... of James and Maureen Tusty's The Singing Revolution. Originally slated to play for a week in mid-December, the film has proven so popular that it has been held over a fourth straight week. The Tustys report that as long as people keep filling the theater, it will keep playing. Check out showtimes here.
The Singing Revolution will be playing from January 28 through February 4 at the Bear Tooth Theatre in Anchorage, Alaska, and from February 14 through 18 it will participate in the Boulder International Film Festival in Boulder, Colorado.
Campus movies are, for understandable reasons, cult classics among college students. From The Graduate to Revenge of the Nerds to Good Will Hunting to Legally Blonde, they tend to capture something essential about the pivotal years during which one is at once an independent adult and an oversized adolescent. Those years of studying and party-going, of endless experimentation and, ideally, gradual maturation, are for many Americans synonymous with life itself--or at least with some of the most important moments and memories in life. That's probably one reason why campus films are so eternally popular--and it's one reason, too, why Indoctrinate U ought to take campus culture by storm. It's not your typical college movie--but it tells us a lot about what has become typical on campus, and it also exposes for us the frighteningly illiberal aspects of an experience that many regard as the apex of personal expressive freedom.
2008 will see Indoctrinate U coming to campuses across the country. Kicking off with a screening at LSU -- Shreveport on January 29 at 7 PM and following that with a showing at San Diego State on February 13, Indoctrinate U is bound to be one campus film that students will never forget.
The New York courts recently dismissed author Rachel Ehrenfeld's efforts to seek redress against a British libel judgment against her for publishing a book that accuses Saudi billionaire Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz of funding terrorism. It was a sad day for free speech, and a distressing commentary on how vulnerable English libel law leaves those who seek to uncover the complicated mechanisms by which terror financiers operate. But that may be changing.
The New York Sun is reporting that state legislators are considering a bill that would enable writers like Ehrenfeld to count on far more protection than they can now:
A bill introduced this week in Albany would give new protection to New York authors and journalists against libel judgments from foreign courts and would make it easier for writers to use New York courts to challenge foreign judgments against them.
The bill was introduced in response to a British libel judgment against a New York-based researcher that ordered her to pay a libel award of 30,000 pounds to the family of a Saudi billionaire. The researcher, Rachel Ehrenfeld, had written a book, published in America, which accused the Saudi, Khalid bin Mahfouz, of funding organizations with alleged ties to terrorism. Mr. bin Mahfouz denies the allegation and has said he "abhors terrorism in all its forms."
The libel suits Mr. bin Mahfouz filed in London against Ms. Ehrenfeld and others who made similar accusations caused a stir in the publishing world, fueling concern that foreigners increasingly head to English courts to take advantage of a lower legal standard required to prove defamation. Critics call the practice "libel tourism" and say it undermines First Amendment protections.
"If you want to go to Singapore or England or Katmandu to get a libel judgment, that judgment will not be enforceable in New York," the Queens Democrat who introduced the legislation in the Assembly, Rory Lancman, said.
The bill would prevent New York courts from enforcing such foreign libel judgments "unless a court sitting in this state first determines that the defamation law applied in the foreign jurisdiction provides at least as much protection" as the federal and state constitutions. It is unlikely that any foreign libel law passes that test. Foreign libel judgments are, most lawyers agree, generally considered unenforceable in New York courts. Current state law forbids New York courts from enforcing foreign judgments that "are repugnant to the public policy." That has been interpreted to include at least one foreign libel judgment in the past.
"The proposed legislation is unnecessary, since no foreign libel judgment has ever been enforced by a court in the United States," a lawyer for Mr. bin Mahfouz, Timothy Finn of the firm Jones Day, wrote by e-mail.
The bill does give one new boost to authors. It lets them go to New York courts to challenge a foreign libel judgment, without first waiting for anyone to try to enforce the judgment. A decision by the state's highest court, the Court of Appeals in Albany, last month refused to let Ms. Ehrenfeld pursue such a challenge.
The court decided that because Mr. bin Mahfouz, hadn't yet gone to court in New York to collect on the British judgment, Ms. Ehrenfeld couldn't get an order saying the judgment was unenforceable in New York. Ms. Ehrenfeld claimed that Mr. bin Mahfouz's employees had contacted her repeatedly with requests to pay. She said that having the order hanging over her head made it difficult finding publishers for her work . The bill would give New York courts jurisdiction to hear countersuits such as Ms. Ehrenfeld's.
Three cheers for New York. May the rest of the states follow.
