AFTRS Comedy Filmclub with Paul Harris #Melbourne

From slapstick, the irreverent wit of screwball, romantic comedy and the deadpan hilarity of the mockumentary join other film fans to learn and laugh your way through some wonderful films and fascinating discussions with Paul Harris.

Every Friday night
April 9 - May 21 6.30-9.30pm
2 Russell Street (corner of Flinders) Melbourne 3000
Cost: $290

For more information and how to apply:
Website: wwww.aftrs.edu.au
Phone: 03 9602 8300
Email: aftrsopenprogramvic@aftrs.edu.au

Enrol now: Video Journalism with Carmela Baranowska #Open channel #Melbourne

Starts January 7 | Enrolments close December 22

Cross-media skills are essential for journalists. This practical course gives you the knowledge you need to plan, shoot and edit stories as a single-person crew. You will be guided by Walkley Award-winning journalist and filmmaker Carmela Baranowska (Scenes From An Occupation, Taliban Country) and screen your story to a news producer. This course is suitable for print journalists or emerging documentary makers.

Open Channel Training | Under Video Journalism

Docos wanted. Australian Ethical Documentary Australia Foundation callout

Australian Ethical, in association with Documentary Australia Foundation, is calling for film makers to submit a mini-documentary piece on the theme of ‘corporate responsibility and the environment’.The winning documentary piece will be awarded $12,500 in prize money, which will be presented at the Australian International Documentary Conference on 24–26 February 2010.

Entries close December 18

Australian Ethical website

FamousWhenDead screens Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist, a documentary “focuses on suppressed historical & modern information about currently dominant social institutions, while also exploring what could be in store for humanity if the power structures at large continue their patterns of self-interest, corruption, and consolidation” it says rather modestly on the zeitgeist website.

Free screening at FamousWhenDead Gallery, Thursday 29 October, 7 pm.
Running time 90 mins.
For RSVP’s please  email JD Mittmann so he knows how many seats to supply.

FWD Gallery
207 Victoria Street
West Melbourne 3003 Australia

10 Conditions of Love at Open Channel

FRAMED 07: 10 Conditions of Love or ‘How a small film became a VERY BIG deal
Friday October 30, 12.30 – 2.00pm
Open Channel Theatrette – Shed 4
North Wharf Road, Victoria Harbour – Docklands, Melbourne

Melbourne documentary filmmaker Jeff Daniels’ independent film The 10 Conditions of Love is the most controversial film of 2009. It tells the story of Rebiya Kadeer, the exiled leader of the predominatly muslim Uyghur people in the far western deserts of China and her struggle for autonomous rule. Labelled a terrorist by the Chinese government, she has been twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Its selection at festivals in Melbourne, New Zealand and Taiwan this year sparked an international news feeding frenzy following Chinese government demands for the film to be pulled from the festivals and subsequent internet hacking attempts traced to mainland China. At MIFF, the film played to an audience of more than 1,000 at a special Q&A screening with Daniels and Kadeer which was was the lead news item that night, before it embarked on a recently concluded season at Cinema Nova. Not bad for a 53-minute doco made on a shoestring budget.

However, the film is also a labour of love for Daniels, who first heard about the Uyghur and Kadeer over a beer with a friend in Beijing seven years ago and set about researching and then shooting the film which has created such a stir around the world.

Join Jeff Daniels and Open Channel’s Marc Gracie as they discuss the origins of the film and the many steps it has travelled to this day. This session is invaluable for documentary filmmakers and those looking to get into the craft.

Bookings essential – framed@openchannel.org.au

Second skin doco about virtual worlds

Second Skin, is a documentary about virtual worlds (WoW, Second Life, Everquest 2) and the lives they enhance and destroy.

Second Skin takes an intimate look at three sets of computer gamers whose lives have been transformed by online virtual worlds. An emerging genre of computer software called Massively Multiplayer Online games, or MMOs, allows millions of users to interact simultaneously in virtual spaces. Of the 50 million players worldwide, 50 percent consider themselves addicted. From individuals struggling with addiction to couples who have fallen in love without meeting; from disabled players whose lives have been given new purpose to gold farmers, entrepreneurs and widows, Second Skin opens viewers’ eyes to a phenomenon that may permanently change the way human beings interact.

Second Skin, opens in the US this August.

Info at: http://www.secondskinfilm.com

This August, Second Skin will become the first widely released movie about virtual worlds- a movie for the 50 million gamers who spend most of their time in virtual worlds, and all those curious to understand this phenomenon.

