Don't miss the Free to Choose Network's third annual Winning Ideas Weekend, to be held in San Francisco from June 24-26, 2010. This event gathers kids, parents, grandparents and teachers to explore and celebrate liberty. This year, there will also be a range of inspiring speakers, discussions, activities and a special student video project. Mornings will center on seminars on subjects of interest to teens and adults--fashion, music, careers, and so on. Afternoons will see adults at freedom-oriented panel presentations while students will collaborate on a short YouTube video.
Register by March 1--and get a discount. Attendance is limited--so sign up now!
2081, Chandler Tuttle's stunning adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron," is now available for pre-order at Amazon.com. Order your copy today--and in the meantime, visit FinallyEqual.com to see an exclusive clip.
The deadline for IHS' Master of Fine Arts scholarship program is this Friday, January 15th. IHS awards scholarships of up to $10,000 for tuition and expenses for students pursuing degrees in filmmaking, fiction writing, or playwriting. If you will be enrolled in an MFA program for the 2010-2011 school year, apply now! Learn more here.
Also, IHS is now accepting applications for its summer internship program for aspiring filmmakers. The deadline is February 15th -- learn more here.
Don't miss IHS' upcoming networking event, to be held on February 25 in the Empire State Building. Keynote speaker Stephen Davies will deliver a talk entitled "Positives or Negatives: Ways of Winning the Argument for Liberty Historically and Today." Q&A and a reception will follow.
The Stoning of Soraya M., from writer-director Cyrus Nowrasteh and Mpower Pictures, tells the true story of a woman in a remote Iranian village in the wake of the fundamentalist revolution of 1979, who is falsely accused of adultery and then stoned to death by a mob desperate to cleanse themselves of this rumored affront to their collective honor and to their religion. It's not only a gripping story in its own right, but it also focuses a harsh spotlight on the shocking reality that stoning still exists in the Iranian penal code. The movie has been reviewed and written about many times on Big Hollywood, as well as listed among the site's 10 best movies of 2009. (Look for it on DVD from Lion's Gate in March)
Despite official condemnation of the film in Iran and a government clampdown on cell phone and Internet traffic as the country wrestles with revolution, word is getting out from sources close to the filmmakers that bootleg DVDs of The Stoning of Soraya M. are being shared secretly by Iranian citizens and shown in private homes in Tehran, Shiraz, Isfahan, and elsewhere. These sources must be kept anonymous, of course, since arrested protesters there have an unfortunate tendency to be allegedly raped and allegedly tortured, if not allegedly killed.
In one e-mail dated New Year's Day, for example, a woman wrote that her "cousin was in a party last night and everybody was talking about [Nowrasteh's] movie. They all liked it. The movie is all over." Another woman's message: "We send our greetings and we congratulate you on 'Soraya.' The word that we're hearing is that if they find this film in anyone's hands they will be jailed. People fear for their safety and are choked off from the outside world, telephone conversations are monitored...it's bad." And yet another source relates that "I was at the hairdresser yesterday and two women were talking about a movie called SANGSAR [Stoning] that they had seen and they like it a lot. I asked about it and they said the dvd is all over Tehran... It is a perfect time for the movie with the mess that is going on here."
When the film was released in the States last summer, Iranian-American viewers in some communities stood at the end and proclaimed "Down with the regime! Death to the dictator!" Now viewers inside Iran are feeling a similar surge of defiance after watching it, and it has been stiffening their resolve as protesters clash with riot police and the paramilitary Basij on the streets in that "mess that is going on here." Iranian citizens reportedly see Stoning as dramatic confirmation of why the demonstrations against apocalyptic madman Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his cleric-in-crime, the Ayatollah Khamenei, are taking place - and why women are at the forefront of them, challenging the totalitarians in power just as Soraya's fearless aunt Zahra confronted the village hypocrites in the film.
