EzraWinton.com | Media arts and politics

“Knowing has everything to do with growing. But the knowing of dominant minorities absolutely must not prohibit, most not asphyxiate, must not castrate the growing of the immense dominated majorities.” Paulo Freire, Teachers as Cultural Workers.

A teenager with light brown skin, short hair and clad in orange coveralls sits slumped at a desk, head held in delicately cupped hands, and sobs. As he cries for his mother in Arabic the grainy image flickers and jerks with a lo-fi intensity that befits surveillance footage. He is alone in the room, having been left by his CSIS and CIA interrogators, fuliginous nameless wraiths who are off camera watching the same footage themselves, waiting for an opportune time to return to the tiny room to continue the psychological warfare they have been conducting on this twice shot, blinded from shrapnel, tortured and imprisoned adolescent.

And we—the audience—are watching with them, sitting tense in our seats, experiencing the intimate proximity of an interior space of intense injustice, pain, suffering, and desperation.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Coke ad at Hot Docs says: "Thanks to Coca-Cola Canada for supporting the presentation of environmental films at Hot Docs"

Below is an excerpt from a longer piece I’ve just posted on Art Threat about the documentary festival Hot Docs, currently underway in Toronto. This is one of the largest festivals for documentary in the world, and this year organizers have made the very unusual and short-sighted blunder of signing on Coca-Cola as the environmental film presenter for the fest. I plan on writing more about this after talking with more organizers, but for now, here is an excerpt from the my Art Threat piece:

And now finally, the ethics of the fest: I plan on writing about this more in the future, but for now I’d like to flag a huge problem with this year’s edition of Hot Docs. Organizers have made the massive mistake, ethically inexplicable as it is, of signing on with none other than Coca-Cola as their, get this, environmental film sponsor. At many of the social events I accosted Hot Docs management about the festival facilitating greenwashing for one of the world’s worst human rights and environmental abusers. For a festival that showcases a film genre interested in not only truth but social justice, it is bizarre that they would take such a careless decision to not just bring on Coca-Cola as a sponsor, but give the company the space it needs to misrepresent itself as a corporation concerned with the environment. Coke’s eco-record is well-documented, and judging from my conversations with many audience members at Hot Docs, I’m assuming also well-known. Imagine a cigarette company sponsoring the festival’s cluster of films on health issues. Imagine BP sponsoring a program of eco-disaster docs.

Off the record, Hot Docs organizers told me that there is a “firewall” between programming and the business of the fest, and that there was a discussion about bringing on Coca-Cola as a sponsor, but it seems it wasn’t a protracted debate. This separation between art and economy at a festival like Hot Docs is about as real as objectivity in documentary, or the tooth fairy. The relationship is a delicate balancing act that determines the ability of the organizers to show quality documentary cinema. I appreciate this tension, but it is hardly a firewall when Coca-Cola is given the opportunity to associate their brand (in fact, the opportunity to rebrand) with environmental documentary cinema.

Hot Docs is risking their reputation with this new partnership, and if they think it will pass over without notice they are wrong. The Coca-Cola commercial played before every film I watched at the festival, and each time I overheard audience members around me, surprised and in disbelief: “What? You’ve got to be kidding me!” The reaction from documentary filmmakers was, of course, even more sever. Festivals like Hot Docs may feel immune from questions of ethics, when confronted by those of us who bring attention and protest to unethical sponsorship, but with their Green Galas, carbon offsetting, and other eco-friendly initiatives (and promotions), I’m venturing festival organizers actually do see the importance of addressing a newly-formed alliance with a company with one of the worst track records on human rights and the environment in the world (and I’m also sure Hot Docs ist familiar with Coke’s record, considering the documentaries on this very subject). Let’s hope enough people talk to them about this issue and they drop Coke for next year.

A portrait of me done by Amanda McCuaig for ArtThreat.net (we all got them....really) - thanks for making me look ten years younger!!

