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/33123752[/vimeo]
Back from Chile
Back from my trip a week ago, I buried myself in editing the video I shot in Chile on the student movement, which screens on Saturday 3 December at the Latin American solidarity conference in London and Saturday 10th December at the Roehampton Human Rights Film Festival. Now it’s done, and I break off briefly to give a quick report on the trip.
What happens when you privatise universities: now on video from Chile
The world represented by the mainstream media is still governed by a division into centre and periphery which has been thrown into doubt by recent events—not only the global effects of economic crisis, but the popular protest movements which have sprung up in Europe, the Middle East, and now the USA. It is nowadays the general rule that news from the old periphery, as well as the margins and the interstices of society, arrives in the social media before reaching the mainstream media. It was three or four weeks before Occupy Wall Street was picked up by the mainstream, and predictably it only broke through when cameras on the streets caught the first acts of gratuitous police violence and posted them on the web.