Sweet Crude

Black gold blues

Sandy Cioffi’s Sweet Crude documents the havoc wreaked by the oil industry in the Niger Delta

by MATT JONES

September 23, 2010

ANGER FLARING: Sweet Crude
Photo by KENDRA E. THORNBURY

In November of 2005, filmmaker Sandy Cioffi travelled to southern Nigeria to document the opening of a library intended as a friendship gesture in a region scarred by ethnic warfare. What she saw there made her switch her plans entirely and turn her focus to the oily elephant dripping in the corner of the room. The Niger Delta is Africa’s biggest producer of petroleum, a commodity behind most of the country’s wealth, pollution and violence. Her film Sweet Crude (sweetcrudemovie. com) is the product of four years of research and interviews that brought Cioffi into close contact with the resistance movement that’s fighting for a say in how the oil companies use their land.

[read on...]

Dave Zirin interview

Fair ball and foul

Journalist Dave Zirin on the mendacious effects of publicly funded stadiums, corporate ownership and boring baseball

by MATT JONES

September 16, 2010

ALL FUNDING AND GAMES: Zirin

In the last year, pro sports have taken a hefty beating from the Left. It was hard to love the colonialist Olympics, painful to watch South African runner Caster Semenya’s gender identity interrogated by sports pundits, and to many World Cup watchers, vuvuzelas lost their charm pretty quickly. But if there’s one person who’s able to sift through the layers of spin that drown the artistry of great athletes in so much corporate paraphernalia, it’s Dave Zirin, a sportswriter for Sports Illustrated’s website and The Nation magazine, and author of Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love. The Mirror spoke to him on the phone from New York.

[read on...]

Cinema Politica 2010 Season

From Bas: Beyond the Red Light

There’s only so much documenting of the world’s audacious political atrocities that can be done before filmmaking starts to feel morose, so to pull us out of that potential rut, Cinema Politica has chosen the theme of resilience and resolutions for their upcoming season.

“The documentary genre is very good at investigating and revealing the world’s problems but they don’t always offer up stories of solutions. There’s a more positive aspect to the political and social issues that are explored in those films,” says Ezra Winton, the organization’s founder and Director of Programming.

This year’s 16 films follow activists who have been able to produce concrete results, from Maude Barlow’s work on keeping water public to activists in the Niger Delta struggling against Shell Oil to the satirical prankstering of the Yes Men.

The season kicks off September 20 with Bas: Beyond the Red Light, a Quebec film about a rehabilitation arts project for 13 girls who were previously sold into the sex trade industry in Mumbai. Wendy Champagne, the film’s director, will be present at the screening which is also a fundraiser for project in Mumbai.

For the full program see: cinemapolitica.org

Open Data in Montreal?

Hot data

Montréal Ouvert wants the city’s facts and figures in open format

by MATT JONES

September 1, 2010

DEMOCRATIZING NUMBERS: Jonathan Brun (L) and Michael Lenczner
Photo by WILL LEW

Over the past couple years, city administrations around the world have begun to take various types of public data they’ve been sitting on—the kind that’s usually on display in the basement fil­ing cabinet of City Hall—and upload it onto the Internet in open format. The result is a software developer’s wet dream: pages and pages of unorganized data just waiting to be pieced together, measured, graphed, made into parabolas, sexed-up and put online as user-friendly applications to make our increasingly tech-heavy lives more convenient. That’s a fantasy the four founders of Mon­tréal Ouvert hope to see realized in Montreal as soon as possible.

[read on...]