As March comes to a rainy end, I can finally take a moment to catch my breath. It’s been busier than usual around here, both for Svetla and myself. The book tour has been a real time-sucker, but it’s paid off: we’ve had great launches in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and just a few days ago in Vancouver where over 100 turned up. There’s one left, in Halifax, and Svetla and I will travel with co-editor Tom Waugh on April 15th by train for that one (21 hours - it’s going to be sooooo relaxing). We’re going to turn that trip into a bit of a getaway and stay on the east coast for at least a week. Svetla’s never been to Atlantic Canada, and we need a break as well as a change of scenery (not to mention some of that famous East Coast hospitality).

This past Friday marked the finale of a couple of other major jobs: Cinema Politica passed a referendum question at Concordia to increase our fee levy from two cents per credit per student to seven. This was quite a feat considering all the other fee levy questions failed, and despite still being by far the smallest fee levy on campus we remain subject to unfair attacks from bloggers like Steve Faguy. At any rate, provided it goes through Concordia’s Board of Governors smoothly, we’ve just ensured CP Concordia will be sustainable long after Svetla and I have finally left the school (the mother hens need to leave the nest eventually!). This was incredibly important to us - to make sure the original Cinema Politica chapter has a decent enough budget to hire a coordinator and keep going for as long as students want to show up to see documentaries (last semester we had almost 7,000 come through the doors, so apparently they still do).

The other good news on Friday was that I successfully passed my Second Comprehensive PhD Exam. For the last year I researched and wrote a huge essay on audience theory and research. Because it was largely a literature review, I admittedly struggled with it. On Friday, after several drafts and revisions, I successfully defended the paper to my committee. What is so relieving about this moment is that now I am in the final stretch of my PhD: for the next 12-18 months (I know what you’re thinking: how is that a final stretch?) I will only work on my thesis. The process starts with me writing then defending a 20-25 page thesis proposal, which I’ve already begun researching.

Read the rest of this entry »

From left to right: Svetla Turnin, Deirdre Boyle, Dorothy Todd Hénaut, George Stoney, Tom Waugh, Ezra

So, February is thankfully gone. This winter has been a slow, protracted grey gloom that is only now lifting with the first week of March. We had far less snow than usual (making our ski passes not worth the money we spent on them) and dark dark days. As the clouds lift and the sun begins to thaw us, I’m preparing for the next stage in my triad of work: PhD, CP, CFC/SN.

In PhD news, I’m waiting to hear back from my committee on my Second Comprehensive Exam, which was really an essay the student has to write to show an expertise in one particular area of the field of study. I’m not surprised it’s taking them a bit of time given I handed in a real monster of a paper - it is double the length it should be, at 69 pages. I wrote a literature review of scholarship on audiences and discovered it was a much more difficult task than I had anticipated: there is a insane amount of literature out there and I am by nature not a very organized person. I hope the committee approves the essay, which will mean I will defend it at the end of March, and following a successful defense, I will then move on to my PhD Thesis Proposal (writing it, then also defending it). Then the epic part will happen: the writing of a 200 page tight, seamless thesis.

In CP (Cinema Politica) news, things are as frenetic and busy as ever. Svetla and I are desperately trying to delegate work we do to others, and some amazing people have recently come forward to help us, which is so welcomed I don’t have words to even describe it. We have a new intern who is busy writing funding applications in French for Quebec arts funding agencies. We have undergraduate students at Concordia running a fee levy increase campaign. We have Svetla’s sister, Yoana, working her way through a huge list of tasks. And we have an office (that we haven’t had time to move into yet). And lastly, today we are being presented an award for Concordia Sustainable Champion at Concordia at 5 PM - Woohoo!!

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to Sarah Spring at Loaded Pictures, Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada now has its very own trailer!! The three minute video features clips and music from some classic Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle works. Feel free to cut and paste this anywhere online and help spread the word about the book and the Challenge for Change project. Look for the book online at Amazon.ca.