Inspired by the ever-innovative Radiohead, Evan Coyne Maloney is introducing the downloadable Indoctrinate U. Last fall, Radiohead made its latest album available as a free download from its website; bypassing the mega distributors of the recording industry, the cutting-edge group decided to leave the question of what--and whether--to pay for the album up to fans. Now, Maloney is adopting a similar approach for Indoctrinate U:
The problem with the film business is that too many insiders forgot that the rest of America doesn’t necessarily share the same view of the world as their friends in Hollywood. Instead, Hollywood has become its own echo chamber, which is why distributors keep pushing out flop after flop of military-bashing films. In Hollywood and at film festivals, such fare is highly praised. But in theaters around the country, the audience for films like Redacted is comprised mostly of empty seats. It’s almost as if Hollywood is producing films only for itself.
My experience in trying to get distribution for Indoctrinate U only confirms this. People in the film business just don’t take seriously the possibility that there’s a market for documentaries outside Hollywood’s typical Michael Moore/Al Gore worldview. I don’t know to what extent that’s out of political bias or the result of a simple Catch-22: they don’t see a market for anything different, but that’s because they’ve never tried distributing anything different.
That leaves us in the position of having to self-distribute Indoctrinate U. And because the Internet will allow us to put the film in people’s hands in the fastest, most cost-effective way possible, we’ll be able to conduct a little experiment of our own. Indoctrinate U will not be available on DVD right away. Instead, we’re going to focus our efforts on seeing whether the Internet can be used to route around the gatekeepers in Hollywood—without the shackles of physical media. (Although unlike Radiohead, I’m afraid, we’re not in a position to give our goods away for free.)
Who knows? Maybe the market can be proven without Hollywood’s help. I think it can. And once the market is proven, we’ll finally know who in the film business wants to serve customer desires instead of the dogma of Hollywood groupthink.
Rock on, Evan. Or, as Thom Yorke might say, "This is what you get when you mess with us."
If you've been following the Harry Potter series, you'll know that as it builds, it becomes increasingly focused on issues of freedom. By the final two novels in the series, the entire wizarding world is caught up in Voldemort's totalitarian bid for power--individual liberty no longer exists, and people are imprisoned, tortured, and even killed for insisting on their rights to free speech, to free association, and to personal choice in their manner of living. The final volume of Rowling's series culminates in a revolutionary battle for freedom, and explores in depth what it means to risk one's health, one's happiness, one's security, one's future, and one's life for a cause. It's complex and worthy of careful treatment--so it's good to know that the final film of the series will actually be two films. "It is simply impossible to incorporate every storyline into a film under four hours long," Rowling wrote on her website. It's also tough to mine the philosophical questions Rowling's series raises--always subtly, by way of the story lines--while compressing those story lines. Everybody wins this way--audiences get to see a thorough treatment of the final installment, and Warner Brothers stands to increase its profits by something on the order of $1 billion.
When Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini published his first novel, The Kite Runner, in 2003, he took the world by storm. Coming at a moment when international interest in Afghanistan was intense, Hosseni's tale shot to the top of the international best-seller list, and was hailed as a watershed moment not only for literature, but also for global understanding of a war-torn nation. Isabel Allende called The Kite Runner "one of those unforgettable stories that stays with you for years," noting that it contains "all the great themes of literature and of life ... love, honor, guilt, fear, redemption." Entertainment Weekly called it "a moving portrait of modern Afghanistan," and the New York Times Book Review wrote that the novel "reminds us how long [Hosseini's] people have been struggling to triumph over the forces of violence--forces that continue to threaten them even today."
Now the movie is out--and it promises to be just as spectacular, and just as important (Roger Ebert calls it "magnificent"). The only problem is that there are crucial audiences who will never see it. Variety reports that the Afghan government has banned the film because it contains graphic scenes of a rape and represents ethnic conflict. Nothing like a little state-mandated censorship to underscore the importance of art such as Hosseini's.
Advocates of national health care point to Canada as an example the U.S. should follow. But we would all do well to take a closer look at what they are pointing at. Canada's health care system may look ideal from afar--but as Stuart Browning's short films show, it doesn't look so good up close. Patients can't get the care they need, and many suffer chronic pain, additional injury, or even death while they wait in line for treatment in a system that cruelly places limiting quotas on certain kinds of care.
Canadians themselves are increasingly alive to the dangers their health care system poses for their well-being--and aware, too, that those dangers are not simply physical. They are also economic.
