I just linked to this on Twitter but it’s so gobsmackingly creative that I have to post it here too.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

When my job and my life start to feel a bit random and pointless (like when you start saying a word over and over again and it starts to sound bizarre and meaningless) I always wish that I was a war photographer. I think I really want to be a doctor but my camera skills are definitely better than my surgical skills so war photographer it is. I don’t mean to sound facetious. I really do want to be on the front lines sometimes. I think that the life or death immediacy of the job would feel refreshingly solid after a lifetime of always wondering whether I’m doing the right thing or doing enough. I gobble up books like The Bang-Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War and documentaries like War Photographer and Bearing Witness which really make you realize the emotional toll that this sort of work takes but don’t stop me yearning to somehow do more although I’m sure that my intentions are often fairly dubious (ego-trip, martyr-complex etc. etc.)

Watching Triage: Dr. James Orbinski’s Humanitarian Dilemma at HotDocs brought back many of these feelings. Dr Orbinski is such a focused, passionate and inspiring person and I found the film incredibly powerful. It follows Orbinski, who received the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of Médecins Sans Frontières, as he travels back to Somalia and Rwanda where he worked with Médecins Sans Frontières at the height of the famine and the genocide respectively. The editing of some of the scenes when he reminisces about his experiences works really well, overlapping his heavy silences with words in a way that serves to heighten the moment rather than getting in the way of it. Here’s the trailer for the doc:

Dr Orbinski is now involved with an organization called Dignitas International, doing AIDS/HIV prevention work in Malawi. Which brings me to the Madonna-produced I Am Because We Are, a doc about the AIDS epidemic in Malawi that I saw at Tribeca. Unlike the angry restraint of Triage, I Am Because We Are is all in your face and, although I’m sure the filmmakers’ motives are well-intentioned, there is something really patronizing and frustrating about this film. The second half could have been called Chicken Soup for the Malawi Soul and annoyed me most of all. Surely the focus should be on building a solid public infrastructure and providing real access to good healthcare, not on hollow, Hollywood self-help affirmations.

For a better understanding of the problem of AIDS in Africa and the people throughout the continent who are living with HIV/AIDS and fighting to make things better, read Stephanie Nolen’s 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa. It’s an incredible book, putting a very human face on a problem that often feels too big or too distant to think about.

I may not be a doctor or a war photographer but I believe in the power of stories and there’s nothing random or pointless about that.

It has been so frustrating not having time to blog about all the films and other events I attended at HotDocs and then Tribeca. Work has foiled me every time. It has just been a nutty couple of weeks - full of good things but no time to sit and think and write. Yesterday I got home and was so tired that I watched the end of Music and Lyrics and then the end of Just My Luck before crashing out at 9.30pm. Not one of my better TV-watching moments!

I attended a really interesting panel last week at Tribeca called Reuse Remix Renew - covering copyright and digital culture in advance of the release of the Tribeca Institute’s Sample This! licensing toolkit for filmmakers which should be available later this Summer. The panel included DJ Spooky - aka Paul D. Miller, That Subliminal Kid, who has recently released a book he has edited called Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture. He said that his 1996 album Songs of a Dead Dreamer would probably not be released today because litigation against sampling has become so much more robust. Spooky thinks of this work as an “invisible sculpture made of fragments of history” and the battles over copyright come down to “who owns memory?” for him. He talked about how the old model of copyright is based on scarcity but now culture is “ubiquitous, downloadable, everywhere, all the time” and smart folk, like Google, are tapping into this new model and making millions. He went on to talk about the bootleg economy that is dominant in many countries in the world and to note that the way that the law is currently written and the way that we actually live are parting ways. We are moving toward a gift economy and people are having to work out how to monetize this in new ways. Digital literacy will be a big deal as we move forward in this new world.

Eric Steuer, creative director of Creative Commons, is one of the people working to increase digital literacy and explore new ways of allowing legal reuse, remixing and sharing of creative work. “People are going to engage with things they love,” he said “so you have to create business models that accept this and work around it. People are not going to stop downloading but they respect the flexibility of Creative Commons.”

Jennifer Urban and Himanshu Singh from the USC Intellectual and Technology Law Clinic are working with the Tribeca Film Insitute to develop the Sample This! toolkit. Clinics like theirs help filmmakers with issues over fair use and the toolkit came out of this work.

While I was thinking about fair use, sampling and copyright I re-discovered this awesome performance by Jamie Lidell so I’m embedding it here for some extra sample-tastic pleasure.

Shooter Marc Hawker has co-directed (with Ishbel Whitaker) a series of films for Amnesty’s unsubscribe campaign, depicting various kinds of torture used by the CIA in US detention camps.

We recently featured Waiting for The Guards on Watch Film and now you can watch Marc’s latest film for the campaign, a 90 second piece shot at 1,000 frames per second, called The Stuff of Life, depicting someone undergoing waterboarding, or what the CIA euphemistically refers to as an “enhanced interrogation technique.”

Check out Marc’s Shooter profile here: www.shootingpeople.org/cards/Marc_Hawker

To take action go here: www.unsubscribe-me.org

My friend Duska Zagorac made this video in response to Jennifer Fox’s Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman which starts screening on Sundance Channel tonight. Duska is featured in Flying and you can read more about her and the other women Jennifer talks with in the film here. My festival whirlwind is over so I’m looking forward to having some time to catch up on blogging and “real” life. Happy Cinco de Mayo everyone!

