Drexel Gift Certificate Sale

This from Jeff Frank at the Drexel:

Drexel Gift Certificate Sale – we’re givng 1 Free Ticket (an $8.50 value)
with every $25 purchased. This is the best movie deal in Columbus!
Details at www.drexel.net

Help the Festival. Easy and free to do.

On Facebook? You can help the CIF+VF raise money without spending a dime. Click on the icon below and vote for the Film Council of Greater Columbus (that’s our legal 501c3 name). Help us to continue to bring great films to Columbus. Thanks.

Zombies: How to make em, and how to make em popular

by Roger Landes

The phenomenon of zombies is two fold, the obvious one being people rising from the dead to serve the living.  But the real enigma is how did a secretive Voodoo practice from Haiti find its way into our television screens and movie theaters (and on Memorial Day it can even be found on our streets!)

Zombie Walk Columbus has been running for years now.  It begins in Goodale Park and makes its way along High Street.  Thousands have taken part through the years and it has been welcomed as some sort of undead parade.  But, where did it all begin?  Where did the concept of the living-dead originate? And why do they need brains so badly?

Zombies: When the Dead Walk is a documentary that serves to answer these questions. It chronicles the cultural beginnings of the zombie ritual from Haiti all the way to its involvement in major motion pictures in the United States. The highlight of the documentary is Wade Davis, an anthropologist and writer who traveled to Haiti to find the formula used to create a zombie.

The film also does an amazing job of explaining how zombies have become such an integral part of modern day horror films.  After World War I, American troops were sent to Haiti to protect U.S. assets (mainly coffee and sugar).  When the troops returned, hundreds of soldiers were commissioned to record their tales amongst the Haitians.  This sparked a rash of novels and films distorting some of the Voodoo practices.

The initial popularity of Voodoo films in American can easily be attributed as Western fascination with Black culture, in particular the fear of it. The films manipulate Voodoo’s practices to appear particularly threatening, as nothing sells better to the American public than that which they don’t understand. But later filmmakers like George A. Romero tweaked the racist elements and something else evolved.  Our love for zombies comes from our fear of death.  Death is seen as the release from pain.  To not even achieve peace after death is, well, horrifying.

• Zombies: When the Dead Walk
  Canzani Center, CCAD
  Friday, November 13 at 8:00pm

PREVIEW: 57th Season Arrives Early

Q: What do dead people (as in zombies), pornography, mortgage foreclosures, genetically modified food, and strawberry jam have in common?

A: The longest running film festival in the US, the 57th Columbus International Film + Video Festival. Beginning with three “Early Bird” screenings in October the festival kicks off an amazingly diverse spread of films “you can’t see anywhere else”.

Check out our updated events page!

On October 15th at 6.30 pm at Studio 35 the Festival starts off with a bang with a screening co sponsored by Population Connection and the Ohio Sierra Club. Not Yet Rain is a powerful film about women’s access to family planning services and the recent legalization (but not necessarily available) of abortion procedures. Director Lisa Russell will be there to chat with at a reception after the film. On October 20th at 7 pm, also at Studio 35 the Festival presents Strong Coffee: The Story of Café Feminino. Shot mostly in Peru, Strong Coffee tells the amazing story of the women farmers who grow this high quality, certified organic, fair trade coffee. Closer to home is the October 27th 7.30 pm screening of We All Fall Down shot Ohio covers the American mortgage crises and its effect on the poor to middle-class sectors of the United States.

In November, from the 10th to the 15th the festival is showing Scientists Under Attack a German film about genetically modified food and corporate sponsored research (at Germania 11/10 at 8 pm), My Son, The Pornographer a film about a father’s visit to Prague, where his son directs porn movies (Arena Grand 11/11 at 7 pm), and on Thursday November 12 an evening of Award Winning Student Works (CCAD Canzani Center at 8pm). Friday the 13th means zombies of course, with Zombies: When the Dead Walk (CCAD Canzani Center at 8pm). Dress as a zombie and get in free! Saturday morning is for kids of all ages with Saturday Morning Cartoons From Around The World (CCAD Canzani Center at 10am). Children get in free.

Saturday evening is for grown ups with An Evening of Movies + Mead with Animation 4 Adults 2, cartoons for adults that includes hometown’s Jennifer Deafenbaugh’s Strawberry Jam. Stay for the award ceremony after the films and get a chance to meet the filmmakers. The festival wraps on Sunday with two very different screenings, The Magistical, a feature length animated film for kids (Drexel 1 pm) and closes with the Best of Festival winner One Water, (CCAD Canzani Center at 7pm), a stunning documentary that highlights a world where water is exquisitely abundant in some places and dangerously lacking in others, where taps flowing with fresh, clean water are contrasted with toxic, polluted waterways that have turned the blue arteries of our planet murky.