The Canadian Medical Association has just released a study showing exactly how expensive Canada's cost-cutting approach to universal care is:
Waiting for a joint replacement not only prolongs pain in the knees, it causes billions of dollars of damage to the health of the Canadian economy, a study released Tuesday by Canada's doctors says.
The study, conducted for the Canadian Medical Association by the Centre for Spatial Economics, found that it cost the economy $14.8-billion in 2007 to have patients wait longer than medically recommended for four procedures: joint replacements, cataract surgery, coronary bypasses and MRI scans.
That, in turn, cut provincial and federal government revenues by $4.4-billion, the report says.
“Time spent waiting robs the economy of workers, both patients and their caregivers. Time spent waiting also leads to increased costs on the health-care system, as patients need extra appointments, tests and medication,” it says.
The four procedures examined were among five identified by federal and provincial governments in 2005 as part of an initial push to reduce queues for treatment. And the CMA study did find some positive news – last year, most patients generally received treatment at or before the maximum recommended waiting-time limit.
But many did not.
The average Canadian patient who was not treated within the medically acceptable period in 2007 waited a year for a hip or knee replacement and seven months for cataract surgery. Cardiac patients not treated within the recommended period had to wait an average of more than three months for coronary artery bypass surgery.
And, while the maximum recommended wait for an MRI scan is 30 days, the median patient still waited 56 days while patients who did not get their scan within that maximum recommended period waited an average of 85 days.
That meant lost productivity and an added burden on the health care system, the CMA says.
The medical association says waiting longer than recommended for joint replacement cost the economy an average of $26,400 per patient, followed by MRIs at $20,000, coronary artery bypass graft surgery at $19,400 and cataract surgery at $2,900.
That's not counting the costs to Canadians who pay out of pocket for care in the U.S. rather than wait for their own sluggish system to get around to treating them.
Rachel Ehrenfeld may have been told to shut up by the English courts--and the U.S. courts may have failed to assume responsibility for defending her free speech rights. But that doesn't mean she's got a muzzle on. Here she is in today's Washington Times, on the subject of terror's financiers:
The antiquated Securities and Exchange Commission's computer system prevents investigators from safeguarding U.S. market integrity. "It's like working with one hand tied behind their backs," Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley commented about the Dec. 17 release of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) report he'd initiated — "SEC: Opportunities Exist to Improve Oversight of Self-Regulatory Organizations." Why can't the government with the world's most advanced computer technology and capabilities equip its agencies with state-of-the-art systems allowing them to better monitor markets and transactions, including illegal activities?
In response to the GAO criticism, SEC Chairman Christopher Cox acknowledged, "additional information-technology changes such as these may help the [SEC] enforcement staff to effectively analyze trends, manage current caseloads and focus areas of investigation." But all federal officials — not just at the SEC — should worry about much more than insider trading.
Take terror financing. So far, no U.S. official at any level, including presidential candidates from both parties, has publicly addressed how radical Muslim groups and Islamic terror organizations raise major sums to facilitate the murder of Americans in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, among other things.
At The New Republic, foreign policy and terror experts talk about why The Kite Runner film matters for Afghanistan and the U.S. Yet another reason why it's a shame that the film has been banned in Afghanistan. There is nothing to fear from dialogue, debate, information, knowledge. There is much to fear from silence, repression, and censorship.
MPI was founded on the premise that someone besides Hollywood is going to have to do the work of bringing the ideal of freedom into the realm of film. It's having great success--and it's great to see people noticing. There's a nice piece in Reason all about how the entertainment industry continues to sidestep important historical material--and how the work of making movies about resistance to totalitarianism has fallen to independent filmmakers. Topping the list of such exemplary indie films is The Singing Revolution:
A spate of recent films—none of them produced in Hollywood—is ... providing a more nuanced picture of the Cold War, one that eschews simple moral equivalence in favor of the dystopian reality of the Eastern Bloc.
This past year saw the release of The Singing Revolution, a riveting documentary detailing the little-known story of Estonia's non-violent resistance to Soviet occupation .... Almost a decade ago in reason, Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley rightly bemoaned the film industry's lack of interest in arguably the 20th century's greatest tragedy: the stubborn adherence of politicians, artists, and intellectuals to the dogma of Marxism-Leninism. The recent crop of films promises, however belatedly, to begin the process of correction.
That's a highly abbreviated version--but you get the point. If it weren't for determined independent filmmakers and organizations such as MPI, these visions of history would be far less available to us, and would be in far more risk of being forgotten.
The performance embedded above is not part of the Singing Revolution--but would not have been possible without it. Freedom takes many forms, some of them tongue-in-cheek. And this is good.