It’s a busy month already: a book about to be launched in a few weeks (see last post), finishing up my Second PhD comprehensive exam (hopefully, fingers and discursive tentacles crossed), and the new POV Magazine is out with an article I wrote on documentary as a tool for education. The cover is pictured at the left so you can spot it on the newsstands - it comes out this week across Canada. If you can’t find it in the meat world, you can go to the virtual source and order a subscription online.It’s the first thematic issue and they chose education, a great theme for documentary of course. I argue in my piece that documentary cinema is an effective and much-needed tool for education - for students, teachers and the rest of us. Docs already provide an alternative, critical education and often accomplish much more than a textbook can. It’s for this reason and others I outline in the article that we need to seriously take up programs and policies of media literacy in Canada. The lens through which we view the world is increasingly audio-visual - it’s not time to fight it or engage in moral panics, but prepare our citizens with the abilities needed to critically engage with all the media saturating our daily lives. Check out my article if that mini-rant didn’t bore you….

Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canadais now on sale at Amazon.ca for the ridiculously low price of $22. The regular price for this 600-page book will be around $35, so if anyone is interested in what’s kept me locked in this tiny office for the last three years and wants to save a few bucks, I’d go to amazon.ca and pre-order this excellent book now.

This was a labour of love for sure, and it wasn’t exactly easy organizing 40 contributors and so much material into one coherent chunk of literature, but myself, Tom Waugh and Michael Brendan Baker did it! We start our book tour with the first launch in Toronto on February 25th, followed by stops across the country. For details on the tour, visit this page. Below is a description of the book, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. Thanks for your support - my goal is for the publisher to need to print a second run within one year!!

Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada is a collection of thirty-eight essays and interviews written by the editors and other Canadian scholars, including a small selection from academics outside of the country. While in some published works there exists a tendency to discuss Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle exclusively as a romanticized revolutionary media experiment that empowered citizens, disseminated counter-narratives and impacted real change—and in other works a fair dose of postmodern skepticism around such naïve baby boomer idealism is found—the bigger project of complicating CFC/SN and interrogating its many (conflicting) facets is best reserved for a dedicated collection. The essays provide such a heterogeneous approach, and yield varied perspectives that together, house cultural theory, politics, historiography, film and media studies, and cultural policy discourse. The book is divided into four sections, “Historical Spaces,”  “Community Spaces,”  “Screen Spaces,” and “Discursive Spaces,” and book-ended by an introduction and conclusion by the editors. A “Resources” section complements the literature with details for further reading, research and viewing, along with a complete filmography of the CFC/SN collection, for the first time in one place.View the Table of Contents online

Whew!! It’s been a craaaaaaaazy month. Today I finally put the finishing touches on the first draft of my Second Comprehensive Exam Essay for my PhD and sent it off to my fearless supervisor, Ira. It ended up weighing in at 55 pages double spaced, a grand total of 13,000 words. Whether all the words add up to anything intellectually stimulating or not is another story, but I’ve definitely cornered the market on quantity this time around. The paper is on audiences, and much of it was a literature review where I was kind of staking out the terrain. I’m now convinced that I need to include a big section of my PhD thesis on audiences, so as an exercise in moving toward my end goal of finishing this PhD, I’d say it has worked quite well. Ira will get back to me in a week or so with feedback and I’m sincerely hoping he likes it and I can do some edits and submit to my committee. Once I’m done the Second Comps process, I’ll be focusing on my thesis - first the proposal, then the proposal defence, then the big one…

In the last month I also wrote a pretty big article for POV Magazine’s special education issue, which will hit newsstands at the end of January or beginning of February. Pick up a copy and check it out - I argue the case for documentary cinema as a form of critical, alternative education.

The book I spent the last three years working on with Tom Waugh and Mike Baker is finally coming off the presses next week as well. We should be getting our own hard cover copies and soft cover copies in about two weeks time. In the mean time you can actually pre-order the book, Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada, from amazon.ca for super cheap ($21). It’s also for sale on the publisher’s site, McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sunita Narain, on Democracy Now, is in one word, AMAZING. As the Copenhagen talks dismantle, Narain reminds us of what the leaders and elite of the wealthiest countries do not want to hear, face, address, or otherwise even acknowledge:

“The inconvenient truth is not that climate change is real, but that confronting climate change is about sharing that growth between nations and people. The rich must reduce so that the poor can grow.”
- Sunita Narain, Centre for Science and Environment, Delhi, India