Most screenings are $5, some are free, CCAD screenings are free for CCAD students. For more information go to www.chrisawards.org.

Strong Coffee: Fair Trade and Feminism in the World of Coffee

Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2009
7:00pm – 8:30pm
Studio 35 Cinema & Draft House (here)
3055 Indianola Ave, Columbus, OH

Film Review By Roger Landes

As with millions of Americans, my day begins with a large, piping hot cup of coffee. No cream, no sugar. Or, on days when I wake up late, I’ll throw in a couple of ice cubes so that I might slide it down my gullet while running out the door. I tend to buy the second-least-expensive bulk coffee I can find at the grocery store and only in the most basic flavor available. Even in coffee shops I usually just go with the most basic flavor, mainly for fear of lacking some sort of lingo necessary to order without the baristas rolling their eyes at me. In short, my coffee purchases have been based upon the ease of the transaction and not having to think about my choice whatsoever.

And that, I have learned, has been a mistake.

It’s not that I didn’t understand what organic food was. It implies that the food was held to a higher standard of production and quality. It also means it is more expensive. So my confusion was not in what was organic, but why choose organic.

And here we find the most important message of Strong Coffee. Coffee is second only to oil as a traded commodity, and is primarily produced in Africa and South and Central America. The average coffee farmer makes about $2 a day, while big business brings in billions of dollars through imports and exports. The documentary chronicles the creation and management of Café Femenino, a coffee co-op that aims to redirect the balance of money towards the farmers of the actual coffee.

For over 40 years, Isabel Latorre and her husband Victor Rojas have been working to aid female coffee farmers in Peru who were being abused by a chauvinistic society and economy. Abuse of women was climbing to the rate of 70%, and a machismo attitude kept women from having an education or being able to make any real money. Latorre began educating the female farmers to improve their production to organic standards. She got into contact with Garth Smith, an organic coffee importer from Washington. With the help of his wife Gaylene, they started Café Femenino, made up of exclusively female farmers and administrators. At the heart of the group were two ideals: fair trade and feminism.

Café Femenino demonstrates all of the best aspects of both of these concepts. The farmers must meet strict criteria to be classified as organic, which sells at a much higher price on the international market. In order to make sure that these proceeds are indeed coming from the women farmers, the farm land that the farming is occurring must be owned by a woman. This helps restructure the family economic model; by bringing in more capital, the women have more pull within the family structure. Also, the roasters must to sell the beans with 2% of profits must be donated to women’s crisis centers. The film shows several different locations in Washington where women’s shelters have been sustained solely because of the sale of Café Femenino coffee in their area.
The film displays the painstaking process that these women go through in order to provide for their families, as well as showing the incredible benefits of their hard work. The film also shows the dedication of the administrators and the roasters have for supplying great coffee to the public, while still holding the integrity of the company. And this is where the message truly resonated for me. I find the commitment to making a better life for people, and the sacrifices made to be very moving.

Why organic? I don’t know. Maybe because going to Stauf’s and buying Café Femenino instead of Folgers isn’t really that much of a sacrifice for me to make. And neither is paying the extra coin. But the result can be tremendous.

Not Yet Rain – Thursday Oct. 15

The 57th Columbus International Film + Video Festival

Early Bird Screenings: (Festival|Events)

Not Yet Rain ~ Thursday Oct. 15  [at Studio35]  w/director, Lisa Russell in person!

6:30pm – 8:30pm
Studio 35 Cinema & Draft House (here)
3055 Indianola Ave, Columbus, OH

Join us after the film for a reception
with the director, Lisa Russell!

Not Yet Rain, a short film by Lisa Russell,
is a powerful film charting the course
of reproductive freedom in Ethiopia,
told through the voices of women who
have faced the challenge of finding safe
health care. Through their stories, we see
the important role that safe health care
plays in the overall wellbeing of women
and their families.
www.notyetrain.org/

FREE Admission!
This screening is co-sponsored by Population Connection and the Central Ohio Sierra Club.

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Please check out our Festival Events page for continued updates and a running list of events.

Children Of Armageddon, Tuesday Sept 22

Children Of Armageddon

a film by FABIENNE LIPS-DUMAS

SCREENING: Tuesday Sept 22, at the Drexel Theater, 2254 E. Main st., Bexley

CHILDREN OF ARMAGEDDON(watch trailer) digs back into the contaminated soil of the nuclear argument.