My friend and Shooting People NY Editor Jesse Epstein shot this and you should watch it. It’s funny and shows you some very crafty ways to get rid of all that leftover Matzah.

Thanks to Agnes Varnum over at the Resources Blog for reminding me to watch the VPRO doc on Wikipedia. I heard about it via various tweets and blog posts from the Next Web conference in Amsterdam and finally got a chance to watch it earlier today.

As a fan of documentaries I am fascinated by debates around the idea of “truth” and the endless unpacking of the nature and meaning of the word. But I am also aware that sometimes you need to just get on with it and accept that you are always going to be telling a subjective, manipulated story and that you can only hope it is fair to your subjects and does not knowingly mislead your audience. This is NOT to say that anything goes. The “fair and balanced” claims of Fox News are laughable precisely because a news channel should strive to tell stories about the world that reflect the world, rather than a particular political viewpoint. Context is key here, as is media literacy. I know that I need to take Wikipedia entries with a rather large grain of salt although I’m always amazed by how accurate they usually are. Fox News on the other hand requires such a large dose of media alertness to weed out the factual snippets from the moralizing that I’m not sure I’m up to the job.

I think everyone in The Truth About Wikipedia makes some valid points but many of them are so determined to drive their point home that they miss the bigger picture. Andrew Keen is right that Web2.0 has resulted in a “cult of the amateur.” One of the results of this is that there is some really idiotic content across the web. Take for example this brilliant exchange in the YouTube comments for the Wikipedia doc:

NaNlolz
Andrew Keen is an narcisistic dumb@ss who just ‘doesn’t get it.’
Ignore him….(or in web2.0 lingo: vote him down!)

hemansunderwear
I bet you have 10 myspace pages and no girlfriends.

Some of these amateurs, however, produce incredible work, and in the process re-define all these terms we use so loosely: expert, amateur, producer, consumer etc. Knowledge and talent do not only, or even necessarily, come with a university degree. Keen speaks as though “experts” are somehow completely free of bias, inaccuracies and power struggles. And what defines an expert anyway? I wrote my Masters thesis on electricity and I still can’t change a plug! Sometimes I think people get stymied by their own logline. In Keen’s case: we are in an age of the amateur ergo all amateurs are incompetent and all experts are right. It just doesn’t follow.

Anyway, without getting into further debate about the nature of truth and knowledge, here is the doc about Wikipedia. See what you think. I like the quote from Ndesanjo Macha toward the end when he explains that the original meaning of amateur is people who love what they do. I think that Web2.0 at its best provides a platform where this love can be fully expressed, without any meddling from gatekeepers who may or may not get it. And if you want experts and curation, well you can have that too. Either/Or makes for good soundbites but it doesn’t explain the world we actually live in. What we need is more digital literacy that will help to explain this world and empower the next generation of expert amateurs.

I wrote about King Corn last year when it had its theatrical release. If you missed it back then, now is your chance to catch it on TV. The film is about two recent college graduates, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, who decide to move to rural Iowa to plant an acre of corn and follow it through the food production chain all the way to the dinner plate. Along the way they learn some rather nasty facts about the way our food is produced. The bottom line: Americans eat too much corn and the cost of food in this country does not reflect the true cost of producing it. The industrial process of food production is literally “fast food” and it is doing terrible things to our health and to the wider eco-system.

I have been getting rather obsessed with Michael Pollan’s writing because of King Corn and thinking about my food perhaps more than I’d like to! I just read Pollan’s excellent Power Steer article in The New Kings of Nonfiction (a fantastic book by the way, edited by This American Life’s Ira Glass).

Check out local listings for King Corn on the Independent Lens website. Dinner will never be the same again!

The kind of knee-jerk anti-Americanism you often get in Europe annoys me as much as knee-jerk anything else. It’s often simplistic, ill-informed, hypocritical, and driven by fear rather than thought. But there can be no doubt that there is a degree of cultural flattening taking place, and the culture usually flows in one direction only: out of the US (yeah yeah I know there are exceptions like The Office and The Beatles and The Queen). I miss the cultural differences I used to relish when traveling between the US and the UK, differences vanishing with global uber-brands and the world wide interweb.

PACT are worried that American TV imports are taking over the wee minds of Britain and even though this does smack a little of the “they’re stealing our jobs and our women!” border mentality that drives me up the blinking wall, I can also see their point. Apart from anything else, there should be healthy production and representation everywhere in the world and it starts with the kids y’all (Oh god, am I somehow proving their point by saying “y’all” when I’m British?). Watch PACT’s Badass Wombles of Central Park video. I’d love to hear comments if you feel strongly about the issue.

In closing I should add that I think Brits are safe from one particular American import - British children will NEVER, EVER start saying “fanny pack” with a straight face!

We are continuing to improve our WATCH FILM tools on Shooting People with lots of exciting new developments to help our members upload and share their work. We have just introduced an embed tool and to show you how lovely it is here is the trailer for We Are Together made by Shooters Paul Taylor and Teddy Leifer, a wonderful documentary about a group of AIDS orphans from South Africa who form a choir.

UPDATE: We’re working on this RIGHT NOW so this video may go through a few different versions and look a bit different each time. This is beta baby!

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Ok our player IS lovely but it is also HUGE and it was eating up my whole blog so I have taken it down while we continue to work on making it awesome.

UPDATE MARK 2: Ok let’s see if we’re at awesome yet. Hooray, I think we did it!