Salt Spring Film Festival - Film Festival Cafe

Our Island Our World Film Festival, and Jen and Jason Coles, the owners of Barb's Bakery & Bistro, proudly present the "The Film Festival Café," at the downtown Ganges restaurant. On the last Thursday of the month, fall and winter, a variety of socially relevant films will be followed by speakers and discussions. The films will include classics and new releases.

Evenings will begin at 5:30 pm for those who wish to partake of food, beverages and conversations with friends, with films starting at 7pm. There will be no charge for the films, but the Film Festival will gladly accept donations to go towards purchasing much needed equipment, and for youth filmmaking in our community.

Film Festival Cafe is on hiatus until October 2008. Thanks for all your support this season!

Valdy joined the Film Festival Cafe for a celebratory evening of music and a screening of PETE SEEGER: THE POWER OF SONG. Donations from the evening went to support the Our Island, Our World Film Festival.

In PETE SEEGER: POWER OF SONG, director Jim Brown documents the life of one of the greatest American singer / songwriters of the last century. Pete Seeger was the architect of the folk revival, writing some of its best known songs including “"Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” "Turn, Turn, Turn” and "If I Had A Hammer."

Brown reveres Seeger and his life's work. His director's notes state, "For me, Pete Seeger has been one of the most important voices and influential musicians in America. He got a whole generation interested in playing guitar and banjo, got them singing together, and helped introduce America to its own folk heritage, while using music as an instrument for social change.

For a brief period, Pete was a member of the American Communist Party and used music to organize labor unions. Subsequently, he was blacklisted. While Pete sang about unions, civil rights, the environment and peace, the government tried to censor him. He was kept off commercial television for 17 years. In addition, his concerts were often picketed. He never backed down and always stood by his beliefs.

Pete Seeger's ethics are pure. He believes that everyone is equal. He is an American patriot who built his own log cabin and lives simply in the woods. Pete has a complete distrust of commercial forces, pop culture, technology, greed, fame and the corporate and military influences on democracy. He hates the word career, and has no interest in personal gain, shuns publicity and works tirelessly with his wife, Toshi, because he believes we are blindly destroying the world. He might be right. There are lessons to be learned by exploring his life and music."

With a combination of never-before-seen archival footage and personal films made by Seeger and his wife Toshi, PETE SEEGER: POWER OF SONG chronicles the life of this legendary artist and political activist.

According to Knowledge Network’s press release, “Thirty-five years after Greenpeace’s first seafaring vessel, the Phyllis Cormack, set sail for Amchitka to fight testing of the nuclear bomb, producer/director Leigh Badgley follows Greenpeace’s co-founder Rex Weyler to Argentina. Here, he meets young Greenpeace recruits on a potentially dangerous campaign – fighting to save the Chaco forest, homeland of the indigenous Wichi people. Together with John Watterberg, an energetic young campaigner from New York, Rex witnesses the bulldozing of vast tracts of virgin forest to make way for massive industrial soya plantations. The film follows Weyler and Watterberg as they join the Greenpeace Jaguars – a daring squadron of Argentine activists who ride high-power dirt bikes into the forest to stop the bulldozers in their tracks.

With dramatic action footage, still photographs, lively interviews, and evocative music, Greenpeace: Making a Stand explores the reasons people are inspired to risk their lives for their beliefs – whether it’s sailing a ship into a nuclear test zone, getting between a pod of whales and an explosive harpoon, or blocking bulldozers from mowing down a forest.”

Finding Dawn won the Gold Audience Award winner at the 2006 Vancouver Amnesty International Film Festival and has played to packed houses all across Canada and the U.S. The film has also screened at the Seattle Human Rights Festival and the San Francisco American Indian Festival, as well as at the UN Commission on the Status of Women last spring.

Ms. Welsh, a UVIC Women’s Studies professor, says that she doesn’t choose film projects rather the projects choose her. She had been struck by the 2004 news coverage of the missing women of the Downtown Eastside. She described how this story was brought home for her when she read about the RCMP’S discovery of DNA evidence on a BC farm that identified a missing Aboriginal woman, Dawn Crey. As a filmmaker and storyteller, Welsh set out to learn more about Dawn and her family.

“I wanted to contribute to the conversation that was taking place around the issue of missing Aboriginal women and why our deaths and disappearances go unnoticed,” stated Welsh. “This film gives voice to our friends, and our relatives, about what it’s like to be an Aboriginal woman in this country.”

Finding Dawn takes us on an epic journey into the dark heart of Native women’s experiences in this country from Vancouver’s skid row to the “Highway of Tears” in northern British Columbia and onward to Saskatoon, where the murders of Aboriginal women remain unresolved. To honour those who have passed, she uncovers inspiring stories of strength, courage, and resilience, as communities come together to stem the tide of violence.

“I’ve always felt strongly that if you’re going to tell a story, no matter how dark it is, you have to leave people with some hope,” says Welsh. “Our people have incredible beauty and strength and resilience and that’s part of the story too.”

The evening’s proceeds were to benefit SWOVA’s award-winning Respectful Relationships violence prevention program.

The feature documentary, ¡Salud! is directed by Academy Award nominee Connie Field (Freedom on my Mind) and co-produced by Gail Reed. The film spans three continents to look at the philosophy and health professionals placing Cuba on the map in the worldwide movement to make health care a global birthright. Today, Cubans are among the world’s healthiest people, despite the island’s poverty. Cuba’s volunteer corps now posts 28,000 health professionals in 68 countries; and Cuban medical schools will graduate an unprecedented 100,000 new doctors from developing countries over the next decade.