Protest slaughter of dolphins in Japan

Just saw a very compelling documentary about dolphin slaughter at the Melbourne International Film Festival. The movie called The Cove is utterly disturbing and you may well want to grimace, turn away or just shut your eyes while the footage of horrific scenes take place. But for how much longer can we turn away from the crimes we perpetuate against animals!?

Thank goodness people care and it’s kudos to the film makers who risked their lives to capture this untold story of how the tiny coastal village of Taiji, Japan is at the epicenter of this dreadful crime.

The website won’t give the plot away and it’s something that the director wants you all to take your friends to see! Who knew! But sometimes it’s not such a bad thing to make money to further influence a cause and get the word out.  I’ve personally learnt that you don’t have enough time to be complacent about the things you believe in, and I am trying to have some conviction and stop in my own complicity of killing animals.

See what you can do to help the campaign to raise awareness of The Oceanic Protection society and help spread the word.

http://thecovemovie.com/

Win tickets to Food Inc.

Did you know that the average American supermarket now stocks 47,000 products that are no longer seasonally dependent and miraculously stay fresh? Food, Inc. is a documentary that dishes up surprising and shocking truths about what we eat, how it’s produced and where we’re going from here.

For your chance to win a double pass to take part in the MIFF (24 July – 9 August) be the first to email competitions@foodfest.com.au between 4 – 5pm today (Tuesday 21st July) with your name and contact details.

Food Inc. (USA):  Showing Sat 1 Aug, 2.30pm at GU Cinemas and Thurs 6 Aug, 4.45pm at ACMI
(Part of the Melbourne International Film Festival)

Beijing pressures Melbourne International Film Festival to dump documentary

Excerpt: THE Chinese Government has demanded that the Melbourne International Film Festival dump a documentary about an exiled minority leader whom they label a terrorist and blame for instigating this month’s ethnic riots in Xinjiang, which left more than 180 people dead.

The Australian film about millionaire Uighur businesswoman and grandmother Rebiya Kadeer, who was once feted by the Chinese Government as an example of ethnic harmony in China, is scheduled to premiere on August 8.

Festival director Richard Moore said the Chinese consulate in Melbourne phoned him late on Friday after the festival’s full program was published in The Age, insisting that the documentary, The 10 Conditions of Love, be withdrawn.

The consular official, Ms Chen, who is believed to be the new Melbourne cultural attache, demanded that Mr Moore justify his decision to include the film. She also castigated him for allowing Ms Kadeer to be a guest of the festival. Ms Kadeer is due in Melbourne next month to speak at the premiere.

More from The Age

Covering the Mirrors, roadside memorials project

Covering the Mirrors documents a resistance, a reversal; where each ‘roadside memorial’ undermines the (non-) nature of the motorway space.

The proliferation of non-space seems perversely natural; airports, freeways, shopping centres, stations and hubs appear at each turn and beyond every turn off. These vast areas designed for functionality, supposed progress, in fact programmatically efface ‘the local’ with its community interests and historical presence; this leaves empty meaningless space in abundance.

Contrary to intent the ‘universal network’ actually isolates the individual by atomizing the community. It does this through an expanding ‘grid’ of interstitial non-spaces that affects all aspects of daily life – from our environment through to our emotions. No longer are these in-between zones mere links; they are fast-forming generic centres, places in and of themselves – that control and re-order the social experience.

Yet the presence of roadside memorials somehow resists this deterritorialization. As the visual markers carry with them a sacred significance and a small piece of history, which once situated in monotonous space they activate a subversion of the spatial homogenization. Suddenly these non-spaces are filled with meaning. These shrines with their folk rituals and cult following hint at a growing social dissent – as an emergent material culture they tap into an underlying collective impulse to reclaim lost space.

Taking the roadside memorial as his starting point, Neuman uses a variety of lens-based media, and techniques that span from appropriation to documentary to the staged, to critically respond to physical and cultural changes in the Australian landscape.

Host:
Don’t Look Experimental New Media Gallery
From – Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 6:00pm til  Saturday, July 25, 2009
Location:  Don’t Look Experimental New Media Gallery
Street:  419 New Canterbury Rd, Dulwich Hill, Sydney, NSW (426/428/445 bus)
Phone:  0401152434
Web: http://www.myspace.com/dontlookgallery
Email:  dontlookgallery@gmail.com