Read Our Full Review

With the reality of a nuclear threat more and more present – especially because of recent U.S. politics. Maki, the granddaughter of a Hiroshima bombing survivor, strives to keep the memory of the horror alive so that history is not repeated.

Nuclear explosives testing, while conducted in secret and silence on the world stage, continues to bear witness to a particular human ability to put itself at risk.

Sponsored by the Free Press, Drexel Theater and the Central Ohio Green Education Fund Film. Admission is free, donations accepted. 253-2571, truth@freepress.org.

Review: Children of Armageddon

Children of Armageddon:  Or how I learned to hate the bomb again!

By Roger Landes

One of the most difficult aspects of making a good political documentary is finding a subject matter interesting enough in order to not only captivate an audience, but also to persuade them to believe in the position taken by the film. In other words, it better make people care.  And at first glance, Children of Armageddon is in a very difficult position.

People seem to have made their choices for what are the most important issues in the contemporary world, and activism in anything else seems to be trite.  Global warming, the war in the Middle East, health care, and genocide in Darfur take up the upper hierarchy of pertinence, and everything else is considered to be of a lesser need.  These issues are clearly the most crucial problems in our world today.
Right?

Children of Armageddon digs up an argument that has been stewing for over half a century.  The so-called “nuclear issue” has been pushed to the back burner to make room for the aforementioned other causes.  Children of Armageddon brings the conversation back to pertinence by raising the question: “Who are the real victims of nuclear war?”  It begins showing us the obvious answer.  The Hibakusha, survivors of the Atomic Bomb droppings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, fight to keep their tragedy relevant in a Japanese culture that is trying to forget their own history due to their reliance on America’s nuclear deterrence umbrella.  Maki, a third generation Hibakusha, works to bring the fear of nuclear weaponry back into the youth of Hiroshima to raise awareness.  She is faced with a resistant populous who would simply rather forget than accept a tremendous situation.

The effects of nuclear warfare effect areas outside of Japan as well.  The U.S., France, and Great Britain have been testing nuclear warheads for decades.  The test detonations for these warheads contaminate the land and cause horrible side effects to the surrounding peoples.  The Marshall Islands, an American colony located between Hawaii and Guam, was host to nuclear tests for American bombs in the 1950s.  In 1954, a bomb was detonated to close to the coast of Rongelap, a village near the coast.  The entire town was contaminated with radioactive powder.  This caused gene mutations in the women of Rongelap.  These mutations have caused massive amounts of miscarriages and infant deformities.  The mutations have transgenetic effects, so even 55 years after the testing, young women are still being affected by the bombings.

These lingering effects can be seen in other parts of the world.  France did its nuclear testing in French Polynesia, but claimed there would be no repercussions because it was done underground. What they failed to realize is the movement of the radioactive materials through the soil into the water and soil.  Due to this, French Polynesia has an incredibly high rate of leukemia, as well as thyroid and kidney cancer.  Maurea, a young Tahitian woman, fights to end nuclear testing in order to raise her family in a healthy atmosphere.  In the 1995, French President Jacques Chirac ignored protests by locals like Maurea as well as environmental groups and claimed that he would resume the nuclear testing at French Polynesia.  He was met with such an opposition from the people that he almost immediately recanted his comments and disposed of a massive amount of nuclear warheads.

Children of Armageddon attempts to tackle an incredibly complex and difficult topic.  Nations like the U.S. and France claim that their nuclear arsenal is a deterrent against other nations to use their weapons against them.  The film states that even this is an inappropriate use of their power.  The mere existence of a single nuclear warhead is too dangerous to the survival of the human species.  Even its use as a deterrent is merely one country threatening all others.  The films most interesting contribution is from the issues oldest and loudest opposition, Noam Chomsky.  He states that at the very essence of the nuclear issue is that it is “the only threat to the species that can be immediately solved.”  The message of Children of Armageddon is very much idealistic, but it is exactly what is needed in order to wake the public up to the importance of the topic.

Children of Armageddon is screening Tuesday September 22 at 7.30 PM at the Drexel. Admission is free, donations accepted.

view TRAILER

A Powerful Noise – Drexel Screening Tuesday August 25th!

A Powerful Noise at the Drexel tomorrow, Tuesday the 25th at 7:30pm

The sun has come out for a momentary “good afternoon,” and August in Ohio seems inordinately cool & comfortable. Its been a few months since the last Festival/Free Press event, so we are all looking forward seeing you at the Drexel Theater, Tuesday evening, for this late summer shindig.