The film’s cameras reach into The Gambia, rural South Africa, coastal villages of Honduras and river settlements in the Amazon, where a Cuban is often the first doctor a poor community has ever seen. In some nations they staff entire health systems. In all, they take with them the experience and philosophy of their own community-oriented, preventive and universal health care model fundamentally at odds with a global wave of healthcare privatization."

The DVD notes describe the film as “a compelling portrait of an Arab Country where Muslims, Christians, and Jews have lived together in relative peace for centuries. Beautifully photographed during the Fez Festival of World Sacred Music, the film presents unforgettable performances from groups from Morocco, Ireland, Russia, Afghanistan, Mauritania, the USA, Portugal, and France, which carry viewers into what the film’s Moroccan Sufi guide calls ‘the hearing of the heart’- the essential oneness at the core of all religions and faiths.” The city of Fez, Morocco, presents this music festival annually, and is renowned for “its history of tolerance.”

Everything Blue, according to notes describing the film, “is an investigation of the music of the favelas in Brazil, namely samba. While that vibrant music is considered an expression of the soul of Brazil and a realization of the people’s joy, [the director] Jesse Acevedo still has the guts to contextualize samba in terms of racism and the long struggle of blacks to resist discrimination since first being brought to the Americas as slaves.

Acevedo interviews both prominent entertainers and those less known and still living in poverty, such as an elderly former prostitute in Salvador de Bahia, who now cares for homeless kids and teaches them joy and belonging as part of her "Black Mother's Band." The film uncovers a history of struggle and political dissent in the once-prohibited samba, including the continued worship of African gods. Following the music which preserved the rhythm and beliefs of the slaves, the film travels from Salvador de Bahia to Rio where the fusion of sounds we now call samba is said to have first been realized in legendary porch parties. Today Carnival and the competition among samba schools emerges as the reason to sing and dance and find joy in lives which might otherwise be unbearably sad.”

The inspiring and powerful documentary tells how the present day Haida from the Queen Charlotte Islands pulled together in their community to repatriate the bones of their ancestors that had gone missing over one hundred years ago.

This is the story of taking a very dark and difficult chapter of Haida history and making it right. In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, a man named Dorsey travelled to the Queen Charlotte Islands and excavated the burial grounds of various villages and took the remains of 150 Haida back to the Field Museum in Chicago for anthropological study. It has been devastating for the community. “There is nothing there but the poles. The remains are gone. How would you feel if somebody came along and took your ancestors’ bones away? We need to bring our ancestors home” expressed a Haida elder.

The Haida took the initiative and approached the Field Museum in Chicago and for the first time ever, these two groups worked together on this significant repatriation project – indeed, a very sensitive can of worms has now been opened, which will likely have ramifications for several international museums today.

The films tells the story of the Cuban people’s hardship, ingenuity and triumph over sudden adversity—through cooperation, conservation, and community, told in their own words. As the world approaches Peak Oil, Cuba provides a valuable example of how to successfully address the challenge of reducing our energy use.

The May presentation was Michelle Mason's "Friendship Village". Special guests for the evening were Vietnam veteran Bruce Logan and his partner Elaine Head who had just returned from a reconciliation and humanitarian trip to Vietnam, with experiences and slides to share.

Friendship Village is a story of reconciliation and healing: A badly wounded Vietnam war vet, whose platoon was wiped out in combat, moves from anger to compassion and helps to found a village for Vietnamese children and adults suffering from illnesses related to Agent Orange.

April 2006 - "Let Them Stay: Voices of US War Resisters in Canada" The film features exclusive one-on-one interviews with U.S. war resisters in Canada, documenting their life-changing experiences in Iraq and the hidden realities of U.S. military recruitment and warfare. It also documents the War Resisters Support Campaign, a pan-Canadian coalition of labour, faith and peace groups, Vietnam war resisters, and individuals who are working with these war resisters to put pressure on the current federal government to let them stay.

March 2006 - "Kimiko Murakami: Triumph Over Internment"
In the film, Mary Kitagawa, tells the story of her mother Kimiko Murakami. Kimiko and her husband had a successful farm on Salt Spring Island in the 1930s. But when Japan attacked Pearl Harbour in 1941 their lives were to change.

Mary's family was sent to a series of internment camps and beet farms where they would live in dire conditions and work for meager wages. Despite 8 years of internment, Kimiko refused to allow the children to lose hope. She was determined to return to her farm again.

February 2006 - With voices from the streets of Havana and the Cuban countryside, "Bloqueo" (or blockade) lets Cubans speak for themselves about how they have been affected by the blockade, and what it means to live in Cuba today. The documentary also features analysis from activists travelling with the Pastors for Peace Caravan - an annual journey calling attention to this controversial policy. "Bloqueo" looks at the successes that have made Cuba a model in healthcare, environmental stewardship, and other arenas that forge an alternative, and ultimately more sustainable, system.

January 2006 - Judy Jackson's "Talk Mogadishu: Media Under Fire", which highlights "three Canadian Somali refugees who refuse to agree with the international consensus that their country is a hopeless basket case." In the face of chaos and devastation they create an independent radio and TV station in Mogadishu which provides a unique way for the voiceless thousands to speak out. (Note: this film is available at the Salt Spring Public Library)