In this morning's New York Times, columnist Thomas Friedman calls on President Obama to place Mary Mazzio's remarkable new film, Ten9Eight, in every classroom in the country:
The president should also vow to bring the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, or NFTE, to every low-income neighborhood in America. NFTE works with middle- and high-school teachers to help them teach entrepreneurship. The centerpiece of its program is a national contest for start-ups with 24,000 kids participating. Each student has to invent a product or service, write up a business plan and then do it. NFTE (www.NFTE.com) works only in low-income areas, so many of these new entrepreneurs are minority kids.
In November, a documentary movie -- "Ten9Eight" -- was released that tracked a dozen students all the way through to the finals of the NFTE competition. Obama should arrange for this movie to be shown in every classroom in America. It is the most inspirational, heartwarming film you will ever see. You can obtain details about it at www.ten9eight.com.
This year's three finalists, said Amy Rosen, the chief executive of NFTE, "were an immigrant's son who took a class from H&R Block and invented a company to do tax returns for high school students, a young woman who taught herself how to sew and designed custom-made dresses, and the winner was an African-American boy who manufactured socially meaningful T-shirts."
This film, Friedman argues, can be a cornerstone of an urgently needed effort to inspire innovation within our culture--and to generate the jobs that come with it. "You want more good jobs, spawn more Steve Jobs," says Friedman. "Obama should have focused on that from Day 1. He must focus on that for Year 2."
Watch the trailer above, and find out about screenings the the upcoming BET broadcast at Ten9Eight.com.
Scifiblock calls 2081 an "amazing twenty-six minutes," adding:
In short fiction of any medium, everything has to be perfect. Chandler Tuttle understands this and has crafted a film in which not a single step is out of place. "2081," adapted from Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron," depicts an imprisoning "ideal" United States, in which everyone is forced to wear handicapping devices so that they are equal on every level. The strong wear weights, the intelligent wear headphones that emit distracting bursts of noise, and the beautiful wear masks. The film alternates between a tired, weighted-down man watching television with his wife, and a rebel disrupting a ballet to fight for inequality. What transpires is beautiful.
[...]
It would seem natural to call this film an Orwellian warning, but it is more accurately a portrayal of the necessity of embracing individuality - even, perhaps, if that individuality is abject. It is possible that in the far future such measures of social equalization would be considered by a government -- who knows? -- but "2081"'s value now is its demonstration of how great our differences make the world. And in a world devoid of such differences, a carefully coordinated defiant act becomes a moment of salvation. That which we thought was profane will become sacred.
This is simply one of the most powerful portrayals of the modern totalitarian state on film. Visionary as if a new Peter Weir had appeared on the movie making scene. A film financed by the Moving Picture Institute perhaps the most powerful force in films for the Libertarian point of view and philosophy, psychology.
[...]
The scenes are lit in a spectacular manner. Perhaps some of the best art direction I've seen in any current films. The music by the incomparable Kronos Quartet. They set a perfect background to this brilliant short film. Perhaps the most powerful short film I have ever seen.
The film 2081 marks the arrival of a film company called the Moving Picture Institute (MPI) as the major film voice for the libertarian philosophy.
[...]
It will be interesting to watch what future films MPI will create. They have set the bar pretty high with their entry into the current political arena with 2081. It offers a powerful commentary of an equalitarian world of the future. One wonders if they will be able to continue to spin out brilliant and powerful stories like 2081. It offers that one scene that our Founding Fathers fought against. In effect, it offers a future version of what the Founders of America wanted to avoid. Perhaps it offers a vision of their worst nightmare.
With this powerful film from MPI there is the announcement that a new voice has entered the arena for the Libertarian cause. It's the powerful voice of the young filmmaker Chandler Tuttle. It is a voice that the Founding Fathers would most likely endorse. The ideas for MPI films really stories from the ideas (their philosophy and psychology) of freedom rather than equality. This film marks a powerful statement to the powers of equality in the modern world.