The drexel is blocks away from fresh sushi, an irish pub, and the spectacular Jeni’s ice cream in Bexley! Call it the last screening of summer vacation, mothers bring your daughters! Fathers, sons, brother’s and sisters make an evening of it.

Many films emphasize the glaring differences between developing and developed nations, creating an “us/them” perspective that minimizes the relevance to Western audiences. However, this documentary captivates viewers because it speaks to the common aspirations, the common abilities that all women share. “A Powerful Noise” is a meditation on the inherent potential of women to change the world. “A Powerful Noise”. The impact of one voice. The power of many.

Please consider joining us tomorrow evening for a powerful film, with powerful consequences.

Film reviewed by Roger Landes, here.

Plus… whats not to love when Admission is free!

Review: A Powerful Noise

Putting the Power in A Powerful Noise

By Roger Landes 

A Powerful Noise asks nothing from its viewers.  At least, not directly.  It’s not that kind of documentary.  To put it quite simply, it doesn’t need to be. 

Sure, it’s an activist film with a strong feminist message, but not once will it demand anything from you.  But that is not to say it isn’t affecting.  Hell it’s inspiring.  The inspiration of the film comes not from a manipulative director, but from the characters presented.  This is where the brilliance of the film is found.

The film follows three women with backgrounds as different as their locations.  Hanh is a HIV-positive widow from Vietnam.  Nada is survivor of the Bosnian war.  Lastly, the wonderful Madame Urbain is a social activist in Bamako, the largest city in one of the poorest countries, Mali. 

Although these women at first glance have little in common, their struggle is the same: they must reform the societies that seem to have no interest in changing.  The film chronicles their hardships, and successes.

Hanh works in Vietnam to combat the growing number of HIV/AIDS in Vietnam.  The disease is spreading at the same rate as the amount of heroin use in the country.  Hanh’s husband transferred to her the disease which was spread to her young daughter, who died not a year after contracting the disease. 

Hanh now tackles the difficult task of educating the public on safe sex and not sharing needles.  Hanh passes out condoms and literature to locals and gives speeches to the masses.  This is particularly difficult in her home country, as its society has intense social stigmas on the disease.  As much as she tries, she is met with great difficulty from factory owners who refuse to let her speak to the workers. 

Hanh also sets up support groups for those affected by the disease.  The film does a remarkable job at showing the shame, fear, and hope found in the people of Vietnam.

The Bosnian War is arguably the most misunderstood travesty of the past 30 years.  The war occurred due to the clashing cultures of the Bosniaks and the Serbians.  In the aftermath of the war, the people found their economy completely destroyed, over a million people displaced, and over 50% unemployed. 

Nada is a survivor of the war who works to help local farmers to find a place to sell their crops.  Without an economy of imports and exports, farmers have no place to sell their goods.  Nada helps to create co-ops and connect families in order to collect their stocks and sell them.  She struggles with the still fallen economy, and remaining clashes between the two cultures.  She flows freely around both the Bosniak people and the Serbs.

Of the three women, Madame Urbain shines as not only the most moving, but entertaining as well.  Mme. Urbain is a social worker in the West African country of Mali.  The countries immense poverty reaches out to the villages, where men and woman have no ability to get any form of education. 

The only option for many girls is to move to the countries biggest city, Bamako, in order to find work.  But, without any education or skills the only option for them is to become domestic servants.  Mme. Urbain works to end this practice.  She has offices that work to take protect these domestic servants, making sure that their employees don’t take advantage of them and pay them properly. 

Mme. Urbain works foremost to set up schools and encourage the education of young women. “To educate a woman is to educate a village is to educate a nation.” 

But she is met with resistance, especially from the male villagers, as the society maintains its emrace on women’s past subserviant role.  Mme. Urbain knows the great weight on her shoulders, but she accepts it with grace and humility, even when confronted with difficulties.

The truly inspirational part of the film: with so much resistance and so many hardships, where can these women find hope?  The film shows us, three women with no place in society, yet they reached out and claimed a place for their own.

(Trailer)

SCREENING:

A Powerful Noise screens on Tuesday August 25, at The Drexel Theater, 7:30 – 9:00pm.

This screening is co-sponsored by the Free Press. Admission is free. Donations accepted.

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This is the first contribution to OH! Film by guest blogger and CIF+VF volunteer Roger Landes. Without the generous support of people like Roger, the reach of the CIF+VF and OH! Film would be severly stunted.